In the past few years, therefore, the Chinese communist dictatorship has been able to close a huge technology gap, and to destroy a security buffer that had kept America safe from foreign attacks on its territorial mainland for more than a century.

Throughout its entire history until 1957, the United States was protected from such attacks by the natural barrier of the oceans surrounding this continent. In 1957, the Soviet Union acquired an intercontinental missile technology that threatened to close that gap. Since then, the only real protection the United States has enjoyed has been its technological edge in developing more sophisticated warheads and more accurate missiles than its potential opponents. The edge provided a possibility that America might prevail in a nuclear war, and discouraged preemptive strikes.

The catastrophe that has occurred on the Clinton watch is summed up in the fact that this edge has now vanished, probably never to be regained.

America’s new vulnerability to nuclear attack is a reality now not merely in respect to China, because of the absence of an anti-ballistic missile defense system. This, the Clinton administration has steadfastly refused to develop, despite the emergence of rogue states armed by China or Russia. These two are the chief distributors of nuclear, missile and satellite technologies to other governments. The governments that have benefitted are notorious stockpilers of biological and chemical weapons and among the most dangerous and dedicated enemies of the United States: Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Yet, the attitude of the Clinton administration to all this has been one of hear-no-evil, see-no-evil. The official line, ritually repeated by the Democratic leadership in the sickeningly familiar refrain from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is thateverybody does it and it’s no big deal.

Far from acknowledging the catastrophe that has occurred or recognizing the dangers it creates, the Clinton White House has hurried to resume export sales of the same previously restricted technologies and to reassert the “strategic partnership” it promoted with the very dictatorship that has declared America its “No. 1 adversary” and has stripped us of our military shield.

Indeed, the government’s awareness of many of the losses dates back several years, during which time the Clinton reaction was exactly the same: Continue on the destructive course. According to Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., a member of the Cox Committee, at least 15 government officials have experienced the wrath of the Clinton administration because they tried to protect America’s secrets from being transferred to China. One notorious case was described in a recent Wall Street Journal article by a former security official, Michael Ledeen.

According to documents obtained by Ledeen, a mid-level government arms control bureaucrat was asked in 1997 to provide a memo supporting the administration’s certification that China was not a nuclear proliferator and could be provided with advanced technologies. This request was made on the eve of a visit from China’s communist dictator, Jiang Zemin. The bureaucrat refused and wrote that the agreement the U.S. government was about to sign “presents real and substantial risk to the common defense and security of both the United States and allied countries.”

The official added that China was actively seeking American secrets and that “China routinely, both overtly and covertly, subverts national and multilateral trade controls on militarily critical items.” This patriot was immediately told by his superiors to revise his memo or lose his job. Sadly, according to Ledeen, he complied with the order and rewrote the document to state that the proposed Clinton trade agreement “is not inimical to the common defense or the security of the United States.”

In keeping with its fierce defense of a suicidal policy, the Clinton administration has failed to prosecute the people who have been identified as being responsible for the most critical thefts of American military secrets, and has protected those whose wrists it has slapped. Wen Ho Lee, the man believed to be responsible for the most damaging espionage, is known to have downloaded millions of lines of computer codes revealing the designs of our most advanced nuclear warheads. But Wen Ho Lee today is a free man.

Peter Lee, who gave communist China our warhead testing techniques and the radar technology to locate our submarines — until then the most secure element of our nuclear deterrent — is also free, having served only a year in a halfway house for his treason.

Wen Ho Lee was actually protected while performing his dirty work. When government agents requested a wiretap on his phone, the request was denied by Clinton’s Justice Department. This was the first wiretap request ever denied in the Clinton era. Asked why it has not prosecuted Lee, the Justice Department claims that its evidence only shows that Lee downloaded the classified information onto a non-secure computer, from which others unknown may have picked it up.

But, as Angelo Codevilla pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article, “By this logic no one could be prosecuted for espionage for putting stolen documents into a dead drop, such as a hollow tree, for later pickup by foreign agents.” Of course, the administration lacks even this transparent excuse in the case of Peter Lee, who did in fact give the information directly to the communists.

