J’accuse, Against Both Parties

For many years a woman named Juanita Broaddrick has publicly alleged that President Bill Clinton raped her in a hotel room while he was the Arkansas Attorney General, and we’ve always believed her. President Donald Trump believed her, too, or at least said he did when he invited Broaddrick and three other women who accused Clinton of sexual misconduct to a news conference in the aftermath of the release of the famous “Hollywood Access” tape that captured Trump boasting about his ability to get away with sexual assault.

Since then 13 different women have publicly accused Trump of the very sort of behavior he had bragged about, and  a former teen beauty contestant has accused him of invading a dressing room to ogle her in a state of undress, as Trump had bragged to shock jock Howard Stern about doing, and now a woman named E. Jean Carroll is publicly alleging that Trump raped her in a fancy department store’s dressing room while he was a name in the New York tabloid headlines and failing casino mogul. We believe them, too.

Broaddrick had no apparent motive for lying about Clinton, and ample reason to not expose herself to the public scrutiny and partisan opprobrium that her allegations inevitably brought. Clinton had already paid a sizable settlement to a low-ranking Arkansas civil servant named Paula jones who alleged he had exposed himself and made lewd suggestions in another hotel room, and he didn’t seem to mind his longstanding reputation for being a sexual predator, so given our general lack of respect for his character the accusations seemed plausible enough.

Carroll has a new book out that makes brief mention of the incident, but she’s a former writer for the “Saturday Night Live” comedy and a widely-read advice columnist and established author, and the press is by now inured to such allegations, so that doesn’t seem sufficient motive for her to lie about Trump and invite the death threats she’s inevitably received. She’s a registered Democrat who’s made contributions to Democratic campaigns, but so was Trump at the time of the alleged rape, and our experience of Democratic women is that they’re no more likely to make false allegations of rape than their Republican counterparts. As we’ve already mentioned Trump has boasted about the sexual misbehavior he’s been accused of, and he went on at length in his book “The Art of the Deal” about his aggressive and adulterous sexual appetites, and he’s carefully cultivated a reputation as a man who won’t take “no” for an answer.

Trump says she’s lying, of course, just as he says those other 14 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct are also for some reason lying. None of them have become rich and famous on their accusations, which Trump and his apologists said was their motivation, and all of them are still sticking to their highly credible stories despite all the grief and public embarrassment it has caused them. Meanwhile, Trump’s denials are not convincing.

At first Trump denied ever even meeting Carroll, but a picture of him and his then-wife laughing it up with Carroll and her then-husband at a fancy New York party made that hard to sustain. By Monday Trump was telling The Hill newspaper that “I’ll say with great respect, number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. Never happened, OK?”

This doesn’t strike us as at all respectful, for one thing, and the implication that he might have raped her if he’d found her hotter is not at all reassuring. Carroll strikes us an attractive woman of a certain age, and we can easily believe her modest claim that 24 or 23 years ago she happened to be one of the more attractive women in that fancy department store on that particular day. For another thing, we’ve noticed that whenever Trump says something twice and adds “OK?” to the end he’s usually lying.

We say that with great respect, by the way. OK?

Way back when Broaddrick and Jones were making their highly believable accusations against Clinton we were mightily disappointed by most of our Democratic friends. They’d all believed every word of Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, as well as anything salacious any woman had to say about any Republican candidate or office holder, and they were all the sorts of feminists who insisted on believing the woman in any he-said she-said situation, but they made an exception for Clinton. He was in favor of legal abortion and was otherwise in line with their notions of women’s rights, after all, and the only bulwark against the “Handmaiden’s Tale” theocracy that would surely result if another Republican ever became president, so they were willing to extend a very generous benefit of the doubt, and in many cases admitted they’d give Clinton a pass even if the allegations were true. Jones accused Clinton of pulling out his penis and telling her to suck it, having used a state trooper to bring her to his hotel room, and ultra-feminist Gloria Steinem gave him a free pass on the “one grope free” rule, as he eventually took “no” for an answer, which was pretty much the end of her reputation, and which she now regrets.

This time around we find ourselves even more disappointed with our Republican friends. The erstwhile party of “family values” and “character counts” and the gentlemanly Judeo-Christian tradition has reconciled itself to a thrice-married and six-times-bankrupt casino mogul who has publicly bragged about all the married babes he’s bagged over the years, and it’s willing to extended him a seemingly unlimited benefit of the doubt about everything, and the once Grand Old Party doesn’t seem to care much even if Trump has grabbed some women by the pussy over the years. They believed Broaddrick and Jones and any other women making allegations against Democrats, but this time is different. This time it’s the sort of alpha male behavior that Trump’s die-hard supporters seem to love, after all, and they always tell us he’s the only thing standing between us and the socialist hell that would surely result if another Democrat were ever elected president. Such self-proclaimed “religious right” leaders as Jerry Falwell Jr. have declared Trump a divinely chosen leader, and we expect they’ll eventually regret that.

We never intended this to be another pornographic web site, so we apologize about writing about men pulling out their penises and telling women to suck it, or men grabbing women by the pussy, and it’s more painful to write that we believe at least two of the presidents of the United States in our lifetime are probably rapists and certainly moral reprobates. That’s where we find ourselves, though, and we hold out faint hope that sooner or later both our Democratic and Republican friends will insist on something better.

