"Jon Stewart on the Clinton Scandal"
Rolling Stone
November 12, 1988
by Jon Stewart

 

I guess you could say Ken Starr is acting responsibly -- if Clinton had, in fact, killed Monica Lewinsky after blowing a load on her dress. Clinton engaged in reckless adolescent behavior, but it's not for me to forgive him. It's none of my business. I mean, if he had done it on my dress, yeah, then I think we'd have an issue here; but as far as I know, he didn't ruin any of my clothes.

The way we're dissecting him is the way that you're supposed to dissect somebody after they've died. Like one of J.F.K.'s mistresses, who's eighty years old, goes, "You know, I actually got a story to tell you: Remember that whole Cuban missile crisis? Well, I was blowing him when he was talking to Khrushchev." It's supposed to be that tell-all biography thirty years from now.

Look at the names of the shows and tell me the media are objective -- Hardball, Crossfire, The Capital Gang, Your Ass is Grass With Sam Donaldson and Geraldo Rivera's two shows: Lurid Excess With Geraldo and But He Didn't Kill Anybody WIth Geraldo.

There is no moral outrage over the act that Clinton committed. It's all a football game: The Republicans won the coin toss and elected to discredit the president. The Democrats are doing the opposite. I mean, Jesus Christ, the Republicans are fighting for women's rights against sexual harassment and the Democrats are dismissing it? Day is night, night is day, black is white, it's raining cats and dogs.

In the end, something really terrible is going to happen. Truly catastrophic, like some guy is going to get anthrax in a bottle and figure out how to put it in our soft drinks or something. We will look back on these days with the kind of nostalgia that people have when they talk about the nickel movies. We'll look back and go, "Oh, remember the days when all we worried about was the president blowing his load on someone's dress?"

 

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