There was a thoughtful Caitlin Flanagan piece in the Atlantic you should all read about how liberals need to admit they were on the wrong side of history when they supported Bill Clinton through the Lewinsky affair. Until they do so, she argue persuasively, they will have no….ha ha, I’m kidding, fuck that shit and the totebaggers who gobble it up. It’s not even fair to the Soviets to call it whataboutism.
This post is about the crappy tax bill that ol’ blue eyes has scheduled today. It’s going to be tough to stop it in the House, but if you live in a Republican district, get on the horn with your representative.
We keep hearing about how it will be a big win politically for Republicans if it passes both chambers, is signed, and becomes law. I think that’s bullshit. The bill is already extremely unpopular. The Republicans are better off not passing it from the standpoint of the 2018 elections. But that’s not what matters. The bill is bad for the middle-class, bad for the country, bad for the future, and we need stop it.
Here’s one Republican who has the right idea:
Steve Louro, a Republican donor who hosted an event for Donald J. Trump at his Long Island home last year, abruptly quit his post as regional finance chairman for the state’s Republican Party on Tuesday over objections to the Republican-led tax bill advancing through Congress.
“The bill that’s going to get passed is not going to take care of the American people. It’s a disgrace,” Mr. Louro said in a phone interview. He had resigned from his post as a fund-raiser via email earlier in the day, he said.
“The Republican Party took control of the government against all odds, and the bottom line is” they messed up, he said, using an expletive. “It’s a disgrace. It’s going to hurt a lot of middle-class Republicans.”
SFAW
But it’s GOOD for the near-billionaires who are trying to become REAL billionaires, so fuck you, libtard, and all your libtard snowflake friends.
hueyplong
Seems like he was OK with everything until it started hurting GOPers, too. I mean, he didn’t quit until yesterday.
martian
It’s weird how some Republicans seem the most surprised of all to see what the Republican party is, and I’d especially include all those NeverTrumpers people love to read now. Y’all were there from the start, how are you surprised?
Baud
We should definitely try. No Dem will vote for this. I just want to put a marker down against anyone who will choose to blame Dems if it does pass.
different-church-lady
@martian: “I thought they were just saying they were going to eat my face to get elected!”
Lapassionara
The Senate version would require $25 million in cuts to Medicare. When asked, most Senators did not know this unhappy fact.
So call your Senators too.
aretino
@Lapassionara: that’s 25 billion, actually
aimai
@martian: Never trumpers were afraid that Trump’s naked corruption and stupidity would make it impossible for republicans to covertly carry out these very plans. Now that he’s carrying them out they, too, are facing a quandary–they object to trump and trumpism primarily on the grounds that he can’t carry out their program. Now that he is permitting/enabling Ryan to carry it out they are scared because they realize that their fucking program is the problem and is going to destroy the party (sometimes they tack on: middle class republicans). But they can’t admit that republicanism and the party, the voters, and the politicians are the problem. They simply wanted to blame trump for being too tawdry and stupid.
Tom Levenson
There are no GOP House dawgs within range for me (I’m represented by a third gen. Kennedy, Warren and Markey). But I called Sen. Collins yesterday as I have tons of my wife’s family in Maine and both left a long message in DC and spoke for a while to a very nice staffer in one of her regional offices.
I highly recommend calling local offices. You almost always get a person, you can have (often) a real conversation, and they remember.
NCSteve
So said the frog who gave a scorpion a ride across the river and the little girl who saved the snake from freezing. And the part where both the scorpion and the snake doomed themselves by acting in accordance with their nature is pretty much directly on point as well.
Humboldtblue
Nothing like waking up at 3:05 a.m. to the sound of gunfire. At least 14 shots were fired about a block from my bedroom window and if I wanted to hear that shit I woulda stayed in the army.
And are we talking about the leopards eating people’s faces party again?
Doug!
@Tom Levenson:
Yeah, I call Chuck’s and Kirsten’s local offices here.
MomSense
@Tom Levenson:
Which office answered? I tried Bangor, Portland, and Biddeford but didn’t get a human. Hopefully that means the call volume was yuuge.
