There’s an extra excitement in the Giants clubhouse when Mays is there. Visitors, Giants staff and even some of the players seem to get a kick out of it. I ran into Dusty Baker’s 74-year-old father, Johnnie B. Baker Sr., outside the clubhouse, and he got excited when I told him I was there to see Mays. “Willie Mays is here? Where is he? I’ve got to say hello.” The two men greeted one another warmly, but with a touching formality, as “Mr. Mays” and “Mr. Baker,” the one awed by the star’s celebrity, the other respectful of the older patriarch’s seniority. They compared aches and pains, and the 68-year-old Mays shook his head, “Well, I have longevity. My daddy’s still alive.”

Mays signed some autographs for kids who happened to be hanging out, and then walked me into clubhouse manager Mike Murphy’s tiny office, where I sat, tape recorder in my outstretched hand, and we talked when we weren’t being interrupted by visitors. I asked how he felt about the title “greatest living baseball player,” which Joe DiMaggio had reportedly demanded be used whenever he was introduced for public appearances.

“I don’t know what Joe wanted, but I don’t have a problem, if he wanted to do that. He was my hero. Joe was the best all-around player. Joe was the best. I only played against him once, in the ’51 Series.”

I ask what current players he would put in the same league as himself and DiMaggio, and he answers quickly: “There’s only two guys you could put there: Griffey and Barry” — Ken Griffey Jr. and Mays’ godson, Barry Bonds — “for all-around. A lot of guys put numbers on the board, but only those two do it all.” He’s equally unequivocal on the question of his best play ever: “The catch off Bobby Morgan in Brooklyn was the best catch I ever made. Jackie Robinson and Leo Durocher were the first people I saw when I opened my eyes. Jackie came out to see if I caught the ball. He was a very good competitor.”

But he thinks it’s silly to try to pick a best season. “I didn’t think like that, about best seasons. What if you thought ’97 was your best year — what would you do now? I never looked back. I couldn’t dwell on last year’s season. I always looked forward. I never worried about what other people were doing — except the guy I was playing against.”

Then Giants broadcaster (and ESPN celebrity) Jon Miller popped his head in, mock-introducing himself to his old friend Mays, who deadpanned, “Hi, I’m Jim Brown.”

While they bantered, I saw Mays’ humor, and his legendary profanity, which he kept in check the rest of the time with a female reporter. Miller confided that he was known for his “Willie Mays stance” when he played Little League, and Mays, not believing that the portly broadcaster had ever picked up a bat, demanded the names of his teammates.

“I said I played Little League,” Miller averred.

“I heard what the fuck you said,” Mays came back. “I wanna know who played with you.”

“Nobody,” Miller confessed. “Nobody who was any good.”

Miller relates that when he was in New York recently, he saw somebody filming a TV commercial with Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter playing stickball. Mays explodes in laughter: “Jeter don’t know about no stickball, he never played in his whole life. He’s a good ballplayer, but where’s he from? Michigan? Maybe he plays hockey, but he don’t know stickball.”

I ask about his stickball-playing days as a rookie. “We played with a mop handle, cut the top off. The stick was small; the ball was small, too. We played it in Birmingham, we called it something else altogether, ragball or something. It was different, we threw the ball in the air. We’d steal mops, we’d cut them off. We’d play on 155th Street in Harlem, we’d play in between the cars. And if you hit it over the roof you were out.” I ask why, and he cackles. “Because you’d lose the ball! You got to hit the ball for location.

“I played stickball in the morning, around 10, for about an hour. There was a bunch of kids. They’d come and knock on my window, ’cause my window was on the ground level. I could walk from where I lived down the street to the Polo Grounds. So I’d buy the kids ice cream, then go to the ballpark. I did that all year in ’51, and in ’52 till May, when I went into the military.” I mention that manager Leo Durocher had problems with his stickball, and he smiles.

“Leo didn’t want me to play there — he didn’t want me to get tired. But it was good for me, playing with the kids was good. That’s how I learned to hit the breaking ball. Guys would bounce the ball to you, and you’d have to hit it, and sometimes it would bounce this way, that way. That’s a breaking ball. I could hit anything that moved — the change-up, breaking ball, curveball.”

Mays is happiest reminiscing about great plays and games and players of years gone by. His hearing’s going, but his memory for baseball detail is incredible. Miller tells a funny anecdote about a hit Mays got off Mets pitcher Jon Matlack, and Mays volunteers, “I remember that game! They beat us 7-1. It was a change-up; I could always hit the change-up.” He recalls a legendary extra-inning doubleheader against the Mets and volunteers, “Galen Cisco pitched eight shutout innings, and then in the ninth gave up two runs,” remembering like it was last year, instead of more than 30 years ago.

