And in any case, it’s not the lie per se that’s important — it’s the enforcement mechanism. And for those of us who insisted during the campaign that the miasma of “impressions” about Hillary Clinton were neither accurate nor accidental, here’s the latest update. Clinton’s so-called character weaknesses, the whole tar-bucket-load of them having done their work, are now being surgically removed from her, carried in a portable ice chest and grafted onto the next Democratic woman who happens to be standing in line, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Yes, the woman who so recently was seen as the opposite of Clinton is now going to be portrayed as the exact SAME as Clinton. Untrustworthy. Hypocritical. The playbook against a Democratic candidate doesn’t offer that many choices, but apparently not that many are needed. If the Democrat is not rich, it’s the “politics of envy.” It they are rich, then it’s “hypocrisy.” You see you can’t win this game. And if you are a woman, you’ll be, you know, “untrustworthy.” The one variable with women is apparent passion. If you display it, you will be “unstable, or unhinged.” If you don’t, you will be “chilly, remote, artificial.” And yes, Clinton was acutely aware of this binary trap and the near-impossibility of escaping it.

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The main thing, though — as with Al Gore’s portrayal as a now-quaint-sounding “serial exaggerator,” or the swiftboating that John Kerry received, or the attempted radicalizing and de-citizening of President Barack Obama — isn’t what the charge is; it’s that it gets made. And that it is made early, is some form of character assassination, and is funded and repeated, repeated and repeated in a media atmosphere that needs a “storyline” for it to understand a candidate.

The right is apparently very eager for this process to begin, and is so confident and dependent on it as a strategy that it is starting even before there are any actual candidates. The right must feel that early infection will yield early political demise.

One can only hope that now that we have seen this pattern and diagnosed the disease, pointing it out early enough will serve as some kind of inoculation.