TWGB: The Tale of the Tape

 

"I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case you know.... Except it is like, highly confidential."

That's a quote from the tape CNN played last night as an exclusive. It's Trump, at Bedminster, talking about one of the documents that proves his case. What case--does it absolve him of the Russia Hoax or the first impeachment? 

Nah. Just a pissing contest he's having in his own mind with chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FGen Mark Milley. 

That audio comes from open pissing and moaning about, among other things, Trump's need to be right, and a discussion about how, supposedly, Hillary Clinton handled secret documents. "Please print" was a joke between Trump and a suck-up aide of his that can be heard on the tape. Irony of ironies: he knows having this stuff printed out is wrong, and here he is, with the actual paper in his hand.

Speaking Ill of the Ill-Starred Dead

 

There are people who find themselves appointed to unpleasant tasks and are called upon to serve, even in difficult circumstances, with zealous attention and exacting rectitude, to achieve a necessary goal with persistence and above all, honor. Ken Starr was not that guy.  And while one shouldn't speak ill specifically of the dead, I am not sure why I should stop a necessary conversation started while he was yet living.

He was, charitably, a nasty piece of work. 

He's most famous for dogging President Clinton and family and associates up until he came across an affair and dragged both the president and the 25-year-old intern through the most salacious interpretations of human interaction imaginable for partisan reasons. But he also defended Prop 8 and Jeffrey Epstein and ignored rape allegations at Baylor when he was president of the University.  He unironically defended Trump against impeachment in a way about as hypocritical as former impeachment manager Lindsey Graham. 

It's hard to imagine a person who took up for more horrendous things and yet (obviously) retained the respect of the larval creeps who managed to do stuff like get on the SCOTUS bench with his tutelage.  You know, like Brett Kavanaugh. 

If any of that sounds disrespectful to the dead, you should have heard what I would have said about him, alive. Probably even to his face with the appropriate lubrication. He had the opportunity to do an awful lot, and what he did was, well, awful. And a lot. 

TWGB: Words Mean Things

Here is Prof. Turley in 1998 arguing that President Clinton should be impeached because he had "deprived himself of the perceived legitimacy to govern" with his conduct. Turley thinks oral sex triggers impeachment but abuses of power involving national security don't. pic.twitter.com/O1mtOTYtC1

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) December 4, 2019

I'm not supposed to sit here and lambaste Jonathan Turley for his 1998 opinions because, I, too, was alive in 1998 and had opinions, and man! Deep down I did not enjoy that I had a particular opinion regarding the legitimacy of, for example, Clarence Thomas's ability to sit on the highest bench in the land as an accused sex creep, and being convinced my President (the first one I ever voted for!) did in fact have an albeit consensual, but wildly inappropriate relationship with an intern and tried to cover it up. That, no shit, played with my mind. The significance of the office and power of the job meant that President Clinton could try to suborn perjury in a youthful and vulnerable person and manipulate her ability to answer to questions I also felt that, at that time, were not actually Congress's business to pursue, as I could not fathom how that particular abuse of office was specific to his job as president, and not just basic sex-creep shit. Men, I had already established in my roughly same-age as Monica Lewinski and first-time around married life brain, did gross shit. But at least Clinton was still handling business. I was entirely ready to defend what I saw as Clinton's attention to business. He was doing his meta-job in office of seeing to the economy and bombing the fuck out of Iraq so that they didn't have a WMD program for a future president to credibly lie about-heh (I have long had shitty-ass centrist leanings, and there is lots about the '90's that primed me for them).

So I just want to recall that back then, the argument was fixated on the meaning of "is". This is a thing that has, in its way, defined "Clintonism". For certain values of liberal, Clinton triangulated along law'n'order, business-positive, technocratic lines (watch yourself, young Buttigieg--it isn't Obama that you're emulating as a red state educated white wunderkind). But the concept that Clinton was slippery and not entirely truthful was summed up by the "meaning of is". This got trumpeted far and wide. To the best of my ability this far after the fact to parse the legalese and tv-friendly language upon which this argument rests, I am left with the bro-code's unwritten value that "Eating is not cheating.". This is something even the husband to the current ambassador to the Vatican, would very readily understand. Was oral sex even considered sex? (I effectively presume it is, as a person who does not in fact, mouthfuck people ad libitum. Extensive "verbal" contracts are, perforce, observed.)