At that point manager Dusty Baker dropped in, apologized for interrupting, and told Mays that someone from the players’ union had phoned to ask if Mays would host an awards ceremony that had in the past been graced by Hank Aaron and Joe DiMaggio.

“Why didn’t they call me?” Mays demands.

Baker smiles. “He was afraid to call you.”

“Tell him to pick up the damn phone,” Mays retorts, then asks for the number.

And about a minute later, in walks Giants star Barry Bonds, (Mays played with Bonds’ father, Bobby, in the Giants’ outfield in the late 1960s and early ’70s). They have a cryptic exchange; it seemed Mays was trying to put Bonds in touch with someone who’d pay him for an appearance. “Guy didn’t call you?” Mays asks. “OK, I’ll call him. I don’t wanna hold you up. I’ll let you know.” The $10 million-a-year-superstar leaves, and his godfather shakes his head: “He’s gotta earn some money? He needs money like he needs a hole in the head. Give me the money. Why’m I tryin’ to get him fuckin’ money?”

Then Miller says goodbye, mentions he’s going to England for vacation when the season’s over and jokingly invites Mays to come along. Mays says a quick no. “I ain’t never been to Europe. I like it over here. What am I goin’ over there for? What am I gonna do over there? It’s cold in England.” He notices Miller isn’t wearing a jacket (you need one at Candlestick, even in June) and insists, “Where’s your jacket? The Giants didn’t give you a jacket? I’ma bring you a heavy jacket, Bally’s is always givin’ me jackets. You need a jacket.”

When we get back to our conversation, I ask if he would like to have managed. He says no. “I didn’t think I would be a good manager. Maybe I had too much expectations, I just felt I wouldn’t be good at it, and I don’t like to do anything I’m not good at. I know the game, but I don’t think I could sit there day in and day out and watch baseball. Even when I was playing the game, I used to get up, come in the clubhouse, walk around. I couldn’t watch it all. Maybe I was nervous.”

Periodically Mays would lapse back and forth from past to present tense when talking about his playing days, which ended 26 years ago. Asked about his favorite manager, he insists, “I never had a favorite manager. I never had a manager that bothered me. As long as they leave me alone.” I mention reading he’d feuded with Clyde King, the Giants manager in the late ’60s who tried to make him bat leadoff, and he shrugs. “Clyde didn’t bother me, he just was the type of guy who didn’t tell me the truth. We just had problems, that’s all.

“I got along with all of them. As long as they leave me alone out on the field. I could do things on the field a manager couldn’t tell me to do, because a manager doesn’t know what I can do — sometimes I don’t even know myself. Bill Rigney and I had a problem the first year. When a new manager comes in they have new ideas. When I talked to him I said, Bill, just leave me alone, and after four or five months, he did. And we would become very, very good friends.”

But the conversation took a bad turn when I asked about the years he was banned from baseball, and it never righted itself.

“I wasn’t out of baseball long. It was two years. Two years. It was short.”

I acknowledge it was a brief period.

“Well, say it, then. Say what it was: Two years. I was only out a year and a half, really.”

And the interview went south from there. When I tried to change the subject to happier times — last year, when the Giants announced they would name the plaza outside their new ballpark “Willie Mays Plaza,” and build a statue there in his honor — Mays got even more ornery.

“Wouldn’t it be moving for you if you had a statue put up of you? You wouldn’t appreciate that? Anybody who’d have a statue put up about him, and don’t appreciate it, then there’s something wrong with the person. I’m kind of curious why you’d ask me a question like that. I’m having a statue built while I’m alive to see it, and I think it’s tremendous.”

It was a bad moment; in 20 years I’ve never had an interview turn so sour. I apologized to Mays for upsetting him, and wrapped up the interview.

“It don’t matter. You’ll write what you want to write. I’m just me, I’ll be me from day one till the day that I’m gone. That’s just me.”

I’ve mostly dismissed stories about rivalry and tension between Obama and Clinton, at least after 2008, as media mischief. But the former president’s comments last week in an interview with Harvey Weinstein on CNN can’t easily be explained away, even as the two men get ready to put up a united front to raise a ton of money tonight.

