Posted on 01/05/2016 4:05:09 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Turning Bill Clinton into Bill Cosby: Sorry, conservatives, there's a massive difference between their sex abuse allegations
Heaven save us all from conservatives who think they have a "gotcha."
And boy they sure think they have one with Bill Clinton and the supposed "hypocrisy" of feminists who don't agree that his wife's career should be derailed because of allegations of sexual harassment and assault made against him in the 1990s.
At stake is this alleged unfairness that while some men accused of sexual abuse get in actual trouble for it, Clinton walks around free and even gets to campaign for his wife. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton, who, in a bit of ironically sexist logic for these supposed defenders of feminist integrity, is treated as an extension of her husband and therefore guilty of anything he might have done.
"Why is Bill Cosby finished? He was the most beloved guy," complained Mark Steyn last week, drawing into question whether he's angrier that Bill Clinton isn't in trouble or that Bill Cosby is.
"You'd almost think it's some kind of like racism thing," Steyn added, to turn this into a double gotcha. "That somehow, when a bunch of women make accusations against the black guy, boom: he's vaporized. When a bunch of women make accusations against some white southern redneck, we're talking about putting him back in the White House for another eight years as first gentleman."
A number of other conservative commentators played the same card. Donald Trump, of course, is way out in front of this, calling Bill Clinton "one of the great women abusers of all time."
Rand Paul gotcha'd himself into a frenzy, saying, "Hillary Clinton has brought this on herself, by saying women should be believed," as if the only choices are between believing all women or not believing any women at all.
In New Hampshire, a Republican legislator heckled Hillary Clinton over these accusations. Faux feminist Kirsten Powers compared Clinton's "bimbo eruptions" to the "Cosby situation," which had the added bonus of collapsing the difference between rape and Clinton's admitted consensual encounters with women not his wife.
You can see the sick genius of this gotcha. Even if it doesn't actually work to derail Hillary Clinton's campaign, it can still be used to silence and discredit women who are making substantive allegations of abuse on the grounds that if Clinton's accusers aren't believed, no one should be.
This entire gotcha is based on a straw man. Contrary to what conservatives might have you believe, it simply isn't true that feminists think every allegation of sexual harassment or assault, no matter how unlikely, should be treated like God's honest truth. What feminists want is to end the double standard, where sexual abuse allegations are disbelieved out of hand, subjected to more skepticism and second-guessing than any other crime, or dismissed even in the face of strong evidence. By saying most women aren't liars, we aren't denying that some women do lie. This is an important distinction.
"I think rape and sexual assault allegations should be treated like allegations of mugging or burglary - which is to say, investigated promptly and thoroughly, on the assumption that the person reporting a crime is telling the truth," Kate Harding, the author of 2015's must-read examination of rape culture, "Asking For It," told me over email. "But that's often not how it works - so many people, including many in the justice system, presume that anyone reporting a rape is just as likely to be lying as not. When feminists affirm that we believe victims, we're saying there's absolutely no good reason to presume that when someone reports sexual violence, there's a 50/50 chance they're lying."
"We're not saying we'll ignore any evidence that someone fabricated a claim of rape," she added.
Feminists don't want every rape accusation to be mindlessly believed. As Harding points out, there have been cases, "Steven Avery and the Central Park Five come immediately to mind," where "aggressive police who settled on the wrong suspects and blinded themselves to exculpatory evidence." What feminists object to is the common problem of police and prosecutors who are so wed to the idea that women lie for the hell of it that they blow off rape accusations, even ones where a reasonable amount of investigation would show the woman is telling the truth.
This matters with the Clinton case for a couple of reasons. One, it's downright laughable to compare the Clinton case to cases where law enforcement and prosecutors blow accusers off. Was there ever a more dogged and determined prosecutor than Ken Starr? This was a man who was so hell-bent on finding something to ding Clinton with that he resorted to questioning about consensual sex to catch Clinton in a perjury trap. Unlike prosecutors who wrongly assume that accusers are lying, Starr and his comrades in the Republican Party were clearly eager to believe. They just never got the evidence together, despite having all the political will feminists wish was applied to less politically convenient accusations.
Second of all, while false rape accusations are uncommon, false accusations of criminal activity against the Clintons are common as dirt. The same right-wing noise machine that has supported Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick also churned out an endless number of often fantastical accusations against the Clintons during the same time period, including accusations that they murdered Vince Foster, Ron Brown and even Jim McDougal.
Willey herself, after claiming that Bill Clinton groped her in 1993, is the source of some laugh-out-loud ridiculous accusations against the Clinton, namely that they had her cat killed and oh yeah, she likes to imply that they killed her husband while they were at it.
"When multiple people accuse the same man of sexual assault, I am certainly more inclined to believe it's true," Harding told me, pointing out that Bill Clinton is certainly a "pig." "I think the only intellectually honest answer is, we can't know if he did what those three women claim, but we can't rule it out, either."
This is true. We can never know with 100 percent certainty if these allegations are simply part of the same right-wing lying machine that accuses the Clintons of witchcraft, murder and kitty-killing, or if the right lucked out and found the one damn thing that Clinton did do. But feminists do not and have never said that sexual assault accusers need to be held to a lower standard of proof than people who accuse of other crimes, just the same standard of proof. And while Harding is right that multiple accusers, in most cases, sets up a pattern, it's equally true that there's another pattern at work here, of multiple right-wingers making lurid and false accusations against the Clintons. Under the circumstances, there's simply no way to know which pattern these accusations fit into.
