Who Will Rid Us Of This Meddlesome Clenis?
The Clenis is back in the news, because the media will always find a way to make the news about the Clenis, even when NOBODY IN THE WORLD was curious what the Clenis was up to these days. Also, Bill Clinton and his Clenis have a book to promote, and this last year has been pretty earth-shaking with the #MeToo movement, so when you put all those things together, what do you get? You get NBC News interviews where journalists are like "Oh hey what up, Big Clenis?" and ask Clinton if he thinks he and his Clenis should have behaved differently during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, or if they would have behaved differently had the #MeToo movement been around back then.
Let's be clear here: Bill Clinton needs to shut the fuck up. And if journalists insist on asking him questions about this, he needs to either ACTUALLY take some responsibility for what he did, or ACTUALLY try to talk about the differences between the 1990s and now, or really, just say anything besides what he said when NBC's Craig Melvin started inquiring as to the life and times of the Clenis:
MELVIN: If you were president now, in 2018, with everything that's going on with the #MeToo movement, how would you have approached the accusations differently?
CLENIS: Well, I don't think it would be an issue because people would be using the facts instead of the Imagined Facts. If the facts were the same today, I wouldn't.
What? OK, we obviously grant that Clinton was the subject of a years-long investigation that, in the end, only managed to turn up a jizz stain on a blue dress and a big old perjury committed by the president. GRANTED. But what the hell "facts" is he talking about? He doesn't really say!
But times have indeed changed. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said if Clinton was president now, with the same allegations, he should rightly resign. Monica Lewinsky, for her part, has started publicly questioning the commonly held idea of Consent, How Does It Work, when interpreted through the lens of the relationship between "president" and "24-year-old intern." Obviously, there is a complicated conversation going on here.
But the Clenis is not participating in that conversation. The Clenis is instead saying "Nuh uh!" and "I cherish women!" not entirely unlike a certain orange shitwaffle who currently lives at 1600 Pennsylvania and has been accused of sexual misconduct by ELEVENTY women:
MELVIN: Through the lens of #MeToo now, do you think differently or feel more responsibility?
CLENIS: No, I felt terrible then. And I came to grips with it.
MELVIN: Did you ever apologize to her?
CLENIS: Yes, and ...
OK, sort of. In public. He later clarified that's what he meant, and that he had never personally apologized to Lewinsky.
But anyway, the Clenis is the real victim here:
CLENIS: Nobody believes that I got out of that for free. I left the White House $16 million in debt!
Dadgummit!
CLENIS: Two-thirds of the American people sided with me!
That's kind of irrelevant!
CLENIS: I had a sexual harassment policy when I was governor in the 1980s. I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor. Women were over-represented in the attorney general's office in the '70s. [...] I have had nothing but women leaders in my office since I left.
Well then surely the Clenis has committed no sins! If he did other nice things for women, then he can certainly not be held accountable for bad things he did to women!
We should probably also not accuse Donald Trump of improperly dispatching his miniature tangerine joystick, because did you hear Kellyanne Conway ran his campaign and works in the White House now? Did you know the press secretary is a lady? Hell, he even made an office in the West Wing for his daughter, Ivanka Trump, whom he considers REALLY fucking hot, like if she wasn't his daughter, he might be dating her!
We hate to make the obvious comparisons here, but we must because THEY ARE SO FUCKING OBVIOUS.
Look, we liked a lot of things about Bill Clinton's presidency, and we enthusiastically campaigned for Hillary Clinton, who was our -- as in me, Evan; Wonkette was split down the middle -- first choice in the Democratic primary. But that does not mean these people are perfect and above reproach, and as Democrats, we need to be Better Than This.
And it really shouldn't be hard for us to do this regarding Bill Clinton, who was president twenty years ago and who is never running for a thing again. We need to be able to forcefully say Clinton handled all that very badly (and that Hillary handled some things badly too, in her defenses of Bill!), so that we can go forward as the party that actually gives a shit about the stories women have to tell, the party that actually is NOT PUTTING UP WITH THIS SHIT ANYMORE.
Barring that, can the Clenis please GO 'WAY NOW? We are sure his new book is very good and stuff (not gonna read), but if he can't be a thoughtful fucking adult about this, maybe he should just delete his book tour and go fuck off somewhere.
We are just saying.
Now keep the comments NOT INSANE you guys, we are tired of your intramural murder shit.
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[ NBC News ]