What’s keeping more women from coming out now? If Clinton were an undisciplined, serial groper, surely more would come out now in this day and age of digital media? I’ll gladly modify my comments if others do come out but it seems that there were some so-so allegations made in the 1990s and we’ve heard nothing more since. None of these allegations have had damning corroborating evidence. 20 years and counting.
I think you misunderstand what “if those women came out today” means. Not sure why there needs to be more women. We can compare what our response would be today to what it was 30 years ago without bringing more women into it.
No, I didn’t misunderstand anything. There were three women who claimed that they were victims of unwanted sexual advances and at least 2 of those claims were litigated, and yet the litigation didn’t really resolve the issue one way or the other. There’s an allegation of rape, but that claim was unsubstantiated. Unlike a lot of the claims made today, there’s no single pattern of behavior other than the fact that Bill Clinton liked to engage in sex with women other than his wife, which was never denied.
You still don’t seem to get what an alternate history is in this case, but never mind. I’ll just say that if they came forward today, there would be no litigation from years ago to refer to. We would be judging this freshly, and who knows if there would even be any litigation going forward? That was the proposition being put forward.
The news (and even this thread) about Bill Clinton is being* trump*eted purely to distract the voters from the pedophile Moore. It is 100% pure “whataboutism”.
I don’t see what’s wrong with the discussion as an interesting examination of the difference in attitude towards sexual predation 20 years ago versus today. It’s becoming a fascinating discussion, as well, in terms of how people will take really different attitudes towards sexual predation when the behaviour is exhibited by politicians of their political stripe.
I absolutely do not see how it serves as a distraction from Moore. No one in the thread is using it that way or is a Trumpist. Saying one theft is bad doesn’t mean saying other thefts are not bad.
Speaking of alternate histories: “Imagine if Hillary Clinton were a B-movie villain…”
Any post ending “…but bloggers can safely speak the truth” is stretching Poe’s Law to breaking point.
I don’t think you understand what the word “psychotic” means. It does not mean “very psychopathic.”
Be careful what you’re lumping in under the name “predation”, please. Are you *seriously *trying to claim that cheating on your wife with a willing partner is equivalent to groping children?
It’s an even more fascinating discussion about how far people will stretch their definitions in order to reach a comfortably both-sides-ist conclusion.
In politics, yes, saying “They all do it” does imply “It’s OK if my party’s guy does it too so I can go ahead and vote for him”. Yes, it absolutely is a distraction from Moore.
I do not recall writing that.
Can you name the posters in this thread who have taken this position?
Then please tell us what you *do *classify as “sexual predation” so we’ll all know what you mean.
That was a response to your claim that you “absolutely do not see how it serves as a distraction from Moore.”
What the hell?
Even if that’s so, it doesn’t matter. While I’m more on the skeptical side about whether Clinton sexually assaulted anyone, the fact is that if he did, he damn well deserves to be raked over the coals over it. If the case is overwhelming that he raped Juanita Broaddrick, he needs to become persona non grata in the Democratic Party.
No question, we had different attitudes about it back in the 1990s.
And what you say about the relevance of political stripe is on target: even if (that’s ‘if’; I’m not saying here that she did) Paula Jones completely fabricated her allegations, at least she got conservatives to believe in sexual harassment as a meaningful thing, when they’d been ridiculing the whole notion just a few years earlier when Anita Hill and Angela Wright accused Clarence Thomas of harassment.
I think people may be talking past each other here. Discussing this issue here on the Dope isn’t a distraction from anything; people can skip threads that they regard as distracting them personally.
But only so many stories can occupy the national news slot of a half-hour news program; only so many stories can be above the fold on a newspaper; only so many stories can be visible on your screen when you click into a news website.
So there is a bit of a zero-sum game going on in the national media with respect to the various allegations against various public figures. They can’t all be front and center. So at that level, “whatabout Clinton” is a distraction from Moore in particular, since Alabama gets to decide in the next two weeks whether Moore will represent them, and anything new in his case should be front and center now. While all other things being equal, it’s six of one whether the news media deal with the allegations against Clinton now, or three weeks from now. Ditto Trump.
In the interests of full disclosure, don’t we need to start threads deprecating Thomas Jefferson (his concubine was a black slave), George Washington (another slaveowner who allegedly got special bedroom services), Warren G. Harding* (multiple mistresses; one love child has now been confirmed with DNA), LBJ, FDR, Ike, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, and even Bush-41. (Never mind John F. Kennedy — we’d need several threads just for him.) The GOP will be happy to learn that the Democrat Buchanan was soiling the White House sheets with homosexual trysts. OTOH there are credible allegations that Abe Lincoln was actively bisexual during his White House years. … I’m getting tired typing; can we instead just have a brief thread “Chiefs of State who NEVER had an extramarital affair” ?
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- Harding’s mistress Carrie Phillips (not the one with Harding’s love child) is “the only woman known to have successfully blackmailed a major United States political party.”
Depends on what you want to deplore, doesn’t it? Where you draw the line that defines what you consider outside the pale of acceptable conduct. Any result-driven choice is pretty obvious, of course.
ETA: Don’t forget Grover Cleveland’s acknowledged illegitimate child. Oh, guess you didn’t.
Yes, let’s go to ridiculous extremes and disinter the dead as a way of making sure to distract from reasonable discussion about the living.
It’s called context. It matters, particularly in conversations about moral standards. Attempting to dismiss context sends a pretty loud signal.
Let’s get this straight: You’re all for adding the “context” of Jefferson raping a 14 year old slave 250 years ago (“it matters”), but you’re objecting to a discussion about Bill Clinton from 30 years ago? Wow.
Living? Oh, you mean the guy who was elected President twenty-five years ago (that’s Twenty-five with a ‘T’) and is being used as a distraction from the child rapists active in the GOP today.
In mainstream media, Roy Moore stories are outnumbering stories related to Bill Clinton’s dalliances about fifty to one, and such front page stories as relate to Clinton’s sex scandals are, I’d assume, all on Breitbart or Infowars, and they’re going to parrot the fascist agenda no matter what, anyway.
I realize that the Trumpists and Nazis love “whataboutism” and that it’s intellectually dishonest, but there is room for an honest examination of Bill Clinton’s legacy in our discourse on the SDMB and in society in general. This is not a Roy Moore thread that some wannabe Mussolini hijacked with “whataboutClintononandHillarysemails” nonsense.
Bullshit. We’re not discussing moral standards from 250 years ago to lend “context” to modern society. That isn’t what this discussion is about.
Yeah, that guy. Per OP title. So maybe let’s just stick to that for a change.
You know, it’s disturbing to me that fellow progressives are so invested in their heroes that they can’t admit that those heroes were far from perfect and that we can and should do better in the future. Maybe you’re perfectly happy to be just a little bit better than the GOP. Me, I prefer we set our bar a lot higher.