Rick — Sure there were lunatic preoccupations in the Clinton years. The boys on the tracks story, for example, was a peculiar fascination at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Mena was something similar for The American Spectator. There were others, although most conservative publications simply ignored things like the “Clinton Chronicles.” Clinton himself found some of that stuff useful, and cited it in his public remarks, because it allowed him to cast his opponents as nuts. Hillary used it too — in the famous “vast right-wing conspiracy” appearance on the “Today” show in 1998, she world-wearily said that the right was “accusing my husband of committing murder, of drug running.”

On the other hand, what about the stories that were grisly but true? Clinton led a colorful life and hung out with colorful people. Troopergate was probably the most bitterly denounced of all the anti-Clinton stories, and some of Clinton’s defenders wrote off anybody who took it seriously as a hater and a kook. But the core allegation of the story — that Clinton used his Arkansas security team to facilitate his philandering — was true, and the story was, in retrospect, the most accurate predictor of the kind of behavior that Clinton so disastrously exhibited in the White House in the Lewinsky matter. So the haters and the kooks were right on that one.

When I interviewed the founders of Air America radio in 2003-2004, as they were designing the network’s programming, they said they were not going to engage in the kind of “blowtorch” material that they believed was a staple of conservative radio. They were far, far better than that. But then they got on the air and discovered they liked blowtorch, after all. Maybe they’re motivated by an eye-for-an-eye desire for revenge, as Mike Malloy told me. Maybe they’re trying to grab an audience. Or maybe, in the thrill of opposition, they’ve just come down with a case of the lunatic preoccupations. It happens.