“Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life,” President Clinton whined.
It was the late hot summer of ’98 and the man dubbed “Slick Willie,” the nickname he claimed to dislike the most, was facing the prospect of becoming the first president to be successfully impeached.
These days the Clintons seem to have changed their minds about whether presidents should have private lives that ought to be pried into. So did the media, which back then insisted that it was “just sex,” but has belatedly decided that a president’s sexual conduct ought to be subject to scrutiny after all. But then again double standards are its stock in trade. They always have been.
Bill’s bedroom is off limits, but Trump’s isn’t.
Unable to run on national security, the Clintons want to run on the same subject that they once eschewed. And they want Trump’s sex life to be up for public debate, but not Bill’s.
The media has joined in this chorus which insists that when Trump mentions Bill’s rapes, he’s climbing into the “gutter,” but that when Hillary references Trump’s tape, she’s taking the “high ground.”
How can the same subject be both the gutter and the high ground? It’s either one or the other.
Meanwhile the clock to the next Islamic terror attack goes on ticking.
Back in ‘98 Bill Clinton complained, “Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time, in fact, it is past time to move on,” he added. “We have important work to do — real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.”
These days the Clintons don’t want to move on. They want to discuss the Trump tape as often as possible. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with what the Clintons did move on to.
Hours before 9/11, Bill Clinton was giving a speech in Australia and boasted that he could have gotten Osama bin Laden, but chose not to because of the collateral damage in Kandahar.
“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him,” he admitted.
The planned airstrike had been vetoed in late December ’98. Congress had postponed debate on impeachment a few days earlier to allow Bill Clinton to bomb Iraq in peace. The raids accomplished little except to distract from the impeachment debate and from his refusal to take out Osama bin Laden.