The Externalization of Responsibility: Monica Lewinsky’s Personal Shame

Posted on | October 21, 2014 | 135 Comments

Today’s headlines via Drudge:

Monica Lewinsky: I was ‘in love’
with President Clinton
— New York Post

Monica Lewinsky: Drudge Ruined My Life
— Truth Revolt

This raises a subject long overdue for discussion. The Internet is merely a tool — a very powerful tool, but still just a tool. For Monica Lewinsky to depict herself as “Patient Zero” in an epidemic of “cyberbullying,” as she has done, inspires several questions: Was she genuinely a victim? What does the phrase “cyberbullying” mean? How innocent must a victim be, in order for their victimhood to be genuine? In the context of online disputes like #GamerGate, how do we determine who is the victim and who is the bully? Is it possible that our prejudices, including the set of prejudices we call “political correctness,” may prevent us from accurately assessing responsibility for these conflicts?

Here’s the thing: Monica Lewinsky committed perjury.

Perjury is a crime and a very harmful crime. President Clinton’s personal attorney, Vernon Jordan, prepared a perjurious affidavit, which Clinton certainly knew to be false, and Monica Lewinsky signed that affidavit knowing it to be false. The purpose of that perjured affidavit was to deny justice to Paula Jones, who had filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexually harassing her. Clinton’s harassment was a violation of Jones’s rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and Jones, as the plaintiff, was entitled to true testimony from Lewinsky, who had been subpoenaed to testify in order to establish (as courts have determined harassment plaintiffs may do) that Clinton’s behavior toward Jones was part of a pattern of behavior by the defendant.

Instead of providing truthful testimony, Monica Lewinsky lied.

She perjured herself by signing that false affidavit and, in doing so, became part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, to deny Paula Jones the remedy prescribed by law. Whatever we think about the concept of “sexual harassment” and the 1991 law that enabled Jones’s lawsuit, the law is the law. And both plaintiffs and defendants in lawsuits have a right to truthful testimony. Your sympathy for one of the parties in the suit cannot justify your lying under oath as a witness in an attempt to “help” them. Perjury is a crime, and conspiracy to obstruct justice is also a crime. It is possible that Monica Lewinsky did not understand the full legal consequences of her crimes, but (a) she damned sure knew she was lying, and (b) Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law School, who was subsequently disbarred as a result of his own admitted perjury in the Jones v. Clinton case.

Because this is a very important story, it’s important to get it right.

We cannot allow the media to propagate myths about history, and Monica Lewinsky’s attempt to re-write her own part in recent history — to depict herself as a victim of cyberbullying, rather than as a criminal perjurer who attempted to deny justice to Paula Jones — should not be shrugged off or treated as one-day humorous punch line.

Because readers will want to comment on this story, I’m going to go ahead and hit “publish” and then come back to extend this little essay and aggregate reaction from other commentators.

 

 

UPDATE: How quickly we have forgotten the truth! Does anyone else remember that Clinton tried to claim that, once he became president, he could not be the defendant in a lawsuit for torts he had allegedly committed prior to taking that office? The Supreme Court ruled unanimously — 9-to-0 — in the landmark 1997 Clinton v. Jones decision that the president enjoyed no such immunity.

Also, have we forgotten how the Democrat-Media Complex, including Clinton henchman James Carville, viciously defamed Kenneth Starr, depicting that honorable man as the Torquemada of a 20th-century Inquisition simply for carrying out the duties of his office?

“[Ken Starr is] a sex-obsessed person who’s out to get the president. . . . He’s concerned about three things: sex, sex, and more sex. . . . It’s about sex. . . . [Starr] plants a story, he goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing waters of the Potomac go by, and we are going to wash all the sodomites and fornicators out of town.”
— James Carville, quoted in The Death of Outrage by Bill Bennett (1998)

Well, yes, Mr. Carville: A sexual harassment suit is necessarily “about sex,” and it was a Democrat-controlled Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, under which Paula Jones brought her federal lawsuit against the man who harassed her. Your attempt to change the subject, to portray Ken Starr as “sex-obsessed” and make him the scapegoated villain in the story, was dishonest in the extreme, sir.

You are a liar, Mr. Carville, and Bill Clinton is a liar, and if you think honest people cannot see what a reprehensibly dishonest creep you are, you have another think coming.

