Part two of the two-part article Zuzu and I wrote, as mentioned yesterday, is now up.

Meanwhile, a hatchet job on Bill Clinton in Vanity Fair - rife with rumor and speculation, either unsourced or anonymously sourced, precisely the kind of journalism the Left blogosphere would once have almost universally rejected, irrespective of its target - was peddled by some progressives as though it were fact. And we were meant to care what the Moonie Times had to say about ancient Clinton scandals.

Increasingly, it looked as if many on the left had never spent a moment believing those attacks to be untrue, or the Clintons defensible, in the first place. And eventually came the posts of regret for having ever defended the Clintons in the 1990s, a curious position if those defenses were merited in the 1990s.

Perhaps the left had never defended the Clintons on the merits, instead merely playing a game of partisanship that once required rejecting rightwing frames, even while they internalised them. Perhaps the "vast right-wing conspiracy" had reached further than we once imagined.