Washington: To Betsey Ross Wright, a long-time aide to Bill Clinton when he was Governor of Arkansas, goes the credit for coining the term "bimbo eruptions." Tasked with defending Clinton when he was running for President in 1992, she used the expression to push back against a raft of claims and charges about the candidate's alleged extramarital affairs and peccadilloes, a strategy that Hillary Clinton was seen to have supported.
Nearly quarter century later, the ploy of discrediting women who make such claims and allegations is very much in play as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton size each others campaign up in the race to the White House. Trump is now having his own share of "women troubles" as his past dalliances during the time he was a reality show star comes back to haunt him.
Earlier this week, America's slavering media unearthed a phone recording of Trump describing a model who claimed she had dated him in the 1990s as a "f***king third rate hooker." The model, Victorial Zdrok, has in turned called Trump a racist and a narcissist, describing how he could never stop talking about himself and his looks, while claiming that women were stalking him all the time.
"He loves to talk about how women are chasing him all the time, which doesn't make a girl feel special on a date," Zdrok, a Ukarainian immigrant who was a Playboy and Penthouse centerfold when she purportedly dated Trump, told a New Jersey entertainment magazine. "The other thing he talks about is what a great lover he is. He said to me, "Once you made love to me, you'll never be able to make love to anybody else."
Zdrok, whose resume lists a law degree and a Ph.D in clinical psychology, also claimed that Trump was obsesses with a mixed-race supermodel but he would not go out with her "because she was half-black and that would be bad for his reputation."
Trump has trashed Zdrok, but the language he has used, recorded for posterity by a reporter, is not something that will endear him to women even if he is correct that she stalked him and sought him out.
"I don't even know who the hell she is. I never took her out. And, by the way, based on her picture, I would never take her out, she looked like a f***ing third-rate hooker," Trump says, telling the reporter that he has "good taste in women."
While Trump's demeaning declamations echo Bill Clinton's own finger-wagging "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky," the Republican billionaire has also turned on Hillary Clinton for being the enabler for her husband's indiscretions, as if that could absolve his own infractions. Some of Trump's supporters are saying Hillary has no one to blame for the current coarseness and misogyny of political discourse but herself and her husband, maintaining it was she who made light of her husband's straying and blaming right-wing conspiracy for the charges.
"If she doesn't care when her husband does, why should we get all worked up over Trump's indiscretions?" asked one commentator, as both sides girdled up for what threatens to be a below-the-belt campaign in the months to come.
The emerging spat is godsend for stand-up comedians who make a living from such material. Stephen Colbert noted that if Trump chose Newt Gingrich as his running mate, they would have six marriages between them (three each), and "both the First Lady and Second Lady would actually be the Third Lady.'
