No matter how clear cut or murky a scandal can be, we can always count on Bobo Brooks to shine, as long as it involves trashing progressives and fluffing cons. His latest apologetic is somehow both painful and entertaining to read.
(NYT) My first question is over whether the Clinton statute of limitations has expired. My assumption, post Lewinsky scandal, was that for at least a decade no president or presidential candidate could be punished for an improper workplace relationship because if Clinton could get away with it then no one else should suffer.
Nice try David, but did we really escaped so unscathed? It’s a fair assumption that Al Gore paid for Clinton’s sins by losing Florida’s electoral votes, and we all suffered a’plenty as a result of that outcome, eh? Both because of Bush’s serial cluster-fucks and the endless, mindless, cheerleading by you and your buddies for what proved to be policy disasters so epic I would never have believed it all possible had I not lived through them. And correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Lewinsky in 1998? By my admittedly secular math that makes it more than a decade.
Wasn’t Lewinsky consensual? Shouldn’t there be a difference between how we treat consensual sex and harassment?
But conservatives did punish Clinton. They impeached him
Only in the House of Representatives was Bill Clinton impeached. The Senate acquitted him – would you call that em-apple-ing?
Yoritomo raises an interesting point. “Consensual” just means that both sides are in agreement, but plenty of persuasive power can be applied upon the less powerful side – and between a lowly intern and POTUS, we know where the power lies. As President Jed Bartlet in West Wing warned Charlie Young when the man talked to him about dating his daughter Zoey, “Remember – the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all report to me.”
OTOH, power can be a powerful aphrodisiac. If an intern approaches a president, turned on by the thought of having some sort of tryst with the most powerful human being on the planet, that’s sex. If the President approaches the intern, with the ability to utterly destroy the intern’s career if the advance is unwanted and spurned, that’s harassment. The issue would be exactly the same if we were talking about a male intern and a female president, as it was in the case of Lewinski and Clinton.