More Hil 'n Bill

Geov Parrish, obviously a regular reader of the Brain and a man poised to read my posts an instant after they're posted, agrees with my comments in my MoDo post about the speculation on the Clinton's marriage.

Okay, let me be up front about this. There are days -- about 365 of them, in the average calendar year, with allowances for leap years -- when the reporting in the New York Times pisses me off. (The nadir, perhaps, being when our self-styled "newspaper of record" sat on the domestic warrantless NSA spying story for 14 months, a decision that may well have given George W. Bush his second term.) But rarely does the Times strike me as classless, an exercise in poor taste that leaves me with an icky feeling just reading it.

But that's exactly how I felt Tuesday, reading the Times' exhaustive story on the state of the marriage between Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is, of course, a dream article for the Republican National Committee. Without quoting a single Republican, it manages to insert a particularly tasteless incident of marital infidelity into the dialogue surrounding a probable 2008 presidential candidate, a full decade after the incident occurred. And as unsavory as that incident was, it pales compared to the repeated lies, law-breaking, Constitution-bashing behavior of the current White House occupant. The RNC could use that kind of distraction right now.

Get used to it, of course. If Hillary becomes a frontrunner in 2008, which her money and fundraising connections virtually guarantee, this is exactly the sort of thing smear-happy Republicans will pound. (They certainly can't criticize much in her senatorial record, which has often lined up nicely with the Republican agenda.) Conservative talk radio spent nearly a decade hammering away at the themes of Hillary as liberal queen bitch and Bill as amoral "Slick Willie," and they're not about to let go of a proven ratings winner.

Why the first frontal assault should come from the New York Times, though, is, as they say, "hard to gauge from the outside." Damn that liberal media, anyway.

Of course it's all about politics. It's still about as no-class as it gets.

While I was typin' and c-n-pin' this, this came to me:

"Bill 'n Hillary
Sittin' in a tree,
Nothin' but lies
From the RNC."

Nothin' new, and I apologize on behalf of my poetic muse.