Earlier this week, Professor Jacobson noted that Hillary Clinton still very much wants to be president and thinks she was robbed last November. There is little doubt this is true. However, between her ridiculous book What Happened and bizarre pretense that allegations against her husband for sexual indiscretion, including rape, never happened, she highlights, even doubles down on, some of the main problems of her failed presidential campaign.
Many of us were dumbfounded in 2015 when Hillary tweeted the following:
Even the left was left cringing and puzzled: via Buzzfeed, “Juanita Broaddrick wants to be believed.” The backlash from her own party was so intense that the Hillary campaign took the statement off her campaign website.
That was two short years ago, and Hillary has apparently forgotten the incident, a remarkable feat in the current Harvey Weinstein atmosphere.
In a radio interview with WABC Radio’s Rita Cosby, Hillary says with seeming outrage, “we have a man who is accused of sexual assault sitting in the Oval Office.” She further notes that we need to see some “accountability” from both Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) and President Trump.
The former Secretary of State, who is on tour for her new book “What Happened,” blasted Alabama GOP Senate Nominee Roy Moore and President Trump, lumping them together, and saying there is a big difference between those two and allegations surrounding their sexual behavior versus Democratic Senator Al Franken. She says Franken’s apology for his inappropriate behavior and his willingness for a Congressional ethics investigation into that “is the kind of accountability I’m talking about. I don’t hear that from Roy Moore or Donald Trump… Look at the contrast between Al Franken, accepting responsibility, apologizing, and Roy Moore and Donald Trump who have done neither.”Secretary Clinton says President Trump “has disgraced the office.” When asked by host Rita Cosby if there is anything she admires about President Trump or what he’s accomplished while in office, she quickly answered, “No. The answer is absolutely no, Rita.. I didn’t think he’d be as bad as he turned out to be.“On Roy Moore she said, “Clearly he doesn’t appear to be someone who will bring respect and honor to the state of Alabama.” When asked about her own husband’s past behavior and if she should’ve been more supportive of his female accusers versus reports that she attacked their credibility, “Every situation has to be judged on its own merit.” She further said those allegations were investigated and recent comments by others about her husband are not relevant, “I don’t know that we can rewrite and revise history.“
Real Clear Politics has a partial transcript:
RITA COSBY, HOST: Do you think that given the fact that it’s been 9 women that have made various allegations against Roy Moore should he drop out of the race?HILLARY CLINTON: Well I’m going to leave that to the Republican party because they’re the ones that have to deal with this. And, look, we have a man who is accused of sexual assault sitting in the Oval Office, don’t we? And the very credible accusations against him have not been taken seriously. So, I think that the Republicans have a big problem that they are going to have to address and it’s not just confined to what’s happening in Alabama…People seemed to think he didn’t have to be held accountable for it. And now we’re seeing other accusations against other people but that doesn’t mean what we learned in the [2016] campaign and what we can see in terms of the women who are still speaking out about their experiences with [Donald Trump] should be overlooked or forgotten.
She goes on to explain that then-President Clinton was held accountable, a shaky assertion at best.
COSBY: But shouldn’t they then look at allegations against your husband and others because some feel that it’s a double standard.CLINTON: I don’t think so, Rita. I mean everything was investigating. Everything. I think that’s the big difference. When somebody else is investigated to the tune of $70 million and a special prosecutor who wants to prosecute and a partisan Republican party that wants to impeach, that’s the parallel. And the people of the United States rejected it, the Senate rejected it, but he was held accountable and he paid a price for it as was appropriate.COSBY: Do you regret not saying something in support of the women? Because you’ve always said that women should be believed and yet George Stephanopoulos and others said that you were part of the attacking the victims, the women who were making the allegations against your husband. Do you regret that?CLINTON: Look, I think every situation has to be judged on its own merits. And there were allegations that were disproved. There were allegations that were absolutely contradicted under sworn testimony. So, of course, you should give people who make such allegations the benefit of the doubt, that’s what our system does, but then you have to investigate them, and that fully happened in the late 90s.And what we’ve got here is something very different. You know, there’s been no commitment to investigate the more than a dozen women who have made charges against President Trump and there’s been no effort to really go into and understand what he was talking about in his Hollywood Access tape. So I just say they are not parallel and I think it’s unfortunate that people are either misremembering or misinterpreting history. The country remembers it. The country went through it. And it was a painful period. The Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars looking at every part of our lives and we all know what they found. And that was based on those allegations that were provable and the many that were not and this is a distraction that we shouldn’t fall for. Because if you’re going to hold people to the same standard there’s a lot of parallels that are not being followed in recent times.
The recent flurry of accusations and the swift judgments against the accused (and the accusers, for that matter) are being compared on the left to the Clinton sex scandals. Indeed, as noted above, Hillary’s 2015 decision to enter a discussion of sexual predation back-fired on her in a big way. And in 2016, the New York Times, for example, noted that her husband’s ’90’s sex scandals were “eroding” her “strength with women.”
Given the fall-out from the Weinstein scandal, the left-wing Atlantic makes a case that the feminists of the ’90’s, whom they argue saved Bill Clinton’s presidency, were on the wrong side of history.
[L]et us not forget the sex crimes of which the younger, stronger Bill Clinton was very credibly accused in the 1990s. Juanita Broaddrick reported that when she was a volunteer on one of his gubernatorial campaigns, she had arranged to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, he had changed the location to her room in the hotel, where she says he very violently raped her. She said that she fought against Clinton throughout a rape that left her bloodied. At a different Arkansas hotel, he caught sight of a minor state employee named Paula Jones, and, Jones said, he sent a couple of state troopers to invite her to his suite, where he exposed his penis to her and told her to kiss it. Kathleen Willey said that she met him in the Oval Office for personal and professional advice and that he groped her, rubbed his erect penis on her, and pushed her hand to his crotch.
It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation, and it was willing—eager—to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.
. . . . The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his stunning string of progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its central principles. The party was on the wrong side of history, and there are consequences for that.
Hillary’s comments in the WABC radio interview are mind-boggling in any context, but in light of even members of her own party stating that allegations of her husband’s sexual predation should have prompted him to step down, they almost need to be heard to be believed.
Listen:
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