By: Chris Bray | Commentary, The Federalist
Delay, delay, delay, then dismiss the scandal as old news. Clinton 101.
Democrats always lie the same way, so pattern recognition becomes a kind of vaccine, except that it actually creates immunity. Once you know how they do it, they can never fool you again. Unless you’re also a Democrat, in which case you were born to be fooled, and you can just go back to sucking your thumb in a basement.
Back in the political Pleistocene, a slippery American president who was known as “Slick Willie” slogged through scandal after scandal, often in the company of his amoral and tone-deaf grifter wife. Perpetually embroiled in controversy because of their own behavior, this shameless couple developed a set of reliable techniques for the management of uncomfortable questions.
The Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel famously described this set of techniques as “The Clinton Scandal Manual,” and the steps were predictable. First you muddy the paper trail by delaying the release of documents or misplacing the records of the scandal. This slows down the arrival of accountability, and forces your critics to engage in a long effort to untangle the threads of your poor choices.
Then, after you’ve forced your critics to prolong their attack by hiding records and muddying the waters, you count on the news media to get tired of the story. The Clintons knew that the press has attention deficit disorder, Strassel wrote, and its members will eventually want to give up on a topic and move to something fresh.
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