It seems the primary tactic against Hillary Clinton these days is to attack her through her husband and his well-documented philandering. They call her an enabler, pointing out how she went after Monica Lewinsky with all the viciousness of a pit bull terrier, even though Bill was guilty. They say Hillary aided, abetted, and even possibly encouraged her husband to abuse women.
Rudy Giuliani, in particular, has utilized this argument with the kind of full-throated shrieking I haven't heard outside of Donald Trump. In fact, I'd say Trump is exactly who he learned it from. What Christopher Hitchens ever saw in Giuliani back in 2007 is beyond me.
Oh, Rudy. You picked the wrong teacher.
It's time for me to bury yet another of the myths regarding Hillary Clinton. And yes, there do seem to be a good deal of such baggage items following Hillary around. But what I find so fascinating about such baggage is - there's nothing in them! Most baggage at least contains something. Not Hillary's!
To understand why Hillary's attacks against Monica Lewinsky and others are justified, it is necessary to construct a timeline. Once you see the timeline, you will understand why the argument Trump and Giuliani are using is totally bogus.
1995, Bill Clinton begins his affair with Lewinsky. They would have about a dozen or so fellatio encounters over the course of the next few years.
January 17th, 1988 - The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on the Drudge Report.
January 21st, 1998, the Lewinsky scandal gets reported in the Washington Post.
January 26th, Bill Clinton issues his harsh denial to the press, "I never had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Hillary was standing beside him at the time.
** Keep in mind, at this juncture, Hillary takes Bill at his word when he flatly denies any affair took place with Lewinsky. She knows he's had trysts in the past, such as the affair he'd had with Gennifer Flowers. But she believes him anyway. Why? Partly because he was so firm in his denials, but more importantly because it was just unthinkable. In the oval office? Surrounded by Secret Service personnel? It just seemed too ridiculous at the time, even with her husband's reputation! In fact, such a reputation would make him a prime target of such a concocted right-wing smear campaign! She concludes that the Republicans must have cooked up false allegations to attack her husband. She was out for blood!
January 27, 1998, Hillary interviews with Matt Lauer on the Today show. She utters her famous line about there being a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, then makes her not-to-veiled threat that certain people would "have a lot to answer for."
Hillary, true to her word, tries to apply an "Ellen Rometsch" strategy, where her husbands opponents, including Monica Lewinsky, would be shamed into silence by having all their dirty laundry aired out. She does this from February until mid-July of 1988. Keep in mind, she believes her husband is totally innocent, and that Monica Lewinsky is a lying bitch who was working for the Republicans while she worked as an inside staffer. To her mind, she's earned it!
July 28, 1998, Monica Lewinsky is given transactional immunity in exchange for her grand jury testimony. She also turns over a semen-stained dress which her friend, Linda Tripp, encouraged her to not throw away or get dry cleaned.
August 15, 1988 - Bill Clinton, realizing that Monica was not bluffing, and that he had nowhere left to hide, awakens Hillary in the middle of the night, and nervously confesses everything. He says that the whole thing is far worse than he thought. He says that the tryst with Monica was brief and fleeting, and that he did everything he could to pull away from her.
** Now, imagine what must be going through Hillary's mind at this point. Holy shit! It was all true?! It hits home that her husband has been caught lying about something the Republicans will no doubt grill him mercilessly for, and there was no getting around it. She could go down for it too! And holy hell! She'd attacked Monica Lewinsky for nothing! True, she was hardly innocent, but she was nothing more than a stupid bimbo! And she'd treated her like a traitor!
Then it hits her how insincere her husband's apologies for the Gennifer Flowers affair were! It hits her that allegations she took to be false from Paula Jones and others are probably also true after all! She remembers how viciously she attacked them, and they were only guilty of the far lesser crimes of being hapless sluts as well!
According to all accounts, Hillary scarcely spoke with Bill for the next two years. Bill literally spent the next several weeks sleeping on the couch. If it weren't for Chelsea pleading with the two of them not to split up, the marriage may have ended right there.
Fast forward to 2016. Nearly two decades have gone by. Hillary finally has opened back up to Bill somewhat. After much soul-searching (and winning her elections), she forgave Bill, but not because he deserved it. She did so because their marriage was always about partnership, and destroying it meant destroying the political franchise they'd built together - a chance to make the world a better place.
Now imagine how pissed off she must be when shriveled old farts, like the shell-of-his-former-self Rudy Giuliani, spout off accusations that Hillary's attacks on Monica Lewinsky were consciously designed to knowingly protect a guilty husband. Imagine how her blood must boil when he repeats the Paula Jones lie that she is some kind of "enabler."
As if she weren't lied to as well.
And Hillary stays cool. Shit, she doesn't have thick skin, she has armor-plating!
I was right to nickname her, "Lady Titanium."
Republicans would like to paint Bill as a college playboy whom Hillary could, in her lust for potential power, mold into a political draft-horse which she could drive to the White House. They speculate that she thought she could use his sex scandals against him as a weapon, brow-beating him into enacting whatever policies she wanted done.
Bullshit! Let's have some common sense, here! No woman who marries a known philanderer can ever control him! Nor does any woman look at such a man and see such opportunity! How ridiculous can you get?! Bill was a shy, pudgy band geek who fell in love with a brainy woman who never wore makeup. He was always awkward around women, and so the "plain-Jane" woman Hillary was back then must have seemed more approachable to him. By all accounts, he asked her to marry him first. She initially refused. It was a classic "semi-attractive smart people" romance, and the Republican narrative of a philandering college-boy Bill is all wrong.
It wasn't until Bill won the governorship of Arkansas that he suddenly got attention from women, because certain women are attracted to power, and it probably went to his head. Literally. He spent many years trying to recover from that sudden drug overdose! And Hillary spent many years coming to grips that her husband was not the shy, committed band geek she first married.
Hillary may be battle-scarred, but she's no lady-pimp cracking the whip over her gigolo husband. Such a notion is silly, if one knows the background. And even if one doesn't, it's easy to see that the back-story concocted for "enabler Hillary" makes no logical sense.
Contrast this with Donald Trump, who is not only a philanderer, but one who has openly boasted of it! A man who has been a playboy, been in Playboy magazine, and even had a cameo in a porno. A man who has had three wives after cheating on the first two, and has undoubtedly cheated with all three by yet more women besides.
If you thought a man getting a blow job in the oval office was bad, just think what this neo-Caligula will do to in there!
Eric
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