Politics & Power Quote by Vincent Bugliosi

Bugliosi’s move here is prosecutorial, not poetic: he frames news coverage as an evidence trail that somehow stops at the courthouse door when the defendants wear robes. The line sets up a blunt imbalance - Clinton’s lie about sex gets years of oxygen; five Supreme Court justices, in Bugliosi’s view, commit an institutional crime and the story evaporates. The intent is accusation by contrast, a rhetorical cross-examination of the press and the public’s hierarchy of outrage.

The subtext is harsher than the headline complaint about hypocrisy. Bugliosi is arguing that American media incentives tilt toward salacious, character-driven scandal because it’s legible and marketable. Constitutional sabotage isn’t. It’s abstract, slow-burn, and demands civic literacy. The Clinton saga had plot, humiliation, and a villain you could caricature nightly. A contested election and judicial intervention requires diagrams, patience, and the uncomfortable implication that legitimacy itself might be compromised. Better, the quote suggests, to treat it as “too big to hold” and move on.

Context matters: Bugliosi was a relentless critic of Bush v. Gore and of what he saw as the Court’s partisan overreach. Calling it “one of the biggest crimes” is intentional overstatement - a moral charge meant to pierce the fog of “both sides” neutrality. His cynicism lands because it names a familiar media reflex: we can’t resist the intimate lie; we struggle to stare at the systemic one.