By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, January 09, 2016
I haven’t written to you since last year. Saying, “A lot
has happened since then,” seems like the kind of understatement on par with
saying “It’s been a bad day,” after Cthullu has turned the oceans to blood,
commanded that wolverines eat the bait-and-tackle of every man with a vowel in
his name, and given the rest hooks for hands and an aggressive case of the
crabs.
A modest recap: Roving bands of rape gangs are fanning
out across Europe. In Cologne, one of the latter day Vandals taunted the
police: “I’m Syrian. I must be handled in a friendly manner. Mrs. Merkel
invited me.” Knuckleheads in Oregon have seized a wildlife refuge, and some on
the left are angry they haven’t been summarily slaughtered. The international
economy is turning into one long “Buy Gold” commercial. President Obama has
responded to a renewed terror threat and chaos in the Middle East by redoubling
his efforts to keep the boom in gun sales and NRA donations going for the rest
of his presidency. Donald Trump is concern-trolling Ted Cruz because other people might make a big deal about
him being a Canadian sleeper agent. Joe Biden says, “My tank tops have a gun
show loophole on each side.” He also said that he regrets not running for
president, “every day.” A self-described “Peace Troubadour” who appears to have
been raised on an ancient moron burial ground has announced he will hold a
“peace concert” in ISIS-controlled Syria. Rumors that his face will grace the
new Darwin Award Medal remain unconfirmed. If he goes ahead with the concert, I
have a long list of performers he should bring with him. ISIS released a video
showing them working with surface-to-air missiles, while we’ve apparently been
shipping missiles to Cuba. Iran expedited its ballistic-missile program and the
Obama administration threatened to do something about it but then chickened
out. Saudi Arabia and Iran seem minutes away from open war with one another and
President Obama’s advisers reportedly think his Iran deal is a source of
“stability” in the Middle East (one has to wonder if they, too, were raised on
ancient moron burial ground). Any day now we will give them somewhere north of
$100 billion dollars – you know, for even more stability! North Korea detonated
an atomic bomb (which may have been a hydrogen bomb). And Time magazine has already declared Donald Trump the winner.
But there is good news.
For those of us who toiled in the fetid swamplands of the
1990s culture wars, particularly the boggy tributaries fed by Bill Clinton’s
pants, this is a moment of effulgent wonder.
Let’s back up a moment.
That ’90s Show
There’s a lot of talk these days about how feminist
attitudes towards sexual assault have evolved in recent years. And that’s true
as it far as it goes. What it leaves out is that we’ve been here before.
Starting in the late 1980s, “awareness” about sexual harassment and sexual
assault became a huge issue. There was the nomination fight over Senator John
Tower to become Papa Bush’s Defense Secretary, and allegations about his
drinking and “womanizing.”
Side-note: It was a long time ago, but I remember
thinking at the time that, given the charges against him, at the last minute
the kids from Scooby-Doo would step up, rip off the John Tower mask and
exclaim, “Why it’s Ted Kennedy!”
Scooby: Ruhhhh?!?
Velma: He’s the one who was
chugging boilermakers in the cloak room and shagging his secretary all along!
Senator Kennedy: That’s
right, and I would have kept on doing it, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!
Hey, I have an idea, why don’t you kids relax and let me take you for a drive
in that bitchin’ van of yours? What could go wrong?
By the way, “womanize” is a weird word. As an
intransitive verb, it means to have casual sex with many different women. As a
transitive verb it means to do what Bruce Jenner’s makeover team does to create
Caitlyn Jenner.
Zero Tolerance 1.0
Where was I? Oh right, it was the late 1980s and early
1990s, the golden age of the mullet, the hairstyle that’s business in the front
and a party in the back — which, oddly, is how they described various private
jets Bill Clinton has flown on. After John Tower there was Bob Packwood, a name
so perfect for a sex scandal even porn moguls would say, “That’s a bit too on
the nose, don’t you think?” Packwood, a liberal Republican who had a good
relationship with feminists, was thrown to the wolves. Investigators rummaged
through his diary and he was hounded from public life.
Then there was the fight over Clarence Thomas, who was
alleged to have made a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can and asked a
colleague out for a date. And this was enough to make his accuser into feminist
martyr. It’s difficult to exaggerate the feminist feeding frenzy those hearings
created in the media. Carol Mosley Braun and Patty Murray ran for the senate in
protest of the hearings, giving rise to the Year of the Woman. It was zero
tolerance, not just for rape, but for even the slightest verbal misstep.
Similarly, the discussion on college campuses then would
seem familiar to people today. There was lots of talk about a rape epidemic and
how “women don’t make these things up” or words to that effect. Feminists were
even declaring open war on the porn industry, something they would never dream
of doing today.
Enter the Clintons, a husband-and-wife team if ever there
was one. While no one talked about Bill Clinton being the Messiah or a
“lightworker” or anything like that, Clinton was still a much-adored figure in
all the predictable circles. (And I don’t mean Little Rock brothels.) The
media, which loathed the Reagan-Bush years with a passion that hastened the
demise of mainstream media credibility, saw Clinton as a redeemer figure in his
own right. He was also powerful. And as I keep saying, power corrupts the
worshipper more than it corrupts the worshipped.