— Bud Norman

From the Sideline View

The state of America and the rest of the world remains a preoccupying fascination for us, but these days we watch the news unfold with from a somewhat disinterred perspective. The team of old-fashioned Republican cold warriors and red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists and stodgy traditionalists on the social issues we’ve always rooted for didn’t even the make the political playoffs in this crazy election year, so there’s the desultory feel of a World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers about all of it, and our newfound objectivity makes the worst of both remaining teams so much more glaring.

All through the long years of President Barack Obama we groused about his groveling appeasement of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and all through a crazy election year we indignantly noted that his would-be successor and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State started it off with that stupid “reset” button, and like all good Republicans we excoriated them durned Democrats for their Russkie-friendly ways. Now the putatively Republican president-elect has a mutual admiration society going with Putin and is appointing all sorts of Russophile wheelers and dealers who have also already wheeled and dealt some some officially friendly arrangements with the Russkies, suddenly those formerly apologetic Democrats who once laughed at Obama’s line about how “the ’80s are calling and they want their foreign policy” back are now demanding a more Reaganesque response towards that bear in the woods, and we note that pretty much everyone is accusing pretty much everyone else of being a partisan hypocrite who suddenly switched sides. Pretty much of all of them are right about all of that, of course, even if we do stand unsullied on stands, but from this viewpoint they all seem wrong about the rest of it.

There does look to be a whole lot of de-regulatin’ coming, perhaps even on a bigger-than-Reagan scale, and our old-fashioned Republican souls will begrudgingly enjoy that, along with the inevitable squealing from those durned Democrats, but we also anticipate a lot more of the kooky economic interventions that president-elect Donald Trump has already imposed on free markets. Trump’s admittedly different version of command controlled and outright protectionist economic policies have already aroused the indignation of the very same Democrats who spent the Obama years praising the same industrial policies we were continually grousing about, and we suppose we should welcome their company, but we don’t quite trust them. Much of the putatively Republican press we used to have some trust in are now suddenly enthused about about the government picking winners and losers and marketplace of ideas and products, such stalwart holdouts of of Burkean skepticism as The National Review and The Weekly Standard and The Central Standard Times are awaiting vindication before getting back in the game, and for now everyone looks faintly ridiculous.

We’ll continue to place our faith in God, but for now even His role in all this might be seem marginalized. The Republican party of family values finally vanquished that awful wife of that libertine ex-president, but it did so with a thrice-married-to-a-nudie-model casino-and-strip-club mogul who has bragged in print about all the married babes he’s bagged, and many of the Democrats who once defended Clinton’s behavior are now aghast Trump’s, and many of the Republicans who were once aghast by Clinton’s behavior are reaching into the Old Testament to exalt Trump. We count it a loss for the religious right, even though many of its putative leaders enthusiastically backed Trump, and despite their sudden prudishness we can’t see the secular left restoring any righteousness to the world.

All that bother about sex and abortion and the guy wanting to get into the women’s locker room and safe spaces from offending opinions and all the rest of those modern world things that keep popping up will surely continue for the next four years, no matter what the Illuminati have cooked up, and we expect that all sorts of people will wind up on all different sides of it, but for now we’ll try to keep warm and maintain a fair perspective from the sidelines.

— Bud Norman

A Crazy End to a Crazy Election

This crazy election year seems to have culminated with Republican nominee Donald Trump becoming president, and how crazy is that?

The good news, for those who insist on finding some, is that the awful Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won’t become president, the past eight awful years of President Barack Obama have been rightly repudiated, those shockingly tawdry and vastly overrated eight years of President Bill Clinton are at long put to rest, and that entire awful Democratic Party finds itself out of power in the executive branch and in a minority of both chambers of the legislative and perhaps in the judiciary, along with historic lows at the state and local levels throughout most of the country. Ordinarily this would warm our old-fashioned Republican hearts, but there’s nothing at all ordinary about this crazy election year.

The bad news of this crazy election year, for those of us willing to face it, is that Trump represents an entirely newfangled Republicanism which is unlikely to bring any improvement. Our erstwhile party of free market capitalism is now led by an unabashed protectionist who has vowed to bully businesses into unprofitable arrangements that fit his nativist notions, and the alliances and treaties it championed that won the Cold War and generally maintained a peaceable and increasingly prosperous world are now up for negotiations based on a short-sighted financial bottom line. What was once the Party of Lincoln is now home to a neo-confederate “alt-right,” while the former defenders of “family values” and the canon of western civilization are now represented by a proudly-adulterous-and-thrice-married-to-an-illegal-immigrant-nudie-model casino-and-strip-club-and-scam-university mogul who boasts that he can grab women by their wherever because of his reality show stardom.

As awful as another Clinton presidency would have surely been — and we were publicly warning against that dire possibility way back in the days when the Republican nominee and President-elect was contributing to her campaign and inviting her to his third wedding and and praising her as the best Secretary of State ever — we’re now expecting a markedly different but just as disastrous awfulness. This time around a Republican president will be to blame, and we’ll be no more inclined to make excuses for it than were in these last awful Democratic years, but all along we’ve been resigned to spending another four years in futile dissent. As we search desperately for some good news we note that some recognizably old-fashioned Republicans are among those congressional majorities, several of whom polled far better in their states than the party’s newfangled leader, despite their open dissents from his leadership, and that much of conservatism’s intellectual leadership never wavered from their more old-fashioned Republicanism.

That old fashioned-Republicanism of ours also took a beating on Election Day and seems unlikely to make quick comeback, as the next four years probably won’t make voters more nostalgic for it than those awful but soon-to-be-overrated Obama years, but we’d like to think that crazier things have happened.

— Bud Norman