CBS ‘Early Show’ Guest: No One Cared About Bill Clinton’s ‘Philandering’

Photo of Kyle Drennen.
  • Bookmark and Share

Showing the kind of intrepid journalism that morning news is known for, on Monday’s CBS "Early Show" co-host Harry Smith led a panel discussion about some recent celebrity divorces, when publicist Marvet Britto observed: "...men are, you know, patting each other on the back when philandering happens. Sad as it may be...You know, look at Bill Clinton. It's not like he's -- you know, we're walking down the street thinking, ‘oh, look what he did.’"

The topic came up when Smith and the other panelists, divorce attorney Raoul Felder and clinical psychologist Robi Ludwig, were discussing Christie Brinkley’s divorce from her husband, who had an affair. In response, Smith awkwardly laughed and quickly moved on.

Story Continues Below Ad ↓
Here is the transcript of the exchange:

8:25AM

HARRY SMITH: Now here's my question. Christie Brinkley is a brand. Everybody in America knows exactly who she is. America's sweetheart forever and ever and ever. Does any of this do her any good brand-wise?

MARVET BRITTO: It doesn't. Companies look at the equity that you have, and that's what they choose to leverage. And for so many years she's built an amazing career where companies, corporations, Colgate, whoever she's worked with, knows what they're getting with Christie Brinkley.

SMITH: Right.

BRITTO: She loses big time if she has a public divorce where dirty laundry will come out and that might taint or soil the very career that she's built. The brand equity that she's built. She has a brand. He has a name. And like [divorce attorney] Raoul [Felder] said, men are, you know, patting each other on the back when philandering happens. Sad as it may be.

SMITH: Right.

BRITTO: You know, look at Bill Clinton. It's not like he's -- you know, we're walking down the street thinking, 'oh, look what he did.'

[Smith laughs awkwardly]

BRITTO: So I think it's a bad move.

—Kyle Drennen is a news analyst at the Media Research Center.


Comments Policy

All comments are owned by whoever posted them and are subject to our terms of use. They should not be assumed to represent the views of NewsBusters.

Viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Bill who?

Old news. The Clintonistas wore out thier welcome, and media dominance, for that matter.

Philandering or adultery?

Anyone who laments a society that doesn't blink at either one can thank the Libs who have been systematically dismantling the moral structure of this country for the last 60 years at least.

mattm, You are so

mattm,

You are so correct.

No one in the know cared

No one in the know cared about Bill philandering because no one expects a healthy male to do without.  Hillary's interests were elsewhere.  If you read the stuff Dick Morris wrote about the Monica affair, HRC wasn't mad about the sex, she felt he was stupid and hurting her future career. 

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."  - Sir Winston Churchill

philandering Bill

It was a big issue. It is only in Bill Clinton's wake that philandering has lost its stigma, yet another facet of the Clinton legacy.

Don't you remember

the uproar from NOW?

LOL Eileen!

They didn't care because he was "good on women's issues."

If it were a Republican CEO, they would have argued that even if it was "consensual," it wasn't, because of the power difference.  Instead they congratulated Monica for "using" HER power.

Hypocrisy doesn't even come close to describing their defense of him. 

 

Shoot 'em all; let God sort 'em out! - Marge Simpson

I don't give one flying fig

I don't give one flying fig about Christie Brinkley or her divorce...I do think she is fool to not keep this all private because of her kids...

Now as to Bill Clinton the serial cheater and rapist....it wasn't just men patting each other on the back Marvet...look at the women that defended him for years...still do...including his biggest political whore...Hillary.

Legacy my arse...he is an impeached nobody...that left this mess with Al Qaeda by doing NOTHING....now there's a real man for ya, eh?

