"As is the case for many people who grew up in the Deep South but have lived somewhere else for many years, the Southern accent I once had..."

"... has given way to the 'nowhere man' accent that I think of as generically American. But it comes roaring back when I visit my family in central Alabama, and even lingers for a few days after I have returned to Brooklyn. It’s also a little more pronounced after a martini (or two). No one gets offended when my Southern accent comes and goes. For Kamala Harris, it’s a different story. Figures on the political right, including JD Vance, Donald Trump and various conservative internet celebrities, have accused Ms. Harris of affecting a Southern accent on the campaign trail, and implied that it was a kind of deception. Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English. There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black...."

Writes Elizabeth Spiers in "The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy" (NYT)(free-access link, because she has a lot of other things to say and I'm not in the mood to summarize it).

And then there are the people who say she sounds drunk....

"Kamala Harris to hold discussion with Bill Clinton on 'empowering women and girls'.... 'Is this a ... joke?' asked Juanita Broaddrick."

Fox News reports.

I guess this is good news for Andrew Cuomo: Bill Clinton, never cancelled, and now, forefronted, with special access to the first woman Vice President.

"Spend some mind-numbing hours tracking the origins of 'Believe All Women' on social media sites and news databases — as I did..."

"... and you’ll discover how language, like a virus, can mutate overnight. All of a sudden, yesterday’s quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize. In this case, that foreign intrusion is a word: 'all.' 'All' insertion was all the rage during the Kavanaugh hearings. When senators from Kamala Harris to Mazie Hirono had their regard for Dr. Blasey’s credibility elevated by Fox News pundits to universal gender credulity, their actual words, 'I believe her,' became believe all women. 'That’s literally the hashtag,' former Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus said in February 2019.... Is there 'literally' a hashtag? Well, kind of.... Type in #BelieveAllWomen for 2017, when the #MeToo movement took off in October, and you get several dozen references, followed in 2018 (the year of the Kavanaugh hearings) by many more. But here’s the thing: I found that the hashtag is, by a wide margin, used mostly by its detractors. It seems that #BelieveAllWomen first appeared on Twitter in late 2014, in three tweets — by an Ontario midwife.... Then, in the fall of 2015, Hillary Clinton posted a tweet: 'To every survivor of sexual assault … you have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed.' To which Juanita Broaddrick, who alleges that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, responded on Twitter on Jan. 6, 2016, 'Hillary tried to silence me.' Conservative editor David French, who has a large Twitter following... retweeted Ms. Broaddrick at once — attaching the hashtag #BelieveAllWomen, followed by four question marks.... As happens, the canard, blown into a bonfire by the right, became accepted truth in mainstream media...."

From "'Believe All Women' Is a Right-Wing Trap/How feminists got stuck answering for a canard," by Susan Faludi (NYT).

I appreciate that tracking down the origin of a saying that can't possibly be right. It is a good taunt coming from the right, and it's important to know how to keep from getting tangled up in it.

But I can't resist taking a shot at that "canard, blown into a bonfire." A "canard" — as all of us who took French class should remember — is a duck. The French word has been used in English since the 1840s to mean "A false or unfounded story, rumour, or claim, esp. one that is deliberately misleading; (originally) spec. an extravagant or absurd story circulated to deceive the credulous; a hoax" (OED). It's a dying metaphor, so you have to watch out for putting it with other metaphors, like a bonfire. I can't read "canard, blown into a bonfire" without picturing a poor waterfowl bursting into flames...

"Those on the left have been going over how we’re supposed to feel about him for decades, but in the arguing about it, we have been asked to focus again and again on Clinton and his dick and what he did or didn’t do with it."

"The questions we’ve asked ourselves and one another have become defining. Are we morally compromised in our defense of him or sexually uptight in our condemnation? Are we shills for having not believed he should have resigned, or doing the bidding of a vindictive right wing if we say that, in retrospect, he probably should have?"

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling? A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York" (a long compendium by the editors of New York Magazine). Traister continues:

Meanwhile, how much energy and time have been spent circling round this man and how we’ve felt about him, when in fact his behaviors were symptomatic of far broader and more damaging assumptions about men, power, and access to — as Trump has so memorably voiced it — pussies?

