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Monica Lewinsky Is (Half) Right
Monica Lewinsky has reemerged to claim the spotlight. She gave a speech the other day about being the “patient zero” of Internet-driven attacks on one’s reputation. In describing her experience, she began:
Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college, a 22-year-old intern in the White House — and more than averagely romantic – I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way. It happens. But my boss was the President of the United States. That probably happens less often.
Hearing the audio clips and reading the transcript, I think she’s correct, but doesn’t go far enough. In any organization outside government, when a 22-year-old intern falls in love with her boss, the boss knows he cannot have a romantic or sexual relationship with her. The relationship would not be coequal. In any organization outside government, the power differential would be assumed to be exploitative. In any organization outside government, the boss would know that revelation of such a relationship would cost him his job.
I’ll recap some history for the millenials. President Clinton was sued in 1994 by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, for sexual harassment. In her suit, Ms. Jones claimed that after she refused then-Gov. Clinton’s request for sexual favors, she was denied promotions and her career suffered. In contrast, there were reports of a former White House intern who had engaged in a sexual relationship with President Clinton and was then given direct assistance in landing a plum job.
Clinton first argued that a sitting president could not be sued; SCOTUS rejected that argument with respect to matters outside the president’s official duties, so the suit proceeded. As the case progressed over the next four years, information trickled out, much of it tawdry: Lewinsky was the former intern; her friend Linda Tripp had secret tapes of Lewinsky discussing the relationship; Lewinsky had saved a “little blue dress” and refused to wash it because it was stained with Clinton’s “DNA”; President Clinton had subsequently perjured himself, lying under oath that no relationship with Ms. Lewinsky had existed, and was accused of manipulating witnesses.
The tawdriness was exacerbated by Clinton’s shameless manipulation of the media, from the photos of the Clintons going to church, to the televised fingerpointing denials, to the attack dogs he unleashed to eviscerate the reputations of anyone who stood in his way; most notably, prosecutor Kenneth Starr. The perjury charge was the most substantially documented of the many scandals Starr was tasked with investigating, so he used it as the basis for his impeachment recommendation. Paula Jones eventually settled her suit in 1998 for $850,000, after Clinton was impeached but the Senate — in a bizarre trial in which it refused to review any evidence — declined to convict.
In her speech, Ms. Lewinsky lamented the her experience as the target of media attacks too:
During this period, I gradually came to realize that there were two Monica Lewinskys. Yes, the world was big enough for two of us. There was me. And there was public Monica Lewinsky, a somewhat curious character constructed by political factions and the media, constructed with a little fact and a lot of fiction….
What does it actually feel like? What does it really feel like to watch yourself – or your name and likeness—to be ripped apart online?
Some of you may know this yourself. It feels like a punch in the gut. As if a stranger walked up to you on the street and punched you hard and sharp in the gut.
For me, that was every day in 1998. There was a rotation of worsening name calling and descriptions of me. I would go online, read in a paper or see on TV people referring to me as: tramp, slut, whore, tart, bimbo, floozy, even spy.
I feel much sympathy for Lewinsky, and was moved by her description. What she overlooked in her speech, however, was the agency of President Clinton. The prosecutors were keeping her information confidential. It was the president — and his cutthroat defenders — who leaked and planted information in the media to discredit her. They could not afford for the country to understand that Clinton was an irresponsible lout. So they had to make the public believe instead that she was obsessed.
There is a straight line from Monica’s experience to the Obama scandals. Before Watergate, the media sought out juicy stories on both parties (though they looked the other way when the scandals were personal). After Watergate, the media adopted a new narrative: Republicans are bad guys with scandals to be discovered, Democrats are the good guys who need to be defended, and reporters are the heroes who shape events.
As the first post-Watergate president dogged by personal scandal, Clinton presented a challenge to this narrative. So the media went into overdrive to ensure that the public would not hear of the scandals or — when that became impossible — to”contextualize” information so the public would not draw the undesired conclusions. Everything from the Whitewater deal, to the Travel Office firings, to the disappearing (and reappearing) Rose Law Firm billing records, to the misuse of FBI files, to the inexplicable hiring of bar bouncer Craig Livingstone, to the myriad campaign finance irregularities was swept under the rug. And when the president was sued for quid pro quo sexual harassment, with incontrovertible evidence, and the president then perjured himself — a scandal that the public could understand easily without the media’s help — the media helped turn it into a story about an obsessive girl’s crush.
Today, the media is similarly in the pocket of a Democratic president. Once again, the media is remarkably uncurious about numerous meaty scandals. Once again, the lies go unchallenged so as to preserve the narrative. Once again, the little people are taken advantage of by the powerful. At least Monica can be grateful that she — unlike Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty, and Brian Terry — is still with us 17 years later to tell her side of the story.
Image Credit: Featureflash / Shutterstock.com
Great Post! Well worth thinking about.
I second that.
Your summary is better than anything else I’ve read on this horrible chapter in American history.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone takes the Clintons seriously.
Lowlife of the century.