Edmund dantes
I’m guessing his business is one of the ones that is exempted from the pass through loophole.
So he is pissed he isn’t getting his tax cut. So defender of the middle class.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Is there some point where the fans of, say, Rush, are bothered by being told they need to sacrifice a couple of grand a year out of their own pockets to line his?
Haha, of course not, evangelists have been selling that line with success for years, even centuries. Mark Twain’s con men in Huckleberry Finn spent some time on that circuit.
But still, isn’t there some point…? I guess I’m thinking of the scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray is saying why should we obey all these stupid rules, for instance why shouldn’t we drive down the railroad tracks when there’s a train coming, and his passengers pause and say, um, actually we think that’s kind of a good rule… Of course I’d kind of like the Rush fans to say that before the train actually kills all of us.
SFAW
@Humboldtblue:
The neighborhood was under the misimpression that you were pining for
the fjordsyour salad days.Patricia Kayden
Monica Lewinsky engaged in a consensual affair with President Clinton. It’s not comparable to what Moore is being accused of or with Trump’s admitted sexual misconduct. I doubt Clinton could win in today’s climate anyways given his colorful philandering background.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I guess what continues to puzzle me is just how beholden politicians are to the rich donors. Even when they know damned well they’re being asked to support a bill that the voters hate, they make the calculation that it’s better to keep the richest donors happy at the expense of everyone else.
What does “better” mean? I would think the only measure is “probability of being re-elected”. And that means that the calculation is that MONEY is more important than pleasing voters, even when you’re trying to persuade those voters to vote for you! It’s a bizarre logic, but they’ve been screwing their own voters for years while winning state houses and congressional seats, so the calculation is obviously correct. Money can apparently overcome a lot of voter-screwing. Ads can persuade anybody of anything.
Did the 2017 election convince them that maybe this bedrock postulate, $$ uber alles, no longer necessarily works for getting re-elected? Naah, the habit is too ingrained.
But if the rules are changing, maybe one could hope, eventually, for a country with two political parties who both believe that a “representative” is supposed to represent their voters.
D58826
IIRC the left did not ‘uncritically’ stand by Clinton. Most folks condemned what he did but did not think a BJ warranted impeachment or 4 years of the Starr inquisition.
And lets remember that while it was unfair to call Monica a stalker, she certainly went out of her way to attract Clinton. And she certainly didn’t think of herself as a victim as she talked to Linda Tripp.
As for the other women –
1. Paula Jones was a creation of the right wing hit squad in AK and shot her credibility with the non-existent markings on Clinton’s penis
2. Kathleen Willy had to be offered two immunity deals because she lied to Starr and then her corroborating witness recanted her support
3. Gennifer Flowers was an adult consensual relationship of some indeterminate length. Disgusting but hardly unique
4. and then there was Juanita Roderick which was the most serious charge – rape. She denied it for years, which we now know is normal. Apparently she refused to testify under oath for Starr.
Does anyone seriously think that if Starr could prove a rape charge he would NOT have included that in the referral? All he had was a blue dress.
Do I think Clinton’s conduct was above reproach – of course not. I would like to have seen him put in stocks on the WH lawn and then let the citizens throw veggies at him. A big part of the liberal defense was because it was so obvious that the right was trying to reverse the election.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
My white progressive Berniebro female friends are all over that piece of shit Flanagan article. Here we are up to our necks in klansmen, fascists, nazis, pedophiles, forced birthers who want to take our health care away, but yes, let’s debate whether Bill Clinton should have resigned. When I mentioned this, she told me “if I have to tell you why it’s important, than there’s no point in discussing it with you”. I was going to go after her hard, but she’s a Bernie deadender so there’s no point. She then posted Berniebro Matt Yglesias companion piece, and…. scene. Peak white privilege on display, but she’s PROGRESSIVE!
Thoroughly Pizzled
When you treat everything as a horse race, eventually you lose the ability to realize that one of the horses is still a horse and the other has mutated into a pus-oozing slime monster. This would not be a “win” in any sense.
D58826
@Patricia Kayden: Times and attitudes change over time (and in this case for the better). We accept the fact that the founders were slave owners.
