Also, had Mitchell bothered to check, she would have learned that the vast majority of gifts the Clintons claimed in 2000 (rugs, sofas, golf clubs, etc.) are not even sold at Borsheim's. Twice in her story Mitchell mentioned how the items were received just before Hillary's Senate gift ban went into effect. Mitchell seemed again to be picking up where Dowd left off late last December: "Attention Hillary shoppers! Only nine more days before that pesky Senate gift ban goes into effect! As a senator, Hillary won't be able to accept gifts worth more than $100."

But that's not true. According to the Lobbying Disclosure Reform Act of 1995, senators may accepts gifts from close friends valued at more than $250 if approved by the Senate Ethics Committee. So, if documentarian Ken Burns had waited until after Hillary was sworn in to give the Clintons a photograph of jazz great Duke Ellington valued at $800, would the Senate Ethics Committee have objected? Or if longtime Clinton friends and supporters Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen really wanted Bill and Hillary to have $4,787 worth of china (which, according to the record. they did), but had waited until after Hillary became a senator, couldn't they simply have given the gift directly to the former president, making the question of Hillary's Senate gift ban moot?

Mitchell concludes her piece this way: "Still, some of Senator Clinton's own supporters say her buying spree shows terrible political judgment." But wait -- what "buying spree" are these anonymous "supporters" referring to? Mitchell had just chronicled how the Clintons were showered with luxurious gifts, so what's with the reference to the former first lady's "buying spree"? Wasn't the whole point of this manufactured, hand-wringing scandal that Clinton didn't have to "buy" a thing? That phrasing was either amazingly sloppy on Mitchell's part, or another attempt to spin the story into something it was not. The senator's "receiving spree" just doesn't sound very sinister.

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