Posted on 10/23/2014 6:16:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
Monica Lewinsky re-entered public life this week. Actually, this is the first time she volunteered to enter the spotlight. Her first foray was involuntary and embarrassing. It also was her own fault. Well, hers and President Clinton’s.
Lewinsky gave her first public speech on Monday at the Forbes “30 Under 30 Summit” celebrating young achievers. She spoke for 25 awkward minutes, but she could’ve delivered her message in half that time if she were speaking comfortably. But as stilted as the delivery was, the content was worse.
Poor, sweet, innocent Monica was exploited, abused and bullied back in 1998 when her affair with Bill Clinton was made public. And she was. But not by who she blames for her humiliation.
Lewinsky blames Matt Drudge, Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, the media in general and the Internet in specific. She blames everyone but Bill Clinton and, most importantly, herself.
In talking about when the story broke, she told the crowd, “Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was Patient Zero. The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet.”
But Monica’s reputation wasn’t destroyed. The façade reputation she created for family, friends and co-workers, and maybe even herself, was destroyed. When the Drudge Report broke the story that Newsweek had spiked Michael Isikoff’s story of her affair, we learned a lot about Newsweek. But we also learned what kind of people Monica and—to a lesser extent since he already had a reputation for this kind of thing—Clinton were.
Monica Lewinsky was a victim in one respect only—the most powerful man on the planet saw an opportunity to use a young sycophant for his own sexual pleasure and took it. But she was a willing victim, and she was an adult.
She said, “I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.” Well, 22-year-olds are responsible for their actions; they aren’t babes in the woods. If she didn’t look at an affair with a married man who happened to be the president of the United States as something that might end badly, no matter what her emotions may have been, that’s on her. “Young and stupid” might apply to 5-year-olds who break their legs trying to jump off the garage and fly. But it does not apply to people with two decades of life under their belt.
The only people who victimized Monica Lewinsky were Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton.
She recounted the lows she went through after the news broke, the threat of prison time over committing perjury in a sworn affidavit in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and the fear she felt at the time. But that isn’t “bullying,” as she claims; those are consequences of willfully taken actions.
It hard not to feel some degree of sympathy for Monica Lewinsky, but it’s harder still to care.
Near the close of her remarks, Monica said something that shows she doesn’t get what she was involved in doing, or just hopes you don’t.
“I don’t know which came first: the coarsening of the culture or the worsening of behavior,” she said. “Either way, what we need is a radical change in attitudes — on the Internet, mobile platforms and in the society of which they are a part. Actually, what we really need is a cultural revolution. Online, we’ve got a compassion deficit – an Empathy Crisis — and something tells me that matters a lot more to most of us.”
After the Clinton/Lewinsky affair broke in 1998 the culture did change, radically. The media and the Democratic Party spent years telling us it was “only about sex,” and stigmatizing judgment on such issues. Since then, our culture has developed a new class of celebrity.
Were it not for Monica Lewinsky, the media, and the Democratic Party, we would not know the names Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Farrah Abraham and countless others people famous for things that would’ve mortified them prior to 1998. Are we better off as a society because of their “celebrity”?
That people would push back against that change for the worse is not only common sense, it’s a good thing.
Monica said she wants a “cultural revolution.” Well, she got one. It might not be the one she wants, but that’s the risk you run when you start something without thinking through the consequences first. Something with which she is intimately familiar.
“Lewinsky gave her first public speech on Monday”
Didn’t she speak up about 10 years ago? On her own?
Lewinsky needs to get a clue. If not for the notoriety she got she would have been another footnoted corpse lying aside the Clintons path to power just like so many other inconvenient people the Arkansas mob found troublesome. Drudge saved her life.
Monica was born to be a Democrat. She has the victim thing down pat.
She feels the problem wasn’t her affair with the President but that they got caught.
Dear Monica,
Please please continue talking about this and never allow Hillary to sweep it under the rug for the next few years.
Yea but that’s not today’s truth.
