Gore, meanwhile, for all his showy chest-puffing, is coming across as an effete, pretentious, mealy-mouthed candy man on the licorice umbilical from feminazi Big Mamas.

Last Sunday’s Million Mom March, the gun-control protest organized (as the major media is finally admitting) by the sister-in-law of Hillary Clinton’s longtime lawyer pal and hatchet woman, surly Susan Thomases, may not do the Democrats much good this year, when the electorate is in a mood, as during the humiliating 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis, to restore military credibility to the U.S.

It doesn’t take a weatherman to figure out that the average citizen doesn’t want national policy determined by packs of weeping women led by a shrill, dimwitted talk-show host (Hillary sycophant Rosie O’Donnell).

Yes, there are terrible problems with random violence in the U.S., though the incidents are not nearly as numerous as inflammatory media accounts make it seem. But are guns the problem or merely the symptom?

The Million Moms would do much more for this country if they would focus on the breakdown of family and community ties that produce sociopaths like the goons who shoot up schools and day-care centers. It was parental irresponsibility and neglect, and not simply the availability of guns, that were ultimately at the root of the Columbine massacre, where home-barbecue propane tanks had been converted into bombs.

The problem with gun-control laws is that they only work on already law-abiding citizens. Although I don’t own guns, I respect those who do. And I venerate the armed woman as a transcendent symbol of independent female power — from ancient goddesses like the Venus Armata or the knife-wielding Hindu Kali to the pistol-packing babes of “Charlie’s Angels.”

Neither do crime statistics from other countries carry much weight with me. Only the U.S. has a complex Bill of Rights with a First Amendment guaranteeing “freedom of speech” and a Second Amendment guaranteeing “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” which remain our protection against government tyranny. It’s no coincidence that this most heavily armed nation in the world is also the most individualistic and entrepreneurial, with incandescent creativity in the high-tech field that has transformed the economy.

While the Millions Moms’ demand that citizens be prevented by law from buying more than one weapon per month seems to me blatantly unconstitutional, I’m not so clear about why the gun lobby feels that pro forma registration of all firearms would necessarily be a first step toward government confiscation. And surely the production and sale of heavy-duty, military-style automatic weapons should be better tracked. But the general discussion has been so clouded by kneejerk, urban-liberal media bias that trying to achieve national consensus seems more remote than ever.

As I file this, Mayor Rudy Giuliani still hasn’t withdrawn from the New York Senate race, which he should ethically have done two weeks ago to allow his party to get its act together before its May 30 convention. I’ve always felt that the quick-witted, dynamic, fresh-faced Rep. Rick Lazio, with his practical congressional experience, would make a much more formidable opponent to the cynical, jaded Hillary Clinton, whose only way to win would be to inflame racial passions against Giuliani, tearing up my home state in the despicable way now par for the course for Democratic operatives.

By the way, I thought the mayor’s wife, Donna Hanover, acted like a horse’s ass in her melodramatic press conference last week, as she hammily keened about past acts of “personal intimacy” with her spouse. Eve Ensler’s off-Broadway “The Vagina Monologues” (a p.c. squawk fest where white ladies exorcise their bourgeois pudeur) has evidently gone to her head.

The disconnect between Giuliani’s Mr. Clean public image and his chaotic private life has certainly taken the bloom off his reputation as a tough, efficient executive. But Giuliani deserves credit for the kind of affairs he’s evidently had: Unlike the predatory Bill Clinton, who riffled through vulnerable women like playing cards and demanded mechanical servicing from them like nameless plumbers, Giuliani has conducted authentic, long-term relationships with mature, intelligent, feisty career women.

Speaking of the current administration, the most sickening spectacle of the year has to have been the delusional behavior of the Washington press corps at last month’s black-tie White House correspondents’ dinner, where most of the overwhelmingly liberal guests hooted and hollered like baboons at a video of the leader of the free world performing childish stunts like raiding ice cream machines and riding a bicycle down the corridors of the Old Executive Office Building.

Evidently there is no shame left in the nation’s capital and no sense whatever of the dignity of the presidency. Why should my fellow Democrats be surprised that a purging Republican tide is rising?

Reader response to my support of the government’s forcible removal of Elian Gonzalez from his great-uncle’s Miami home was extraordinarily negative: Despite national polls indicating a majority of Americans agreed with the government’s action, at least 75 percent of mail sent to me via Salon took the opposite position and often in terms more virulent than anything I have seen since the date-rape wars of the early 1990s (when feminist fanatics from around the country called my university to try to get me fired).

In analyzing this explosive reaction, I tried to sort the most intemperate letters into groups. One faction conflated the Easter weekend INS raid with the 1993 ATF assault on David Koresh’s ranch at Waco. This column has consistently deplored the government’s atrocious behavior at Waco, but I see few parallels between the two incidents, except for Attorney General Janet Reno’s procrastination and bungling.

