You Know Hillary is in Trouble When...

1. She lends $5M to her campaign and her staffers go without pay.

2. She starts begging superdelegates to "exercise independent judgment" and not be swayed by the popular vote.

3. She's looking for ways to get the 366 delegates from Florida and Michigan to count after all, contrary to party rules.

4. OBAMA SWEEPS THREE STATES!

and...

5. Pravda... err... sorry... I mean, the New York Times runs a two page non-article on the non-story of Obama's high school drug use.

I mean WTF?! I thought we'd been through this before? It seems that the grey lady is shitting her pants that her favorite white lady is threatening to lose the nomination contest. So she resorts to shamelessly rehashing utterly pointless accusations and insinuations whose irrelevance was proven on Super Tuesday. But no, the NYT is not below engaging in Democratic internecine infighting on behalf of its preferred candidate, even if that risks weakening both Clinton and Obama when they later have to face McCain. It's very subtle actually. On the face of it the article says nothing actually negative about Obama, The piece starts with a bit of a vague quote from Obama's memoirs where he mentions his youthful drug use and then it goes on to interview classmates of his, none of whom actually have anything substantive to say and none of whom were eyewitnesses to any drug use worth mentioning. But then note the headline: "Friends Say Drugs Played Only Bit Part for Obama". WTF does "bit part" mean in English? I mean does any native speaker talk like that when he actually means to say "no part"? When was the last time you heard anyone - educated or not - say "oh, no, that plays only a bit part in the grand scheme of things"? A blind man with a cane can see from three miles away through the fog that the sole purpose of this ludicrously stilted formulation is to deceive the careless reader into thinking the headline says "big part", instead of "bit part". Such careless reader would be justified in believing the correctness of such mistake were he only to read the first few paragraphs of the article, which insinuate that Obama was a heavy user. The all-clear-nothing-to-see signal doesn't come until well into the second page of the article, by which time the careless reader will have stopped reading. The entire purpose of the article is to keep this non-issue in the public consciousness without actually making any concrete accusations that could be shown to be false. It allows the issue to be repeated while actually saying nothing damning about the candidiate.

I suppose we should be glad that Hillary is growing up. At least she has stopped impeaching Obama's kindergarten essays and moved on to high school. But she still behaves more like middle school.

Worth reading: Frank Rich's column and also a blog post by Michael Dorf, a classmate of Obama's and professor at my alma mater (via Octopus Grigori).