And I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface. Remember being afraid to listen to AM radio in the presence of children, because the news reports were R-rated (or at least PG-13)? Remember the dismissals of the relationship as “consensual sex”, as if Paula Jones or Juanita Broaddrick or Hillary Clinton had consented in their respective cases? Remember the squad that managed the “bimbo eruptions” — James Carville, Paul Begala, Hillary Clinton…? The one good thing I can think of with regard to the Clinton years is that the unending lies and corruption turned me from a liberal to a centrist and finally into a conservative.
The worst week of my life. I was around young kids all the time. I thought I would be sick.
All I could think was, “Why doesn’t someone just get him out of the presidency?”
It’s a bit scary how much of a role model the POTUS is, if subliminally, for the American public. I’ve always thought Clinton’s cheery dismissals of his exploits, and the way they were catalogued in the news, gave a kind of permission to other lowlifes to be unashamed of their sins. Likewise Obama, whose arrogance and ignorance of past protocol makes it easier for incompetents to bluster their way through failure after failure.
It’s one very strong reason I wish Romney would have won. He would have made mistakes, to be sure, but he would have been a sterling role model of behavior, which the country really needs.
I understand now Clinton got away with it because of the media? Newt diddling his administrative assistant while going after Clinton had nothing to do with it?
Well said. Maybe it’s too bad we didn’t have the new definition of rape back when Clinton was plying his trade. Might have given lefties some second thoughts about that.
Funny story. My daughter Rachel met Clinton when she went to Girl’s Nation in 1997. We have a photo of her shaking his hand. There was a guard in the photo that I photoshopped out, but when the Monica Lewinsky thing happened, my Mom told me that we needed to reinstate the guard.
So the internet is the villain in this story, and Clinton is . . . just another victim?
Poor woman. She probably still thinks he loved her.
Perhaps this will sound harsh, but one thing I find missing from this account, and too many others like it, is any sense of her own culpability. She just “happened” to “fall in love,” as if it were inevitable, and nothing about the fact that he was not just the president but a married president. This is not to deny the almost overwhelming power-of-attraction the President held in the situation, nor the disgusting treatment she received, especially from the Clintons and their minions, nor the understandable sense that her role was insignificant when weighed against the President’s actions, but I believe it still takes two to tango. A cautionary tale on many levels.
I long for the days when a politician with a scandal like Clintons would have had the decency to retire to his study with a brandy and a revolver. But then again “Clinton” and “decency” don’t belong in the same sentence….
She is a victim of nothing more than her own poor decisions. She chose to mess around with a married man, let alone the President, and everything subsequent stemmed from that decision. She’s being disingenuous to cry, “Oh, poor me” without acknowledging her own responsibility in how her life turned out.
liberal Jim, Newt and Bill Clinton were both equally guilty, weren’t they? Or at least darn close. But the media loved Newt so much that they protected him. That’s obvious.
That is not “harsh”. The fact is, the best way to avoid being called a tramp, slut, or whore is to not act like a tramp, slut, or whore
You could write a 600-page book on this subject and never fully cover it. There is something in the psychology of human beings that makes this kind of stuff inevitable.
Bill Clinton (and millions of others like him) have that roguish charm that many women find alluring. Couple that with political power and you have trouble, right here in River City. With a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for… well, it ain’t “pool.”
When you introduce that charm to people who are consumed by ideology you get a disconnect, a cognitive dissonance that can’t be reconciled.
An ideologue might say she wouldn’t want her daughter interning for Clinton but, like former Time reporter Nina Burleigh she might also say, “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
That sentence is totally irreconcilable with their stated beliefs of patriarchy, power and exploitation. But Burleigh, and millions like her, are happy to make their deal with the devil. (It’s compounded when you’re a militant atheist like Burleigh you don’t even have the moral compass to realize you’re doing it.)
There is also a weird leftist culture with age. Clinton and Obama were celebrated for their JFK-like “youthful vig-ah.” Reagan and Bush 41 were derided as “old white guys.” But when you see everything through an ideological lens, wisdom only comes with age when you’re black or brown.
Boffing every woman in sight is celebrated as “youthful vig-ah” unless it’s a conservative. Then it would be a sign that they are a perverted hypocrite. (Their logic: We don’t give a damn about your morality so our cheating and whoring is “sincere.”)
Brilliant, EJ, and thanks, I guess, for reminding us of Burleigh. I recall the New Left (nothing new about it) being none-too-gallant around their own women, and the Kennedys. Well, you just have to say the name. Anyone who hasn’t read Michael Kelly’s piece on Teddy should run right to Google. The Left loves power (okay, it ain’t alone in that) and is adept at justifying anything and everything.
I wouldn’t say Newt had “nothing to do with it”, but I also wouldn’t assign him primary culpability. Newt’s sins would not have carried so much weight with the public if the media hadn’t already established their spin that, “It’s just about sex” (or even the more nuanced, “It’s just lying about sex, which is something anyone would do”). Kenneth Starr also made a tactical error when he focused his report on the scandal with the most evidence, rather than the scandals with the most serious implications, or the pattern of scandals itself. Sen. Joe Lieberman gave Clinton the moral backing he needed at the right time. But stepping back, I still think that the fundamental reason Clinton got away with all he did was because the press, collectively, placed partisan loyalties ahead of their jobs. They were content to amplify the Clinton machine’s spin because it allowed them to continue their illusion that Democrats are the good guys.
