"The great thing about Bill Clinton is his hands are completely in touch with the average American."

Said Chris Matthews, on "Meet the Press" this morning, unintentionally conjuring up an image that made us laugh.

He continued:

He's got his hands on the American experience in a way that Obama's probably lost for a while, that connection. He knows people are really bugged by this promise that wasn't kept. He knows it.

"Whatever Bill Clinton’s motives — Republicans say he is distancing his wife, Hillary Clinton, from the ObamaCare debacle in advance of a White House run..."

Says Jonathan Easley at The Hill in a piece titled "Obama is boxed in by Bill Clinton."

Do we really need Republicans to explain that Bill is out to help Hillary? How could anyone begin to analyze Bill Clinton's remarks about Obamacare without the assumption that he's positioning Hillary for 2016?

Now, Bill's main quote was: "I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got." And I think we know that it's not really possible to keep Obamacare and somehow force private insurance companies to re-activate all the plans that have been canceled. What Bill is really saying is Obama lied. Obama made promises he knew would be broken, because that's what it took to get the government's health-care machine going.

Hillarycare failed, but the up side of that is that Hillary isn't loaded with the political damage that had to happen in the process of dragging everyone into the machine. That's all on Obama. Millions feel the pain and the anger as the big machine grinds into motion and pulls them in. In retrospect, it's a benefit to Hillary that Obama got the win in '08 and that his name went on the "care" that's hurting so much.

Once Obamacare is in motion and everybody's in and the screaming at the intake point has given way to muffled groaning from inside the grinding machinery, a beneficent Hillary will sweep forward with plans for easing that pain. The competent one is here at last, now that you're all in there and can't complain to her about that nasty, deceitful intake process.

ADDED: Jonathan Cohn explains how "Bill Clinton Is Wrong" about "How Obamacare Works." But Cohn is assuming (or pretending) that Bill isn't smart, devious, and political (which I'm taking for granted).

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

Cox concedes that it's completely boring that a bunch of female Democrats support a Hillary candidacy. So what's to talk about? The fact that it was secret. A letter with nothing interesting to say was nevertheless written and revealed to have been written but we still can't see the text even though the text is presumably uninteresting. Well, there's your reason right there for not revealing the text. It's thuddingly dull. Cox says:

There's not much reason to make your support for something political private....

Which is why the existence of the letter and its gist was revealed. Cox concedes this as well: The secrecy label was "less about keeping the support in the note secret than making the support note-worthy." I won't get tripped up by that hyphen. That must be how they write "noteworthy" in the U.K.

So the letter functioned, dully, to give a teensy bounce to the Hillary for President beachball that no one feels like playing with right now. So what's to say? Here's where we get to the part of Cox's column that I found so hard to read:

Hillary... knows a thing or two about "inevitability", and what she knows is not likely to make her more excited to suffer through a fourth presidential campaign (I think we can safely say what she went through during Bill's campaigns counts as suffering). 

What? Hillary doesn't want to run? Excited to suffer? The meaning of suffering? There's just enough of a frisson of masochism in that to make me notice the absence of sex, which sets me off for this:

One of the maddening things about covering the Clintons is Bill's love of the dramatic reveal, the tension-filled lead-up...

Now you've got me thinking about the time "Bill Clinton Finally Just Show[ed] America His Penis."

Excuse the expression: back to Cox:

Bill Clinton is called the "The Big Dog", but he's really a tomcat (in more ways than one) – he likes to toy with his victims. He likes to play hard-to-get, though in the ends, he's almost always gotten. 

In the ends.... More Brit-talk? Does that mean the same as "in the end." The ends? Is that like the way there's an "s" on "buttocks"? (Is it the "s" that absconded from "Sessions"?)

I don't know what I'm supposed to think about here. Bill Clinton likes to play hard to get? That's not how Juanita Broaddrick describes it.