Why is Clinton furiously covering up for the communist Chinese and protecting its leaders and their spies from the wrath that should surely follow their rape of America’s most guarded secrets? Certainly not, as Clinton and his complicit Democrat defenders now claim, because “everyone does it.”

Unlike China, for example, the state of Israel is a democracy and a proven ally of the United States. Yet when an Israeli agent named Jonathan Pollard was discovered stealing secrets whose dimensions did not even approach the seriousness of these thefts (no technologies, for example, were involved), he was given a life sentence amid the most solemn anathemas from the officials of the government he betrayed.

The evidence suggests only one conclusion. The reason Clinton is protecting China’s spies and their communist masters is because in protecting them he is protecting himself. The China strategy is fully intelligible in the frame of Clinton’s strategy on other matters: The president has triangulated with China’s communist government in pursuit of his own political interest at the expense of the United States.

This is not about loyalties that Clinton might have to communist ideology or communist dictators. On this, Clinton’s record is clear: He has no loyalties, except to himself. It is the solipsistic nihilism that we have come to know as the very essence of President Clinton that has made this treachery possible, even, inevitable.

Clinton’s triangulation with communist China has been chillingly charted by two national security professionals (although they do not employ the term itself), with the help of congressional investigations into illegal campaign contributions.

In “Year of the Rat,” Bill Triplett and Ed Timperlake show that the roots of the Clinton betrayal lie in relationships that go back to Arkansas, and the fact that Clinton owes his political life to the Chinese communists through their agents, business associates and friends.

The book begins with the authors’ observation that the No. 1 funder of the Clinton-Gore 1992 campaign was an Arkansas resident and Chinese banker named James Riady, who has been a friend of Clinton’s for 20 years. Riady is the scion of a multibillion-dollar financial empire that is a working economic and political partnership with China’s military and intelligence establishment. The Riadys gave $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential campaign and another $600,000 to the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties.

But the importance of the Riadys to Clinton’s ascent is far greater than even these contributions suggest, and not merely because the Chinese network, in which the Riadys are only one important factor, extends through thousands of companies and individuals whose contributions no one has as yet attempted to track. Without the Riadys, Clinton would not have won the Democratic nomination in the first place, and would not have been in a position to benefit from their later largesse.

In the presidential primaries of 1992, in fact, the Riadys were the absolutely crucial factor that stood between Clinton and defeat. After losing the New Hampshire primary, the candidate faced a crucial test in New York. But he had also run out of money. At this critical juncture, James Riady stepped in to arrange a $3.5 million loan to the Clinton campaign. New York proved to be the last real competition that Clinton faced on his path to victory.

When the Arkansas governor stepped onto the national scene, Clinton and Riady were not new acquaintances. They had met in 1978, when Clinton was attorney general, and had not yet become governor of the state. They were introduced by Clinton’s chief political backer, Jackson Stephens, the head of Stephens Inc., one of the largest private investment firms outside of Wall Street. “Thus began a friendship,” in the words of Timperlake and Triplett, “that has lasted 20 years, and has spread a web of intrigue, financial corruption and foreign influence into American government.”

Riady had begun his American banking career earlier in the ’70s as an intern at Stephens. Later, they became partners in the Worthen Bank of Little Rock, the very same institution that subsequently experienced a mysterious fire that destroyed records being sought by Kenneth Starr and other Whitewater investigators in their inquiries into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Rose law firm activities. It was through the Worthen bank that Riady arranged the $3.5 million credit to Clinton’s failing primary campaign.

The Riady relationship extended beyond the Clintons themselves to their friends and to Hillary’s associates at Rose, including its head, Joe Giroir, and a White House aide named Mark Middleton, who later invoked the Fifth Amendment when he was called before a congressional committee. It was the Riadys who provided a $100,000 “job” for the indicted Web Hubbell, at the moment when he had indicated to the Starr prosecutors that he might be ready to talk. After the payment from Riady and others, Hubbell changed his mind and chose jail instead.

Understanding the security disaster that has befallen the United States requires an understanding that the leakage of America’s secrets proceeded along two parallel tracks. One track was espionage, the other was a political-economic track through the legal commercial activities of the United States government — in particular through its political oversight of these commercial activities, which in past administrations had included formal controls of sensitive technologies that the Clinton team systematically dismantled. Political contributors to the Clinton-Gore campaigns played key roles in promoting the dismantling process.