One cannot help but wonder if Monica’s new job with Vanity Fair isn’t just another way the Clintons are holding her hostage to the harassment she was subjected to so many years ago. It’s so easy to manipulate her this way too because the “evil conservatives” are more than happy to call Monica a slut and allow Clinton to deflect blame from himself to his victim.
We don’t need to long for honor suicides do we? We can still find him despicable without wishing death upon him can’t we?
I for one am simply tired.
I’m tired of the bad behavior that the left allows its representatives to do. I’m tired that rational conclusions about character are no longer “allowed” to enter into debate. I’m tired of the open, obvious, hypocritical positions politicians take, say, and do, to get elected (note the recent performance of Shahene in NH).
And I am MOST CERTAINLY tired of any discussion of Monica Lewinsky. Had she actually had any real realization of the extent of misbehavior, on both her and Clinton’s parts, she would not be seeking public stage to utter platitudes about her behavior (“it happened” ?Really. We had no idea!) but would have quietly retired to a life of taking care of her OWN business. Our media is still complicit; she should never have gotten the media stage for this “episode”. It should have been looked at embarrassingly as further bad decisions, no longer excusable by being a 22-year old.
I remember a related issue. A woman was convicted of perjury, and she questioned why she was going to jail when the president did the same thing and did not go to jail. It was then and is now a perfectly relevant question: Why didn’t Clinton go to jail for perjury?
That speaks to every senator who voted not to impeach Clinton, including the Republicans who failed to uphold the law.
Bill Clinton, the patron saint of liars and those that seek inspiration in their justification for committing perjury. Let us not forget Sandy Berger the patron saint of shoplifters and those who have no intention of returning library books, or even checking them out.
I was working at the schools as a full-time volunteer–I had my own mailbox at the administration offices!–at the time the scandal broke. I was surrounded by Democrats, and the men were really angry at Clinton. The superintendent of our school district literally had a tear running down his face when I saw him the morning the scandal was first reported on the news. Another friend, a principal, was angry for days about it. He couldn’t even speak about it, he was so enraged. The young orchestra conductor who was coming to the Cape from New York once a week said to me angrily, “The president is held to the highest standard. He is setting an example for the kids in this country.” He became a Republican because of it. He was truly embarrassed to be a Democrat because of Clinton’s behavior.
I wondered at the time and ever since if the congressional Republicans did the right thing in bringing Clinton’s behavior public. Clinton was guilty of so many things. For the sake of the kids and families in this country, couldn’t they have found some other way? Use something else to get rid of him? And why weren’t they ever able to get rid of him? He was guilty of so many things. Using this particular charge against him made him seem to be a victim to the sympathetic women in his party. We should have seen that effect coming.
And because they didn’t make this charge stick, Clinton is still around today, and we’re paying him a pension. And his wife is now running for president. Which puts Bill back in the White House. Wonderful.
When the doctor prescribes an antibiotic, he or she goes to great lengths to explain that the patient must take all of it and leave not trace of a germ because the infection will come back if there is even a tiny bit of it left. This is how we should have treated the Clintons. :)
While we lament the incompletness of the impeachment of Bill Clinton just keep repeating to yourself, “On 9/11, President Gore…”
Thank you for this.
I say to people constantly, I don’t care what he did or didn’t do as president. He saved this country from Al Gore and John Kerry. The rest was up to us!
Since we are playing counterfactuals, a President Al Gore might have authorized elimination of Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11 (choices that President Bill Clinton was presented with several times).
It may be a stretch to imagine, but it’s also unknowable.
Stacy McCain makes an important point: Monica Lewinsky perjured herself when she signed the Clinton procured false affidavit – signed it knowing it to be false – that was part of the conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Paula Jones case.
Lied in defense of the very people who were vilifying her to the press. She’s still in the tank for the Party today. But let’s blame Drudge.
I disagree. Algore almost won the presidency as an unknown-potential POTUS. Had he been POTUS for a year or three prior to the 2000 election, he might’ve lost convincingly, or at least by enough that there’d’ve been no Florida chad debacle in our past. Bush’s presidency might’ve been viewed as completely legitimate by the country, instead of as illegitimate by half of America then and still as illegitimate today by a substantial minority of Americans.
No, I’m not convinced that not convicting and removing Clinton had a silver lining.
Dittoheadadt – Recent history would argue with you. As bad as Clinton was, as bad as Obama IS they both won re-election. Al Gore, running as an incumbent would probably have managed to win his home state AND Florida quite handily.
Part of Gore’s problem was Clinton fatigue. Add the power of incumbency and Bush 43 is only remembered as the former governor of Texas.
….and Jeb might be in a better position to capture the Republican nomination.
Heh.