The Patriot Post® · Thursday Opinion

Best of Right Opinion

• Mona Charen: The Uses of Disgrace
• Tony Perkins: Senate Tax Force Aims for ObamaCare
• Ed Feulner: Extra Money for Defense Could End Years of Underfunding
• Larry Elder: No, Colin Kaepernick Is No Muhammad Ali
• Cal Thomas: A Moving Experience

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Mona Charen: “Some liberals are now coming around to the idea that, as Matt Yglesias of Vox put it: ‘I wonder how much healthier a place we’d be in as a society today if Bill Clinton had resigned in shame back in 1998.’ The key words are ‘in shame.’ Bill Clinton’s shamelessness — and his party’s acquiescence in it — corrupted our culture in profound ways. What we choose to shame or overlook determines what kind of society we are. We didn’t want to hold him to account, and so we told ourselves convenient lies, such as that it ‘was just sex.’ It wasn’t. It was classic harassment, and assault, and abuse of power, and perjury. But his worst transgression was refusing to acknowledge our unwritten code of honor. If he had done the right thing and resigned, he would have taken the disgrace on his own back, where it belonged. By brazening it out, he made all of us complicit in it. His refusal to resign said, ‘I’m an abusive pig, and you are a country of abusive pigs if you permit me to remain in office.’ Inevitably, because we let Bill Clinton off the hook, we had to downplay the seriousness of his offenses. So here we are. It is quite possible that Harvey Weinstein and Anthony Weiner and Kevin Spacey and Roger Ailes and the rest of the rotten roster of sex abusers thought, even if only in the back of their minds, that if they got caught, in our age, this sort of thing gets a wink and a nod. After all, it’s just sex.”