You wouldn't have spent all that time if you'd been consistent in the first place. Anyone who cared at all about feminism back then already knew the "far broader" picture! That is feminism. If you'd put feminism over party politics at the time, you'd have easily processed the Clinton story long ago.

After all, Clinton was elected president during a period that may turn out to be an aberration, just as the kinds of dominating, sexually aggressive behaviors that had been norms for his West Wing predecessors had become officially unacceptable, and 24 years before those behaviors would again become a presidential norm. So yes, Clinton got in trouble, yet still managed to sail out of office beloved by many, his reputation as the Big Dog mostly only enhanced by revelations of his exploits.

I don't understand the logic of this "After all... So yes" rhetoric. I feel that I'd need to rewrite those 2 sentences to begin to understand them. I invite your efforts. Here's mine: Although Clinton became President after America had officially rejected sexual harassment in the workplace, many people gave him a pass and even loved him more because he did it anyway.

But the election of Trump over Clinton’s wife, and the broad conversation around sexual assault and harassment that has erupted in its wake, has recast his behavior more profoundly.

Ha ha. What's "profound" about partisan politics? It's not profound. It's laughably shallow!

The buffoonery, the smallness and tantrums of Trump, has helped make clear what always should have been: that the out-of-control behavior toward women by powerful men, the lack of self-control or amount of self-regard that undergirded their reckless treatment of women, spoke not of virility or authority but of their immaturity.

To "undergird" is to fasten something securely from the under-side. According to this sentence, lack of self-control undergirded recklessness. When I see writing like this, my hypothesis is that the writer is declining to be straightforward. Here's my paraphrase: Things that are perfectly visible go in and out of focus depending on what you want to see.

Time for MSM at long last to get serious about Hillary Clinton's complicity in rape and sexual harassment.

Why now? Because she's gone out hounding publicity right before the midterm elections and it's the Democratic Party.

I'm reading, in the NYT, "Hillary Clinton’s Master Class in Distraction/Democrats need to be focused on the midterms." by Michelle Cottle. The headline makes no secret of the staunchly partisan reason for pushing back Hillary after giving her a pass all these years.

President Trump being a pig and an alleged sexual predator in no way excuses Bill Clinton from being a pig and an alleged sexual predator. In fact, by declining to re-examine her own husband’s acts, Mrs. Clinton only makes it easier for Mr. Trump’s defenders to ignore the current president’s. (Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation that she was raped by Mr. Clinton in 1978 can be revisited in a recent episode of the Slate podcast “Slow Burn.”)...

[I]t is no secret that Mr. Clinton’s response to sexual scandal was to try to trash the reputations of the women involved. And while the degree to which Mrs. Clinton joined in such efforts may remain in dispute — in the CBS interview, she denies having played any role — her fundamental complicity is beyond reasonable doubt.

You're referred over to Slate for the damning details, and it's significant that Slate is doing this now. But on a fundamental level, nothing new is happening. The top priority is Democratic Party power, and the sexual subordination of women matters when it serves that interest and gets brushed aside when it doesn't.

But why does Democratic Party power matter? The argument I've been hearing is that it matters because of the interests of women! Does that make sense? The interests of women are highlighted or hidden depending on whether it helps the Democratic Party amass power, and we're supposed to care about that party's power because it's for the good of women. It's laughable.

One way to attempt to make sense of it is that there are 2 different big women's issues at play. There are other issues that can be framed as woman-oriented, and just about anything can be reprocessed as gender politics. But there are 2 main issues: sexual subordination (rape, sexual harassment, etc.) and abortion. For as long as I can remember — at least 40 years — the Democratic Party has starkly distinguished itself from the Republican Party by supporting abortion, and — because no party is for rape and sexual harassment — the Democratic Party has given priority to abortion.

