Take two recent examples: their acceptance of some $190,000 worth of gifts during the final days of what the anti-Clinton forces like to call the “co-presidency,” and the alleged trashing of the White House by Democratic vandals on their way out the door. In the mainstream media, these stories have been portrayed as evidence, as if more were needed, that the Clintons are shameless, graceless people who can’t possibly match up to the Bushes, whom they both replaced and are being replaced by. The truth, however, is a little more complicated.

In Salon, Eric Boehlert weighs in with a well-considered analysis of the Clintons’ gifts, showing that what they did was by no means unprecedented or unusual. It turns out that the Bushes accepted $144,000 in goodies during George Sr.’s one-term presidency. And the Reagans allowed their friends to buy them, on loan, a $2.5 million home two years before Ronnie left office, a blatant conflict of interest. (Nancy Reagan only recently finished paying it off.) As for charges that many of the gifts the Clintons are taking with them came in only after Hillary was elected to the Senate, Boehlert shows rather convincingly that there is no actual evidence as to when those gifts were received — only when the Clintons filed the required paperwork.

Meanwhile, Slate, which just happens to be Salon’s principal competitor, reports on how the media have backed off charges that the Clintonistas trashed the White House without ever quite having the guts to admit that they’d gotten carried away publishing such reports in the first place. It now appears that what happened amounted to pranksterism on the order of what the Clinton team found when they moved in eight years ago, which had included disabled computers, Bush-Quayle bumper stickers, and the like.

Slate writer Joshua Micah Marshall neatly skewers the press for attributing the change of plot line not to misinformation, but rather to the classy Bushies’ not wanting to reveal how bad the vandalism really was. “Reporters are suckers for stories that conform to their prejudices: It stood to reason that the Clinton crew would make a graceless exit and that the grown-ups from Texas would rise above it,” Marshall writes, adding: “The story here wasn’t Clintonite shenanigans. It was the new White House’s smearing of their predecessors and [Bush spokesman Ari] Fleischer’s refusal to put up or shut up when it came time to start giving details.”