Man, those Republican Presidents early last century were maniacal tyrants hell bent on our country’s destruction.
Paul Waldman thinks Hillary makes Republicans not see or think straight.
There are few things more fundamental to smart political strategy than the understanding that other people may not share your beliefs, and may not have the same emotional reactions you do to certain people and events. That understanding is what allows you to make thoughtful decisions about how to persuade the number of people you need to achieve your political goals, whether it’s passing a piece of legislation or winning an election. This is something Republicans often struggle with, but when it comes to the Clintons, they’re absolutely blinded by hate. To take just one example, if Hillary runs, we’re going to be hearing a lot about Benghazi, because Republicans are not only sure she did something scandalous, they’re also sure that if they just hammer away at it long enough, everybody else will become convinced, too. But just like with Bill’s impeachment, exactly the opposite is likely to happen: the more they talk about it, the more voters will become convinced that they’ve taken leave of their senses. And that, more than anything else, may be what gives Hillary Clinton such a good chance of winning in 2016. When they’re looking at her, her opponents just can’t see straight.
Maureen Dowd gives us Exhibit A: Rand Paul and his longing for Monica Lewinsky:
Fresh from taunting rival Chris Christie as “the king of bacon,” and declaring their feud “water under the bridge,” Paul turned his slingshot at a bigger target, the Big Dog himself, the gallivanting global statesman who is more popular than he has ever been, the master politician who has had to sell President Obama to America only a few years after he so vituperatively tried to turn off America on the whippersnapper and usurper.
With the passage of time and a cascade of fawning magazine covers, Bill Clinton’s image has evolved, leaving the repellent sexual scandals a pentimento in a new, more magnetic portrait.
Unruffled by the kerfuffle, Paul reiterated to me that he disdains the Democratic “hypocrisy within the party that wants to blame Republicans for somehow not liking women, that somehow we’re this party that has some kind of war going on, and they have as a leader and one of the most prominent fund-raising people in their party still to this very day, a person who seems in some ways to have his own private war on women.”
LOL. Whatever you think of Clinton’s womanizing, and you can think that he is a womanizer and an adulterer, because he is; it is not evidence that Democrats don’t like women. It is not even evidence that Bill Clinton doesn’t like women.
Now, I suppose you can make that argument if there was some violence involved, or if there was some sexual harassment going on where Bill pursued Monica, forced her to have sex with him, and then threatened her with her job.
But Monica pursued Bill. She was the aggressor, if you want to call it that, in that relationship. And according to the Starr Report there was never any threatening about losing her job. In fact, Bill was trying to get her good jobs as an inducement to keep quiet.
Lewinsky is evidence that Bill likes women too much.
But go ahead, Rand Paul, pretend that it is 1998 again and just constantly harp on Monica Lewinsky. Because that worked out so well for the GOP in 1998. LOL.