That priority was shown most memorably in the ludicrous, horrible case of Nina Burleigh:

In a 1998 essay for Mirabella, Burleigh described an occasion aboard Air Force One when she noticed President Bill Clinton apparently looking at her legs.... Approached by a Washington Post media reporter to discuss the Mirabella article, Burleigh stated, “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

I distanced myself from the Democratic Party during the Clinton impeachment, because I saw that the sexual harassment issues that had been so important in the Clarence Thomas hearings were turned into nothing when the party's own man was threatened. It's not a serious issue if it's only used selectively. It would be better to do nothing with it at all than to wheel it out when it works for your side and stow it away again when it doesn't. But if abortion is important enough to you, you might, like Burleigh, think it's worth it to turn sexual harassment and rape into nothing when it works to maintain access to abortion.

But what a kick in the head when it doesn't even work to keep your access to abortion! What if the Democratic Party is losing the midterms because the embodiment of its selective concern about rape and sexual harassment decides to go swanning about on the public stage 3 weeks before Election Day? Time for the liberal media to finally take her to task.

AND: 3 afterthoughts:

1. Male privilege can explain the priority of abortion over sexual harassment and rape. We see these as women's issues, and we might imagine that freedom from sexual harassment and rape is the stronger interest, because many women oppose abortion and only a minority want abortion completely legal. But men have an interest in abortion. Many men urge women to have abortions and pay for women's abortions. The availability of abortion is part of the agenda of sexual freedom. Hugh Hefner was a big supporter of the abortion rights movement. And the expanding definition of rape and increasing vigilance about sexual harassment in the workplace threaten the sexual freedom of men. Ask Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer. Gender politics-propaganda is designed to get women to vote for the party, so it's going to obscure the interests of men. But those interests are there, and they have their effect even — and especially — when they are not talked about.

2. Blowjobs deserve better than Nina Burleigh's famous quote. Her unstated proposition is that blowjobs are indeed jobs — work that you do for some sort of pay or because you owe a debt. It's not a pleasure for you, but a sacrifice. Worse than that, she's expressing the idea that women want something other than sex and they give sex to get those extraneous things. She's saying: Sex is not intrinsically valuable for a woman — it's a form of currency. We can buy what we want with it. In that construct, what's the sense of "buying" abortion rights? If you don't think sex is good in itself, don't have sex, and you won't ever need an abortion... unless you are raped. Which brings us back to the question which is the more important interest: access to abortion or freedom from rape and sexual harassment?

3. When I say that now is the time for liberal media to take Hillary Clinton to task over rape and sexual harassment, you might hear resonance with #TimesUp. I didn't intend that, and I want to stress how wrong it would be to make that connection. "Time's Up" means that in the past it was possible for men to get away with rape and sexual harassment. It was done in private spaces, hidden away, lied about. Women who objected were ignored, paid off,  suppressed. But that's all in the past. We don't do that anymore. That's what "Time's up" means. It's an idealistic assertion that embodies optimism. But when I say, now is the time for liberal media to take rape and sexual harassment seriously, I'm being sarcastic and cynical. I'm not saying the obscuring of the problem is a thing of the past and the future looks bright. I'm talking about party politics in the present, and I think the issue is forefronted in the run-up to the elections now because it seems useful. That's a transient and political motivation. Time isn't up. There's plenty of time in the future to do whatever people think works. I'm not a complete cynic: I'm saying these things harshly and openly because I think it can save people from getting taken in by political propaganda.

Do liberal media notice the elitism oozing from their discussion of the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford?

I'm overhearing the television, so I'm not going to link to anything, but I keep hearing the indicia of elite status — notably, that Blasey is a college professor.

I'm trying to think of how her allegations should be handled, and I want like cases to be treated alike. When will one allegation from long ago justify delaying the Senate confirmation process and the opening of new investigations?

The answer cannot be: when the accuser has elite status!

I'm thinking of how Paula Jones was denigrated 20 years ago. "If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find," James Carville said famously.

[Carville] with Hillary's assent — set the tone on how the Clintons would treat women who dared accuse former President Clinton of sexual harassment....

[Paula Jones] wasn't fancy or rich, just a working woman sexually harassed by Bill when he was governor of Arkansas. But she was denigrated by Clinton's top advisers as "trailer park" trash, as someone so craven she'd crawl on dirt for the cash to slander Bill.

She was telling the truth. It was a straightforward sexual harassment case. If Bill had been a private-sector CEO, he'd have been fired.

