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 doesn’t take long to figure this crock out. The leftie skanks are demanding the right to decide which lecher should be prosecuted, and which should be given a pass.....and lionized.
Apparently, Bill Cosby has not been a good enough er, ah, umm, plantation employee. He had the audacity to criticize ebonics, and black sexual mores, and parental negligence, etc. The hubris! He could have shaken the whole democRAT voter, welfare bondage, abortion-patient-supply-chain.
Nail his hide to the barn door!
“Feminists don’t want every rape accusation to be mindlessly believed. “
Sorry, but that’s just a damned lie.
One of my favorite FR memories is when Bill Clinton was speaking in downtown Newark, NJ in 1999. Racebannon brought flyers announcing a sexual predator was in the area. We walked around handing them out. After receiving one, a woman started following us and yelling at us. Good times. Good times.
The Left can’t wait for those of us who lived through this sordid Clinton history to pass on.
But we’re still here.
They’re crooks, liars and predators.
There isn’t enough whitewash to cover it up.
Thank you for finding and linking it to the thread.
The Clintons and their backers don’t want these facts to get out to the millions and millions of voters who don’t know their history.
Chilling.
You can sum up this windy diatribe easily: it’s okay when a liberal is a sexual predator; it’s a lynching affair when a conservative is.
Marcotte is playing the “look over there” journalism
game and by the looks of the posts in this thread she
is winning. The real issue is not about what he did but
what Hildo did to quell his accusers! Articles about what
Slickster did or didn’t do are more of a diversion than
anything else.
This is an example of how much benefit Trump is providing - he’s the only candidate who can bring this issue back to the politicsl forefront and both immune to reprisal attacks AND extortion via third party (Dems threatening to expose other Republican scandals).
Even if Trump doesn’t get the nomination he’s doing substantial damage to the Clinton political machine and the Dems.
I see it more as a one-two punch.
Punch one: establish that it wasn’t “just about sex” and that Bill Clinton is a predator and misogynist.
Punch two: demonstrate Hillary’s culpability as not only an enabler but also an accomplice and enforcer.
Punch two will only be effective if punch one is landed solidly. The fact that twits like this writer are twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels to rationalize Clinton’s behavior shows just how effective punch one is being.
HOT DAM*!!! BILL CLINTON wants to be MY “First Lady”!
IF any mate of any Presidential wannabe had ever
conducted themselves in the nasty, horrid way that
“Bill the Bull” Clinton has done, they would be told to
KISS OUR GRITS!! I, for one, am telling the sorry
Canker Sore to zzzbttttttbttttzzzzxxxXXXXXXXX himself
and Hitler-y, too!! - Oh, and inform Hitlery that you will
not be able to keep your promise to bequeath the Office
of the POTUS to her. = God help us be shed of the CLINTONS!
And the writer of thos article has selective memory-on a lot of issues, but I’m particularly remembering how the left, most especially its propaganda arm the media, whipped up the mother of all “gotchas” in Clarence Thomas’ appointment hearing.
Well, they don’t want accusations against leftist stalwarts to be believed, or even made public if they can help it-the left has a long history of covering up for the sexual indiscretions and even crimes of their own-Kennedy (many Kennedys), Anthony Weiner, Clinton, and more. It’s all just fun and games when it’s one of theirs.
“I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,”
The authorette claims the accusations were made by KKKlinton haters, but in fact the accusers were KKKlinton supporters or were indifferent to him until they were attacked.
The Clinton’s best defense is always the same. “You can’t prove that! There is no evidence of that!”
I call it the Bart Simpson defense. “I didn’t do it! Nobody saw me! You can’t prove anything!”
The only difference is that Cosby did not have a ruthless b-I-itch like Hillary dealing with his bimbo eruptions.
The fact that Salon felt compelled to spend 22 paragraphs on an attempt to diffuse this tells you that we’ve struck all the right nerves.
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