By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--November 15, 2017
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Of the Clinton accusers, the one who haunts me is Broaddrick. The story she tells about Clinton recalls those we’ve heard about Weinstein. She claimed they had plans to meet in a hotel coffee shop, but at the last minute he asked to come up to her hotel room instead, where he raped her. Five witnesses said she confided in them about the assault right after it happened. It’s true that she denied the rape in an affidavit to Paula Jones’s lawyers, before changing her story when talking to federal investigators. But her explanation, that she didn’t want to go public but couldn’t lie to the F.B.I., makes sense. Put simply, I believe her.
What to do with that belief? Contemplating this history is excruciating in part because of the way it has been weaponized against Hillary Clinton. Broaddrick sees her as complicit, interpreting something Hillary once said to her at a political event — “I want you to know that we appreciate everything you do for Bill” — as a veiled threat instead of a rote greeting. This seems wildly unlikely; Broaddrick was decades away from going public, and most reporting about the Clinton marriage shows Bill going to great lengths to hide his betrayals. Nevertheless, one of the sick ironies of the 2016 campaign was that it was Hillary who had to pay the political price for Bill’s misdeeds, as they were trotted out to deflect attention from Trump’s well-documented transgressions. And now they’re being trotted out again. It’s fair to conclude that because of Broaddrick’s allegations, Bill Clinton no longer has a place in decent society. But we should remember that it’s not simply partisan tribalism that led liberals to doubt her. Discerning what might be true in a blizzard of lies isn’t easy, and the people who spread those lies don’t get to claim the moral high ground. We should err on the side of believing women, but sometimes, that belief will be used against us.Now I realize it's easy to look at this and ask: Where was this when Hillary was running for president and Bill was in the thick of her campaign effort? It's easy to say this now when your newspaper in particular and your ideological tribe in general isn't trying to drag Hillary across the finish line and into the White House. The Clintons are are yesterday's news, and given the recent revelations about Hillary's corruption of the DNC, it may be that the tribal imperative of the left has changed from defending the Clintons to burying them, lest they get any ideas and try to come back yet again for another shot at the White House. I get all that, but even taking that into account, Goldberg's piece still represents a stunning change of course for the left. She clearly struggles to accept the idea that, after decades of attacking and discounting the honesty of these women, the left should have believed them all along. She remains far too willing to excuse those obfuscations.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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