Monica Lewinsky’s Dubious Roger Ailes Claim Shows She Needs a Class in Personal Responsibility

America was designed to be a self-governing society, where people make decisions and take responsibility for the consequences.  In a New York Times op-ed, Monica Lewinsky demonstrates what personal responsibility does not look like.

This week, she wrote about the death of Roger Ailies, the man who created Fox News…  and blames him for what she and her family went though after her affair with Bill Clinton.

Her op-ed begins:

This is not another obituary for Roger Ailes, who died last week 10 months after being ousted at Fox News. It is, I hope, instead an obituary for the culture he purveyed — a culture that affected me profoundly and personally.

Just two years after Rupert Murdoch appointed Mr. Ailes to head the new cable news network, my relationship with President Bill Clinton became public. Mr. Ailes, a former Republican political operative, took the story of the affair and the trial that followed and made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day…

My family and I huddled at home, worried about my going to jail… Meantime, Mr. Ailes huddled with his employees at Fox News, dictating a lineup of talking heads to best exploit this personal and national tragedy.

She goes on to say that Ailes used her “tragedy” for ratings.  Tragedy?  It feels a little over-the-top for her to place more blame on the founder of Fox News than she places on, I don’t know, say…  the married, President of the United States who turned her name into a national punch line.

“The irony of Mr. Ailes’s career at Fox — that he harnessed a sex scandal to build a cable juggernaut and then was brought down by his own — was not lost on anyone who has been paying attention,” she wrote.  She explained that Fox news personalities like Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelley brought Fox off-screen “culture of exploitation” to light. But you don’t have to be paying attention to know, as Jim Treacher wrote, that “Ailes didn’t make her do what she did. Ailes didn’t make Bill Clinton lie about it under oath.”

There’s a lot wrong with the way the media covered the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, mostly that Clinton was never held accountable for his actions (against her or many other women) and is now the patriarch of the Democratic party.  When Lewinsky wants to talk about that, America will listen.

But the larger issue, the one that no one talks about, is that Lewinsky’s New York Times article promotes grievance, not personal responsibility.  And our nation can’t survive without the latter.

Image Credit: TED Conference