Liberals are coming to grips over the sexual misconduct of former President Bill Clinton this week. And, considering how they’ve spent years dismissing the accusations made against him, the reckoning this country is having with sexual harassment, assault, and misconduct have caused them to think twice about his legacy.
Matthew Yglesias, a senior correspondent with Vox, penned an admission that Bill Clinton should have resigned over what he did to then-22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“Looking back after the election of Donald Trump, the revelations of massive sexual harassment scandals at Fox News, the stories about Harvey Weinstein and others in the entertainment industry, and the stories about Roy Moore’s pursuit of sexual relationships with teenagers, I think we got it wrong,” Yglesias wrote. “We argued about perjury and adultery and the meaning of the word “is.” Republicans prosecuted a bad case against a president they’d been investigating for years. What we should have talked about was men abusing their social and economic power over younger and less powerful women.”
Just a little over 10 years ago, Yglesias wrote in The Atlantic that former President George W. Bush should be impeached with a year and a half remaining in his second term. However, he invoked the case of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial for lying under oath to draw a similarity in how pointless it would be to go through with it.
“Impeaching and convicting Bush means, in practice, only that Dick Cheney becomes president. In a weird way, it was the very trumped-up and trivial nature of the charges against Clinton that made impeachment plausible,” Yglesias wrote in 2007.
Now, granted that this was 10 years ago and Yglesias is a changed man in that regard, and he should be commended for evolving on this subject. But with that in mind, between 2007 and now, there wasn’t any new revelation in the case against Bill Clinton and his affair with Lewinsky. What has changed is that society is taking a harder look at itself and outing all the sexual deviants and miscreants, and Hillary Clinton isn’t the president of the United States (and Bill isn’t the first gentleman). The Clinton dynasty has ended before it had a chance to begin, and there’s no reason to go easy on them anymore.
For a commentator who once wrote that he was more worried about President Marco Rubio than President Donald Trump, only to change his mind after it had become almost certain Rubio was toast and Trump would actually win the Republican nomination, it’s not difficult to believe that Yglesias’ sails are blowing wherever the political winds take him.
If politics and tribalism never got in the way in the first place, perhaps Clinton’s accusers would’ve gotten the justice they so desperately sought. Instead, they’re getting apologies from writers who once called their experience with rape, sexual assault, or harassment as “trivial.”