A central figure in the economic track of Chinese activities was the vice president and Far-East area manager for the Worthen Bank, a Chinese-born American named John Huang, who was a friend of Bill from Little Rock days. Triplett and Timperlake make a strong case that it was through the personal intervention of Hillary Clinton that in 1994 Huang was made a top official in the Commerce Department, where he had access to all the information an agent would need to strip America of the supercomputer technologies vital to the development of advanced weapons systems. Huang also inexplicably retained his top security clearance in the Commerce Department when he left the government.

The decision to leave the government for a position at the Democratic National Committee was made for Huang at a meeting in the Oval Office attended by the president, Huang, Riady, Riady partner and former Rose law firm head Giroir and presidential aide Bruce Lindsey.

This meeting took place three days after the president had decided on a strategy to rescue his failing political fortunes, which had reached a nadir following the Democrats’ historic defeat in the congressional elections of 1994 and Newt Gingrich’s ascension to the speakership of the House. It was the first Republican majority in the House in 48 years.

Designed by the president’s new political advisor, Dick Morris, the strategy involved a massive television advertising campaign, directed against Gingrich and the Republican House. The campaign has been directly credited with turning the political tide and ensuring the reelection in 1996 of the Clinton team. The chief fund-raiser for this campaign was John Huang.

It should be evident from these facts (and they could easily be amplified with many more) that the alliance Clinton has made with the Riadys and their China network is the pivot of his political career, and the absolute key to his survival. It has had consequences for American politics and security so vast that no brief summary can begin to describe them.

In 1996, to pick an illustrative example, the Long Beach (Calif.) City Council granted a lease on the demobilized Long Beach Naval Station to a Chinese company named COSCO, which is little more than the naval arm of the Chinese communist army and is a major arms supplier to dictators and terrorists. Its cargoes have included rocket fuel for Pakistan, helping to destabilize the Indian peninsula; and nuclear components for Iran, a volatile factor in the Middle East. In 1996 a COSCO ship was seized in Oakland, Calif., by U.S. Customs agents who discovered a cargo of 2,000 assault weapons intended for sale to Los Angeles street gangs.

Why would the Long Beach City Council approve a lease to such a company, particularly if the relevant oversight officials in Washington had alerted them to the nature of the COSCO enterprise? Because the relevant oversight officials in Washington did not alert Long Beach to the danger posed by COSCO. On the contrary, they encouraged the deal.

In the 1996 campaign, Johnny Chung — another middleman for the China network and for COSCO in particular — gave $366,000 to the Democratic Party. It was subsequently returned after the campaign finance scandal surfaced and it was clear that it had come illegally from foreign sources. Among the sources was a Chinese intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Liu Chaoying, the daughter of China’s highest ranking military officer. On the eve of the 1996 elections, a White House official named Dorothy Robyn made a conference call to the Long Beach City Council and applied direct pressure on them to push the deal with COSCO through. Robyn told the Council that the “national interest would best be served if the [COSCO] plan proceeds.” The chief competitor for the lease, whose application was denied by White House pressure, was the U.S. Marine Corps.

Nine months before the COSCO lease was sealed, a crisis had developed in the Taiwan Strait. Elections were being held in Taiwan and the communist regime, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan, was launching intermediate range ballistic missiles with blank warheads in the direction of the island, an act of blatant intimidation. The Clinton administration had interposed two aircraft carriers from the 7th Fleet ostensibly to remind the communists that Taiwan was an American ally. At that moment, an old Little Rock friend of Clinton’s appeared in Washington with a $460,000 donation to the legal defense trust that Clinton had set up to defray his expenses in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

The friend also brought a message from one of China’s top officials that if the United States interfered in this matter, a missile attack against Los Angeles would become a possibility. The friend also brought his own broken-English personal message: “Any negative outcomes of the U.S. decision in the China issue will affect your administration position especially in the campaign year.”