And if he had shown up on my doorstep when the Monica story first broke I would have beaten him about the head and shoulders with a 2×4
D58826
help comment in moderation
MomSense
@Patricia Kayden:
I doubt WJ Clinton could win the Democratic nomination now with his background, but obviously he could win the Republican nomination with his background if he were a supply side worshiper, etc. They nominated trump and continue to defend him or look the other way. They continued to support Vitter.
Doug!
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I thought Yglesias was a neoliberal shill, not a Berniebro.
His article sucked, in any case.
JMG
The very conservative but anti-Trump foreign policy guy Tom Nichols had the perfect response on twitter to complaints about Bill Clinton (complaints he made in the ’90s): “I think President Grant’s drinking was problematic.”
Eric U.
as disgusting as this thing is with Moore, twitter is still successfully mining it for laughs.
As I have said before, the trump era is going to be comedy gold — if we live.
Roger Moore
@martian:
The answer to this is pretty straightforward and mundane: they’ve been deceiving themselves about what the Republican party is and what it stands for. The media has been complicit, but the core of all of this is self-deception. They were Republicans and thought they were good people, so they simply couldn’t believe they were part of an awful party hellbent on doing awful things. Rather than confront the painful reality that’s exactly what was happening, they lied to themselves and refused to see what was right in front of their faces. It happens all the time. Our best hope is we can get enough of them to wake up and realize what’s happened to make a difference.
germy
Julian seems to have lost the intercept?
mike in dc
@JMG:
Have there been any credible NEW allegations against Clinton in the past 20 years? What would we be seeking from the former president? An apology? An admission of wrongdoing? If you want to “reevaluate his legacy”, nothing is stopping anyone from doing that.
OzarkHillbilly
I think I see what is wrong with this country.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Doug!:
That whole Vox crew are still banging on about “economic anxiety” and how Dems need to appeal to the Bernie wing of the party (that he won’t join), blah blah blah. White male privileged bullshit, ad nauseum.
different-church-lady
@germy:
Translation: “We are a bunch of dumb shits.”
different-church-lady
@OzarkHillbilly:
Translation: “About half of us are a bunch of dumb racist shits.”
nonynony
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
It’s not really. The GOP has relied for decades on two things to gain power in the Congress – an overwhelming monetary advantage to drown out competing voices in primaries and overwhelm voters with bullshit in the general, and the evangelical Christian faction turning out to vote for them in the general election. They’re being threatened in both areas now – their monetary backers are threatening to cut off the spigot if they can’t get everything they want, and the rich evangelical megapastors who “control” the evangelical vote are on the same page as the big moneymen.
Basically they think that two forms of propaganda – election campaigning and religious campaigning – will overwhelm individual voter self-interest. So if they don’t give their backers what they want they will definitely lose. If they screw over their voters, well, maybe the propaganda will be enough to convince them that voting for the guy who screwed you over is better than voting for the Democrat.
It’s some basic expected value theory – if they really think they’re guaranteed to lose if they don’t make the money guys happy but that there’s a small sliver that they can still win if they make their voters unhappy, they’ll screw the voters. (This is also why Murkowski was able to tell them all to pound sand for the ACA repeal – she has a different set of expectations on whether she thinks she can win without the megapastors and the moneymen than her colleagues seem to.)
D58826
Oh man all of the slugs are crawling out from under their rocks
Secret witness in Senate Clinton probe is ex-lobbyist for Russian firm
Barbara
@Patricia Kayden: Thank you for saying this. I think Clinton would not have been nominated today with the kinds of allegations that were made against him. But the fact is, people knew about these allegations and investigated them, to the point of obsession. He was even forced to show up for a civil suit brought by Paula Jones when he was president. I read the briefs and I knew it would be dismissed. She blamed him for losing her job at a state agency, but he was never her supervisor or even working in that agency and she had zero evidence that he ever spoke to anyone about her. Monica Lewinsky was young (if memory serves, 23) and stupid, and it was stupid for Clinton to do what he did, but she has never alleged that she did anything that she didn’t want to do. I don’t remember the others as clearly. I think some people felt that Juanita Broaddrick was the most unsettling and the most credible, but she would never agree to state her allegations under oath. None of these women was under the age of 18.
