Hillary Clinton is the very opposite of the smart, independent female role model once hoped-for as the first woman president. For nearly five decades she has defended her serial predator and accused rapist husband whose despicable behavior she denied while behind the scenes she viciously trashed his victims and often ruined their lives. Hillary conducted her own personal war on women against the very same women her own husband had already savaged. And now she wants us to believe her whole life has been about helping women and children.
Hillary and Slick Willie’s top staff convened strategy meetings to squelch what their team called “bimbo eruptions” before and during his presidency. Kathleen Willey, an attractive campaign volunteer who accused Bill of sexual assault, recalled some of their tactics in a 2000 press conference announcing she was suing the then-president, First Lady Hillary, and White House aides because of “their efforts to intimidate and harass me.”
Willey told reporters she’d been confronted by a stranger who asked about her cat that had disappeared, and also about her children by name. The man then warned her “you’re just not getting the message.” Is anyone else reminded of the chilling scene in the classic thriller “Fatal Attraction” when the maniacal Glenn Close character breaks into her rival’s home and boils her pet rabbit to death on her own kitchen stove?
In the thick of Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign, his wife sat primly at his side in the famous 60 Minutes interview as he denied a 12-year affair with blonde model and Arkansas TV reporter Gennifer Flowers. Hillary accused Flowers of saying “wacky things” as Bill admitted “causing pain” in his marriage. But he repeatedly refused to answer Steve Kroft’s direct question of whether or not he had ever had an extra-marital affair. Hillary bridled at Kroft’s suggestion their union was an “arrangement” insisting “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette, I ‘m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”
But the “Stand by Your Man” lyrics uncannily describe Hillary’s ongoing dilemma: “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman…You’ll have bad times, And he’ll have good times, Doin’ things you don’t understand.” The smartest woman in the world was marriage-shamed by her own husband who had to admit the long-lived affair when Flowers produced phone tape recordings of her conversations with Bill.
Despite her feminist pretensions, Hillary continued to stand by Bill even as the campaign hired private detective Jack Palladino to collect information on two dozen more of Clinton’s accusers. In his memoir, former White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos recalled discussing in a meeting a woman’s accusation published in Penthouse Magazine. When Bill denied it, Hillary Clinton urged, “We have to destroy her story.”
Instead of the Women’s Lib icon she pretends to be, Hillary has always in reality been a throwback to that Tammy Wynette era “little woman” – a woman really of the 1950’s when wives were submissive and wholly dependent on their husbands, before we gained power via education and careers. Instead of the proud anthem of the time: “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar,” her theme song should be “I am in Denial, Watch Me Be Humiliated.”
While today she trumpets a woman’s “right to be believed” in accusations of rape and sexual abuse, back in the day she blamed her husband’s serial sexual harassment and worse on the women themselves.
But she knew exactly what Bill was doing as more of his “good times” came to light. In 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones alleged in a lawsuit that the then-governor had groped her in a hotel room three years before. Chilly Hillary wrote unemotionally in her autobiography that she shouldn’t have opposed an early settlement, since eventually Paula Jones cost Bill $850,000. You don’t pay that kind of money for “alleged” crimes. Unfortunately for Hillary, during discovery Jones’s lawyers discovered young White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
True to form, Bill said nothing happened. He actually looked the American people in the eye on national television and famously scolded: “I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Even as the story broke in national media, Hillary insisted on NBC’s Today Show that “It is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
Actually, it was a classic case of abuse of a much younger subordinate employee (Lewinsky was 22) by an older man in a position of authority as her boss (Clinton was 49). Just the kind of case that should have outraged that great victim defender and champion of women’s justice Hillary Clinton.
Though the media tried to frame the scandal as harmless private consensual fun, Bill wasn’t prosecuted for having sex with Lewinsky or for lying to America. He was impeached by Congress for perjury and obstruction of justice – specifically for lying to the grand jury in his sworn deposition in the Paula Jones case. He became a member of a very small club; one of only two presidents ever to be impeached (the other was Andrew Johnson in 1868) and the only president brought down by the silent DNA testimony of a semen-stained blue dress that Lewinsky had failed to dry clean. In addition, a federal judge fined him 90,000 for contempt and his license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas and by the U. S. Supreme Court.
But Bill Clinton’s numerous affairs, groping and even Juanita Broaddrick’s accusations are only important now because they unmask Hillary’s viciousness against fellow females who had been victimized by her husband. And they also reveal her as a person deeply in denial, indeed reality-challenged about what is going on around her.
This inability to come to grips with reality may what drives her ability to believe that a stupid plastic “reset button” would defang Russia’s aggression; for her failure to anticipate that Libya would plummet into chaos after she had eliminated its stable dictator; and for her telling ABC News’ Jake Tapper in 2011 that Syrian strongman Bashar Assad’s days were numbered and soon he would be deposed since he is “not going to be able to sustain what is an unfortunately growing armed opposition…”
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Now Russian troops threaten Ukraine after swallowing up Crimea; ISIS ruthlessly rules poor Libya; and about a half million Syrians have died in Assad’s war since Hillary said his days were numbered. Her judgement is not only poor; it has absolutely no relationship to the harsh actuality of real life. Denial as a wronged wife is tragic; denial as the president of the United States can be fatal.
The real Hillary Clinton is a terribly damaged woman who stayed with her abuser all these decades because she knew he was her only ladder to high office and ultimately to the presidency. She is a user who poses as a victim herself. She is not the role model we want for our bright, full-of-life daughters, but instead a sad remnant of an oppressive, bygone time. Her time is over.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1