Everyone who assisted Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal — everyone who tried to exculpate that guilty liar — covered themselves in immortal shame. After all was said and done, and Bill Clinton settled out of court with Paula Jones, paying her $850,000, that worthless son of a bitch’s hired liars kept lying on his behalf:

Robert S. Bennett, Clinton’s chief attorney in the case, said the president still insists Jones’s allegations of a crude proposition in a Little Rock hotel suite seven years ago “are baseless” but agreed to make the payment in the interest of finally putting the matter behind him.
“The president has decided he is not prepared to spend one more hour on this matter,” Bennett said. “It is clear that the American people want their president and Congress to focus on the problems that they were elected to solve. This is a step in that direction.”

All decent and honest people must recoil in horror at the way in which Democrats and their media allies, in their politically motivated project of covering up Clinton’s guilt, relentlessly smeared Paula Jones, Ken Starr and everyone else who told the truth about Clinton.

Let me tell you something, Mr. Carville and the rest of you hired liars on Team Hillary: Do you think honest people will believe that Monica Lewinsky’s timely emergence, with this carefully scripted tale of her “victimhood,” was merely a coincidence?

Like I said, you have another think coming.

You want to try and re-write history? OK, I’m going to invite readers to study the true history of the Lewinsky scandal. OK, I’m going to direct them to Bill Bennett’s book The Death of Outrage and to the official “Starr Report” of the investigation.

What part of “fuck you” don’t you understand, Mr. Carville?

 

 

UPDATE II: Have we forgotten how “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” has become a very wealthy woman as a result of her victimhood?

Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose affair with then-President Bill Clinton paralyzed the nation, has been shopping a memoir for several weeks, and according to the New York Post, she has apparently sold it for $12 million to an unnamed publisher. . . . Lewinsky . . . already cooperated with celebrity gossipmonger Andrew Morton for a 1999 book called Monica’s Story . . .

Yeah, here’s another book you should read:

 

 

No One Left to Lie To, by the late Christopher Hitchens. Welcome to the Internet, which is the enemy of lying cocksuckers.

The phrase “lying cocksucker” applies literally to Monica Lewinsky, and also to many in the media, literally or metaphorically.

@starless941 @rsmccain Everyone now *wants* to be a victim. An INNOCENT victim, no matter what damn fool things they did. This will doom us.

— Undine (@HorribleSanity) October 21, 2014

UPDATE III: Readers will please forgive my use of Anglo-Saxon words to describe these lying cocksuckers, but “mendacious fellatio performers” doesn’t have quite the same rhetorical force. There is something admirably powerful about plain English words when we are speaking the truth about a lying cocksucker like Monica Lewinsky:

Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college, a 22-year-old intern in the White House — and more than averagely romantic — I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.

(The “22-year-old sort of way” that people fall in love, she wants us to know, involves [a] fellatio, and [b] mendacity.)

It happens. But my boss was the President of the United States. That probably happens less often.
Now, I deeply regret it for many reasons.

(Including the many millions of dollars in my bank account.)

Not the least of which is that people were hurt. And that’s never okay.
But back then, in 1995, we started an affair that lasted, on and off, for two years. And, at that time, it was my everything. That, I guess you could say, was the golden bubble part for me; the nice part.

(Lying and sucking cock? “The nice part”! She’s still a Democrat, you see.)

The nasty part was that it became public. Public with a vengeance.

(Because she perjured herself.)

Thanks to the internet and a website that at the time, was scarcely known outside of Washington DC but a website most of us know today called the Drudge Report.

(Reminder: Drudge got the story because Newsweek magazine spiked the story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. As a result of this — the Newsweek spike and then Drudge learning about the spiked story — there were days of media speculation until, on Jan. 21, 1998, the Washington Post finally broke the story on their front page. But yeah, Monica, you just keep on blaming it all on Drudge, you lying cocksucker. Don’t even mention Paula Jones or your own perjury.)

Within 24 hours I became a public figure, not just in the United States but around the entire globe. As far as major news stories were concerned, this was the very first time that the traditional media was usurped by the Internet.

(“Usurped” is a word that has a definition, an actual meaning. To “usurp” is to acquire authority wrongfully. What actually happened, as opposed to what the lying cocksucker Monica Lewinsky wants you to think happened, is that “the traditional media” had for many years been abusing their authority, so that as soon as the Internet permitted others to challenge that authority, the authority of  “the traditional media” was exposed as illegitimate. There was a revolution against “the traditional media,” which forfeited its authority by using its authority in wrongful and dishonest ways. We now return you to the self-serving victimhood mythology of the lying cocksucker Monica Lewinsky.)

