Just how low had their standards fallen by the summer of 1999? Consider a pair of TV appearances in which the sitting president of the United States—Bill Clinton—was accused of a long string of murders.

In this case, Clinton’s accuser was Gennifer Flowers, the Little Rock woman who had played a role in the 1992 New Hampshire primary. During that race, Flowers authored a two-part report for a supermarket tabloid, The Star; it alleged a torrid, twelve-year affair with then-governor Clinton. Flowers was paid $150,000 by the Star; eventually, she’d receive more than $500,000 for making her various claims about Clinton. But her Star piece was "riddled with demonstrable inaccuracies," as Jonathan Alter quickly noted in Newsweek. "Flowers claims she met Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in 1979 or 1980," he wrote. "The hotel didn’t open until late 1982." And this: "Flowers claims to have been Miss Teen Age America, 1967. She wasn’t - that year, or any other." But then, Flowers’ assortment of clownish misstatements turned out to be rather lengthy. "Among other things, Flowers’ resumé claimed degrees from colleges she’d barely attended, membership in a sorority she’d never joined and jobs she’d never held," the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Gene Lyons wrote in 1998. In 1995, she had written an entire book about her alleged twelve-year affair without naming a single time and place when she and Clinton were alone together. Nor was Flowers an especially dignified critic. In her book, she recalled the first time she met Hillary Clinton. "I was shocked," she thoughtfully wrote. "She looked like a big fat frump with her hair hanging down kind of curly and wavy. She had big, thick glasses; an ugly dress; and a big, fat butt." By the summer of 1999, this was the person the press had adopted as an unfailing vessel of truth.

In his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton - using an expansive definition of "sexual relations" which had been mandated by the court - testified to one such act with Flowers, in 1977. He said the act wasn’t intercourse. Washington’s pundits were thrilled, of course; on this basis, scribes routinely said they "now knew" that Flowers had been telling the truth all along. In an unintentionally comic formulation, Frank Rich wrote that Clinton had "conceded having an affair with [Flowers], disputing only its duration." Only its duration! Flowers said the "duration" had been twelve years; Clinton said it was more like ten minutes. But this was close enough for journalistic work in an increasingly fatuous era.

At any rate, Flowers was back in the spotlight in 1999, this time pushing an eponymous web site - and a long list of alleged murders. On August 2, she was granted an unusually long, half-hour guest segment on Hardball; instantly, she described Bill and Hillary Clinton as "murderers." Her host, Chris Matthews, expressed (or feigned) surprise - and from that point on, viewers were treated to a clownish spectacle, one which captured the public morals of an increasingly puzzling era. "Who did he try to kill that you know of? Give me one hard case," Matthews asked.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign said Thursday that Michelle Obama never used the word "whitey" in a speech from the church pulpit, as it set up a Web site to debunk rumors about him and his wife.

The rumor that Michelle Obama railed against "whitey" in a diatribe at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ has circulated on conservative Republican blogs for weeks and was repeated by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. The rumor included claims of a videotape of the speech that would be used to bring down Obama's candidacy this fall. ...

Obama bristled when he was asked about the "whitey" rumor on his campaign plane last week, saying it was nonsense that should not be repeated in questioning by a mainstream reporter.

"It is a destructive aspect of our politics right now," Obama told the traveling press corps. "And simply because something appears in an e-mail, that should lend it no more credence than if you heard it on the corner. And you know, presumably the job of the press is to not go around and spread scurrilous rumors like this until there's actually anything, one iota of substance or evidence that would substantiate it."

At the same time, his campaign was preparing the debunking Web site in recognition that refusing to address rumors only perpetuates them.