Clinton got most attention last week for calling Romney’s Bain Capital career “sterling,” and criticizing the Obama campaign’s efforts to focus on the occasions in Romney’s career when he bought companies, cut costs, threw employees out of work, got the government to bail out pension funds and provide a safety net  – while Bain and Romney pocketed a small fortune, no matter what happened to the firm. Apparently Clinton doesn’t see a problem with that. “I don’t think we ought to get into the position where we say, ‘this is bad work, this is good work. There’s no question that, in terms of getting up, going to the office, and basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who’s been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.” No one is suggesting Romney isn’t qualified to be president; that’s what the other team says about Obama.

I’ll get back to that outrage in a second, but I want to talk about the Clinton comment I found far more awful and inexplicable, which got less attention: his warm words for top birther Donald Trump, and his unbelievable weasel words when asked about scurrilous lies that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. It was Harvey Weinstein, subbing for Piers Morgan, who got both the Romney and Trump admissions from Clinton, but the Trump statement was far more disturbing. When Weinstein mentioned Trump’s latest foray into crackpot birtherism and asked, “How do you put that out of the minds of the American public … once and for all?”  Clinton offered his worst answer since saying “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” He told Weinstein:

I don’t know. You know, Donald Trump has been uncommonly nice to Hillary and me. We’re all New Yorkers. And I like him. And I love playing golf with him. But the evidence is pretty clear that President Obama was born in Hawaii and this whole election should not be about any of these side issues. It really ought to be about the decisions that each of them will make on where we are and where we need to go.

“I like him” is a pretty shoddy thing to say about the guy who’s humiliating your ally, the president, in psychological and racial ways. Even worse is Clinton weakly nodding that “the evidence is pretty clear that President Obama was born in Hawaii.” This was a time for that old Clinton, the angry, righteous guy who ripped Chris Wallace a new one, to attack the birther conspiracy as even lower than the right’s efforts to claim he peddled drugs, fathered an illegitimate black child and had a role in the death of his friend Vince Foster. Even assuming he truly likes Trump, which I find hard to believe, he’s even more required to tell his friend to shut his trap and get back to firing folks on “Celebrity Apprentice.” Now is the time for even erstwhile friends of Trump who have a conscience to usher him off the political stage, and to sharply criticize his birther nonsense.

What does Trump have that Clinton needs, anyway? His wife isn’t New York senator anymore. She says she doesn’t want to run for president, though who knows what will happen in four years. Even if she does, is Trump’s support and money really worth defending the narcissistic fat-cat’s racist bullying of our first black president?

It may be that Clinton’s Trump defense is related to his Bain Capital defense, and both have to do with protecting his dubious legacy: making the Democrats competitive with Republicans in raising money from Wall Street and, more broadly, the FIRE sector — Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, the sector that gave lavishly to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 but ultimately favored Obama. While Clinton has expressed regret for signing bills repealing Glass-Steagall and essentially waving a “Go” sign at the predators of Wall Street, he can’t quite quit them.

It’s the same reason that Cory Booker, Harold Ford Jr., Steven Rattner, Ed Rendell (whose populist instincts I normally respect), Sen. Mark Warner and other opportunistic Dems have been doing their best to show finance capital that they’re the good Democrats, the ones who still love Wall Street, even at the expense of the president.

Trust me, if Obama loses, there will be a huge push to blame it on his seeming hostility to Wall Street – a measure of what spoiled little princes and brats those masters of the universe are. Obama once called them “fat cats” – but he otherwise deferred to them, resisting all efforts to break up the banks, limit their bonuses, force them to write down mortgages in default or otherwise help the victims of their casino high jinks. Still, there will be a long list of Democrats – look for Evan Bayh! – to tell us Obama’s “class warfare” cost him the election, and that the party needs to repair its ties to Wall Street, and the top 1 percent more generally, to win back the White House.

Of course, ever since the 2010 midterm debacle I’ve been pointing out that Americans who blame the economy’s troubles on Wall Street voted for Obama in 2008, but Republicans in 2010, according to CNN exit polls. Wall Street may be offended by Obama’s milquetoast rebukes, but many Americans have seen him as their champion.

I think Bill Clinton is trying to telegraph to his old Wall Street friends — and to friends of his Clinton Global Initiative, an admirable philanthropic juggernaut that mainly relies on flattering rich people to get them to do what people of conscience should do anyway — that the young president has taken a wrong turn, and other Democrats don’t agree with his criticizing the financial sector. Let’s hope American voters fed up with Wall Street don’t hear the former president’s imprecations.

