She’s not asking this question idly. Hillary, who’s gearing up for a sub-moronic identity-politics campaign, actually did say recently that rape accusers have “the right to be believed” even though her own husband has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault. How does she resolve that dilemma?
I thought she’d never be asked, for the simple reason that no one in the media would dare risk access to a future Clinton administration by putting her on the spot about it. But sometimes, my friends, the questions don’t come from the media. Sometimes a candidate has to face the voters.
And that’s when magical things can happen.
Here’s the clip, via the Free Beacon. Obviously there’s no good answer to this question, which is why so many righties perked up when she first said something about the right to be believed. She set a trap for herself. If she stands by it now, it means she sides with Juanita Broaddrick over Bill. If she walks it back, which is what she has no choice but to do — accusers should be believed unless the evidence says otherwise, she clarifies — then it undermines the whole point of the pander. The “right to be believed” bit was her way of trying to leverage the feminist frenzy over “rape culture”; she was signaling to young women, whose votes she desperately needs, that she shares the progressive belief that rape defendants are guilty until proven innocent. Now that she’s on the spot, she retreats to the banal point that we should go where the evidence leads us. In practice, the “right to be believed” amounts to nothing more than the idea that the police should investigate when someone claims they’re the victim of a horrendous violent crime. All of us who took first-grade civics can agree.
Exit question: If accusers have a right to be taken seriously, if not quite “believed,” does that mean she took Broaddrick seriously when she first accused Bill of assault? That’s a follow-up question for the next townhall attendee who gets to quiz her.
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