Rand Paul Calls Bill Clinton A 'Troglodyte'

Shortly before addressing the denizens at this year’s CPAC gathering, Senator Rand Paul once again dredged up Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, because these are the issues that matter! Speaking to The Hill, Paul referred to Bill as a “throwback to a sort of troglodyte time” in the American workplace when men preyed on their female coworkers with impunity. According to the junior Senator from Kentucky, Bill’s infidelity in 1998 disqualifies the entirety of the Democratic party from fighting for women’s rights in 2014 because logic.

“It is quite hypocritical that a party that says they’re great defenders of women in the workplace supports a guy who violated all of those pledges, all of those promises that the workplace is a safer place for women than it has been in the past,” Paul said Friday. "He's a throwback to a sort of troglodyte time, where men did whatever they wanted to women in the workplace."

This is at least the third time Paul has gleefully reminded viewers of Bill Clinton’s philandering. It’s generally accepted that he’s doing this as a preemptive attack on Hillary Clinton in anticipation of running against her for president in 2016. What’s unclear is why in the world Paul thinks that this is an effective line of attack.

The suggestion is that Hillary and her husband are basically the same person. Paul tried to reinforce that idea earlier this year when he joked in a C-SPAN interview that “sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other.” The implication, of course, is both flawed and offensive — it essentially amounts to an insistence that a woman should be held responsible for her husband’s sins. The only people who might conceivably buy this line of reasoning are people who already despise the Clintons, and they weren’t going to vote for Hillary anyway.

Perhaps a clue to what exactly is going on in Paul’s head can be found in the remarks he made last January on whether the “war on women” is a actually thing. “I’m scratching my head,” Paul explained, “because if there was a war on women, I think they’ve won.” In other words, this is a man who thinks that sexism — “if there was” such a thing to begin with — is over. The problem has been solved. If that’s Paul’s starting assumption, it makes a little more sense, but only a little, that he’d fail to grasp why his repeated attempts to link Bill and Hillary are going to alienate the women whose support he needs in 2016.

But it’s still absurd. Paul is advocating both guilt by association and the idea that nobody can ever redeem themselves. If that’s the case, Paul himself should probably answer for the hideously racist newsletters that his father was publishing when Bill Clinton was cavorting with Monica. It’s no wonder that even Mitt “Binders of Women” Romney thinks Paul is off his rocker.