Andrew Sullivan has a brutal takedown of Sid Blumenthals book:

This is Sid’s utopia. A world run by Democrats, in which everyone is a Democrat, everything is a Democrat, and being a Democrat is being a member of the elect, the saved, the holy. When John F. Kennedy visited Chicago in 1960, for Sid, "it was the beginningoftheworld."Hisbaptism- confirmation into the faith occurred in a huge political rally: "From time immemorial Democratic presidential campaigns in Chicago reached their climax with a torchlight parade of precinct captains. Danny Spunt took me to a bus that deposited us at a downtown site, and we marched up Madison Street to the ancient Chicago stadium. I pinned a Kennedy button to my jacket and carried a ‘Kennedy for President’ placard stapled to a wooden stick. There were men holding torches aloft as far as I could see, an endless trail of fire. In the stadium everybody was standing, bellowing, and whooping."

Blumenthals religion is Clintonism and power. Sullivan holds nothing back:

But the enemy? Humane isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind. The real value of this book is in its portrait of Mr. Clinton’s foes. I’ll leave the endless sifting of claim and counterclaim to the people who still care who said what to Brock via Ingraham about Willey or Goldberg. A few years later, it seems beyond petty and vicious. From the viewpoint of history, it’s going to seem deranged. But the account Mr. Blumenthal gives of the haplessness and priggishness of Kenneth Starr is riveting stuff. The testimony of Sam Dash, Mr. Starr’s ethics advisor, is particularly damning. The insane attempt to actually bring down a President over perjury in a civil suit has not yet been more vividly evoked. The character assassination of Hickman Ewing, "the avenging rider of the Gothic South," is a cult classic of Blumenthal hyperventilation. Then there are, alas, the smears. The portrait of Christopher Hitchens as an unreliable right-wing drunk is particularly vicious and dumb. So is the evisceration of the late Mike Kelly, and vituperation directed at Mike Isikoff of Newsweek, Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post and other actual journalists. This is ugly stuff, and Mr. Blumenthal revels in it.

Smearing Hitchens and Kelly is understandable, but Isikoff? For what Sid, Researching the Monica story? Clinton was responsible for giving the Republicans any kind of opening. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy did not put Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and force her to...well you know. He never accepted that responsibility and blamed it on the Right, making things up to get him out if power.

Read the whole thing.