The Northeastern media treated Koresh, a religious zealot who nevertheless had constitutional rights, like a crackpot hillbilly, while in stark contrast, they allowed the family and friends of Lazaro Gonzalez to rant and grandstand for the cameras for months, as a small boy, a Cuban national, was held hostage and amorally used as a stage prop. As a teacher, I was sickened by the crazed environment that that child endured virtually from the moment he was rescued from the sea last November.

Uncritical supporters of the egomaniacal Lazaro and his unstable daughter Marisleysis (who is reported to have been hospitalized for stress and anxiety three times last summer, long before Elian arrived) may have been relying primarily on print accounts of the standoff. If not, then they lack the ability to “read” information fully from visual images on TV. The Gonzalez household and street scene looked like an anthill on dope. That family was given more than ample warning, week after week, to comply with INS regulations, which they flagrantly defied.

The second group of negative letter writers claimed that their experience, or that of their parents, under past totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union gives them special knowledge that Elian would be far happier with distant relatives in the U.S. than with his father, grandparents and school friends in Communist Cuba.

As I have made clear, I am no admirer of Fidel Castro and look forward to the day when he’s gone and impoverished Cuba inevitably democratizes. But it seems foolish to portray that slow-paced, backward Caribbean island in garish, apocalyptic terms based on the violent overthrow of the Batista government 40 years ago.

The third group of irate letters were of the my-America-right-or-wrong variety, coming from those who, as far as I could see, have rarely, if ever traveled beyond their native shores and have little sense of how the rest of the world lives. In the crassest terms, they equate America’s cornucopia of material goods with personal happiness and fulfillment.

As someone only one generation (on my mother’s side) and two generations (on my father’s side) removed from the Italian countryside, may I suggest that, in a sunny climate amid the fertile operations of nature, it’s possible for villagers who own very little to achieve a contentment not necessarily guaranteed in the frenzied, careerist U.S.

Several liberal readers wrote to upbraid me about my past praise for radio host Rush Limbaugh, who has repeatedly and vehemently condemned the government raid in Miami. Surely now, they crowed, I would admit that Limbaugh, in comedian Al Franken’s words, is “a big fat idiot”?

How absurd! What this Salon column has stood for from the start is independent thought — freedom from dogma and from insular partisanship. Rush Limbaugh is a conservative Republican, and I am a libertarian Democrat; of course we will disagree on many things. But nothing in the forceful position Limbaugh has taken on the Elian Gonzalez issue makes me respect him any the less.

And as a football fan, let me add my two cents to the ABC Monday Night Football debate: After a decade of listening to his show when I can (I do have classes to teach!), I think that Rush Limbaugh would make a terrific addition to the broadcast booth. He knows his stuff and in fact has a sharper command of hard-nosed sports strategy than did the often annoyingly self-intrusive Howard Cosell.

The cover story of the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly is a lengthy excerpt from Christina Hoff Sommers’ book, “The War Against Boys,” to be published next month by Simon & Schuster. Sommers debunks one flimsy study after another claiming that girls are oppressed by a male-dominated, sexist system. But her socko revelation is the shiftiness and shrinking from scholarly accountability of Harvard’s Carol Gilligan, one of the queens of campus gender studies. No neutral observer could fail to be dismayed by Gilligan’s evasive behavior as well as by Harvard’s irresponsibility in impounding archival data.

On the vexed question of Caligula vs. Diocletian, Prof. Carl Johnson writes from the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver

The Roman emperor Caligula never made his horse Incitatus a consul. This is another academic myth (cf. Nero, the violin and the burning of Rome). In the two surviving sources Suetonius (LV. 3) and Cassius Dio (LIX 14.7), Caligula only plans to make the horse a consul, but does not in fact carry out this plan. Apparently this misconception began with Gladstone and Disraeli and mutual slanders. I hope this helps.

Thanks very much, Prof. Johnson. The tall tale about the senatorial promotion of Caligula’s horse has become very widespread, as I pointed out, because of the popular public-television series based on Robert Graves’ novel, “I, Claudius.” Peter Bartl, writing from Rodenbach, Germany, contributes this about the emperor Diocletian:

Diocletian did reestablish the Roman Empire as something resembling a Hellenic monarchy, with himself — and his three “colleagues”, Maximian, Constantius and Galerius — far removed from their subjects and with the Senate, indeed, reduced to irrelevance.

However, Diocletian was consolidating and strengthening trends rather than inventing them. The Roman Senate was continuously losing influence and status since the reign of Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211).

During the so-called period of “military anarchy” between Alexander Severus and Diocletian (A.D. 235-284) when emperors were constantly elevated and murdered by the soldiers, the Senate lost even its formal prerogative of appointing the emperor: The emperors recently appointed by the soldiers no longer bothered to ask the Senate to confirm their powers. At most, they wrote to merely inform the Senate of their appointment. There were periods when the Senate did recover some influence, but they were short-lived.

The decline of Roman traditions, I think, must be seen in the context of the loss of economic, military and political influence on the part of the traditional elites of Italian origin. It started when Septimius Severus became emperor — the first for whom Latin was a foreign language, and whose family had strong eastern connections.