"Never murder your opponent when he is committing suicide." ~ W. Wilson

STEPFORD JOURNALISM

STEPFORD
JOURNALISM: POVERTY MAKES U A CRIMINAL

Local and national outbreak of grave robbing By
Nicholas J.C. Pistor
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 06/30/2008
Grave robbing has become an above-ground affair.
Gone are the days when enterprising thieves would dig up an old grave
and pillage for gold teeth and rings. Today, it’s mostly the bronze
markers and flower vases that draw their attention.
Rising scrap metal prices, coupled with the lagging economy,
have triggered
a string of cemetery thefts both locally and
across the nation.
CRAWFISH NOTE: In the liberal (secular socialist)
world poverty causes crime. Even tough times cause crime. People do not
cause crime by their personal decisions. Despite the fact Mississippi
is the poorest state and has a very low crime rate (for one example)…
the myth is so useful for growing the gov-ment, for creating
dependency, for redistributing income and for vote-buying which the
democrats do so well that it rises like dracula weekly.
Morals? Parental values? Church influence? These are of no use to the
modern liberal because morals or anything limiting behavior is
repugnant to them. They make their own religion (liberalism) and create
their own ultra-flexible pseudo-morality. Daily we see these articles
“covering-excusing” all sorts of immoral acts (often even criminal),
blameshifting, ignoring the personal responsibility factor and putting
guilt on others (to get their $$$ of course which buys votes). We
behold the vile insidious libmedia repeating the mantras of modern
liberalism like stepford journalists. It is the ultimate fatal cultural
virus… secular socialism.

Doug Schexnayder, Ph.D. (theconservativecrawfish)

I saw that earlier today

I saw that earlier today and ended up just shaking my head.

Why wasn't there a nationwide crime wave during the Great Depression? What's missing now that we had then?

Oh, yeah! A sense of right and wrong!

 

Shoot 'em all; let God sort 'em out! - Marge Simpson

You're right Bigtimer, as usual

As long as a POS like Clinton fits their agenda, you'll never hear a word from the lovely ladies from NOW.  Interesting though, how you never hear a peep from them on honor killings, female circumcision, treatment of women in Islam, etc.

They basically are only a pro-abortion bunch of ugly women!

Jeff Lebowski

www.angrywhitedude.c...

GMTA, jeff. I said the same

GMTA, jeff. I said the same thing above, about their defense of him, before I saw your comment.

The NAG's also fight for abortion, but don't seem to care that in third world countries way more girl babies are aborted than boys.

And then there's the "Roe effect."

Talk about being hoist on your own petard!

 

Shoot 'em all; let God sort 'em out! - Marge Simpson

And the ugly, evil

result of his unholy adventures, moveon.org.

So wrong.

Ms. Britto is so wrong.  Everyone cared about Clinton fooling around, but for different reasons.  The Democrats cared because they had to back up his lies and then, when he got caught, they had to go out there, on a limb, and say it was just about sex.  I'm sure none of them wanted to be in that position. Hillary cared about it, but more for his legacy and her run for the presidency, than anything else.  The Republicans cared about it because they thought they finally had him, and found out that the Democrats only care about winning and not lying. 

 So anyway, to make this a little shorter, everyone cared.

Democrats: Stuck on Stupid since 2000.

So... here we are once

So... here we are once again discussing how blind and willfully ignorant the Democrats were, how they ignored the obvious signs that Clinton was a scumbag, and they did it all because he was their go-to guy to protect abortion.  Now we jump ahead to 2008 and it is now Republicans who are turning a blind eye to the failings of John McCain. Things like:

McCain says he signed some confessions, but the reality was he was the go-to guy for the North Vietnemese. Here are links to transcripts of some of the things he said: http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/cin_declassified_landing.htm

McCain entered the Hanoi Hilton as a LCDR, and left five years later as a LCDR.  POWs usually receive automatic promotion while a POW, yet the Navy opted not to advance McCain to commander or captain.  The Navy did not find his conduct as a POW very honorable.

In a 1973 interview with US News and World Report, McCain admits that he offered to trade US military information for medical care.

