By Jack Limpert
Glenn Kessler, who writes “The Fact Checker” column for the Washington Post, usually examines claims about issues like the debt limit and Obamacare but Sunday the hed on his column was: “Rand Paul calls Clinton a ‘sexual predator,’ but the facts don’t support his claim.”
Wow, let’s look at those facts. Gennifer Flowers? Clinton under oath acknowledged a sexual encounter with her. Monica Lewinsky? Intern at the White House whose affair with Clinton fueled impeachment charges. Dolly Kyle Browning? A high-school friend who said in a sworn declaration that she had had 22-year off-and-on relationship with Clinton. Elizabeth Ward Gracen? A former Miss America who said she had a one-night stand with Clinton…
And how about Paula Jones? She filed a sexual harrassment suit against Clinton, who settled the suit for $850,000 with no apology or admission of guilt. Juanita Broderick? She alleged Clinton had raped her 21 years earlier but Clinton denied it and no charges were brought. Kathleen Wiley? The former White House aide claimed that Clinton groped her in his office in 1993, on the same day when her husband, facing embezzlement charges, died in an apparent suicide.
That’s livening up the A-section of the Sunday Washington Post.
Kessler then quotes political analyst Kirsten Powers in USA Today as saying that “no court of law ever found Clinton guilty of the accusations.” That really helps to rebuild Clinton’s reputation. But then Kessler quotes Peter Baker, ex of the Post, now with the New York Times, as saying in his book, The Breach, an account of the impeachment saga, that House investigators found in the files of the independent prosecutor that Paula Jones’s lawyers had collected the names of 21 women they suspected had a sexual relationship with Clinton.
Finally, after dragging Clinton’s name through all this dirt, Kessler awards Rand Paul three Pinocchios for claiming, without sufficient proof, that Clinton is a sexual predator.
Since checking facts can be shown to be so much fun, how about:
Is that sportswriter right that Dan Snyder is the worst owner in the history of the NFL?
Or how about the charges in the book, The Everything Store, that Jeff Bezos runs a company where the in-house culture is “notoriously confrontational” and many employees “live in perpetual fear” of getting fired.
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Kessler’s condemning Rand Paul, while laying out almost all the dirt ever dug up on Clinton, echoes the newsstand strategy at Henry Luce’s Time magazine back when pornography wasn’t so easily available and respectable people didn’t want to be caught reading it.
Once a year Time would publish a cover story condemning pornography in America. When you opened it up, Time took readers on a tour of all the horrors of pornography, complete with photos that gave the reader pretty good clues as to what was out there in the dirty book stores.
I ran the Kessler-Luce comparison by an editor friend in the Midwest who remembered those Time cover stories: “One of my friends in high school went down to the News Depot and bought up all copies of one of those Time covers on sex and pornography, then resold them for a profit to his classmates. Yes, I paid up and never regretted it!”
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