As we all know, Donald Trump recently suggested that Vince Foster’s suicide was “fishy.” He did this solely to get everyone talking about the old conspiracy theories that maybe Hillary had him murdered, and it worked. Everyone’s talking about it. Sure, most of the talk is about how the conspiracy theories were thoroughly discredited years ago, but as Digby says:
The problem is that nobody believes fact checks they don’t already agree with. And from what I’m hearing from some of my readers, this is all news to them and they’re ready to believe it. Clinton lies about everything so why not about murder?
Yeah. If you’re under 35, you probably barely heard about this in real time. It’s all brand new, and if you’re a Bernie supporter who loathes Hillary as part of the corrupt, warmonger, Wall-Street-loving establishment, you’re primed to give it a listen.
Needless to say, Trump is likely to repeat this about every one of the long string of pseudo-scandals that have been aimed at Hillary over the past 25 years. So here’s what we need: a series of cheat sheets. One for Vince Foster, one for Whitewater, one for Travelgate, etc. Here’s a proposed format:
Description of alleged scandal (100 words max).
Where it came from (150 words max)
Actual truth of the matter (250 words max)
Conspiracy theory talking points (1 million words max)
Just kidding on that last one. Let’s keep it to a few hundred words, OK? The idea here isn’t to be exhaustive, it’s to provide something that people might actually read. Something that allows folks who don’t know about this stuff to get up to speed in a minute or two. I nominate Joe Conason for this task, but anybody else with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Arkansas Project and its bastard cousins is welcome to contribute instead. I hate to say it, but we’re probably going to need this.
