All Intensive Purposes

Kevin Drum and Mike Tomasky think that conservatives keep churning out the hit pieces on Bill Clinton because they see a long-term value to discrediting his presidency. Me, I tend to think that it's that they viscerally dislike the guy, for reasons I've never quite been able to understand, and they just can't stop themselves. Also, it's a lot more fun to kick Clinton than it is to think about foreign policy (read: Iraq) or domestic policy (read: massive deficits).

That aside, Tomasky's piece reminds me of a question I've thought about from time to time, going to the relationship between daily media and history's judgment. Most (if not all) of the opinions and analysis that you get from television, newspapers and weekly magazines is emphemeral, and their conventional wisdom -- to my mind -- has little weight when historians sit down to do their thing. With a few years of perspective, much of what preoccupies us today will seem silly, or obvious, or both. Which tends to suggest that even if Tomasky is right, the sorts of hit pieces that he's talking about won't matter much.

Maybe this is wrong, and today's conventional wisdom because the first draft of history.