The messenger was Charlie Trie, owner of the Fu Lin restaurant in Little Rock. Trie was also a member of the Four Seas triad, a billion-dollar Asian crime syndicate allied to Chinese military and intelligence agencies. Clinton’s written reply to Trie’s blackmail was addressed “Dear Charlie” and assured him and his communist bosses in Beijing that the interposition of the aircraft carriers was “not intended as a threat to the People’s Republic of China,” but as “a signal to both Taiwan and the PRC that the United States was concerned about maintaining stability in the … region.”

The network of businessmen, agents and gangsters that links Clinton to China’s communist dictatorship is interwoven with every element of the greatest security disaster in American history. It is as though the Rosenbergs had been in the White House, except that the Rosenbergs were little people and naive, and consequently the damage they were capable of accomplishing was incomparably less. It could even be said on behalf of the Rosenbergs that they did not do it for themselves, but out of loyalty to an ideal, however pathetic and misguided.

President Clinton has no such loyalties — neither to his family, nor his party, nor his country. As is evident from the disclosures that have already come to light, the damage he has done is without precedent and will dwarf even the legacy of national embarrassment that he earned for himself in the Lewinsky affair. The wounds he has inflicted on this nation, and every individual within it, with consequences unknown for future generations, cannot be said to have been inflicted for ideological reasons or even out of some perverse dedication to a principle of evil. The destructiveness of President Clinton has emerged out of a need that is far more banal — to advance the cause of one ruthlessly self-absorbed man.

But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.

Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.

For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.

NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)

The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.

In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.

The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.

This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.

But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.

The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” or someone fairly serious and “savvy,” like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

There will be events no one could’ve predicted — like “obvious” future Republican presidential contender George Allen using an obscure racial slur on camera, or John Edwards being generally John Edwards — that destroy promising careers in an instant.

And there is also the plain fact that the sort of politicians that Washington-based reporters and pundits and political operatives like, and the sort of politicians they think “voters” would like, are often people who have no appeal for anyone outside of their districts or the Beltway. (Like Evan Bayh. Jon Huntsman. And Mitch Daniels, probably.)

Some people turn out to be awful at campaigning: Like Wesley Clark, the general who was going to sweep a troop-worshiping country off its feet and away from George W. Bush, until it turned out that he did not blink like a human. Or Rick Perry, who, it turned out, seems too dumb to dress himself when asked simple questions on television.

There are times when this sort of long-range forecasting is easy until you overthink it: John McCain was the logical 2008 front-runner the moment he addressed the 2004 Republican convention, until you started daydreaming about Fred Thompson’s seductive drawl. Al Gore was pretty obviously going to be the Democratic nominee in 2000, and boredom with his inevitability might’ve had a hand in how the political press helped destroy him that year.

A hell of a lot will obviously depend on whether or not Barack Obama wins reelection. If he loses, Democrats might suddenly find white candidates from the West or the South more attractive. If he wins, we might have to take Joe Biden semi-seriously for a few unlikely news cycles. If Obama ends a second term as popular as Clinton, someone associated with his administration is certainly more likely to be nominated than if Obama’s 2015 numbers look more like Bush’s in 2007.

So let’s get to the predictions, shall we? According to Cillizza, the “number one seed” for 2016 is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (Mark Warner is still on the shortlist, by the way. His time will come!)

Cuomo is the reasonably popular governor of a very populous state. He’s thus far managed to balance liberal base-pleasing deeds (gay marriage!) with “moderate” newspaper editorial-board pleasing things (going after the pensions of public employees!). But we’re still talking about a Northeast liberal (or “liberal”) — from New York! — who’s living with but not currently married to a celebrity television cook who makes awful-looking garbage food out of prepackaged garbage food. The Democratic Party might not want to chance another blatantly culturally urban candidate. (I mean urban in the literal sense, and not as weird racial code.) Plus he’s in the honeymoon portion of his governorship, and that job has utterly destroyed its last two holders.

Plus, Cuomo looks like he’s on pace to use up much of the goodwill he built up with liberals after signing gay marriage into law. (So far there’s been his apparent lack of interest in transit, signing awful gerrymandered legislative and congressional district lines, and his property tax cap.)

