For those of you youngsters who may be joining our program already in progress, you can look no further than Wednesday morning's First Read from NBC News if you want an example of what Grampy and Grams are talking about when they start fuming about The Clinton Rules and yammering incoherently about the Mena Airport and Parker Dozhier's fish camp. The piece carries three bylines, which is rather astonishing, since they could just as well have put down "By Opp O. Research" and not have been accused of deceiving anyone.

The topic is The Clinton Foundation, and the new e-mails released by the ratfcking legal operation known as Judicial Watch, which got the AP all a'quiver. Here is the simple answer to that: no quid pro quo, no pay-for-play, no matter how many respected people want to believe it's there.

Having said that, let's move along to what NBC had to say on the subject of "The Clinton Conundrum," the first of what I guarantee you will be a Bourne-length series encompassing the entire prospective presidency of Hillary Rodham Clinton. If you're interested in having the executive branch function at all over the next eight years, you should start paying attention now.

The latest controversy over the Clinton Foundation—the allegation that special access was given to Foundation donors when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state—follows a familiar pattern: The entire arrangement appears sloppy, careless, and seedy.

An allegation that "special access was given," and an allegation that the people who got in touch with the Foundation did so in the expectation of "special access," are two hypotheses of a different color. See how this works?

As New York magazine's Jonathan Chait writes, "What [new emails] show is that people who donated to the foundation believed they were owed favors by Clinton's staffers… [Former staffer Doug] Band, for instance, called the crown prince of Bahrain, who donated millions to the foundation, a 'good friend of ours.'"

Darren McCollester

Well, that's certainly a smoking popgun right there. The crown prince of Bahrain needs to buy access to the Secretary of State of the United States of We'll Buy Your Oil? How would you like to prove that in the Court of Public Ridicule? It also is to be noted that the AP discovered an e-mail in which Muhammad Yunis was seeking an audience. Yunis, of course, won a Nobel Prize for inventing the microloan. Dens of thieves!

But there's another familiar pattern to the discussion, especially regarding the AP report showing that Foundation donors met with Clinton when she was Secretary of State: This kind of behavior is standard operating procedure for any politician. If you're a sitting congressman, senator, or governor—raise your hand if you've never granted meetings with big donors (either ones you've known before or after the donation). This is a practice that happens ALL of the time in American politics. And as a result, none of it is illegal or demands a special prosecutor.

Well, that's that, then. Let's all go get a beer. Wait. What?

And as a result, none of it is illegal or demands a special prosecutor. So two things can be true at the same time: One, what the Clintons are doing can be sloppy, careless and seedy. And two, they're not the only ones doing it.

First of all, you didn't prove Part A, which is good because Part B completely undermines your whole argument. The level of credibility for this interminable tut-tutting depends completely how deeply you bought into all the innuendo and all the fairy tales about the Clintons and corruption dating back to the original botched Whitewater story in The New York Times. And I am, ahem, dubious of the argument that the Clintons should have been ready for a reprise of the snipe hunts of the 1990s simply because they are the Clintons.

There are a lot of people peddling this line at the moment, including our pals at First Read.

The Clinton Foundation was always going to be a target in this campaign. And if you're scratching your head as to why the Clintons didn't have a better plan for dealing with it—like having a well-devised exit strategy months ago—remember that the decisions are usually coming from the principals rather than the political advisers.

If you want a perfect example of what corruption-by-access can do to journalism, you have it right there. The authors know that candidates come and go, but that the permanent class of consultants, advisors, lobbyists, strategists, and other species of political Remoras will be with us always. So you decide that the candidate (and her husband) are to blame for not being ready for another onslaught of thinly sourced investigative offal. That way, your friend in the permanent political class will still return your calls.

It's a wonderful life, truly.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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