But Hillary and Bill fought back, using the "nuts and sluts strategy," denigrating Jones and others, including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and the intern Monica Lewinsky.

So what is the standard we are creating? How will we apply it in the future? I'm seeing analogies to Anita Hill, but how is Christine Blasey Ford like Anita Hill other than that she's challenging a Supreme Court nominee? Anita Hill worked with the nominee (Clarence Thomas) in a professional context. That was not in question. With Blasey, we only have her assertion that she was once in a room with Brett Kavanaugh. How will we treat other women who assert that they were once with the nominee? What is the principled plan that we can agree on?!

Hillary, I will accept your good faith on this subject if you will do just one thing first: Denounce your husband.

I cannot watch the video without screaming at the screen. Having turned it off after a few seconds, I will blog from the text:

MADDOW: “If the Brett Kavanaugh nomination is now hurdling into the suns..."

"Hurdling" or "hurtling"? Is the nomination running on its own and jumping over obstacles or has it been thrown with great force?

"... which is what I think, and that’s just my take on it. I don’t know if that will be proven right or wrong, there is the question about how the Senate should handle this matter going forward. I mean, there is this screwy precedent now where Republicans would not let President Obama fill an opening on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Scalia for nearly a year until they got another shot at the White House in the 2016 election. Some Republican senators during the election campaign said that if you were elected in 2016, they fully intended to hold that seat open for all four years if necessary to give a Republican another shot at holding it. Given that extreme recent history, do you think that Democrats should play that kind of hardball too, be prepared to use those kinds of tactics so as not to be sort of the Patsy being pushed around on this, or do you think Democrats should just go through regular order with whoever Trump has to put up next if the Kavanaugh nomination fails?”

(Funny to capitalize "Patsy."*) But that's a great, well-framed question by Rachel Maddow. I just have a problem with the interlocutor, Hillary Clinton, who worked hard to push back the women who accused her husband. She has no credibility on this issue. Make her talk about Juanita Broaddrick first!

CLINTON: “What I would like to see is a democratic majority that actually has the chance to make that choice right now the Democrats have very few tools at their disposal to stop the Republicans from going full speed ahead and engaging in the kind of unprecedented behavior as they did with the Garland nomination. So I’m not in favor of either unilateral disarmament or Defcon-10."

I had to look up "Defcon-10." Urban Dictionary, with lots of down votes, says it means "awesome." Wikipedia has an entry for "Defcon," showing levels of military readiness that begin at 5, the lowest level, normal readiness, and go up to 1 — "maximum readiness," "imminent nuclear war."

Why would Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, say "Defcon-10"? What is that, one tenth of normal readiness?! Does she not know Defcon is a 5-point scale and that the lower the number, the more intense the situation? Saying "Defcon-10" is stupider than saying "It goes up to 11" or "I support him 1,000%," because she not only got the scale wrong, she had it going in the wrong direction.

"I think there has to be some effort to try to get back to regular order, try to get back to having a system, a process in place so that we are not subjected to the hardball behavior of the Republicans.... I mean, there can’t be one set of rules for Democrats and one set of rules for Republicans...."

That is, we need to play hardball, because they play hardball. We'd be foolish to unilaterally disarm.

That’s one of the reasons why people don’t have any confidence in the Congress. How can you? You don’t know what’s going to happen from day to day. I remember back in the Thomas hearing when senator bird...

Patsy Bird?!

... was asked what he was going to do....

"He" = him:

... and he said in a situation like this we should give the benefit of the doubt to the court and the country. And that’s what the Republicans should be doing right now, from the White House down Pennsylvania avenue to the Senate, give the benefit of the doubt to the court and the country. And that means have an investigation that will then lead to a hearing that will then lead to a vote if appropriate.

This is the new move of the Democrats: After Republicans acceded to a hearing, they demanded an investigation. To be followed by hearing. And with the words "a vote if appropriate," Hillary reveals the planned goal: There will never be a vote. Make that happen.

And instead, they are playing the hardest of hardballs...

They are playing hardball. You're playing, what? Rope a dope?

... to try to pack the court with, you know, another nominee, regardless of the questions....

Everyone is always trying to pack the Court. The other side will always have more questions. It's challenging to play from the down position, but the Democrats are trying. It's working pretty well too!

