Bill Clinton's Shamelessness

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, January 18, 2010. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock)(Released)

If President Clinton had done the decent thing, he would have resigned over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and taken his shame on his own back. Instead, he defiantly brazened it out and made the country complicit in his classic harassment, assault, abuse of power, and perjury. How did Democrats handle their president having an affair with an intern half his age? Hillary called the charges a “vast right-wing conspiracy, while ultra-feminist Gloria Steinem wrote a NYT’s op-ed defending the president. “… a resounding never mind echoed through liberal world,” Mona Charen writes in NRO.

Inevitably, because we let Bill Clinton off the hook, we had to downplay the seriousness of his offenses. So here we are. It is quite possible that Harvey Weinstein and Anthony Weiner and Kevin Spacey and Roger Ailes and the rest of the rotten roster of sex abusers thought, even if only in the back of their minds, that if they got caught, in our age, this sort of thing would get a wink and a nod.

What we choose to shame or overlook determines what kind of society we are.

Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, and practicing yoga.