Benghazi conspiracy theorists turn on Trey Gowdy (Washington Post)
What was AG Loretta Lynch thinking? (All In with Chris Hayes)

One of the more difficult concepts that some of my students have when it comes to forming arguments is the concept of unconscious bias, the realization that as hard as they work to not be biased as they conduct their research and come to the conclusions they’ll be writing up in their papers, there will always be biases that can slip into their writing and editing that they aren’t conscious of. It can seem like a personal attack to tell students that they have biases, especially for those who are concerned with social justice issues, and even reminding students that everyone does this — including me — doesn’t do much to ameliorate the guttural reaction they have to feeling accused of discriminating against people, even if only in their heads.

I understand my students feeling uncomfortable when I talk to them about unconscious bias, because I remember how uncomfortable I felt when I was first confronted with the concept. That initial shock is probably common to most people, but I think it’s been exacerbated in recent years by conservatives pushing back against the concept of subtle racism, denigrating academics and liberals who talk about things such as institutional racism. For those who stay firmly inside the right-wing media bubble, they’re regularly bombarded with talking heads claiming that nothing short of wearing a white hood or carrying out a lynching is “really” racism, and anyone who says otherwise is an effete socialist et cetera. I honestly believe that the current campaign of the presumptive Republican candidate for president this year is reflective of the strong pushback that many conservatives have been taught to feel against the idea that their words or other actions might possibly be, in however small a way, racist.

It’s been over twenty-five years now since the Clintons first entered the broad American conscious, and at this point I’m wondering what would take more brainpower: Eradicating every American’s unconscious biases about Bill and Hillary Clinton, or finding a cure for cancer.

To be clear about this, I have never cared for either of the Clintons, from the moment Bill launched his first presidential campaign to today. I think they’ve both done a number of good things in their public lives, but I have very serious issues with several of their political stances and actions that basically render it impossible for me to consider voting for either of them for any office, let alone the presidency. That being said, having lived through the early years of Bill Clinton’s first term as my political senses started kicking into overdrive in high school, the degree to which many right-wingers have gone to try to vilify the Clintons defies description, to the point where I have serious doubts that many of the most vocal conspiracy pushers are clinically sane.

When the first whispers of alleged wrongdoing by Bill Clinton started making national news during the 1992 Democratic primaries, I was inclined to believe every bad thing that I heard about him. In my defence, I was in my early teens at the time, and still a couple of years away from getting Internet access so I could research this stuff independently, but in hindsight I can see how foolish I was at the time to just accept everything bad that I heard about the Clintons just because I didn’t like them. Some of the negative stories turned out to have more than a little substance to them, of course, but it didn’t take me long to realize that many of the allegations were little more than right-wing fever dreams designed to play to Americans’ worst instincts in general (and conservatives’ worst instincts in particular), creating a literal caricature of Bill and Hillary Clinton as the spawn of the demonic coupling of Satan and Karl Marx, their incestuous coupling producing, as Rush Limbaugh “joked” about on his short-lived television show, a dog.

Two of the right-wing allegations made against the Clintons really stuck in my craw when it came to taking any future accusations against them seriously. The first was allegations that Bill Clinton, while Governor of Arkansas, was either dealing cocaine out of his office or letting his brother deal cocaine in his office or … honestly, as with a lot of these conspiracies, different theorists are making such wildly different claims around a common theme that it’s hard to tell just what exact details they want me to believe, except that the Clintons are the most evil people on the face of the planet. The second, and perhaps the most ridiculous of all the claims made against the Clintons, is that they had their White House counsel (and former law colleague of Hillary Clinton), Vince Foster, murdered and then covered up the murder to look like Foster committed suicide. The low point (or high point, depending on how you look at it) of the bizarre conspiracy theories came when a Republican congressperson named Dan Burton videotaped himself shooting a melon in an effort to “disprove” the official conclusions of the investigations into Foster’s suicide. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

Although the Vince Foster conspiracy theories got some mention on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, they never really went that far beyond the insular world of the right-wing media bubble, at least until this year’s presumptive Republican presidential candidate resurrected them (because apparently resurrecting the Macarena while wearing Zubaz would have been too dignified of a nineties flashback for him). Dan Burton was elected to Congress, and showed his melon-shooting video on the floor of the House of Representatives for C-SPAN cameras to capture in all its glory, which was perhaps prescient of Congressional Republicans slowly incorporating the fringier right-wing politics of talk radio (and that one cable “news” network that launched during the Bill Clinton presidency) into their legislative actions, culminating in the two becoming virtually indistinguishable after the rise of the Tea Party movement. Despite Burton becoming a national laughingstock in the aftermath of his melon-shooting video, he kept getting elected to the House until his retirement a few years ago.

