The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Politicians' Sex Lives Are Fair Game
Talk radio host and syndicated columnist Erick Erickson recently hit “both parties” for nominating “terrible candidates.” In explaining his thoughts on Kamala Harris, he used colorful language to describe a sex act she is supposed to have committed while having an affair with then-California Speaker Willie Brown in the 1990s. Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell took exception, and then Mark Hemingway took exception to her exception. Follow?
Well, in any case, here are some of Hemingway’s thoughts about the sex lives of politicians and the feigned outrage of so many.
Setting aside Erickson’s crude imagery, I’ve covered Kamala Harris’ relationship history more extensively before, but here’s a summary of the facts as we know them: When Harris was a subordinate in the San Francisco DA’s office, she started dating Willie Brown, the most powerful man in California politics, who was 31 years older and married. After the current DA passed over Kamala Harris, a woman who failed the bar exam and is not exactly known for her mastery of the law, Brown was instrumental in alienating the existing DA, and was personally involved in raising money and running Harris’ successful campaign to get elected district attorney. Once in office, Harris let a number of Willie Brown’s friends off the hook when they were facing serious charges — including an egregious case where she let a city contractor and Willie Brown donor skate after endangering people’s lives after defrauding taxpayers by using cheaper, structurally unsound recycled concrete to build bridges and other important structures. This was all reported on in detail by local San Francisco media when it happened, who aren’t exactly in the business of pushing right-wing smears.
And yet, Sarah Longwell thinks Erickson is a bad person because he rather bluntly states the fact that Kamala Harris abased herself personally and engaged in political corruption at the behest of a man who demonstrably advanced her political career. I would have been more circumspect than Erickson, but 26 years after Bill Clinton’s “dalliance with an intern,” I’m supposed to believe Longwell and her colleagues are on their fainting couches because a pundit made a reference to oral sex?
Hemingway touches on Clinton’s relationship and trips with “notorious pedophile” Jeffrey Epstein before noting:
Not that any of this made a difference. Bill Clinton was a primetime speaker at the DNC last week, campaigning on behalf of a woman who by all reasonable appearances engaged in political corruption on behalf of a dirty politician she was having a transactional sexual affair with. Weird how these same people were not outraged by that.
At the same time, Trump’s sex life, which however disdainful, was never a matter of public corruption. And yet the whole reason they’re running around saying Trump is a Convicted Felon™ is that the Democratic Party engaged in an all-hands-on-deck effort to try and turn Trump’s attempt to keep an entirely private affair with an onscreen prostitute from becoming public knowledge. By presenting an entirely novel legal theory into a courtroom presided over by a corrupt judge who had donated money, in violation of judicial ethics rules, to Trump’s political opponent, they got a partisan New York jury to buy it.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to argue this incident merits more legal scrutiny than what Harris did in San Francisco.
He concludes:
To be clear, this is not about defending Trump’s private life, which is in many ways indefensible. This is about being honest about the state of American politics. If you want to understand why someone as allegedly immoral as Donald Trump wasn’t immediately kicked off the political stage because of his supposedly outrageous character flaws, you merely have to recognize that the American public rightly understands that the Democrat Party is itself fully in the thrall of figures whose personal dealings and sex lives are in many ways worse than Trump’s peccadilloes.