That’s LA for you. You never know when you’re going to run into some actor doing something ordinary.
"what digby sez..."
Month: September 2021
I know you are inundated with invitations to subscribe to Substack newsletters and probably don’t have time to read all the ones you have. But I have to recommend that you subscribe to this new on by James Fallows. Not only is he one of America’s best writers of excellent long form journalism, he’s also one of our best bloggers. He had to retire his Atlantic blog some years back but now he’s back and it’s a good bet you’ll read some great insights on this newsletter.
Here’s one for you today from one of California’s favorite sons:
Before the returns come in from today’s recall effort against Gavin Newsom in California, here are two ways the vote already matters.
These are implications beyond the important-by-definition consequences of whatever happens in the nation’s most populous and most economically productive state. These are also beyond the media focus on any high-profile Democratic-vs-Republican showdown anywhere these days.
In both instances, I am thinking of California’s long-standing if imperfect function as indicator of future national trends. In different ways they involve the structure of California’s governance and the nature of its society—and the resemblances of both to the national situation.
The curse of good fortune
Australia enjoys calling itself the “lucky country”. Inevitably, as with most things in Australia, the term has a sardonic edge.
For countless reasons, and despite their curses and failures, the “lucky” category applies non-sardonically to the United States as a whole, and to its major Pacific-coast state.
The U.S. is fortunate in its location: oceans on both sides, partners/neighbors to north and south. It is fortunate in its resources; its scale; its waterways; its arable land; its capacity to absorb newcomers; and on down a very long list.
I once sat through an endless lecture on America’s positional “luck” from an instructor at the People’s Liberation Army University in Beijing. To illustrate the contrast, he showed a map of China, with all its vulnerabilities. Its landmass is mostly desert or mountain; it is ringed by countries that are historic enemies of China or are on dicey terms with it; it has more than a billion people to deal with; and so on. “You think your president has problems,” he said—it was Obama at the time. “We’d trade problems in a heartbeat.”
California is “lucky” in the same way America is. Beaches and mountains. Farms and rivers. Gold and oil. Ideal land for growing wine grapes, and marijuana plants, and everything. It even has scale. The highest point in the continental United States is in California, and the lowest. Only Alaska and Texas contain more acreage.
The modern problems of California need no enumeration, from drought and fires, to homelessness and economic stratification. The point for the moment is that California and the nation share the following trait:
–only a place with so much going in its favor, could have kept on going with such a deeply flawed governmental structure.I am talking here about the structure of government—its operating rules of the road—rather than “incompetent bureaucrats” or “crooked politicians.” Such bureaucrats and politicians are a given all around the world.
Nor am I leaning on the cliché that “people and businesses succeed despite government, not because of it.” That’s sometimes true, sometimes not—either way, it’s a different topic.
I’m saying that the American—and Californian—problem is the rules by which the government works. In both cases, idealistic-sounding structures from another era have adjusted badly to current times, and penalize the society as a whole.
As a recap on the national level:
A three-branch governing system was based on the idea that each branch would be an institutional check on the other. For instance, Congress would, in theory, jealously guard its powers to declare war, against executive-branch overreach. Now the three branches are just three different arenas for the same partisan battle. Mitch McConnell might as well sit on the Supreme Court. The emerging U.S. system has all of the drawbacks of Parliamentary governance—iron discipline by party—with none of the advantages.
Gerrymandering was seen as a defect in the early days of the Republic. Now it’s just one more partisan tool.
Built-in gerrymandering, in the form of the Senate, has reached a scale the practical-minded Founders would never have countenanced. When the U.S. Senate was created, there was a “mere” 10-to-1 population difference between the most and least populous states (Virginia and Delaware). Now it’s roughly 70-to-1 (California, and Wyoming).
Empowered by the filibuster, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, and weaponized by partisan discipline, the modern U.S. system empowers small-population dominance on a scale that, again, pragmatists like Madison and Hamilton would not have endorsed.
And so on.
But the U.S. has kept bouncing back and finding its way around barriers—because of everything else in its favor. Only a country so favored could have come back so often.
As for California? Its structural problems are more recent. They were expertly laid out by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul in their 2010 book The California Crackup: How Reform Broke the State, and How We Can Fix It.