I’ve been a huge defender of Bill Clinton over the years but I’ve got to say, his Bain comments were disloyal and his Trump comments were offensive. He better raise a lot of money for the president Monday night to balance out that betrayal — of Obama, and of the party that’s struggling to find its moral and political moorings after its damaging dalliance with the men who wrecked the economy.

The piece is just factually wrong. First of all, the Project for Excellence in Journalism tracked Obama-Romney media coverage this year and found that the president received far more negative coverage than Romney did. GQ’s Devin Gordon took apart VandeHei and Allen here. He said everything I wanted to about the piece – most notably, the Times took the lead in reporting on Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, starting with Jodi Kantor’s piece in April, 2007. Gordon found 2,950 references to Wright in the Times archives. Even if Gordon’s math is off by a factor of 10, that’s a lot of coverage.

Politico’s faux-outrage that both the Post and Times “ignored” David Maraniss’s story about Obama epic high school weed-smoking is silly, too: The future president inoculated himself against almost all drug revelations by revealing them himself in “Dreams from My Father.” The memoir leaves little doubt that Barry Obama was a lost stoner in high school. Who cares?

Meanwhile, Matt Drudge’s favorite journalists are angry that the Post published revelations about Romney’s high school bullying. They seem to think high school behavior matters in the case of Obama but not Romney, just another example of the pervasive partisan double standard in media. But I don’t want to say I learned nothing from the piece: It features populist Haley Barbour defending Ann Romney from the mean Times this way: “The New York Times does a huge exposé that Ann Romney rides horses. Well, so does my wife, and a few million other people. Watch out for equine performers!” You are so fricking losing the dressage vote, Team Obama! Take that!

The ultimate moral vacuum at the heart of the story is its failure to care that just two days after its “exposé” of Ann Romney’s fondness for seven-figure horses and the silly costumes that go with them, the Times ran a chilling investigative piece about Obama’s “kill list” process, with damning details about how the president decides on drone strikes and other methods of killing suspected terrorists.

The Times piece revealed that the administration has minimized its reported civilian casualties by counting all males killed, including minors, as “militants.” It contains the detail that echoes George Zimmerman’s thoughts about Trayvon Martin – that any young men in the vicinity of suspected terrorists must be “up to no good.” The single most haunting revelation, to me, was the fact that political guru David Axelrod sits in on the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, evidence that the president’s process is at least partly political. Oh, and “Terror Tuesday” isn’t my juvenile label for the meetings; according to the Times, that’s how they’re known in the White House. I hope they got that detail wrong. It even quotes Bush CIA director Michael Hayden praising the president but urging a little more transparency in his process. When a Bush-Cheney intelligence operative is telling you you’re keeping too many secrets, you maybe ought to think about it. (I’m going to write more about Obama, the Democrats, national security and “kill lists” next week.)

Politico’s only mention of the piece comes within Times editor Richard Stevenson’s email rebuttal to its charges. Clearly, VandeHei and Allen think a story about the president’s controversial drone policy is less grave and potentially damaging than a close look at Ann Romney’s dressage hobby. I can’t think of a better example of the mindset that drives trivial, democracy-degrading political coverage. Politico didn’t create that world, but it’s the news outlet that was most deliberately invented and perfected to make sure we continue to live in it.

Broadcast in New Hampshire, the swing state that also leads the nation in per capita student debt, the ad highlighted “the fact that the president has not been able to help students deal with this crushing debt,” according to Romney spokesman Ryan Williams. Unfortunately, the ad used footage of New Hampshire students complaining about their loan burden without their permission, and one of them happens to plan to vote for Obama. “Considering I am not a supporter of Mitt Romney, this is not exactly sitting well with me,” said Southern New Hampshire University sophomore Matt Raso. The campaign pulled the footage when a local television station objected, but Ryan Williams told the Associated Press that the campaign plans to run ads blaming the student loan crisis on Obama in other swing states.

That takes a kind of chutzpah Romney rarely exhibits. He won’t stand up to birther bully Donald Trump or the misogynist Rush Limbaugh, but he apparently has the cojones to blame student debt on Obama. We’ll see how it goes. In fact, American student debt is a scandal in which state and national lawmakers in both parties share some blame. But by far the lion’s share of responsibility for the debacle belongs to Republicans. The roots of the crisis go back to California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who imposed the first “fees” on the formerly free University of California system in 1968, declaring “the state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” As president, Reagan helped nationalize that disdain for well-funded public higher education in the 1980s.