In 1998, as you can imagine, there was a media frenzy. Even though it was pre-Google, (that’s right, pre-Google). The World Wide Web (as we called it back then) was already a big part of life.
Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was Patient Zero.
The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet. . . .
This is what my world looked like: I was threatened in various ways. First, with an FBI sting in a shopping mall. It was just like you see in the movies. Imagine, one minute I was waiting to meet a friend in the food court and the next I realized she had set me up, as two FBI agents flashed their badges at me.
Immediately following, in a nearby hotel room, I was threatened with up to 27 years in jail for denying the affair in an affidavit and other alleged crimes. Twenty-seven years. When you’re only 24 yourself, that’s a long time.

Dispensing with the italic fisking format — you can go read the entire dishonest transcript — let me note how Monica Lewinsky has transposed events and, in the process, shifted responsibility.

She was the one who (a) sucked the cock of the President and (b) lied about her cocksucking in a false affidavit, which was intended (c) to deny justice to Paula Jones, a previous victim of Clinton’s predatory sexual habits, and (d) secure for Monica Lewinsky the assistance of Vernon Jordan and others in providing her, the lying cocksucker, with employment in New York City. As I recall, there was both a quid (“sign this false affidavit”) and a quo (“we’ll get a job with Revlon, whose CEO is a Friend of Bill”), but as always in such situations, it was difficult to prove the “pro” part of this quid pro quo arrangement.

Without checking the timeline of the scandal, I distinctly remember (because I was involved in editing daily news coverage at that time) how the revelation of the Revlon job in New York and Vernon Jordan’s role as Clinton’s personal “fixer” brought into stark relief exactly how the Clinton Scandal-Control Machine operated.

The object of the game, in  Ms. Lewinsky’s case, was (a) to get her out of Washington, D.C., (b) to put her in a respectable job where she didn’t feel disgruntled and could tell friends it was a step up from her White House gig, and (c) thereby to provide her with a plausible pretext for claiming, in her perjurious affidavit, that her duties at her new job in New York made it impossible for her to appear and be deposed as a witness in the federal lawsuit Jones v. Clinton.

This was the game. Everyone following the story at the time could see why it had been crucial for the Clinton Scandal-Control Machine to get Monica out of D.C., because if Paula Jones’s lawyers had gotten the opportunity to depose her in person, they were prepared to confront her with sufficient evidence to force her to admit the truth about her relationship with Clinton. Remember, testimony about Clinton’s predatory sexual habits was being sought by Jones’s lawyers as evidence that what happened to her was part of his pattern of behavior, and one key element of this pattern — i.e., Clinton’s preferring to have women perform fellatio, as opposed to normal intercourse — clearly could have been confirmed by Monica, if she had been willing to tell the truth under oath. Instead, she signed that perjurious affidavit and took that cushy job at Revlon headquarters in New York. Quid pro quo.

And also quod erat demonstrandum, you lying cocksucker.

UPDATE IV: In the comments:

Sworn to secrecy, she only told 11 people (including an erstwhile squeeze, one of her high school teachers who was 33 years old and had been married right along).

People forget so much so quickly, don’t they? Bill Clinton wasn’t the first married man Monica Lewinsky had sex with and, indeed, her own narcissistic compulsion to tell people about her sexual exploits was the proximate cause of her becoming a public figure:

Monica Lewinsky’s former high school drama instructor said yesterday that he had a long-running affair with her that began in 1992 during her college years in Portland, Ore., and continued until last year, throughout much of the time she reportedly has alleged she had an intimate relationship with President Clinton.
In an account questioning Lewinsky’s credibility, Andy J. Bleiler, 32, said through an attorney that Lewinsky had called him as often as four or five times a day after coming to Washington in 1995 as a White House intern, and that she talked obsessively about sex, including boasts that she was involved in a sexual relationship with a “high ranking White House official.”
Standing beside Bleiler and his wife at a news conference outside their home in Portland, attorney Terry Giles said the Bleilers “would both describe Monica as having a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image.”

So, Lewinsky’s former teacher (and former adulterous lover) says she has “a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image.” Did I mention she’s a Democrat?

Hmm. Nothing yet from @AceofSpadesHQ on this Lewinsky thing? Either (a) he's working on a killer post or (b) he's in a Valu-Rite vodka coma.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

Hey, @AceofSpadesHQ, you see this from @/bitingtea? A story CNN is running EVERY HOUR TODAY is "stuck in 1998." pic.twitter.com/mJuNy8IbGY

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

UPDATE V: Let’s talk more about this quote:

“I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.
It happens.”

Does anyone else notice the helpless passivity — “It happens” — with which Monica Lewinsky attempts to deny her own agency?

