It’s Not Unfair to Point Out Republicans Have an Acquired Partial Immunity to This, Charlie Pierce

Look, for example, at how easily the story has morphed from whether Biden did that of which he was accused to what he’s hiding in his personal papers at the University of Delaware. Of this I’m sure: some archivist at that institution is in for six or eight months of complete hell. Good luck to him or her.

I will also guarantee this: If the folks at the University of Delaware do as Marcus asks, and they find nothing, that will satisfy nobody. Once this kind of story gets rolling, there’s always supposed to be another memo, another email, another billing record. The argument that answering “legitimate questions” will put anything like this to rest has been refuted, time and time again, since at least the pursuit of the Whitewater affair in the early 1990s. Indeed, on Friday, writing about the situation, The New York Times’s media correspondent sought out for quotation Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of raping her. The name “Donald Trump” appears nowhere in the article, and the central point that somehow the media was too soft on Clinton sounds hallucinatory to anyone who lived through it.

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I have no doubt that this story is now part of the campaign narrative, especially since there is no apparent actual campaign going on due to the pandemic. How crucial it will be is completely up in the air, because everything about this election has been blown to shrapnel by the pandemic, which likely will be the only real issue driving any election for the foreseeable future. Nothing is solid in our politics anymore.