Okay, I got trapped in a self-adulating post by NRO's Peter Wehner remarking on his prescience for thinking the Clintons were the most horrible things on earth ever since he first saw them. How was this confirmed? By recent letters from Obama fans commending him in his opinions by reiterating the nastiest language possible about the Clintons. Par for the course. But then I noticed he referred to his article back in January. Before the Jesse comment. In it, folks from The Nation and WaPo were already trashing Bill. In none too flattering hedge-your bets terms. Wow, what had the Clintons done at that point to deserve the ire? And then I thought to click on Greider's archives, where I found his posting from March 8, 2007 on Senator Inevitable. Wow, so one of the worst labels to stick on Hillary came from the supposed liberal press months before the famous Mark Penn memo.

You see, the press is just a-filled with people with grudges and tags and pithy anecdotes just waiting to trot them out at a moment's notice. They're none-too-clever, but they can recycle so much of this - from Gore to Kerry to Clinton to Obama - that they don't have to work too hard at it. So on any given day, a candidate might say "the sky is blue" and they'll start going through their archives to find a time when they said something related to blue, and if so, woe be to all, because they'll herd together like packrats and push all of their blue columns out at one time. How do they hit those deadlines? Cut-and-paste, of course. Recycle, re-use, no need to wash - no one can smell old laundry via print.

So why is Bill Clinton pissed? Because he knows some of this is still about the travel office, how reporters lost some of their perks at that time. Some is because he touched welfare, even though they can't quite say what harm came from it. Some is just because he's from Arkansas which still isn't cool. And so on. So when the time came, everyone was spring-loaded whatever he might say. And Rove-style, they hit him right in what he considered his strength, what were some of his greatest accomplishments.

And it's a bit funny, because with people complaining that Hillary helped McCain, here are Democrats and "progressives" providing fodder for the likes of the arch-and-unreasonable-conservativeNational Review who can then self-righteously use phrases like "blinded to the ruthlessness and corruption of the Clinton Machine", in sheer gall and chutzpah ignoring the exponentially more ruthless and corrupt Bush/Cheney/K Street Machine of the last 8 years. Of course NRO has no need to itemize any supposed high deeds of corruption by the Clintons - there's a trail of smears and innuendo that never panned out but is close enough for government-and-journalist work.