A Predator With "Friends"

"It's an indictment of the legal system that allows well-connected, well-heeled, wealthy individuals to avoid accountability for obvious, horrific crimes with victims."

Jeremy Bash on Jeffery Epstein's 2008 plea deal with Alex Acosta.https://t.co/DAmdVIPfZC

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 9, 2019

There's a lot that's hard to stomach in reading about the extensive abuse Jeffery Epstein is charged with, but the chilling thing to me is that he seems pretty damn guilty and got let off the hook once, and it looks for all the world like it was because money and influence can do that for a person, no matter how reprehensible they are. Now, stories are flying around about important people whose names and reputations will go down in flames, or who will face criminal liability for any involvement. And good--that's what should happen. Knowing that something evil is happening and saying nothing, risking nothing, is enabling it to persist. To me, it isn't political in the least, but about what justice means. Justice should be blind with respect to party or class. It shouldn't be something that can be bought off or threatened away.

It's also chilling in hindsight that there were lots of signs that Epstein's world was a deeply weird construction of mysterious deals (probably lots of financial shenanigans) and the cultivation of "friends" in a oddly useful sort of way. A lot of people are making the connection now that his investments might actually in part equal "A fuckton of blackmail." What does this sound like:

Finally, despite having been previously convicted of a sex offense involving an underage victim, the defendant has continued to maintain a vast trove of lewd photographs of young-looking women or girls in his Manhattan mansion. In a search of the New York Residence on the night of his arrest, on July 6-7, 2019, pursuant to judicially-authorized warrants, law enforcement officers discovered not only specific evidence consistent with victim recollections of the inside of the mansion, further strengthening the evidence of the conduct charged in the Indictment, but also at least hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of sexually suggestive photographs of fully- or partiallynude females. While these items were only seized this weekend and are still being reviewed, some of the nude or partially-nude photographs appear to be of underage girls, including at least one girl who, according to her counsel, was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken. Additionally, some of the photographs referenced herein were discovered in a locked safe, in which law enforcement officers also found compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: “Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.” The defendant, a registered sex offender, is not reformed, he is not chastened, he is not repentant;6 rather, he is a continuing danger to the community and an individual who faces devastating evidence supporting deeply serious charges.

so much as a trove of evidence to be used as leverage later on the off-chance it would come in handy? But also looking back at pieces written about Epstein from mere years ago, the nebulousness of his income stream and odd hedonism comes through in ways that seems a bit like foreshadowing.

From Vicky Ward's Vanity Fair piece:

Unlike such fund managers as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, whose client lists and stock maneuverings act as their calling cards, Epstein keeps all his deals and clients secret, bar one client: billionaire Leslie Wexner, the respected chairman of Limited Brands. Epstein insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires—who depend on him for discretion. “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit a billion dollars or more,” he tells people freely. According to him, the flat fees he receives from his clients, combined with his skill at playing the currency markets “with very large sums of money,” have afforded him the lifestyle he enjoys today.

Why do billionaires choose him as their trustee? Because the problems of the mega-rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine, and his unique philosophy is central to understanding those problems: “Very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars. The key is not to have it do harm more than anything else…. You don’t want to lose your money.”

Why the mega-rich? Because under the right circumstances, they'll let you hold their money for them so nothing bad happens. They're more anxious than other people--they have more to lose.

Or take this piece from 2002 at New York Magazine:

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people – be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends.

It seems corny: "I invest in people". Sure. If one is a philanthropist, great. And "To Serve Man" is a cookbook to a man-eater. And sometimes, those people being invested in are a network of abused underage girls who are traded like units without any regard for their wellbeing.