Thank you for that lucid overview, Mr. Bartl. I find nothing more fascinating or more pertinent to contemporary politics than study of those two huge transitional periods in the ancient Mediterranean world — from the decline of Athens to the rise of Rome; and from the rise of Christianity to the decline of Rome and the interrelated rise of Byzantium at the dawn of the Middle Ages. Erron Silverstein has more troubling things to say about Diocletian:

Diocletian entirely changed the administrative structure of the Roman empire. He doubled the number of provinces (to stop any provincial governor from having enough military forces to mount a successful rebellion), and the bureaucracy mushroomed. The military was stronger than ever, resulting in the imposition of crushing taxes.

The Edict of Diocletian of A.D. 301 probably had more destructive force against the Roman Empire than the Visigoths or the Huns. It essentially froze prices, capped salaries and made jobs hereditary. This was enforced by a reign of terror that wasn’t confined to Christian persecution. This destroyed the curial class in the provinces — the city elite whose job it was to be the local administration.

Essentially, Diocletian was the Stalin of the third and fourth century. People fled to the countryside to escape forced conscription and the horrible taxes. As a natural consequence, the Senate was effectively neutered. Consuls were chosen, but they had little real power.

Diocletian destroyed many vestiges of Roman tradition (government, taxation, justice, commerce, and military) to make a super-state that would be easily recognizable to Mao, Hitler or Stalin. In part, the achievement of Diocletian was possible because of 50 years of civil war and chaos (starting after Maximinus Thrax and running through Probus) making people tolerate anything that was stable.

I appreciate your remarks, Mr. Silverstein. This is just the kind of nuts-and-bolts political history that ambitious young women should be immersing themselves in if we are ever to get a female president. (Women’s studies courses in excess are a solipsistic dead end.) Greg Bayan has an amusing parting shot for our classics excursion:

Whenever Bill Clinton sends Janet Reno on a mission, I recall the behavior of that mischievous rascal Nero, who sent his mother Agrippina on a doomed cruise aboard a vessel rigged to fall apart on the open sea. At least Nero quickly put Agrippina out of her misery when she managed to swim ashore, mercifully truncating her interval of grief and shame. But Clinton appears to have an illimitable appetite for casting Reno into waters way over her head.

From Waco to Miami, Reno knows the ordeal by heart. She knows the sickening vertigo when solid footing vanishes beneath her and she plunges into the murky depths. She knows there will be no miraculous intervention by dolphins or passing fishermen. She knows she can count on nothing more than the air bubble in her panty hose to keep her ass from sinking to the bottom.

Yet the old girl makes it to shore, flopping and gasping, every time. Hardly is the brine cleared from her lungs, and she’s being sent on another fool’s errand to divert public scorn and ridicule away from her master and onto herself.

Now I ask you: Between the two autocrats, Clinton and Nero, who is clearly the more accomplished sadist?

You leave me breathless, Mr. Bayan! This could be the pilot for an action-adventure TV series, “Justice Gal,” with Reno trekking into jungles and parachuting onto glaciers to bring the hellzapoppin’ law where no man has gone before.

As we careen forward on the pop front, here’s a diverting message from George M. Hook:

Could I make a nominee to your pop culture pantheon? Anne Francis. I recently purchased the “Twilight Zone” episode where Anne portrays a haunted woman in a spooky department store. It turns out that she is a mannequin come to life! Talk about insights into the modern female persona.

Anne was, of course, the one and only “Honey West” [a 1965-66 ABC detective drama] — which they should be remaking instead of “Charlie’s Angels.” She was sexy, she was witty and she took bubble baths with her pet ocelot, Bruce. And she kicked butt. I believe Anne was also one of the first female independent filmmakers: She directed a documentary about rodeo life.

Who would I want next to me in my foxhole? Not Gloria Steinem, but Anne “Honey West” Francis!

In its original half-hour incarnation on CBS (1959-62), Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” had a staggering effect on me as an adolescent. Serling (who hailed from the same upstate New York towns as I do) has always been vastly more important to me than any “serious” novelist since World War II. He was, in my view, the supreme American Surrealist.

The program you mention, “The After Hours,” was written by Serling and aired June 10, 1960. It remains my absolute favorite of all “Twilight Zone” episodes — so eerie that it still gives me the chills. And yes, Anne Francis was terrific — here and in the science-fiction classic “Forbidden Planet” (1956).

Finally, I was bemused and pleased to read in the May 22 Time magazine that Septime Webre, the new artistic director of the Washington Ballet, premiered a work at the Kennedy Center this season called “Fluctuating Hemlines,” which, according to reviewer Terry Teachout, was “inspired by Camille Paglia’s iconoclastic ‘Sexual Personae.’” The article is illustrated by a sprightly production photo.

This is my last column before summer hiatus, when I must focus on my book projects. The column will resume when school begins in September, but I’ll definitely be on call for Salon if major news breaks over the summer.

Stay cool!

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.