� � � Right off the bat in the first paragraph, Hitchens, a columnist for "Vanity Fair" and "The Nation", lets us know his feelings on the biggest news story of 1998:

This little book has no "hidden agenda." It is offered in the most cheerful and open polemical spirit, as an attack on a crooked president and a corrupt and reactionary administration. Naturally, it also engages with the strategems that have been employed to shield that president and that administration. And it maintains, even insists, that the two most salient elements of Clintonism--the personal crookery on the one hand, and the cowardice and conservatism on the other--are indissolubly related.

� � � Similar remarks are stated throughout, spending entirely too much time on the welfare-reform subject. I began to get the feeling that Hitchens dislikes Clinton more for this than for the sex scandal and impeachment debacle. The amount of pages dedicated to this turned me off, as I didn't buy the book to read about welfare, but about the events of 1998. I want to read about how Slick Willie is a scumbag and deserved to be thrown out of office, not chastized about supporting such reforms.

� � � On the same note, Hitchens laments the fact that the U.S. Senate is "perhaps the world's most deliberately conservative political body" because "unpopulous white and rural states such as Montana and Wyoming have the same representation as do vast and all-American and ethnically diverse states like New York and California." Essentially Hitchens is saying that white, rural people don't deserve representation since they are racist bigots who are all rich Republicans. Yeah, Hitchens is definitely the man who keeps an open mind.

� � � Hitchens didn't even need to write this book. It is only 113 pages long, with many elements repeated for elongation's sake. It would make a great expose in a magazine or political journal, able to fill 40-50 excellent pages, instead of over 100 repetitive ones. He even uses 14 pages from an essay he wrote for "Vanity Fair," which was well-done, but if you're going to do such then use a few more of your columns from the period to help fluff out the book and prevent repetition.

� � � Back to the positive. Credit where it's due, Hitchens spends the vast majority of "No One Left To Lie To" going into details about the evils of the Clinton White House. Several items I was not even aware of, and bolstered my hatred of the president. One of which involved the extensive look at the Wag the Dog scenerios, where conveniently Clinton used the military to cover his personal indescretions:

Not once but three times last year, Bill Clinton ordered the use of cruise missles against remote and unpopular countries. On each occasion, the dispatch of the missles coincided with bad moments in the calendar of his long and unsuccessful struggle to avoid impeachment...the bombings helped to raise Clinton's poll numbers and to keep them high, and who will say that this is not a permanent White House concern?...the subject was temporarily changed from Clinton's thing to Clinton's face, and doubtless that came as some species of relief.