Trump Has Allowed Pundits to Revive the Great Penis Chase of the 1990s

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

03 January 16

The Washington Post seems especially keen.

t the Café, even as we prepare for the big New Year's Rockin' Eve bash, loading up the old jukebox with tunes from Three Dog Night and Hawkwind (in honor of Lemmy), we're still open for business. And a good thing, too, because the last minute takeout orders nearly broke us today.

Guess what's back in the news? You'll never guess.

It's Bill Clinton's penis!

Because the national news media will jump at everything that proceeds from the mouth of the vulgar talking yam currently leading the Republican presidential field, everybody has decided to relive the formative experience of their young pundit lives—the Great Penis Chase of the 1990's. There are a number of excuses given for this: 1) Donald Trump mentioned it; 2) Bill Cosby; 3) Hillary Rodham Clinton's feminism; 4) Donald Trump mentioned it, and 5) Donald Trump, you know, mentioned it.

Ruth Marcus, scourge of teenaged potty-mouths everywhere, has weighed in:

Well, Bill Clinton has a penchant for something. He had a successful presidency—with an ugly blot. "Sexism" isn't the precise word for his predatory behavior toward women or his inexcusable relationship with a 22-year-old intern. Yet in the larger scheme of things, Bill Clinton's conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said.

Is it worse than any of the offensive things toward women that Trump allegedly has done? Inquiring minds want to know.

But the real speciality du jour was delivered to Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's fact-checker, who ran through an entire New Year's Eve marathon as though he were the SyFy Channel and Bill Clinton were The Twilight Zone. I confess a certain fondness for a "fact-checker" who provides us with a guide to "allegations." The further you read down in the piece, the foggier the facts of it get, until you get to this passage right here:

Peter Baker, in "The Breach," the definitive account of the impeachment saga, reported that House investigators later found in the files of the independent prosecutor that Jones's lawyers had collected the names of 21 different women they suspected had had a sexual relationship with Clinton. Baker described the files as "wild allegations, sometimes based on nothing more than hearsay claims of third-party witnesses." But there were some allegations (page 138) that suggested unwelcome advances: "One woman was alleged to have been asked by Clinton to give him oral sex in a car while he was the state attorney general (a claim she denied). A former Arkansas state employee said that during a presentation, then-Governor Clinton walked behind her and rubbed his pelvis up against her repeatedly. A woman identified as a third cousin of Clinton's supposedly told her drug counselor during treatment in Arkansas that she was abused by Clinton when she was baby-sitting at the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock." 

Even the author quoted by the fact-checker calls these "wild allegations, sometimes based on nothing more than hearsay claims of third-party witnesses." (It was a strange time, kids. Ask your folks.) Nonetheless, we quickly get to, "But…" and that "but" is doing a lot of heavy lifting by the end of the paragraph. I also note the lack of Pinocchios awarded to He, Trump as regards to the tweet that touched this whole thing off.

If only there had been someone who warned us all this was coming, we might have been prepared.

It would be a capital mistake to believe that Ms. Clinton's years as a senator, and as a presidential candidate, and as secretary of state—to say nothing of the postpresidential popularity of her husband—have somehow put all the ghosts of the 1990s to rest. The political climate is even wilder now, the political conversation, in many quarters, even further detached from reality than it was when Rush Limbaugh openly passed along a report that Vince Foster had died in some Washington pied-à-terre, only to have his body moved to Fort Marcy Park. There are thousands of little Limbaughs now, on the radio and on the Internet. A lot of mainstream political journalism is being practiced by young people whose formative lessons in the business were not Woodward and Bernstein chasing down lead after futile lead, but rather Matt Drudge ruling the world in the 1990s, with all the elite press chasing after him. I would like to believe we all have learned as much as we've needed to learn from that incredible decade of enabled slander. I also would like to believe in unicorns.

Gotta get back to the kitchen now. Tonight's gonna be a zoo.