‘Deep Denial’ Generates A Lame Defense

Hillary Rodham Clinton was out on the morning talk shows the day of her husband’s State of the Union address, doing what she has done repeatedly since their 1975 marriage deflecting public criticism from her husband’s reckless sexual behavior.

She blamed her husband’s latest sex scandal on a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that has pursued the couple for years.

This is a silly defense. Sure, there are right-wingers who don’t like the Clintons, but even Hillary can’t believe that right-wing conspirators somehow forced her husband into decades of daredevil womanizing and the serial adultery that has repeatedly threatened to wreck his political career.

According to an investigation of Clinton’s political career by Washington Post staff writer David Maraniss, Clinton’s first political race, a 1974 run for Congress in northwest Arkansas, was plagued with charges of his troubled sex life. On one side were tales of his multiple girlfriends, which were true, and on the other side were rumors that he was a homosexual, which were far from the truth.

According to what Clinton’s aides in the 1974 campaign told Maraniss, Clinton would be ushering one of his Arkansas girlfriends out the side door of the campaign headquarters while his wife-to-be, Hillary Rodham, was walking in the front door.

Clinton’s overactive sex life has been an issue his entire political career, according to Maraniss, who based his article on hundreds of interviews over the past six years.

When Democratic presidential contender Gary Hart dropped out of the race in 1987, after photos of his womanizing were published, Clinton seized upon the opportunity to enter the race himself. But then, his trusted aides twice read over a list of women with whom he was rumored to have been having extramarital affairs. Finally, according to aides who talked to Maraniss, Clinton grasped the problem and backed away from announcing his entry into the race.

Clinton apparently thought he learned a valuable lesson from Hart’s experience. When he counseled his long-time extramarital lover Gennifer Flowers about how to deny their affair, he is recorded as saying, “They don’t have pictures. If no one says anything, they don’t have anything.”

Clinton has shown that he has no reservations about cheating, lying about it and urging others to lie about it. The tapes Flowers has of conversations with Clinton do not have Clinton coming out and urging her to lie. Instead, he urges her to deny the truth, which is a typical Clinton trait. He defines his own words and leaves himself an out, no matter how hair-splitting and deceptive it may appear to others.

Flowers talks about the time when Arkansas Gov. Clinton invited her to sing at the mansion (there are pictures) and tried to have sex with her in a bathroom while his wife was only feet away (no pictures).

When the Flowers scandal broke, Clinton went on national television with Hillary and denied the affair his typical hair-splitting way.

Now Clinton is accused of having an affair with a 21-year-old intern in the White House not far from his wife and daughter. He also is accused of urging her to deny their affair when she is called to give an affidavit in another case in which Clinton is accused of sexual misconduct.

Clinton’s most recent denial of his alleged affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky would appear straightforward at first glance. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman … I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.”

But if Clinton defines sexual relations as only one act, and if not telling someone to lie is different from telling someone to deny the truth, then Clinton has reverted to form and pulled another slick one on the American people.

Hillary is in deep denial. No right-wing conspiracy forced her husband into this pattern of behavior.

xxxx