"She knew what was happening and just to ignore it. It was a political relationship and suited them both. The Clintons don't care what they do, who they run over to get to the top. It is all about political status."
Said Paula Jones, who was run over so long ago that many young voters have never heard of her.
"Did this have something to do with Monica Lewinsky?" a student asked last month when we read Clinton v. Jones. I wondered whether the Supreme Court's statement of the facts in that case came as a strange surprise to the young people in the class:
Those allegations principally describe events that are said to have occurred on the afternoon of May 8, 1991, during an official conference held at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Governor delivered a speech at the conference; respondent--working as a state employee--staffed the registration desk. She alleges that Ferguson persuaded her to leave her desk and to visit the Governor in a business suite at the hotel, where he made "abhorrent" sexual advances that she vehemently rejected. She further claims that her superiors at work subsequently dealt with her in a hostile and rude manner, and changed her duties to punish her for rejecting those advances. Finally, she alleges that after petitioner was elected President, Ferguson defamed her by making a statement to a reporter that implied she had accepted petitioner's alleged overtures, and that various persons authorized to speak for the President publicly branded her a liar by denying that the incident had occurred.
"You see yourself from the point of view of your detractors; you pelt yourself with their revulsion, and as you do you begin... to lose track of the self altogether. Someone else�s narrow, stiffened vision of who you are replaces your own mottled, expansive one. As Lewinsky listened to the recordings of her phone calls, she tells us, she heard her voice as if it belonged to a different person: 'My sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth.' It was 'the worst version of myself, a self I didn�t even recognize.'"
"The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary's record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It's a scandal! Anyone who believe in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He's a sex criminal! We're going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary's ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has her own career, who's made her own career! The woman who failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose law firm was because her husband was a politician."
Says Camille Paglia, in the interview embedded 2 posts down. Paglia also says � responding to the question "Is Hillary Clinton kind of your worst nightmare as a woman?" � "No, she's exactly my age. I feel I know her completely. Our accents are kind of the same. I understand her completely. So I see all the games and falsehoods and so forth. So I've enjoyed it. I've made an entire career practically�in fact I wrote the cover story for The New Republic 'Ice Queen, Drag Queen'�that was 1996, it was way back there."
I'd like to read that 1996 piece. This is the best I can do: here. I have a New Republic subscription, but a search for the title turned up no results. But I can excerpt this:
Ice queen, drag queen: the Great White Feminist Hope is a far more conflicted and self-destructive creature than either her admirers or revilers understand.... The woman her classmates called "Sister Frigidaire" has the "mind of winter" of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man." She, too, in Stevens's words, has "been cold a long time."
This coldness is the brittle brilliance of Hillary's calculating, analytic mind, which at its most legalistic has a haunting, daunting impersonality.... Hillary had to learn how to be a woman; it did not come easily or naturally....
That's the woman who lives and is completely understood in the brain of Paglia.
ADDED: The idea that Hillary would not have had a viable legal or political career without lashing herself to Bill is utterly ridiculous. There is every reason to think she would have had a far better career if she hadn't gone off to Arkansas. The idea that her legal credentials weren't good enough to get her a job at Rose law firm is pure fantasy. As for failing a bar exam, that's not an intelligence test. Take a look at the eminent folks who have failed bar exams. Kathleen Sullivan, former Dean of Stanford Law School. Benjamin Cardozo, the Supreme Court Justice. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Paglia rattles off ideas as if to bury us in sheer volume.
But, of course, I agree with her that the first woman President should not be someone who built her career on top of her husband's success and who is implicated in the destruction of women who got in her husband's way. Here I am, last May, making (half of) this point in 37 seconds (along with another reason why I don't think Hillary should be the first woman President):
"That's her e-mail address at clintonemail.com, HDR, Hillary Diane Rodham. No mention, no relationship, no mention whatsoever of her husband, Bill.... At any rate, it's stunning, the New York Times, the Associated Press, the New Republic, Politico, it is unprecedented," said Rush Limbaugh, at the beginning of yesterday's show.
Now, one of the things that it could possibly mean... is they don't want her to begin with. They resent her being forced on them. They resent the idea that the presidency is hers again, just like it was in 2008, just because.... What we're looking at here, ladies and gentlemen, is an actual War on a Woman...
Let's try to keep in perspective what has happened here, and going back some years. First, they used a young, inexperienced, community organizing, chain-smoking man of color to kick Hillary to the curb in 2008. In 2008 it was a coronation, remember? In 2008 it was going to be hers to lose. In 2008 it was the Democrat Party paying her back for all she had done, subordinating herself to her husband, subordinating herself to the party in order to maintain her husband and his political viability and keep him in office....
We're talking 2016, the next Democrat president... In the normal ebb and flow of events... [t]he media would be trying to sweep all of this stuff under the rug.... Just because her husband spent countless hours with a playboy pedophile flying all over the world, what difference does that make now? Just because Hillary ruined innocent women's lives to protect her husband who sexually assaulted those women, what difference does that make now?...
�If you look at the left-hand side of it, there�s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things,� the painter said.
�It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.�
That is, Bill Clinton posed for this artist, who nevertheless took it upon himself not just to subtly interpose an allusion to the Lewinsky scandal but also to tell the world that he did so.
Shanks claimed that the Clintons have been lobbying the National Portrait Gallery to remove it, but a gallery spokeswoman denied that to the Daily News. Clinton reportedly chose Shanks to paint the portrait back in 2001.
Oh! Clinton even chose him. Wow. Smacking your patron around. That must be an old portraiture game, right? Can anyone cite historical examples of this sort of thing?
