If Bill Clinton Were A Republican....

....would a story like this one not sound awfully familiar?:

The revelation that security costs for Rudy Giuliani’s trysts with Judith Nathan may have been hidden in obscure New York accounts exposes the former Big Apple mayor to harsh questions his campaign wanted to avoid - about character, truthfulness and a penchant for secrecy.

Confronted at Wednesday night’s GOP debate in Concord, Giuliani said, “as far as I know,” his security officers’ handling of travel records was appropriate.

The records show Giuliani making his first trip to the Long Island town of Southampton, where Nathan had a condominium, from August 31 to September 1, 1999 - well before the former mayor acknowledged in the spring of 2000 the breakdown of his second marriage.

There were ten more trips before Giuliani left office on January 1, 2002, including visits every weekend in August 2001, as well as the 2001 Labor Day holiday. Security costs for those trips were charged to agencies such as the New York City Loft Board, which regulates loft apartments. It was billed $34,000. The Office for People with Disabilities was charged $10,000, while the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, which provides lawyers for indigent defendants, was charged $400,000.

A city auditor discovered the Loft Board charges, and when City Comptroller William Thompson asked for an explanation, he was rebuffed by mayoral aides who cited “security,” a spokesman said.

Okay, that's a good point - the Enemy Media would never cover a story like this, or any negative story, about Bill Clinton. One would think that the adulterizing, which wasn't exactly unknown before now, would have affected Rudy's efforts to sway evangelical voters, to say nothing of nixing Pat Robertson's endorsement. But the addition of the whiff of corruption to the equation creates problems for the former ruler of Gotham and, given the unparalleled propaganda exploitation capabilities of the Clinton Machine, has to now finally raise some doubts about his general election electability as well.

One would think, anyway.

That Giuliani's woes could possibly be benefitting Mike Huckaplucka, of all also-rans, is as baffling as it is appalling. But it also speaks, I think, to Mitt Romney's electability doubts as well:

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who once trailed badly with little money and a skeletal campaign staff, has now pulled ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to steal the lead....

The phenomenon that is Mike Huckabee has not been lost on others deeply involved in the 2008 contest. Bill Clinton has candidly admitted that Huckabee may just be wife Hillary’s worst nightmare in a general-election matchup.

And Senator Barack Obama is on record saying that Huckabee is his personal favorite GOP candidate.

Does it alarm you at all that Democrat presidential candidates and hangers-on like Mike Huckabooboo so much? Does it surprise you given what a comprehensive economic policy RINO he's turned out to be? Does it irritate you that one of his self-touted selling points - "authenticity," or as he phrases it, "being comfortable in my own skin" - is even truer of Fred Thompson, who isn't a burgeoning, nacent nanny-statist? Or that the ex-Arkansas governor claims general election electability on the basis of this claim:

“I went into a legislature that was more lopsided than any other legislature in the country including Massachusetts,” Huckabee explains. “No governor faced a more overwhelming opposite-party legislature than I did and that legislature was heavily populated by people politically related to the Clintons.

“Bill and Hillary campaigned for every opponent that I have ever had,” he says, explaining how he took on the Clinton machine in Arkansas and beat them twice.

Huckabee notes that his unique advantage is that, in his opinion, nobody running for president knows the Clintons better - and knows how their campaigns will be operated as well as he does.

“Believe me, the political machinery that they set up in Arkansas was the machinery against which I had to run every time I faced an opponent.”

To that I would lodge at least two caveats:

1) After Mr. Bill's two terms, Clintonoid standard operating procedure isn't exactly classified information. Indeed, no Republican campaign has any excuse for not knowning that playbook inside and out.

2) Everybody - EVERYBODY - for whom the Clintons campaign always loses. As endorsers, Bill & Hillary are political leprosy. But when they are campaigning for themselves, they are invincible. And Mike Huckleberry has never run against either one of them.

I'm telling you, the GOP nominating electorate is flailing around looking for a candidate who is both comprehensively conservative and capable of beating back the Hillary beast, and they keep looking everywhere but right in front of them. Fred Thompson, and Fred Thompson alone, satisfies both criteria; not the Populist Pastor, not Plasticman, and not the Mayor Who Couldn't Keep It In His Pants (On His Own Dime), but Ready Freddie.

Perhaps Senator Thompson should start saying so. I'm doing all that I can, but I just don't have the time....