Based on that, journalists have determinedly disregarded any indication that Hillary's ambivalence is genuine. 

But Hillary is not Bill. Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her.

All right. I've settled down. I guess there was no call to think about sex. No sex, please, we're British. Cox was just trying to say that Bill Clinton is good at toying with us politically, so if he were to act ambivalent, it would be theater. Is Cox saying that because Hillary isn't good at that kind of theater, somehow she might actually be sincere in her ambivalence? Most of us are just ignoring the lady's coyness. We already know what she wants. If she can't do coyness as prettily as Bill, that's a reason not to look at the insipid show.

Maybe Cox is just saying the thing that is too boring to write about: We already know that Hillary is running for President. And: Just say it! Cox gets back to her feminism-as-sexism with that last line, which is trying so hard to be a zinger: "Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her." Games — plural — are for boys, and this particular game — the teasing roll-out of a candidacy — is not for her. If games are for boys and Hillary is not a boy, then no games are for her. To specify that one game is not for her is to imply that she is a boy. I'm just talking about logic here, not saying that's where Cox meant to go.

Cox apparently meant to end where she began: The premise that female politicians are the adults. But the evidence is that the females have acted like children, so what are you going to do? Cox tells them to stop acting like men, because men are childish. But they're all childish! They're all acting like politicians! Cox should only be able to say wouldn't it be nice if only the males behaved like children, and then you could say the males are children and the females are grown-ups?

Really, all you can say is that they're all politicians, acting like politicians, and some are better at playing politics than others, and — clearly! — Bill is better than Hillary. Therefore: Hillary should keep it simple. Noted. In my note-book of things that are just barely note-worthy.

Charles Ferguson bails out of the planned documentary on on Hillary Clinton because "nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film."

"Not Democrats, not Republicans -- and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration."

Not even journalists who want access, which can easily be taken away. I even sensed potential difficulty in licensing archival footage from CBN (Pat Robertson) and from Fox. After approaching well over a hundred people, only two persons who had ever dealt with Mrs. Clinton would agree to an on-camera interview, and I suspected that even they would back out.

The most stunning passage in Ferguson's essay is his description of a private conversation with Bill Clinton:

I asked him about the financial crisis. He paused and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate. And then he proceeded to tell me the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while....

Read the whole thing, but let me summarize: Ferguson pegs the Clintons as wealthy folks protecting their financial interests and nostalgizes about the 1990s, when the Clintons "attempted courageous reforms: allowing gays to serve in the military, a carbon tax, health care reform."

I can see where Ferguson wanted to go with his documentary — Good Clintons/Bad Clintons — and it's clear why neither Republicans nor Democrats trusted him to lay down the storyline in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Republicans were averse to Hillary hagiography. The Democrats were afraid of framing Hillary as good when she's skews left and bad when she's supportive of business and finance.

Ferguson was pleased with the full control and final cut authority he had over his film. He must understand that the Clintons don't want to cede any of their control over Hillary's campaign.

How can "Obama and Clinton really believe that young people are all going to become extraordinarily altruistic just in time for Obamacare to be smoothly implemented"?

John Althouse Cohen is skeptical, in this Facebook post, linking to "Bill Clinton: Obamacare 'Only Works' If 'Young People Show Up' and Buy Insurance."

Clinton says (text and video at that second link):

"I think it’s important for you to tell the people why we’re doing all this outreach, because this only works, for example, if young people show up and even if they buy the cheapest plan, they claim their tax credit so it won’t cost them much — 100 bucks a month or so. We’ve got to have them in the pools, because otherwise these projected low costs cannot be held if older people with preexisting conditions are disproportionately represented in any given state. You’ve got to have everybody lined up..."

Now, I might suspect him of slyly undercutting Obama's grand plan. He's almost coming out and warning young people that the old are exploiting you, you should take alarm, and you can free yourself from this plot by saying no, I'm not jumping into that pool, I'm not lining up for my own destruction.