The short version of their argument is that many of the “direct-democracy” reforms that Hiram Johnson and his colleagues brought to California in the early 1900s have taken on an unintended, corrupt, chaotic-and-obstructive shape.
The three central Johnson-era reforms, as we had to memorize in grade- school civics classes, were: initiative, referendum, and recall. Citizens could bypass the legislature to get their own measures on the ballot (initiative). They could review what the legislature had passed (referendum). And they could remove elected officials (recall).
Sounds democratic! In practice, the tools mainly have been warped to serve either big-money interests, or general chaos. Or both, as with the current recall.
But—having been pushed almost to the abyss of governance by abuses of these measures—California over the past decade has found ways to deal with many of them. I say this while fully aware of the crises the state still faces. I gave some details in an Atlantic profile of Jerry Brown back during his third term.
To wrap this up: California, like America, is a fortunate but flawed enterprise, falling back on its many resources to overcome handicaps of its antiquated operating rules. California has provided some examples of how to begin changing those rules. A useful guide on how to start at the national level is here, from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Majority Minority
Fifty years ago, California’s population was three-quarters white. Twenty years ago, the white share was less than half. Now the Latino proportion is slightly larger than the white share, and California has become the classic “majority minority” state. (Even as the Census Bureau is avoiding those terms and, correctly, emphasizing the multiple identities people might claim.)
Here’s a recent chart from the Public Policy Institute of California. It shows that whites lost their “majority” status around 1995.
Why does this matter?
Back in the early 1980s, I remember talking with the legendary reporter and author Theodore White, about the era’s demographic trends. He was thinking of writing an Atlantic article on California as America’s first big “majority minority” state (not counting Hawaii), and what its shift to that status would mean.
I don’t think he ever wrote that article. But in his autumnal-toned late-career book in 1982, America in Search of Itself, he expressed his concern about upcoming changes in ethnic proportions and identity. In a cover story I wrote about immigration in 1983, I quoted him:
It was “noble, revolutionary—and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society.”
Thus did Theodore White, chronicler of all that is brave and optimistic about America, assess in 1982 the thing his country had done to itself seventeen years earlier. He was not talking about the decision to increase the commitment of American ground forces to South Vietnam… Rather, this most thoughtless gesture was the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments of 1965.
The 1965 act greatly broadened America’s immigrant-influx pool. Relatively fewer from Western Europe, relatively more from everywhere else. It was an important part of the changes in U.S. ethnic identities through Censuses of the past 40 years.
This matters, in turn, because with the latest Census, the U.S. is drawing nearer the threshold California crossed a quarter-century ago: whites as less than half the population. According to the latest Census, more Americans claim more identities, but the “white alone” (non-Hispanic) category now is just over 60%, and varies strongly by state.
When the latest Census came out, various news-analysis and big-think pieces wondered about the profound change in U.S.-identity (and “racial resentment”) that the shift away from majority-white would mean.
As a white man from California, I am here to report that when the state attained that status 25 years ago, it was not so big a deal. To be clear:
-Race has always been the central axis in American culture, politics, justice, and opportunity;
-The political story of every city and state, involves racial and ethnic affinities. Irish voters in Boston. Italians (among others) in New York. Cubans in Florida. Every bloc you can think of in Chicago. And so on.
-The cultural and legal struggle for scarce opportunities, including among ethnic groups, has always been a political struggle. It shows up now in “affirmative action” battles of all kinds.
-All evidence suggests that many Californians are angry now. They’re aware, as people always are, of racial and ethnic differences.
But what they’re angry about is: Real estate costs. And homelessness. And high taxes. And fires and drought. And traffic. And crime. And infrastructure. And real estate costs again. And taxes again. And public schools. And the pandemic. And the myriad other real-world problems that demand real solutions
Race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity—these are eternal elements in American politics. But the magical “majority-minority” threshold? My reading of California’s experience is: people took it in stride. As I believe the whole country will.
I won’t republish his stuff in its entirety going forward. But I wanted to do it today in order for you to see how good it is. And, as is so often the case with Fallows’ writing, it’s very hopeful. We need that.
Subscribe if you can. You won’t be sorry.
