The “striking” difference between the Bill Clinton and Donald Trump impeachments, argue MSNBC hosts and others in the media, was not only the willingness of Clinton to “show contrition,” but the willingness of his supporters to acknowledge that the president had done something wrong.
Let’s not let liberals rewrite history.
In the real world, Clinton, with help from the entire Democratic Party, kept earnestly lying to anyone who would listen until physical evidence compelled him to admit what he had done. His subsequent “contrition” was a matter of political survival. The notion that Trump engaged in “bribery” is debatable. The notion that Clinton perjured himself is not.
If it hadn’t been for the Drudge Report bypassing the institutional media, in fact, Newsweek — still an influential magazine in 1998 — would likely have sat on the Monica Lewinsky story until after the Clinton presidency ended.
Then again, even after Drudge reported on Lewinsky’s stained blue dress, Clinton still lied about his affair to the country, famously saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
His wife, Hillary, who almost surely knew the truth, told Matt Lauer that a “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president” was responsible for the charges.
If it hadn’t been for Linda Tripp recording her calls, Lewinsky would doubtlessly have been smeared by the Clinton Janissaries like so many other women before her.
These were the virtuous days before Trump hit Washington, when the White House was running a “nuts or sluts” operation to protect the president, led by James Carville, who said that Clinton accuser Paula Jones was the kind of person you found “if you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park.”
It wasn’t until Tripp had handed Lewinsky’s blue dress to investigator Ken Starr, who then concluded that the president had lied during sworn testimony, that Clinton finally admitted to the affair.
What else was he going to do? Argue that it was acceptable to lie under oath and carry on sexual relationships with 23-year-old interns in the White House?
More significantly, what liberals ignore is that Clinton’s Starr-induced penitence was largely beside the point. Clinton wasn’t impeached for acting like a dog; he was impeached for perjuring himself and obstructing justice — on 11 very specific criminal actions — in a sexual harassment case.
And any perfunctory willingness by his allies to admit wrongdoing was quickly overwhelmed by a Democratic Party rallying around the notion that Clinton had actually been the victim of “Sexual McCarthyism,” a vacuous term that would be repeated endlessly on television by his supporters.
Worse, the entire country was soon plunged into an insufferably stupid debate over whether being fellated by an intern in the Oval Office should even be considered a sexual encounter.
Then again, Democrats largely offered the same arguments that the GOP does today.
“Not all coups are accompanied by the sound of marching boots and rolling tanks,” said Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY).
“I rise in strong opposition to this attempt at a bloodless coup d’etat, this attempt to overturn two national elections,” explained Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY).
“This partisan coup d’etat will go down in infamy in the history of this nation,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), said. And on and on.
In the end, there would not be a single patriotic Democratic senator who was brave enough to stand up for the American justice system, for women or for decency. Every single one of them chose partisan interests over their country and the cult of Clinton over the Constitution.
Now, just as it’s debatable whether Trump’s Ukrainian call rises to the level of an impeachable offense, it was debatable whether Clinton’s actions warranted it.
There’s no debate, however, that Clinton had an affair with a subordinate in the White House and then lied about that affair under oath.
His partisan allies did whatever they needed to save him because the notion that rank partisanship was discovered in 2016 is nothing but revisionism.