The Lies About Hillary

I hate the idea of supporting the right wing financially by purchasing their cruddy books. Generally what I try to do is stand around the bookstore and read from the right-wing garbage bin, so that I have some idea what lunacy they are trying to spread -- and I always, of course, re-shelve the book upside down or place a left-wing book on top of the pile or something like that -- or wait until the public library has wasted its money on the trash.
But I may be compelled to buy and read the latest scummy attack on Hillary Clinton, Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary : What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President, just because I feel it's important to understand the particular lies they will be spreading in the run-up to 2008.
I think one of the biggest mistakes made in 2004 was the delayed response from John Kerry to the scurrilous Swift Boat attackers. By waiting a month before responding, the Kerry campaign allowed the lies to become part of the public consciousness -- hell, some otherwise reasonable people seem to still believe there are questions to be answered on the Kerry issue.
The Clintons have done the right thing by immediately denigrating the book as the fiction it surely is, but it seems to me there needs to be a concerted, continued effort to place this book firmly in the trash bin where it belongs, especially in light of the somewhat respectful profile of Klein in Salon yesterday.