The battle in Seattle forced a welcome if brief international consciousness on the mass TV audience, which has been preoccupied with domestic issues and celebrity scandals throughout this decade, an obliviousness barely dented by President Clinton’s outrageous boutique bombings abroad. The protesters’ success in hamstringing the WTO, which adjourned without reaching key agreements, will surely inspire more young people to social activism for a wealth of causes. I hope it’s curtains for another style spawned in Seattle — the apathy and whining asexuality of passive-aggressive grunge.

The danger is that this nascent coalition of Democrat-led trade unions with environmental and labor equity groups will get stereotyped as left-loony. When post-adolescent anarchist goons pledge total destruction of the system or when dinosaur Marxists denounce capitalism as “evil” and call all property “crime” (caught on camera in Seattle), this promising movement doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining popular support.

Capitalism, in my view, is the best vehicle of social change. Free enterprise and free thought are inextricably and creatively intertwined. Over the past 200 years, capitalism has enormously advanced global prosperity, even if an unacceptable economic gap remains between the first and third worlds. Though you’d never know it from the snide rhetoric of cloistered liberal academics, modern feminism owes everything to capitalism, which gave women financial independence for the first time in history.

On the other hand, capitalism is inherently Darwinian, and a just society must provide a safety net for the poor. While intrusion by government into the market should be as minimal as possible, it is ethically imperative to monitor working conditions, product safety and environmental integrity. My lifelong scriptural texts are William Blake’s radical poems “The Chimney Sweeper” and “London” (discussed in my first book), which heartbreakingly dramatize the disparity between the powerful and the powerless in newly industrial, polluted England.

Adjusting tariffs or formulating trade guidelines is a very difficult matter when emerging nations interpret U.S. demands as a usurpation of their sovereignty. We need a stronger “green” lobby that will fruitfully ally with its foreign counterparts. And we urgently need a broad-based, rigorously rational progressive party that will, without succumbing to outdated Marxist formulas, challenge the corruption of the major political parties by big money; critique the escalating power of multinational conglomerates; and condemn flagrant corporate greed (as in the looting of company profits through the inflated salaries of top executives).

There is no stopping the high-tech transformation of the world economy — except by Mother Nature, of course, with one of her standard cataclysms (a perennial Paglia prophecy). What is needed is massive educational reform — such as the development of trade schools and vocational programs serving students of every age. The social convulsion of job losses because of migration of industry abroad cannot be wholly prevented by artificial government manipulation. At present, American primary education is failing to provide either knowledge or skills for anyone but those already set on a professional track by their affluent, upper-middle-class families.

Don’t look to Washington for help, since Congress is stalemated and the immediate political field seems bleak. Gov. Bush has yet to show presidential qualities, and his elementary communication skills are weak. Hillary Clinton’s senatorial fantasy is sapping the Gore campaign by stealing P.R. wattage and keeping 20 years of Clinton scandals on the front burner. Al Gore continues to lose credibility through his own foolish choices and grating hamster-wheel freneticism. After the devastating revelations in the Nov. 20 New York Times about the leading advisory role played by his shallow 26-year-old daughter Karenna (Naomi Wolf’s Ivy League pal), who can take Gore seriously?

Shame on the superstructure of the Democratic Party for its cowardly decision, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in early 1998, not to force President Clinton to resign: Gore would have been elevated to the presidency at his peak of strength and prestige and would have grown into the job, guaranteeing Democratic control of the White House well into the next decade. Instead, we Democrats must watch the gruesome spectacle of Gore whittling himself down day by day as dope-on-a-rope Clinton bounces from screw-up to screw-up.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley, for whom I need a palpable reason to cast my Pennsylvania primary ballot, is still plodding along in a coma. Bradley’s obliqueness is starting to look like petulance. A president needs more dynamism. If Bradley doesn’t ratchet up soon, Bush will sweep to victory simply by reason of his raw, youthful, bulldog vitality. As for Sen. John McCain, whom the liberal media are busily over-promoting to sabotage Bush, I can’t believe anyone takes him seriously as a candidate for high office. He belongs in military operations, not the Oval Office.

