Matt Yglesias explains Hillary Clinton's mindset — it all goes back to Vince Foster.

From "Vince Foster's death and subsequent conspiracy theories, explained" at Vox:

If you ever find yourself wondering how it is that Clinton doesn't manage to resist the temptation to accept paid speaking gigs even when she's already rich and clearly gearing up for a presidential campaign, Foster is basically the reason. Where most politicians would be warned by staff to avoid even a slight appearance of impropriety, Clinton feels from experience that she'll be slammed regardless of what she does, so she might as well let her own conscience be her guide star in terms of policy and cash whatever checks she's offered.

One day after the NYT publishes "Kenneth Starr, Who Tried to Bury Bill Clinton, Now Only Praises Him"...

... we learn — from Inside Higher Ed — that Starr is expected to resign from his job as president of Baylor University, where the Board of Regents has been considering firing him for looking the other way when the school's football players were accused of sexual assault and domestic violence.

There have also been a lot of reports that the board voted to fire Starr. 

Here's our discussion, yesterday, about the NYT article, which seemed framed to help Hillary Clinton by offering up the supposedly surprising news that Ken Starr is a fan Bill Clinton's. The Times downplayed Starr's current troubles, which undercut the value of his seeming admiration for Bill Clinton.

I didn't say this yesterday, but I think it was unfair to Starr to write that he "tried to bury Bill Clinton." Starr was appointed Independent Counsel to investigate the Clintons, beginning with the Whitewater matter and expanding into the death of Vince Foster and then various other matters — "the firing of White House Travel Office personnel, potential political abuse of confidential FBI files, Madison Guaranty, Rose Law Firm, Paula Jones law suit and... possible perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up President Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky."

Whatever criticisms he may deserve for going too deeply into these things, he was acting in the role of a prosecutor, under a charge from the 3-judge division that appointed him and subject to removal for good cause. One may be dismayed at all the things he turned up, but I don't see why he deserves to be seen as motivated by an intent to destroy Bill Clinton. He was a prosecutor, and if he were on a personal vendetta, why didn't Attorney General Janet Reno fire him?

By the way, Trump has brought up the old Vince Foster story, and there's some amazement that he's willing to sully himself with the sort of tawdry material that GOP candidates have traditionally left to others, as the NYT is talking about in its new article, "As Donald Trump Pushes Conspiracy Theories, Right-Wing Media Gets Its Wish":

[B]y personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a Clinton White House aide, Donald J. Trump is...  defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style — one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity.

The Times observes that the Hillary campaign is trying to figure out how to interact with an opponent like this. It's much harder to decline to respond when material is purveyed by the GOP candidate himself and not just right-wing radio and websites. The Times quotes James Carville recommending no response at all.

Then it goes to Anita Dunn, who was once Obama's communications director. (This isn't in the Times, but let's not forget: She's the one who called the Obama White House "a genuinely hostile workplace to women.") Dunn told the Times that Hillary needs to figure out how to respond or Trump gets viewed as "winning the day" whenever he lobs one of his attacks.

And then here's the last sentence of the article:

Half-jokingly imagining Mr. Trump dredging up the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., she said, “We haven’t heard ‘David Koresh’ yet.”

I don't know why that "Half-jokingly" is there. I fully expect Trump to bring up the Waco siege, and there's nothing amusing about it at all.  

"Clinton’s 20-year sojourn in public life has been bracketed, jarringly, by two pseudo-scandals, both involving the tragic and less-than-fully-explained death of an important man in Hillary’s orbit."

"In between there have been assorted smears and public humiliations, including real traumas like Monicagate, the cumulative effect of which has been to make Hillary reluctant to reenter the political game. Or so many of her friends and aides say, and so Republicans must be hoping."

A paragraph out of Politico's piece titled "The Benghazi-Industrial Complex/Will the pseudo-scandal be enough to stop Hillary from running?"

You know, Hillary should be very afraid to expose herself to the beating that every presidential candidate richly deserves. That's how we do democracy. I'm not accepting any pushback. And I'm not going to be massaged into thinking that Hillary is some bold impressive fighter if she steps forward even after friendly journalists have warned her that it's going to be rough.

And perhaps, in the end, the prospect of facing down accusations over Benghazi alone won’t matter much to her. Between the bloody chaos in Syria, Iraq and the larger Arab world, violence in Afghanistan and the standoff with Russia over Ukraine—despite her effort at a “reset” of relations—Clinton will have a lot else to defend in her record if she runs. Real issues, in other words. With Benghazi or not, any presidential campaign is going to be ugly. But the Benghazi-Industrial Complex is going to be as toxic as anything Hillary has faced since … Vince Foster. Is she ready?