Trump’s right. The news has been reporting it as if it’s true. But it’s just a bunch of lying MAGAs saying they are being told they already voted when they didn’t and the mainstream media interviewing nothing but Trumpers talking trash about Newsom and saying they want him gone.
I hope his cultists are listening and realize it’s not worth it to vote today. Why waste their time when it’s already rigged, amirite?
I think most people who read this blog know that Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice for president. Maybe even my 4th or 5th choice. But like all thinking people, I got behind him against Trump. Of course, I would have gotten behind a pile of dead fish over Donald Trump.
But I have been happily surprised so far. So has Michael Moore:
“I think what we’re going to see is how was it that he got all those people out without them being killed by the Taliban. Without a single plane being shot down. How did he do that, and while he was doing it, increased the food stamps to all the poor of this country, cut child poverty in half? So many things happened during this last month because we’re consumed with Afghanistan, the fact that he eliminated college debt for all disabled Americans. So if you’re disabled, your college loans have been just forgiven during this time of chaos in Afghanistan. There are so many little things like that, and we don’t talk about them. But I think you know he should get the credit for this because he had the guts to say no. That’s the end of this. He had the guts to do it. Nobody else had the guts to do it. And he’s a badass in that way that he will just do what he thinks is right, and he will do what he thinks is the moral choice.”
I’m pretty sure they knew they’d get the reaction they got when they withdrew. And I don’t think anyone genuinely believed that getting out was going to be perfectly efficient and clean. Wars don’t end that way. Biden and his crew have been around long enough to know that the Republicans would immediately revert to their warmongering ways and the press would join the party in order to prove how unbiased they are. But he did it anyway and it was a gutsy move. I can’t say that I expected it of him — or any of the other stuff he’s pushed along so far. Michael Moore is right about this.
Another poll shows that the vaccine mandates are popular with the American people.
A majority of Americans — including suburban voters — support vaccine mandates for federal workers as well as private companies, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.
The findings, on the heels of President Biden’s mandates announcement last week, suggest that while his move was divisive, it may be politically safer than his opponents hope.
“From a political perspective, he especially reinforces himself with independents,” said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs.
“The No. 1 issue for Biden has been COVID, and he’s been losing ground on it, especially among independents … it should stanch the bleeding … this is an initiative that could help bolster him there.”
However, “he wins no points with Republicans. He wins a lot of points with Democrats, but they already support him.”
Respondents were asked two separate questions: Do you support the federal government requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19? And do you support a federal government rule that requires all business with 100 or more employees to make all staff be vaccinated or undergo regular COVID testing?
Their overall responses were virtually identical:
42% strongly supported both; 18% somewhat supported both; 13%–14% somewhat opposed both; and 25%–26% strongly opposed both.
In other words, respondents didn’t draw major distinctions between mandates for public or private employees.
The high concentrations of strong support and strong opposition reinforce the depth of polarization.
About seven in 10 urban respondents supported the mandates or testing requirements, compared with nearly six in 10 suburban voters — and a little less than half of rural voters.
About two-thirds of respondents 65 and older, or under 30, support the mandates — compared with a little more than half of those in between.
Pollsters also asked this week’s respondents which of the following options should be the federal government’s current COVID vaccine policy priority.
38% said redoubling efforts to get remaining unvaccinated Americans vaccinated. (That included nearly half of vaccinated respondents, but only one in 10 unvaccinated respondents.)
28% would prioritize booster shots for every American who wants one.
19% would prioritize making shots accessible to people in developing countries.
The bolded sentences are my emphasis. It’s very interesting that independents, suburban voters and people over 65 are with him.
They vote, the latter two in large numbers in mid-terms. This one isn’t a winner for Republicans and it appears they are just going to make it worse.
White-male existential panic demonstrates again that the Republican Party’s jingoistic, red, white and blue chest-thumping is empty marketing. The rule of law, democracy, small-government and more — all disposable in the name of retaining White, male, minority power.
I’m reminded of one Keith Olbermann commentary (I cannot locate) in which he walked through examples of how under the Bush II administration the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights had been discarded, with only the <strike>Second</strike> Third Amendment surviving.
It turns out that even the GOP’s “party of business” branding was a lie. Catherine Rampell explains at the Washington Post:
Thanks to President Biden’s vaccine mandate for employers — and the GOP’s response — Democrats have taken over the mantle of the pro-business, pro-economy, pro-growth party.
