CLINTON SCANDAL! SECOND OF THE WEEK!

This MSNBC story, which has been on the MSN portal all day, has a whole lot of information, but virtually nothing to reveal about Clinton. It's just bad, hacky journalism trying one more time to create controversy out of thin air. Granted, hiding in the shrubbery and peeping through their windows made some "journalists" very rich in the nineties-- and it's still a cash cow for cheap demagogues like Limbaugh and O'Reilly.

I suppose it's a little more juicy than the earlier front page WaPo headline that hinted menacingly at ethical lapses, only to reveal over the course of the article that the nefarious Senator had (Gasp!) under-reported her charitable donations.

Somehow I missed the entire "Hillary Clinton's Thesis" episode, which suggests to me that it was confined to wingnut radio, Fox News, and ideology-driven columnists. And the fetishistic obsession with a forty-year-old college paper as a "Rosetta Stone" for her psyche is on a par with sasquatch hunters and Rothschild conspiracists-- and just one step away from sending ninja to retrieve one of the senator's hairs for a voodoo doll.

*David Brock, in his 1996 biography, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," called her "Alinsky's daughter." [No mention of Brock admitting that he was a paid operative of the right back then who now champions responsible journalism as the man behind Media Matters.]

* Barbara Olson, the conservative lawyer and commentator, used an Alinsky quote to open every chapter of her 1999 book, "Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton." Olson, who died in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, had charged in her book that the thesis was locked away because Clinton "does not want the American people to know the extent to which she internalized and assimilated the beliefs and methods of Saul Alinsky."

* A purloined copy was offered for sale on eBay in 2001, then withdrawn when Clinton's staff cited copyright law.

* Bill O'Reilly waved a few pages on Fox TV in 2003, chiding Wellesley for hiding Clinton's analysis of a "far left" activist.

* Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2005, decried the continued suppression of "the Rosetta Stone of Hillary studies."

* Just last month, an anonymous commentator lamented on the conservative Web site Free Republic, "She's a Marxist. Saul Alinsky's student. I sure wish we could unearth that sealed thesis of hers that she wrote at Wellesley."

The punchline? The thesis has been free and open to the public for six years. In other words, one phone call to Wellesley College would've put the kibbosh on this whole story. But, typically, that isn't the author's point. After revealing that this is all a big nothing, he goes on for another two pages about all this... nothing. Which is to say he lends credibility to a story that he's already debunked.

So it's total crap, the right is being credibility where they deserve none (again!), and the press, along with the Republican party, is still obsessed with Hillary Clinton.

And after reading the article, it occurred to me-- in line with the idea that some violent homophobes are closet cases, how many freepers and Fox fans occasionally rub one out while imagining themselves sniffing Hillary's drawers? Or walking on them in spike-heeled boots? Not something I'd care to dwell on much, but between Rush and his sack of Viagra in a country notorious for child prostitution, the story of O'Reilly spanking it while making obscene calls to an underling, or vocally anti-gay Ted Haggard's fall from grace, you've got to wonder.