SLANDERRIFIC! Smears and spin work in similar ways. In both cases, the important thing is to get the story in play. Useful idiots will then do the heavy lifting for you.

To distinguish Ed Klein's The Truth About Hillary from the other 2,000 Hillary-is-Evil books released in the past year, someone leaked to Drudge the pre-publication money shot that Bill Clinton actually raped his wife, with Chelsea the wicked deed's poisoned fruit -- by which assertion Klein proves that the proverbial barrel has a false bottom, by means of which one can indeed sink lower if one is sufficiently motivated.

That such a slander would find a home at Drudge's place is of course no surprise. But, while the story seems crude, I perceive subtleties in the placement; perhaps, being of the sort that is always looking for the Good in his fellow man, I just wish to regard the story's facilitators as brilliantly evil rather than as simple thugs.

Whoever promulgated this filth seems to have taken the measure of the blogosphere, and judged that, while the more popular wingnuts certainly could not credit this story, they would yet be forced by that compulsive self-indentification which defines their type to prove, even as they discredited the tale, that they hated Hillary at least as much as the next wingnut; and, lest someone think that defending the Clintons from a lie were the same thing as defending the Clintons from such proven crimes as the murder of Vincent Foster etc., they would use the occasion for a vigorous Clinton-bashing. These slurgasms might excite among their Clinton-obsessed readers feelings of nostalgia and gratitude, and would perhaps move them to buy the gosh-darned book jes' to see what the feller was sayin'.

See, there really is no downside to saying anything at all, even the frankly unbelievable, about the Clintons. Except, of course, maybe they'll run out of slurs one day. Maybe these guys have a trade organization set up to prevent that.

Captain's Quarters does a nice job, flattering its readers by declaring that "vitriol" against the Clintons has "mostly disappear[ed]" in recent years (in which case he should maybe tell Arthur Finkelstein he's wasting his time), and concluding that the real villains in this case are anonymous sources and Klein's former employer, Newsweek magazine ("small wonder we end up with Qu'ran-flushing frauds from the magazine now").

Ankle Biting Pundits (tipped by Perfesser Mabuse hisself) are even better. The whole thing, they surmise, is a "trap" to get conservatives to overreact and thereby make Hillary look sympathetic. Besides, Clintons spread dirty stories, not clean-fingered conservatives such as ABP -- as, I guess, this dirty Clinton story is supposed to prove. (PS Juanita told the truth.) Altogether too brief a posting -- but fortunately for us, ABP has commenters, some of whom attack Hillary for being around when bad things were written about her, the fucking martyr ("I wonder how many episodes of 'Oh poor me' we are going to have to endure?? Like her little fainting spell awhile back...").

But my favorite (so far -- this thing is only getting started, and so many celebrated imbeciles have yet to weigh in) is Conservative Cat, who doesn't buy the rape part of the story, but does buy the part where Bill jokes about raping Hillary: "This is evidence of aggravated tackiness, not sexual assault. Not only is tackiness not at all surprising from Bill, we've already spent millions of tax dollars to prove that he is not a credible resource when it comes to stories about his own sexual activities." So this horrible, merely-half-true rape story is -- like so much else, for such people -- all about President Peckersnot. Semioticians and cryptographers will especially go for this haunting paragraph:

So, the only mystery here is why the Clintons would dignify the episode with any sort of rage. Of course, the only rage evidence we have is attributed to an anonymous source, which as we have seen is not exactly the best criterion for accuracy.

Who is trying to make it look like the Clintons are actually angry about starring in Ed Klein's lurid, public rape fantasy? We can't say, but it has something to do with MSM lies! For the Clintons never stop laughing at Ron Brown's death long enough to feel rage!

If, 100 years from now, people aren't getting doctorates in Clinton Studies (a branch of Abnormal Psychology), I will be very surprised.