But Obama is sitting right there next to him. They're side-by-side in 2 big, upholstered Clinton Global Initiative armchairs. Obama restates Clinton's point:

"What happens is, if you don’t have pools that are a cross-section of society, then people who are already sick or more likely to get sick, they’ll all rush out and buy insurance. People who are healthy, they say, ‘You know what, I won’t bother.’ And you get what’s called adverse selection."

You can get snookered in a comfy chair.

"They want power to cut taxes, eliminate regulations, take government down except for what they like."

That's Bill Clinton, criticizing Republicans, and — accidentally — describing what should happen in American democracy.

Take government down sounds destructive, but when you add except for what they like, the alarmism dissipates. Why shouldn't we always, in a democracy, be figuring out what we like and withdrawing our support for everything else? Otherwise, the idea would need to be that we must always retain everything that we already have, because we already have it. That seems to be a definition of conservativism.

In context, Clinton's remark is about how difficult it is for liberals who must add new things for government to do. That's hard, he's saying, when the conservatives are trying to subtract. Then the liberals have to expend effort trying to preserve all the things government has already gotten involved in, when it would be so much nicer to talk to people about the next thing government could do.

"President Obama’s toughest Syria hurdle: The calendar."

Oh no! Our leader, assailed by the calendar!

Obama will sit Monday for interviews for six TV news programs, which will air within an hour of what had promised to be the week’s most highly anticipated Washington event: the NFL Redskins’ season opener against Philadelphia....

If Monday Night Football pushed Obama’s address to the nation on Syria to Tuesday, odds are low for the president to have the nation’s attention to himself the rest of the week either.

The Sept. 11 anniversary comes Wednesday, the same day the Senate could vote for cloture. Yom Kippur begins Friday night.

Oh! That pesky September 11th anniversary, randomly popping up as a "tough hurdle" on Obama's — what's the metaphor? — race toward war! And this year, it's not just the usual anniversary of the day the terrorists declared war on the United States, it's now the first anniversary of the attack in Benghazi. Oh, my lord! The double 9/11 and football.

Obama won’t even have Tuesday to himself. Hillary Clinton is due to deliver a speech that afternoon in Philadelphia. Voters in New York City will head to the polls for that city’s primary elections. And the new iPhone event scheduled for that day has become an annual media spectacle.

Fate has no mercy on this man, this once-golden savior of the world! The double 9/11, football, and Hillary gives a speech in Philadelphia. A speech! In Philadelphia! (I wonder if she'll talk about Benghazi? What difference at this point does it make?) The double 9/11, football, and Hillary gives a speech... and New York has a primary... and Apple has the audacity to do another one of its PR events.

Here's Bill Clinton's old press secretary Mike McCurry:

“How do you hold the attention of the American people when it is increasingly hard to do so with the distractions of the NFL season and religious holidays and back-to-school nights?” 

Increasingly? Is football new? Is going back to school new? Is Yom Kippur new?! (Note: Only 1.7% of Americans are Jewish.)

“This is the challenge of the presidency, the ability to gather the nation around a common campfire is just not there anymore. You have to go for the sporadic bursts of attention and deal with the perpetual A.D.D. that people have.”

And now we are to be blamed for A.D.D.! People are tired of 12 years of war. It's not A.D.D. to react with an instinctive "no" to another war, a war that should have been explained already.

Why would a normal person — with a normal attention span — believe that Obama will tell us something new on Tuesday? Why didn't he look us in the eye and explain everything clearly when he first proposed it or when he said he was submitting the question to Congress? It's not A.D.D., it's common sense to reflexively turn away.

Timing has worked against the White House from the very start. The Aug. 21 attack that prompted the administration to gear up for a Syria strike left Obama violating his predecessor’s key rule on selling the public on a war: Don’t do it in August.

Politico writes as if war is funny and the real issue is the little things that bug Obama.

"Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation..."

