If you ever find yourself wondering how it is that Bill Clinton was caught having had a sexual affair with a White House intern and came out more popular than ever, here’s the answer — just as the Clintons and the media are locked in apointless, toxic cycle of scandal and cover-up, the Republican Party is locked in its own cycle of pathological overreach.
The problem for Republicans is that the conservative movement has already firmly committed itself to the narrative that some nefarious entity called "the Clintons" is deeply and profoundly corrupt in some unprecedented way. That’s why behavior that appears entirely innocent to outsiders — things like losing money on a land deal, your friend killing himself, or trying to clean up a mismanaged travel office — end up portrayed as scandals inside the bubble.
Republicans are so convinced there’s a silver bullet out there that will destroy Bill and Hillary’s careers forever that they will chase any shiny object in the hopes that they’ve found it.
Since inside the bubble it’s already taken for granted that "the Clintons" are crooks, the bar for scandal exploitation is set impossibly high.
Rather than accepting a bad news cycle or two for Hillary Clinton as a win, anything that doesn’t result in her being dragged away in chains plays as a loss. So if Comey says she was careless but not a criminal, House Republicans are going to second-guess the FBI. If Lynch accepts the FBI’s recommendation, now she’s a crook too. And the sheer weight of dozens of bogus scandals piled up over a quarter-century means any sensible person tunes it all out.
After all, lost in the endless drive to gin up scandals is any sense of caring about anything that impacts the American people’s actual lives.
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