Either way, the equation of the Clinton accusations and the Cosby accusations simply doesn't pass the smell test. Cosby has been accused by more than 50 women of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault, and there's no reason to think anyone would lie about it. Clinton, in contrast, has been accused of sexual harassment by Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, and the only substantive accusation of rape, made by Juanita Broaddrick, was thoroughly investigated in the '90s. There simply is no evidence, one way or another, to tell if this was a sincere accusation or yet another incident of a wild-eyed Clinton hater with a grudge telling tall tales of murder and mayhem coming from those dastardly and satanic Clintons. Not all rape allegations are the same. And it's not feminists who are suggesting they should be treated that way.
".....The missionaries of the big progressive causes, the Steinems, the Irelands, the Michelmans, the Friedans, and Hillary Clinton herself, were all willing to toss their feminist movement overboard to give Bill Clinton a pass on multiple sexual harassments, and on a career of sexual predation that reflects his utter contempt for the female gender.
Indeed, the Clinton-Lewinsky defense-accord which the feminists signed onto, can be regarded as feminism's Nazi-Soviet Pact. Their calculation was both simple and crude: If Clinton was removed, Hillary would go too. But she was their link to patronage and power, and they couldn't imagine losing that. Their kind was finally in control of the White House, and the conservative enemies of their beautiful future were not.
Almost a decade earlier-in the name of the very principles they so casually betrayed for Clinton-the same feminists had organized the most disgraceful lynching of a public figure in America's history. Despite fiercely proclaimed commitments to the racial victims of American persecution, they launched a vicious campaign to destroy the reputation of an African American jurist who had risen, unblemished, from dirt-shack poverty in the segregated south to the nation's highest courts. They did it knowingly, cynically, with the intent to destroy him in his person, and to ruin his public career.
Has there ever been a more reprehensible witch-hunt in American public life than the one organized by feminist leaders who then emerged as vocal defenders of the White House lecher? Was there ever a more sordid betrayal of common decency than this collective defamation-for which no apology has or ever will be given?................."
Yeah...big difference. One rapes after first drugging. The other just gets right to the rape and says, afterwards, “Better put some ice on that.”.
They both have wives that condone the activity.
So these wimen were all liars?
Can't sell this BULLSTALIN, Salon.
NOW nags made excuses like "the first grope is free" and that it didn't matter WHAT Bill Clinton did to women in his office because he had the right position on abortion.
Time was that workplace sexual affairs (even consensual) were opposed by Feminists because it created a hostile environment. The "sexy" secretary who went on overnight trips with the boss was supposed to be a thing of the past.
And what of the allegations that Bill Clinton went to an island resort stocked with teen prostitutes and 1%es?
Could not read it all.
Salon is so full of s***.
Don’t forget that Bill Clinton used the power of his office as Governor to use state troopers to intimidate the women into compliance.
This matters with the Clinton case for a couple of reasons. One, it’s downright laughable to compare the Clinton case to cases where law enforcement and prosecutors blow accusers off.
Yeah here it was just the entire Democrat party and the entire MSM that blew (no pun intended) the accusers off.
If Bill Clinton had been ANY other man except Bill Clinton he would have been in jail long long ago..............
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
Born in 1977
>>In January 2007, Marcotte wrote controversial statements about the Duke lacrosse case, including that people who defended the accused were “rape-loving scum”.
Clinton was worse. Women who dated Cosby knew what was up and got involved voluntarily. They knew, or should have known better. I suspect more than a few of them got what they were looking for and expected, but are just engaged in extortion of a rich old man.
Clinton attacked women he ran into in the course of conducting government business, a female student at Oxford, and coeds at U. Arkansas when he was an instructor.
She apparently dismisses rape charges against Bill Clinton like a holocaust denier (her own analogy)
“In 2014, Marcotte criticized journalists who investigated and helped debunk gang rape allegations from Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus” story, which was later discredited and retracted. She wrote of those who questioned the details, ‘it’s really time for people to understand that rape denialism is like Holocaust denialism: a broad refusal to face reality’,”
I stand amazed at the many ‘strongholds’ that are being dismantled....
....what has been hidden is being revealed.
Thanks be to God!
Amanda Marcotte could win a Pulitzer Prize for this.
At the very least she’ll be invited on a network roundtable.
Hard to believe, but the ability to lie straightfaced is a top media resume’ enhancer.
Look for the Marcotte File to spring up on CNN.
She must be unfamiliar with US college campuses.
Look who’s back to running her mouth again. Our old friend Amanda Marcotte.
Wow. Great link. She really is a piece of work.
She was also front and center during The Duke Lacrosse Frameup.
“Contrary to what conservatives might have you believe, it simply isn’t true that feminists think every allegation of sexual harassment or assault, no matter how unlikely, should be treated like God’s honest truth.”
Holy crap! This person is either a liar or a REALLY BAD LIAR!
I cannot even believe that this little punk actually wrote this knowing full well that this is a major part of 3rd wave feminist philosophy!
They even call it “victim blaming” or shaming!
And might I ask I Clinton’s accusers are soooo obviously liars, then what makes Salon think that Cosby’s are telling the truth? And what was their opinion of the Rolling Stone rape article when it first appeared? I’ll bet it wasn’t anything short of complete 100000000% agreement.
Salon tells liberals how to talk about issues. Without Salon or Slate or Politico telling them what to say, mindless progressives would be unable to speak.
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