This week in the politics of sex scandals in the US

Michael Tomasky on the suddenly fashionable notion among some Democratic liberals that Bill clinton should have resigned over the Monica Lewinsky affair (Hell No, Bill Clinton Shouldn’t Have Resigned Daily Beast 11/21/2017):

The idea that Clinton should have resigned is insane. It’s insane from the perspective of the historical record, which in no way supports the idea that he should have quit his job. And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books, a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting.

The fact that we are actively discussing the Bill Clinton cheating scandals of the 1990s is a major sign that the Republicans are way, way better at exploiting such scandals politically than Democrats are.

And that's in very large part because they are much savvier than Democrats about what suckers the corporate media are for not only sex stories and stories about anyone named Clinton, but also their obsession with the false equivalence of Both Sides Do It on every issue and practice all the time.

I'm tempted to say that it's a sign of progress that it a whole week, more-or-less, for the credible claims made by numerous women about sleazy and even violent behavior of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore toward teenage girls when he was in his 30s to be replaced by a return to the media' Great Clinton Penis Hunt that they loved so much during the 1990s.

Tomasky says of the Clinton impeachment:

The most important point is that the Republican effort to remove Clinton from office was a constitutional coup d’etat. If you’re young—all this hatred you see today, this right-wing rage machine (which does have its much smaller counterpart on the left); it all started then. The right hated Bill Clinton pretty much because he was a liberal (a moderate-liberal, but as they saw him, a dangerous leftist) from the Woodstock generation who had the effrontery to beat a Republican incumbent at a time when conservatives thought the presidency was theirs for life. Literally from the day he won, some people were plotting how to undo the voters’ verdict. And finally, years later, he handed them some rope.

That is what liberals were confronting. The right’s aim was to nullify a presidential election. Two of them. If Clinton had acquiesced in that, having obviously committed no high crime or misdemeanor, the precedent would have been chilling. No Democratic president after him would have been safe from a similar assault. They would have gone straight after President Gore, on the slightly dodgy fund-raising stuff, and they’d have had the added talking point that Gore’s presidency was especially illegitimate because unlike Clinton he wasn’t even elected. I’m not saying they could have driven Gore from office. I am saying they’d have tried, and they’d have tried with Barack Obama or whatever Democrat came next in that timeline, too. There is no way on earth Clinton should have opened that door. [my emphasis]

That's a good point. No matter that they hated him dearly, the Republicans never seriously tried to impeach Barack Obama.

I agree with Tomasky's judgment, "And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books." Although he adds at the end, "a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting." That last part goes a little far from my perspective. There is a lot about the Clinton deregulation policies and military interventions that deserve to be responsibly criticized. The Clinton Administration's policies toward Russia are looking more and more dubious all the time, including the ham-handed intervention in the Russian election of 1996:

But Democrats definitely need to up their game on how to deal with such scandals. Starting with remembering how bogus the criminal allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton were that were so extensively investigated during his Presidency. Once again, the link to the Final Report of the Special Counsel investigating the Whitewater pseudoscandal, Final Report of the Independent Counsel in Re Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association Regarding Monica Lewinsky and Others 03/06/2002.

Jill Abramson also looks at the politics of the current sex scandals in Have we reached zero tolerance for sexual misconduct Guardian 11/19/2017:

Casting out Al Franken, who has been a passionate, zealous defender of women’s rights in a Senate grown ever more hostile to them, could remove an important weapon in the embattled Democratic arsenal.

A reassessment of Bill Clinton’s behavior era could have the same counter-productive effect. His accusers already signed up to help Donald Trump get elected when they appeared with him before one of the presidential debates. They have all made a devil’s bargain with various Republican creeps, including Roger Stone.

One of Trump’s key political advisers recently told me that the appearance of the Clinton accusers with Trump “completely blunted the damage of the Access Hollywood tape. It was a very important turning point in the campaign.” The Clinton accusers helped elect a different sexual predator. And unlike Clinton, who was an ally of the women’s movement, Trump is its mortal enemy. [my emphasis]

Joe Conason, still debunking Clinton pseudoscandals

Joe Conason, co-author with Gene Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), has addressed two sets of Clinton pseudoscandals. Uranium One is a relatively new entry in the portfolio of Clinton pseudoscandals. The allegation is that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was bribed by Russians via the Clinton Foundation into approving the sale of a company named Uranium One to a state-owned Russian company, Rosatom.

Clinton Conason writes in One radioactive smear campaign New York Daily News 11/19/2017:

Neither the House Republicans nor Sessions have yet explained how the Clintons could have controlled the disposition of Uranium One's assets. Nor have they explained how the Uranium One deal, which prohibited the Russians from selling so much as an ounce of uranium ore outside the borders of the United States, could have endangered American national security.

