Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall sees a pattern of self-deception among Clinton-loathing conservatives. Marshall acknowledges that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely “play close to the line” and “refus[e] to play by rules tighter than those applied to anyone else,” but argues that right-wingers fool themselves when they insist that behind those tendencies lies criminality.
“It's never enough for the Clintons' perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior,” wrote Marshall in a Tuesday post. “It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don't materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment.”
Marshall commented that “freak show conspiracy theories…inevitably bubble up around [the Clintons], a symbiotic embrace of grievance, aggression and derp. It's painful to admit, but the two sides feed on each other.”
From Marshall’s post (bolding added):
I mentioned a couple months ago the quiet dread I experienced awaiting the Clinton campaign, the quite possible Clinton restoration and the drama both bring inevitably in their wake. There's another part of that story we're now seeing in spades: let's call it the inevitable Vince Fosterization of really every media scrape, pseudo-scandal and genuine embarrassment the Clintons are ever involved in. (For those of you not familiar with Vince Foster, his tragic suicide or the years-long right-wing clown show it kicked off, it is probably best described as the '90s version of Benghazi.)…
Part of what is endless and exhausting about the Clintons is that they really do always push it right to the line. We've seen it enough times to know they're generally smart enough and careful enough not to go over it...
Yet it's never enough for the Clintons' perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior. It's got to be more. It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don't materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment. Why else do we have 'Benghazi', the President's birth certificate, the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of the White House and so much more? And if you think that's bad, you should have seen the '90s.
The big difference between then and now is that President Obama is just too straight-laced and controlled a figure ever to have given these jokers and their resentment-addled minions much to work with…
This weekend I was perusing the right-wing blogs, discussion areas and media generally. You can already see the picture emerging. The Clinton Foundation is actually a fraudulent charity. Or in other versions, the Clintons stole millions of dollars from the Clinton Foundation. At a minimum, Bill Clinton raised most of his money for the foundation by trading on the favors Hillary Clinton could provide as Secretary of State.
Only none of this appears to be true; or at a minimum, the claims remain entirely unproven or even un-evidenced…
But of course we've already moved on to the stage where…the entire Foundation is [considered] a corrupt enterprise. And by this logic, everyone who contributed money to the Foundation was contributing to a corrupt enterprise even if they didn't have any pecuniary interests that could be served by doing so. Thus, George Stephanopoulos has to apologize for contributing to the Clinton Foundation since...since in doing so he would be compromised and give more favorable coverage to the Clintons?
[The Clintons have] used their fame and power to enrich themselves, which is of course an outrage since it makes them always indistinguishable from the Bush family...[F]reak show conspiracy theories…inevitably bubble up around them, a symbiotic embrace of grievance, aggression and derp. It's painful to admit, but the two sides feed on each other.
