Christopher Hitchens Still Really Enjoys Hammering Bill Clinton [Slate]
In fact, Clinton’s problem arose from the fact that he was exploiting a junior employee and lying about it under oath in the course of a lawsuit. That lawsuit in turn arose from an episode in which he had made use of his political office to “hit on” young women in his employ. Not content with forcing his whole Cabinet to join in the deception, Clinton used his own staff to suggest that Monica Lewinsky was “stalking” him, an accusation that was highly defamatory and damaging and might well have been believed if she had not been in possession of proof. This extremely sordid behavior led to the surfacing of many earlier allegations. These included charges of coerced sex, amounting to rape, from more than one believable witness. (The story of that revolting conduct is told in my book No One Left To Lie To.) But a majority of the country made light of the entire business, regarding it as a “peccadillo” or private matter. Two of Clinton’s hastily recruited spiritual advisors, Jesse Jackson and Billy Graham, even defended the exercise of his special needs as an alpha male, overlooking the crucial fact that his entire defense consisted of denying having done so. Jesse Jackson has gone on to admit the fathering of an out-of-wedlock child, without any noticeable effect on the rate of his pious public appearances. So it seems that the American public is by no mean as censorious either as it believes itself to be or as others believe it to be.
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