The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => Topic started by: mystery-ak on May 06, 2014, 02:41:55 pm
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http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-speaks (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-speaks)
MAY 6, 2014, 10:00 AM
Exclusive: Monica Lewinsky Writes About Her Affair with President Clinton
by Vanity Fair
(http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-speaks/.i.2.s-monica-lewinsky-vf-pr.png)
Monica Lewinsky writes in Vanity Fair for the first time about her affair with President Clinton: “It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress.” She also says: “I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”
After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”), Lewinsky, 40, says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)”
The full story is available May 8 in the digital edition. Subscribe now. The magazine will be on national newsstands and available in an audio edition on May 13.
Clearing the Air
Maintaining that her affair with Clinton was one between two consenting adults, Lewinsky writes that it was the public humiliation she suffered in the wake of the scandal that permanently altered the direction of her life: “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. . . . The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”
Job Hunting
After the scandal, writes Lewinsky, “I turned down offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do.” After moving between London (where she got her master’s degree in social psychology at the London School of Economics), Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, Oregon, she interviewed for numerous jobs in communications and branding with an emphasis on charity campaigns, but, “because of what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my ‘history,’” she writes, “I was never ‘quite right’ for the position. In some cases, I was right for all the wrong reasons, as in ‘Of course, your job would require you to attend our events.’ And, of course, these would be events at which press would be in attendance.”
Why She’s Going Public
When Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who was secretly streamed via Webcam kissing another man, committed suicide in September 2010, Lewinsky writes, she was brought to tears, but her mother was especially distraught: “She was reliving 1998, when she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She was replaying those weeks when she stayed by my bed, night after night, because I, too, was suicidal. The shame, the scorn, and the fear that had been thrown at her daughter left her afraid that I would take my own life—a fear that I would be literally humiliated to death.” Lewinsky clarifies that she has never actually attempted suicide, but had strong suicidal temptations several times during the investigations and during one or two periods after.
Lewinsky writes that following Clementi’s tragedy “my own suffering took on a different meaning. Perhaps by sharing my story, I reasoned, I might be able to help others in their darkest moments of humiliation. The question became: How do I find and give a purpose to my past?” She also says that, when news of her affair with Clinton broke in 1998, not only was she arguably the most humiliated person in the world, but, “thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.” Her current goal, she says, “is to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment and to start speaking on this topic in public forums.”
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When all else fails, cast your lot with a hapless mentally disturbed homosexual youth and hope for a little sympathy as his fellow victim.
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I think it's good that Monica is coming back into the public eye.
It will remind people of what a sleaze Clinton is, and how complicit his 'wife' was in the lies told about all his 'bimbos'...........including Monica.
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http://www.mediaite.com/tv/lynne-cheney-suggests-hillary-approved-monica-piece-to-get-it-out-of-the-way/ (http://www.mediaite.com/tv/lynne-cheney-suggests-hillary-approved-monica-piece-to-get-it-out-of-the-way/)
Lynne Cheney Suggests Hillary Approved Monica Piece to ‘Get It Out of the Way’
by Josh Feldman | 8:48 pm, May 6th, 2014
With Hillary Clinton almost assuredly running for president in 2016, Monica Lewinsky‘s Vanity Fair piece today set off a lot of people’s conspiratorial alarm bells, with some suspicion anti-Clinton forces might have been behind it. But on The O’Reilly Factor tonight, Lynne Cheney suggested it might have actually been pushed by Clinton’s team themselves.
Guest host Laura Ingraham talked with Cheney about liberal attacks on the Bush administration, and Cheney briefly addressed it before pivoting to Lewinsky’s piece and making an observation. She said, “I really wonder if this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way. Would Vanity Fair publish anything of Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t want in Vanity Fair?”
Cheney pointed out that Rand Paul had been bringing up Monicagate earlier this year and looked like it would be a big issue further on, so, she said, maybe the Clintons are “getting it out of the way” so they can call it “old news” by the time 2016 comes around.
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:thumbsup2:
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Obedient Clinton lackey Slate (http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/05/06/_monica_lewinsky_breaks_her_silence.html) gets all huffy about it:
... Slate, which is the only magazine you usually need to read, went with the duller-sounding headline "Monica Lewinsky Will Write About Bill Clinton in Vanity Fair." This headline had the advantage of being true, whereas the "silence-breaking" headlines made no sense. What silence was being broken? The Huffington Post notes that Lewinsky "is opening up about her affair with former President Bill Clinton for the first time in years," but that's not the same as breaking "silence." The Times reports that Lewinsky "says she became reclusive during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president in 2008 for fear that she would be used for political purposes."
Still not the same as a person "breaking silence," right? It's been 15 years since Lewinsky co-operated with Andrew Morton for Monica's Story, which you can pick up for $0.01 on Amazon, so hot is the interest in this story. (Even after you pay shipping, it's cheaper than a copy of Vanity Fair.) It's been just 12 years since Lewinsky co-operated with Monica: Black and White, a documentary she promoted on cable news. It's been 10 years since Bill Clinton published My Life, his memoir, and Lewinsky broke her silence to accuse the former president of lying.
