Brace yourselves. As the Democrats get closer to taking Congress, the Republicans are rearming and reactivating their 90’s attack machine. There will be attacks and smears often created whole cloth from nothing. Thankfully, Congress won’t spend millions investigating these rumors, but it’s going to be annoying and ugly. Left-wing blogs call this the “Clinton rules of journalism.” Republicans and their operatives spent years just throwing imagined misdeeds and overblown garbage at the wall. Eventually, they got one to stick, and it gave them a shot at the 2000 election.

Nancy Pelosi gets the pleasure of being the next Bill Clinton, it seems. So far, I count three imagined storylines and scandals that Republicans have tried to push. They’re clearly trying to build a storyline around Pelosi, attempting to undermine her ability to govern before she’s even taken the job. So far nothing is sticking, but then nothing has involved sex or money. First, there was the whole Hoyer/Murtha silliness. Then we’ve had the fun and slowly ending Hastings/Harman faux controversy. Neither story was sexy, but were part of this story building: can Pelosi lead? They’ve tried silly traditional political attacks, but so far they’ve been easily debunked.

It is ridiculous that this is what we spend so much time on these days. Fake scandals and personal attacks instead of meaningful reporting and debate. We should want more. We need more. We also can ask for more. Local news offered less than 2 minutes worth of coverage to election news each night. That’s awful.

I wish I could think of a way to bring together the best political reporting around the web and put it together in a compelling and consumable format. Aggregation is what people need, the filter to help them find the stories they should focus on. None of the automated solutions seem to work all that well. Memeorandum is the closest I’ve seen and even that isn’t really right.