Mick's Tip Shite ... Er ... Sheet

Mickey Kaus's imaginary editor has gotten his own e-mail address, from which he sent himself Mickey a "tip" that "bears watching." What's the valuable inside poop? Little Mick The tipster says that how Senator Clinton votes on the judicial nomination of Michael Chertoff will tell whether she's running for President in 2004. (Chertoff was the mouthpiece for Alphonse "The Bigot" D'Amato's Senate investigation into Whitewater, which, by any rational measure, was a complete failure and waste of tax money.) Kaus's source -- who writes remarkably like Mickey pretending to be Dick Morris -- says that if Hillary Clinton votes for Chertoff, she has a 2004 run in mind, because vote against him would trigger bad publicity in the form of "a new round of headlines recalling the old days."

Could any intelligent person, let alone a "valued" political insider, believe that Hillary Clinton's no vote on a judicial nomination would be a significant issue in a presidential campaign? Of course Rove and his boys would rehash Whitewater every time they got the chance, but they'd do that without the Chertoff angle. Except for voters who already hate Hillary because of the Whitewater smear, no one would possibly care how she voted on the Chertoff nomination. Anyone who knows who Chertoff is and what he did on Whitewater has already made up his or her mind on Hillary. Odds are Kaus knows the "e-mail" is nonsense and is simply quoting it to publish some gratuitous Clinton-bashing. Or maybe he's just a lazy S.O.B.