Down-Hill

You know how the Clintons never got, or get, anything but fawning, sychophantic, adoring, worshipful press coverage? Much of it is due to the generational factor and the all-encompassing aura of rock star charisma eminating from Mr. Bill, but as the Politico brought out anew the other day, there's also a brick inside that glitzy velvet glove - or, in this case, Hillary's purse:

Early this summer, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

Neat, huh? Think THAT isn't a Louisville Slugger that Mrs. Clinton couldn't use to stifle any and all negative press coverage that might ever occasionally emerge about her embryonic-but-already-criminal administration? That would leave just the new mainstream media (talk radio, the handful of conservative newspapers and magazines, and the blogosphere), and she'd use the "Fairness Doctrine" to squash us.

The former isn't quite an evisceration of the First Amendment, since GQ did have a choice. And the men's magazine was obsequiously gutless in folding to the Clinton Machine like a K-Mart deck chair. But once Hillary is back in the White House, the distinction will rapidly blur into de facto irrelevance. How long, I wonder, will it take for the frogs that put her there next November to realize the (tin)pot into which she's thrown them is boiling them toward a Hugo Chavezian tyranny that will make her, one way or the other, the last president of the United States?

In the mean time, the Admiral adds that spiking the tough story and substituting the Sick Willie-fellating one could constitute an in-kind campaign contribution on GQ's part. Which is a nice segue into the next layer of the Norman Hsu scandal, a chapter which could cast the Clintons' latest Asian bagman as a really scuzzy version of Spiderman - not for the webs he slung, but the ones he wove with other people's money:

Disgraced fund-raiser Norman Hsu did a lot more than just pump $850,000 into Hillary Clinton's campaign bank account: He also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local, state, and federal candidates who have endorsed Clinton or whose support she courted.

A major fund-raiser for Democrats since 2003, Hsu became one of Clinton's biggest bundlers - gathering scores of individual checks and sending them to her campaign. But since revelations last month that Hsu was a fugitive in a 15-year-old California fraud case, Clinton has said she would return the $850,000 she has taken from him and his associates.

In at least some cases, Clinton or her aides directly channeled contributions from Hsu and his network to other politicians supportive of her presidential campaign, according to interviews and campaign finance records. There is nothing illegal about one politician steering wealthy contributors to another, but the New York senator's close ties to Hsu have become an embarrassment for her and her campaign.

This, then, is Hillary's idea of "networking": hire Oriental conmen to bilk, embezzle, and outright steal millions of dollars from any skinnable cat and distribute the excess around to buy intra-party endorsements and by so doing pre-empt any serious opposition to her coronational processional. Her satisfied "customers" include Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, Nevada gubernatorial candidate Dana Titus, Senators Tom Harkin, Debbie Stabenow, Dianne Feinstein, and Mark Pryor, New York governor Eliot Spitzer and A-G Andrew Cuomo, and a posse of state and local officials to numerous to count.

Will it derail her triumphal march to the pinnacle of global power? Don't be ridiculous. The FBI investigation in which Mr. Morrissey is placing so much hope will bog down, and can't possibly reach any election-influencing decisions before next November. And once Mrs. Clinton is safely elected, she'll spike it in any case.

Think Republicans will drum up a campaign slamming her for "politicizing the Justice Department"?

I said don't be ridiculous....