On
Friday evening the MSNBC host Chris Hayes sent out a tweet that
electrified online conservatives: “As gross and cynical and hypocritical
as the right’s ‘what about Bill Clinton’ stuff is, it’s also true that
Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the
allegations against him.” Hayes’s tweet inspired stories on Glenn Beck’s
The Blaze, Breitbart and The Daily Caller, all apparently eager to use
the Clinton scandals to derail discussions about Roy Moore, the
Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Alabama who is
accused of sexually assaulting minors.
Yet
despite the right’s evident bad faith, I agree with Hayes. In this
#MeToo moment, when we’re reassessing decades of male misbehavior and
turning open secrets into exposes, we should look clearly at the
credible evidence that Juanita Broaddrick told the truth when she
accused Clinton of raping her. But revisiting the Clinton scandals in
light of today’s politics is complicated as well as painful. Democrats
are guilty of apologizing for Clinton when they shouldn’t have. At the
same time, looking back at the smear campaign against the Clintons shows
we can’t treat the feminist injunction to “believe women” as absolute.
Writing at Crooked.com, Brian Beutler warns
that in future elections, right-wing propaganda will exploit the
progressive commitment to always taking sexual abuse charges seriously.
It’s easy to imagine an outlet like Breitbart leveraging the “believe
women” rallying cry to force mainstream media coverage of dubious
accusations.
The
Clinton years, in which epistemological warfare emerged as a key part
of the Republican political arsenal, show us why we should be wary of
allegations that bubble up from the right-wing press. At the time, the
reactionary billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife was bankrolling the
Arkansas Project, which David Brock, the former right-wing journalist
who played a major role in it, described as a “multimillion-dollar dirty
tricks operation against the Clintons.” Various figures in conservative
media accused Bill Clinton of murder, drug-running and using state
troopers as pimps. Brock alleges that right-wing figures funneled money
to some of Clinton’s accusers.
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