If you study psychology, you know that good mental health is characterized by a sense of personal agency, that is to say, a psychologically healthy person thinks of himself as the agent, the active force in his own life. He is in charge, he is “the subject of the sentence,” as it were. Even though unpleasant or unfortunate things may happen to anyone, people with healthy minds do not think of themselves as helpless, passive objects to whom things merely “happen.”

A healthy-minded person, finding himself in a predicament for which he is not responsible, immediately thinks: “What can I do? What are my options? How can I exercise agency and regain control over my own destiny, rather than to allow the continuation of this circumstance in which others are exercising control over me?”

This sense of agency requires an ability to look at your situation objectively and, if you are unable to obtain that objectivity, it impairs your ability to learn from your mistakes. Here is the thing: It is very common for people to find themselves in a situation where, in some sense, things seem to “happen” to them through no fault of their own. However, in such a case, it becomes necessary to ask yourself, “What did I do, or fail to do, which has made me vulnerable this way?”

Problem: Your job is a stress-inducing nightmare. You are underpaid and treated poorly. Your boss is a jerk, and your good work is repeatedly sabotaged by a handful of selfish, lazy and dishonest co-workers who are envious of your superior ability. No matter how hard you work, or how clearly you explain the problem to your boss, the mistreatment does not end. As a matter of fact, your assessment of the problem and attempts to rectify the situation are counted again you. You’re labeled a “troublemaker,” and the people who are actually causing the problem (who for reasons of seniority or favoritism or company policy are in some sense protected) escape the consequences of their sabotage. Never mind the harm their sabotage does to you, personally, but by impairing your ability to do your job, these selfish and dishonest co-workers are doing harm to the company’s productive efficiency.
Solution: Quit.

It’s really that simple. The only reason those sons of bitches are able to make your working life a Hell on Earth is because you let them do it.

If you’re not willing to quit — just tender your resignation and walk out the door — then you are choosing to continue the problem. There are few situations in life where we are truly helpless, except where we have put ourselves into a bad situation by our own unwise choices.

Considering the lifelong series of bad choices that preceded Monica Lewinsky’s alleged “victimhood,” she has no legitimate cause to complain. Jeff Dunetz at Truth Revolt:

Ms. Lewinsky wasn’t a victim of cyber-bullying; she was a victim of having sexual relations with a person at or near the peak of power. She became news just as Donna Rice, Elizabeth Ray, Fanne Foxe and many others had before her.
Matt Drudge didn’t ruin her life just the same way that the Miami Herald did not ruin Donna Rice’s life. Drudge simply reported a huge news story.
If she wants to place the blame for the personal attacks she received, Ms. Lewinsky would be better served to look toward the “Clinton Machine,” whose history of destroying reputations is well-documented.

You hit the nail squarely on the head, Jeff: Monica Lewinsky deliberately chose to associate herself with people who were (and still are) dangerously dishonest and cruelly unscrupulous. If you lie down with Democrats, you’ll wake up with corruption.

So, @EdDriscoll, how soon will @MarkSteynOnline get an RT from @MonicaLewinsky? Today? Tomorrow? http://t.co/m8oQ4C76tB

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

.@elliottkrista Actually, the "creeps/jerks/haters" are the FUN part of Twitter. Am I right, @AmandaMarcotte ? @MonicaLewinsky

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

You stay classy, notorious "progressive" troll! #tcot #UniteBlue pic.twitter.com/hKSfDhJxfN

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

UPDATE VI: Because there is other news happening on which I wish to comment, I will wrap this up. Here’s the point: Monica Lewinsky was/is externalizing responsibility for her problems.

This is a classic symptom of the narcissistic personality. A narcissist will ruin his own life and, rather than recognize his own self-harm, will irrationally transfer blame to a scapegoat.

Pick up a psychology textbook and look up “defense mechanisms” or “rationalization.” Nobody likes to admit error. Nobody wants to recognize their own worst tendencies. However, if we cannot be objective about our problems, we can never solve our problems. It is difficult, and perhaps in some ways impossible, to be objective about yourself. But if you find yourself in a bad situation that seems to resemble the last bad situation you were in, and if you keep finding yourself in similar situations, you have to recognize that you are a major cause of your own problems. In other words, it’s not them, it’s you.

Earth to Monica Lewinsky: You have a wounded ego.