But do I need to hear from Hillary on this subject?

That's — and I'm choosing my words carefully — looney tunes.



__________________

* "Patsy" is a common noun. It means, to quote the unlinkable OED, "A person who is easily taken advantage of, esp. by being deceived, cheated, or blamed for something; a dupe, a scapegoat." But it originated as a proper noun, in the context of — surprise! — a minstrel show:

1889 H. F. Reddall Fact, Fancy & Fable 404 A party of minstrels in Boston, about twenty years ago, had a performance... When the pedagogue asked in a rage, ‘Who did that?’, the boys would answer, ‘Patsy Bolivar!’... The phrase..spread beyond the limits of the minstrel performance, and when a scapegoat was alluded to, it was in the name of ‘Patsy Bolivar’..the one who is always blamed for everything.

My favorite "patsy" quote is — "Patsy" being a nickname for Patti/Patty — something Patti Smith sang about Patty Hearst:

And I was standin' there in front of that flag
With a car bomb between my legs
You know, I felt so free of death beyond me
I felt so free, the F.B.I. is looking for me baby
But they'll never gonna find me, no
They can hunt me down like a dog
And I will stay on the run
And they can speculate what I'm feelin'
But daddy, daddy, you'll never know just what I was feelin'
But I'll tell you
I am no little pretty little rich girl
I am nobody's million dollar baby
I am nobody's patsy anymore
I'm nobody's million dollar baby
I'm nobody's patsy anymore
And I feel so free...

And now the F.B.I. is looking for Brett Kavanaugh... in the Democrats' dream. Well, 60 days ago, he was such a lovely child...



AND: I had a feeling I'd riffed on "patsy" before. Here: "Let's look at the word 'patsy' — used yesterday by Donald Trump to describe the United States" — back in 2015. Look how similar my stream of consciousness was, complete with Patti Smith. BUT: In the old post, I had Lee Harvey Oswald. That was suggested by Meade though, and didn't come out of my stream of consciousness. My stream got diverted.

Confronted about Monica Lewinsky in light of #MeToo, Bill Clinton displays an attitude that had me gasping aloud in disgust.

“Through the lens of #MeToo now, do you think differently or feel more responsibility?... Did you ever apologize to her [Lewinsky]?” @craigmelvin to Bill Clinton pic.twitter.com/rXcixhDHER

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 4, 2018

That's the "Today" show, this morning, I believe. The interviewer is Craig Melvin, whose demeanor is rock solid. I'm not seeing the whole interview, but from this clip, I would criticize Melvin for focusing only on what Clinton did to/with Monica Lewinsky. Ask him about Paula Jones (not to mention the others)!

Bill Clinton focuses on himself and acts like the debt he owed his lawyers — $16 million — is commensurate with the harm he did to the women. That's not enough for #MeToo purposes (and it was never enough for me).

And Bill says it's already been litigated and 2/3 of Americans agreed with me. But that can only mean that 2/3 of Americans thought that he shouldn't be removed from office because of the asserted offense (basically only perjury in a deposition in a civil lawsuit). The American people haven't agreed with him that it's okay to treat women like that.

And then Bill starts chuckling, in his trademark Southern manner, over the good he's done for women. The tone, the fake casualness, and the reliance on his idea that we have the idea that he's a good guy — it's just so disgusting.

By the way, I don't give a damn about whether Bill Clinton apologized, but that's what Melvin focuses on here. Clinton's answer (at the end of the clip) is contemptible.

ADDED: Here is a longer clip:

Clinton's incomplete effort at summoning up his famous old charm is gruesome.

"As soon as Broaddrick’s story starts to impose on today’s tribal loyalties, and possibly impugn Hillary, it loses credibility."

