“I think the norms have really changed in terms of, what you can do to somebody against their will, how much you can crowd their space, make them miserable at work. You don’t have to physically assault somebody to make them, you know, uncomfortable at work or at home or in their other — just walking around. That, I think, is good.”
—Former President Bill Clinton in a clip posted by RealClearPolitics.
No, Mr. President. It was never acceptable to do things to people in your power against their will that made them uncomfortable in the workplace. Never. It was just common and legal for a long, long time, and powerful men like yourself reveled in exploiting and abusing women because they could. And nothing has changed about what was legal and what was not since you were President. The major change in sexual harassment law occurred while you were President, in fact. You just didn’t think the rules and laws applied to you, that’s all. Based on your recent comments, you still don’t think they applied to you.
What an astounding thing for this man to say.
Like Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park” when the T-Rex gets loose, I hate it when I’m right all the time. Twenty years ago, I endured waves of sneers and smug “oh, you’re just biased” brush-offs as I was telling anyone who would listen that Clinton’s escapades were not “personal, private misconduct” but workplace misconduct under the law, that there can be no mutual consent when there is such a massive imbalance between a superior and an inferior, that the workplace isn’t a man’s harem and dating bar no matter who he is, that Bill Clinton was a probably sociopath (the quote above eliminates the “probably”), and that it was a measure of the hypocrisy of feminists and Democrats that they denied this. All the evidence was there: I wasn’t brilliant or prescient. I just wasn’t corrupted and biased.
Well, I owe Bill: he inspired me to go into the ethics field.
Nonetheless, I have no respect for the sudden converts who are attacking him now. Now it’s easy and safe….not like when it mattered. Not like when a strong societal declaration that the President of the United States was encouraging a culture that would facilitate Harvey Weinstein’s rapes unless it was rejected, and hard.
I really don’t want to hear now from people like former MSNBC producer Matt Stoller, whose network sliced and diced reality and manipulated its audience’s perception of right and wrong to try to put Bill back in the White House with his Enabler in Chief. Stoller tweeted,
“Old Bill Clinton asserting in his own way ‘I’m a terrible person but you elected me twice’ is the most honest Bill Clinton.”
Oh, shut up.
Yes, he was and is a terrible person, and it was no less obvious when he was President that it is now.
If you want to know the reasons I stopped trusting progressives and began doubting their integrity and sincerity, Bill Clinton is the place to start.
Ethics Alarms 
I went through the same defensive nonsense with Gerry Studds and Barney Frank. A litany of excuses to justify the unjustifiable. When the Massachusetts Democratic Party endorsed Studds I dropped off the Democratic Town Committee and changed by enrollment to Independent. I have seen a steady erosion of values all tied to ends justifies the means by both parties, but the Democrats have made it an art form.
They are all crooks, no doubt. But agree that the Democrats have made criminality an art form. The GOP is a poor copy, though they try so hard (bless their hearts!)
Bill, along with his wife, are also the ones who put into the mainstream the notion that lying is just a tactic like any other. As the saying goes, a truly great sociopath is one who has two great sociopathic ideas.
Jack M. said”: “Like Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park,” I hate it when I’m right all the time.”
Hearkening back to Barry Goldwater: “Yes. Extreme Right…..”
Nope, not in the least surprised. Bill isn’t sorry he did what he did, and Hillary isn’t sorry she lied. They’re both just sorry they got caught.
I believe the term is Shine-Blocking,” and a hilarious article about it here:
https://www.theringer.com/2016/7/26/16036354/a-brief-history-of-bill-clinton-shine-blocking-people-6e431ddffa49
That article was funny. That they are ROOTING for Clinton makes it great, if un self aware, prose.
I have to laugh any time I see something from moveon.org, the preposterously self-righteous outfit that is always circulating virtue signalling petitions on line. Don’t people remember the phrase and the organization were started as the principal weapon of the Clintons’ strategy to get everyone to forget about various aspects of the Clintons (eg. office blow jobs by interns) so we could all move on to more important things (like their making tons of money). It might as well have been called nothingtoseehere.org. What a cynical crew.