I’d like to say one more thing about Journolist, the subject of my column today. Most of the Journolist material has to do with the Obama years — how the Left must respond to the Jeremiah Wright controversy; how they must respond to the Scott Brown victory, etc. But, to me, the most interesting extract has to do with the Clinton years. Here is a writer for The Nation:

I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita.

Here I will quote my column:

It may have been “no fun,” but she did it, didn’t she? They all did. They donned their “presidential kneepads,” in the immortal words of Nina Burleigh (a Time magazine writer). Burleigh wrote, “I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
Yup — and line up they did.

I grew up with the slogan “Believe the woman.” In fact, I believe it was on bumper stickers, in Ann Arbor. For years, men — powerful men (and they were almost all powerful, by definition) — used and abused women, and got away with it. Their testimony weighed a lot more than women’s. The slogan was born, “Believe the woman.” It was part of our liberal credo.

But in the Clinton years, all of that changed — because the testimony of women was dangerous to a Democratic presidency. Jerry Falwell was getting the upper hand. All of a sudden, women had to be lying trash. You remember: Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, and you’ll get inbred floozies to say anything.

As readers may know, I am not a great fan of Jimmy Carter, quite the opposite. But I’ve always admired one of his slogans, or one of his set-pieces. He’s said it a million times: as a candidate, as a president, and as an ex-president. In Plains, they had a schoolteacher, Miss Julia Coleman, who taught the kids, “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

Tell ’em, Miss Julia.