The Lion In The Winter

"Like a lion in the winter,  I can hear the summer call" ~ Hoyt Axton


Our favorite President Bill, Bill Clinton, made news last week.

In an interview with Craig Melvin on The Today Show, President Bill got all in a huff and wagged his crooked index finger because Mr. Melvin had the nerve to bring up Monica Lewinsky.

Quick history lesson:  In the 90's, President Bill had an "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky.  In the 90's, "inappropriate relationship" meant President Bill had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Of course, if you know anything about President Bill, you know this devolved into a long national conversation about the meaning of the word "is"  and if a particular sexual act counts as sex since if it wasn't intercourse.  It was a difficult time to raise a child, even with a village.

President Bill and writer James Patterson were on The Today Show promoting their new book called  The President is Missing.  It is a novel. (For what it is worth, President Bill and James Patterson will be at The Cobb Energy Center on June 13th to discuss their book.)

Yeah, the book sounds like a bad idea, but I wish I was at the pitch meeting.

"You see, the President is a good old boy from some podunk Southern state that somehow gets an Ivy League education. He has a way with the ladies, despite his wife being some humorless Midwestern hag. Anyway, he has awesome sex with just about every woman in the world. Think combo Don Draper/Jethro Bodine.  I haven't come up with a superpower yet, except for the ability to talk endlessly for twenty hours. 

President Bill was expecting the typical interview of President Bill.  "You're so great, President Bill! Are you disappointed that you couldn't get your midnight basketball bill through Congress?"  Instead, he got a question about Monica Lewinsky.

In case you haven't heard, there's this thing going around called The #MeToo Movement which has caused a lot of powerful men to become suddenly unemployed. President Bill seems to have read about it only in passing.

Melvin asked President Bill if #MeToo has caused President Bill to think how differently he should have handled The Lewinsky Affair and if he feels any responsibility for the pain caused to Lewinsky, who has written she suffers from the type of PTSD that comes from a sexual relationship with The President of The United States.

President Bill:  "No, I felt terrible then, and I came to grips with it".  Way to go, Mr. President.

Melvin then asked if President Bill had apologized to Lewinsky.  The response was classic President Bill.

 "Yes, and nobody believes I got out of that for free. I left the White House $16 million in debt, but you typically have ignored gaping facts in describing this, and I bet you don’t even know them. This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided with me. They were not insensitive to that. I had a sexual harassment policy when I was governor in the eighties. I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor. Women were overrepresented in the attorney general’s office in the seventies, for their percentage in the bar. I have had nothing but women leaders in my office since I left. You are giving one side and omitting facts."

Only Bill Clinton could answer a question about apologizing to someone and add in the overrepresentation of women in the Arkansas Attorney General's Office in the seventies. The Washington Post could not find the exact percentage of women with law licenses in the seventies, but two decades after he was Attorney General it was twenty-two percent and it was probably way lower in 1974.

The Washington Post notes that Clinton didn't leave the White House $16 million in debt. The Post estimates that President Bill was probably "$4 or 5 million" in debt, however, The Clintons' joint 2001 tax return shows $16 million as their earned income.

When pressed about if he actually apologized to Lewinsky, President Bill said " (I've) apologized to everyone in the world.". Then Melvin asked President Bill if he owed Lewinsky a private apology, President Bill said he did not because he had already apologized to everyone in the world 20 years ago, dude.

Even though it was twenty years too late, it was good to see someone in the mainstream press willing to take on President Bill and his wagging crooked finger. The press sees him now as a lion in the winter. Once proud and powerful, now he's just vain and weak.

Well, this didn't go over to well and in rides our country's leading satirist, Stephen Colbert, to ask President Bill if he wanted a "do-over". Of course, everybody has been giving President Bill a mulligan ever since he gave that awful nomination speech for Michael Dukakis 30 years ago. That's his problem. He always got the second, third, fourth, or twentieth chance.

He told Colbert, "that was a very painful thing that happened 20 years ago, and I apologized to my family, to Monica Lewinsky and her family, and to the American people.”  Yes, it was just a thing that happened.  One day, he is the President of the United States and the next thing you know him and Monica are doing the West Memphis Mambo in the Oval Office.

President Bill obviously doesn't understand  The Me Too Movement is about standing up to men's exploitive and abusive behavior, no matter how powerful they are or how many women they employed in the Arkansas Attorney General's office in 1975.

That is what the President is missing.