Hillary Clinton has lied so frequently that it is entirely possible that she has come to believe some of her own lies.

Why is Hillary Clinton likely to be our next president, rather than the next inmate at FCI Aliceville? A big part of the answer involves a corrupt, compromised, politicized federal government that protects powerful lawbreakers like Hillary from being imprisoned or even prosecuted. If you or I had committed even one-tenth of the crimes Clinton committed in her tenure as secretary of State alone, we’d be watching the sun rise through a set of bars for the next few decades.

As it stands, Hillary will likely be watching the sun rise and set over Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four to eight years. You can thank your government for that. Another part, though—maybe the larger part, and surely the more practically consequential part—is that Hillary Clinton, and the Clinton political machine itself, is really, really good at lying. There is really a kind of genius to it all—a conniving, narrow-eyed genius, to be sure, but one which requires a considerable amount of talent and investment.

The Hillary Lie Machine Meets Her Email Scandal

Consider, for example, what we know about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal alone, and the skill it must take to avoid prison time for it. We know that Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail server was highly illegal because it processed and stored classified government information on an unsecure system. We know that much of this classified information originated with Clinton herself.

We know that she ordered at least one aide to break the law on her behalf by sending classified information over an unsecure system. We know she has lied repeatedly about transmitting classified information on her server, at press conferences and once, incredibly, under sworn testimony. We know that, although she insisted otherwise, Clinton deleted thousands of work-related e-mails. We know that one of her aides destroyed Clinton’s mobile devices with a hammer, preventing a full forensic analysis of her e-mail usage. We know that Clinton has lied about the FBI’s own assessment of her previous lies. And so forth.

Given this staggering level of criminal behavior, one might ask: how has Clinton been able to defend herself? The answer is: lying. For much more than a year Clinton has lied repeatedly and ceaselessly about her e-mail woes. She has lied about the classified information on the server, she has lied about her recordkeeping, she has lied about the very lies she has previously told, she has lied so frequently that it is entirely possible she has come to believe some of her own lies.

Therein lies the unrivaled brilliance of the Clinton Lie Machine: it’s the relentlessness of it all, the utter refusal to tell the truth, the determination to lie long after other self-respecting people would have given up and just admitted the facts.

Exhaust the People, and They’ll Go Away

The magnitude of the lies—the depth and breadth of the Clinton Machine’s penchant for falsehood—serves a dual purpose. Initially it obscures the truth, and then it obfuscates when the truth inevitably arises.

At this point, after well over a year of solid lies and untruths from Clinton and her entourage, exposing the hard facts of the e-mail scandal to a weary American electorate is incredibly difficult. There are too many twisting webs, too many contradictory statements, too many cover-ups piled on top of cover-ups, too many angles from which to approach it.

Adding to the problem, there are often multiple Clinton scandals going on at once, leaving people confused over just what lurid details belong to which episode of misconduct. Consider the bombshell Wall Street Journal report this week, which was ostensibly about the FBI’s discovery of some new e-mails related to Clinton’s private server. Within the report, however, we learned that the Clinton Foundation is also under investigation by the FBI, and has been for some time.

Two major scandals in one single news article: it’s a swirling mixture of baffling, confusing, hopelessly complex impropriety. In other words, it’s the Clinton Lie Machine.

An American people tired of Clinton’s corrupt scandals and exhausted after a repulsive election season cannot readily be expected to digest the complex and loathsome political runarounds Hillary has constructed since last year. That’s the point: tell enough lies, lie enough about the lies you’ve already told, and people will lose interest out of simple confusion and irritation.

You could see the same phenomenon play out this past September, when Clinton had a health episode at the fifteenth September 11 anniversary. After a video surfaced of Clinton being literally dragged into a van, the Clinton Machine insisted she had merely overheated a little bit (on a 79-degree day, no less). Later, they claimed she was dehydrated. After that, they claimed she had a case of pneumonia, diagnosed a few days before she collapsed.

The obvious intent in this case was to cover up Clinton’s ailing health, and the aggressive lying was just the way to do it. Rather than simply keep quiet (or just tell the truth), the Clinton campaign went through a litany of obvious falsehoods, desperately attempting to conceal Hillary’s illness. Nobody could make heads or tails of it. The lies were so bizarre and transparent that it just turned into a weird, confusing mess. Rather than “Hillary Clinton is obviously not well,” the story became, “What the hell is going on?” This is a tried-and-true Clinton tactic. And it works.

Enlist a Pack of Cronies to Help Obfuscate

This particular method of distraction has been very much on display with this week’s revelation that the FBI was re-examining the Clinton e-mail scandal in light of new evidence. On Twitter, economics professor Paul Krugman—perhaps the most aggressively biased opinion journalist at any major newspaper—demanded that we look anywhere but at Hillary Clinton.

“If we don’t hear more from Comey,” he tweeted, “we just have to conclude that he was trying to swing election. And *that* should be the story.” Also: “Journalist Twitter is full of shock at FBI behavior here. That same shock should make it into news reports; not doing so misleads public.” One more, in response to a statement by Sen. Marco Rubio: “The technical term for what Rubio is doing here is ‘lying’. That should be part of the story of this crazy day.” Clinton fanatics will happily distract us from the Clinton scandals themselves whenever the opportunity arises.

As Krugman shows, these lying campaigns are aided in no small part by a compliant and unhelpful media, one that is either apathetic about investigating the Clintons or else just openly biased in favor of them. Journalists particularly do the Clintons a huge favor by refusing to substantively investigate the Clinton scandals until the last possible moment (by which point the scandals have percolated on conservative media for weeks or even months).

Then, after a half-cursory, uninterested look into whatever it is the Clintons are lying about this time, the media can declare the matter settled—at which point the conservative media’s continued interest in the matter is painted as bizarre, fanatical, and stupid. The Clintons and their surrogates can shrug and say, “Why is anyone still talking about this? It’s old news.”

The Lies Have Just Begun

This is how the Clintons work. In particular, it is how Hillary Clinton—an untalented and uncharismatic politician with perhaps the lowest likability of any candidate since Richard Nixon—has managed to survive in American politics for the last two decades or so. It is also why, barring a miraculous upset, she will be the next president of these United States. (Donald Trump never really had a chance. He lies just as much as Clinton, if not more, but he is very bad at it, and the media do not give him a break like they do Clinton.)

It is, of course, worth pointing out that, as uniquely corrupt and reprehensible as she is, Hillary would still be a preferable candidate to Trump, who should not be let anywhere near the nuclear codes or the U.S. Armed Forces or anything even approaching the head of the executive branch. Clinton is merely a self-serving, corrupt, compulsively dishonest politician; Trump is a genuinely unstable and dangerous human being.

Still, Americans should be aware of what they will get in a president. We should be aware of the machine we will have to deal with until possibly 2024. If Hillary wins the presidency, expect a continuing level of dishonesty unmatched by any president before her and probably any president after her. The e-mail scandal was just the beginning. The lies have only just begun.