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Loony Noonan
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March 24, 2000 | NEW YORK -- Now comes Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal editorialist, Good Housekeeping contributor and former Reagan speechwriter, who is ready to do her dance with the psychological tar baby that is HRC. In "The Case Against Hillary Clinton," a book the author herself brands a "polemic," Noonan cites the expert opinion of an anonymous associate of the first couple. "The key to understanding both Hillary and Bill Clinton, she began, is that they are narcissists," writes Noonan. Hauling out a well-thumbed copy of Otto Kernberg's "Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism," the unnamed associate admits to an unhealthy obsession of her own. "She told me she'd gone to the book in her own attempt over the years to understand them," the author continues, "and what she'd read seemed almost a case study of the Clintons." The Case Against Hillary Clinton By Peggy Noonan
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Well, that settles it. No further witnesses. By her own account, Noonan wrote "The Case Against Hillary Clinton" out of a sense of personal need. As a native New Yorker (a Massapequan, for God's sake!), the often witty and trenchant author of "What I Saw at the Revolution" and "On Speaking Well" sees Clinton's run for the Senate as an affront against her state. Noonan knocked out this breezy (and, despite its scant 181-page length, rather redundant) screed in a few months, armed with only a few other Clinton books (Barbara Olson's "Hell to Pay" gets a few nods), Lexis-Nexis and a wheelbarrow of attitude. For in Noonan's cosmology, the Clintons are evil twin stars orbiting in the same constellation as serial killers and other pathological liars. "Lying, of course, is not the Clintons' only distinguishing characteristic," reads one typical paragraph. "They are marked, too, by an absence of grace, a lack of personal humility that is actually jarring, perhaps because it threatens to lower both standards and expectations for our leaders." They're lousy tippers, too. But Noonan meant to do more than vent her spleen; this book is not, she insists, a mere act of therapy on her part. It is meant to inform New York voters (she told the Albany Times-Union that "it could be read aloud in bed" by couples -- a form of GOP foreplay, I suppose); nail the first lady on her record (or lack thereof) once and for all; and paint a damning portrait of the Clintons through metaphor and fantasy. Sadly, "The Case Against Hillary Clinton" feels forced, an act of party loyalty, homework for the GOP. Writing in the second person, Noonan tries to make her obsession (and her assignment) yours: "Your mind rocks," she writes of the Clintons (for she takes them as they offered themselves: a two-for-one sale). "You make excuses for them time and again because you think, you know from human experience, that no nice educated man in an office like that can be the utterly dishonest person his critics say he is, no nice woman with a kid and a law degree could be the kind of dissembling character her foes insist she is. And then one night when you cannot sleep and your mind begins to wander you think: Wait, he could be. She could be!" Spooky!
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