Progressive pretension:
New York Times essayist Jill Filipovic and selective compassion

In an overly lengthy, 8/24 New York Times essay, writer Jill Filipivic attempts, predictably without success, to paint Hillary Clinton as a sort of Everywoman. ("Donald Trump was a creep. Too bad Hillary couldn't say it.")

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/sunday/donald-was-a-creep-too-bad-hillary-couldnt-say-it.html?ref=todayspaper

Clinton's televised debate with Donald Trump was, Filipovic argues, just like threatening encounters real life women suffer: Sidewalk stalkers, workplace discriminators, subway lurkers.

Debate competitors, too, are of that detestable rank, Filipovic wrongly imagines. 

Genuine, vicious, disgusting sexual crimes well deserve universal 
castigation. They are far distant from the basic, respectful goodness hoped extant in all men. But, momentarily standing near an adversary during a debate televised before millions is hardly a legitimate example.

Distasteful though it certainly is, the following illustration of actual sex criminality is relevant to this Hillary Clinton discussion.

In 1975, then-Arkansas defense counsel Hillary Clinton championed the stomach-turning cause of child-rapist Thomas Alfred Taylor. Hillary's contemporary advocates argue Clinton did not choose to defend Taylor, but was appointed to do so. That distinction, though, does not justify Hillary's laughing about the case years later, at which time she was no longer professionally associated with Taylor. (An audio tape of her shameful chortling can be found here: http://freebeacon.com/politics/the-hillary-tapes/.)

During the debate Filipovic now daubs with garish, melodramatic hues, Hillary refused to apologize to, or even so much as look toward, Taylor's child sex crime victim, Kathy Shelton. (Trump had seated Shelton, and several alleged sexual assault victims of Bill Clinton's, in a front row. Footage of utterly caught-out Bill's strained face during the event was priceless.)

Filipovic mentioned none of that, of course. It would, obviously, conflict with her contrived caring for women's plights.

Has Filipovic ever written a piece for the New York Times (or any publication) explicitly condemning Thomas Alfred Taylor for his monstrous predation? Has she ever used epithets identical to the ones she now hurls at the President of the United States to describe either Taylor or Hillary, his laughing mouthpiece? 

Or, for that matter, has Filipovic ever condemned notoriously lecherous and allegedly law-violative Bill Clinton? Perhaps even middle eastern nations like Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Qatar, whose donation dollars the Clintons avariciously amass (without apparent care that those primitive countries mistreat women and gays in manners too horrible to detail)?

Somewhat early in 1988 film drama The Accused, the lower middle class rape victim portrayed by Jodie Foster confronts Kelly McGillis, who played what amounted to a limousine liberal. McGillis had abandoned Foster. Her mercenary heart simply was not in a case that offered scant opportunity. 

Finding McGillis at an upscale, progressive professionals cocktail party, Foster railed at her for hypocrisy, for only pretending at concern for sexual assault victims. And McGillis, resultantly self-aware and repentant, pursued Foster's cause to eventual courtroom vindication.

But that's the stuff of cinema, and not likely to ensue for Hillary's New York Times fan-girl Jill Filipovic.



----------