Here at the Stupid Café, we remember our old customers as well as our new ones. For example, we remember Gary Aldrich, who used to stop by a lot with a retinue of skeevy journalists who all wore hats saying, "I Visited Mena Airport And All I Got Was This Lousy Kilo."
Aldrich was a former Secret Service guy who wrote a book called Unlimited Access in which, among other things, he charged that the Clintons had decorated one of the White House Christmas trees with crack pipes, condoms, and obscene clay figurines. He also said that an ornament supposedly representing the "five gold rings" from the Christmas song was created out of cock rings. There were crack pipes on the Clinton tree and crackpots sitting around the Aldrich family tree, I guess.
Anyway, there's another Clinton running for president, and another Secret Service chap telling fanciful tales of life in the White House the last time a Clinton ran things. This should surprise approximately nobody. This time, it's some guy named Gary Byrne and, lo and behold, his charges against Hillary Rodham Clinton reflect exactly the kind of thing that has made the country uneasy about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
The 2016 puke funnel begins at The Hill:
"What I saw in the 1990s sickened me," Byrne writes in the intro to his new book, "Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill and How They Operate." "Hillary Clinton is now poised to become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, but she simply lacks the integrity and temperament to serve in the office," he adds. "From the bottom of my soul I know this to be true. And with Hillary's latest rise, I realize that her own leadership style—volcanic, impulsive, enabled by sycophants and disdainful of the rule set for everyone else—hasn't changed a bit."
And, I mean, if you can't trust a guy who plugs his work of Page Six, who can you trust?
The book claims she repeatedly screamed obscenities at her husband, Secret Service personnel and White House staffers—all of whom lived in terror of her next tirade. Secret Service agents had discussions about the possibility that they would have to protect Bill from his wife's physical attacks, Byrne writes, and the couple had one "violent encounter" the morning of a key presidential address to the nation. Meanwhile, a paranoid Hillary Clinton tried to have the Secret Service banned from the White House and once tried to ditch her security detail, Byrne says.
I suspect that various reporters who consider themselves respectable will be Covering The Controversy by the end of the week. We're shining up one of the old booths for the occasion.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
