Really, liberals?  Really?  More than seventeen years after we movedon.orged this issue, we're going to turn on Bill Clinton? As with most progressive mistakes, this seems to come from a well-meaning place.  We lefties like to be intellectually and ethically consistent and we are trying to make the world a better, more inclusive place, after all.

I can also certainly see how, on the surface, it seems like Bill Clinton's story is analogous to the stories of other famous and powerful men who abused women with impunity for decades only to be called out long after fortunes were made and power attained, in effect made to suffer consequences long after enjoying spoils of life unknown to the vast majority who will ever live.

But it ain't so.

Because none of the arguments I've read contra Clinton make serious mention of The Arkansas Project, a long-running political dirty tricks and smear campaign financed by the late billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. It involved a whole lot of made up stories about Bill and Hillary and a whole lot of Scaife money transferred into the hands of southern swamp rats and assorted sundry people who could fabricate stories to bring down Clinton. It ended with a multi-year investigation led by an out of control special prosecutor who was more biased against his target than most.

In short, if Bill Clinton could credibly have been accused of ever having raped anyone, Kenneth Starr would have made a huge deal out of it. He examined the claims and went with perjury in a civil suit as his casus belli. See, the big complaint against other powerful abusers is that claims against them were either ignored or never investigated.  Claims against Clinton were not only investigated, they were investigated by a hyper-powered prosecutor out for his target's scalp.

In my lifetime, I've seen two democratic, two term presidents.  Both were treated by their opponents as if they didn't belong in the White House -- Clinton for being a country bumpkin and Obama for being black. Obama gave his opponents a lot less to work with, to be sure, but the birtherist attack on his presidency is analogous to the Arkansas Project. Turning on Clinton now is like waiting 18 years and then deciding that maybe Obama really was born in Kenya.  It's that stupid.