But it took a long roster of Republican governors to turn the problem into a crisis, and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney led the way a decade ago, dramatically slashing public higher-education funding and hiking fees during his one term. According to the Boston Globe, from 2003 to 2007, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts’s once-stellar system of public higher education as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state’s community college, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.

Romney also wanted to spin off the flagship UMass-Amherst and privatize three other colleges, including the medical school, a harbinger of what he says he’ll do as president. That agenda failed in Massachusetts, but it would be a shame to give him a second chance as president.

It’s tragic that Republicans have become the dismantlers of public universities, since it was Abraham Lincoln who signed the Morrill Act in 1862, creating the system of land-grant colleges that made the U.S. a country of unusually broad opportunity. (Of course, today’s GOP has betrayed Lincoln in many other ways.) “Abraham Lincoln is weeping today,” university president Graham Spanier told reporters when Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett slashed Penn State funding by $182 million last year. It was the aggressive expansion of college education access after World War II that helped create the vast American middle class. In 1946, only one in eight college-aged student got higher education; by 1970, one in three did. And the balance of enrollment shifted to public institutions: In the 1940s, most students attended private colleges; by 1970 three-quarters were enrolled in public ones.

Presidents from Truman through Eisenhower and Nixon to Carter continued to endorse and enable broad college access, but the tide began to turn in the 1960s as universities became hotbeds of political protest and the new educated generation began to use its college smarts to question society rather than become cogs in the corporate machine. But we can make too much of Reagan’s resentment of Berkeley radicals as a factor in his push to end free UC tuition. He and his backers were anxious to dismantle the public sector and the tax structure that made it possible as well as to privatize all sorts of formerly public institutions, creating lucrative new money-making opportunities for their wealthy friends.

The result: University tuition is up 128 percent nationwide since 1980, the year Reagan became president (and coincidentally, the year I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, when I paid less than $400 a semester). Public university tuition has tripled since then. In that same period, the middle class has shrunk, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. Is it all connected to our breaking our promises to our kids about higher education? Not entirely, but it’s not a random coincidence, either.

The Romney-Reagan approach to higher education has a lot in common with their overall approach to the economy. Let’s take jobs as an example. Under Reagan, median wages for the working and middle classes began to stagnate and fall – but household debt began to rise. It was as if the GOP-unleashed private sector figured out how to make money lending families the money that they were no longer making in income. Republicans have the same approach to higher education: They slashed public funding and then let their banker friends “help” students afford higher tuition by lending them the cash to pay for it. Now, of course, the nation’s student loan debt is larger than its credit card debt, and graduates leave college carrying about $25,000 in loans. It’s like a mortgage, but without the house.

Andrew Leonard wrote a great piece Tuesday about Romney’s ties to the for-profit education industry and his commitment to relax Obama administration regulations on that high-profit, low-student-success sector. That’s the other key to Romney’s higher education agenda: slash public funding, increase the student loan burden and privatize the whole system as much as possible. Leonard explains what’s wrong with Romney’s priorities more succinctly than I could:

The biggest for-profit schools generate 80 to 90 percent of their revenue from federally guaranteed student loans. Only one out of every ten American college students attends a for-profit institution, but these students account for a quarter of all student debt and almost half of all student loan dollars in default. There’s no sugar-coating it: The booming for-profit industry is one of the worst possible examples of the “free market” in action that one can find in the entire U.S. educational sector. For-profits charge higher tuition rates than their public school competitors, graduation rates are lower, and the entire business would not exist without massive government subsidization in the form of cheap student loans.

Romney is also pledging to undo one of Obama’s most progressive reforms: his overhaul of the student loan system, taking banks (and their gouging) out of the middle of the government-guaranteed loan relationship.

It’s against that backdrop that Romney is trying to blame Obama for the student loan crisis. It won’t work. Democrats need to pay much more attention to Romney’s higher education record in Massachusetts. It’s no wonder he doesn’t like to talk about those years.

Obviously Blitzer could have cut “beginning to look a little” from his put-down, but those were harsh words coming from Blitzer. Trump had already insulted the CNN anchor’s ratings, telling him, “Frankly, if you would report [the birther conspiracy] accurately, I think you would probably get better ratings than you’re getting, which are pretty small.”

So Obama surrogates Hilary Rosen and Cory Booker were almost universally denounced for ill-chosen words on behalf of the president, but Trump gets to insult not just Obama but an influential cable news anchor on behalf of Romney with no reprisals? That’s the old IOKIYAR double standard at work, but this time, it might actually backfire and hurt Romney.

