Now they notice

[Chuck] Todd asks, "Watching Bill on the trail makes folks wonder whether he could have held up to scrutiny in 1992 had YouTube and instant fact-checking existed back then. No one has seemed less prepared for the intense scrutiny of this campaign than Bill."

Come on. Back then, people did check Clinton's facts and call him on his lies and exaggerations; the folks doing it were people like Rush Limbaugh, magazines like National Review, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard (a few years later), Human Events, newspapers like The Washington Times and some days, The Wall Street Journal... Sometimes they had help from the occasional voice in a mainstream institution like William Safire at the New York Times, or half the Capital Gang on CNN, or a few others... But most of the mainstream media just wasn't interested in pointing out when Bill Clinton got the facts wrong. The fact-checkers of that era didn't have the added firepower that came along later with Drudge, Fox News, the plethora of talk radio voices, the blogs, NRO, etc.

I know very few people who didn't know that Clinton was a liar from day one. But most of those people didn't care. They loved him anyway. Or at least they pretended to.

Back during the Clinton administration I was active on a political forum on CompUServe. When Juanita Broaddrick accused Bill Clinton of raping her and many experienced rape councilors spoke up and said that Broaddrick's story and the way she told it had all the marks of a truthful account of a genuine rape the Clinton partisans, almost every last Democrat, either denied outright that the accusation could be true or said things like, "well the statute of limitations for rape has expired so what do you want us to do?".

Well the obvious answer was that people who voted for Clinton could admit that they made a mistake. They could demand that Clinton resign in disgrace. They could write their congressman and demand that articles of impeachment be filed. They could publicly state that Bill Clinton was scum and didn't deserve to be president of the United States.

But with very few exceptions none of them did anything close to that. The reason is that they simply didn't care. As long as he "kept abortion legal" the women didn't care how many of their sisters he raped and abused and the men were too busy looking at how well their mutual funds were doing to care.