Remember the Hillary Clinton tipping debacle? The waitress it was all about, Anita Esterday, said this to the New York Times when asked for more and more stuff:
"You people are really nuts," she said. "There's kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now—there's better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn't get a tip."
I was planning to put that statement up as the Deep Thought of The Decade but forgot, because I was watching Chris Matthews tell us how Clinton's "people" are trying to intimidate CNN host Wolf Blitzer about the debates. Even though Blitzer denied that accusation! Now isn't that fun and relevant for understanding the candidates, too.
It is mostly Hillary Clinton who is the object of the really weird stuff that some pundits write these days. Maureen Dowd wrote two columns on her perfidies, one after the other, and she is supposed to be one of the liberals in the New York Times stable. Andrew Sullivan told us how horrible writing will be if the Clinton's get back into the White House. Indeed, many of the arguments I hear against Hillary Clinton have to do with how unpleasant her presidency would make the job of a pundit.
That's a fair argument, among pundits. But it doesn't say very much about her impact on the rest of the country. For instance, would she attack all sorts of small Muslim countries or not? Would she pour the rest of the Constitution down the toilet and flush afterwards?
It's hard to know whether the dirt-digging on Hillary Clinton is to do with her gender or with the Clintons who evidently were greatly hated among the press corps. But in either case I think we all have gotten the message already. Please stop with the silly Hillary-bashing. Bash her on the issues, sure. And no, that Chris Matthews has issues with her does not legitimize those as real issues.