How can you spend a year and a half in the late ’90s saying that it’s okay if a governor and president…
1. Uses public employees to procure sex;
2. Cheats on his wife countless times;
3. Gropes and fondles a job-seeker;
4. Carries out a sexual affair with a very junior subordinate;
5. Lies under oath about the affair;
6. Encourages others to perjure themselves (“We were never alone, right?”)
…and then pretend it’s a big deal when a movie star, who holds no position of public trust, is accused of being an obnoxious boor?
I hold no brief for Arnold, and I would vote for McClintock if I were in the land of my California ancestors. That being said, nobody’s accused him of rape, perjury, or abuse of government power. He didn’t do anything extraordinary, by Hollywood’s alleycat moral standards — and I thought if “everyone does it,” as Clinton-lovers were so fond of telling us, then it’s tolerable?
I’m not trying to square Catholic morality with Arnold’s alleged behavior, just pointing out the blatant hypocrisy on the part of Democrats and the media. I can’t resist referring you to something I wrote six weeks ago:
“The media love ‘moderate’ Republicans. All you have to do is favor abortion under just about any circumstance, and you get to be a moderate….Then when election time comes, the ‘moderate’ Republican finds that his buddies in the press, along with previously friendly Democrats, have turned against him. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the latest to find out that just because you favor abortion, gun control, and scads of money for ‘the children,’ you’re not immune from being lumped in with the snake handlers.”
I blogged about this on my site. I focused more on the media bias angle of it.
The LA Times DUG up this story with a thorough 7-week investigation. That’s fine. I’m all for aggressive, thorough investigative reporting, especially in the political arena. However, the LAT wasn’t so inclined during 1998 when Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick made very strong allegations about Clinton. Sure, the papers would cover these things as they organically surfaced in the public eye, but they didn’t actively seek to give the accounts of any and all Clinton accusers out there.
I think the LAT and other papers are more than willing to dig and dig and dig for dirt on Republicans and center-right pols but not to have that cynical, investigative spirit with Democratic and center-left pols. Yeah, they’ll COVER these stories when they need to because it is news, but they won’t harp on it.
Hey, is it okay for the governer or president to screw around? Well, I don’t know. What’s worse? Screwing around, or pointing out how others are screwing around? Nothing’s so gratifying as casting the first stone, hey?
Academy Girl