The Return of Clinton Derangement Syndrome [View all]
Her email scandal has predictably transformed from a legal inquiry into a partisan witch hunt.
BY BRIAN BEUTLER
July 8, 2016
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, then Republicans lost their minds chasing the Clintons down rabbit holes years ago.
They spent the 1990s turning every gnat fart in the Clinton White House into a six-part inquiry, and at the end of it, Bill left office historically popular. They’ve spent the better part of the 2010s doing the same thing to Hillary, and though she is emphatically not historically popular, Republicans have, in the process, tended to humiliate themselves and abet Donald Trump—the one person politically incorrect enough to call her crooked and accuse her of playing the woman card, at last, at last.
What we witnessed Thursday was part of a pattern that goes back more than 20 years. A Clinton does something—in some cases innocuous, in this case worthy of criticism—and her political nemeses respond completely out of proportion. They’ve invested so heavily in the fantasy that she’s one email or utterance away from complete self-destruction that they can’t bring themselves to accept anything less than the highest returns. A sunk cost fallacy of power politics and partisan score-settling.
. . .
Republicans in Congress and their conservative media allies largely brought this upon themselves. They were the ones who made right-wing sop out of baseless speculation that Clinton might be indicted for violating a law nobody’s ever been convicted of violating.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/134949/return-clinton-derangement-syndrome
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