"Suddenly, Broaddrick’s account is 'wildly unlikely.' Broaddrick was obviously misreading Hillary’s remark, [Michelle] Goldberg speculates [in her NYT column]. 'Most reporting about the Clinton marriage shows Bill going to great lengths to hide his betrayals.' On the question of Bill Clinton’s decades-long history of sexual abuse, Goldberg implies, Hillary Clinton had absolutely no idea what was going on. And yet this is what Goldberg also believes about Hillary Clinton: that she’s an intelligent, shrewd political operator; a woman who pioneered the notion of a First Lady as co-president; someone intimately involved in every aspect of her husband’s career and campaigns; supremely attuned to what her enemies could use against her; a wife whose televised defense of her husband’s account of his sexual past in the primary season saved his career; a master of detail and strategy; worldly because she had to be. And yet at the same time, Goldberg believes that Hillary knew nothing about her political partner’s history of abusing, harassing, and exploiting women, was for decades a staggering naïf, and not an equal partner, was kept out of the information loop all along, and shocked, shocked, every time one of these bizarre accusations emerged...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine.

Interest in sexual harassment was suppressed to protect Bill Clinton: Is that part of why Harvey Weinstein got away with his abuses?

The 1990s began with a heightening of interest in sexual harassment as liberals tried to defeat the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. The refrain in the fall of 1991 was "You just don't get it," as Democrats lambasted anyone who resisted taking sexual harassment in the workplace seriously. But in 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Democrats reversed the message. In the biggest sellout of feminism I've seen in my lifetime, sexual harassment turned into just sex, and those who wanted to take it seriously were derided as prigs.

Now, I'm reading the NYT article "Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Others Say Weinstein Harassed Them/'This way of treating women ends now,' Ms. Paltrow said as she and other actresses accused the producer of casting-couch abuses," and I'm wondering why only now? Why not earlier? What stood in your way?

My hypothesis is that liberals — including nearly everyone in the entertainment business — suppressed concern about sexual harassment to help Bill Clinton. Giving him cover gave cover to other powerful men, and the cause of women's equality in the workplace was set back 20 years.

So I'm looking at the new NYT article and trying to see what the dates are. They're kind of obscure! I'm seeing vague phrases like "in the late 1990s" and "accounts of sexual harassment going back to the 1990s." I am seeing a couple clear dates. First, 1999...

Even as Ms. Paltrow became known as the “first lady of Miramax” and won an Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love” in 1999, very few people knew about Mr. Weinstein’s advances. “I was expected to keep the secret,” she said.

... and 1996:

In 1996, the French actress Judith Godrèche said she was invited up to Mr. Weinstein’s suite, where he asked to give her a massage. After she said no, she recalled, he argued that casual massages were an American custom.

I just want to put this hypothesis out there and encourage people to correlate allegations about Weinstein with the great knowing-and-forgetting process that happened in the 1990s — 1991 and 1998 were the key dates — as the issue of sexual harassment was crushed into whatever shape worked in the interest of Democratic Party power.

Are these allegations coming out now because Hillary Clinton lost the election and the time for covering for Bill Clinton is over at long last?

***

"I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate the things you do for him. Do you understand? Everything you do."/"What really went through my mind at that time is 'She knows. She knew. She's covering it up and she expects me to do the very same thing.'"

"This was also a different time, when it was perhaps more accepted for powerful men to prey on young women, when women felt less able to protest."

"In fairness to Trump, other senior men in politics and business — John Kennedy and Bill Clinton come to mind — also sometimes showed a sense of entitlement toward young women."

Writes Nicholas Kristof about allegations of sexual harassment by Jill Harth against Donald Trump. The "different time" was not 1964. It was 1994. We knew about sexual harassment then. We knew it very well. We'd just had our consciousness raised. (That was before it was lowered, in 1998.)

It's a complicated story, by the way:

I asked her: Why would a woman who accused Trump of attempted rape ever go out with him?

“I was scared, thinking, ‘what am I going to do now?’” she says. “When he called me and tried to work on me again, I was thinking maybe I should give this a try, maybe if he’s still working on me, I should give this rich guy a chance.”

They dated for several months in 1998, when he was separated from Maples, she says. In the end, he was a disappointing boyfriend, always watching television and rarely offering emotional support, she says.

“It was a hard divorce, and I was in a nonstop crying jag,” she recalls. “You know what he was thinking? He wanted me to get a boob job. He made an appointment for me to get a boob job, a doctor in Miami.”

Kristof says that in the end he decided that Harth is telling the truth. Has Kristof ever opined about Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey? A search of the NYT archive turns up nothing with his name and either of those 2 women who have alleged that they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton. 

