|
aquascoot
|
. That Clinton was gifted and brilliant at winning elections was clear; that there was something sordid, entitled and morally bankrupt at the centre of the Clinton project was evident. I always thought there would be a reckoning. Some may say it came with Hillary Clinton losing the presidential election. Now at last, it may also be coming for him. Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern, buoyed up by the #MeToo movement, is finding a way to talk about what happened.
For Clinton to win public forgiveness as he appeared to do, a young woman’s life was ruined. He lied. He lied on camera, and then he had a prayer breakfast and suddenly all the stuff about the accusations of an affair that Hillary had denounced as “a rightwing conspiracy” turned to ash. Watching him, Hillary and Chelsea, faces frozen in pain, do a walk of shame towards a helicopter, I wondered how they could simply “move on”. But, though a tearful Clinton said he was “a broken spirit”, he still got standing ovations. It was Lewinsky’s life that stopped. At 24, in 1998, she was bundled into a hotel room by a group of FBI agents overseen by Ken Starr and told that unless she cooperated she could face 27 years in prison. They had tapes, made by her “friend” Linda Tripp. Clinton may have lied but, forced to give evidence to a grand jury, Lewinsky was fixed for ever in the public imagination.
She was destroyed: a blousy sexual opportunist, a blowjob queen, a girl with weight problems in Beverly Hills maxing out the credit cards on Rodeo Drive. Pushy, dumb, naive. The US academic and writer Camille Paglia said she offered herself up as a “dessert cart” to the president. This intern did a stupid a thing at 22, and the most stupid thing of all is perhaps that she wanted him to love her. She wanted to hug him so bad, “I could cry”, she wrote. She felt he had “a beautiful soul”. She wrote reams of romantic tosh, but she was pilloried as a woman with the wrong appetites. She was not a victim but a sluttish vamp.
|