Coupled with a lunge at oil company profits, Clinton has found not only the most hollow of arguments, but she uses the Bush-Rove-Cheney "you are either with us or against us" threat. It is not merely unseemly for Senator Clinton to say "I'm Goldilocks" because she want to remove the the 18¢ gas tax for the summer. (She claims the "too hot" McCain porridge is a tax holiday with no revenue replacement and the "too cold" Obama position is no tax holiday at all.) It is the worst kind of snake oil salesmanship. It is the kind of smoke and mirrors that provokes short term emotional reaction, and long term disappointment at elected official. Is winning everything? Even if it means lying to the voters that their lives will be better if they save a total of $30 this summer? Perhaps it is too much to expect Clinton to acknowledge that lowering the price of a gallon of gas by 18¢ would more likely encourage more driving (more pollution, more traffic) and it would do nothing to decrease demand which drives up the cost of gas; it would do nothing to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, and it would actually do nothing to help those poor, poor beleaguered drivers who are paying 200% more for a gallon of gas than they were in 2001 because... of a war that she voted for. Easier to promise cheap theatrics and bash Obama for failing to hand thirty bucks to each voter than to be honest and tell it like it is. Michael Kinsley—who was my hero 20 years ago when I read TNR devotedly—famously said a "gaffe" in politics is when you tell the truth. By that standard, Hillary Clinton's goof on the gas tax is most certainly no gaffe.

And now the coup de grace: her self-affirming praise for the rich (from a self-confessed non-elitist, lest you have forgotten) and her ingratiating exchange with the Biggest Phony of Them All, Mr. Unfair and Imbalanced, Bill O'Reilly. For its humor value, I offer you a second video clip: an embarrassing campaign trail photo op at a local gas station meant (oops!) to endear her as one of the common folk. (Inability to operate the pump ["it's been awhile" aka "I'll never do this again"] followed by, perhaps even more embarrassingly, her strained-neck investigation of a coffee machine during a staged photo op.) Does it get any more laughably hypocritical than this?