This will be very ugly. I see that AG William Barr has recused due to prior associations. Time will tell us whether that means anything. And in a very rare concurrence with myself and the Concerned Women of America, I agree that Alex Acosta needs to be removed from Trump's cabinet, because defending himself regarding the sweetheart plea deal he made with Epstein should be his new full-time job.


UPDATE: Oh, it's like that, then:

NEW: DOJ official says that AG Barr will remain recused from any review of the 2008 #Epstein case due to past legal work, but after consulting with ethics officials, he will NOT recuse from the current #Epstein case led at #SDNY

— Brooke Singman (@brookefoxnews) July 9, 2019

Whether to Bury or Praise

There is something fortuitous in the historical placement of George Bush in wherever he happened to be in the course of his long life. He was fortunate in being born privileged, he was fortunate in surviving a brutal war. He was fortunate in politics, after a fashion. He married the love of his life, and one of his sons followed him in the White House. As lives go, it wasn't half bad. He was surrounded with admiration and love at the end of his life, and that's nothing to scoff at. We could all hope to do so well. 

He also benefited by being neither so wretched as Nixon or crass as Trump, and the halo of his dedication was in part burnished by the haplessness of his son's time in office, and the bar of doing politics had dropped to where service and decency, just by being part of one's make-up, were all that needed to be present to gloss over really harsh truths. But his record was mixed, and a pretty damn comprehensive blog post of the not-great bits was served by Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, so I'd say check that out for the stuff already said, and better than I would have, by him. 

As for me, I still simmer over 1988. This was the first presidential election I paid attention to, occurring after Iran-Contra, and in some way, my innocent soul thought Republicans should have been over, for at least this round. How in the world does a country accept Bush was "out of the loop" as a former head of CIA, and not think his principal job in taking office in the White House was to tidy up loose ends? I was all of sixteen and livid at the "pledge of Allegiance" nonsense and the entire crock of referring to Dukakis as an "ACLU card-carrying liberal" as if sticking up for the Bill of Rights was something to sneer at. Stupid wedge issue content (and maybe not the most competent campaign waged by Dukakis and Bentsen) dictated a win, and a pardon for several folks who participated in that debacle of literally extralegally arming a country that we considered a supporter of terrorism, to also extralegally support a faction in a war that wasn't any of our business. And cite the reason for these pardons as "patriotism". 

I still to this damn day don't know what American principles or interests were served by this thing. As with Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, it sits poorly with me as a violation of the concept that no one should be above the law. 

And the nomination of Clarence Thomas, whatever we think of his qualifications today or his sexual harassment concerns, was a slap in the face of civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall, whose seat he filled. As if this bland patrician looked on this black conservative, and gave no fucks for the vast difference in viewpoint but saw a certain blatant commonality, and rolled with it. 

I do not know the family or personally, any friends of George Bush. I knew I was slipping as a blogger when I tried to silver-lining the life of his beloved spouse. The War on Drugs,  and whatever crap example he set that made George W. Bush and Jeb Bush the politicians they were,  his poor response to the AIDS crisis, his feints to hardcore conservatism to try and obviate the claim he was a "wimp" which in some ways proved it--all stay in my memory as things that were part and parcel of his legacy, that should not be forgotten. 

And yet, in retrospect, he could have been so much worse. And he wrote lovely notes, and his family doesn't all suck, and his friendship with Clinton and Obama....? 

He was human, and we are all a mixed lot, and have redeeming features. He did his thing for charity, and I will allow I consider some of what people say about Carlyle Group and the defense industry and drawing arrows here and there from Halliburton/Dressher to the exploits in Iraq seems a bit paranoid. I can't dispute that the end of the Cold War would have been something difficult for any president to navigate. 