What about me?

"Remember me? I’m the one your husband raped and you threatened. I’m still here telling the truth and you are a liar."

"'Rape is about power, not sex.' For those for whom it’s about power, those are the serial rapist guys, and they hate women and want to punish us."

"But I don’t think that’s in every case. I think good men can rape, and be sorry, and not do it again. This is very bad feminism."

Writes Rebecca Schoenkopf, in Wonkette, carrying on the venerable tradition of women making exceptions for Bill Clinton's sexual transgressions as she confesses to her own transgression — being a very bad feminist... or, ooh, not really... it was just this one time... I got carried away... Bill is so dreamy... he's not a bad man... he just does very bad things some times — just that one time! — I'm still a good girl — good feminist — I just engaged in very bad feminism that one time... and I'll never do it again... unless Bill needs me... oh, that Bill...

And this is why we can't have good feminism. Women — the majority of humanity — who could come together and demand respect and protection for our bodies are susceptible to getting peeled off individually by a man they feel powerfully drawn to and simply must make an exception for. He's not really bad. He said he was sorry and he'd never do it again. And there she is, the erstwhile feminist, mouthing the biggest domestic violence cliché in the world.

But it's not a cliché, not this time, because my guy is so special, mama. If you only knew his heart like I do.

***

There's a poll at Wonkette. The results look like this right now:



AND: To continue this theme of why we can't have good feminism: The woman who rose the highest is Hillary Clinton, and she did it by siding with the man, rejecting alliance with women. Staunch commitment to the sisterhood is not the winner's strategy. That is the lesson we're inscribing into American history as we create The Story of The First Woman President.

"The black and white spot runs for about 20 seconds and features women's voices, including Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of rape."

"Bill Clinton is shown with a cigar in his mouth. The ad ends with Hillary laughing and the words: 'Here we go again?'"

It's a new era of communication, and it's changing all the time. Can Hillary keep up? Or will some combination of ignoring and sneering not be enough?

"The Bill Clinton scandal machine revs back up and takes aim at his wife."

Says the front-page Washington Post teaser:



I'm struck by: 1. Calling Hillary Clinton, the dominating presidential candidate, "his wife." 2. Using a gun violence metaphor — "takes aim" — about an American presidential candidate. (Never do this, whatever your politics. It's never needed. And there are weak people with impressionable minds.) 3. Dehumanizing Hillary's opponents as a "machine." 4. The idea that problems relating to Bill Clinton's interactions are manufactured — machine-made — and don't come from real people who think there really was something wrong. (I have always had a problem with the sexual harassment aspects of Bill's misdoings, though I was never a Republican, and I voted for him twice.) 5. A supposedly serious newspaper straining so obviously to carry the Clintons' message: It's old, it's manufactured, it's unfair, it's (metaphorical) violence against women. 6. The mixed metaphor: a manufacturing device, a gun, and — "gain new traction" — a vehicle.

So I clicked. At the article, the headline is different, and much more appropriately journalistic: "For Hillary Clinton, old news or new troubles?" It's so different that I didn't think I'd arrived at the article I'd clicked on. But the byline is the same — Karen Tumulty and Frances Stead Sellers — and I double checked.

Tumulty and Sellers observe that the sexual troubles are old but there's a "fresher case being made" that Hillary has been "hypocritical"...

In November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” She has made women’s issues a central focus of her campaign and is counting on a swell of support for the historic prospect of the first female president.

... or, worse, "complicit."

[Juanita] Broaddrick, now a Trump supporter, tweeted Wednesday: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73. . . .it never goes away.”

And times have changed. We have "a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact." Interesting. I remember when we had "a new sensitivity" in the early 1990s, when male Senators, chided with "You just don't get it," stepped up and took it very seriously. That new sensitivity got lost to a politically opportune insensitivity when Democrats decided it was more important to protect their President. They subordinated feminism to Democratic Party power, and it required a long struggle to get back to a second new sensitivity. And so, once again, the question is whether sensitivity or insensitivity better serves the interests of the Democratic Party.

If you don't remember "You just don't get it," here's a Washington Post column from May 5, 1994, by Richard Cohen: "Bill Clinton's Anita Hill":

Conservatives (and others) have wondered out loud the last several weeks why The Post, which reported [Anita] Hill's allegations [against Clarence Thomas], was so silent about a similar accusation lodged against Bill Clinton....

As few conservatives failed to note, the Jones story and the Hill story have much in common.... The fact remains that both women have made unsubstantiated accusations of a grievously wounding nature. They both amount to bulletless assassinations...

Ugh! Another cheap gun violence metaphor.

... of character and possibly of career. It's hard, moreover, to gauge their relevance -- although if Jones is on the level, then Clinton has truly given womanizing a bad name. Her story is revolting, and the purported use of state troopers as procurers is deeply disturbing. But liberals had this coming...

The mere invocation of the phrase "You just don't get it" during the Thomas hearings seemed to banish common sense, not to mention decency. In Thomas's case, so much -- feminism, the abortion movement, civil rights -- was invoked to justify the public trashing of a man who, whatever his politics, was hardly evil. It's hard to see him now and not wonder what all the fuss was about. Hill was just the means to try to bring about Thomas's end.... Paula Jones is to Bill Clinton what Anita Hill was to Clarence Thomas. It's that simple -- and that regrettable as well.

And thus the new sensitivity became the new insensitivity until a new sensitivity seemed like a good idea again and now — once again for the Clintons — it seems to be time once again for a new insensitivity. As if feminism is nothing but what the Democratic Party needs it to be and believing women depends on whether we like what they are saying.

I get it.

BUMPED: Originally published at 6:53 AM, but it got buried. 

Hillary was asked the blunt question: "You say that all rape victims should be believed, but would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and/or Paula Jones?"

Clearly prepared for that question, she answered: "I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence."

Next time the question should be reframed: You have said that all those who make an accusation of sexual assault should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence, so can I assume that you originally believed Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones, and if you ever came to disbelieve any of these women, was it genuinely because you considered the evidence and found that they deserved to be disbelieved?

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

The gesture Cain made that, he says, brought a complaint about sexual harassment.

On Greta Van Susteren's show, he spoke of an employee in her late 30s or early 40s who accused him of sexual harassment:

"She was in my office one day, and I made a gesture saying -- and I was standing close to her -- and I made a gesture saying you are the same height as my wife.  And I brought my hand up to my chin saying, 'My wife comes up to my chin.'"  At that point, Cain gestured with his flattened palm near his chin.  "And that was put in there [the complaint] as something that made her uncomfortable," Cain said, "something that was in the sexual harassment charge."

Supposedly, the woman and her lawyer asked for a "huge" settlement, but she got very little, just enough to induce her to terminate the lawsuit.

Rush Limbaugh's reaction today:

Now, we don't have any evidence of ice packs on a busted lip as we had with Juanita Broaddrick and Bill Clinton.  Yeah, Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick, "Hey babe, you better put some ice on that, you're bleeding at the lip."  We don't have any of that.  This story appears to me to be a close relative of the hit job that the Washington Post is doing on Marco Rubio.  It's not a news story.  This is gutter partisan politics, and it's the politics of minority conservative personal destruction, is what you've got here.  Rubio and Cain unfit to lead, don't you see. We cannot have a black Republican running for the office of president.  We can't have one elected.  We can't have an Hispanic.

The left owns those two groups, and those two groups are gonna forever be minorities. Those groups cannot ever be seen to be self-sufficient or rising above, on their own. Those two groups are owned -- lock, stock, and barrel -- by the Democrat Party and anything good that happens to any black or Hispanic in American politics can only happen via the Democrat Party....

This is how the mainstream media keeps the Republican Party in check: They're scared to death of this kind of thing happening to them. Pure and simple. It's also why (I'm just predicting) you're not going to see too many people in the official Republican establishment rise up to Herman Cain's defense. You know, if this exact circumstance (as I just mentioned) had happened in a conservative publication, not only would the Democrats and the media be going after the women -- as James Carville did and others during the Clinton years -- they'd be going after the reporters. They'd be going after the publication. Anybody who had anything to do with the story, it would be search-and-destroy. Our side will not do that.