RANT
OR RAVE
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
“I sort of knew from the start of
this book that it would be thrown
in the maw of this bitterly divided
and ideological political culture. I
can’t pretend to be naïve about it. I
figured that would happen, but it is
still unpleasant that it has.”
– David Maraniss
voted its cover to Klein’s claims of a rift
between first lady Michelle Obama and
media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Over the
next week, Klein sat down with both Fox
News host Sean Hannity and Fox Business
Network’s Lou Dobbs, who called The
Amateur an “explosive new book pulling back the curtain on the Obama White
House [and] painting a picture of amateurish leadership.”
The reason most networks aren’t calling may not be Klein’s rightward drift, as
some conservatives claim, but rather his
off-the-wall claims in several books over
the last few years. Most notably, Klein
suggested in his 2005 book, The Truth
About Hillary, that Chelsea Clinton was
conceived after former President Bill Clinton raped Hillary Clinton, a claim that
prompted Clinton spokesman Philippe
Reines to tell The Washington Post that
the book is “full of blatant and vicious
fabrications.” Five years later, Klein cowrote a novel, The Obama Identity: A
Novel (Or Is It?), using debunked conspiracy theories, like Obama being born
outside the United States, as plotlines.
In reviewing Klein’s latest book, the
New York Times’ Janet Maslin described
Klein, who, in a previous journalistic life,
edited the New York Times Magazine
from 1977 to 1987, as an “inept, arrogant
ideologue who maintains an absurdly
high opinion of his own talents even as
he blatantly fails to achieve his goals.”
In a July Washington Post profile of
Klein, the White House dismissed The
Amateur as “nonsense” while Reines
dismissed the author as “a congenital liar.” On Aug. 17, Obama campaign
press secretary Ben LaBolt pushed back
against Klein’s latest post-publication
claim that the White House put out feelers about replacing Vice President Joe