It’s been with equal parts satisfaction and disappointment that I have watched from afar as the left has finally come around to my opinion of Bill Clinton, or at least they have finally come around to believing his accusers.
As I have maintained since the 1990s, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey. Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Clinton, was also telling the truth.
During the past week dozens of prominent journalists and a few left-leaning politicians – notably the one who took Hillary Clinton’s seat in the Senate – have come out of the closet, as it were, and admitted that not only should they have not defended Bill Clinton against these very credible allegations, the president should have resigned.
Good. But why did it take the left so long, and why did this communal revelation arrive only after the Clintons made their long-awaited exit from power and, hopefully, the page?
Rather than parroting the pitiful “better late than never” cliché, allow me a bit of self-reference to prove that I’m not arriving to this party late.
From my memoir, Hitch 22:
“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous ‘New Democrat,’ you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.”
For the record, here I am with my friend Brian Lamb on C-SPAN discussing Broaddrick shortly after those proceedings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKUvetJQric&t=1130s
For expressing this opinion, the left and many in my profession attacked me with the passion one would assume they’d reserve for … well … a sexual predator aspiring to the highest office in the land.
Perhaps, however, their subconscious contempt for Clinton was redirected towards me for bringing this up.
There are many examples of this online. Look them up. Meanwhile, here’s one from my appearance on Politically Incorrect in the 1990s. There I faced off against host Bill Maher along with Suzanne Somers and some rock star from a group having something to do with Ezra Pound (sorry, as my faithful readers know, music is lost on me).
https://youtu.be/MGCVQPrru7o?t=10m42s
The lesson is clear: Never trade your principles for a person, for you will always be disappointed. Years later, you’ll be looking back at something you wrote, or worse, a YouTube video of yourself, with horror and regret rather than satisfaction for a stand well taken.
Don’t make the same mistake with a politician today that the left made with Clinton 25-years ago.
They lived to regret it, and so will you.
Alas, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends … one cannot be right about everything.
The fact that I’m looking down upon this now with a smile, knowing that I was very right about Bill Clinton, means that I was also … very wrong about something else.
Now if I could just keep this harp in tune. I told these chaps that music wasn’t my thing.
(The late Christopher Hitchens was the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and, posthumously, Mortality.)
