Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the phrase “Cokie’s Law,” which referred to a specific comment by pundit Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had actually blamed her husband’s childhood for his philandering, Roberts said:

“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

Cokie’s Law is the axiom that says the press can  pass judgement about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.

You see, if the person being discussed were “competent,” it wouldn’t be “out there” in the first place, so even if it is based upon entirely specious speculation, it’s his or her own fault for inspiring people to speculate so speciously. It all goes back to their “character,” which nobody is more equipped to analyze and dissect than celebrity political reporters and pundits.

And even if the charges are patently false, they are always far too complicated to rebut in detail; and, anyway, the other side says something different (aka “he said/she said), so who’s really to say what’s true and what isn’t? It’s still the responsibility of the target of those charges because he or she shouldn’t have allowed him or herself to be in a position where someone could make false charges in the first place.

This is where we are with Clinton’s email pseudo-scandal from yesterday morning’s “Meet the Press“:

CHUCK TODD: Let me bring in the panel. Jon Ralston, the “lawyerly” answer there from Howard Dean [who said that in Clinton’s public responses to the email controversy she sounded too much like a lawyer]. I thought was an interesting way… Every defense they’ve sounded off, that’s what it sounds like. A lawyer, not a political consultant.

JON RALSTON: I guess what I thought from the beginning on that, I thought that was terrible for her that Governor Dean said that. But Chuck, “it depends on what the definition of classified is,” I think is what people out there in real America are thinking. Even if it wasn’t classified, why did she have to do this? Was there sensitive information on there? Why did she have that on an insecure server? This is not, as Governor Dean said, a purely media-manufactured story. Sure, the media’s been all over it. But it’s her handling of it. You know, someone should’ve given her this advice before that appearance in, by the way, Nevada, where she’s at– Here’s the first thing you shouldn’t do Hillary, joke about it. Don’t joke about it, because people, even if they don’t understand all the nuances, they know it’s serious. So don’t say, “Wipe it with a cloth,” because you know in this world now, it’s going to go viral right away, which of course it did.

CHUCK TODD: Amy is there a competency thing about this? You know, I had somebody email me and they go, “You know what, I don’t think it’s a big deal, but jeez, if she can’t handle this mess, what does it say about her managerial expertise as president?”

AMY WALTER: Well, it goes to the heart of what her campaign message is, is I’m one of you, and I’m going to fight for you. But the reality is, and this is where the campaign still has its biggest problem, is explaining why on earth she set up a separate server in the first place. Normal people don’t do that. Normal people who work in the government know what they have to do. So that just distances her even more, and it sets up this sense that she is–

CHUCK TODD: Special. Elite.

AMY WALTER: –she’s special, she’s elite, she’s–

CHUCK TODD: Doesn’t play by the rules.

AMY WALTER: And that to me is the bigger problem here.

As for the “elite, special” charge, that’s just cheap armchair psychoanalysis of both Clinton and the electorate. It’s not political analysis; it’s beltway parlor games, and it’s not really worth discussing. Both Job Ralston and Amy Walter are excellent reporters and analysts but there’s something about Clinton that turns all of them in to Cokie Roberts on the Sunday shows.

But let’s dispense with the rest of this right now, because it’s not hard to do. First of all, the issue does depend on what the definition of classified is. If that’s what the American people are thinking, then bravo, because the fact is that none of the emails that have been flagged were classified when she handled them. Various departments are looking at them now and reportedly deciding that maybe they should have been. That’s really it, as far as the “classified documents” issue is concerned, and the press shouldn’t be dismissive of that fact.