Salon reader Zack Galler, a former naval officer, writes:

McCain’s claim to national attention is as our most prominent victim of bad luck. During his brief naval career, he had two aircraft destroyed beneath him, one by a Zuni rocket, another by a NVA missile. Granted he survived through unusual stoicism and discipline, but, bereft of these, his problem-solving cupboard is bare. Witness his pitiful response to the Kosovo fiasco, a call to persist and endure in whatever military horrors the commander in chief invents. His first principles are invariably to throw the weight of government regulation and law (as manifestations of discipline) against individual choice (tobacco, political speech [i.e. campaign finance reform], drug reform).

It’s not expansiveness and charisma that the man lacks; it’s the total absence of subtlety, creativity, and original thought which, hopefully, should sentence him to retirement as a minor politician from a minor state. He’s a Sherwood Anderson grotesque.

If the media think they’re atoning for their Vietnam-era sins or doing veterans a favor by giving this Strangelovian refugee a free ride, I wish they’d reconsider.

I couldn’t agree more. The myopic McCain apologists in the Northeastern media are destroying their own credibility as political analysts.

Hillary Clinton, whose “I intend to run” two weeks ago was clearly ambivalent in tone (her qualification was truncated mid-sentence by a mad rush of hysterical lady teachers toward her) is embarking on a trial campaign for which she has no record of concrete achievement and which seems to have no other aim than to snag a comfy post-White House residence and a face-saving reason not to live with bimbo-besotted Bill.

Salon reader Steve Story asks, “Is New York in such dire intellectual straits that it must panhandle for leadership?” The people of New York (including my scores of relatives) are merely pawns in Hillary’s game. Gail Sheehy’s gushy new book, “Hillary’s Choice,” which I skimmed at the store, contains enough negatives to prove why Hillary has no business meddling in electoral politics.

Sheehy confirms that Hillary was indeed the hard-liner who refused to settle with Paula Jones — thus putting the country through a divisive year of impeachment crisis (since Lewinsky’s name surfaced in depositions in the Jones case). And Sheehy claims it was Hillary who pushed the president into bombing Kosovo — in my view an abuse of American military power. If it is also true, as rumored, that Hillary leaned on Janet Reno to order the disastrous 1993 assault at Waco, then Hillary is beyond doubt one of the most destructive personalities in American politics in the last 25 years.

Sheehy’s sentimental formulas can’t conceal the bunkered mess of Hillary’s early family life — all of which was intuited, by the way, in my stormily controversial cover story for the March 4, 1996, New Republic, “Ice Queen, Drag Queen,” where I focused on Hillary’s eerie memory of a childhood snowman (her double, I argued) on her televised White House Christmas tour. Sheehy oddly fails to catch the killer competition that seems to have been going on between Hillary and her brothers and Hillary and her mother — a dynamic that may have been operating in the two weeks Hillary played hooky from her brand-new duties as health-care czarina to station herself like a Victorian angel at her failing father’s bedside.

Hillary has the kind of glib, sanctimonious mind that I loathe in the p.c. professoriat. She selectively memorizes facts and recites them without regard to context. She is devoid of psychological insight into herself or others. She simplistically externalizes conflicts onto demonic “enemies.” She claims compassion for the dispossessed but prefers to hobnob with the rich and famous. She’s a secret snob addicted to status, a true Machiavellian who reduces everyone, even her family, into instruments of her will.

The only thing that’s fueling this absurd campaign is the complicity of the liberal news media. While 80 percent of the leading journalists and columnists now seem to have defected from the noisy Hillary bandwagon of early last summer, the picture editors are keeping it going, choosing the most glamorous photos and news footage of Hillary and carefully concealing how staged her events are — how she comes and goes, for example, with bully-boy platoons of the taxpayer-funded Secret Service, who keep hecklers at bay.

Salon reader J. McCann writes from Johannesburg, South Africa, about another of our presidential candidates, Pat Buchanan, whose ambiguous Scottish-Irish heritage was addressed in an earlier column:

My Irish grandfathers inflicted on their descendants the bizarre experience of growing up Catholic in apartheid Calvinist South Africa, where for a time Catholic immigration was prohibited and clergy refused entry visas. Thus the eagerness of Americans to seek an Irish Catholic identity has always seemed incomprehensible seen from a country where we were long regarded with scorn.

The confusion around Irish names is forgivable because it is a very widespread ignorance. Modern Scottish identity is largely an invention of the Victorian era. The Scots originated in Ireland and settled Scotland in the fifth century, displacing the Picts. The bagpipes, whisky/whiskey and plaid cloth they promote as British inventions were brought from Ireland along with the similar names and the Gaelic language.

