Also: Ken Starr Hates Her

I can't believe The Washington Post reported this with a straight face:

"Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., reports that during her husband's 1992 campaign, a team she oversaw hired a private investigator to undermine Gennifer Flowers "until she is destroyed." Flowers had said publicly that she had an affair with Bill Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas.

The book also suggests that Hillary Clinton did not read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in 2002 before voting to authorize war. And it includes a thirdhand report that the Clintons had a secret plan after the 1992 election in which he would have eight years as president and then she would have eight years, although last night a key source disavowed the story.

In short, Jeff Gerth, author of any number of sloppy and inaccurate anti-Clinton stories, now has a book full of anti-Clinton stories, at least some of which we can already tell are sloppy and inaccurate. Another thing worth noting, of course, is that while books appear weightier and more definitive than newspapers and magazines, there's actually no fact checking and relatively little editing involved in putting together a book. Any news that actually "breaks" in book format is almost certainly news that couldn't be sources rigorously enough for periodical publication.