"... that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:"

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

What accounts for this sudden and shocking spike in bigotry?

"A year and a half ago, even the president of the United States opposes gay marriage.  President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed DOMA into law.  Now all of a sudden, after Obama changes his mind, the whole country supports gay marriage, and those who don't are bigots."

What accounts for this sudden and shocking spike in bigotry?

It depends on what the meaning of bigotry is. (To paraphrase that humanitarian, Bill Clinton.)



But — to quote Marbury v. Madison — as quoted in the DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, "‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’ ” Zivotofsky v. Clinton, 566 U. S. ___, ___ (2012) (slip op., at 7) (quoting Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803))." (I know, who quotes Marbury like that? And what the hell was Zivotofsky v. Clinton? Was there some insuperable urge to bring up Bill Clinton? The Clinton in Zivotofsky was Hillary Clinton, in her Secretary of State role, and this was the case about the State Department's refusal to list Israel as the place of birth on a U.S. passport for a person born in Jerusalem.)

So if it's the Court's duty to define the terms, and opposition to same-sex marriage is defined as nothing but bigotry, then its the Court's decision in Windsor that accounts for the sudden and shocking spike in bigotry.

But let's be clear about a few things.

1. The majority opinion in Windsor did not use the word "bigotry" (or "bigot"). That word appears in Chief Justice Roberts's dissenting opinion: "At least without some more convincing evidence that the Act’s principal purpose was to codify malice, and that it furthered no legitimate government interests, I would not tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry." Justice Alito also uses the word: "Acceptance of [Windsor's] argument would cast all those who cling to traditional beliefs about the nature of marriage in the role of bigots or superstitious fools."

2.  The majority's expression is "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group," which might sound extreme, but it appears in the case law going back to the early 70s, and it's a stock phrase used to characterize the government's interest when the Court is applying minimal scrutiny and therefore needs to say that there is no legitimate governmental interest.

3. What that "bare... desire to harm" language really means is: We don't want to have to heighten scrutiny for this discriminated-against group — they don't want responsibility for what that would mean in future cases — but we do want to be able to strike this down while staying at the minimal scrutiny level.

4. This doctrinal maneuver produces the strange impression that the Court is calling Bill Clinton and the majority of the members of the 104th Congress a bunch of bigots.

5. Now lots of traditionalists have the raw material to whine and cry about being called bigots. I doubt if that will work out very well for them, but they've been stewing in their own juice for a long time, and they're going to find it hard to stop. Unfortunately, same-sex marriage was originally presented as a conservative idea, and traditionalists could have gotten out in front of liberals on this issue if they'd listened to the original argument and predicted the future better, and now they'll have to scramble to improve their image. If they think crying about being called bigots — when, again, the majority didn't even use that word — is going to help, I just have to laugh. You took the opportunity to oppress when it was there, and now that it's gone, you want to say you are oppressed. Man up, losers. You lost. And you deserved to lose. Now, stop acting like losers. If you can. (I bet you can't!)

"Perhaps Regina Marcia Benjamin should suggest teaching pro-abortion-rights bloggers that masturbation is part of human sexuality."

Says Meade, here, in the discussion of the ugliness of the mockery of the "masturbating fetus," and alluding to Benjamin's predecessor in the role of Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who was fired by Bill Clinton in 1994 for saying that children should be taught that masturbation "is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught."

(She meant taught about, but there was much mockery, as people assumed or pretended they believed that she thought that school teachers should be showing children how to do it, as opposed to simply teaching that it's something that many people do, that isn't physically harmful, and that avoids pregnancy and disease.)

This mockery of masturbation is quite fascinating. I'm drawn to Scalia's notorious dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he defended the state's power to criminalize sodomy:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices.

Imagine a state today attempting to prosecute the crime of masturbation. Of course, the defense would be the right of privacy, and the courts would hear masturbation described in the loftiest terms. It would parallel what we heard — over the past few decades — about homosexuality, which was initially viewed as a lowly or ridiculous matter that didn't belong in the treasured realm of constitutional rights.