To complicate the issue, at least one old Scottish name begins with O’. In general Irish “mc” names start with Mc, and Scottish ones with Mac, but there are exceptions. There has also been a flow of Irish migrant labor to Scotland leaving names like Connery, and Ireland has had Norman and Viking invaders as well as immigration from northern Spain and even Italy. Coupled with the recent historical arrival of formalized spelling and literacy in Ireland there is no completely sure way of establishing certain identity from just a name.

Incidentally, the Gaelic language is split in two streams and is also spoken in Brittany (Little Britain), France. It has its origin in the same Indo-European language group as Latin, and the two languages have many words in common. Some sub-Alpine dialects such as Occitane are thought by some to be closer to the Latin/Gaelic proto language.

Many thanks, Mr. McCann, for this complex contribution to our ongoing ethnic symposium. Cultural and linguistic transmission via population migration is a basic principle of history that I find woefully missing or distorted in the Foucault-influenced theorizing that saturates American humanities departments.

Responding to my
remarks about the routine defamation of Italian-Americans by the entertainment industry, Mark Hall writes from Richmond, Va., about “libeled Southerners”:

If you are annoyed by the stereotyping of people of Italian descent here, try being a native Southerner for a while! I’m so fed up with Hollywood’s (and others’) pathetic and hateful smears on my culture and values that I rarely see movies or television anymore. I never thought that believing in honor, integrity, and equality (not the man-hating feminist or affirmative action quota kind of “equality”) would make me “racist” or a “misogynist,” but that’s what I am, according to the now decades-old barrage from Hollywood.

You’re absolutely right, Mr. Hall. Scriptwriters, directors and production companies based in New York and Los Angeles have a very blinkered view of the rest of America, which they see as a vast wasteland of rednecks and yokels. Even the Midwest is too much of a stretch for them, as witness the cringe-making way Kansas is always portrayed by my favorite soap, “The Young and the Restless,” as a drab, beige-hued flatiron peppered with very simple, slow-spoken folks who seem to be auditioning for the 1940 dustbowl film “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Extending our ethnic theme, Rob Williams of New York asks if Madonna is an “Anglophile”:

A recent news item in the gossip pages said that Madonna is looking for a house in England that would be near a prestigious school for her daughter Lourdes. The item was interesting because Madonna seems to be transforming herself into a Brit. Every time I see her on awards shows these days, she seems to speak with a more affected air, as if she never grew up in Michigan. (I was reminded of a line in a Tom Wolfe book where a character criticized an American for adopting a British manner to appear more cultured, as if his new accent had arrived in an airmailed box from England like a pair of dentures that he popped in his mouth.)

Is Madonna’s behavior an attempt to gain respectability by adopting the manners of the British middle class or royalty? Is she in the next stage of some evolutionary process from New Money upstart pop icon to Old Money aristocrat? Do you consider her behavior laughable or even hypocritical? Does Madonna demonstrate some kind self-loathing in the continual reinvention of her image? Is it an artistic impulse or are these reinventions a business necessity to thrive as an entertainer?

All of the above! Madonna’s application to a chic Manhattan preschool for Lourdes was apparently denied on the grounds that a pop star’s presence would be dangerous and disruptive. Rushing off to England in a snit without exploring other options doesn’t exactly sound like Madonna has all her maternal oars in the water.

On the other hand, should Madonna decide that Lourdes ought to be educated in England, I would applaud it. American prep schools may have a substantive curriculum, but their graduates, as evidenced by the examples funneling into the Ivy League, are increasingly mundane. A British or continental education would give Lourdes a smattering of knowledge (“Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit,” says Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. “Touch it and the bloom is gone.”), but more importantly it would make her a sophisticated woman of the world.

As for that bizarre in-and-out British accent, Madonna, like many artists, is a sponge. Just as she is a brilliant synthesizer of musical styles or fashion motifs, so she is highly susceptible to her last three-and-a-half experiences. Madonna talks like the queen mother when she’s been loafing around with any of her British dates and pals, like that overrated bore of an actor Rupert Everett. As someone who has deliberately retained the irritatingly flat tones of her native upstate New York, I agree with you that it would behoove Madonna to remember her gritty family past in lower-middle-class metropolitan Detroit.

