Nothing new there. Nothing to see here. Time to move on for good. That was the attitude of most in the mainstream media to the eleven-hour questioning of Hillary Clinton by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It was not the prevailing attitude, as I remember, toward the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee or the impeachment debate at the House Judiciary Committee (on whose staff Clinton served) 40-something years ago. Of course there were different motivations at work. In 1973 and 1974, many in the media wanted to see Richard Nixon disgraced and removed from office.

In 2015, many in the media don’t want to see the only plausible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination disgraced and rendered unelectable. This year, all the committee’s Democrats decried the hearing as a waste of time and a squandering of taxpayer money. Four decades ago many — but by no means all — Republicans made similar complaints about the Watergate and impeachment hearings.

In both cases, the purpose of the inquiry was legitimate. But in both cases, the focus of the inquiry, on a president or might-well-be-president, inevitably had a political dimension.

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