His family will bury him, and they can praise him as well. As well as can any of his loved ones. I am not in that circle, and I will tell the truth if I please. His civility was admirable. But we should not hurry to polish the reputations of those who have died when their legacies are still ongoing. And the stupid political postures of 1988 still resound in 2018. I can't shrug that off, or forget that Roger Ailes, who made Fox News, was one of his campaign advisors back in the day, and of course, the episode of peak Les Atwater--the Willie Horton ad. 

I am dry-eyed and unromantic about his legacy. We are here in it. And my Trump obit will definitely be even worse, come the day. I wish peace of mind to his surviving loved ones. (But not without clear memories.)

UPDATE: And just one other damn thing--he was for Brett Kavanaugh, and fuck him and his son and Brett Kavanaugh. But not the all the way, because none of them deserve the satisfaction. 

The Rime of the RW Radio-Listener

I'm going to forgo a discussion on the big crowd of anti-racist protestors who converged in Boston with the intent of countering a so-called "alt-lite" (AHEM!) "free speech" (AHEM! AHEM!) rally, because I don't know what there is to even say. No one on the anti-racist side was anti-freedom of speech, they just understood that the rally in question, on the heels of what happened in Charlottesville, had to be met with numbers.

It was, and well-done, and even Trump realized he couldn't turn this into an "OMG Leftist anti-cops and stuff!" thing. (Not that some digital a-holes aren't going to try it on. There's a lot of photo-shops out there trying to hang up antifa as worse than they are--I recommend taking any picture of so-called anti-racism or leftist violence with a grain--some of the photos are from Occupy anarchist crashers years back. In general, leftist skull crackers isn't the problem with these rallies.)

Nah. I want to go back in the Wayback machine to reminisce about a wedding I went to circa 1996 or 1997. I was on my first marriage, and the bride was a cousin of my ex's. I was in my maxi-length empire waist navy blue Wanamaker's favorite all-purpose looking awesome dress--I loved this article of clothing. I kid you not, it was the perfect cut and fabric (stretchy) for a curvy person who wanted to look modest and sophisticated and I wore that thing to weddings, and job interviews and work and damn! I really wish I still had a dress like that in my wardrobe.  Navy is the greatest of stealth neutrals! I was chilling around the pool at the hotel in Wildwood at the wedding after-party where drinks and a Viennese table with pinenut cookies and cake and finger foods and whatnot were available, and I found myself in political conversation with someone who marked me out as a liberal.

"Well, I know you are a Clinton-fan" I think, was his actual words. The wedding-guest who stopped me was a short, stout, 1990's era Van Dyke (people who call it a goatee are wrong, because that refers to a beard only--the circle-beard is actually a Van Dyke) early-adopter. "Say what?" I improvised, caught flat at the idea that I literally wore my bleeding-heart liberalism in my sleeve. Was it my wire-rim specs? Something about the insouciance of my long-banged Rachel cut?

"Have you heard about the Clinton death count?"

"Vince Foster and who else?" I snapped back, as if to show I was aware of all internet memes, in an era when internet memes were not yet really a thing.

Meet a Girl

Yesterday, the roll call at the DNC gave us a wonderful image of the historic nature of Hillary Clinton's becoming the first woman nominated to the presidency from a major party through the eyes of history, as seen by Arizona's 102-year-old honorary chairperson, Geraldine "Jerry" Emmett, who was born before women even had the right to vote. Women of course have run before, and appeared on major party tickets, but this time feels different.

You can step back from the idea that it's sheer identity politics that makes this particular moment important. Take in the idea that a woman president can now seem inevitable in US politics, as if it was astonishing and dumb that it never happened here before. How has there been Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher, without this thing happening right here, in the US? How has there been Megawati Sukarnoputri and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and this never happened in the US already? Corazon Aquino.  Ireland had Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, and we've yet to have one? (Wow--actually this whole not having a woman president before gets more dumb the more you look at it.)

But to take in why Hillary Clinton, and why she's our best choice now, it might help to take a listen to her husband's story of how they met, and all the wonderful things that she has actually done. Some people looked a little askance at the idea of former President Clinton starting out his reminiscence of knowing her with "I met a girl". I don't. Women start out that way--being girls. And you know what?Girls run the world. What is the future? Ask Malala Yousafzai. Ask Melinda Gates where the future is. 

