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"If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team."

This assertion of political purity struck me as false, coming from a journalist who has appeared repeatedly as a speaker at Republican Party events across the country -- a breach of the political boundaries of "traditional journalism" that few, if any, of the writers on Journolist, for example, would ever contemplate.

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Consider the discussion of her personal background on the first day of the hearings, when Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl directed our attention to the New York City neighborhood where bright young Elena grew up. Quoting a profile from Politico that described her life experience as "distant from most Americans," Kyl noted portentously that she was raised on "Manhattan's Upper West Side" before attending Princeton and Harvard Law School, where she eventually served as dean.

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According to him, voter revulsion "will be enough to eradicate an entire generation of House and Senate Democrats ... This is the prospect the House and Senate Democrats who vote for Obamacare will face in the fall of 2010. This is the record they will have to defend. Or, they could save their political lives and vote no!"

Such hysterics must be expected from every carnival barker in Fox Nation, especially a featured player like Morris – and the shrill rhetoric surely helps to separate the rubes from their money, in this case through donations to the League of American Voters, sponsor of this morning’s e-mail and many more from him.

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"Romney, I think, is virtually out of this race because he proposed healthcare reform in Massachusetts very similar to Obama's. It passed, and it's a disaster in Massachusetts now," Morris said in a recent interview. (Hat-tip to GOP 12.)

Fortunately for Romney, the good news is very good: Given Morris' recent history of prognostication, it's probably best to now consider Romney the front-runner for the nomination, if not a lock to win in the general.

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Let me give you a stock tip of my own. Don't invest your money on the advice of people who don't understand the English language. Inflation might be a long-run threat, but hyperinflation is not.

The term "hyperinflation," technically speaking, refers to inflation that is completely out-of-control, rising, for example, by at least by 50 percent a month or worse. As Ryan Avent told us a few months ago, Weimar Germany suffered through "a monthly rate of inflation of about 3,000,000 percent" in 1923. That's hyperinflation. Not even the bad old days of the late '70s during Jimmy Carter's presidency (with which Morris makes more than one Obama comparison) qualifies. Inflation was high, by American standards, but not hyper. Avent has it exactly right:

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KJL: Are we witnessing a Clintons comeback?

DM: No. Bill is probably just delighted to be relevant again.

The irony of that statement coming from Morris is just amazing. He's made a fairly lucrative career for himself out of hating both Bill and Hillary Clinton ever since he resigned as campaign manager of then-President Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign when his involvement with a prostitute became public. Really, the fact that the Clintons continue to be relevant is what makes him at all relevant -- especially after he penned a book predicting a 2008 presidential election battle between Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.

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"But if he does, they'll have forced him off his winning message of hope and change from the bitter politics of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush eras.

"If they pull him off his game and onto theirs, they can wrest away the Democratic convention victory that he's earned.

"The solution for Obama is clear: Reply in kind, but do it through surrogates."

That left us wondering why Obama would take Morris' advice seriously at this point. Sure, Morris knows the Clintons well, having worked for Bill Clinton on several campaigns, most notably his 1996 reelection campaign, from which Morris resigned after his alleged affair with a prostitute was revealed. And he has made a career out of Clinton hatred ever since.

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At least, that was the fear at the Free Congress Foundation on April 13, where a panel discussion of an ancient broadcasting regulation quickly turned into a discussion of Don Imus and how his firing might portend a similar fate for some of the right's best-known media personalities. In the absence of any compelling evidence, participants in the latest of the conservative think tank's occasional Next Conservatism Forum series managed to convince themselves that the Fairness Doctrine, a rule that was scrapped by the Federal Communications Commission 20 years ago, was poised for a comeback, and was about to become a weapon in a liberal jihad against the right wing's freedom of speech.

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In an appearance on Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes," the political strategist turned pundit vowed he'd flee the country if Sen. Clinton wins the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, with Barack Obama as her running mate, according to NewsMax.com. If anything, that pledge, surely, will only make Clinton more determined to run.

Morris managed Bill Clinton's successful 1996 reelection campaign until he was embroiled in a toe-sucking sex scandal with a prostitute. Since then, he has broken ties with the Clintons, and created a cottage industry out of critiquing them in his column in the New York Post and on Fox News. His Hillary hating has even included writing a book-length rebuttal of her memoir "Living History," as well as another book imagining a presidential election matchup between her and Condoleezza Rice.

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Morris, a former advisor to Bill Clinton, says in his column that Klein's accusations about the Clintons hit "below the belt" and "do not belong in the public dialogue." "I am no defender of Hillary Rodham Clintons, to put it mildly," Morris says. "But the recent charges in Ed Kleins book to the effect that she is a closet homosexual or that Bill raped her and that this act triggered Chelseas conception are as crazy as the list that was circulating around of the 20 or so people the Clintons allegedly had killed."

