OPINION:
Bill Clinton, hereafter to be known as the Tone Deaf President, has had a heck of a week trying to shove his lecherous affair with a young White House intern into a #MeToo box, as if the two could ever fit together as one.
But for Republicans, this is all good.
The more Clinton squirms, the more America’s reminded why Democrats don’t deserve votes. Why, even the media of the left are starting to flee from the guy.
What’d he do this time?
Only this: Only tell “Today” host Craig Melvin that if he had the chance to go back in time and do a redo on the whole Monica Lewinsky affair, knowing what he knows now about #MeToo and sexual harassment, he wouldn’t change a thing.
“I don’t think it would be an issue,” he said, explaining why he wouldn’t have resigned his presidential post or even “approached the accusations differently,” based on #MeToo lessons. “Because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts. If the facts were the same today, I wouldn’t.”
He then said his fight against impeachment was a just cause then, and a just cause now — that “I think I did the right thing. I defended the Constitution,” he said.
The nation gasped.
But not just the right-leaners — not just the Republicans.
Just look at this headline from CBS News — CBS News, folks: “Commentary: Time for Bill Clinton to go away.”
Here’s a snippet of the piece: “[Clinton] was a predator, who survived and prospered like so many of his kind in the 1990s. Back then, making a big deal of Clinton’s infidelities was portrayed as nothing more than sexual puritanism. The investigations into Clinton’s appetites, which the liberal commentariat of the time argued were perfectly normal and even healthy, was compared by no less than Arthur Miller to the witch hunts of the 17th century.”
Then there was this, from “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, who pressed Clinton in a recent interview to explain himself and his “Today” show showing, just a little bit more, please.
“Examples of men who were not held accountable for their behavior, especially men in power with younger women or people who worked for them, is worthy of being re-adjudicated or adjudicated for the first time, no matter how long ago it happened,” Colbert said, in reference to Clinton-Lewinsky Gate, Fox News reported.
Right, Mr. Clinton? Mr. Clinton?
Bill?
“I was mad at me,” Clinton said, acknowledging the “Today” interview hadn’t represented his “finest hour.”
No kidding. Neither had the hours spent in the White House with the blue-dressed Lewinsky — nor the countless ones spent afterward, covering up. But live and learn, yes?
That’s what #MeToo seeks to say, in part. Look at the past, look at the present, and look at what’s happened with women in the work force all these years. With Clinton, though, the Democratic Party’s seeming serial sexual harasser, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through, at least, not in any loud and clear type of way.
“People need to know I apologized,” he told Colbert. “I meant it then. I mean it now … and I still support Me Too.”
Well, apologies for the mocking raised eyebrows. But it’s hard to believe a guy who says he believes that sexual harassment of women is wrong — but who has a past riddled with both settled and unsettled sexual harassment accusations and who stands firmly in the camp of self-righteousness when confronted about one of the admitted affairs.
That’s called confusing. That’s called disingenuous. And that’s in the politest of terms called tone deaf, a phrase Clinton has definitely etched for himself as a placard to place on his desk, for all of history, alongside the ones that read Bad Husband and Bad Father.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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