This is the key to understanding narcissism. Somehow, narcissists suffered an injury to their ego, so that they are unable to cope with negative feedback. They cannot accept that they are wrong, because they can’t handle the shame. By contrast, a healthy person understands the sense of shame as useful feedback. If you feel ashamed of your action, this is a clue you did the wrong thing. If you are merely feeling tempted to do the wrong thing, your sense of shame at your wrongful urge is also a good thing. The narcissist, however, cannot cope with shame because their ego is damaged. And so, in an attempt to defend itself against criticism, the narcissistic ego begins to engage in rationalization, including blameshifting, minimizing and scapegoating.

Irresponsibility and narcissism go hand in hand. So the narcissist will blame-shift (transferring agency for their wrongful action to others), the narcissist will minimize (diminishing the harmfulness of their wrongdoing) and the narcissist will scapegoat, magnifying the harm (perhaps wholly imaginary) done to them by someone (perhaps entirely innocent) in order to justify their own irrational anger.

The narcissist’s choice of scapegoat is always significant. Consider, for example, Hitler’s scapegoating of Jews. What happened to Hitler was that he applied to the academy of art in Vienna and was rejected. Hitler inarguably had some artistic talent. However, he applied to the Vienna academy at a time in the early 20th century when “Modern Art” was all the rage, and it happened that Jews (including some members of the Vienna academy) were very much involved in the Modern Art trend. Now, there was a pre-existing tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany, and there was also a pre-existing tradition of romantic nationalism in Germany. However, the crucial factor was Hitler’s damaged ego. He had apparently developed at an early age a grandiose concept of himself (a classic narcissistic overcompensation for the damaged ego), and had invested this grandiosity into his artistic ambition. Being thwarted in that ambition because of his rejection by the Vienna academy, he blamed Jews for his failure, and spent many years thereafter developing his paranoid conspiratorial anti-Semitic ideas into an all-encompassing worldview. At the root of the problem was not the Jews, of course.

The root of the problem was Hitler and his damaged ego, his inability to accept his failure. Hitler could not cope with this shame — the sense of unworthiness which his rejection by the Vienna academy caused him — and his grandiose messianic dreams of becoming a World-Historic Leader made him the most infamous case of narcissistic personality disorder in history. Hitler’s entire career from the 1920s onward could be seen as a classic revenge gesture of the thwarted narcissist who, failing to get what he wants, decides to vindicate himself by a grandiose act of destruction. This quest for vindication, you see, is necessary for the narcissist to prove to himself that he was wronged, cheated out of what was rightfully his, so as to exculpate himself for his own failure and thus purge the stigma of shame.

Obviously, Monica Lewinsky is not Hitler. But she is doing the same minimizing/scapegoating thing, trying to vindicate herself, to evade responsibility for her own disgrace, and to make Matt Drudge and the Internet the scapegoat in this mythical drama she’s scripting for herself.

It’s sad to see people do this, and it would be even sadder if, with such an example as Monica Lewinsky in front of us, we did not take the opportunity to learn the lesson of her sad fate.

 

UPDATE VII: OK, just a couple more final points:

1. I didn’t make clear the difference between blame-shifting and scapegoating. Blame-shifting is a defensive move, to avoid responsibility for your failure by saying others are actually at fault (or, at least, more at fault than you are). Scapegoating is an offensive move, turning someone else into a target of your vindictive rage. The scapegoat becomes, in the mind of the narcissist, a hated symbol of the wrong which (in the narcissist’s unhealthy ego-damaged mind) he has suffered. Think about a guy who cheats on his girlfriend, who then breaks up with him. The guy blame-shifts (saying that the girl he cheated with was actually at fault for his cheating), but if he then becomes obsessed with the ex-girlfriend who broke up with him, she’s the scapegoat. She hasn’t done anything wrong, except in the mind of the narcissist who scapegoats her. However, in many cases, the targeted scapegoat has little or nothing to do with the narcissist’s rage. In the throes of his irrational paranoia (which is often a side-effect of narcissism out of control) the thwarted narcissist may focus his rage on utterly innocent people. Rodger Elliott’s shooting spree in Santa Barbara was such a case. The people he shot had done him no wrong, but in his twisted mind, they were symbolically to blame.
2. Notice how Monica Lewinsky can’t distinguish between “falling in love” (i.e., a subjective emotion) and the wrongful acts of sucking the president’s cock and committing perjury? Unhealthy minds are impulsive in this way. Their actions are out of control and irrational because the damaged ego produces such strong emotion that the person feels they must act on these emotions. Monica’s fixation/obsession with “The Big He” (as she nicknamed Clinton) is a typically symptomatic trait of the damaged ego. Their emotions run out of control and become fixed on some object — a person, an idea, an ambition, an activity — and the obvious dangers of their irrational behavior are ignored.

Exit question: Why are crazy people usually Democrats?

 

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