Given the importance of privacy rights to the pro-abortion-rights bloggers, I think their laughing at the masturbating fetus shows the poverty of their understanding of the very rights they'd like to pressure others to believe in.

By the way, that much-produced theater piece "The Vagina Monologues" gets reverent about masturbation:

I lay back and closed my eyes. I put the mirror down. I watched myself floating above myself. I watched as I slowly began to approach myself and re-enter. I felt like an astronaut re-entering the surface of the earth. It was very quiet this re-entry, quiet and gentle. I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood and cells and then I slid into my vagina. It was suddenly easy and I fit. I was all warm and pulsing and ready and young and alive. And then, without looking, with my eyes still closed, I put my finger on what had suddenly become me. 

As the Supreme Court said: "one's own concept of existence." Or as the commenter at the fetus-mocking pro-abortion-rights blog said: "'I fap, therefore I am'? Sounds like a plausible slogan for today’s GOP wankers. Jesus God." Exactly. Jesus. God. Cosmic.

Reemerging twinges of lust for our old boyfriend, Bill Clinton.

That's the post title I've written for this quotation of the first 2 sentences and the last 2 sentences of Maureen Dowd's new column. Read with me, and then let's talk about it:

Not  only is President Obama leading from behind, now he’s leading from behind Bill Clinton.

After dithering for two years over what to do about the slaughter in Syria, the president was finally shoved into action by the past and perhaps future occupant of his bedroom....

The less Obama leads, the more likely it is that history will see him as a pallid interregnum between two chaotic Clinton eras.

Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Bill Clinton.

If you want to talk about what's actually going on in Syria and what the United States ought to do about it, please go to the earlier post on the subject. This new post is for talking about those 4 Maureen Dowd sentences. I'll start off the conversation with a list of 10 things.

1. The phrase "leading from behind" has always seemed funny to people. If you're behind, you're not in front, so how is that leading? Those who like Obama think it's clever/intriguing. Those who are literal-minded — and notice imagery — focus on the word "behind."

2. To take "leading from behind" and then put Barack behind Bill is to demand that we picture the 2 men in a physical position and — particularly with the amusing phrasing and because we're talking about Bill Clinton — to experience the sexual innuendo.

3. Said innuendo is violently intensified by the phrase: "shoved into action by the past and perhaps future occupant of his bedroom."

4. If Barack is behind Bill, then how did Bill shove Barack? Maureen is not fully in control of her imagery.

5. Got to give Maureen points for the poetic proximity of the verbs "dither" and "slaughter."

6. The dithering is Barack's. The (unlinkable) OED says "dither" originally meant, in dialect, "to tremble, quake, quiver, thrill."

7. "Pallid" means " Lacking depth or intensity of colour; faint or feeble in colour; spec. (of the face) wan, pale...." That's quite something, saying that history will remember The First Black President, Barack Obama, as pale-faced!

8. Barack is pallid compared to Bill. Maureen is taunting Boyfriend Barack: He's not as manly as Boyfriend Bill, who might just get to be her boyfriend again.

9. Pallid interregnum. "Pallid" is a poetic word, and Maureen is doing various poetic turns. I know what "interregnum" means, but I also hear near-puns, and we've got leading from behind and shoving in the bedroom and 2 boyfriends, one of whom is portrayed as subordinate.

10. And that brings us to "vacuum," an empty space. One might say a hole, which you know Bill Clinton feels compelled to fill.

"It is irresponsible for critics like Mr. McCain and Mr. Clinton to fault Mr. Obama..."

"... without explaining how the United States can change the course of that brutal civil war without being dragged too far into it."

"Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws."

"But senior leadership must understand that today’s and tomorrow’s mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected’ communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries."

