Sometimes I wish journalists were doctors – so we could sue them for malpractice. In her July 24 column on Weinergate, syndicated columnist Ruth Marcus notes that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, and her mentor, Hillary Clinton, both had to deal with unreliable spouses.
But, Marcus says, there is a “difference between Slick Willie and Carlos Danger, and therefore the difference between Hillary Clinton [who stood by Bill in the 1992 interview on “60 Minutes”] and Huma Abedin, is the distance between plausible deniability (even to oneself) and uncontroverted proof.
“Post-Monica, at least post-Bill’s Monica confession — you did not see Hillary Clinton making the case for her husband. You saw her, back to the camera, with Chelsea bridging the physical and emotional distance between husband and wife as they trudged to the helicopter en route to Martha’s Vineyard.”
Despite her plausible deniability hedge, this interpretation is utterly and absolutely false. Of course Hillary knew that Bill was cheat – as two even more famous Washington Post reporters have detailed. David Maraniss has written that Bill began cheating on her while they were dating at Yale Law school in the 1970s. Carl Bernstein reported that Bill planned to divorce Hillary in 1989 so he could be with one of his lovers. He also says that she told her friend, Diane Blair, that she hoped the spotlight of the presidency would force her husband to control in his extra-marital appetite.
If your spouse cheats on you once, you might not know. If your spouse does it as often as others eat cereal, you know – especially when you tell your best friend you know!