In 1991. when Col, Bui Tin, the head of the Hanoi Hilton and head torturer of McCain and others, and the man responsible for killing who knows how many POWs, came to DC to testify before Congress, McCain gives him this warm welcome (can you imagine embracing a guy who personnaly tortured you for five years???)  http://www.daylife.com/photo/02Bw2asaWO22D

In 1994, McCain is responsible for killing a bill in the Senate that was passed unanimously by the Congress, and that would open all POW records to the public.  He replaces it with The McCain Bill that ensures POW records will never be released.

McCain's willingness to betray Republicans isn't the only time he's been open to better deals from the other side.  McCain wants people to vote for him because he was a POW, but what kind of POW was he?

 

Liberals strenuously

Liberals strenuously defended Bill Clinton’s philandering, forceful sexual misconduct (rape?) and Bimbo Alerts. As other bloggers have stated, the Nation Organization for Women (NOW) and other feminist organizations not only turned a blind eye, but they and the liberal media attempted to discredit women Clinton sexually harassed or terrorized, such as Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Sally Perdue, Elizabeth Gracen, and others.  One feminist journalist, Nina Burleigh, who has written for Time and the Washington Post, stated that she believed that many of these alleged victims were probably willing and even initiators. She saved her most famous line for an interview with the Washington Post (I’ve cleaned it up for this post):  "I'd be happy to give him (President Bill Clinton) a b****** just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."

Although these liberals defended Clinton outside of their home, you wonder how they felt inside their home when they had to explain to their young children, who certainly had heard about the incident involving the President, what the word b****** meant.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Which political party is invested in our defeat in Iraq?

Here's what it looked like from my eyes.

Democrats habitually didn't-care about the philandering, and by the time of Monica were used to all sorts of intellectual leaps to make excuses for Slick being Slick as far as sex went. Republicans cared so-deeply about the (relatively minor by comparison, IMO) BJ scandal that they ignored the (impeachable-IMO) tech-to-China for money scandal completely while people like me screamed about it. To the extent that Democrats reflexively tried to ignore the sex, Republicans & the media went nuts about it and ultimately ignored everything-else. Both parties sucked in their usual ways, IOW, and the media ignored Libertarians screaming about the real issues. Again.
JMR

The tax & spend drug war looks racist in the real world.

sarc,

I mostly agree with you but I saw the media's role a little different and that may be only because of the specific stories I saw and read as the Monica scandal turned into lying under oath.
One of the last stories I saw that centered soley around the sex angle of the story was a media poll telling its audience that there was not interest among the public about the president's sex life. The media themselves were saying that they were overplaying an angle that no body cared about.
Then came the lying under oath and various other scandals and the media did their job, IMO, and kept the focus on sex. Afterall, they already believed no body cared about the issue but kept playing it to the exclusion of every other story in keeping with thier usual defense of people willing to push a more leftest agenda.
What you say about the Republicans is true but from what I can tell from trying to find out information about recent speeches that I wanted to hear from Senator Tom McClintock and Senator Jim Inhofe it is hard to get anything through the media to a deaf audience if it doesn't go along with their idea of a story.
But to support your statements, the Republicans had six years to do something and failed miserably. They may have had their eyes on the WOT but their hands were in the treasury.

Liberals and Grammar...

Does anyone else notice when these libs don't have a teleprompter, or a speech writer they come up with nonsensical garbage like this?

"...men are, you know, patting each other on the back when
philandering happens. Sad as it may be...You know, look at Bill
Clinton. It's not like he's -- you know, we're walking down the street
thinking, ‘oh, look what he did.’"

I'm sorry. Could you possibly form a sentence?

"To beat Violence, You must ignore the focus groups. You must send in the Mossad, turn off the BBC, CNN, and don't look back."

She is right to a point...

No one cared about his "Philandering", as she puts it. What many did care about was when he lied about it to a Grand Jury in a deposition in order to save his butt from a law suit. That was perjury and resulted in him being only the 2nd President to be impeached. Unfortunately, the Senate found him not guilty.

I guess that means that he and OJ have something in comon.

 

The day that "politician" became a career choice is the day we started losing the Republic. Let's get it back! Alan Keyes '08.