After
doing all this reading, I’m not sure my reasonable middle ground is
actually reasonable. It may be that the conservatives of the 1990s were
simply right about Clinton, that once he failed to resign he really
deserved to be impeached.
Yes, the Republicans were too partisan, the Starr Report was too
prurient and Clinton’s haters generated various absurd conspiracy
theories.
But the Clinton operation was also extraordinarily sordid, in ways that
should be thrown into particular relief by the absence of similar
scandals in the Obama administration, which had perfervid enemies and
circling investigators as well.
The sexual misconduct was the heart of things, [
No it wasn't. 'At the heart of
things' were the drugs, murders, treason, and utter corruption of the
Clinton crime family]
but everything connected to Clinton’s priapism was bad: the use of the
perks of office to procure women, willing and unwilling; the frequent
use of that same power to buy silence and bully victims; and yes, the
brazen public lies and perjury.
Something like Troopergate, for instance, in which Arkansas state
troopers claimed to have served as Clinton’s panderers and been offered
jobs to buy their silence, is often recalled as just a right-wing hit
job. But if you read The Los Angeles Times’s reporting on the
allegations (which included phone records confirming the troopers’
account of a mistress Clinton was seeing during his presidential
transition) and Stephanopoulos’s portrayal of Clinton’s behavior in the
White House when the story broke, the story seems like it was probably
mostly true.
I have less confidence about what was real in the miasma of Whitewater.
But with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, we know what happened: A
president being sued for sexual harassment tried to buy off a
mistress-turned-potential-witness with White House favors, and then
committed perjury serious enough to merit disbarment. Which also
brought forward a compelling allegation from Juanita Broaddrick that
the president had raped her.
The longer I spent with these old stories, the more I came back to a
question: If exploiting a willing intern is a serious enough abuse of
power to warrant resignation, why is obstructing justice in a sexual
harassment case not serious enough to warrant impeachment? Especially
when the behavior is part of a longstanding pattern that also may
extend to rape? Would any feminist today hesitate to take a similar
opportunity to remove a predatory studio head or C.E.O.?
There is a common liberal argument that our present polarization is the
result of constant partisan escalations on the right — the rise of Newt
Gingrich, the steady Hannitization of right-wing media.
Some of this is true. But returning to the impeachment imbroglio made
me think that in that case the most important escalators were the
Democrats. They had an opportunity, with Al Gore waiting in the wings,
to show a predator the door and establish some moral common ground for
a polarizing country.
And what they did instead — turning their party into an accessory to
Clinton’s appetites, shamelessly abandoning feminist principle,
smearing victims and blithely ignoring his most credible accuser, all
because Republicans funded the investigations and they’re prudes and
it’s all just Sexual McCarthyism— feels in the cold clarity of
hindsight like a great act of partisan deformation
[BLAH BLAH BLAH]
