"Hit pieces" are a time-honored political tradition in American politics. Although they frequently disguise themselves as editorials or legitimate news pieces, they rarely qualify as either. The main difference is that the latter usually contain facts, distorted as they may be. The former, however, tend to completely lack anything resembling truth. The attacks are quite often unsophisticated, such as taking a quote out of context (or inventing quotes, should their Google searches fail them). These pieces are then distilled into frantic e-mails, which are passed around from inbox to inbox until the campaign season ends.

This pieces rarely deviate from this accepted standard. However, sometimes you find something that completely blows you away. The winner of the 2008 Hit Piece of the Year is Glenn Thrush, a writer from Newsday.com, for his exceptional work on "An early look at how Clinton deals with crisis."

The article deals with the case of a 12 year old girl that accused an older man of raping her. Although you can literally feel the author struggling to make the piece sound balanced, the trained eye finds evidence to the contrary without moving past the opening sentences.

Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her "35 years of experience making
change" on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on
behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid
clients.

But there is a little-known episode Clinton doesn't mention in her
standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. In
1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed
attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an
aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas -
using her child development background to help the defendant.

In her 2003 autobiography "Living History," Clinton writes that she
initially balked at the assignment, but eventually secured a lenient
plea deal for Taylor after a New York-based forensics expert she hired
"cast doubt on the evidentiary value of semen and blood samples
collected by the sheriff's office."


However, that account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense
strategy - attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim,
according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.


Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed
she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl
often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a
July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.

There you have it. Accusing a 6th grader of "seeking out" rape? That's pretty low. Low even for a lawyer. Who could do such a thing? Even her defenders would have to pause and think about that one for a second. The article trots out defenders, who tell us that she was merely conducting the best possible defense for her client. But that doesn't make that feeling in your stomach disappear when you imagine it playing out in court.

And, of course, Glenn Thrush couldn't let it end on that note. The injustice of it all is made clear. The vile rapist walks free after one year in county jail and four years on probation. Meanwhile, the victim, in prison for stealing checks to finance her meth addiction, doesn't seem to blame Hillary for where her life has gone. Maybe she doesn't, but the contrast between a victim in jail and a rapist walking free can hardly cause the reader to feel anything but disgust. And it's easy to figure out where that disgust is supposed to be directed.