Wednesday, September 28, 2016

WE'VE TURNED ON COSBY AND WOODY. HERE'S WHY TRUMP PROBABLY WON'T MAKE US TURN ON BILL CLINTON.

In a radio interview yesterday, Eric Trump praised his father for not bringing up Bill Clinton's infidelities in Monday night's debate. This comes after Dad praised himself for not raising the subject in the debate. On Fox and Friends this morning, veteran right-wing hit man and current Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie elaborated:
... Bossie said “clearly Mr. Trump held his tongue” at Monday night’s presidential debate when Hillary Clinton raised the Manhattan billionaire’s history of derogatory remarks about women....

“I think that if you look at Hillary Clinton's background and if you look at her being an enabler, really, in the '90s and really attacking these women, it goes against everything that she now tries to spout as a candidate for president,” Bossie said on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning. “She'll say and do anything. Those are Barack Obama's words, not mine. She'll say and do anything to become president of the United States. And I think we're seeing that now.”
Politico says that the Clinton campaign is expecting this subject to reemerge -- and the Clintonites hope it does, because attacks of this kind have historically resulted in improved poll numbers for Hillary Clinton.

But is it possible that things would be different now? Recently, allegations about the sexual behavior of Bill Cosby and Woody Allen have significantly damaged the reputations of those men. The worst stories about Bill Clinton are decades old, but so are the Allen allegations and most of the ones involving Cosby. Why couldn't a changing national mood turn the public against Bill Clinton?

The main reason, I think, is the way the Clinton accusers have operated. Some women have charged Bill Clinton with sexual assault, not merely infidelity, but in the 1990s his antagonists spent more than a year trying to destroy his political career by focusing on a relationship that was undeniably consensual. Yes, there was a vast power inequity between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but it was clear that she wanted to have a relationship with Clinton, and there are no allegations of violence by Clinton against her. The conservatives who fixated on this case now try to talk about Clinton as a sexually violent man (and Hillary Clinton as an intimidating enabler), but they keep getting it wrong -- over the weekend, the Trump campaign teased the possibility of extending a debate invitation to Gennifer Flowers, another woman with whom Clinton had a consensual affair.

Here's a tip, conservatives. Say absolutely nothing about any aspect of this story that's merely illicit and not allegedly criminal. The public thinks cheating is a matter best dealt with by the parties involved, with divorce court as a backstop. Nobody cares whether Bill Cosby had consensual extramarital affairs, or whether Woody Allen cheated on Mia Farrow with any consenting adults -- it's allegations of drugged date rape and pedophilia we care about in these cases. But conservatives lose focus when talking about this subject, going for pure titillation rather than outrage. The problem for them is that we stopped feeling titillated by Bill Clinton sex stories twenty years ago.

The right is having the same problem with Alicia Machado, the former beauty queen who was insulted and humiliated by Donald Trump for gaining weight. Unsavory stories about her past have surfaced -- as New York magazine notes, she was once charged with driving a getaway car after her then-boyfriend shot a man, and was said to have threatened the judge overseeing the boyfriend's case. You'd think that right-wingers who want to besmirch the reputation of Machado, who's now a Clinton surrogate, would stop there. But no -- the Daily Caller has to slut-shame:
Porn Star Campaigns For Hillary Clinton

Former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, who has been campaigning against Republican nominee Donald Trump for the Hillary Clinton campaign, has appeared in pornographic videos.

Snippets of an adult film starring Machado are available on multiple free porn websites. Machado also appeared topless in Mexican Playboy in 2006 and 2012.
Donald Trump's wife has also posed nude, but never mind.

Oh, and while the Federalist cites the shooting and the alleged threat to the judge, and also cites reports that Machado had a child with a drug lord, it also lists this as one of "4 Things the Media Won’t Tell You About Hillary’s Beauty Queen BFF":
3. She’s Really Bad at Geography

In 2010, Machado de-activated her Twitter account after she called North and South Korea “the Chinas.”

“Tonight I want to ask you to join me in a prayer for peace, that these attacks between the Chinas do not make our situation worse,” she tweeted.

The tweet spurred a lot of backlash, prompting her to delete her account.
Yes, that's terrible, because we certainly know that there couldn't possibly be a Donald Trump supporter who has a faulty knowledge base.

You don't know to do this, right-wingers. You humiliated Monica Lewinsky twenty years ago and you're humiliating Alicia Machado now. So just cut your losses and quit now.

7 comments:

  1. t-RUMP, Newt, and Guiliani, are all on their 3rd wives.

    Roger Stone has taken part in orgies.

    But that's all THEIR business.

    But because they suffer from a severe "irony deficiency," they are incapable of seeing the irony of ridiculing the wife who stuck "With Her Man."

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  2. "You don't know to do this, right-wingers. You humiliated Monica Lewinsky twenty years ago and you're humiliating Alicia Machado now."

    Thereby demonstrating that right-wingers think that attacking women as sluts, pigs, and bitches is fine and dandy as long as they think those women somehow deserve it. And right-wingers are always convinced that somehow the women do deserve it. It's not chronic misogyny, it's just fearless truth-telling!

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  3. Clinton obviously stayed with a serial philanderer for political power without which alliance she would have none.
    If that is the chief offense, it is enough-ask almost any Iraqi, Libyan or Christian Syrian abroad and any job outsourced worker at home.

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  4. KenReich,
    Any evidence for your assertion about Hillary Clinton?
    Or did you get it from your favorite source, Otto Yerazz?

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  5. And everytime they say Monica Lewinski was an "intern" tell them she had gotten a job before she had the affair with Bill..

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  6. I don't even understand why Trump would bother to attack Machado - it profits him nothing. Except for the fact he has no impulse control and simply can't help himself, there was no reason for him to even address the subject. His attacking her simply kept it in the news longer.

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  7. KenRight must certainly be single, because he obviously hasn't a clue about the emotional dynamic of marriage. Or if he is actually married, it's to a very unhappy woman.

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