Just when the Democratic Party thought it didn’t have enough problems on its plate with primaries in five states, a narrowing lead on the generic ballot, and wedge issues relating to the national anthem and freedom of speech along comes former President Bill Clinton and makes it even worse. And this is without factoring in the toxic divisions in the New York gubernatorial race that have placed Clinton’s wife and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders against each other once again.
All he wanted to do was sell some damn books!
Full interview of Bill Clinton and James Patterson by Craig Melvin on the Today Show. Six minutes of the interview delved into the #MeToo movement, Monica Lewinsky, and Clinton’s sordid sexual past.
On June 4 The Today Show with Megyn Kelly aired a bombshell interview with President Bill Clinton and his co-author James Patterson. The two were there to promote The President is Missing, a novel they had written featuring a president in resembling Clinton in the leading role. Being as he is a former two-term president sitting beside a colleague who is the most well-paid author of the 21st century, Clinton likely hoped that he would skate through the less than half hour with Craig Melvin and be able to spend a leisurely limo ride back to his home in Chappaqua watching Brazzers on his phone.
Instead the interview became punctuated by a tense series of questions presented by Craig Melvin that called into question not only whether Clinton was out of touch following the #MeToo movement’s spread on the progressive and liberal left, but whether America was really honest about the events of the 1990s and could address the fact that a sitting president had committed acts of sexual harassment. Clinton reacted to Melvin’s quetions with profound righteous indignation behaving as if his legal battles that left him debt were an appropriate price to pay for his indiscretions. In the train wreck interview, Clinton’s statements reeked of a number of factual and logical errors:
He stated that the resurfacing of the discussion about him was due to Donald Trump supporters not caring about allegations against him. “You don’t ever talk about that,” he alleged. This after two months of nonstop media coverage of the Stormy Daniels affair that happened over a decade before Trump was elected. However, unlike in Trump’s case there were witnesses including law enforcement that vouched for the accuser stories in both the Lewinsky and Paula Jones cases.
Clinton gave nods to the Starbucks, #MeToo, and #TimesUp movements by claiming that they would allow women to not be victims anymore. However, it was the lawsuit Clinton v. Jones in which he was brought to curt by alleged victim Paula Jones that enabled a sitting present to be sued to begin with and had to be decided by the Supreme Court by a unanimous decision. Moreover, not only was Clinton the main defendant in the case but his Arkansas State Police bodyguard Danny Ferguson was a co-defendant.
Clinton claimed that he had a sexual harassment policy as governor in the 1980s, yet by the accounts of Arkansas State Troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson he had ordered them to assist him in both pursuing his female targets as well as in keeping the liaisons under wraps. In order to keep other troopers from going public, he appointed the head of their detail Buddy Young to a management position at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Taking cover behind the dead
When Clinton claimed that Melvin was not aware of the facts of the interview, the reporter asked him whether he had apologized. Clinton responded that he had apologized publicly. When Melvin pressed as to why a private apology was not called for, Patterson interceded in defense of Clinton claiming that “it was twenty years ago. Let’s talk about JFK, let’s talk about LBJ. You know? Stop already”. Then Clinton asked Melvin whether he thought John F. Kennedy should have resigned over allegations of affairs and sexual harassment. Yet the case of Kennedy was somewhat dissimilar as his affairs were not well-known to the public prior to his reaching office, and then during his term they were covered up often by reporters.Moreover, Clinton’s activities took place well into his second term in office, whereas Kennedy was murdered less than three years into his first term. None of JFK’s associates came forward while he was alive to expose his activities. Whether Kennedy would have been forced to resign was up to the Democratic Party of the time that controlled both houses of Congress and a media that was reluctant to address the allegations in a much less sexually liberated society.
As for Lyndon Johnson, he is reputed to have been “a competitive womanizer. When people mentioned Kennedy’s many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose”. Johnson was not forced to resign but he did end up declining to run for reelection in 1968 as a result of his unpopular role in getting the US more deeply involved in Vietnam. But that deflection is immaterial as Clinton took office 24 years after Johnson left office and almost 30 years after Kennedy’s assassination.
Sinking deeper with Colbert
Patterson and Clinton appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the day after the disastrous interview on NBC.
On the Colbert Report the President claimed the following day that he had felt that a younger reporter like Melvin may have not been conscious of the facts of the case. That type of statement assumes ignorance on the part of both the interviewer and the audience. So the next day he was offered a chance to rethink his responses. This was another mistake on his part as he reiterated that he had apologized to his wife, the American people, Monica Lewinsky, and the world. Yet he turned this around, and bizarrely earned thunderous applause, by claiming that his having lived through the saga and having to face it helped him to support the #MeToo movement.
The remainder of the interview was half a political statement that included urging the audience to vote during midterms and the other half a promotion of their new book. Colbert even proposed sending the book to Donald Trump as a guide on how to be president. The irony of the Colbert interview is that the president and the host jokingly discuss whether Clinton ever wanted to go missing from the Secret Service during his time in the White House.
Perhaps Colbert does not know this, but such an event was alleged to have occurred. FBI agent Gary Aldrich, the Bureau’s former liaison to the White House detailed in his 1998 book (prior to the Lewinsky scandal) how Clinton’s Personal Protective Detail had been slipped on several occasions so that he could be transported by friend and lawyer Bruce Lindsey to a DC hotel where he was engaged in an illicit affair. It is ironic that in the same interview with Colbert in which he thanked the Secret Service for their hard work he alluded in a tongue-in-cheek way to an incident where he deliberately obstructed their mission for his personal pleasure.
Interview with Gary Byrne that includes details of his ordeal having to testify as a Secret Service officer during the Starr hearings.
It is also ironic that while parrying allegations relating to the Lewinsky scandal he thanked them when thirty members of the agency’s Uniformed Division (UD) were forced to testify during the Starr hearings. Indeed, it was because of Bill Clinton’s perjuring of Lewinsky by having her sign an affidavit giving false testimony that was later refuted by DNA evidence on the infamous blue dress that the Secret Service officers and agents were forced figure whether they are even allowed to testify against the president. (They are).
Bill Clinton’s two days of interviews are the same type of contradiction that he has been as a person and as a president. Yes, he managed the economy better, he negotiated peace treaties in Bosnia, Northern Island, and the Middle East but in terms of personal character and transparency he may have brought the government to the worst depths of corruption in our national history. Likewise, while Craig Melvin did his utmost to at least address how Clinton’s unrepentant sexual harassment and cover-ups within a day Stephen Colbert coached him through a process of how to rub balm over the open sore. That’s how America lived through Clinton’s kingdom of lies, and the media is still living in it.
Relevance: Informationwar Organization