National Security Agency memo from the Clinton era, highlighted at Politico under the headline "NSA memo pushed to 'rethink' 4th Amendment" and noting "The quotes around 'protected' appear in the original document." (I haven't read the memo, but the quotes around "protected" may have to do with the third party principle discussed here.)

Also at the Politico link:

The NSA has been a central player in U.S. cyber strategy since at least 1997, according to a separate declassified memo obtained by [George Washington University’s] National Security Archive. That document describes how the administration of President Bill Clinton assigned NSA with “Computer Network Attack” — “a natural companion to NSA’s exploit and protect functions,” the memo said.

But it wasn’t until later, after the infusion of billions of dollars and the new legal authorities that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that NSA’s capabilities grew to the scale revealed this week.

I note the groundwork for the argument: Bill Clinton would have averted the 9/11 attacks. Also: Everything is Bush's fault. Before 9/11, he didn't do what Clinton told him to do. After 9/11, he did too much.

Bill Clinton acknowledges double entendre about Hillary having sex with Barack Obama.

From a montage of clips from recent graduation addresses, shown on today's "Fox News Sunday":

"One of the things that heartened me when President Obama asked Hillary to be secretary of state and she said yes, and they developed this -- not just working relationship -- this amazing friendship, which I just watched with great interest, is that they -- they had -- oh, come on, guys. Get a life here."

The "oh, come on, guys" reacted to the audience's reaction to "I just watched with great interest." I wish I had the video clip, because it was very clear from the manner of his laughter that he was acknowledging the double entendre and — I think — the idea that people associate him with sexuality.

ADDED: Here's the video:

Should Republicans make the 2014 elections about Obama?

"'I don’t think I’d personalize it,' said John Linder, the former congressman from Georgia who ran the National Republican Congressional Committee during the late 1990s while Newt Gingrich and House Republicans were preparing an impeachment case against President Bill Clinton."

Mr. Linder said he fought and lost a battle with Mr. Gingrich over their strategy in the 1998 midterm elections, which Mr. Gingrich thought should be focused on assailing Mr. Clinton’s character.

“I didn’t want to talk about Clinton at all,” Mr. Linder recalled, saying the same logic should apply today. “Obama was not in the Justice Department. Obama was not working in the I.R.S.” His advice? “Don’t overreach,” he said.

The analogy to 1998 isn't exact. Clinton was active in doing the things that got him into impeachment trouble, but those things weren't about the political ideology that he shared with the Democrats in Congress. Voters might want Congress to go after him more aggressively, but it made sense, if you agreed with Democratic Party ideology, to regard the sex-and-lies scandal as secondary to the overall legislative agenda when deciding who should represent your district in Congress.

Obama is — or looks — passive. You've got the difficulty of attaching him to the scandals. You have to argue that he should have known more, or he must have known more than we're seeing, or he's not rigorous enough in supervising his multitudinous underlings, or he's responsible for the "climate" within which everyone understands the sorts of things they ought to do to satisfy their superiors. Voters need to be convinced to blame Obama for the things that have gone wrong. But what has gone wrong is something that is wrong with governing.

In both cases — Clinton and Obama — there's room for the argument that we need stronger supervision from Congress. But going after Clinton over sex and lying was only loosely connected to the ongoing work of government. With Obama, the most central work of government has been compromised. It's not just a matter of letting the President off the hook and moving forward to deal with the real problems that affect Americans. Regardless of how directly Obama is implicated and how much any given voter wants to blame Obama, the scandals make a strong argument for opposite-party control of Congress.

That's all I'm going to write this morning about how 2014 is different from 1998 other than to say I have not made the argument that Republicans would do well to personalize the election.

Huma Abedin: "A Wife With Powerful Ties Is an Unexpected Architect of a New York Comeback."

That's a front-page article in the NYT, illustrated by a picture of Huma and Hillary that makes them look like a single 2-headed entity. The Times, citing unnamed sources, calls Abedin "a seasoned operative well versed in the politics of redemption" and "a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback," who is exploiting her status as a "surrogate daughter to Bill and Hillary Clinton."

