Yesterday I asked about the bizarre conservative obsession with totally unsubstantiated reports that Barack Obama was about to drop Joe Biden from the 2012 ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton. I can’t exactly tell whether it’s a fantasy based on spin, or spin based on fantasy, but in any event, it looks like its purveyors have finally decided to move on, but via an even crazier and more fact-free claim. This is from today’s “Washington Secrets” column in the Washington Examiner:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pressed by her husband and a top Obama aide to consider replacing Vice President Joe Biden just a couple of weeks ago, claims the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Amateur.”
But Clinton, exhausted from four years of international travel and diplomacy, shrugged off the suggestion to lay the groundwork for her own 2016 bid with her husband at her side.
The source for this claim is, as the first graph indicates, none other than Ed Klein, author of a nasty 2005 attack-book on Hillary Clinton that was denounced all over the political spectrum as a pack of inventions and smears. Here’s a take on Klein’s The Truth About Hillary from Politico‘s Glenn Thrush:
[H]is Clinton book was strewn with serious factual errors, truncated and distorted quotes, and the overall themes don’t gibe with any other serious accounts of Clinton’s life. The disdain for Klein’s previous efforts haven’t necessarily broken along political lines.
A sampling of literary criticism of the “Real Hillary:” This, from conservative columnist John Podhoretz: “This is one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn’t have to suffer through another word.”
So natch, this is the guy, who the Examiner credits with having :”sources deep in the Clinton camp” (yeah, sure he does), who’s the source for this deus ex machina rationalization of why Biden hasn’t been dumped.
It sure is easier to find that perfect groove of spin when you live in a fact-free world.