It is Democrats, after all, who have a plan to get the economy humming again, by controlling the coronavirus and thereby making it safe for Americans to work, shop, attend school and otherwise resume their pre-pandemic economic lives.
For the past decade, voters have usually said they trusted Republicans more than Democrats on the economy. This was a triumph of propaganda over experience, given how much better the economy has generally performed under Democratic presidents, on nearly every major metric — jobs, output growth, productivity, stock prices. To be fair, Democrats’ superior economic record to date has been primarily due to luck. But right now, Democrats deserve Americans’ economic faith because they are the only — yes, only — party actively working to help the economy recover from covid-19.
We might have kicked the virus to the curb by now and returned to some semblance of normal by voluntarily adopting “the cheapest, most effective measure available”
— vaccination — to put the pandemic behind us. But no.
The GOP could not bear the thought of allowing a Democratic president party that Republican leaders and its base reject as illegitimate (because in their minds no Democrat is legitimate) to preside over such a recovery, even at the cost of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of American additional lives. Even among Republican voters.Rampell acknowledges the latter:
Some have actively discouraged people from getting vaccinated, amplified conspiracy theories, and (in places including Florida and Texas) obstructed private companies from taking measures to reduce the spread of covid-19 within their own workplaces. These efforts, coupled with the spread of the more transmissible delta variant, have led to increased hospitalizations and deaths and slower job growth.
Some prominent Republicans, such as Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, have openly cheered on the carnage. Nevermind that GOP voters appear to be dying in higher numbers as a result.
Using existing authorities over federal employees and large, private companies (via OSHA), President Biden last week announced vaccination requirements for workers to ensure safe working environments. Reuters found large businesses in favor. They want to get back to normal. They want their employees and their customers back. Rampell cites more examples.
“This will come as a relief to the business community, to have an order that requires all of them to move together,” the CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership told the Post.
Biden’s rule doesn’t yet exist, but already GOP officials have pledged to challenge it in court. They claim they want to protect the economy from tyrannical government intervention. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), for instance, denounced Biden’s order as “an assault on private businesses.” This is pretty rich coming from Abbott, who has similarly “assaulted” private businesses — in his case, by forbidding firms that receive any public funds from implementing vaccine mandates.
As the Trump presidency wore on and even after, press critics damned the mainstream press for giving oxygen to the man of 30,000 lies. Nothing Trump says is credible, yet the press treats it as news. The GOP’s pro-America, pro-business branding is just as empty of substance as Trump’s. It would be refereshing to see the press acknowledge that and stop treating GOP propaganda as credible.
Update: A reader reminds me it was the Third Amendment surviving, per Olbermann in 2006. TW provided a transcript link.
First things
If you haven’t mailed in your California recall ballot, drop it off today or go to the polls in person to vote No:
Newsom, now in the third year of his first four-year term, has in recent weeks taken a strong lead in the recall race as more Californians became aware of the need to vote in September of a non-election year.
Doesn’t matter if California’s electorate is “more heavily Democratic since 2003, when voters last ousted a Democratic governor.” Be the good citizen others are not. Do your part.
First time
An ill wind (and rain):
Last month, for the first time in recorded history, rain fell on the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet. It hardly made the news. But rain in a place historically defined by bitter cold portends a future that will alter coastlines around the world, and drown entire cities.
[…]
A consortium of climate scientists writing two years ago in Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, concluded that if Greenland continues to melt, in one bad-case scenario after another, tens of millions of people could be in danger of yearly flooding and displacement by 2030 – less than nine years from now.
And by the end of this century, when Antarctica, which contains vastly more ice than Greenland, also enters a phase of catastrophic melting, the number of annual flood-prone people could reach nearly half a billion. It’s more than farewell, Miami. It’s goodbye, Florida.
First place
First impulse
Democratic constituencies could be 99% of the electorate and Republicans would consider their wins illegitimate.
Digby wrote in 2008, “This is the realization of a very long term plan to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, like all aristocrats, know that if enough average people vote, they will lose. Period.”
This meme goes back more than two decades, however.
Rick Perlstein has written of “Operation Eagle Eye” from 1964:
The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself.
And here we are.
I think we need an extra today. Check this out:
He misses Champ. I get it.
