Maureen Dowd: Yeah, OK, Rand Paul is onto something here with regard to Bill Clinton.

This is an interesting Maureen Dowd piece: there’s a good bit less teeth-gritting going on than I expected.

Senator Claire McCaskill told Andrea Mitchell that she found [Senator Rand] Paul’s comments [about Bill Clinton] “infuriating,” and that he was just “grasping,” trying to show he could be tough in a bid to win the presidential nomination.

But back when McCaskill, now on Team Clinton, was trying to crush Team Clinton and get Barack Obama elected, she said this about Bill: “He’s been a great leader, but I don’t want my daughter near him.”

Paul brought that up with me, suggesting that if McCaskill were being honest and not partisan, she would still be worried about having her daughter around Bill and that maybe there’s a double standard for the famous.

Either Maureen Dowd is mellowing, or perhaps I am – or perhaps Ms. Dowd is just tired of pretending that Bill Clinton is the best thing for feminism since the Seneca Falls Convention.  Because Rand Paul is perfectly correct: Bill Clinton – whatever else your opinion of him – enthusiastically engaged in activities that society now has a real problem with. Anybody else would have been made into a pariah by now; and feminists who do not at least admit that are particularly vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, because those accusations are true. And yes, it does damage feminists’ ability to push policy: I for one would be a lot more sympathetic to certain gender-based arguments if I didn’t think that those arguments would go out the window the second they’d inconvenience a male Democratic politician.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane

PS: Fun game to play with Clinton apologists: ask ’em precisely what it is that Bill Clinton’s ever done for women’s rights. Don’t let them have ‘abortion,’ either: women’s opinions on that issue are effectively split right down the middle.

2 thoughts on “Maureen Dowd: Yeah, OK, Rand Paul is onto something here with regard to Bill Clinton.”

  1. C’mon, Moe, I’m sure Bill said something nice about the Lily Ledbetter Act, aka Obama’s OTHER major legislative accomplishment, for an extremely given value of “major”, not to mention “accomplishment”.

  2. About the pariah thing. I’ve been thinking about this in regards to Woody Allen, and while the less heinous Bill Clinton fits my thoughts too: No one is pariah any more. Not for sex, and hardly for crime or blatant lying. You have to shoot a black kid and have the media go on a year-long hate campaign against you to even come close to being shunned. And Zimmerman is in talks for Celebrity Boxing.

    Allen, Clinton, Kobe, Tyson – all alleged rapists at the very least (I’ve my doubts about Tyson), all mostly mainstream acceptability. Tupac was convicted of anally gangraping a girl, and still has a huge fanbase of women who love his ‘sensitive’ poet’s soul.

    Marv Albert still works. Weiner and Spitzer still are unashamedly in the public eye. The list goes on and on.

    People are shameless because there is no shame in an enabling world full of co-dependent depravity. Where to point out the failings of another is the greatest sin.

    That’s why Paul’s crack was ineffective. Not because of a lack of substance, but because of a lack of shame.

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