But at least it is obvious that Democrats learned from Clinton. No one excused John Edwards, Anthony Wiener, or Eliot Spitzer. No one even tried to defend them. It seems that the only thing Republicans learned from Clinton was to brazen out allegations, however credible, even when they involved conduct that is illegal — David Vitter, Donald Trump, and now, Roy Moore. Not always, of course, and not everyone, but when the contest is between character and power, power wins every time.
different-church-lady
If Clinton gets in a time machine and resigns, can we get rid of Trump?
Roger Moore
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I think you’re wrong about that one. The advantage of pleasing ultra-rich donors like the Koch brothers is that they don’t just fund election campaigns; they also fund wingnut welfare to employ them after they’ve been driven from office. Wingnut welfare makes a huge difference for the politicians who have it available.
El Caganer
Christ, this constant replay of things that were covered and allegedly resolved 25 or more years ago is annoying. If I want to see stuff rise from the dead, I’ll go watch old Hammer films with Christopher Lee.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
I’m going to partially disagree. At some point, Democrats really need to have a serious discussion about Bill Clinton and what role he should play going forwards. It’s not just Monica Lewisnky (though I think even a consensual sexual relationship of that sort in the workplace is problematic); there are also multiple women who have made credible claims of nonconsensual sexual harassment and assault. They are, frankly, as credible as the accusers of Roy Moore.
The reason this is different than Grant’s drinking is that Ulysses Grant is dead and no longer playing any role in Republican electoral politics. Bill Clinton is not dead, and the Democratic Party keeps running him out as a big part of the convention and campaigns. This is not an issue that you can only take seriously when it’s the other side that’s guilty. You either draw the line at abuse, or you don’t.
The reason I only partially disagree, and say that we need to have this conversation at some point rather than right now is because the presence of another serial abuser in the White House changes the ballgame entirely. As long as Trump is president, we really can’t deal with the Bill Clinton problem.
Barbara
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Just to chime in regarding Vox – they are doing really good work on health related issues, both health care reform and opioid abuse. I think Ezra Klein is still worth reading. Yglesias has always been overrated. As with Ms. Flanagan, being the child of a famous author seems to open doors but it doesn’t necessarily hone critical thinking skills.
D58826
@Barbara: IRC the left did not ‘uncritically’ stand by Clinton. Most folks condemned what he did but did not think a BJ warranted impeachment or 4 years of the Starr inquisition.
And lets remember that while it was unfair to call Monica a stalker, she certainly went out of her way to attract Clinton. And she certainly didn’t think of herself as a victim as she talked to Linda Tripp.
As for the other women –
1. Paula Jones was a creation of the right wing hit squad in AK and shot her credibility with the non-existent markings on Clinton’s penis
2. Kathleen Willy had to be offered two immunity deals because she lied to Starr and then her corroborating witness recanted her support
3. Gennifer Flowers was an adult consensual relationship of some indeterminate length. Disgusting but hardly unique
4. and then there was Juanita Roderick which was the most serious charge – rape. She denied it for years, which we now know is normal. Apparently she refused to testify under oath for Starr.
Does anyone seriously think that if Starr could prove a rape charge he would NOT have included that in the referral? All he had was a blue dress.
Do I think Clinton’s conduct was above reproach – of course not. I would like to have seen him put in stocks on the WH lawn and then let the citizens throw veggies at him. A big part of the liberal defense was because it was so obvious that the right was trying to reverse the election.
martian
@different-church-lady: I think people who vote for the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces Party fall into two main groups: those who imagine that they, too, are leopards (but they never are), and vultures who imagine they’ll float high above, safely out of the way of the leopards’ carnage until it’s time to enjoy their share of the spoils. I have no sympathy for either group but, of the two, it’s the vultures whom I most want to see getting their wings bitten off and their flesh rended from bone. That’s unfortunately rare. The cosplay leopards getting their faces eaten is just darkly amusing.
@aimai: I wonder how people are going to feel when someone like Ana Navarro finds her next GOP Daddy? Or Frum? They won’t be in the wilderness forever. I think, soon enough, having been NeverTrump will have an enviable cachet – no loser stink, never indicted.