I know it’s petty considering the full catastrophe that is Donald Trump but the fact that he hates animals and his monstrous spawn kill endangered species still offends me as much as anything else about him.
As the coronavirus surges in their states and districts, fanned by a more contagious variant exploiting paltry vaccination rates, many congressional Republicans have declined to push back against vaccine skeptics in their party who are sowing mistrust about the shots’ safety and effectiveness.
Amid a widening partisan divide over coronavirus vaccination, most Republicans have either stoked or ignored the flood of misinformation reaching their constituents and instead focused their message about the vaccine on disparaging President Biden, characterizing his drive to inoculate Americans as politically motivated and heavy-handed.
On Tuesday, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican who said he had received his first Pfizer vaccine shot only on Sunday, blamed the hesitance on Mr. Biden and his criticism of Donald J. Trump’s vaccine drive last year. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, said skeptics would not get their shots until “this administration acknowledges the efforts of the last one.”
And Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas pointed the finger at the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
“Every time Jen Psaki opens her mouth or Dr. Fauci opens his mouth,” he said, “10,000 more people say I’m never going to take the vaccine.”
Some elected Republicans are the ones spreading the falsehoods. Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, a Senate candidate, warned on Twitter of “KGB-style” agents knocking on the doors of unvaccinated Americans — a reference to Mr. Biden’s door-to-door vaccine outreach campaign.
Such statements, and the widespread silence by Republicans in the face of vaccine skepticism, are beginning to alarm some strategists and party leaders.
“The way to avoid getting back into the hospital is to get vaccinated,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a polio survivor, pleaded on Tuesday, one of the few members of his party to take a different approach. “And I want to encourage everybody to do that and to ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.”
The fact that Mitch is saying this means that they really are worried about where this is going.
I suspect that some of these Republican governors think they may be able to leverage this anti-vax/mask activism into something like the Obamacare town halls which led to a Democratic rout in 2010. I think they are wrong.
The same nihilistic impulse that led Republicans to lose their minds over the Affordable Care Act is at work with this irrational anti-vax activism, but the circumstances are very different. First of all, these people aren’t protesting the first black president proposing a “government giveaway” to the so-called undeserving which was at the heart of the anti-Obamacare protests. Neither is it an abstract issue as it was for the majority of people who had insurance in 2009, particularly those who had America’s best health care program Medicare. Those people had no immediate skin in the game, making it easy to oppose.
COVID is not like that. Yes, it’s about health which seems to make Republicans insane. But this time everyone is affected. 660,000 people are dead, one out of every 500 Americans and it isn’t about the “undeserving” or taxpayer money. They may get their raucous town halls and maybe even some deadly violence. But I doubt very seriously that they will be able to get a majority of Americans to vote for them on this basis and perhaps
80% of Democrats back the plan to require U.S. employers with at least 100 workers to mandate vaccinations or testing vs. 33% of Republicans who say the same.
About two-thirds of Democrats say vaccine requirements protect the rights of Americans, and just as many Republicans say the mandates violate those rights.
Roughly 3 in 5 U.S. adults think the White House plan will result in reduced COVID-19 cases and increased vaccination rates.
Democrats layed out in 2010, content to let president Obama and the Democratic majority handle politics while they watched TV. I don’t think they’ll do that this time. The Republicans are sufficiently radical that the Democratic base remains engaged and active. Raging about vaccine mandates is far more likely to result in overwhelming backlash than electoral victory.
Of course Republicans have already made it clear that the only way they can lose elections is if Democrats steal them so …
This piece by Helaine Olen in the Washington Post is the only one worth reading about the new Clinton Impeachment series on Netflix. Everything she says is right on in my opinion:
Monica Lewinsky went on NBC’s “Today” show recently to promote the new FX series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” of which she is a producer. Judging from how quickly her name began trending on Twitter, it seems people will never tire of debating the rights and wrongs of the Whitewater investigation that led to a presidential sex scandal. Tellingly, a lot of tweets asked if Bill Clinton needs to apologize to Lewinsky. Or: Should Lewinsky — yet again — offer an apology to Hillary Clinton?
