Bill Cosby is accompanied by his attorneys Brian McMonagle (left) and Monique Pressley, as he arrives at court to face a felony charge of aggravated indecent assault, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Dec. 30. | AP Photo OPINION Cosby era presents problems for candidate Clinton

The Age of Bubba has been swept into the dustbin of history by the ugly realities of the Cosby Era, where turning a blind eye to powerful politicians, perverted entertainers and predatory priests sexually abusing subordinates is no longer an option.

But feigning ignorance was standard operating procedure in all those institutions during the time the Clintons ran the White House. Throughout the 1990s, it was common knowledge among the White House insiders that the Clinton machine regularly shamed women who had allegedly been sexually mistreated by the president by either accusing the accusers of being money-grubbing trailer trash or sexually-charged sluts. It may be hard for younger Americans to fathom in these days after watching sex scandals tear apart the Catholic Church, Penn State, the U.S. military and college campuses, that during the Clinton years, the president's chief spokesman could successfully ward off charges of sexual abuse against his boss by sneering that if you "drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you will find."


As the pages of the New York Times signaled this weekend, those days are done. Americans have an increased sensitivity to the epidemic of sexual assault and new political realities of the 2016 campaign are presenting Secretary Clinton a series of vexing challenges.

The Times has already earned the Clinton camp's wrath in Brooklyn by doggedly investigating and reporting on Mrs. Clinton's questionable use of a personal email account for State Department business. But this weekend, the Times' editorial page hit closer to home as it dug into President and Mrs. Clinton's mistreatment of women during Bill Clinton's rise to power.

While the editorial staff noted that Mr. Clinton's sexual misdeeds were irrelevant to the campaign, the editorial board suggested that Secretary Clinton should be held to account for her actions in hiding her husband's questionable behavior for her own political benefit.

"For decades Mrs. Clinton has helped protect her husband’s political career, and hers, from the taint of his sexual misbehavior, as evidenced by the Clinton team’s attacks on the character of women linked to Mr. Clinton," the Times wrote. "When Mr. Clinton ran for president in 1992, Mrs. Clinton appeared on television beside him to assert that allegations involving Gennifer Flowers were false. In 1998, he admitted to that affair under oath. After the Monica Lewinsky affair emerged, some White House aides attempted to portray Ms. Lewinsky as the seducer."

Maureen Dowd's op-ed the next day cut even deeper. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist blasted the former first lady's "hypocrisy in running as a feminist icon when she was part of political operations that smeared women who told the truth about Bill's transgressions."

Dowd publicly shamed Hillary for her own public shaming of Monica Lewinsky as a "narcissistic loony toon" and a "troubled young person" when the 50-something president preyed on his 22-year-old intern. The Democratic front-runner, she concluded, would be damaged by a "retrospective of the Clinton's cynical campaigns against bimbo eruptions" and observed that being part of a process to destroy the character of young women who came forward as sexual abused victims "will not play well in a politically correct society sensitized by epidemics of rape in colleges and the military and by the Cosby effect."

Much has, in fact, changed in the decades since NBC's Dateline interviewed women like Juanita Broaddrick, who openly wept as she recounted her own sexually violent encounter with Bill Clinton. Beyond Cosby, the Catholic Church, and Penn State, Americans younger than 38 who never saw Bill Clinton's name on a ballot have grown up in a culture so much more sensitized to the human wreckage caused by powerful men using their positions of power to sexually abuse others. The same Sunday Times that ran Dowd's blistering column also carried Sunday Styles cover story on the new thorny issues of sexual consent and rape on college campuses.

The Times Style Section wrote that "the statistics by this point are familiar: More than ones in five college women will become victims of sexual assault, most of them by somebody they know, with very few of them coming forward to report the crime."

Those chilling statistics parallel the facts Mrs. Broaddrick tearfully told NBC News of her encounter with Bill Clinton when he was still governor of Arkansas.

Myers: “Is there any way at all that Bill Clinton could have thought that this was consensual?”

Broaddrick: “No. Not with what I told him, and with how I tried to push him away. It was not consensual.”

Myers: “You’re saying that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted you, that he raped you.”

Broaddrick: “Yes.”

Myers: “And there is no doubt in your mind that that’s what happened?”

Broaddrick: “No doubt whatsoever.”

Beyond the question of consent, Broaddrick, like the vast majority of college students the Times wrote of did not report the alleged rape to the police despite the fact Broaddrick told NBC News she was injured both internally and externally. She would also tell Myers that several intimidating encounters with Hillary Clinton following the alleged rape left her in fear for her physical safety.

More Dowd:

"Bill hid behind the skirts of feminists — including his wife and esteemed women in his cabinet when he got caught. And feminists, eager to protect his progressive agenda on women, allowed the women swirling around Bill to become collateral damage, torched as trailer trash or erotomaniacs."

Beyond increased sensitivity to sexual abuse, Mrs. Clinton now faces another reality her husband did not during his personal battles in the 1990s. Back then, the political collapse of Bill Clinton would have accrued to the almost exclusive benefit of Newt Gingrich's morally preening, hypocritical right-wing majority.

If 22-year-old women were to be sexually preyed upon by a president more than twice their age and then have their character destroyed by Team Clinton when those deeds became public, well, feminists like Betty Friedan were just fine with that so long as they continued to hold a political advantage in the White House. Friedan would join in attacking the young woman facing global humiliation for Clinton's predatory behavior by blasting her as nothing more than "a little twerp."

If a woman was sexually molested in the Oval Office the same day her husband committed suicide, Gloria Steinem was just fine with Hillary Clinton's "Sluts & Nuts" team going into overdrive to destroy the aggrieved women's reputations in the press. And what if, like Broaddrick, this woman reported feeling physically threatened after one Clinton's alleged sexual abuse episodes? Well, as Bill Cosby might say, sh*t happens.

And it did happen often around Bill and Hillary Clinton first in Arkansas and then at the White House. But two decades later, the Times' coverage this weekend signals that the free pass older feminists and left-leaning editorial boards gave Bill Clinton 20 years ago will not be extended to Mrs. Clinton, especially while she is preening on about the importance of sexual assault survivors having "the right to be heard and the right to be believed."

As the New York Times editorial board wrote this weekend, Hillary Clinton may have to answer for her actions after these episodes. Why the change? Because the alternative to a Clinton in 2016 is not a hypocritical right-wing religious zealot from the most frightening wing of the GOP, but is instead a popular progressive senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.

What a relief that must be for liberals in the Age of Cosby. Like priests now in Francis' Catholic Church, they can speak freely about the plight of sexual abuse victims without fearing the loss of their own power.

