Kevin Drum advances a theory!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

Clinton's email procedures: Kevin Drum offers a theory today concerning Hillary Clinton's reasons for handling her email the way she did.

Drum's theory attributes innocent motives to Clinton. "I'm a partisan," Drum notes near the end of his piece. "I'm keenly aware that I'm motivated to find innocent explanations for Clinton's actions." That said, his theory could be right. That said, we had this basic reaction:

Frankly, we don't care why Clinton did what she did. In the larger scheme of things, this whole fandango is massively trivial. This discussion has persisted for more than a year for two basic reasons:

First, the press corps simply hates discussing matters of substance. They prefer discussing issues of "character," which is press speak for gossip.

Second, they have an enduring story-line about the Clintons' alleged character problems. For reasons which no one has ever made clear, they've been pursuing this favored story-line for more than twenty years.

In 1999, that story-line took a detour through two years of attacks on the alleged character problems of Candidate Gore. Now they're in the final chapter of this morality play.

We're not suggesting that every major journalist is trying to take down Candidate Clinton. That said, the modern press corps' devotion to preferred elite "narratives" is virtually its defining characteristic. In our main reports for the next few weeks, we'll be exploring the Ahabian way the press corps has driven certain story-lines concerning the nation's public schools. In the political realm, we're seeing the Ahabs pursue the fiendish story-line which started with the Whitewater pseudo-scandal.

Drum's theory may be right, but it's a theory about Clinton. Concerning this disastrous twenty-four year morality play, we'll make two more observations:

First, the behavior of our mainstream press corps is bizarre and pathological. Again and again, this phrase comes to mind:

Not recognizably human.

Second, the liberal world has enabled or actively driven this disaster every step of the way. Some liberal gods—think Frank Rich, for one example—have been up to their ears in the wars against both Clintons and Gore. Other liberal journalists have persistently looked away as this lunacy has unfolded.

As for us the liberal rubes, we simply aren't smart enough to play this particular game. Smart enough or tough enough—we simply haven't been able to see the structure of this endless play. We can't seem to see the way our leaders, Drum perhaps included, have persistently sold our interests away in search of career advancement. (It's the mainstream press which has successfully driven these wars, not the right-wing machine.)

When they came for Gore, we let them do it. From that day to this, we agreed that those events must never be discussed. Even when someone did years of work on this fascinating subject, we agreed to avert our gaze from what had so plainly happened. Just this week, Paul Krugman finally broke the spell on this forbidden topic.

Quite correctly, Krugman said it's happening all over again. That said, if we thought President Bush was a bust, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the possible President Trump.

We're dumb and we're ugly and nobody likes us! Our press corps heroes treat us like fools. We used to laugh at the ditto-heads because they let themselves be treated this way. Now, as our President Trump draws near, we are the ditto-heads too!

We know, we know—this can't be right. Here's the big problem:

It is!