Sticking with divas, I love this saga of a letter from Salon reader Audrey Mack, which is titled “Babs & politics; fluffy shawls ‘n’ quilty things” and had me in stitches:

I was flipping through the TV channels on Nov. 16 when I stopped to watch a few minutes of an interview between Rosie O’Donnell and Barbra Streisand. I thought it was going to be a Linda Richman-style love-fest, all about Barbra’s music, Rosie’s all-consuming love for it, whatever. Good for a few laughs, anyway.

But noooo. Babs was yammering away about politics, carefully explaining to Rosie that the Democratic Party is “the party of the people,” “the party that cares about the people;” and that the Republican Party is “ALL ABOUT [her words, not mine] supporting big business, insurance companies, the tobacco industry,” plus one other group I can’t recall. She went on in this vein for several minutes.

Well, where do I start? Has this woman been asleep for the past 20 years? Has she not seen that many working stiffs in this country support the Republican Party as a defense against (what they perceive as) the tax-and-spend Democrats? And has she missed all the moral/religious battles, in which Republicans are seen as the champions of “decent” American moral values, family values, and so forth — as opposed to (what Republicans perceive as) the anti-religion, liberal, secular humanist (gasp) Democrats?

Has she not seen that political party loyalties have changed greatly in the past 20 years, and are still changing, largely due to moral, religious and ethical issues? I’d thought that the days of the “have” Republicans battling “have-not” (mainly working-class) Democrats were over; that the political battles aren’t mainly drawn along economic lines anymore. That was my parents’ struggle, in the FDR and post-FDR eras.

Thank goodness I have Barbra Streisand to set me straight. I don’t mean to knock all liberals here, but really, there’s no liberal worse than a Hollywood liberal: ignorant, uninformed, clueless, just plain DUMB.

Babs’ blather made me laugh, but I wonder how many other viewers reacted the same way. If she’s an entertainment celebrity, she (and Warren Beatty, Cybill Shepherd, Ah-nuld, and Alec Baldwin), must know what she’s talking about when it comes to politics, right?

(Oh, and Warren Beatty gets invited to speak at the Kennedy School of Government. The gargoyles have finally taken over the cathedral.)

Maybe any garbage can get sold nowadays if it’s wrapped up in an attractive package. The set for the Rosie-Barbra interview was some room in one of Barbra’s many houses: very country cottage, with flea-markety distressed furniture, and shawls and patchwork quilts draped over every surface: the sofas, the tables, even a piano. Very Shabby Chic. Barbra herself was dressed in a chenille-looking halter top with a matching shawl draped over her shoulders: very soft, very texture-y, very “woman-friendly.”

It reminded me of the day Oprah turned herself into a New Age priestess, crammed full of opinions and feelings, with no disciplined thought. Suddenly she was wearing warm earth tones, sitting in brown leather or warm earth-toned chairs, on warm earth-toned sets, shot in soft-focus (Indian blankets on the camera lenses?), with gold and cinnabar (not a TRUE RED, no, that would be too strong) pillar candles twinkling in the background. If you can craft the image, you don’t have to work on the substance.

Maybe Al Gore should hire Barbra’s or Oprah’s image engineers to work their magic, and hand Naomi Wolf her walking papers. So my question is, how much longer do we have to listen to these Hollywood idiots blather away about politics?

Someone should give you a column, Ms. Mack! Thanks for that surgical dissection of the flakes of Hollywood. And I suspect that a thousand gay men from Montreal to Montevideo will applaud your deft evocation of Oprah’s “gold and cinnabar pillar candles.”

The problem is not actors expressing their political opinions, since they have a perfect right to do so in a democracy. What is repellent is the lack of balance: Alternate viewpoints are rarely given equal weight or respect. This is in no one’s best interests, since as you correctly observe, liberal politics in Hollywood (or on campus) have gotten retchingly sophomoric because of over-preaching to the choir. Upper-middle-class Democratic liberalism now has the arrogant imperialism of any establishment, lazy, slack and inert.

Your dart at Naomi Wolf, by the way, reminded me of a gibe made about her by a professional driver on the West Coast when I was being ferried around on my first book tour for Vintage Books in 1991. He had driven Wolf to several interviews on her tour for “The Beauty Myth” a few months earlier. Her constant primping and obsession with cosmetics seemed hypocritical, he thought, for someone who was claiming that looks don’t matter. His snorting judgment: “She never passed a plate-glass window she didn’t like!”