See how that's designed to position us to root for her?

Jane Harman recited not the talking points, but the opposite of talking points on Benghazi.

The former Democratic Congresswoman went too far on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday. She intended, I think, to present the Democrats' talking points on Benghazi, but at one point — in just a few words — she let us see the way Democratic Party strategists are talking to each other behind the scenes about the effect the talking points are supposed to have on the public mind. I'm visualizing a memo that has bullet points of what one ought to say out loud and a narrative section of things you don't want to say.

The host Chris Wallace turned to Harman for discussion of the new efforts to investigate what happened 2 years ago in Benghazi, and she quickly got to the declaration "This is a circus" and the suggestion that the idea is "to get Hillary Clinton or some way to embarrass her during the election season."

There's some talk about the Rhodes memo (with Harman saying that maybe it only came out when it did because there was "some claim of executive privilege") and assertions that there was "legitimate confusion" when Susan Rice received her preparation to go on all the Sunday shows and to attribute the Benghazi attack to spontaneous protests over the "Innocence of Muslims" video. It was "an intelligence failure." And on saying that phrase "intelligence failure," and just before saying "it's time to move on and focus on the real problems," she wedges this in:

And, by the way, this was an intelligence failure. But it wasn't a conspiracy. And there aren't aliens in Area 51 and Vince Foster wasn't murdered.

And there aren't aliens in Area 51 and Vince Foster wasn't murdered. That was too revealing! I suspect... Look, I realize I can be accused of "conspiracy" thinking to suspect something and to speak as if I know what they're saying behind our back... but here's the kind of thing Harman's Area-51-Vince-Foster remark made me feel they are saying in private:

We need people to hear the word "Benghazi" as a buzzword of nuts. Somebody says "Benghazi" and the reflex reaction is "Oh, no, here we go again with the conspiracy theories." It should be like when somebody brings up Area 51 or Vince Foster was murdered. A normal person is like "Ugh! Leave me alone." That's the way "Benghazi" should feel. Somebody says "Benghazi" and all anybody thinks is "conspiracy nutcase." Nobody who wants to be considered mainstream in this election should be able to say "Benghazi" anymore. Case closed, and you've built in the respect for Hillary saying "What difference at this point does it make?" Everybody decent — if we get this idea across — will react to Benghazi with a Hillary-esque exasperated "What difference does it make?" If it makes a difference to you, you're crazy. This is a circus. You're a clown. A scary clown. Boo! Aliens! Benghazi! Vince Foster!

"All roads led to a mysterious source—the newly exploding Internet," says Chris Lehane, confessing to, explaining, and justifiying his authorship of the 1995 "Right-Wing Conspiracy" memo.

Lehane, a lawyer in the Clinton White House counsel, with access to The World Wide Web, says he felt as though he had been "transported to a parallel universe." His journey of discovery took him to "early versions of chat rooms, postings and other information showing there was an entire cottage industry devoted to discussing conspiracy theories relating to [Vince] Foster’s death, including numerous online reports of people claiming to have seen him."

Those reports would be picked up by so-called news sources that most Americans at the time had never heard of—conservative outlets such as Eagle Publishing’s Human Events or Richard Mellon Scaife’s the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. From there, the story would migrate to right-leaning outlets we were familiar with, such as the New York Post, the Washington Times and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal—all before eventually ending up in the mainstream press.

He had discovered a "media food chain." (Funny that New York Post and the Wall Street Journal didn't count as "mainstream press" to him.)

Lehane says he "realized that this was just the beginning":

We saw the transition from an electorate that passively consumed the information put before it (a joke at the time was that a political rally was a family watching a political commercial on television) to an electorate that could use technology to actively engage in the creation, distribution and self-selection of information.

I have to read that as implying that Lehane thinks an activated electorate is a bad thing. What made it a "conspiracy"? What was particularly "right-wing" about it? I agree it was vast — it was World Wide — but why did Lehane not see it as thrillingly good?

I have to hypothesize that the threat template came immediately to mind because from the perspective of the White House, he was part of a restrictive network of power that exercised immense control over the mainstream press.

The Wide Web really did threaten The Narrow Web.

"The Hillary Papers/Archive of 'closest friend' paints portrait of ruthless First Lady."

"The papers of Diane Blair, a political science professor Hillary Clinton described as her 'closest friend' before Blair’s death in 2000, record years of candid conversations with the Clintons on issues ranging from single-payer health care to Monica Lewinsky."

ADDED: From Blair's notes from a phone call with Hillary about the Lewinsky debacle:

[Hillary] is not trying to excuse [Bill Clinton]; it was a huge personal lapse. And she is not taking responsibility for it... But, she does say this to put his actions in context. Ever since he took office they’ve been going thru personal tragedy ([the death of] Vince [Foster], her dad, his mom) and immediately all the ugly forces started making up hateful things about them, pounding on them.

