The Washington Post awarded associate editor David Maraniss front-page real estate in Wednesday’s paper to gush over Bill Clinton’s speech and reminisce about the Clintons and their, well, “inimitable and tumultous partnership.” That’s code for “a marriage wracked by admissions of sexual harassment (and accusations of sexual assault), adultery, and a lot of lying about it.”
The headline in the paper was “Only the Clintons: Bill delivers the speech no one else could.” Online, it was gushier: “Only the Clintons: Bill’s speech was unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
Liberal journalists have this idea that Bill can talk about their “prosaic love story” as if there’s anything “prosaic” about his decades of “sexual incontinence,” as Michael Kinsley once put it.
Maraniss saw in the conservative revulsion at this behavior – and all the lying about it – rage and conspiracy theorizing:
“Only the Clintons” applies in so many ways. Only the Clintons have been hanging around together at the top of American politics for a full quarter century. Only the Clintons can excite and then exasperate their fellow Democrats with such dizzying predictability. Only the Clintons (or maybe now Obama) can send the Republicans into paroxysms of rage and the deepest, darkest pools of conspiracy theorizing. Only the Clintons can keep going and going no matter what obstacles others or they themselves throw in their way along their long and winding path.
Then Maraniss warned that opponents to the right of the Clintons better not revisit “Bill’s libertine tendencies,” since that only helps Hillary:
There has always been a seesaw aspect to the Clinton partnership. When one is up, the other tends to be down. Political opponents who think they might weaken Hillary by revisiting Bill’s libertine tendencies should know that her popularity ratings have consistently risen when she takes on the sympathetic role of victim.
Maraniss and the Post seem incapable of understanding that the "rage" comes from, among other things, a raging double standard? That the media expect adultery or sexual harassment or rape accusations to utterly destroy a Republican candidate, while they go prattling on about the "prosaic love story" of the Clintons like that doesn't sound like a bad joke?
Maraniss made no attempt to translate how today's millennial cries about a "rape culture" should make Bill Clinton's behavior an even more perilous subject for Hillary. But Maraniss can only sadly note that Bill's behavior made Hillary "more secretive and less transparent." That doesn't imply Hillary lying about "Miss Lewinsky" for half a year.
Over the course of those years, her strong feminism — the side of her that inspired Bill to enjoy a saying about the duo, “buy one, get one free,” and that prompted her to explain that she did not intend to just stand by her man or stay home and bake cookies — was in conflict with the demands of their political survival. When necessary, standing by her man was precisely what she did. When he needed that support for a comeback in Arkansas, she changed her last name from Rodham to Clinton. With his career and their futures on the line in Washington in the midst of the Whitewater investigation and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she led the political defense, turning the personal into the political by framing it all as a fight against a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Protecting him — and their mutual interests — for so many decades led her to armor herself in what she considered a battle for the greater good. It was a variation of the ends-justify-the-means rationalization. Some of it was her own disposition, but it was also in large part because of him that she became encrusted with reflexive defensiveness, making her year by year more secretive and less than transparent in her dealings with the news media and the public.
Even so, liberals at The Washington Post think it's just fine that Hillary goes months and months without granting their own allies like David Maraniss an interview. She had them at "Hello."
