Unreasoning hatred of Bill Clinton

In addition to the pervasive misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton, further documented in New Stateman (h/t to my lovely wife) there's an additional irrational and self-destructive idea going around in liberal and progressive circles that Bill Clinton is some sort of demon.

Now, Bill Clinton is not a progressive and barely a liberal (wars in Somalia and Serbia, welfare "reform", the Communications Decency Act). There are a lot of substantive reasons to criticize his work. But in comparison, to say that he stands head and shoulders above his Republican contemporaries is to damn him with faint praise.

Bill got a blowjob and lied about it. Whoop de fucking do. His lie — which is primarily what those on the left criticize him for — is excusable because his sex life is nobody's business but his own; the question should not have been asked. A relentless conservative/Republican campaign, predicated itself on gross mendacity, intentionally forced him into a situation where he would have to lie. Everyone knew before he was elected the first time that Bill Clinton was not the poster boy for marital fidelity, and we elected him anyway.

The latest example of this sort of idiocy from the ordinarily intelligent vjack:

In my humble opinion, Bill Clinton's apology for getting a blowjob and then lying about it was a low point from which we have still not recovered.

He's talking about insincere apologies, but for Christ's sake, let it fucking go already. As low points go, Clinton's bullshit about lying about a question he never should have been asked isn't even in the same fucking galaxy as... oh... let me dig deep here... torturing people, detaining American citizens without trial, looting the treasury, domestic spying or starting an actual war and killing thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis. Even if we're just talking about lies and insincere apologies, how about the lies about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction? And that's just Bush; Reagan and Nixon aren't pulling the average up much.

If Democrats, liberals and progressives were actually concerned with Bill Clinton's actual and real conservatism, the two serious candidates would not be Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom are just as conservative — if not more — than Bill Clinton. We'd be talking about Bill Clinton's welfare "reform", not his blowjob.

Why are still talking about Clinton's goddamn blowjob? At all?

Because liberals are fucking stupid.

As Tim Kreider notes, we can't really fault the Republicans. They are who they are, utterly amoral sharks who can't help but act according to their nature. We can't really fault the 30% of the country so mired in fundamentalist Christianity that they've completely lost the ability to reason. "Against stupidity, the very Gods themselves contend in vain*."

*Friedrich Schiller

But we can blame the liberals, both the intelligentsia and the rank and file. The Republicans have been shoving this bullshit propaganda down our throats for forty fucking years. And liberals, who ought to know better by now, fall for the propaganda time and again. Dumber than a box of hammers, they are.

Pay attention, people, it's very simple: The hatred of Bill Clinton is the result of conservative propaganda. The misogyny against Hillary Clinton is the result of conservative propaganda. The racism and other lies that will be directed against Barack Obama in the general election — obscuring the fact that he's precisely the sort of sane conservative president that a lot of Americans (myself excluded) seem to want — will be started by Republican propaganda... and large numbers of so-called liberals and progressives will swallow it whole.

Not only are we too stupid to nominate someone actually liberal (such as Edwards) or even actually progressive (such as Kucinich), we're too stupid to avoid tearing our sane conservatives to shreds on the basis of Republican propaganda.

They know it worked on Hillary Clinton, and they know, therefore, it will work on Barack Obama. Obama will will be swiftboated and brownsuited, and he will lose to McCain. Even if he wins, he will be lewinskied and rendered completely ineffectual, paving the way for someone who will make George W. Bush and Dick Cheney look like geniuses and saints.

And liberals have no one to blame but themselves.