Christopher Hitchens

Bill Clinton

Hitchens had a number of criticisms of Bill Clinton and, more generally, the Clinton white house, including Hillary Clinton. It's important to note that one of the primary reasons Hitchens moved away from his socialistic and liberal left tendencies during his later years was because of the uncritical reception of Bill Clinton by the left. Hitchens grew increasingly wary throughout the presidency of Clinton, at times accusing him of being a liar and a rapist. In 1999, towards the conclusion of Clinton's presidency, Hitchens went so far as to send in an affidavit to the managers that were overlooking the Republican Party and their attempts at impeaching Clinton from office. Of the Clinton administration, Hitchens once stated

"They are so nasty and underhanded, like everything about this President and his tactics."

Throughout the 1990s and even afterwards, Hitchens never held back from admonishing many aspects of the Clinton administration, which earned the chagrin of many of his liberal colleagues. When asked when it would be possible to look at Bill Clinton's presidency through the prism of history and provide a judgment, Hitchens responded:

"Oh, I think his place in history is secure already. I mean, I really don't think there can be much doubt about it, that people will say his was a regime of nothingness punctuated by nastiness."

Hitchens also strongly criticized Clinton's acts in Sudan in 1998, when Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical company. This attack killed one and injured eleven, but the main critics of the attack believe that thousands of civilians were permanently cut off from much-needed medical supplies due to bombing and destruction of the pharmacy. Hitchens believed that this act should be considered as a war crime.

Bill Clinton is also one of the three people in which Hitchens wrote an entire novel on, which is titled "No One Left to Lie To". In this book, Hitchens criticizes Clinton for promising to the left, but delivering to the right. One of the bills put forth by the Clinton administration that Hitchens made many dissenting remarks about was the Welfare bill, which Hitchens proclaimed to be:

"more hasty, callous, short-term and ill-considered than anything the Republicans could have hoped to carry on their own."