Bill Clinton’s alleged sex crimes
Fox News wants to know: “Is the left ready for a Bill Clinton ‘ reckoning’?” The answer is: sort of. For years, Democrats tried to ignore the array of allegations against the 42nd president. Monica Lewinsky was one thing, but Juanita Broaddrick, Paula
Jones and Kathleen Willey were, as Hillary Clinton said at the time,
“floozies” and “stalkers.” Marjorie Williams took on this donkey in the room in Vanity Fair in 1998. But the majority of Democrats were loyal to capo Clinton in the 1990s, and they stayed that way until this week.
Now they’re suited up to relitigate. Stray tweets in the wake of the Roy Moore scandal have coalesced into thinkpieces denouncing the former president. “Bill Clinton should have resigned,” intones Matthew Yglesias at Vox. “I Believe Juanita,” trumpets Michelle Goldberg on the New York Times op- ed page.
Both of these pieces reflect a broader approach among liberals toward Clinton’s behavior. They offer Clinton up as a sacrificial lamb to avoid charges of partisanship, and at the same time they excuse themselves of sheltering him until it became convenient.
Despite the headline, Goldberg’s piece is a carnival of equivocations. She believes Juanita, sure, but she believes only Juanita, and only now.
Yglesias lets Democrats off the hook, writing off the grave allegations against Clinton from everyone except Lewinsky, because apparently those are the only charges we can safely take seriously. Then he argues that “the policy case that Democrats needed Clinton in office was weak.”
It gets worse: “Now that Hillary is out of electoral politics … there’s no excuse for Democrats not to look back at these events with more objectivity.”
That single sentence gives away the game. Democrats don’t deserve credit today for refusing to be hypocrites. They already are. They stood by Clinton in the ’ 90s because they thought it was in their political interest, and they batted back attempts during the 2016 election to bring up what it would mean to have an accused rapist as first gentleman for the same reason. That impulse may have been rooted in a desire not to see Hillary Clinton punished for her husband’s wrongs. Yet instead of interrogating that reasoning, liberals did their best to ignore the problem.
Democrats now have a chance to prove they’re not still stuck in the ’ 90s. For now, they’re ready to reckon with Bill Clinton. They’re just not ready to reckon with themselves.