Salon reader Rich Berger sends a blast from the past from that very period, when I was under heavy fire from the feminist establishment:

While cleaning up our Tropical Storm Floyd (??)-soaked basement, I found a tape of your “60 Minutes” profile from 1992. The tape was sent to me by some friends — he finds you interesting but his wife treats you like you were radioactive. I still get a charge out of watching it, especially the end piece where Steve Kroft discussed you with that condescending second-rater from Connecticut College. Although she was so pleased with her comparison of you with Marilyn Quayle, I thought she just seemed like a boob.

Yes, that “condescending” tone is exactly how the entrenched feminist theorists and high-muckety-mucks of NOW and Ms. tried to dismiss all dissidents during the p.c. era of the 1970s and ’80s. Unfortunately, that tactic didn’t work very well in the 1990s on a resurgent 1960s rock ‘n’ roll prankster and Joan Rivers-style stand-up comedian with a 700-page Yale University Press book on the whole history of culture. Up your nose with a rubber hose, gals! You missed the train of a new kind of pro-sex, pro-pop, pro-beauty feminism and have been chasing my caboose ever since.

On the feminist angle, I must mention Virginia Postrel’s splendid review of Susan Faludi’s “Stiffed” in the December issue of the libertarian magazine Reason. Its title — “Reactionary Running Mates: Susan Faludi sounds like Pat Buchanan” — gives you a hint of its originality and ingenuity.

This article will certainly enhance Postrel’s ever-growing reputation as one of the smartest women in America. For years, she has demonstrated her daunting gift for cutting-edge social and economic analysis as well as her admirable command of lean, lucid prose. As a contemporary thinker, Virginia Postrel is vastly superior to derivative, overpaid affirmative action queens like the turgid Judith Butler or the windy Martha Nussbaum, who have manipulated the academic system and cowed the gullible with their manufactured importance.

The ongoing controversy over the “Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art has been further inflamed by a lengthy report in the Dec. 6 New York Times showing how British collector Charles Saatchi played “a central role in determining the artistic content” of the exhibit and effectively “usurped control” of it. Even the claim by museum director Arnold Lehman in interviews and “sworn court papers” that he had seen the “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy in London turns out to be false. When will Lehman be fired?

I was delighted to hear that Matt Drudge is leaving his Fox News Channel talk show (reportedly over a flap about a fetal photo), since I’ve longed for him to focus full attention on his historic creation, the Drudge Report, which at its best is an effervescent mix of politics, science news, crime stories, Hollywood gossip and plain old-fashioned scandal.

Where else could one have seen, the moment it flashed across the wires nearly a year ago, a color photo of Hillary Clinton (who had claimed a back injury days earlier) galumphing on humpy camelback down a sand dune with her daughter Chelsea clinging to her like a papoose?

Last week there was a classic Drudge moment: Into the humdrum monotony of midday came blazing onto the Drudge site a just-posted Reuters article titled “Daredevil jumps off Rio Christ in Bond-style stunt.” In the magnificent color photo of the 98-foot-tall colossus of Cristo Redentor on Corcovado Mountain overlooking the misty green slopes of Rio de Janeiro, an Austrian parachutist who had fired a cable from a crossbow over the statue’s arm at dawn could be seen about to jump from its outstretched hand. (He had left flowers on the shoulder of the Christ “as a mark of respect.”)

Thank you, Matt Drudge, for a sublime moment of beauty and awe. Art has migrated from the museums to the Web.

This is my last column of the year and in fact my last article of the decade — and a hell of a decade it’s been! But this millennial brouhaha is getting on my nerves. When will it end?

Amid the many demands for millennial retrospectives this year (most of which were too mushy to respond to), my favorites were a request from the Sunday Times of London to analyze the “masterwork” of the millennium (I chose Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”; the piece appeared April 18) and a recent one from the BBC to address a major figure in religious history, a segment recorded last week by transatlantic hook-up from a Philadelphia studio.

Hence at 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in the U.K., in the final broadcast of the year by BBC Radio 4, I will be celebrating my heroine and role model, St. Teresa of Avila. Mediterranean Catholicism, with its lurid pagan residue, has all the fireworks we need for the new millennium.

Happy New Year to Salon readers around the world! I’ll see you again in January.

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.