Andrew Sullivan has a devastating critique not only of Sid Blumenthal’s new book about the Clinton presidency, but of what it reveals about the author himself.

…There?s no one like Sid. Not even in Washington. I?m still immensely fond of him, although it?s quite clear by now that, in some respects, he is completely out of his mind…

…Which reminds me what The Clinton Wars evoked for me. It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those “Lives of the Saints” books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. It?s not a memoir, or a history. It?s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church. It?s an allegory of eternal good and evil?a passion narrative with a scriptural past and a resurrection at the end, the first-person narrative of one saint who prevailed.

That saint is Bill Clinton. Of all the characters who have graced the office of the Presidency, Sidney picks William Jefferson Clinton as the moral exemplar. There is not a scintilla of a clue anywhere in this book that Mr. Blumenthal sees even a trace of irony in this selection….

And the end:

That?s why, in the end, this book is worth reading. It?s brutally revealing about the stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with President Clinton. I?m glad they ultimately lost. But it?s just as revealing about the hollow moral center of Bill Clinton and Clintonism. The fact that the President and, more worryingly, his wife sought out this slightly nutty man as their confidant?a man whom they knew would never question them, never challenge them, never leave them?reveals the brittleness of their characters and the ruthlessness behind their sanctimony. They used him for his propagandistic skills and his fawning loyalty. They used him to drape their own modest but defensible record with the patina of world-historical significance. And they used him to lie to one another. Some people would find that demeaning. It tells you a lot about Sidney Blumenthal that he regards it as an achievement worth recording for the ages.