Is Hillary Any Better?

The Clinton campaign and its media facilitators are making hay out Trump's juvenile insults of a Venezuelan beauty queen whom he twenty years ago called "Miss Piggy." The insight into Trump's character, or lack thereof, that we glean from this regrettable episode may well dissuade some people from voting for him. After all, anyone who treats women with the sort of vulgar disdain that Trump apparently has is not the sort of person one would feel comfortable voting for.

Unless the alternative is just as bad, or even worse. And, if what has been claimed about Hillary for decades is credible, it's hard even for a Donald Trump to match the maltreatment of women she has visited upon some of them.

Not only are women in her employ paid less than men, but she has throughout her career sought to destroy women she perceived to be threats to the political careers of either her or her husband.

When, for example, woman after woman came forward in the 1990s to accuse her husband of being a sexual predator - of exposing himself, of groping, even of raping them - Hillary Clinton led a behind the scenes effort to smear these victims of her husband's sybaritic impulses and to destroy their credibility in the public eye.

This is not hearsay. It's the testimony not only of the women themselves but also of loyal staffers in her employ. A piece in the Clintonophilic Washington Post, which actually strives to make Hillary look sympathetic, is nevertheless revealing insofar as it hints at how she treated her husband's paramours. Here are some excerpts:

Hillary Clinton has wrestled with allegations surrounding her husband’s infidelities for much of their 40-year marriage, including a sexual harassment lawsuit, a grand jury investigation and an impeachment vote centered on his untruthfulness about a relationship with a White House intern.

The Trump campaign has argued that the issue facing Hillary Clinton as a candidate is not the behavior of her husband but the role she played in shaping responses to accusers. She discredited claims later revealed to be true and worked behind the scenes to help manage the allegations, according to former aides.

In November, the issue surfaced again after the Democratic candidate sent out a tweet saying that assault victims deserve to be believed. At a public forum in December, a questioner confronted Clinton and asked whether her comment also applied to her husband’s accusers. “I would say that everybody should be believed at first,” she said, “until they are disbelieved based on evidence.”

When Bill Clinton launched a presidential run in 1991, his wife and senior staff considered how to deal with what came to be known as “bimbo eruptions.”

Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

Six years later, Bill Clinton acknowledged a sexual encounter with Flowers.

As other women emerged, Hillary Clinton helped forge aggressive de­fenses.

Former White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos recalled in his memoir discussing [with Ms Clinton] a woman’s allegation published in Penthouse Magazine. He said that after her husband dismissed it as untrue during a meeting, Hillary Clinton said, “We have to destroy her story.” By July 1992, the campaign hired private detective Jack Palladino to investigate the accusers involved in two dozen allegations.

“She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies,” Stephanopoulos wrote, describing Hillary Clinton’s reaction.(emphasis mine)

While practicing law in 1975 Hillary Clinton defended a 41 year-old drifter accused of raping a 12 year-old girl named Kathy Shelton. Clinton knew the guy was guilty but got the charges reduced to illicit fondling and laughed about how she did it. In fact, she blamed the twelve year-old Shelton at trial for having encouraged the man even though there was no evidence Shelton had done any such thing.

Shelton, now 54, says Clinton is 'lying' when she claims to be a lifelong defender of women and girls.

Shelton said Clinton accused her during the case of 'seeking out older men', and demanded that the 12-year-old undergo a grueling court-ordered psychiatric examination to determine whether she was 'mentally unstable'.

'I don't think [Clinton's] for women or girls. I think she's lying, I think she said anything she can to get in the campaign and win,' Shelton said. 'If she was [an advocate for women and children], she wouldn't have done that to me at 12 years old.'

While Shelton gave an anonymous interview to the Daily Beast in 2014, she said wants to start speaking out publicly, in part because 'I think a lot of people would look at [Clinton] in a different way' after hearing her story directly.

'I want to speak to the world. Out there at the White House, so everyone can hear me,' said Shelton. 'That's always been my thing since the anger's built up. I want to speak out like [Clinton] does, and let the whole world hear it.' During the case, Clinton accused the 12-year-old of 'seek[ing] out older men' and 'engag[ing] in fantasizing' in court affidavits, and later laughed while discussing aspects of the case in a recently-unearthed audiotape from the 1980s.

On the audiotape, Clinton indicated that she believed Taylor, her client, was guilty, saying that his ability to pass a lie detector test 'forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs'.

Nor is it just women who've been slimed and demeaned by Mrs. Clinton. According to a Daily Mail story Hillary was overheard calling mentally challenged children 'f*****g ree-tards' and caught on record blurting out the terms 'stupid k**e and 'f***ing Jew b*****d', while Bill called the Reverend Jesse Jackson a 'G**damned n****r':

Dolly Kyle - who was just 11 when she first crossed paths with Bill, dated him through high school and began sleeping with him once they graduated - published the claims about the Clinton couple's racial epithets and politics in her new book, Hillary: The Other Woman.

She writes of one occasion, when developmentally challenged children were having difficulty picking up the eggs at a traditional Easter egg hunt on the grounds of the governor's mansion during Bill's tenure in the Arkansas state house.

Reluctant hostess Hillary had enough.

'The frustrated Me-First Lady demanded, "When are they going to get those f*****g ree-tards out of here?"' Dolly writes.

Behind the Reverend Jesse Jackson's back, the Clinton duo called him, 'That G**damned n****r'.

It could be, of course, that Dolly Kyle is lying about all this in her book, although no one has denied the allegations or even claimed that it doesn't sound like the sort of language Ms. Clinton would employ. Nevertheless, the point is that if a close friend or former lover of Donald Trump had published allegations like this, if someone had alleged that Trump denigrated prominent blacks and degraded mentally handicapped children, every liberal news organization in the country would be devoting every resource they could muster to digging up more on the story. Ms. Clinton, however, gets a pass while the media clears the decks to cover Miss Piggy.