They adopted strategy, public strategy, of acting as tho it didn’t bother them; had to. [Hillary] didn’t realize toll it was taking on him.... She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying....

[The affair with Monica] was a lapse, but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control....  HRC insists, no matter what people say, it was gross inappropriate behavior but it was consensual (was not a power relationship) and was not sex within any real meaning (standup, liedown, oral, etc.) of the term.

That last line must refer to Bill's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," but what does that last parenthetical mean?  Is "standup, liedown, oral, etc." the sequence of actions in real-meaning sex or is it supposed to be a list of things that one might do but that — without more depth of feeling — don't deserve the lofty label "sex"? The phrase "narcissistic loony toon" suggests the ridiculousness of Monica's love for Bill and her delusion that he loved her too. In which case — within the Mind of Hillary (as paraphrased by Diane Blair) — Bill did not have sex with Monica, but Monica had sex with Bill.

But Hillary's reasoning is the perfectly banal stereotypical reasoning of a wife explaining why she's staying with a cheating husband. What he did with that other woman wasn't real, because it wasn't love. And to put it that way is to cancel the reality of the other woman, for the sake of one's one alliance with the man, the man who brings you status and power. It's a cancellation because there was love: Monica loved Bill. And that cannot mean anything to Hillary, who nullifies Monica's mind with the pronouncement that the mind is unsound. The woman is crazy.

A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.

Oh, sorry. Wrong phrase. Wrong nutty slut. Oops!

I did not have campaign shakeup with that woman, Ms. Solis Doyle.

That's the position taken by Hillary Clinton, as Patti Solis Doyle steps aside and Maggie Williams assumes the role of campaign manager.

Who is this Maggie Williams, and why is she the one to take over the failing campaign? She's never run a political campaign before. Apparently, the big thing about her is that she's the ultimate fierce loyalist:

Even detractors agree with her admirers that Williams would go to the mat for Hillary.

A Kansas City native, Williams, 53, was a central player in the Clinton damage-control machine during the White House years.

In 1995, a uniformed Secret Service officer swore under oath he saw her leave White House lawyer and Hillary confidant Vince Foster's office carrying documents after Foster committed suicide. Williams denied it.

She ran up more than $100,000 in legal bills defending Hillary in various investigations.

Why is this what the campaign needs? (What are they planning to do?!) And, more generally, what does this say about how the Clintons, if elected, will populate the executive branch?

"How smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?"

Stuart Taylor, Jr. asks the classic I-thought-you-were-supposed-to-be-smart question of Hillary. He notes her ridiculous citation of Obama's "I Want to Become President" kindergarten essay and proceeds to enumerate the Clintonian dishonesty:

Gennifer and Monica. ... Although well aware of her husband's philandering history, Hillary backed his squishy denials, famously asserting on "60 Minutes" that she was not "some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette." More deceptively, she suggested to ABC's Sam Donaldson that Bill's contacts with Flowers were just an example of how he loved to "help people who are in trouble" and "listen to their problems."

"Hillary's words uncannily foreshadowed her insistence six years later to ... a White House aide that Bill had 'ministered' to [Monica] Lewinsky because she was a troubled young woman," Sally Bedell Smith writes in her fine new book about the Clintons, For Love of Politics. Hillary has continued to insist that she believed what she said about Lewinsky. But friends and former aides have told Smith and others that she knew her husband was lying all along.

Travelgate. ... [H]er statements were contradicted by evidence, including a long-concealed memo to McLarty and a written chronology prepared by White House aide David Watkins that came to light years later....

While saying that no provable crime had been committed, Robert Ray, who had succeeded Kenneth Starr as independent counsel, reported in October 2000 that Hillary's statements had been "factually false" and that there was "overwhelming evidence that she in fact did have a role in the decision to fire the employees."

Cattle futures. ... Hillary's first explanation (through aides) of this extraordinary windfall was that she had made the investment after "reading The Wall Street Journal" and placed all the trades herself after seeking advice from "numerous people." It was so preposterous that she soon had to abandon it.....

Removal of Vince Foster documents. ...

Castle Grande. .... Castle Grande was a sewer of sham transactions... Hillary told federal investigators that she knew nothing about Castle Grande. When it turned out that more than 30 of her 60 hours of legal work for Madison Guaranty involved Castle Grande, she said she had known the project under a different name. A 1996 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report said that she had drafted documents that Castle Grande used to "deceive federal bank examiners."...

Billing records. ....

Taylor lays it out crisply.