it all started with Lani Guinier...
"On the (relatively) high road, the Guinier fight taught conservatives that Clinton was singularly susceptible to frontal media assault on 'controversial' social issues; on the low road, the Hill fight produced a cadre of conservatives committed to taking down the next Democratic president by means of mass-media sex-scandal. In this bitter sense, the Guinier episode set the terms for the torpedoing of national health care in 1993 94 and Clinton's later capitulation on welfare 'reform'; Hill, meanwhile, begat David Brock, who tripled the American Spectator's circulation and begat Richard Mellon Scaife and a host of Arkansas state troopers, who together begat Kenneth Starr, who begat Linda Tripp, who begat Monicamania, whose issue was still uncertain at press time. No doubt Anita Hill and Lani Guinier would prefer to leave a different legacy - which is, I surmise, one reason they have written their own accounts of their encounters with Washington at its worst."

(via Eschaton)