CNN has been working over time today to try and defend Bill Clinton after his disastrous NBC interview where he tried to play the victim in the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal. Turns out, Lewinsky was the real victim as her professional life was absolutely destroyed when Hillary Clinton and the media smeared her back in the late ’90s. Even CNN’s Fake Jake Tapper smeared her in a nearly 20 year old article written by Tapper for something called the Washington City Paper. He calls Lewinsky “chubby” and claimed that since Lewinsky was nice to him, she was “bizarre” and had a “childlike sweetness.” That’s what you get for being nice to Jake Tapper.
| CNN Jake Tapper dated Monica Lewinsky, called her chubby in Washington City Paper |
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I got the same basic bio you did, though mine was spoken rather than in black and white in the Washington Post: raised in Los Angeles, a city she found fake because her “hair is brown and boobs are real.” Parents divorced, dad a doctor, mom an author, seemed to be some family money floating around there, very close with her mom. Lewis and Clark College (huh?), liked Portland, Ore., just fine. White House internship, arranged through some random contact I didn’t quite get but didn’t push, Pentagon personal assistant.
I’ve had my share of dates with Really Important D.C. Career Women, and I’ve found it’s easy to get the skinny on anything that ever happened to a woman from meiosis ’til the leak she took before dessert. Monica wasn’t like that, peppering her monologue with questions for me and actually listening with interest to the responses. She didn’t strike me as a classic climber—just a woman looking for a decent, challenging job and a happy life to go with it. We talked about some of her past relationships, though the president’s name did not come up. I didn’t work her over for her opinions on Netanyahu, the emotional residue from her parents’ split, any of that. It was a first date, one I wasn’t sure would be followed by a second, and how was I to know that the woman on the other side of the table would set the presidency into seismic rumblings?
She struck me as cheerful, open, a bit too much a resident of Planet Hap-Hap-Happy in my acerbic view. A little bizarre in her almost childlike sweetness—it was tough to juxtapose her almost giddy warmth with the gravity of the places she had visited, like Bosnia—but she was from both L.A. and money, so her unusualness had a context. She mentioned, more by way of observation than complaint, that her transcribing duties for the DOD were massively challenging for someone who had more skill in communication than in typing—a tidbit now used as bimbo ammo, though it seemed reasonable to me at the time.
Physically, she was pleasant without being overwhelming. She’s a little chubby, but she’s leaps and bounds prettier than that vacuous mug shot beamed all over the world. (You know how some photos of yourself can make you cringe? Imagine if one of those became a new international icon. We should be allowed to pick our own pictures at times like these.) A great dresser—she wore some black ’70s number, kind of, but not in the slightest bit revealing or inappropriate. The reason D.C. quislings are hissing about her “wacky” dress is because she has a sense of style, and this city, simply, does not.