It didn’t help that the biggest scandal of the Bill Clinton presidency, the whole Monica Lewinsky thing, started its life on a right-wing website that many held to be less reputable than the worst supermarket tabloid. When their reporting on the Lewinsky scandal turned out to be true, not only did it lead to the second impeachment of a sitting president in American history, but it also made it much harder to dismiss every negative claim made about the Clintons, and that continues to this day. Yes, there’s the old line about a stopped clock being right twice a day, but the fact remains that every new claim about the Clintons is now all but impossible to dismiss out of hand just because it comes from a right-wing website.

In some ways, though, maybe that’s for the best. As outlandish as some political websites can be with the claims they make (and that goes for sites across the ideological spectrum), the temptation to reject any claims from a certain website, or person, or network, can be dangerous. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for track records, and it’s impossible for any one person to find the time to verify every single claim made in the domestic political arena, but ideally people would take the time to at least consider these claims on more than a superficial level before deciding whether or not to accept them. (Sadly, fewer and fewer Americans possess the critical thinking skills to make those considerations, largely thanks to the same politicians who have been most vocal about the Clintons this past quarter-century and how they’ve fucked up our education system.)

This is why I’ve done my own considerations of all the negative claims and news stories about the Clintons that have emerged these past four years, even though I have enough political disagreements with Hillary Clinton that she was never going to get my vote for president anyway. Some of them, including the controversies about her speaking fees for large corporations and donations to the Clinton Foundation, seem to have a good deal of legitimacy to them, and have given me even more reasons to try to dissuade my friends from voting for Hillary in November. Others, however, not only fail the smell test, but the tests for the other four senses as well.

The lore that has built up around the 2012 consulate attack in Benghazi is practically encyclopaedic at this point, and even with a new “final report” released a few days ago that exonerates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of the most specious right-wing accusations about how they handled the attack, the latest in Congressional Republicans investigating the attack ad nauseum and not reaching any significant new conclusions, many conservatives refuse to accept that Hillary Clinton didn’t somehow gleefully oversee the murder of four Americans, to the point where they’re now accusing even the most right-wing of elected Republicans of somehow secretly being in the back pocket of the Clintons. It’s hard not to think that these people came to the conclusion that Hillary Clinton was guilty of the most heinous of atrocities first, and will only accept evidence that confirms their predetermined conclusions as factual. As hard as it is to believe, the aftermath of this report may cause the Republican Party, and possibly the broader American conservative movement, to cannibalize itself even more than it’s already been doing these past couple of years.

Bill Clinton going across a tarmac to talk with Loretta Lynch on her plane, while the FBI is still conducting its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, may be even more troubling. If the FBI concludes that Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong then this meeting is going to cast a huge shadow over that conclusion, and that’s completely fair. Bill Clinton, whether by accident or not, really screwed up here. By every account of the meeting so far, there is a seeming nonchalance to Bill Clinton’s actions that goes far beyond the typical failing of his political instincts that we’ve seen since he left the Oval Office. As other pundits have pointed out, it’s almost like Bill Clinton knows that no matter what he or his wife does, right-wing media will be predisposed to make a scandal out of it and most everyone else will roll their eyes at it. Much has been made of the presumptive Republican nominee and how he’s sometimes acted like he apparently believes that it doesn’t matter what he says because he thinks that people will vote for him anyway, but there seems to be a lot of evidence to point to Bill Clinton feeling that way as well, which brings up a very uncomfortable question: If there’s a widespread belief that people have already made up their minds about the candidates, then why are we even having a campaign? Why not just vote now and save ourselves from four more months of the gobbledygook that passes for politicking in America these days?

Broadly speaking, I do believe that there has been a right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons since Bill first ran for the presidency, and that the majority of claims that have emerged from that conspiracy have been laughably absurd. The Clintons have proven themselves to be far from perfect, though, and I don’t believe that either of them should ever hold public office again. These are not mutually exclusive schools of thought, and I really wish that other people would consider the Clintons as carefully as I have. With the way our public discourse has degenerated these past twenty-five years, though, I’m not about to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.