“Bimbo eruptions.” “I would crucify her.” “We have to destroy her story.” These are just some of the things said and done by Hillary Clinton to undermine women who accused her husband, Bill Clinton, of infidelity and even assault.
The Democratic presidential nominee is exploiting a video from 2005 that surfaced Friday, showing her Republican rival, Donald Trump, joking about groping women.
Trump, while apologizing, has pointed to Bill Clinton’s behavior towards women in the Oval Office and throughout his career — and Hillary Clinton’s role in enabling it.
Though Trump is not running against Bill, his defenders have focused on Mrs. Clinton’s treatment of the many women who accused her husband of impropriety and even assault — including Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broaddrick, and others.
The Washington Post recently recalled the pattern of Hillary Clinton’s defenses of her husband against what she called “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.”
The Post noted: “Six years later, Bill Clinton acknowledged a sexual encounter with Flowers.”
It added that when the Lewinsky scandal emerged, in which Clinton had oral sex with the then-White House intern in the Oval Office, Hillary Clinton refused to credit the story of his accuser, choosing to believe her husband’s lies instead. She reportedly called Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon.”
Former Bill Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, now an anchor for ABC News, wrote in his memoir All Too Human: A Political Education that Hillary Clinton had to “savage her enemies” during the Lewinsky affair, repeating a pattern from previous scandals involving her husband’s behavior towards women.
In 1991, for example, when a woman named Connie Hamzy emerged to accuse Bill Clinton of having an affair with her, Hillary Clinton said, “We have to destroy her story,” according to Stephanopoulos. He then set about arranging affidavits from people who could back up Bill Clinton’s story: “We’d survived our first bimbo eruption,” Stephanopoulos recalled.
Later, Stephanopoulos wrote, he wondered whether he had been “complicit” in Bill Clinton’s behavior “because my defense of Clinton against past bimbo eruptions had been predicated on my belief that he wouldn’t create new ones.”
The same might be said of Hillary Clinton.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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