LiveWire

Maynard says:

There’s another angle to this double standard that I think is worth mentioning, and that’s that charismatic/strongly extroverted people have a certain odd ability to project their own little bubble of reality around themselves, and the rest of us “learn” (or at taught) that this is normal. You probably know someone to whom everyone else yields some advantage, not out of any physical threat, but just because of a sense that the gears of the smoothly-running social machine will grind if they are treated “normally”, and most of us would rather not trigger that awkwardness.

Part of the appeal of Donald Trump is his bluster and his big mouth; this is expected, so if the media dwells overmuch on anything Trump says, it’s them that ends up looking stupid rather than him. On the other hand, Ben Carson carries himself as a class act, and thus he will always stand accused of some transgression. If Trump crosses a line, it’s dog-bites-man, and nobody cares; if Carson is accused of crossing a line, it’s man-bites-dog.

On the Democrat side, Hillary is protected from scandal because everybody already knows she’s a crook, thus putting the story in the dog-bites-man category. Peggy Noonan noted this in her post,“How the Clintons Get Away With It”.

The Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It’s not news anymore. They’re like . . . Bonnie and Clyde go on a spree, hold up a bunch of banks, it causes a sensation, there’s a trial, and they’re acquitted. They walk out of the courthouse, get in a car, rob a bank, get hauled in, complain they’re being picked on—“Why are you always following us?”—and again, not guilty. They rob the next bank and no one cares. “That’s just Bonnie and Clyde doing what Bonnie and Clyde do. No one else cares, why should I?”