By Alexandra DeSanctis
Friday, February 02, 2018
Hillary Clinton is the latest politician embroiled in a
#MeToo sexual-harassment scandal. The New
York Times reported earlier this week that she shielded a top adviser from
allegations of sexual misconduct against a subordinate.
During the 2008 campaign, a young woman accused Clinton’s
faith adviser, Burns Strider, of harassment. Clinton’s campaign manager
recommended that Strider be fired, but Clinton refused, instead docking his pay
and requiring him to attend counseling. In 2016, Strider rallied to Hillary’s
side again, this time to head up the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record, from
which he was later fired for . . . sexually harassing a female subordinate.
When the Times
story broke, Clinton offered a remarkably tepid statement via Twitter:
I called her today to tell her how
proud I am of her and to make sure she knows what all women should: we deserve
to be heard.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton)
January 27, 2018
After facing intense criticism from several of the very
same media outlets that have long placed her on a golden pedestal, she posted a
follow-up explanation on Facebook. Here’s its opening paragraph:
The most important work of my life
has been to support and empower women. I’ve tried to do so here at home, around
the world, and in the organizations I’ve run. I started in my twenties, and
four decades later I’m nowhere near being done. I’m proud that it’s the work
I’m most associated with, and it remains what I’m most dedicated to.
This line of defense rings rather hollow given from whom
it’s coming — a woman who covered for her husband’s serial sexual abuse, to the
point of publicly smearing his victims. The moral of the Burns Strider tale,
however, is not that Clinton botched her handling of the incident at the time —
although she may have — and therefore is a failed feminist.
Much more important is how her weak response — both in
2008 and in this week’s protracted equivocations — illustrates left-wing
politicians’ willingness to wield the language of the #MeToo movement when it
serves them and discard it when it does not. Anyone can demand zero tolerance
until that same demanding standard is leveled against themselves and their
allies.
Take, for example, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand,
who was grilled about the Strider story on The
View earlier this week by host Meghan McCain. After urging Republicans to
hold former RNC finance chairman Steve Wynn and President Trump accountable for
allegations of sexual misconduct — and repeatedly insisting that enforcing
zero-tolerance policies should not be a partisan issue — Gillibrand swiftly
changed her tune when McCain pressed her to answer for her mentor Hillary
Clinton.
“You need transparency and accountability, and no one is
above criticism. But, in [the Strider] case, I don’t know all the details,”
Gillibrand hedged, before devolving into further generalities. Here’s the rest
of their exchange:
McCain: Senator, you have dedicated
your political career to this fight, obviously. That’s why a lot of people were
really surprised that it took you 20 years to say that Bill Clinton should’ve
resigned over the Lewinsky scandal. So what do you say to that?
Gillibrand: I think this moment of
time we’re in is very different. I don’t think we had the same conversation
back then, the same lens. We didn’t hold people accountable in the same way
that this moment is demanding today. And I think all of us, many of us, did not
have that same lens, myself included. But today, we are having a very different
conversation, and there is a moment in time where we can actually do the right
thing or fixate on one president.
McCain: Can I ask you, do you
regret campaigning with him, though?
Gillibrand: It’s not about any one
president, and it’s not about any one industry. And if we reduce it to that, we
are missing the opportunity to allow women to be heard, to allow women to have
accountability and transparency, and to allow women to have justice.
This kind of empty moralizing is not unique to
Gillibrand, though her particular brand of hypocrisy is uniquely irritating.
When the Harvey Weinstein story broke last fall — the story that catapulted us
headlong into the #MeToo movement — public figures on the left largely stayed
silent, evidently unsure how to deal with the fact that an ally and top donor
had been implicated in something so distasteful.
When Minnesota senator Al Franken and Michigan
congressman John Conyers were entangled in sexual-assault allegations of their
own, top Democrats kept their lips sealed for weeks. House minority leader
Nancy Pelosi said she had “zero tolerance” for harassment but appeared on Meet the Press to defend Conyers,
calling him “an icon,” praising him for his support of women’s rights, and
intimating that his accusers might not be credible.
Democratic senators side-stepped the Franken accusations
for two weeks. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders suggested that Franken might not
need to retire because he was popular in his home state. Gillibrand herself
repeatedly dodged press questions on the subject, saying it was Franken’s
decision whether he ought to resign. It wasn’t until public outcry built that
these vacillators abandoned him en masse, as the price of disregarding his
behavior outweighed their fear of disowning a loyal brother in arms.
Of course, reluctance or refusal to hold allies
accountable isn’t a purely Democratic ailment; there’s plenty of hypocrisy to
go around, on both sides of the aisle. Consider the way top Republicans brushed
aside the Access Hollywood tape, and
factions of the GOP embraced Roy Moore despite credible allegations that he
assaulted minors.
But left-wing politicians have spent decades asking us to
believe that they’re the real allies of American women, that the Right ignores
sexual assault, that conservatives are waging a “War on Women.” Like Clinton,
they promise that they can’t possibly be complicit because they’ve campaigned
against female oppression for decades.
Until they’re ready to stop covering for the misdeeds of
political allies — or simply their employees — these hypocrites have forfeited
the right to point the finger of zero tolerance at enemies.
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