Weekly Standard: Clinton Haters Are Liars

The Weekly Standard has a piece by Andrew Ferguson (reprinted here by the oh-so-liberal CBS News) on "Bush bashing books." The article serves quite well to illustrate the difference -- in truthfulness, substance and tone -- between the anti-Clinton books and the books addressing the Bush Administration.

Ferguson admits that the anti-Clinton books were full of lies:

It's true that for sheer fantasy, none of these anti-Bush books contains anything to rival such Clinton-era classics as Terry Reed and John Cummings's "Compromised," which asserted that Clinton had been installed as president on the say-so of Ronald Reagan's CIA director William Casey, or Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," which implicated Clinton in drug-running and even murder. Still, the anti-Bush books I've been reading through are undeniably . . . overdone. Pick one up, turn it over in your hands, and you can hear, if you listen closely, the faint sound of veins popping.

Ferguson fails to mention many anti-Clinton liar-authors: Gary Aldrich, Babbs Olson, Chris Ruddy, the Weekly Standard... you get the idea.

More significantly, here's the best Ferguson can do in critiquing the anti-Bush books:

Paul Krugman used a similar phrase in his introduction and in one of the columns collected in the book. And he's become shrill.

Jim Hightower's index is anti-Bush, so I don't even have to read this one.

Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose use a lot of statistics and charts, yet they write about real people too. And if Bush had done something different, they'd criticize that too.

David Corn says Bush is a liar, yet he undercuts his own thesis by admitting that presidents other than Bush have lied! So there's no reason for his book.

Geez, if that's the best Fergie can do.... At least Ferguson (who is often better than this) maintains the perfect correlation between bow-tie wearing and stupidity.