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.
It's safe to say she didn't learn much there.
They sure twisted themselves into a knot trying to explain the difference between the two Bills.
“there’s a massive difference between their sex abuse allegations”
Correct.
Clinton is white.
Didn’t take long for Salon to trot out the CDL (Clinton Defense League) did it?
Well...it’s not like rape-rape, right?
I love hearing female moonbats defend Bill Clinton.
Every single time they open their mouths to defend Bill Clinton, the neon sign proclaiming their shallow, partisan stupidity and hypocrisy burns brighter and brighter.
Their obsession with genitalia and rape is 180 degrees opposed to their defense of Bill Clinton. If you gave them truth serum, they would mumble that the possibility of advancing liberal causes is far more important than the contradiction and moral hypocrisy they display by supporting a rapist.
What makes it even more hilarious, is that to liberals, there is NO greater crime to them than hypocrisy. It trumps everything in their little pea-brained minds. But this, they cannot give up. So they shout their support for Clinton louder and louder.
They want their cake, and they want to eat it too.
NYT - Oct. 2015: Geoffrey Marcy to Resign From Berkeley Astronomy Department
"Geoffrey Marcy, the renowned astronomer who was found guilty in a campus investigation of sexually harassing students, is resigning from the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been a professor for 16 years.
....The university placed Dr. Marcy on probation over the summer after the investigation but did not announce the decision. It became widely known only last week.
The announcement of Dr. Marcy's resignation came two days after some two dozen colleagues - an overwhelming majority of the astronomy department - issued a vote of no confidence in a letter saying they believed that he could no longer "perform the functions of a faculty member." In separate statements, the department's graduate students and postdoctoral fellows concurred.
"This should put sexual harassers on notice: No one is too big to fail," Joan Schmelz, a former chairwoman of the American Astronomical Society's Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, said on Wednesday.........."
Moonbats are incapable of seeing irony. It is completely lost on them.
Stopped reading right there. Then I realized this was Salon.
This broad needs to be mocked and ridiculed in public.
Isn’t one of the “big” differences between these two rapists that one of them traveled out of the country to a private island to rape under-aged girls? Not sure that was covered in this puff piece.
” . . . Juanita Broaddrick, was thoroughly investigated in the ‘90s”
I don’t think so.
to provoke that many words from Salon, it means a critical nerve has been struck
some how, they really thought bubba doesn’t matter
"I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal," boasted former Time magazine White House correspondent Nina Burleigh about Bill Clinton. She made her offer known to Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz when he called to discuss a piece Burleigh penned in the July/August Mirabella magazine detailing her lust for Clinton.
Titled "King of Hearts," the two-page article carries this subhead: "Former White House reporter Nina Burleigh thought she was beyond being seduced by a man's power, his status, his job. Then she played cards with the President on Air Force One." The article recounts her encounter with Clinton last year on a trip he took to Jasper, Arkansas for a funeral. At the time, Kurtz noted, she had left Time but was filling in on the trip as a "contract writer" for the newsweekly......................."
Just as democrats did with Anita Hill, Bob Packwood and the Tailgate fiasco. Not to mention Duke lacrosse, not to mention Tawana Brawley. And why did Clinton settle with Paula Jones if she made the story up. Why didn't he want it to go to trial?
As with most things with liberals/progressives/the left (or whatever you want to call them) this all boils down to the political party they support. More to the point, it's all about what they expect to get in return from the political party they support. For this author, given her past writings on rape, to pretend it is about the integrity of women of having justice being done is pure folly.
But let's use here logic in that there were only 3 women accusing Clinton so there is room for doubt. Why not the same for Cosby? If 3 women can be bought off why can't 50? 50 has been or wanna be actresses sure could use a six figure settlement from the Cos...right? There is your motivation..... right? But if somebody were to go on TV and use that logic to defend Cosby, they would be vilified 24/7 for the next 6 months. But defend Clinton using that logic and your articles get printed by Salon and you become an A list analyst for MSNBC.
Lie. If Ms. Broaddrick's allegation had been thoroughly investigated (by the left), Hillary would have known who she was. But Hillary claims she had no idea who Juanita was (another lie). After that it's all just word games. But most leftists seriously really don't know who Juanita Broaddrick is.
At first glance, the one glaring difference here is that “Pudding Pop” Cosby is battling ALLEGATIONS.
BillyJeff is a KNOWN sexual predator.
Somebody tell me if I am mistaken
David Horowitz A Modern Machiavelli 2 Lyrics
... In 1969, the year that publishers reissued Alinsky's first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley undergraduate named Hillary.....
[SNIP]
The title of Clinton's thesis was "There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model." In this title she had identified the single most important Alinsky contribution to the radical cause - his embrace of political nihilism. An SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]radical once wrote, "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution." In other words, the cause of a political action - whether civil rights or women's rights - is never the real cause; women, blacks and other "victims? are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power."....................
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