And they have also failed to explain why the entire deal matters anyway, since the portion of U.S. reserves owned by Uranium One represents a tiny fraction of a fraction — a tenth of 1% — of the world's uranium supply, most of which comes from Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada.

He sketches out the claim here:

Through a complex series of business deals, Russia had obtained control of a portion of U.S. uranium reserves, using a Vancouver-based company called Uranium One. Some of the Canadian investors who profited from the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, the Russian state-owned atomic energy corporation, had given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Russia's acquisition of American uranium had been approved by the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. And Bill Clinton had received a $500,000 fee for a speech delivered in Moscow at a bank that had some connection with Uranium One.

What weakened that apparently damning story was a single big flaw: Hillary Clinton never had the sole authority to sign off on the sale of Uranium One to the Russians, but held only a single seat on a government panel that included members from nine agencies, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

What Conason doesn't say, though I think it's important, is that the laws are far too permissive on ways that donors and/or bribers (sometimes there is no difference) can channel money to candidates and campaigns. Payments to a candidates spouse of, say, $500,000 for a single speech - and even the prospect of earning such speaking fees after leaving office - certainly can be used in that way. But it's not at all clear that such a thing occurred in the Uranium One deal, or that the payments to the Clinton Foundation were in any way illegal. It looks like a pure pseudoscandal to me.

But I see this problem in the larger context of the Citizens' United campaign-funding regime, which is an oligarchical system that inevitably creates de facto corruption, even if much of it is de jure legal.

And, of course, our Pod Pundits can never resist a return to the Bill Clinton Penis Hunt of the 1990s. And the Republicans are skilled in playing to that obsession and to the corporate media's posture of trying to provide a Both Sides Do It phony equivalency between the Democratic and Republican parties on all issues.

So it took only a few days after the Roy Moore sex scandals broke for the Republicans to get the media back on the BCPH again. And there are always Democrats feckless enough to play the same game. Conason addresses the Return Of The BCPH in A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million Probe National Memo 11/17/2017:

Unlike Weinstein, Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, or any of the dozens of powerful men whose misdeeds have provoked a wave of justified fury, Clinton endured a long, painful, and very costly series of official investigations of his alleged sexual misdeeds. Various accounts of his private behavior, whether invented or truthful, filled thousands of hours of national airtime, millions of inches of newsprint, and dozens of books ....

Unlike the Fox News criminals and many other creeps who quietly reached settlements that kept the most lurid details of their behavior under court seal, Clinton’s alleged acts were litigated publicly all the way to the Supreme Court — with attendant coverage that included, among other embarrassments, a debate about the appearance of his penis.

And most important, unlike any of those now in the dock, Clinton underwent a $70-million investigation by a zealous federal inquisitor who had all the powers of the Justice Department, a team of relentless and experienced prosecutors, and the forensic services of the FBI, which he employed in a wide-ranging sex probe that went back decades. That special prosecutor’s name was Kenneth W. Starr. He would be dismayed to learn that his dogged efforts to destroy Clinton have so soon been forgotten.

He also reminds us of the eager but unsuccessful results of Kenneth Starr to validate the claims of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, two favorite icons of the latest BCPH. Which, for the Republicans, will apparently never goes away. I expect them to be harping on it 50 years from now. He also reminds us of the outcome of Paula Jones' charges.

Even after all this time, I still feel stunned when I'm reminded by an article like this how ridiculous the Clinton pseudoscandals lumped under the "Whitewater" rubric really were.

It was the New York Times that vaulted the Whitewater affair into a national issue by its credulous reporting in 1992, which was very competently dissected by Conason and Lyons in The Hunting of the President, and earlier by Lyons in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996), and in the documentary film version of The Hunting of the President.

So the NYT at least deserves credit for reporting on the final report of the special counsel in the Whitewater case, headed in its last phase by Robert Ray, Final Report By Prosecutor On Clintons Is Released 03/21/2002

In a final report that ends the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across a range of subjects and vexed President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton for most of his two terms in the White House, the independent counsel's office said today that there was insufficient evidence to show that either committed any crimes.

Robert W. Ray, the last occupant of the office of independent counsel for Whitewater matters, said in the 2,090-page report that the Clintons' principal business partner in the Whitewater land development scheme in Arkansas, James B. McDougal, had committed several acts of fraud, but that there was no credible evidence that the Clintons either knew of or participated in those acts.

The report concluded the long legal melodrama that resulted in Mr. Clinton's impeachment and sharply split the nation about whether he was the victim of a politically motivated criminal investigation or had truly committed substantial offenses.

The whole underlying pseudoscandal around Whitewater turned out to have been completely bogus.