This is very interesting to me, because when I watched this video, Weiner's first in his mayoral campaign....



... I thought Anthony Weiner did a great job, presenting himself in the context of New York City, seeming to really belong to the city and its people and to care about it and to be ready to serve. And then there's Huma. She appears in a speaking role at the very end, and there's just something off and unnatural about her. Weiner comes across as a regular guy — he's got the actor skills of a politician — but she — in her seeming fakeness — betrays the reality: This is a remorseless machine of a power couple. She's the woman behind the man, and I'm sure they think that bringing her on camera should boost him. She's beautiful — or so we've been told many times — and she stood by her man. If she accepts him after what he did, that should be enough. That should cancel out his sexual misdeeds. If we hold those misdeeds against him, we're punishing her, which would make the opposite of sense, given that the wife is the official victim when the husband sexually sins.

It's like Bill and Hillary all over again, except that — unlike Hillary — Huma doesn't have the actor skills of a politician. She's a behind the scenes person, and though she can look fabulous in stills, in the video, she can't convincingly embody the Warm, Loving Wife character that Americans generally expect to see with a political husband, and that Anthony Weiner in particular needs.

The NYT article reminds us that Abedin "faced scrutiny this month about an arrangement that allowed her to earn money as a private consultant while still working as a top adviser at the State Department." We're told Abedin "fully intends to continue her work with Mrs. Clinton’s transition team" and that  "several political aides have been tempted to sign onto a Weiner mayoral campaign" because they want a connection that might get them in on the Hillary '16 presidential campaign.

The article begins with a description of how Abedin seemingly hoodwinked Chelsea Clinton into appearing in Anthony Weiner's first post-disgrace photo op: "When Chelsea Clinton wanted to make a low-key visit to the hurricane-stricken Rockaways last fall, she arranged to take a trip with her close friend Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton." Huma proceeded to exploit Chelsea's little trip for the re-introduction of Weiner. Now, I'm completely skeptical about whether Chelsea really wanted her visit to be low-key and whether she was surprised or tricked in any way by Anthony's horning in on the Female Empathy Tour of the Stricken. And I'd like to know the real truth of the interactions between the 2 power couples, Bill-and-Hillary and Huma-and-Anthony. I assume the Clintons know everything that's really going on, even as they want to look disconnected. It will be interesting to see what we will be able to figure out about all this, and I think Huma's lack of skill on video camera will be quite helpful in this regard. Bring on the Huma!

By the way, the NYT says "The couple live in a spacious Park Avenue apartment owned by a Clinton donor." But look at the kitchen in the background at the beginning of the video. Come on. That's not their kitchen, is it? I call bullshit.

On everything.

AND:  Rereading that headline... there's that word... that word that is the classic bullshit tell of our time: unexpected.

ALSO: I constantly mistype "Human" for "Huma." I can't tell you how many times I did that in the process of writing this post. But the one that I missed — and left up for 2 hours — was the one in the post title.  To err is human. To err in the post title is... superhuman.

1. "I mean, that's a storybook, man." 2. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen."

1. Senator Joe Biden, February 2007.

2. Bill Clinton, January 2008.

Just 2 old quotes we had occasion to bring up in conversation around Meadhouse this morning. Storybook/fairy tale... the positive/negative description of Obama the Candidate. The story continues. Obama the Candidate continues. What we were talking about was the idea that Obama is operating at a very high level of politics, not just high as in The President is at the top of our political structure, but high as in We are gazing upon the great political genius of our time.

It might be true in a way that Obama is the great political genius of our time, in that he was great enough to make us think that, but it's heartening to see that the greatest political genius really isn't able to be that great in America. Or is that itself a delusion, and allowing us to think that we're onto him is part of the way in which we are duped and part of the workings of the genius? If so, at least I got far enough to be able to ask that question.

