Ken Berwitz
We all know that Hillary Clinton is an avid women\’s rights advocate, don\’t we? After all, she is front and center demanding full abortion rights.
Equal pay.
And that women who accuse men of harassment, molestation and rape be believed, not trashed…..
….uh, wait a minute.
Katherine Timpf, writing for nationalreview.com, challenges that last premise. She goes beyond the issue of whether attacking Hillary Clinton by invoking Bill Clinton\’s predatory sexual past is fair game (which, of course, it is, given that a Hillary presidency would put him back in the White House, with all those interns and four years of time on his hands), and questions whether Ms. Clinton\’s behavior regarding the women who accused Hubby Bubba even qualifies her as a feminist.
Here, excerpted from her latest piece, is Ms. Timpf\’s logic:
Since Hillaryannounced that her husband would be joining her on the campaign trail, peoplehave been debating whether or not it\’s fair for the GOP to attack Bill\’s sexualmisdeeds in order to indirectly attack her.
This makes sense.After all, we\’re talking about a guy who has been accused of the sexual assaultof more than ten women. Think about it: How is her appointing him really anydifferent than if she’d appointed Bill Cosby?
But here\’s the thing:The real issue isn\’t whether or not to attack Bill to indirectly attack Hillary – it\’s about directly attacking Hillary for how she herself treated the womeninvolved.
Hillary Clinton claimsto be pro-women, yet has actively worked to ruin lives of so many of them.She\’s running on a “feminist platform” – she\’s even dared to say thatsexual-assault survivors have a “right to be believed” – despite the fact thatwhat she did to the women who accused Bill went far beyond not believingthem.
She attacked them.
When allegations of sexual misconduct emerged during Bill\’s1992 presidential run, she\’s reported to have said “Who is going to findout? These women are trash. Nobody\’s going to believe them.” Multiplepeople also report that she called the women “sluts” and”whores” – you know, for daring to be raped. A private investigatornamed Ivan Duda claims that, after Bill lost his second governor\’s race,Hillary told him: “I want you to get rid of all these b****** he\’sseeing . . . I want you to give methe names and addresses and phone numbers, and we can get them undercontrol.”
Does that come across as feminist to you? Is that the kind of behavior you associate with someone who is committed to treating women with equality and respect…or someone who will trash women at will, to further her husband\’s – therefore her own – political ambitions?
I doubt that Katherine Timpf\’s commentary and conclusions will gain much traction among our wonderful “neutral” media, which have spent all these years covering for/rationalizing/burying scandals for both Clintons. But that does not change the fact that she makes excellent points which, in a more reasonable world, would cause thinking people, women and men both, to question Hillary Clinton\’s sincerity on “feminist” issues.
It\’s not like there isn\’t reason to question her on just about everything else….
