The Lewinsky Decade

[DixieBelle]

Lots of rehashing because of the anniversary. I've read plenty of articles but I thought this one made some valid points by tying the Clinton scandal to today's politics. Namely, the rise of Hillary. The link to the "vanished" Gloria Steinem article is illuminating and stands on it's own. Check it out.

The effects of the Lewinsky scandal continue to be felt. By some accounts it launched Mrs. Clinton's political career. The notion of a first lady seeking a Senate seat in a state to which she had no real connection was preposterous--yet she carried it off, in part by affording liberal New Yorkers an opportunity to poke the eye of the vast-right conspirators. Now she is a viable candidate for president. Who'd have expected that back in 1998?

Organized feminism lost much of its moral authority, as no less a personage than Gloria Steinem--in a famous op-ed that is mysteriously missing from the New York Times archives but we found here http://www2.edc.org/WomensEquity/edequity98/0561.html--explained away treatment of women that she never would have tolerated from a Republican or a private-sector boss.

The independent counsel statute, a post-Watergate abomination that no one thinks made government cleaner, finally went by the boards when Congress in 2000 declined to renew it. (The impulse behind the independent counsel, however, remains alive, as shown by the witch hunt in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.)

The paranoid style of politics took hold on the left, which blamed right-wing conspiracies for George W. Bush's victory in the disputed election of 2000, the liberation of Iraq, George W. Bush's victory in the undisputed election of 2004, Hurricane Katrina and, on the furthest fringes, the attacks of 9/11. A far-left subculture harbors fantasies of impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney as revenge, even though they haven't committed any high crimes or misdemeanors.

In reality, far from being the victim of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," Clinton was caught in a trap set for him unwittingly by the political left, which made sexual harassment both a legal offense and a political outrage, and which hatched the independent-counsel scheme. He was saved only by an exercise of raw, partisan political power in the Senate, where not a single Democrat voted for conviction.

Mrs. Clinton, facing a strong challenge from Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, finds herself in a weirdly parallel position. Once again, as we noted last week, Gloria Steinem has produced a risible op-ed for the Times, this time defending Mrs. Clinton as a feminist icon, even though she owes her political power to her husband, and even though she seems to have saved her chance at the nomination by coming close to tears.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120058281612497651.html?mod=Best+of+the+Web+Today