Joe Biden has run for president twice and never come remotely close to winning a single primary. He’ll be 74 in 2016. As Steve Kornacki already pointed out, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to nominate 70-somethings. He’s also a gaffe-prone goofball whose appeal is that he’s a ridiculous character. I would not put a lot of InTrade money on Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Hillary Clinton is a bit younger than Biden, and a lot more serious than Biden. But does she still want to be president? Who knows. (Anyone who says they know is lying.) And if she runs in 2016, does she hire the same asinine campaign team that lost her the nomination in 2008?

After those three, we’re already essentially in “who?” territory with the Democrats. Not to say that someone no one has heard of now won’t be the nominee — with Democrats, you may be more likely to get a relative unknown than with Republicans — but we can’t know which governors or senators will turn out to be Barack Obama (or even John Edwards) and which ones will turn out to be… well, Mark Warner.

And theoretically there would be more women vying for the nomination than just Hillary Clinton. Cillizza posits New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — a long shot, in my estimation — and senatorial hopeful Elizabeth Warren, who, if she loses her election, would surely be out of the running, and if she wins, would be … a liberal senator from Massachusetts. So, I dunno, Amy Klobuchar? Sadly, four of the current six female governors are Republicans. The two Democrats are North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, who is currently polling poorly enough that she’s announced that she won’t seek reelection, and Washington’s Christine Gregoire, who seems cool, so let’s just put her on the fantasy shortlist. (Oh, I guess the Times already did.)

But you see where we are, at this point: Randomly tossing out names. It’s like predicting the 2016 NFL Draft. Some of these kids are still in high school!

As for Republicans: If Mitt Romney wins the election, there’s the candidate, fun speculation time done. (Unless Newt and Ron Paul mount a primary challenge?!?) If he loses, the party likely learns the lesson it always learns and lurches to the right for a while, and your front-runner in that case (assuming he doesn’t blow up the party at the convention, I guess?) is Rick Santorum. I made this point already and Dave Weigel concurred. He’s a “true conservative” and he looks like he’ll “come in second” this year, which are both substantial advantages in the Republican race.

Maybe it’s Marco Rubio if Romney makes him the running mate, but the GOP does not often nominate losing running mates, because why would you?

Is Paul Ryan, who frantically introduces numbers-laden fake-serious budgets every year, the future of the party? I happen to think he’s basically a bland weenie who only excites people predisposed to thrill to rich-on-poor economic warefare, but a not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party “elite” seems to like that sort of thing. Mitch Daniels is somehow even less electrifying, but as a governor he has a better shot than Rep. Ryan. And Santorum still seems to have a massive advantage over them all.

(Oh, what about Chris Christie? Yes, well, he’d certainly be fun but he is pretty moderate for the national Republican Party, even if he masks it by being an obnoxious, belligerent bully. And he is woefully unprepared to protect us from CREEPING SHARIAH.)

One guy changes this calculus, obviously: Jeb Bush, because the Bush name exerts some sort of weird hypnotic power over the Republican Party, and they are often forced to do their bidding, even when, afterward, they all regret it. I like to imagine that the nation as a whole has decided that it’s done with Bushes forever, but that is pretty naive. I mean, Nixon got elected twice. Jeb Bush has not actually held office in a while — by 2016 he’ll have been a regular private citizen for nearly a decade — and it’s possible the family has decided to wait for George P. Bush to come of age before reasserting their claim over the White House (oh man, guys, he just turned 35).

The sick need to treat politics like it’s fantasy baseball ensures that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to make people not wildly speculate as to what will happen years after an election that is still months away, so I just encourage you to be sensible and responsible about it. (Like, it won’t be Rand Paul.)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.

Because she’s not running for anything.

So Hillary Clinton should be president instead of Barack Obama, because Obama is too partisan and divisive. America needs a bipartisan plan to attack the deficit and also create jobs, and it is Obama’s fault that that is a vague, magical fairy tale. Hillary Clinton will make this fairy tale real, thanks to the fact that, as we all know, Republicans love cheerfully working with the Clintons for the good of the nation. When a Clinton’s in the White House, partisan politics are always put aside!

