demagogue on 20/1/2018 at 08:54
That was kind of my point. Of course it's pure gossip magazine trash as a story, but it would have been inconceivable and earth shattering for any other president, and for this one it's already par for the course, or at worst a double-bogey.
heywood on 20/1/2018 at 13:15
It wasn't earth shattering for Bill Clinton.
demagogue on 20/1/2018 at 13:45
Huh? Bill Clinton was actually impeached for it. Like the House vote literally legally impeached him and only the Senate held off kicking him from office. (And that was for arguably a smaller thing than this.)
Edit: Also my friend working at the White House said the day the Lewinsky story broke, they had a meter at the front, like a kind of Richter scale of political shake ups of the day that would usually say 3.1 or 4.4, and on that day it said "Mt. Vesuvius", and the issue rocked headlines for it seemed like 9 months straight. Looks like it meets the definition of earth shattering to me.
Trance on 20/1/2018 at 13:52
Moreover it's a thing that will forever hang over the head of Bill Clinton and really prevent him from having any respected place in politics ever again. Everybody knows him as the president who had sex with an intern while in office. It permanently destroyed his credibility.
Starker on 20/1/2018 at 14:00
Well, it's not a real scandal anyway. It's not like he was wearing a tan suit or ordered Dijon mustard.
heywood on 20/1/2018 at 14:28
If you were referring to the media coverage when you said 'earth shattering', then I agree.
I was thinking more in terms of the consequences. He weathered allegations ranging from infidelity to sexual assault and even rape all through his campaign and two terms, and it never hurt him politically.
The impeachment itself was pure political theater and the whole Democratic party and majority of the country supported him through that. His approval rating remained around 60% through the impeachment and the rest of his term. And then he remained the de facto leader of the Democratic party for the next 8 years after he left office, right up until Obama won. He's still respected within the Democratic party, he still campaigns for Democratic candidates and gives them a bump. He still makes millions a year giving speeches at political and business events.
demagogue on 20/1/2018 at 15:10
Ah yeah, as the joke used to go, his "Lewinsky strategy" was successful. That was around the period when politicians learned they could weather anything if they just kept denying or dismissing something long enough, and that's probably a feature of presidential politics here to say now... although it does make it odd that people like Anthony Wiener, Blagovich, et al, fell, but I guess the principle doesn't apply to lesser positions, they were a bit too early in the curve, and they were Dems not Reps.
Nicker on 20/1/2018 at 15:55
The real scandal about Stormy is that she was paid off as part of Trump's election campaign, using a shadow company to hide the source. This makes it a violation of election finance rules and just one more in a long list of impeachable offenses the GOP is suddenly blind to.
nickie on 20/1/2018 at 17:07
Quote Posted by heywood
. . . He still makes millions a year giving speeches at political and business events.
And he and Bush make quite a good double act - at least they made me laugh.