{"id":39155,"date":"2016-05-31T15:08:17","date_gmt":"2016-05-31T19:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=39155"},"modified":"2016-10-08T13:31:40","modified_gmt":"2016-10-08T17:31:40","slug":"jeffrey-epstein-and-bill-clinton-how-will-hillarys-campaign-be-affected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=39155","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton: How will Hillary’s campaign be affected?"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON BABYLON<\/h4>\n

The Jeffrey Epstein Affair Imperils Hillary Clinton\u2019s Presidential Prospects<\/h1>\n

The case of the high-flying (alleged) pedophile reveals a broken American political process<\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

By Ken Silverstein<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON\u2014Why is no one in the D.C. political class and media bubble talking about the Jeffrey Epstein affair? Well, it\u2019s not true that they\u2019re not talking about it at all; they\u2019re just not (for the most part) talking about it honestly or asking the right questions. And the right questions are:<\/p>\n

\n

\"QJEpstein_090705\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Financier Jeffrey Epstein gets handsy with an unknown companion. (Photo: Billy Farrell\/ PMC)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Exactly how tight is the friendship between former President and potential future first gentleman Bill Clinton and Mr. Epstein, who owns a private island in Florida and is now accused of having sex with girls as young as 12 and procuring young girls for sex with other friends of his? What was Bill Clinton doing on the island with Mr. Epstein on multiple occasions and why\u00a0did he fly overseas on Mr. Epstein\u2019s plane at least 10 times?<\/p>\n

What hardball PR and legal tactics will Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign use to try to make this potential problem\u2014which could potentially derail her planned presidential bid\u2014disappear? Will those tactics work, or is Ms. Clinton\u2019s campaign already dead, even if the exact time of the funeral is not yet known?<\/p>\n

Why is the Left-Wing Media Machine pretending that anyone who asks questions about the Epstein-Clinton connection is a paid stooge of the Right-Wing Media Machine? And why is the Right-Wing Media Machine, which would normally be gleefully talking about this or any sordid affair involving the Clintons, being unusually reserved in hyping the case? (Hint: Because\u00a0some notable conservatives and prominent supporters of Israel \u2014 a constituency that used to reside solidly in the Democratic camp but which the GOP in recent years has been wooing, with some notable success\u2014 have been implicated in the Epstein scandal too.)<\/p>\n

How did our political and media elites ever become so hopelessly corrupt?<\/p>\n

For those of you who haven\u2019t heard much about the Jeffrey Epstein, he is a 62-year-old billionaire and major donor to the Democratic Party. The story erupted after Virginia Roberts gave a sworn statement in a federal court filing that claimed (as reported here by Radar<\/a>) that that under Mr. Epstein\u2019s tutelage she \u201cwas a teen sex slave forced<\/b><\/a><\/strong>\u00a0to have sex with Prince Andrew<\/b><\/a><\/strong>\u201d and that she also saw Bill Clinton on Mr. Epstein\u2019s \u201corgy island.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Epstein\u2019s current predicament is hardly a shock. Back in 2008, at a time he had also been indicted (he was subsequently jailed for about a year) in Florida for sex crimes, Philip Weiss wrote an astonishing story<\/a> about Mr. Epstein in New York\u00a0<\/em>magazine that showed that his legal problems back then had not, surprisingly, made him more \u201csober and reserved.\u201d Much to the contrary, the allegations against him (from, among others, a 14-year-old girl) had made him more \u201csparkling and ingenuous.\u201d<\/p>\n

SEE ALSO:\u00a0Servergate Doesn\u2019t Matter: Hillary Was Never Going to Be President Anyway<\/a><\/p>\n

This earlier investigation of Mr. Epstein, led by the FBI, was reportedly closed and the evidence sealed after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to two \u201cminor\u201d counts related to charges that he was involved in underage sex. (How crimes involving sex with underage girls can be deemed \u201cminor\u201d is something of a mystery.) Mr. Epstein has reportedly been a significant donor to the Clinton Foundation, before and after he was implicated in sex crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n\n
\n

Bill Clinton is not running for president now but Hillary Clinton is. She must love him at some level but it seems clear she stayed in the marriage at least in part because she believed it would further her own political ambitions.<\/h2>\n
\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

So OK, let\u2019s acknowledge that there really is a right-wing media and political machine that will attack Bill and Hillary Clinton for any alleged crime, even jaywalking. It\u2019s also true, in my view, that Ken Starr, who sought to impeach Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, is a twisted zealot and that it\u2019s probably a bad idea to impeach a president for sexual misconduct, because that has nothing to do with his or her ability to govern effectively, keep the country out of needless wars, and help make life better for the American people, especially the growing underclass, and do something about police violence against African-Americans and other manifestations of institutionalized racism.<\/p>\n

But Bill Clinton\u2019s conduct, in and out of office, suggests he is a sexual predator without a conscience and has used his power\u2014even the power of the Oval Office\u2014to win sex from many women. That doesn\u2019t mean Bill Clinton has no appeal to women and every woman who ever had sex with him was a \u201cvictim.\u201d But some of them were.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s complicated in some cases and I don\u2019t know precisely how Monica Lewinsky feels about it, but at minimum Bill Clinton lied to her shamelessly, and in my view, took advantage of her even though she was not a passive participant in the \u201crelationship\u201d they had. And while Monica Lewinsky very unfairly became a joke on late night TV (and sadly I probably laughed at some of those jokes), a lot of people, especially men, respected Bill Clinton more after the Lewinsky scandal because it showed that he could get laid and\/or fellated.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s great that Lewinsky worked through all of this and has become quite an impressive person<\/a>. And as noted in this recent New York Times<\/em> story<\/a>, some feminists \u201cwho had stayed silent on the first go-round\u201d have more recently defended her, deploying terms that have emerged since the 90s like \u2018slut-shaming\u2019 and \u2018media gender bias,\u2019 and that late night hosts who once mocked her, like David Letterman and Bill Maher, have now expressed remorse for having done so.<\/p>\n