This is self-evidently dumb on about ten different levels — Clinton won’t run, President Clinton wouldn’t have any more success negotiating with Congressional Republicans than President Obama, Clinton’s popularity is a result of her not being a partisan candidate for office anymore, if there was such a thing as a “bipartisan” plan to reduce the deficit while also stimulating job growth (and protecting entitlements!) we’d presumably have already decided to act on this fantastical plan, everything resembling such a plan is explicitly supported by the White House and rejected by Republicans, Republicans would not endorse said plans if President Obama promised to go away because then they’d simply want to wait for a Republican to take over for him, and Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not, as they claim to be, Democrats — but the Journal published this regardless, as they always do with fresh tripe from Schoen and Caddell.

Schoen — who works for hypothetical future independent presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, though that fact is never, ever disclosed — is a simple hack, precisely as dumb and unprincipled as you’d expect anyone who was once Mark Penn’s right-hand man to be. Caddell angrily left the Democratic party 20 years ago, which is seldom mentioned when he’s trotted out to trash the president on behalf of the right-wing media outlets that pay his rent. But the fact that they’re classic “Fox Democrats” matters much less than the fact that all of their editorials are predictable, wrong, and patently stupid.

As I said, printing their editorials is an implicit admission that you think your audience is credulous and moronic. The people in charge of the Wall Street Journal are savvy enough about politics to know that all of this is bilge and bullshit. They know both that this will never happen and that it’d be a stupid suggestion even if it were within the realm of possibility. They just don’t care. They don’t care that they’re printing garbage, because they figure garbage will get some traffic from those engaged in the same game.

If I were a conservative American I’d be less outraged at the specter of liberal elites hypothetically disrespecting me from their coastal enclaves and much more pissed off that the people on my side are constantly peddling this bullshit.

Clearly Clinton’s competence is an asset to the president, and her power and credibility reflects well on his ability to work with a former rival. And the Time piece, in particular, makes clear, while praising Clinton, that ultimately Obama makes most of his decisions with a small team of confidantes, and she is not among them. He’s the commander in chief.

And there’s fine reporting in the two pieces. Certainly Clinton deserves credit for using her role to leverage support and resources from other agencies, getting greater control of foreign aid funding and even Defense Department funds to bolster her agenda at State. Elevating the role of the State Department took particular work after George W. Bush ignored and degraded so many American alliances.

But neither piece apportions any share of blame for the downside of Clinton’s expansive diplomacy – her role in pushing a bigger continued U.S. presence in and around Iraq, for instance, flagged Monday by Glenn Greenwald. The continued Iraq presence will also use more of the sometimes lawless private contractors whose role she opposed during the presidential campaign. It also seems a little early to be declaring Libya a decisive victory for American interests, or the cause of human freedom, as the nature of the government that will emerge there remains unclear.

Still, at a time when Obama struggles to get the kind of credit he deserves on the foreign policy and domestic security front – for killing Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaida leaders, winding down the military role in Iraq and toppling Muammar Gaddhafi without losing a single American life – it strikes me as a little unseemly that when credit is given, so much of it goes to Clinton. For her part, at least publicly, Clinton works to turn the spotlight on her boss, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press 10 days ago that “President Obama has passed with flying colors every leadership challenge.” And while she insisted, not convincingly, “I’m out of politics, as you know, David, I don’t comment on it,” she quickly boosted her boss against his potential 2012 rivals.  “I think Americans are going to want to know that they have a steady, experienced, smart hand on the tiller of the ship of state, and there’s no doubt that that’s Barack Obama.”

It feels a little mean-spirited to be raising these questions about Clinton’s coverage on the day she lost her mother, Dorothy Rodham, at 92, but this is the week of the adoring press coverage. Again, I’m a strong Clinton admirer. But there’s something a little odd about the worshipful tone of these pieces. I still see a faint echo of Maureen Dowd’s analysis propping up Clinton and other female administration “hawks” in her continued effort to diminish Obama’s leadership and masculinity.   Dowd seems to be on vacation, or else we might see her to use these two profiles as another reason to pit Clinton against her boss.

I spoke with a close Clinton friend last week who insists the Secretary of State has no interest in either the role of vice president in 2012, or a presidential run in 2016, so I don’t think there’s any crusade for either job behind these admiring stories. Maybe her allies are just trying to make sure she gets credit for the great work she did, against all odds, for a man she was once accused of trying to destroy.