If I were the sort of person inclined to believe in conspiracy theories—as so many people on both sides of the political divide seem to be these days—I would also be inclined to believe that the moral panic over celebrity male sexual misbehavior that has raged through the media since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in October had a deeper political purpose. True, the multiplying scandals took down a lot of progressive eminences in politics and the media, beginning with Mr. Weinstein himself, but at least some of the survivors must have seen a way to turn even this to account in the ongoing progressive effort to bring about the eviction of President Trump from the executive mansion.

The theory might go something like this. Having put all their scandal eggs in the Russia-“collusion” basket, the media began to see that, with the indictment of Paul Manafort on charges unrelated to the Trump campaign, the Watergate model was not, after all, going to serve them very well, as they had been devoutly hoping it would from the beginning of the Trump presidency. Therefore, with some misgivings, they decided that, although they would keep pushing the Mueller investigation and making the most of anything it threw up, such as the guilty plea of Michael Flynn to a charge of lying to the fbi, the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal model would henceforth be more likely to serve their purpose of driving the President from office.

Of course, there was an