In a bid for the Washington press corps vote, Bush recently let slip into an open microphone his identification of Times reporter Adam Clymer as a "major-league a..hole."

Interestingly enough, those who know Clymer best were the least nonplussed by Bush's taxonomy. Clymer's own paper mentioned Bush's remark in passing in only a single news story. As The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove observed, "on the core issue," Clymer's editors issued only "non-denial denials." ("I don't need to address it," one said.) Grove quoted one Washington reporter remarking that "Bush probably picked up 3,000 votes in the Washington press corps."

Bush hasn't apologized for the substance of his remark, and to paraphrase Al Gore, the truth is his friend. Consider these few random facts about Clymer:

In his fawning hagiography of Teddy Kennedy, Clymer wrote that Kennedy's liberal voting record made up for his killing that girl at Chappaquiddick. I didn't believe it either, but Clymer actually wrote: Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne." (A review in The Washington Monthly said Clymer's Chappaquiddick section did "not sugarcoat his subject's flaws.")

This is the way addled liberals really think. Even as they champion sucking the brains out of little babies, they think of themselves as indelibly compassionate because they favor an overweening, behemoth federal government.

More recently, Clymer justified the media's near-obsessive search for evidence of George Bush's purported college drug use as a natural reaction to "Mr. Bush's claim to success in fighting crime and drugs as governor." So political achievements of a liberal Democrat eradicate private matters like killing a girl; but the political accomplishments of a Republican merely sound a clarion call for greater press scrutiny into the politician's private life.

Clymer derisively dismissed Bush's complaints about the endless and baseless drug probes, saying that what Bush had been through "does not even remotely compare with the interrogations faced by Sen. Gary Hart before he dropped out of the Democratic race in 1987, or by Bill Clinton, who withstood accusations of adultery and draft-dodging before winning the Democratic nomination in 1992."

Uh, yeah. That's because Hart and Clinton were lying. They were lying to the press, to the public, and -- as if this would matter to a sensitive liberal male like Clymer -- to their wives and families. Moreover, both were lying about conduct they engaged in while serving the public. No one cared whether Clinton or Hart had cheated on his girlfriends in college; the question was whether the public could trust these guys any more than their wives could. Continued...