One key figure was mentioned much less: Kenneth W. Starr. Yet absent the work of Starr’s team, all of us wouldn’t know, certainly not in such lurid detail, precisely what happened between the president and Lewinsky. Perhaps these days we are simply so used to our personal lives being shared, and overshared, that it’s hard to remember just how inappropriate Starr’s pursuit of this matter was. But it is his actions, not Lewinsky’s, that deserve the most condemnation.
Recall that Starr chose to investigate a tip originating from civil servant Linda Tripp — the worst friend since Judas — that Lewinsky, a White House intern, was having a relationship with the president. As independent counsel, Starr had been tasked with investigating investments that the Clintons had made in connection with the Whitewater real estate firm in Arkansas. Yet Starr and his office pursued the affair lead for months. The Lewinsky story “should’ve been dead on arrival” because “it served no useful purpose,” one regretful prosecutor said on Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast in 2018.
The initial confrontation of Starr’s prosecutors with Lewinsky — a 12-hour ordeal that began with her being ambushed at a mall food court — bordered on legal abuse. (A government report later concluded that a prosecutor “exercised poor judgment and made mistakes in his analysis, planning and execution of the approach.”) As for the investigation, no detail was too personal, or humiliating, to spare. Starr included the blue dress, the cigar and more in his report, a document that journalist Sean Wilentz deemed “pornography for puritans.” The spectacle left Lewinsky infamous, notorious and unemployable.
Most scandals fade over time. This one did not. Lewinsky made attempts to get on with her life, mostly with little luck. Only in recent years, after she used her own horrific experience to reinvent herself as a cyberbullying activist, has she been able to earn a consistent living.
Yet when Starr was asked by CBS in 2018 if he would apologize to Lewinsky, he declined. “I regret all the pain that resulted to so many, including to the nation,” Starr said. “But no, I can’t in conscience say to Monica anything other than I’m sorry that the whole thing happened.” He considers the scandal Lewinsky’s fault. Had she “cooperated” with his investigators, all could have been resolved with a minimum of fuss, he suggested. But she, in his words, “lawyered up.”
Imagine that: Lewinsky had the temerity to insist on her legal rights. Apparently, to Starr, this justifies his excessive actions and the decades-long humiliation of a woman barely old enough to legally drink when the events in question occurred.
To be clear, there is a lot of blame to go around. Fair-weather friends, talk-show hosts and many others joined in the slut-shaming of Lewinksy. Newsweek, which almost broke the story, critiqued Lewinsky’s “heavy makeup, revealing blouses and occasionally ribald comments.” Author Nancy Friday crudely suggested that Lewinsky could “rent out her mouth” as her next act. (Irony alert: Friday was the author of such 1970s classics of female sexual liberation as “My Secret Garden.”)
And then there is seducer in chief Bill Clinton. He engaged in a sexual relationship with a junior staffer in his workplace. Of course, it wasn’t just any workplace. The power imbalance screams inappropriate by 2021 standards, even if it did not register as such in the 1990s. When asked about his actions, Clinton lied under oath and allowed Lewinsky’s reputation to be shredded. Two decades later, confronted on television, he couldn’t bring himself to say Lewinsky’s name. The former president was and remains a cad.
Lewinsky, too, could have behaved better. She was an adult, albeit an immature one for her age. By her early 20s, she was old enough to know that affairs with married men are of dubious ethics. But this is a mistake many people make, and she didn’t deserve to have her life irrevocably altered for the worse because of it.
The bigger point remains that Starr is the No. 1 villain of this sorry saga. Ultimately, it’s mainly because of Starr’s appalling lack of judgment in the 1990s that any of us are watching “Impeachment” now. He spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars … to ferret out a few seamy sexual encounters. Of all the facts we can’t forget, this should be the top.
I was always team Monica because she stood up to that despicable Cotton Mather (revealed to be a total hypocrite in recent years)and his thuggish henchmen. I don’t think I would have had the backbone to do what she did.
Clinton survived the onslaught not because everyone loved him so much or thought his behavior was acceptable. He survived because of the vicious nature of his enemies. Someday I would love for someone to sit down with the various “elves” who are now Never Trumpers (George Conway, Barbara Comstock etc.) and ask them if their dirty tricks and character assassination during that episode might have been instrumental in creating the politics that gave us Donald Trump. I don’t know what they will say but I know the truth.