Confessed Hitchens fan as I am, allow me a provisional defence of the still possibly greatish man. Hitchens might be doing the right thing, no? I'm all for people scratching their itches where they can (unless Bill knew he'd be hurting his family in so doing - but I wouldn't know about that, and we're still talking simple adultery here; certainly no reason to give the GOP a free kick on that score), but a bloke who happily pops his John Thomas in someone's gob one minute and then refers to that gob's owner as a stalker the next, well, we're talking real scum then, aren't we? The bloke wouldn't be the victim in my book. The lass would be.
*His* victim.
And, worse still, what if the White House were, as I infer here, intent on destroying Kate Willey's reputation - well, ain't that serious stuff? Molesting someone and then publicly destroying her to avoid the consequences ain't in the realm of everyday philandering, surely?
If all this is kosher (and I don't say it is), I reckon the personal has become pretty damned political indeed. Exploitation and slander are what they are, and questions of scale don't enter into it.
These issues are so big, one might imagine a journalist confronted with an agonising sense of competing goods. Protecting a source guilty of seriously heavy shit on the one hand (ie. alleged participation in the alleged assault on Willey's reputation), or protecting the defenceless against the powerful on the other.
I hope I'd have the guts to take the right road meself ...
Cheers, Rob.
PS: Did Hitchens spill the beans before or after journo's were formally 'released' from protecting B.?