Over at the Associated Press this afternoon (later updated), Ken Dilanian, with the help of four other reporters, prepared a lengthy dispatch attempting to defend 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email and private-server practices. Boiled down to its essence: Boiled down to its essence: "[D]iplomats routinely sent secret material on unsecured email during the past two administrations."

Nice try, guys, but there are two problems with your "many others did it" defense. First, Dilanian and his team quietly admitted that Mrs. Clinton has been lying when claiming in recent weeks that she never sent any classified emails. Additionally, they ignored a December 2009 Executive Order from President Obama which, as Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported this morning, specifies that only "intelligence agencies who own that information in the first place have the authority to declassify it."

Democrats typically argue that almost all of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mistakes have been molehills that Republicans have done their best to make into mountains. Heather Digby Parton thinks that the GOP has been aided in that regard by the mainstream media.

“One of the major effects of the patented ‘Clinton Scandal’ that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats,” wrote Parton in a Monday piece. “They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about ‘what it all means’ while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision.”

Amid the growing rumors on Monday night surrounding a possible presidential run by Vice President Joe Biden, CNN’s AC360 couldn’t help but still mention Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton with chief national correspondent John King ruling that some criticism of Clinton “isn’t quite probably not fair” while David Gergen touted her as “a calm, steadying force.”

You can tell that the left is getting nervous about a scandal when they invoke the successful Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth campaign of 2004 against John Kerry.

As I noted on Saturday, Maria L. La Ganga at the Los Angeles Times did that as she described Planned Parenthood's attempts to fight back against the Center For Medical Progress's exposure of their baby body parts business. On Friday at the New York Times, in a story about how Hillary Clinton was "interrupting" her Martha's Vineyard vacation, Amy Chozick found a Clinton contributor who characterized her email and private server scandal as "somewhat of a tempest in a teapot," and also described it as "their (Republicans') Swift boat issue of 2015."

Well, this was inevitable. On the same day that the Center for Medical Progress exposed the CEO of former Planned Parenthood partner StemExpress laughing "about shipping whole baby heads," a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, in what I have beeen told is a front-page story, has compared CMP's video campaign exposing the commerce in baby body parts to the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth's campaign. The Swift Boat Vets' effort successfully exposed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's serial lies about his service in Vietnam and his smearing of Vietnam veterans as war criminals after he returned.

Times reporter Maria L. La Ganga joined the paper in 1981, and "has served as San Francisco bureau chief, edited in the Business section and pitched in on five presidential elections." Even if one of those five elections wasn't 2004, and even if she didn't dig into conflicting claims over whether Kerry truly earned the Vietnam War medals he received, it's virtually inconceivable that she doesn't know about his frequently stated "Christmas in Cambodia" lie.