Barbara
@OzarkHillbilly: Polls like this drive me crazy. As Brad DeLong pointed out in 2012, polls on the popularity of President Obama showed him upside down with whites, but when you looked at the data regionally, what you saw was mostly break even popularity among whites in the West, Midwest and Northeast, and in the toilet ratings in the South. Because he was so unpopular in the South it brought the overall rating way down. I would bet money that if you did the same poll by state, you would see that opinions among whites are closer to — not the same as — black and hispanic voters in regions other than the South.
El Caganer
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I think ‘economic anxiety’ is real, and everybody except the 1% feels it to some extent. The problem with the folk interviewed on the various Cletus Safaris isn’t their EA, which is real, but the fact that they’ve invented these nonsensical and malicious reasons to explain it. Immigrants and POC didn’t foreclose on your house or ship your job out of the country or decide that natural gas was a cheaper way to go than coal.
D58826
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
If I remember correrctly, at the time there was supposed to be a bimbo eruption of hundreds of women, All we got were Flowers, Jones, Willey, Broderfick and Monica. They were investigated up down sideways. Except for Monica, Starr came up with 0. As I said before if Starr could have pinned a rape charge on Clinton he would have.
As for a re-evaluation of Clinton’s legacy that will happen and it will cover more than just a BJ. As far as Clinto staying out of the limelight, well multiple adulterer Newt is now the spouse of the ambassador to the Vatican, Limpdick continues to spout his bile ever day and then there is Der Fuhrer
mike in dc
@Barbara: Based upon the last few electoral maps, I’d say that states with lower populations of urban, college-educated white voters would tend to oppose Obama. Make of that what you will.
Barbara
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: As I said above, although Democrats might not have had a public reckoning about Clinton, I think that recent history shows that they took these allegations to heart such that no Democratic politician is ever again going to get the benefit of the doubt that Clinton did. And I don’t see that Bill Clinton is going to have much involvement at all going forward. So I don’t really understand the fixation on Clinton. It’s just a dodge and a distraction from having to acknowledge that so-called Christian voters are about to support a predator for the United States Senate.
El Caganer
@D58826: Hundreds of women? Do you mean, like….binders full of women?
Bjacques
@Roger Moore: Exactly. Politicians have to think ahead to their post-political careers. In the UK, whose political/financial ecosphere is more compact ,than that of the US, one magazine Private Eye, addresses this at every level and in detail.
different-church-lady
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
…ANY goddamned problem.
D58826
@El Caganer: :-) yep but I don’t think Bill was every THAT organized
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@mike in dc:
I wouldn’t be seeking anything from Bill Clinton. I would be seeking a commitment from the Democratic Party that he is being exiled to the same place that Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. are going. I don’t want him speaking at the Democratic National Convention again. It’s not about the past; it’s about the present.
eemom
Wow. Seeing as how the Clinton bullshit has survived unto a new day, I guess I’ll just repost what I said last night. I’ll also add, I have new litmus test for stupid as shit: anyone who thinks this topic is worth discussing.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Barbara:
I agree – I do read Ezra and their health coverage, but I find almost all white male political punditry from the left – including Ezra’s – comes from a place of blinkered unself-aware privilege lacking any insight or self reflection of what this election means to us nonwhites/nonmales and how we got here. Apparently everyone else, but most importantly Clinton, must take responsibility for the outcome, but not the left dudebro faction, whose mantra is Bernie Would Have Won because he and his campaign were faultless and everything was rigged blah blah blah. It just permeates so much of left punditry now and once seen, cannot be unseen. The only white male punditry I can stand now is a handful of guys on twitter, two of whom are gay.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@D58826:
In other words, your standard for Bill Clinton is that a criminal conviction would be necessary, while for Roy Moore the allegations alone should get him exiled.
That’s not going to fly.
eemom
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
With due respect, you’re a fucking idiot.
D58826
@eemom: sigh you still don’t get the code:
Hillary – what about her e-mails
Bill – what about all of the other bimbos
Pavlov – dogs and whistles
different-church-lady
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: It’s really a shame about Louis C.K.: that time he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention was one of the best there ever was.
eemom
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
guess I need to elaborate again.
