I didn’t think Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick would be players in next year’s campaign, but now that we’ve been told by Mrs. Bill Clinton that they have “the right to be believed,” I dare say a cable news interview or two is in order.

Which Republican candidate will take the easy lay-up by pointing out that the Clintons are not in, shall we say, an ideal position from which to lecture people about believing rape accusers? I’m guessing Rand Paul, who’s showed before that he’s willing to go bareknuckle on the two of them over Bill’s scandals. It won’t be Trump, in any case. That wedding invitation would be even harder to explain in hindsight.

Hillary Clinton pledged to confront rape and sexual assault on college campuses if elected president at a Monday speech at Northern Iowa University…

She lauded the Obama administration’s work on the issue and promised to carry the torch if elected president. The White House launched the “It’s On Us” campaign last year targeted at ending sexual assaults on college campuses and authored a “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 that spelled out the Department of Education’s views on schools’ responsibility to combat the issue.
 
“I want to send a message to all of the survivors,” she said.
 
“Don’t let anyone silence your voice, you have the right to be heard, the right [to] be believed, and we are with you as you go forward.”

Broaddrick has accused Hillary of threatening her after the alleged rape; Willey claims Hillary led a “terror campaign” against women who’ve reported some sort of sexual contact with Bill, wanted or unwanted, and says of her, “She is the war on women, as far as I’m concerned.” How many enterprising journalists out there will note that the “right to be believed,” although a lovely talking point to mask the terrifying illiberal noises being made by Democratic policymakers lately over the Great Campus Rape Panic, is the antithesis of pretty much everything the Clintons said when they were in the White House in the 1990s?

If the Willey and Broaddrick episodes are simply too icky for our intrepid media to revisit, though, how about noting the fact that Hillary Clinton was quite skilled at demolishing rape accusers when she was still practicing as a lawyer? Ain’t no “right to be believed” on the witness stand when Bill’s better half is in the courtroom:

In a long, emotional interview with The Daily Beast, she accused Clinton of intentionally lying about her in court documents, going to extraordinary lengths to discredit evidence of the rape, and later callously acknowledging and laughing about her attackers’ guilt on the recordings.

“Hillary Clinton took me through Hell,” the victim said. The Daily Beast agreed to withhold her name out of concern for her privacy as a victim of sexual assault…

On the tapes, Clinton, who speaks in a Southern drawl, appears to acknowledge that she was aware of her client’s guilt, brags about successfully getting the only piece of physical evidence thrown out of court, and laughs about it all whimsically.

“He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Clinton says on the recording, failing to hold back some chuckles.

Eh, none of it matters. The e-mail scandal has media legs partly because it’s new dirt and partly because it fits the narrative that Hillary and Bill are shady, wily characters. Her finger-wagging about sexual assault despite her long, dismal background on the subject has no legs because people simply cannot and will not believe that the First! Woman! President! could possibly be weak on that issue. Hillary knows it too, which is why she felt safe to lecture about it today. If she felt vulnerable about it, she would have kept her distance.