The Bill We All
Knew
There’s no need to recount all the sordid details, but it
became very clear that Bill Clinton had a zipper problem. Behind every story or
allegation that made it into print there were dozens that stayed out of the
papers but were nonetheless traded around Washington like baseball cards. Some
were probably just rumors. Others had names and dates attached, but the people
telling them didn’t want the hassles. In short, Bill Clinton put more uninvited
hands on females than a woman’s prison guard in charge of searching for
contraband. In 1992, the Clinton campaign had a full-time team to deal with
what one staffer called “bimbo eruptions.”
And when the time came for feminists and the media to
choose between sticking to the zero-tolerance principle they worked so hard to
establish and throwing a Democratic president under the bus, they chose to hold
a fire sale on their principles. Gloria Steinem, feminist matriarch, raced to
the op-ed page of the New York Times
to declare a “one free grope rule” for lechers. “There is nothing inherently
wrong . . .” wrote Katie Roiphie, also in the Times, “with [Monica Lewinsky’s] attempt to translate her personal
relationship with the President into professional advancement.” Clinton’s
baron-and-the-milkmaid act with an intern, declared feminist author Jane
Smiley, was simply an admirable “desire to make a connection with another
person.”
Of course, in practice the one-free-grope rule became
unlimited free-gropes. Every time a new allegation surfaced, the grope-quota
would be expanded. Time magazine’s
Nina Burleigh even admitted she’d have happily serviced him, just for keeping
abortion legal. Because, feminism!
The Co-Dependent
Co-Presidency
So here’s the fun part. A big source of Bill’s appeal to
feminists was none other than his wife. She was more left wing than Bill. She
was also not just a career woman, she had a chip on her shoulder about it. “I
suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” she famously
snapped. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered
before my husband was in public life.”
I have no objection whatsoever to career women. Indeed, I’m
glad that the term “career woman” itself sounds a bit archaic to the
contemporary ear. But the important part of that line was her shot at
traditional mothers. It was her version of sneering at the “bitter clingers,”
and a lot of female journalists shared her contempt and resentment.
Hillary’s popularity had little to do with her
personality. How could it have been otherwise? That’d be like loving saltines
for the taste, or watching Girls for
the nudity. Rather, it stemmed from the idea that she represented a kind of
feminist ascendancy. From the earliest days, Bill suggested that he would have
almost a co-presidency. Elect him and you’d get “two for the price of one,” he
famously promised. And lurking behind that was the much-discussed possibility
that she would have her “turn” after him.
Hillary had hitched her wagon to Bill’s. She helped
circle the wagons around his philandering. She “thanked” — wink, wink — Juanita
Broaddrick for not making too big a deal about the fact that Bill raped her,
“allegedly.” Indeed, she famously blamed all such allegations on Bill’s enemies
and their desire to hurt the country.
The Bill Comes Due
Fast forward to two weeks ago. Hillary is as close as
she’s ever been to finally fulfilling her destiny. Everyone — at least everyone
who matters — is finally “Ready for Hillary.” The tireless effort by her
minions to make Bill’s behavior a trivial and private issue seemed to have paid
off. Bill is popular, very popular. Despite the fact that pretty much no one
thinks he mended his ways after he left office, all of the sophisticated people
think criticizing his “personal” behavior is boorish and deranged. At the same
time, feminists have finally completed their restoration project. The last
stones have been mounted atop the wall of Zero Tolerance 2.0.
And then, as Jeffrey Epstein’s flight attendant once
said, Bill Clinton comes out of nowhere to bite her on the ass.
Whereas Bill was supposed to be Hillary’s “not-so secret
weapon,” he’s now a liability. It’s schadenfreudetastic to watch liberals
forced to choose between the Scylla of the Hillary campaign and the Charybdis
of the feminist project.
Of course, liberals are mad at . . . conservatives (and
Donald Trump) for pointing it out. I particularly love the subhead on this Slate piece. “The right hopes to turn
the feminist consensus on rape against the Clintons.” Ah yes, those terrible
conservatives, how dare they take feminists seriously!
(As I noted in the Corner the other day, the fact that
the Clintons were completely intimidated by Trump should create a real
opportunity for Bernie Sanders. Hillary’s supposed to be tough-as-nails in her
fight against sexism. Sanders should point out that she has a glass jaw —
because of Bill.)
Oh, I very much doubt this will spell the doom of the
Clinton campaign. But I cherish the possibility. Hillary’s whole campaign is
premised on the idea that she can win because she’s a woman. Whenever she’s
asked if she’s a “change candidate,” she skips past the inconvenient fact that
the Clinton name is like a familiar callous on the foot of the body politic,
and goes straight to the fact that she’s a woman. She’s not a particular woman,
she’s a victory for EveryWoman. To the extent she wants to be more than a mere
biological category, she leans heavily on the positive associations with her
husband’s presidency. And now, the other
legacy of her husband’s presidency is eating away at her feminist sales pitch,
like a dose of slow-acting strontium-90.
I would feel bad for her, but if there’s a person more
fully aware of who and what she got in bed with than Hillary Clinton, I don’t
who she, or he, is.
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