But consider also who she is through the idea of her accomplishments being subjugated to his. When she has done so very, very much, including shaping the governor and the president that he was. Some people didn't want to hear about her progress from a little Republican baby visiting MLK with her Methodist pastor in 1963 to her transition to a Democratic warrior by 1968 sneaking off to the Chicago DNC before she even met the future president . They don't want to know about how she traveled to so many states and fought oppression and accomplished so much that by the age of 30 she made a lot of men look like pikers. Just by doing the quiet drudgery, the non-bombastic work, the long-haul work, the getting-things-done work. The work women don't always get the credit for. 

You know I get mad as hell when no accounts like Carly Fiorina and Jill Stein try to drag Hillary Clinton, She did and does bring the receipts, she just never felt like she had to brag. But others need to do it for her, especially to counter the dragging she has received over the last 25 freaking years.Because our future really does depend on her, and she is honestly as ready for the job as any person could ever be--

So when I see this?  A video that sums up history as "dude, dude, dude, dude....dude, dude, finally a girl?"  A woman? I am stoked that little girls know this is possible for them, and they can believe in and achieve any damn thing they set their minds to, because she is going to.

It means a hell of a lot. Because I was a little girl once. And I had all the thoughts about things.

The Clintons Sure Get Folks Riled, Don't They?

Call me amused about the "scandal" of the moment, where former President Bill Clinton and AG Loretta Lynch incidentally were at the same airport at the same time and chatted for awhile. It makes me laugh a bit because it's really the most Clinton thing ever--people who don't like the Clintons being ready to call "Corruption!" and some liberals who even like the Clintons wringing their hands over the optics.

You know that a chance meeting at an airport isn't exactly the most secure location for going around an investigation in a world where you can pick up a telephone and not even be in the same state, right?  Optics, schmoptics, that imaginary conversation where Big Dog leans on President Obama's Attorney General to "fix" a case for his wife is the stuff of rabid fantasy. And do you want to tell me that after being in the international spotlight for this long, everyone's forgotten Bill Clinton's basic personality? He's a friendly guy. Sociable. He can talk the bark off a tree. So it wouldn't have seemed strange or inappropriate at all for him to visit for a moment with someone he knows--I think that's just his way. He just meets with people. You could say he connects. The email topic would never have come up.

Now that this has turned into a cable news foofaraw,  AG Lynch has explained, as was always the matter, that she would take the recommendations of the experienced investigators on the case. And  what it's worth, former Secretary of State Clinton will be meeting with the FBI, which means that the investigation is proceeding apace. So I don't think there could be any appearance of any tampering with the results of the investigation from that top, and if the FBI is ready for Mrs. Clinton's interview, that should mean that the investigation itself is drawing to a close. I think expectations are good.

And we have no reason at all to suppose all the publicity sped things up in any way to maybe work on winding up loose strings before the convention?

I wonder sometimes why people think the Clintons are either stupid or corrupt when there is a much simpler explanation for everything. But since this is going to be the media drill from here on in, I think this was great practice.

Dirty Donald thinks it's the 1990's

There's something very sad(!) about a guy who isn't worth as much as he says he is, who has to concentrate on tearing others down because he hasn't actually got anything great to say about himself. Take Donald Trump in his weak and antiquated attacks on presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton:

Gross. I'm not even sure how he thinks she's to blame for any of that.

Sometimes the Less Said, Bill...

This was the sort of thing I worried about with a Hillary Clinton presidential run--the return of Bill Clinton, former President, world's greatest Hillary fan, and, sorry to say, not always the most disciplined campaign surrogate. An episode with BLM protesters here in Philadelphia had Clinton looking a little like he got stopped at a tollbooth on that bridge to the 21st century and was short of the change.