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Well, maybe.

Together with more than 190 other candidates who filed papers in time to meet last Saturday's deadline, Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for governor of California now. And while Bush told reporters Friday that he thought Schwarzenegger would make a "good governor," the White House may soon discover that a Terminator candidacy is not so nice after all. Although Schwarzenegger's run to replace Gov. Gray Davis is playing like the second coming for mainstream Republicans, it threatens to open a nasty rift between the Bush administration and the right-wing Christians to whom it usually kowtows.

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The poll of likely voters, conducted by Newsday and New York television station WB-11, shows Clinton opening up a healthy 10-point lead, 52-42, in what for months had been a race statistically knotted. (Clinton's margin jumps to 14 percentage points among registered voters, 53-39.) More importantly, the poll of 1,101 voters, with a 4 percent margin of error, reveals Clinton dominating in virtually every demographic and in most regions around the state.

And with a companion poll showing Vice President Al Gore burying Gov. George W. Bush by 31 percentage points in New York (creating a likely tidal wave effect for Empire State Democrats), it adds up to a current of bad news for the Republican congressman.

The news may drive to distraction some of Clinton's vocal detractors in the press, who have been predicting her demise for nearly a year. Just last Monday, New York Post columnist Dick Morris, who has been wrong about this race with stunning regularity, told readers that his interpretation of the polls indicated Clinton was the one in deep trouble. Why? She was "stuck at 48 percent of the vote. Hillary has got to pull her poll number up to 50 percent in order to win."

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Under the banner headline "Run, Rudy, Run!" Morris boldly insisted, "None of the recent flaps that have engulfed the political career and personal life of Mayor Giuliani will have any real effect on his ability to win the U.S. Senate seat from New York." Last week's uncomfortable soap opera between Rudy and his angry wife "won't cost him a quarter of 1 percentage point" come election day, Morris argued with total certainty.

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No attention has been paid to an equally important question: Where will all the disaffected Bill Bradley Democrats (like me) go this fall if they decide they've had it up to the chops with the deceit and incompetence of the Clinton-Gore years?

Bush will never get my vote, since not only is he embarrassingly unprepared for the presidency but his party, with its weird congressional collection of milquetoasts, dodos and dunderheads, seems stuck in 1958. Nor can I imagine voting for Ralph Nader, the consumer-rights crusader turned flake who could no more govern than my hero Andy Warhol -- another brooding, boyish, ethnic monastic.

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It was a week to boggle the mind, a week to make history -- a week, in short, to totally fuck up year-in-review roundups. Forget politics stopping at the water's edge; the principle that was truly upended this past week is that no real news should occur between Dec. 15 and Jan. 2. Then again, the last week in the news really was the year in the news, what with the simultaneous climaxes of the impeachment story and the bombing of -- oh, you know, that luminous green country with no people in it. Why bother rounding up 1998? We spent a year there last week.

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"Which one?"

"With those two men."

I catch the woman's profile as she turns and heads for a table around the corner. "Goldberg," I say. "Something Goldberg."

It's Aug. 14, 1999, around 8:15 p.m., and we're having dinner at the Empire Hotel across from Lincoln Center. Heather has flown in from L.A. to audition for a part that calls for an angry actress named Heather who works in a biker bar. A real stretch. She's always a little nonchalant when it comes to celebrities -- she's hung out at Kevin Costner's, had cocktails with Al Pacino, gotten kicked out of "Zorro" with Garry Shandling and been called the funniest woman in New York by Bill Maher -- so when we mention that Jerry Orbach walked in front of our car on 56th Street on our way to the hotel, she tells us she waited on him once when she was bartending at Hi-Life up on 83rd and Amsterdam. No big deal.

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Already the press and public are watching to see how Clinton masters the arcane details of New York politics. But how she deals with the controversial Sharpton could become an early defining moment in the campaign, far more important than whether she can find Elmira on a map, identify the mayor of Poughkeepsie or figure out a politically correct vacation spot.

There is little doubt Sharpton will have some role in the campaign. Howard Wolfson, the exploratory committee spokesman, told Salon News, "If [Clinton] runs she will not be in the business of excluding people. We welcome the support of all New Yorkers." Asked if Sharpton had been given an actual role in the campaign, Wolfson said simply, "We will cross that bridge when we come to it."

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Sadly for Morris, companies contacted by Forbes rebuffed his innovative suggestions. "That's why he's a consultant, and we have our own ad agency," a Reebok spokesman scoffed to Androshick.

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But worthiness is not measured by size alone, and though "No One Left to Lie To" is diminutive, it aims to be the Brave Little Diatribe That Could, the book that will once and for all expose the mendacity and corruption and just plain rottenness that is Clintonism. To accomplish that goal, Hitchens will muster all the contempt he had nurtured for Clinton over the past seven years and set off chugging uphill.

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