What part of consensual sex with adult women (Clinton) as opposed to sexual assault of teenage girls (Moore), do you not understand?
satby
@Barbara: this. Dodge and distract has been working for them though, because our side helps by getting distracted.
Bill Clinton was impeached and won’t hold office again, Anthony Weiner is in jail, John Edwards disgraced publicly and not likely to ever run for anything again.
All outcomes much more severe than most Republicans outside of Hastert have faced for their sexual misdeeds.
Stop letting them get away with the distraction com game.
Yoda Dog
I don’t see Bill having any significant place in the future of our party. So the whole conversation is 100% whataboutism and unhelpful.
ETA: what Barbara just said..
different-church-lady
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
And ain’t that the interesting thing about it? They embrace every scrap that they think hints that things were rigged against Bernie, but when you show them evidence that Russia was rigging things against Hillary she’s supposed to stop whining and take responsibility for her loss.
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
Everything new is old again.
Barbara
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I don’t think criminal conviction is necessary. First, I do think that allegations that arise after someone is elected are always going to require a higher standard of proof in order to be acted on if we are actually going to sustain democratic processes. Voters are always free to act on mere suspicion or any other standard they choose. In Clinton’s case, there were allegations before the election, and they were apparently considered weak enough that voters elected Clinton. What happened after that was not a criminal process, but a sustained, obsessive effort to corroborate the allegations that preceded the election. They were litigated in the court of public opinion and in an actual court and by a politically motivated special prosecutor for YEARS and none ever made it past the point of allegations. And just to be clear, I hope voters act on what they are hearing about Roy Moore if they find it credible, and vote for Doug Jones, but if they elect him, I do not think the Senate should expel him.
D58826
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Well there was the Gennifer Flowers story. That was an accusation and the voters still voted for Bill. Since there had been no conviction and if Bill had been able to run again in 2000 (for sake of argument) then the voters could have voted him out of office based on the accusation alone.
As far a conviction – once Starr dragged it into the legal system then yes the usual rules of evidence apply. Impeachment is not an article III legal proceeding. Congress can impeach and convict based on reams of evidence or none at all.
And to repeat what numerous people have said – this is an election not a criminal trial. The rules of evidence do not apply. Even though I would hope those looking into it would require a bit more evidence than a sheet of paper slid under the door.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@El Caganer:
Rust belt whites crawled over glass to vote for Trump because they hate. They hate hate hate Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter. They want racism enforced. That’s all this support for Trump is about. I’ve avoided reading most of the 872,568 interviews of Trump voters, but the one where they went to Johnstown PA was the only one worth reading, and read to the end. It’s pure distilled Trumpism. They will never blame him for anything – they said as much – because he’s a hater too. Full stop.
aimai
Bill Clinton was a noted hound dog–very successful with women–and that was, at the base of it, a huge part of the right wing backlash against him. They tried to use his consensual affair with Gennifer Flowers to throw him out of the primary. If they’d had anything criminal they would have used it and given the hunting of the president they did for years before he ran for president they knew everything there was to be known about them.
They hated that he loved women and had affairs and his wife forgave him and he had a full head of hair. Newt Gingrich, for one, but all the homely old white boys who lacked Clinton’s charisma were pissed, pissed, pissed, that he was having such a good time. The accusations that he had assaulted anyone grew out of envy and a desire to use some kind of quasi feminist talking point, like jiu jitsu, against him and the democrats in revenge for democrats ever dreaming of passing any pro-female legislation.
Technocrat
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
The point is that the Clinton allegations have been investigated, and the Moore allegations *haven’t* been. Before an investigation (Moore) we should take the word of the women, after an investigation (Clinton) we should accept the result of the investigation.
martian
@different-church-lady: I know, right?
“Reckoning” with Clinton already happened – decades ago! – or I didn’t live through seeing tens of millions burned in investigations, wall to wall impeachment coverage, and then Al Gore taking on the Senate’s Chief Scold as a VP while shunning Bill Clinton’s help with his campaign. I don’t think that even now he is a figure of stature in the party commensurate with his resumé, and he never will be.
