Let’s begin with an update to a piece that ran in this space just a year ago (see “Putting down the Big Dog” in The New Criterion of January 2018). One year after I wrote of a Stormy Daniels–inspired revival of interest in the long-ago story of President Bill Clinton’s (and Governor Bill Clinton’s and Attorney General Bill Clinton’s) sexual transgressions—the story from which the Left had been insisting ever since that we all must “move on”—the A&E network ran a six-part miniseries on the same subject titled The Clinton Affair. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that the motivation behind this latest revisiting of the notorious “affair” between Mr. Clinton and the eternally “twenty-two-year-old intern” Monica Lewinsky is not unconnected to the ongoing campaign by progressives to bring down Mr. Clinton’s successor in office, Mr. Trump, whose own past sexual shenanigans, they hope, may be found to include something, anything, that will succeed in producing such a consummation, devoutly to be wished, where Mr. Clinton’s failed. But that doesn’t make its newfound respect for Mr. Clinton’s accusers, no doubt partly inspired by the #MeToo movement, any less valuable.

Amanda Hess of The New York Times introduced her review of The Clinton Affair by writing that the series “lacks a point of view. It is straightforward in style and even-handed in tone. Strangely, this recommends it.” From that word “strangely” you can learn everything you need to know about The New York Times’s own addiction