"The Clintons wish Weiner would just disappear. Every time he pops up..."

"... it’s a reminder of Bill’s scandal with Monica Lewinsky, and it isn’t helpful to Hillary’s hopes for 2016."

Every time Weiner pops up, Clinton thinks of Monica.

But they love Huma...

Why are the figures on our national stage so lacking in greatness?

I wonder — as I scan the news this morning for topics and stop to think about Howard Kurtz and Jason Collins. Kurtz isn't a bold or great writer. He was dependent on Tina Brown, and he crossed a line, got a little edgy but didn't bother to sharpen up for the attempted edginess, and he got cut. Tina Brown runs her various operations. Is she at the level that should awe us?

Jason Collins was never a great basketball player. It's pathetic — a literal joke — that must we look at basketball to find men to look up to. (They are tall.) But this week, we're expected to admire this athlete we hadn't heard of before not for any athletic achievement but for the miniature feat of revealing — after years and years of hiding — that he's gay. Did he risk anything? His revelation comes at the end of his lackluster career, he's receiving plaudits from everyone on up to Barack Obama, and since his college days, he's had powerful political friends including Chelsea Clinton and (his erstwhile roommate) Joe Kennedy.

Is Barack Obama a great man? He's reached the top position. That takes some doing. He scrambled up over a number of people — were they great? — and he maintained his position, but is he great? We — some of us — like him. He seems like a good person — to some people, the ones who feel comfortable enough with him because at least he's not Bush, he's got a nice smile that reminds us of hope and Republicans seem mean, and it's not really his fault that there are so many problems.

And how about those Clintons and Kennedys and — as long as we're listing American dynasties — Bushes? There are no giants here. Why are the figures on our national stage so lacking in greatness?

It must be us. This must be our doing. Our preference.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jonas quotes George Carlin:

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'"

Henry and Balfegor both mention Steve Jobs as the last great man. When I wrote "Kurtz isn't a bold or great writer," I immediately thought Christopher Hitchens.

"Howard Kurtz leaves Daily Beast following Jason Collins column mistake."

Kurtz, whose area of expertise is media criticism, made a mistake in the media that drew some criticism and what looks like swift retaliation.

... Kurtz mistakenly accused Collins of leaving out “one detail” in Collins’s Sports Illustrated essay disclosing his homosexuality. The detail, Kurtz said, was that Collins “was engaged. To be married. To a woman.”...

Kurtz initially amended his Daily Beast story, saying Collins “downplayed” the engagement and “didn’t dwell on it.” But the Daily Beast retracted the story entirely after the mistake and subsequent amendments drew heavy criticism from several Web sites.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill said:

But Collins did attempt to obscure his engagement. This is what he wrote: "When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged."

That sure sounds like someone who got engaged young, not someone who cancelled a wedding at the age of about 30 after an eight year relationship. While his statement was technically true (everything in our past was when we were younger), it had to have been intentionally misleading, especially coming from a Stanford grad.

I agree, and you put that so much better than Kurtz did in his correction. This is an important basis for criticism of Collins, who's being hailed as a hero. Giving up on living a lie is a good idea, but it's not heroic. Maybe 30 years ago, it was heroic to be openly gay, but even back then, if you chose to keep your sexual orientation quiet, it was still wrong to delude another person to the extent that Collins apparently did. Collins graduated from Stanford in 2001, and it's just ridiculous that someone who lived in that environment at that time — he roomed with Joe Kennedy and was friends with Chelsea Clinton — would be seriously burdened with backward ideas about sexual orientation. I'll refrain from lambasting the man for his deceit and cowardice, but extolling him as a hero is absurd. I think that's what Kurtz might have wanted to say, but he botched his attack.

It would be interesting to know which powerful Democrats, if any, interacted with Tina Brown over the downfall of Howard Kurtz.