Getting to drag Bill out to the stocks again is just a thin proxy for giving President Hillary another smackdown, in my opinion. Maybe she should resign?
different-church-lady
Look, why don’t we at least propose the time machine solution to Bill and see if he’ll do it for the good of the country?
Matt McIrvin
Clarence Thomas is still on the Supreme Court, right?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@different-church-lady:
or when you point out to them – WHICH I DO EVERY DAMN DAY – that he shoveled millions into Tad and Jane’s ad buy shop instead of into GOTV when his supporters were having trouble figuring out how, when and where to register to vote because they couldn’t find their asses with both hands – and that after Super Tuesday Bernie made ZERO effort to fix his problems with the AA voters who rejected him overwhelmingly. Instead he dismissed them out of hand and ran back to white caucus states that he certainly knew, or at least Tad Devine knew, woudn’t give him enough delegates to ever catch up. He committed political malpractice, but his cult of gullible fools don’t know anything about politics, especially Dem politics which requires building coalitions. White male lefty pundits never gave Obama credit for what he did to win, and Bernie, like most white guys, saw what he did and thought how hard could it be? So it must have been rigged blah blah blah Clinton was a terrible candidate blah blah blah. Idiots.
D58826
@Barbara:
Something else that has to be remember is a BJ is not a crime. Starr maneuvered Clinton into a perjury trap. For anyone else faced with the investigation would have invoked the 5th amendment and then told Starr to pound sand. IIRC a good bit of the perjury count involved differing reelections by Bill and Monica on the length and frequency of the affair. There were long debates on cable about perjury requiring a material misstatement of facts and that you can’t show perjury when it is an oath against an oath.
Good old Geraldo challenged the DeGenova/Toensing team to find any case in the 20th century in which perjury was the only charge. His contention was that perjury is usally charged as part of a larger criminal indictment. They came up with 2 cases both of which seemed open the interpretation. Geraldo paid the bet since it was going top charity.
El Caganer
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I agree with you that’s the primary motivator (have you read this? Think you’d agree. http://www.ginandtacos.com/2017/11/12/the-heart-of-the-matter-2/), and it’s almost certainly where they get their ideas of who is causing their problems. I do disagree with you about reducing people to ginger-bread cutout caricatures. No, nobody is going to win these folks over to joining the Glorious Socialist Revolution, but no human being is one-dimensional. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m related to a bunch of these people – and I don’t like them any more than you do.
catclub
@hueyplong:
Ron Johnson (not the sharpest spoon in the drawer) took offense because the other senators did not cater to his ideas. More power to him in this case.
Roger Moore
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
No. The standard is that when there’s an uninvestigated accusation, we need to pay attention to the accusation. Once that accusation has been thoroughly investigated, though, we need to pay attention to the outcome of that investigation, not just the existence of the accusation. Since Clinton was not just accused but thoroughly investigated, we need to pay attention to the outcome of that investigation rather than just the original accusations. That means we can fairly treat him as a sleazy adulterer but not as a rapist.
rikyrah
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
NO LIE TOLD
rikyrah
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Sorry, but I’m in the camp of if Starr could get Clinton on rape, he certainly would have. I think Clinton is a Man Whore. I don’t think he’s a rapist.
Scotian
@rikyrah:
That is exactly how he has always read to me, although I’ve used the word slut instead of manwhore, but either way a hypersexual person that loves to play and is clearly no good at monogamy. These can be seen as character questions/flaws for some, but in and of themselves they are not predatory nor inherently wrong. Like you I cannot believe the VRWC and Starr would have missed anything that could possibly have been used to even credibly suggest criminal rape conduct given what they DD reach for to impeach with. I was originally going to quote aimai’s comment at comment 67 alone but yours also is worthy of repeating (with a sledgehammer) IMHO.
@aimai:
They also hated that he was also one of the most capable politicians of his generation on top of that, and he was on the other side. Somehow I feel that if he had all these traits but was a good GOPer instead they would have embraced him with open arms. Wait, critics say, that is an unfair assumption (or so I can hear) to which there is absolute irrefutable proof positive, President Donald Trump.