Against gratuitous mudslinging
I suppose here's as good a place as any to apologize for my role in villainizing Bill Clinton over the non-scandal portion of his scandals. There were many allegations that were just silly. To set the record straight...

Vince Foster committed suicide.
The Clintons didn't make any money off of Whitewater.
etc.

Now, there actually were some scandalous things about that administration. Mostly philandering but also some deeply suspicious campaign funding schemes (the Buddhist monks and so on). Unfortunately, and a bit ironically, I think all the frivolous scandal charges made people just roll their eyes when the real misbehavior came out.

Likewise, over on the main blog (in a comment) M.S. wonders how Lott got to be Senate Majority Leader in the first place given everything unsavory about his past and his outlook on life. I remember hearing dirt about him way back when and I remember wanting reflexively to come to his defense, the same way many Democrats reflexively came to the Clintons' defense. The problem is that when I heard the dirt on Lott, I'd been hearing "dirt" about nearly any Republican with a pulse, most of it coming from the same sources -- Carville, Begala, and so on.

Long story short, the more people sling mud, the harder it is to convince anyone that there's somebody whose dirt really should disqualify him from politics.