jojo22 wrote:. wrote:"No comment gentlemen, I am married and I find this intrusion into my private affairs both undignified for you august gentlemen to ask and beneath the dignity of the office of the President of the USA to answer."
Yeeehhaaaaarrrr
Now what's the bet Bill would read that and think 'damn, I wish I had this person to write my replies back then?
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton's staff formulated a clever plan to handle questions about Bill's "bimbo eruptions." Whenever Bill sat for an interview where such questions were likely to be asked, Hillary sat next to Bill during the entire interview. When the questions were asked, Hillary would become visibly uncomfortable. Bill would then respond that these were "personal matters" which had been resolved between the couple or with similar deflections designed to make the interviewer look like an overreaching scandal-monger. Enough information was not yet known for specific questions about specific women, so Bill never was forced to explicitly admit or deny with specificity. The plan worked brilliantly.
Had Bill Clinton admitted his affair with 21 year-old intern Monica Lewinsky, even as a Republican who loathed Clinton, I would have opposed the inquisition that ensued. Indeed, no inquisition would have ensued because the American people would have forgiven Clinton.
As I stated previously, it was not Clinton’s adultery that in my view rendered him unfit to be President (though I abhor adultery).
Clinton initially displayed abysmally poor judgment in bedding Lewinsky whilst facing a sexual harassment lawsuit by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones. He knew his sexual exploits were under intense media scrutiny, yet he recklessly risked further scandal. But even this, in my view, did not render Clinton unfit to lead.
When allegations about his affair with Lewinsky became public, Clinton resorted to a strategy that never failed in the past: (1) lie and deny; (2) frame it as “he said, she said”; and, (3) then have his formidable public relations apparatus methodically destroy the accuser’s character and credibility with scurrilous leaks to the press – truth be damned. This was the first action that in my view implicated Clinton’s fitness to lead.
Until Lewinsky, Clinton’s accusers were provincial Southern “white trash” women of limited means and modest intelligence who had at least a semblance of a skeleton on which to base a character assassination.
Lewinsky was cut from different cloth. She was the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles doctor. She grew up in a wealthy, worldly, even jaded, environment. Consider that when Lewinsky was notified that she was accepted to be a White House intern – a position with no realistic expectation of spending any time with the President – Lewinsky assured her Los Angeles girlfriends that she would end up blowing Bill Clinton. She was a woman on a mission.
After Lewinsky finagled her way into his pants, Clinton gave her his “rules of engagement”: if two people are in a room alone and both say that nothing happened between them, then nothing happened between them. Lewinsky knew what happened to Clinton’s past paramours (she did her “research”). Not for purposes of blackmail (at the time), but to protect herself from character assassination if the affair ever became public, Lewinsky saved a dress with Clinton’s sperm and didn’t tell Clinton about it.
After Clinton testified under oath that “there was no sexual relationship” between him and Lewinsky, and after Clinton emphatically declared to the American people on national television that he “never had sex with that woman” (he even pounded the podium with his fist), Lewinsky’s wealthy father vowed to defend his daughter’s reputation and dispatched his personal attorney William Ginsburg (whose specialty was medical malpractice defense, but who had a big mouth and relished the media attention) to Washington.
Basking in the limelight, Ginsburg appeared on every news show and every talk show, assuring the nation that Bill Clinton had nothing to worry about. During one such interview, Ginsburg declared that neither Dr. Lewinsky nor Monica nor Ginsburg himself had any desire to damage Bill Clinton, followed by the words “Bill Clinton is a friend of Israel.” No big deal was made about that statement, but it stuck in my mind.
Shortly thereafter, news was leaked that Monica Lewinsky had saved a dress with Clinton’s sperm. When I heard the news, I immediately recalled Ginsburg’s seemingly innocuous statement about Israel. I realized that Bill Clinton had compromised the presidency by making himself vulnerable to political blackmail if he were to act in a manner contrary to the interests of Israel. It was then that I concluded Bill Clinton was unfit to be President of the United States.
In sum, Bill Clinton was outsmarted by a 21 year-old and compromised the Presidency as a result, which in my view rendered him unfit to be entrusted with the most powerful job in the world.