It really doesn't seem like Lewinsky has anything new to add about the facts of the most-thoroughly reported extra-marital intercourse of all time. But let's pretend that she does.
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More from Slate (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/06/monica_lewinsky_to_speak_out_in_vanity_fair_about_bill_clinton_what_else.html) (if you can muddle through the incoherence of it all):
It Doesn't Matter What Monica Lewinsky Writes in Vanity Fair. We Will Never Let Her Move On.
By Amanda Hess
Monica Lewinsky has spoken. Or more accurately, she will speak, by way of a personal essay in the June issue of Vanity Fair looking back on her '90s relationship with President Clinton. (Oh, you hadn’t heard?) So far, Lewinsky has not said much—the magazine teased just a few short blurbs from her forthcoming piece, plus a stylish pic of Monica in repose under the headline “Shame and Survival,” but let’s be honest: Most readers who will eagerly click through to this “exclusive” don’t care what she actually has to say.
Lewinsky has dared to appear in public and open her mouth, and that’s enough to send the Internet back into a Clinton-era time warp of free-association intern-shaming: Monica Lewinsky is an oral-sex-having (“Don't blow your chance to read about Monica Lewinsky”), gold-digging (“ ‘It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,’ says the girl who's been cashing in on them since '98”), total has-been (“16 years ago! Your 15 minutes were up a long time ago!”).
And what else would we have Monica Lewinsky do? In the years after the scandal, Lewinsky traveled from London to Los Angeles to New York to Portland, earning a master’s degree in social psychology at the London School of Economics, then hunting in vain for communications and branding gigs with a focus on charitable giving. But “because of what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my ‘history,’ ” she writes in the snippet Vanity Fair has released, “I was never ‘quite right’ for the position. In some cases, I was right for all the wrong reasons, as in ‘Of course, your job would require you to attend our events.’ And, of course, these would be events at which press would be in attendance.” Lewinsky is 40 years old, but she’s been allowed just one career track—disgraced former mistress—and now we’re dinging her for attempting to make a living from it. (Side note: Don’t you just love Bill Clinton? What a rock star.)
When we talk about relationships between superiors and their workers, we often focus on the power differential. (Did Clinton’s position over Lewinsky compel her to literally drop to her knees?) In what I’ve seen of the piece, Lewinsky is adamant that her relationship with Clinton was consensual and that the extreme gulf in power between a president and an intern revealed itself after the fact. “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position,” Lewinsky writes. “The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.” While powerful men have the ability to rebound from their “indiscretions” and secure their fortunes, young women—who are often singled out for sexual attention at a time when they have little career experience and even less cash—can be branded forever by the incident. As Bill Clinton rakes in cash off of book deals and speaking engagements like any other former president, Lewinsky is left to feed on scraps from the scandal.
While she may forever be a national joke, the Vanity Fair piece reveals that Lewinsky is clearly a sharp and funny woman, as evidenced by her quibble with her appearance in the Beyoncé song “Partition”: “Thanks, Beyoncé,” she writes, “but if we’re verbing, I think you meant ‘Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,’ not ‘Monica Lewinsky’d.” She’s right, but Beyoncé’s slip-up is understandable: We’re still living in a world where women are defined by the sex they have, while men are defined by, you know, other things they say and do. Now, Lewinsky is attempting to mine an alternate angle on her scandal to forge a different career path: As she writes in Vanity Fair, “thanks to the Drudge Report, I was … possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.” Her current goal “is to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment and to start speaking on this topic in public forums.” I hope she is paid handsomely for her time.
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Andrea Peyser of the NY Post (http://nypost.com/2014/05/07/a-plea-for-self-pitying-tone-deaf-monica-lewinsky-to-go-away/) has had it.
Monica Lewinsky should shut up and go away
By Andrea Peyser
May 7, 2014 | 2:06am
Make her go away!
I’d actually feel sorry for Monica Lewinsky — if she weren’t so damn infuriating.
She’s America’s favorite beret-wearing former intern, whose very name has become a synonym for a sex act she eagerly performed on her knees, a dame who rocketed to fame for failing to dry-clean a blue dress stained with the seed of the then-leader of the free world.
Now, Lewinsky, 40, wants our pity and, perhaps, a job she can perform while sitting upright. And — drum roll, please — she doesn’t blame former President Bill Clinton, the alpha male before whom she famously kneeled.
The pair’s sexploits took place in and around the Oval Office, including in a bathroom and a hallway, in 1995, when Lewinsky was a willing pup of 21. This brought about Clinton’s impeachment — although the Senate acquitted him of lying under oath and obstruction of justice in 1999 — and caused strife in his marriage. Ultimately, public sympathy may help catapult his wife, Hillary Clinton, to the presidency in 2016.
