Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times contained this astonishing passage:
First, with Clarence Thomas, a feminist lynch mob tried to kill off a conservative Supreme Court nominee over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics. Then, with Bill Clinton, a conservative lynch mob tried to kill off a Democratic president over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics.
Institutional feminism died when Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright and other top feminists vouched for President Clinton as he brazenly lied about never having had a sexual relationship with “that woman†— Monica Lewinsky. The Clintons and feminists were outraged when Thomas’s supporters painted Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.†Yet that was precisely the Clintonian tact when women spoke up about Bill’s misbehaving.
Time and again, Hillary was a party to demonizing women as liars, bimbos, trailer trash or troubled souls when it seemed clear they were truthful about her philandering husband. She often justified this by thinking of the women as instruments of the right-wing conspiracy.
As I reported in ’98, even some veteran Clinton henchmen felt a little nauseated about the debate inside the White House on a slander strategy for Lewinsky: Should they paint her as a friendly fantasist or a malicious stalker?
Following the Clintons’ lead, Trump dismissed the more than dozen women who stood up to accuse him of sexual transgressions as politically motivated liars.
That is very much the way I saw all of the events catalogued at the time and since and, honestly, I don’t see how any informed person could have seen them otherwise without donning the most grotesque of partisan blinders. The reason that it is astonishing is that not so long ago much of what she wrote would have been considered the rankest heresy.
The key problem with the instrumentalist viewpoint is that experience tells us that you can’t accomplish good things by supporting bad people. You may accomplish them despite the bad people but never because of them. For proof of that just look at the State of Illinois. When you elect self-serving power seekers, surprise! They serve themselves and seek power. Now Illinois is descending into a hole from which it is hard to us extricating ourselves.
The Triple Lindy version of that sophistry is “At least he’s not a ” (fill in the blank). And that is where we are right now.
Better late then never.
However, more then a few commentators have a pointed question about the sincerity of these mea culpas. How convenient to say this now when the Clintons are the most powerless they have been since 1992, and Trump is in the Presidentcy.
The true test of sincerity is willing to condemn when it’s your own “____†that will lose out.
I suspect that most fair people who followed politics casually in the 90s had written most everything about the Clintons off as insane gibberish. You had the WSJ going on about Vince Foster and drug running, plus nutjobs on TV talking about Clinton sneaking out the WH at night. Nobody even understood what Whitewater was, because in the end it was just the Clintons being ripped off.
Most people thought Clinton was a cad, and that was it, which was why he survived. It’s the public perception of what it is to be a ‘cad’ that has changed. Or at least the public who exists outside evangelical America, I guess.
On ABC This Week Matthew Dowd said that he didn’t vote for Clinton in 1992 or 1996 because he thought he was of low character. That’s what I thought, too.
With the flurry of insane accusations against the Clintons — how many people did they kill to protect their Arkansas drug empire? — any serious accusations beyond him screwing around were completely lost in the nonsense.
If there was any truth to any of the other accusations —rape, murdering Vince Foster, and even eventually, PizzaGate — the Republicans would have been better served to muddy the waters so people couldn’t tell the difference between truth and fiction.
Will nobody think of the child sex slaves on Mars? We might have been able to save them had the Republicans not been crying wolf so often…
Was Clinton of lower character than George HW Bush, who was apparently groping women in 1992? Is it better to be assaulted by an Andover man or by an Arkansas hillbilly? There was so much cheapo snobbery about Bill’s transgressions vs the courtliness of a George HW Bush and his nice WASPy affairs.
What’s interesting is that the main defense the Clintons was that we should sophisticated about such things, like the French. And it’s true–we should. An actual affair would have been okay, but that was not an affair.
Wait, didn’t 92 feature Ross Perot; a viable 3rd party candidate? And he wasn’t accused of harassment.
The one case where I voted for X because he’s not a Y did not apply.
It has been a half century since a third party candidate carried even one state. I conclude from that no third party candidate is viable.
Always thought Clinton should resign. Never thought he should be impeached.
Steve
You are making fools of yourselves,, Gustopher and Modulo, by conflating Vince Foster nuts with sober observers.