This is Lewinksy version 3.0.
The deal here is that her general life is ruined. Typically, if this had not occurred....the intern and the political game player would have gone on for two or three decades. A plain Senator or Representative would have hired them up as office support, eventually in six years making them a full manager and ensuring their $100k a year salary.
She would have traveled around with her man (political figure), while the wife sat back home. She’d sip wine in the room with him....discuss politics....and been the perfect liaison gal for a busy guy who needs a wife and a mistress.
Somewhere around age thirty-five, Monica would have discovered that there’s no truth to her guy divorcing his wife, and there’s no family option, or plan B. She’d either pack up and go back to college, find another man, or just accept this for the remainder of her life.
In this present case, I think Monica is still hooked on Bill Clinton and his amazing character. Once introduced at a party....she’s pretty much damaged goods and never able to get a guy to look at her beyond being Bill’s intern. I can understand her frustrations....but there’s no chapter two to this book or story. It just lingers, unless Bill divorces Hillary, and then something might occur.
Uh, no.
I'm pretty sure that this Vanity Fair piece and her book publication constituted "re-entering public life" well before this week:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-speaks
Nothing in politics happens by accident. I’ll wager that the Clinton Machine has trotted her out in 2014 to inoculate Hillary from “blowback” (pun intended) in 2016. Hillary will then say, “That happened a long time ago and Ms. Lewinsky discussed it all in detail last year. It’s old news. (Like Benghazi will be.) Let’s just move on.”
Wait. I thought she was just delivering a pizza.
Besides the fact that man you "fell in love with" was a married man.
Your age had nothing to do with it. Your lack of morals did.
Chandra Levy did the same... these girls have a crying need for attention and crave it to a pathological degree, EVEN IF it means breaking all the rules.
Getting on in life on the merits of your ‘person’ is never a good plan... in fact, there is a not so nice name for it....
They would rather flirt their way to success than actually work and prove their merit!
Feminism has not deprogrammed this ...and SHOULD have by now.
And her MTV appearances, and her home shopping network Purse/designer selling and...
“Lewinsky blames Matt Drudge, Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, the media in general and the Internet in specific. She blames everyone but Bill Clinton and, most importantly, herself.”
Ok, I was wondering about the timing of her appearing out of nowhere back into the public eye but that explains it.
"Coarsening of the culture?" You mean one in which the topic of "oral sex" is readily discussed? One in which we know about DNA evidence on clothing, and know how it got there?
Yes, it's true that there have been Presidents in the past that have had affairs, but none that came with the tawdriness that Clinton brought. He was your President, Miss Lewinsky. You and all your liberal, feminist friends defended his actions. Not just actions against you, but all the other women that he used. Your ilk slandered honest men like Kenneth Starr, while you championed the worst of them. Yes, you're a part of that cultural coarsening because even today, you don't recognize it. You still defend the bad over the good.
When you're ready to acknowledge that, I might be willing to listen.
Exactly! Right out of the standard Clintoon playbook.
Think about it--to have a conference with 30 under 30 to inspire younger professionals, why would have Monica Lewinsky, whose only accomplishment was to give a President oral sex in the Oval Office?
What could this nothing-burger of a woman possibly impart to young professionals of any value. She was the epitome of the woman sleeping her way to the top--literally and figuratively.
She needed a payday, and the Clintons saw to it she got one. In exchange she acted all "gooey-eyed"(Rush said that, not me, but it is appropriate) talking about the "love of her life" and decrying bullying, when her true love and his harridan spouse were plotting to destroy her after he used her like a sink.
For once, I would like to hear Monica thank Linda Tripp for saving her life by advising her to sacve the blue dress with President's DNA splashed all over it,.
It literally saved Monica's life.
Poor thing. She still hasn’t learned the chief lesson from this whole mess (pun intended).
Learn ... when ... to ... close ... your ... mouth
Exactly
Actually, as I recall, Clinton used the sink as a sink. :)
WIN!
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