Eamonn McCann: Why Bill Clinton Shouldn't Be Welcomed In Belfast

You wouldn’t know it from Irish or British media, but the tide may have turned against Bill Clinton. The possibility emerges of Juanita Broaddrick finding ease. Even of the ageing degenerate being forced to cancel plans to come among us next month.

Last November, The New York Times ran a sensational op-ed piece by one of its senior columnists, Michelle Goldberg. The headline which caused liberals across the land to choke on their cornflakes was, “I Believe Juanita.”

The piece was sensational not because it revealed dramatic new information but because its well-rehearsed facts had never previously gotten ink in a prestigious mainstream journal. What’s more, Ms. Goldberg is not a neo-liberal, Clinton-hating conspiracist but a highly-regarded, well-established, left-of-centre (by US standards) commentator.

For decades, Juanita Broaddrick, now in her mid-seventies, has been telling anyone who’d listen that Bill Clinton raped her. She says she was staying in a hotel in Little Rock in 1978 while volunteering in Clinton’s campaign for Governor of Arkansas. She tells of Clinton asking to meet her one evening in the hotel coffee-shop. At the last minute, she says, he suggested they go up to the bedroom instead, where they could better discuss matters to do with the campaign. She says that Clinton threw her on to the bed, ripped off her underwear and raped her. She says that when he was finished, before he left, he bit her lip and left it bleeding.

She recalls him saying, “You’d better put some ice on that,” as he closed the door behind him.

Broaddrick gave this account in consistent detail to five different friends on separate occasions in the week after her ordeal. But back then it didn’t burst onto the front pages. As years passed, aficionados of political scandal will from time to time have monitored mentions of Ms. Broaddrick in the media. But powerful men were still protected when it came to women’s claims of sex assault.

PROTECTIVE DAM

As well, when the air was thick with gobbets of sleaze and flurries of lies hurled hither and yon by neo-con scoundrels out to destroy the Clintons, many, maybe most, progressive people in US politics and journalism balked at adding their brickbats to the relentless barrage. The Clintons were being accused of murder, laundering drugs money, even running a child-prostitution racket (really!) from a pizzeria in a Washington suburb. Broaddrick’s accusation could be filed away with the rest under “far-right-fantasy” and forgotten.

But the tenor of the times has changed. Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Michael Colgan… And in the Clintons’ case, the 2016 election campaign.

One common reaction to Trump’s victory was bewilderment and consternation that such a crude-mouthed lout with the sexual morals of an alley-cat on benezdrine could have been chosen by the American people as their leader. Even when Trump with startling chutzpah assailed Clinton’s husband as a serial abuser of women, she held back.

She never majored on Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” remark, or appealed directly to the women of America not to signal disinterest in the tales of terror being told by women misfortunate enough to have found themselves alone with him.

“A different Democratic candidate would have cut him off at the knees for that,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic.

The only proven incident of voter fraud in the US election came when the Democratic National Committee rigged the primary ballot to ensure that Clinton won the nomination. What concerned top Democrats about Bernie Sanders was that he stood for single-payer health insurance, more control on the banks, fewer restrictions on unions, a hike in the minimum wage. Wall Street would have hated that, So the vote-fraudsters went for a creature of Wall Street instead.

SEEKING REDRESS

Flanagan suggests that the first trickle of truth to dribble through the protective dam built by the Democrats around Clinton came when she blithely tweeted during the campaign, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported… She must have looked at the facts about Juanita Broaddrick and decided to put them in the same locked box where she kept the truth about Bill’s consensual affairs.”

It’s widely expected that her husband will come to Belfast next month for the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Will crowds come out to greet him? Will women?

Why, when they wouldn’t turn out to cheer Harvey Weinstein? Will any politician on the island dare say publicly that we shouldn’t roll out the red carpet for a rapist?

Goldberg’s Times piece may have been the gush which caused the dam to crumble. Peter Baker followed up in the same paper with, “I think we got it wrong.” In Politico, Jeff Greenfield suggested that liberals were experiencing “a moral awakening.”

However, the decrepit argument is still heard that, “I have every sympathy for Juanita Broaddrick, but Bill Clinton was a good president.” “Of course she was badly treated, but she shouldn’t be running around ruining a good man’s reputation.”

“Rape, unlike murder, is accepted as such an unremarkable fact of human experience that a woman who spends years seeking redress for the crime comes to be viewed as something of a lunatic, a rejected lover, or tool of a vast conspiracy,” Goldberg comcludes.

Bill Clinton should be told to stay away, and told why.

Any TD, MLA, MP, MEP, councillor care to take this up?