Happy Monicaversary!: Ten Years After the Spot Spurred Down The Girl

Where were you when you heard?

I heard about it the next day or maybe two days after. A guy in my office brought up this big breaking scandal about Clinton and an intern that was on the Drudge Report.

"What's the Drudge Report?" I asked.

"Oh it's just this guy with a website in Hollywood," he said. "He covers a lot of hurricanes and disasters."

And so he did.

This is the ten-year anniversary, to me, of the superheating and supercharging of American politics. People became radicalized. I know I did. Until the Impeachment Wars I didn't mind Clinton so much -- I didn't particularly like him by that point, mind you, and I preferred the Republican Congress' policies in the main, but I didn't hate him.

But what followed was a year of being lied to, absurdly lied to, by both Clinton and his myriad defenders. Meanwhile those telling the truth about the affair were torn down and slandered by the Clinton Machine and its willing accomplices in the media.

And of course it was the birth of the conspiratorial thinking that has become de rigeur among the left since Hillary first made it politically acceptable to blame one's problems on a "vast right wing conspiracy, conspiring against my husband." Has anything happened since then that wasn't in one way or another due to a vast right wing conspiracy?

At its heart the subject of the lie might not have been all that great, as the liberals uniformly contended. (That is, after their initial claim that no lie had been told became inoperative.) Perhaps that was the problem -- the lie was arguably just small enough that liberals could convince themselves they were "defending the Constitution" in attempting to carve out a new exception in the law against perjury. Even so, that lie spawned a thousand new lies and new slanders, and those were harder to forgive than the first.

The left, I think it's fair to say, became unhinged at this point. As they say, the left despised Clinton earlier as a Republican-lite sell-out; it was, oddly enough, his perjury regarding a sleazy affair with a 21 year old intern that rallied them to Clinton's cause. And already on edge, they went still further crazy after the 2000 elections, and then of course came 9/11.

Toxic times, and we're all still living with the aftereffects. All because Clinton couldn't -- perhaps on the demand of his wife -- simply pay Paula Jones a $25,000 nuisance go-away settlement and apologize vaguely for any harm he "may" have caused.

No, he had to "win," and winning meant lying, and lying meant perjury, and perjury meant putting the country through a year of screaming and distraction.

Newsbusters' Question: Will the media acknowledge the anniversary? Well, I haven't even seen it mentioned on FoxNews yet. So I don't think the networks are planning a retrospective.

Hillary believed Bill, or so she claimed. But she's the one we want negotiating with North Korea and Iran.

posted by Ace at 03:13 PM

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