WHOM THE GODS DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: When does reporting become breaking and entering?

You probably recall this story from February, though it didn’t seem to have much of a lifespan in the mainstream press. New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi was found to have gone into the home of Corey Lewandowski when he wasn’t there and taken a picture as part of a story she was working on. There may be a lawsuit or criminal trial coming out of that as a result, but the details remain unclear. It should seem obvious to one and all that Nuzzi did something wrong, but precisely how wrong was it?

That’s the question Joan Vennochi at the Boston Globe is tackling this week, and to my great surprise, she appears to find some sort of gray area. Sure, it was a crime. But was it a crime crime (to adapt a phrase from Whoopi Goldberg about rape)? She’s even able to find some experts to back up the idea that there might be a different, more flexible standard of justice for special people like reporters.

I’m old enough to remember when a “third-rate burglary” was the stuff of impeachment, if it benefitted a Republican. In contrast, “Liberals need to stop trying to get us to call them ‘progressives’ or whatever word it is this week,” Kathy Shaidle once wrote. “They should just get brutally honest with themselves and with the rest of us and rename themselves the ‘It’s Different When We Do It’ Party.”

As Glenn noted last month, “Trump’s superpower is his ability, just by existing, to bring out the deep and pervasive rot in America’s institutions and the people who run them.”