To understand just how cold and calculating Bill Clinton is, consider that he reportedly interrupted one sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky to take a call from a Cuban-American sugar baron from the crucial battleground state of Florida. The narrator of Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s Lolita<\/em> ultimately admits to himself that he was a sexual predator: \u201cUnless it can be proven to me\u2014to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction\u2014that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.\u201d Bill Clinton is incapable of thinking anything like that, and indeed stories heard by every Washington reporter, but which would be hard to independently confirm, he has learned nothing from his past mistakes. Someone else who comes to mind in this context is former Congressman Carlos Danger, aka Anthony Weiner, whose long-suffering wife, Huma Abedin, happens to be Mrs. Clinton\u2019s closest aide.<\/p>\n

Bill Clinton is not running for president now but Hillary Clinton is. She must love him at some level but it seems clear she stayed in the marriage at least in part because she believed it would further her own political ambitions. And in the end, her marriage may kill her political ambitions because her husband may be subpoenaed to testify about Jeffrey Epstein. And that probably won\u2019t help Ms. Clinton\u2019s poll numbers (in swing states or anywhere) because most Americans understand that a potential first gentleman should probably not be consorting with pedophiles.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Bill<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill and Monica ( Illustration: Victor Juhasz)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Media coverage about the Epstein case has been sadly predictable. The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>and other \u201cmainstream\u201d outlets have reported on the case\u2014of course, it\u2019s too salacious and marketable to ignore\u2014but none as of yet has pointedly and persistently asked important questions about it. TheTimes<\/em> is a great newspaper, but it is generally on the liberal side when it comes to national politics and is probably afraid to look at the story too carefully and draw the obvious conclusions.<\/p>\n

Mother Jones<\/em> and other liberal outlets\u2014which pretend to be independent and sometimes criticize Democrats but, just like the union movement, will end up voting for Hillary Clinton or anyone else who becomes the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee\u2014are generally pretending that this is just the right-wing media machine ganging up on the poor Clintons. See, for example, a Mother Jones<\/em> story last January, \u201cRepublicans Are Pushing a New Clinton Sex Scandal.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not even going to mention David Brock, the former right-wing hatchet man turned liberal hatchet man who now is Ms. Clinton\u2019s pathetic attack dog<\/a>. Once Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman (who I sort of admire), \u201cEvery word she writes is a lie, including \u2018and\u2019 and \u2018the.\u2019\u201d That\u2019s David Brock for you.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the right-wing media has been unusually reserved about the Epstein case. That\u2019s probably because defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who is an Obama supporter but sufficiently noisy in his pro-Israel stance to pass for conservative, has been deeply implicated in the whole story and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reportedly might be a material witness in the case. So you\u2019ve got right-wingers and Likudniks who may get into trouble too. The whole story is unpredictable so everyone is afraid of it.<\/p>\n

Weirdly, three of the only media outlets asking interesting questions about the whole story are Radar (cited above), Gawker and the Daily Caller. Writing in the latter, Nixon acolyte Roger Stone, a well-known Republican political consultant and the Daily Caller\u2019s men\u2019s fashion editor, recently asked<\/a>, \u201cIs this [the Epstein affair] the scandal that ends Ms. Clinton\u2019s campaign?\u201d Which is one of many good questions the media should be asking more.<\/p>\n

For its part, Gawker recently wrote an interesting story<\/a> titled, Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on\u00a0Pedophile\u00a0Billionaire\u2019s Sex Jet.\u201d It discussed Mr. Epstein\u2019s \u201cpredatory past, and his now-inconvenient relationships with a Who\u2019s Who of the Davos set,\u201d and reported that Bill Clinton had repeatedly flown on the \u201cLolita Express,\u201d Mr. Epstein\u2019s private jet, \u201cwith an actress in softcore porn movies whose name appears in Mr. Epstein\u2019s address book under an entry for \u2018massages\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"WashingtonBabylonIcon<\/a><\/p>\n

What all this means is that Hillary Clinton\u2019s husband has already been implicated in the Epstein scandal and that his dubious private behavior, which has already once distracted the entire nation from more important business, could do so again if Ms. Clinton does indeed run for president.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse, at least from my personal standpoint, is that if Ms. Clinton were to become the Democratic nominee I still might vote for her because the likely Republican candidates have retrograde and vile public views about race, class, gender and gay rights, and those are important to me, and especially because the two main parties are virtually indistinguishable when it comes to fundamental economic policy. Because both are bought and paid for by Wall Street and financiers like Jeffrey Epstein, as well as other powerful interests who overwhelmingly fund our political campaigns.<\/p>\n

Actually, I still might not vote for Hillary Clinton if she becomes the nominee, but I probably will if my college-age daughter asks me. Even though I don\u2019t think she likes Ms. Clinton all that much\u2014and I expect she likes her husband less\u2014she is appalled and outraged by the GOP\u2019s stone age social politics and because she would like to see a woman become president. And that\u2019s a good enough reason for me. Maybe.<\/p>\n

This is why the Epstein affair is a national disgrace and shines a bright light on the current tragedy of American democracy and this country\u2019s abysmal national political and media elites.<\/p>\n

___
\nhttp:\/\/observer.com\/2015\/03\/the-jeffrey-epstein-affair-imperils-hillary-clintons-presidential-prospects\/<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON BABYLON The Jeffrey Epstein Affair Imperils Hillary Clinton\u2019s Presidential Prospects The case of the high-flying (alleged) pedophile reveals a broken American political process<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}