For his part, Romney refused to either cut ties with Trump or denounce him. And his refusal to do so was a craven exercise in electoral groveling. “You know,” he told reporters Monday night, “I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1 percent or more, and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.” What else will Romney do to get to 50.1 percent? Stay tuned.

Of course, that’s not the first time Romney has refused to denounce or distance himself from a Republican supporter. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” he merely said it was “not the language I would have used.” When Ted Nugent said “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Romney simply asked for more civility in politics. When a supporter said Obama should be “tried for treason,” Romney didn’t challenge her at all and later told reporters: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.” Romney keeps getting served big fat pitches to let him take a swing at a defining moment of political courage, pitches that he could knock out of the park. He just watches them float by.

Maybe Romney thinks he needs the birther loons to get elected. The base isn’t crazy about him. And Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reveals that Orly Taitz and Joseph Farah are thrilled that Trump continues to advance their cause. But this can’t end well. For better or worse, independents are likely to decide this election, and birther nonsense isn’t going to win them over.

I’ve probably reached my own personal low when I’m fact checking Trump’s lies, but today he consistently claimed – referencing a Breitbart.com story – that Obama’s “publisher” wrote that he was born in Kenya; in fact, the dubious story makes clear it was his literary agent, in a publicity brochure about her clients. (A former agency assistant quickly took the blame for the mistake and said the information didn’t come from Obama.)

Also, when talking about the agent’s brochure to the Daily Beast, Trump said it was a mistake made by a young man who “didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth.”  But when dismissing Blitzer’s reference to the Honolulu Star Bulletin’s Barack Obama birth announcement just days after he was born, Trump argues “many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit of being so-called born in this country.” So his parents knew enough to fake a birth announcement, but the young Harvard Law Review president threw all their hard work away to sell a book? Uh oh, I’m trying to find consistency in a Donald Trump argument. Time to close. Romney owns everything Trump says, and it will cost him in November.

The Breitbart.com empire must be proud Trump is using their story as “proof” of his birther nonsense. Even as they printed the allegation, they stressed that Breitbart himself didn’t support birtherism, and they insisted that they only published the story about the agent’s brochure just to prove the media didn’t vet Obama. Let’s get this straight: So they’re chiding the media for not publishing something that they themselves believe to be false. That’s awesome journalism.

In related news: Regarding the revival of Trump birtherism, I said Friday on “Hardball” that Breitbart’s journalistic proteges were “bottom feeders,” and one of them quickly proved it.  I appreciate all the support I got on Twitter, but to me it was a dog bites man story, and utterly predictable. (I apologize to dogs everywhere for that unfair comparison.)

I talked about how Trump hurts Romney on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday afternoon:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today it’s appalling: puffed up by Romney’s flattery, the preening, orange-haired narcissist doubled down on his idiotic birther claims against the president, telling the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove: “Look, it’s very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”

If you haven’t been following the story, and I tried not to, the addled spawn of Andrew Breitbart found a dusty 20-year-old catalog from Obama’s former literary agency that said he was born in Kenya. An assistant quickly said that she wrote down incorrect information. Trump doesn’t believe her.

“That’s what he told the literary agent,” Trump told Grove. “That’s the way life works … He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said … He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

Give us a break, Mitt. It was already embarrassing that you were using Trump as a fundraising lure – why not raffle off a dinner with Dick Cheney, who’s hosting a fundraiser for you in July? At least Darth Vader has gravitas; Trump is a joke. Pretending to run for president, Trump made birtherism his big issue, and ultimately Obama responded by prevailing on the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate – a truly sad moment for this country, when the overwhelmingly elected president, a black man, has to show a nasty rich white guy his papers.

If you ever want an example of the vicious political double standard that helps Republicans in this country, here it is: Democrat Hilary Rosen said something inartful about Ann Romney being a stay-at-home mom, and the entire Democratic Party had to denounce her; Obama campaign leaders tripped over themselves to be the first to push her under the bus; Rosen immediately apologized. But Romney has been able to keep his ties to Trump as well as misogynist Rush Limbaugh without political penalty — so far.

This is a moment for the presumptive Republican nominee to stand up for sanity and distance himself from the crackpot birther fringe, and tell Trump he’s going to have to cancel their dinner date. Maybe he’s got to wash his hair that night. Or one of Ann Romney’s cars.

Does Romney have the integrity and courage to do that? I don’t think so, but I’d love to be surprised.