You’d think Bill Clinton was still president, lying about his personal life, and that impeachment was imminent, given how the controversy over Alabama’s Roy Moore has been covered by the far-from-monolithic right-leaning media. Moore may have a firewall to protect him, given his popularity, but the quivering among establishment Republicans is obviously revealing of fissures within the party.

Will Sommer, an editor at The Hill who cranks out a weekly newsletter surveying conservative media, notes how, “Fox and most of the rest of conservative media have been as sparing in coverage of this as they can reasonably get away with, and repeating decades-old Bill Clinton allegations along the way.”

“It’s the same playbook we saw perfected after the Access Hollywood tape came out—avoid talking about it as much and as long as possible, until there’s a defensible narrative that can be rallied around. With Access Hollywood, it was ‘locker room talk’; with the Moore allegations, it’s claims that the allegations are ‘he said-she said’ or that the [Washington] Post can’t be trusted. And, just as the Access Hollywood tape fallout inspired Steve Bannon to bring back Bill Clinton’s accusers, conservative media is doing the same this time around.”

He notes the vivid outlier of Breitbart News, which is far more activist than other media on the right. It broke news (obviously fed by the Moore camp) that the Post was about to publish the Moore story, and last week sent reporters to Alabama to discredit the accusations. This is largely because Bannon has real skin in the game. If Moore goes down, it hurts Bannon’s essential case against a moth-eaten GOP hierarchy that he sees embodied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of libertarian Reason.com and Reason.tv, says that one outcome of the Moore saga is “that the Republican Party and many of its press allies—think McConnell, National Review, and The Weekly Standard—have called for Moore to quit his race, even if it means a Democratic pickup in a deep-red state.” McConnell, obviously, now says Moore should exit.

“National Review, which long ago distanced itself from Donald Trump despite sharing much of his legislative agenda, especially on immigration), has similarly called for Moore to take a long hike off a short pier,” says Gillespie. He notes not just how its Jonah Goldberg “casts conservative support for Moore as an existential threat to his movement’s seriousness and moral standing,” but how The Weekly Standard makes a similar argument.

“Only a few weeks ago, the media was awash in stories about ‘the Republican civil war’ pitting limited-government conservatives against less-principled tribalists and who simply want to win at any cost. Roy Moore may well represent the final straw for principled conservatives.”

“The GOP has manifestly failed to shrink the size, scope, and spending of government every time it has run the roost; this year’s failure to pass a repeal-and-replace Obamacare bill, let alone a sensible budget, is more salt in those wounds.”

“Given his lack of ideological coherence or commitments (not to mention his pussy-grabbing comments), Trump was bad enough. A Senate seat isn’t as big a deal as the presidency of course, but it may well be the cherry on top of the shit sundae that the Republican Party has become.”

“What comes next is anybody’s guess, but here’s hoping that the ‘clarifying effect’ of all this is an actual commitment to shrinking the state and limiting its power in all aspects of our lives.” Oh, as he asserted to me last night, this “may well spell the end of the GOP once and for all.”