Actually, the reasons for rehashing her scandalous past are: A) being a 1960s kid, she cannot stop talking about herself, and B) being a narcissistic amoralist, she believes she is blameless -- rather, those who exposed her were the wrongdoers. Troopergate, Travelgate, Whitewater, Monicagate, the impeachment, the pardons -- there was no culpability on her part here despite the revelations, the evidence, those prosecutions that succeeded, and the judicial rulings that left the Clintons paying and Bill without his law license. All Hillary will acknowledge is that she and her unique husband were for years wronged. It has gotten under her skin and will bug her for years to come. She is not going to "move on."
This is where Howell Raines and his scandals at The New York Times come in. The Times is known as the nation's newspaper of record. For a certitude, a nation needs a tablet of record, preferably more than one. Journalists working for such a newspaper should take their role with the utmost seriousness. Raines was serious, but before he left the newspaper after revelations of plagiarism and fabrication shook it, he was not serious enough. He allowed his prejudices and arrogance to overwhelm his judgment. The confluence of Hillary's apocrypha and Raines' disgrace, reminds me of a run-in I had with him as I made a small attempt to set the historic record straight.
When Raines was editor of the Times editorial page back in 1993, one of the paper's business reporters interviewed me about The American Spectator's huge circulation growth caused by our Clinton reportage. The result was not so much a piece on our growth as a sustained attack on our accuracy, particularly with regard to Troopergate, the story reporting Gov. Clinton's use of state troopers as pimps that ultimately led to his sexual harassment charge and impeachment. The reporter claimed it was "near pornographic." Other Spectator stories "included important error." The Times gave no examples.
Then The New Republic's Michael Kinsley was called in to deprecate the Spectator as "untrustworthy" (within two years his magazine would commence publishing dozens of fabrications by Stephen Glass). After quoting our longtime critic, Kinsley, the Times threw in a butchered quote from me "justifying the article (which article was unclear) in a way that would not be acceptable at most serious newspapers and magazine."
Finally, the credulous and possibly malicious reporter repeats a deceit that the Clintons have relied on for a decade to refute the Troopergate story, namely, that a trooper signed an affidavit claiming the Spectator was wrong to write that President Clinton had "offered him a job to remain silent." That sophistry reappears now in Hillary's memoir.
In truth, Troopergate also noted that Clinton offered the trooper a federal job for information on what the troopers were saying -- a matter left unmentioned in the affidavit. That Clinton would call him from the White House was a damning indication of Clinton's reckless use of the presidency.
I called Raines on the telephone requesting that he allow me to reply on his op-ed page. It was the Times that had been inaccurate, not the Spectator. No errors had then been demonstrated in our stories, nor have they been revealed to this day. Actually, Clinton's subsequent behavior vindicated them.
Raines denied my request with arctic disdain, telling me to write a letter to the editor. I reminded him that in the recent past the Times had failed to print a letter from me, and that my friend the British journalist John O'Sullivan had remarked that that was normal. The Times was the only paper he knew of that did not publish letters even when they came from someone the Times had attacked. Raines insisted my letter would be printed. It never was.
Now, Hillary's section on Troopergate reechoes the 10-year-old Times treatment of Troopergate, the story that tipped the world off to Clinton's fundamental flaw. She can base her account on the nation's newspaper of record. In Raines' day, it assisted in creating myths.