Blast From The Past
Sally Quinn’s Post article where she elicits quotes from a bipartisan clique of Washington’s elites expressing their utter shame and dismay in response to Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Monica investigation has been criticized over and over. I won’t go line-by-line or explain why it’s so horrible — just read it – but this one quote is just so absurd in light of the events that occurred between Jan 20, 2001 and Jan 20, 2009:
Washington’s insider press corps has shown little pity for any of them. The feeling toward the president is similar.
“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”
The crazy thing about the collective freakout to Monica-gate and Bill Clinton more generally is how little sense it made on its own terms. It’s obvious that the press and the greater Washington elite doesn’t mind being lied to — there was no equivalent freakout about Iran Contra or the pre-war intelligence fiasco — but the fact that they were willing to cut Bush so much slack despite the fact that he, in a deep way, despised Washington as a city and as a social group is really just mind boggling.
