- Sunday, April 12, 2020

Linda Tripp died last week at the age of 70. Perhaps second only to President Clinton, she remains the most polarizing figure of the 1998 impeachment investigation — proceedings that would not have unfolded with such explosivity save for her surreptitious recording of White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Miss Lewinsky, then 22 years old, made the mistake (one of many, if we are being objective) of trusting to her bosom friend details of an affair with the sitting president. Ms. Tripp would go on to hand the tapes over to special counsel Ken Starr, whose investigation of other Clinton malfeasances was already underway, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A history, like the Clinton machine, which keeps reasserting itself, in spite of protestations from all good Americans to simply “Go away!” But in at least one crucial respect this perennial reminder of a sad, sordid time in our political story is needed. And badly so.

For it recalls to the present generation that the tastemakers who control much of the media landscape today, who feel no compunction about hectoring us about the need for justice in the #MeToo era, who give airtime and inches upon inches of ink to any initiative promising to “smash the patriarchy,” and who train their puppies to sniff out imagined scandals involving conservative politicians, delighted in attacking a young woman who had the ill fortune of gravitating into the orbit of a megalomaniac in the Oval Office.

Take, for instance, the merry savagery of “Saturday Night Live,” whose Molly Shannon portrayed Miss Lewinsky as alternatingly too stupid or too sexualized to understand what was going on, but ultimately 100 percent culpable for the temporary short-circuiting of the Clinton machine. During one “Weekend Update” sketch Ms. Shannon portrays a hysterical, laughing Miss Lewinsky remarking “A lot of people got in a lot of trouble and lost their jobs because of me” and “for a whole year no laws can be passed because of me.” The conceit of the sketch, of course, was that had this young woman simply done the right thing, national disaster could have been averted.

Ms. Tripp, for her part, received perhaps the most horrific treatment of all, as a then obese, grotesque John Goodman endeavored to render her more man than woman, a character lacking altogether any sympathetic qualities. President Clinton, by contrast, was always portrayed by Darrell Hammond as a kind of raffish imp. The audience, by design, was never meant to dislike him and by all accounts never have.

What Americans watched on television was reinforced by pundits in print and a nascent Internet. Everyone not involved in the saga had a great time and a good laugh.

But during what must have felt to Miss Lewinsky as a never-ending merry-go-round of abuse, she started to experience feelings of suicide. She would be diagnosed with PTSD, a clinical determination altogether unsurprising given her unceasing torment. A decade or so later, Miss Lewinsky would — correctly — identify herself as patient zero for cyber bullying. Today she makes a kind of career speaking out against the practice.

Ms. Tripp would fade into obscurity, living out her days in Middleburg, Virginia, operating a holiday store called Christmas Sleigh. She is still regarded by many as whistleblowing martyr.

The Clinton machine, as we have all witnessed, would repair. Hillary Clinton would go on to serve first as senator then secretary of State. She would come close to becoming president herself. Estimates of their net worth approach half a billion dollars. Mr. Clinton has spent his retirement globe-trotting and heaven knows what else.

It’s unclear that the liberal media learned any lessons whatsoever. As a collective, they stopped the practice of going after young women, though they seemed to have transferred that energy into ensuring young conservatives are “canceled” before they have careers to mature into. In this sad respect, history, no matter how much we are reminded, tends to repeat itself.

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