PrintHillary Clinton: The sex harasser's best friend
Burns Strider is a repeat sex harasser. And like Bubba Clinton, he's With Her.
Life is good for pervy sex harassers who have Hillary's pant-legs to hide under.
The New York Times and Buzzfeed of all places have a couple of good pieces on how Hillary Clinton shielded her "faith" advisor, Burns Strider, from any serious consequences for a series of Joe-Biden-like creepy behaviors around the female campaign staff. It was so bad that women were making up dates in their calendars just to get away from the guy, what with his head kisses, insistences on following them home, horny unwanted notes confident of his own attractiveness, and vows to get them drunk.
The guy was recommended for firing by top Clinton staffers - and Clinton intervened to make sure he stayed on payroll. After that, he was sent on his merry way to a David Brock-founded group called 'Correct the Record' where he was free to sex-harass again - and he did.
According to Buzzfeed:
Not only was the adviser, Burns Strider, not pushed out — he thrived after her campaign, landing a senior role at a super PAC preparing for her next presidential bid. In that job, he exhibited the same kinds of inappropriate behavior toward women who worked there, particularly two young female subordinates.
Today, he runs a PAC he helped found called 'American Values Network' and still stays in close contact with Clinton, going to her birthday parties. As Buzzfeed's Hillary Cramer put it:
All along, even after his departure from that super PAC, he was described in the press as a close friend and confidant to Clinton, someone with access to one of the most important people in the country. In meetings, he would refer to the “boss lady” and what she wanted done — a sign to people in the extended Clinton orbit that he wielded influence, especially in the eye of the young staffers who hoped to work for the first woman president.
The fact that both the Times and Buzzfeed did quite a bit of work on this story suggests there had to be something significant about it even to those on the left, most of whom by now want Hillary and all her pretensions of being the great glass ceiling breaker, the emblem of women, and the first woman president to just get lost.
The hypocrisy of the whole picture is part of it - Heavy has a good list of all the phoniness between the presented picture and the disgusting reality here.
It was enough that Clinton seemed to be alarmed, too, jumping in on Twitter to defend herself, while begging the entire question about her own behavior:
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 27, 2018
Clinton's praise for the women who complained is pretty icky, given that she's the one who undercut them by keeping and ensuring the failing upward of Strider.
It's nothing more than a bid to wriggle out from under the microscope. National Review's David French has a good dissection of Clinton's bad behavior in the wake of the revelations:
This is classic Clinton. First, she notes the date — as if that’s remotely relevant to whether she did the right thing. I know the #MeToo movement is grabbing headlines, but sexual harassment has been a prominent public issue for decades, and no one should know that better than a Clinton. Then, she moves on to basic progressive word salad. Justice matters more than whether the victim was “heard” or “taken seriously,” and the Times report creates serious doubt that justice was done. But why would we expect justice from a Clinton? Here’s a woman who rose to power in part by helping quell the “bimbo eruptions” that constantly surrounded her husband, exploited the public sympathy after his philandering came fully to light, and now seems to have — to use the Times’s word — “shielded” a harasser in her first presidential campaign. Oh, and this is only one of the countless scandals that surround one of the most corrupt and dishonest figures in recent American political life.
