"The View" host Joy Behar said on Wednesday that former President Bill Clinton bears "tremendous" responsibility for lowering the bar when it comes to presidential personal conduct.
"We had never heard anything like this about a president in the White House, in the Oval Office, in the United States. And I believe that that set the bar very low," Behar said, referring to Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.
"Clinton bears a tremendous responsibility for a lot of what we were talking about in the first segment, in my opinion," Behar said.
Clinton has been under fire in recent days over remarks he made during an interview with NBC reporter Craig Melvin. Melvin asked Clinton if he ever apologized to Lewinsky, which led Clinton to become defensive and talk about how he paid a steep cost for his actions. Clinton and Lewinsky, a White House intern 27 years his junior at the start of the affair, had a series of sexual encounters between 1995 and 1997, culminating in a political scandal that rocked the administration.
Behar noted she still voted for Clinton.
Co-host Meghan McCain asked Behar how her vote for Clinton then was any different than someone voting for President Donald Trump.
"How is that different than a Trump voter still voting for them after they grab them in the 'blank?'" McCain said, referring to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. "People make moral compromises with things like this related to sex."
"It's a little more complicated with Clinton. I don't want to go into that," Behar said.
"One more thing about that, Bill Clinton was on the right side in many ways. He did not denigrate people's handicaps. He did not denigrate your father, the United States military, people who had children who died in wars. He was not of that ilk," Behar added. "That's the part of Trump that I don't get why anybody supports him."
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg jumped into the conversation with her opinion on who suffered the most from the Lewinsky scandal.
"But everyone is missing the point. Do you know who has gotten her behind kicked with all of this?" Goldberg asked.
"Monica Lewinsky," co-host Sunny Hostin guessed, and McCain agreed.
"No. Hillary Clinton," Golberg said. "Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton, whatever you think of her, she has been dragged through the dirt."
McCain disagreed and said Lewinsky suffered the most.
"I feel bad for Monica Lewinsky who can't get the job she wants. She is not married. She is 44, and she is forever known as the woman who went down in the White House, if you will," McCain said. "I feel much worse for her."
"Nobody comes out of this unscathed," Goldberg said. "Nobody."