The Black Lives Matter protesters have targeted political rallies to keep their message a part of this political cycle, but with this event, their particular message placed a good chunk of the blame for the deadly combination of poverty, crime, and police brutality that they want addressed on Bill Clinton's administration, in the form of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. They didn't just lay the blame on Bill Clinton, but by extension, his wife, for supporting those policies during his presidency. And he defended them to defend her...and that's problematic.

I have to agree with Ed Kilgore when he explains that President Clinton had no business defending those pieces of legislation. He is marrying himself to them in a way he wasn't "married to them" when those bills got signed, and he's re-litigating the past in a way that isn't necessary or helpful. It only serves to reinforce the idea that Hillary Clinton's campaign endorses them. And it's no way to convince protesters who are already deeply suspicious of the motivations behind that kind of political charcuterie--folks talk about law-making as being a little like watching sausage being made. My husband is a butcher, so I'm not especially alarmed by that comparison--but I will say, that like bologna, social and domestic policies sometimes keep very badly. And in this case, a lot of the assumptions behind those two acts are spoiled.

The Plan to Impeach Hillary Clinton

I said I probably wouldn't have anything to say about the Benghazi Committee and Hillary Clinton again until after she spoke before them, but it turns out, Rep. Mo Brooks of AL made a liar of me by stating that he believed that Hillary Clinton would be impeached on day one of her presidency.

Which tells me he's pretty sure that the GOP nominee is going to fail, and that the only hope the GOP has of containing a Hillary Clinton presidency is dragging her name through the mud.  In other words, what else is new? The email story isn't really anything like so dire as the reading the GOP wants people to make of the issue.

It doesn't help Mo Brooks' (or Trey Gowdy's) case that House Democrats decided to release their report of what has been uncovered, which is not at all unfavorable to Hillary Clinton. Now, before anyone says, well that's just partisan ass-covering: Democrats always realize the potential of an ass getting hung out. We cut bait far more often than we keep sinking the line. If Congressional Dems genuinely believed Clinton to be a flawed candidate, they'd have burned her. Their coming out with this means they don't believe any such thing.

Keeping the Benghazi Committee alive in the face of what it has become is starting to be disrespectful to the people most directly affected by those events. The whole thing has gone punchy and stupid.  They may as well quit it, and should she, inshallah, get into office in 2017, maybe they could wait until they had something to get her with before they started up a "get her" plan?

But in case any liberal or progressive is wondering, this is why we really need a Democratic congress, even if it has a few Blue Dogs. These hard-heads keep trying. The Clintons tried to investigate themselves on Whitewater before 1994, but once the GOP owned the House, it was all about "Get Clintons". Once the GOP took the House after the 2010 election, like Jon Chait suggested, it was all about "Get Obama". They never had anything to get him with, but they kept trying.

This is why we can't let them get away with it. They would do it with Sanders too, don't pretend they won't. It's their pretend ace-card--get congress, shit on the Dem president. If you are liberal or progressive or not an asshole, vote Democratic because otherwise, we will have nothing but show-trials and fuckery and half-assed government. Get them out of Congress, and they can't do these things. No more debt ceiling and budget reconciliation stupidness. No one can afford to sleep in on Election Day.  Got it? Good.

Looks like Trump Has Won Another News Cycle

Donald Trump is obviously unhappy with the Fox News handling of his appearance at Thursday night's debate, and was, predictably, pretty vocal about it. There was that one comment though, where he went, as Erick Erickson from RedState.com put it--"a bridge too far", when he basically implied that debate moderator Megyn Kelly was hard on him because she was having her period. (Trump insists he was referring to bleeding out the "nose" and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a "deviant". As a grown person, I certainly don't believe he meant "nose" and am pretty sure he's calling an awful lot of grown people "deviants" right now.)

This is, as I have called this primary before--cuckoo bananas. With a handful of comments directed at Fox News, he's got his followers turned against Megyn Kelly, a smart conservative broadcaster whose centerfold looks and lawyer's instinct have made her pretty popular (and she is receiving an enormous amount of sexist shit right now)and Erickson, an influential conservative blogger who is nobody's idea of a champion of political correctness, might as well be a born-again social justice warrior in the eyes of some Trump folks.