As for Lewinsky, she will not be ignored.
After a decade of precious near-silence — after she blabbed to Barbara Walters, after her handbag company failed, after a pitchwoman stint for Jenny Craig diets, after she hosted a dating reality-TV series that lasted five episodes on Fox TV, authorized a biography, participated in a self-serving HBO TV documentary and graduated from the London School of Economics with a master’s degree in social psychology — Lewinsky has hunted unsuccessfully for a job from New York to Los Angeles to Portland, Ore.
Now, she wants a payday.
In an exasperatingly tone-deaf piece in Vanity Fair, set to be released digitally Thursday and hit newsstands May 13, she gave the scoundrel Bill Clinton a free pass for romping with her in a particularly degrading fashion.
In excerpts released on the magazine’s Web site and in a press release, she wrote, “Sure, my boss took advantage of me.’’ Ya think? “But I will always remain firm on this point: It was a consensual relationship.’’
“It seems that nothing will stop Lewinsky from making a big Lewinsky of herself.”
In an egregiously offensive plea for understanding, Lewinsky compared her situation to that of cyberbullying victim Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old New Jersey college freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2010, killing himself. This, after his roommate set up a Webcam and watched with friends as Clementi kissed another man.
What an imbecile. Lewinsky potentially wounded Clementi’s family, folks who’ve already suffered so much. And she wrote that she didn’t even attempt suicide! Lewinsky just thought about it. Her mom feared for her life, too.
It seems that nothing will stop Lewinsky from making a big Lewinsky of herself.
She got in a good dig at Hillary Clinton, who, according to the files of her late pal Diane Blair, once called Lewinsky a “narcissistic Looney Tune’’ and partly blamed herself for her hubby’s cheating ways. Lewinsky found Hillary’s impulse to blame the women in her husband’s life “troubling.’’
The ex-intern faulted a long list of people for the “abuse’’ she said she suffered after the Clinton scandal became public — “the Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle and the media.’’
Lewinsky, I’d recommend that you use your special talents to forge an exciting new career in whatever it is you do best.
Now hush up.
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Absolutely. Hillary approved the Monica piece to get it out of the way. Hillary triumphs again -- Lewinsky is trashed and Hillary is reprises her role as the martyr.
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I must have stepped through a portal. What year is it?
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I think it's good that Monica is coming back into the public eye.
It will remind people of what a sleaze Clinton is, and how complicit his 'wife' was in the lies told about all his 'bimbos'...........including Monica.
It may have the opposite effect. This morning on a local NYC talk/info-tainment program Lewinsky was trashed and HRC was portrayed as the the wife who "was going through a difficult period in her life". They even trashed Kenneth Starr. The only ones unscathed were Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
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I think it's good that Monica is coming back into the public eye.
It will remind people of what a sleaze Clinton is, and how complicit his 'wife' was in the lies told about all his 'bimbos'...........including Monica.
Simply clearing the decks. By the time the campaign begins in earnest, Benghazi will be a closed book, and now, any mention of Lewinsky will be met with derision.
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How long of an article can that be?
"I blew him. There was a cigar involved."
The End.
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How long of an article can that be?
"I blew him. There was a cigar involved."
The End.
Most lucrative blow she ever gave.
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It may have the opposite effect. This morning on a local NYC talk/info-tainment program Lewinsky was trashed and HRC was portrayed as the the wife who "was going through a difficult period in her life". They even trashed Kenneth Starr. The only ones unscathed were Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Perhaps among some it will have the opposite effect, but for most people who were 'of age' at the time, what Clinton did was disgusting, and he was the subject of jokes.
Since then, somehow, he has become a noble senior statesman.
I think even the reminder that Hillary was a 'victim' of a serial cheater will make some wonder if she is strong enough to be President. Who want's a victim as a leader?
And if the word gets out to more people that Hillary was complicit in the abuse of multiple women, it might taint her more.
What Monica has done is bring back the subject, and if Hillary should win the nomination, the response of the Clinton 'people' to her after her 'consensual' experience, and the abuse she took as a result, might be an effective way to campaign against her.
(Hopeless optimism? Perhaps......... ).
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Who want's a victim as a leader?
The same people who want an unaccomplished, narcissistic, drug addled, Marxist as a leader.
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“I turned down offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
Hmmm...
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The same people who want an unaccomplished, narcissistic, drug addled, Marxist as a leader.
Yeah........ but the rest of America isn't happy with him now that they know he's not as 'cool' as they thought he was.
And the only people who think Hillary is cool............have serious problems................
I still think the memory of Monica will hurt Hillary, not help her.
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"I turned down offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
Oh, come on!
Even Jewish girls will let you "go there" for that kind of money.
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Oh, come on!
Even Jewish girls will let you "go there" for that kind of money.
:thud:
:silly: