Maureen Dowd wonders whether Gropegate would be any different if Hillary were president

Maureen Dowd wonders whether Gropegate would be any different if Hillary were president

While everyone else in the mainstream media is in full condemnation mode, looking for Al Franken’s head on a pike, The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd is more introspective — cerebral if you will — in her take on what she calls “the war against preying on women.”

In a column out yesterday, Dowd engages in a thought experiment, writing:

If Hillary were in the Oval [sic], would some women have failed to summon the courage to tell their Weinstein horror stories because the producer was also a power behind the Clinton throne? …

… [W]ould Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other liberals still be saying in the past few days that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency over his own sexual misdeeds if he now occupied the first lady’s quarters and reigned over a potent Clinton political machine?

Or would feminists and liberals make the same Faustian bargain they made in 1998: protect Bill on his retrogressive behavior toward women because the Clintons have progressive policies toward women? So what if a few women are collateral damage, they might ask — again. Wouldn’t you rather have Bill and Bill’s enabler, Hillary, than Donald?

You may wonder why in the year 2017, after so many graphic and scalding national seminars on sexual predation over the last 26 years, we are still trying to come to terms with it.

Perhaps because in those earlier traumatic sagas, both the left and the right rushed in to twist them for their own ideological ends. The stench of hypocrisy overpowered the perfume of justice.

For an example of that “stench of hypocrisy” — of circling the wagons to protect a known predator purely in the interests of the party — consider another column from The New York Times, this one dated May 31, 1998:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Poor little Monica.

On top of all the other indignities she has suffered during her career as White House gofer and scandal babe, she had to spend hours on Thursday at the F.B.I. field office in Los Angeles. She had to write down in longhand whatever came into her head. The 24-year-old must have felt like Bart Simpson, forced by Schoolmaster Starr to stay after class and copy out the same sentence a hundred times on the blackboard.

The prosecutor needed a handwriting sample. Or he pretended to need a handwriting sample, so he could scare the poor girl into thinking he is about to indict her unless she starts spilling the cat out of the beans, as Carmen Miranda used to say. He no doubt wants her penmanship to compare it to the lovey-dovey stuff Monica was messengering the President from the Pentagon.

You’ll never believe this, but a copy of Monica’s scribbles has fallen into my hot little hands. Her stream-of-consciousness ramblings are on F.B.I. letterhead — in a girlish scrawl, with loopy letters, little hearts and breathless punctuation. …

Who wrote this crass sexist drivel? Maureen Dowd.

(h/t John Podhoretz)

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles is a freelance writer and regular contributor to "Liberty Unyielding."

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