Well, um. That escalated quickly.

But the result is, Trump gets talked about incessantly--again. He's, as the Charlie Sheen Hashtag put it #winning. Or maybe, a little bit more appropriately, as the old journalism saw says--"If it bleeds, it leads." I wonder if, anticipating that this is what Trump-style means to political news, it was this, and not Trump's prompting, that made former Mayor Giuliani (allegedly)contact Fox to request gentler treatment for The Donald.

It also makes me wonder a little bit about that call that was supposed to have taken place between Trump and Bill Clinton. I wasn't sure what to think about that before. I still don't exactly know. But I wonder if ol' Bill didn't tell him, "You may not be the leader that the GOP needs right now, but you sure are the leader they deserve." And then he hung up. Then he laughed.

This Wasn't Ever Going To Not Happen

There might be people who would question whether there's anything just too coincidental about Monica Lewinsky penning her memoirs and a possible Hilary Clinton presidential run.

I wouldn't be one of them. I've always had a soft place in my heart, in a way, for Lewinsky. I think it's maybe because we aren't so different in age, and I just feel entirely sympathetic to the idea that the media and the instant, sick and sometimes anonymous, gratification culture of the internet and the 24 hour news cycle violated her personal life in a virtually irreparable way that I don't think she or President Clinton could have ever fathomed. I don't think Clinton ever understood that his private business would ever be anything but private because he imagined it inconsequential in the grander scheme of things. And as for Monica Lewinsky, imagine you find a companionship and intimacy with the president of the US--I don't know what to call that relationship. But I understand how she got caught in it, and I think we all get in retrospect, how it might have always been doomed to be eternally spun.

And it had to follow, like night the day, that the signal jibber-jabber gossip mongering that became the defining scandal of the Clinton years had to be revived. This was not ever not going to happen.

No conspiracy needed. And I can not even blame Lewinsky for deciding the iron was hot. What Hillary Clinton chooses to do with this thing, if it even becomes a thing, when she runs (if she chooses to run) is so up to her.

But all agita aside, this was exactly what was going to be.

Rand Paul is Being Awkward, isn't He?

Sen. Rand Paul has been bringing up President Clinton's past quite a bit lately, which is...awkward. I'm not really sure that singling out Clinton's misdemeanors really has anything to do with what is popularly called "the War on Women". I don't believe Sen. Paul really thinks it does, either--I admit, at first, I thought he was laying in groundwork for a possible face-off against Hillary Clinton.  But it really is a bit early for that, surely? There's no saying for sure she's even running, or that a swipe taken at her spouse, now, will even reverberate two years from now.That's why it makes sense to me that this has more to do with Clinton's coming to Kentucky in support of Sen. Mitch McConnell's Democratic challenger. That may be why Paul recently called on candidates to reject money raised by President Clinton.

It just seems like a mistake, though, to hit quite so firm a note on the topic of women's issues. For one thing, I don't think we would mistake Clinton's impropriety with actual policies of the Democratic Party. For another, it serves as an opportunity to point out that Sen. Paul (and Sen. McConnell, for that matter), have not been strong supporters of policy issues like the Violence Against Women Act or the Lily Ledbetter Act, and Paul himself has expressed a favorable opinion of the Lochner decision--which favored the ability of employers to exploit worker's for low wages (and would certainly hurt women where unequal pay is still the rule rather than the exception). He's also a hard-liner against reproductive choice in the case of abortion.

In other words, his policy views are pretty much typical of his party. But if he wants to bring personal behavior or guilt-by-association into the conversation, there was that one time he kidnapped a lady. And, well, there was this other thing when his fan club curb stomped a woman's head.  (There's is another female journalist who alleges harassment by Rand Paul supporters, and the Senator has also suggested he might duel Rachel Maddow over her reporting of his plagiarism.) That's an interesting pattern, isn't it?

Awkward.