MARK HALPERIN IS STILL TRYING TO LICK CONSERVATIVES' BOOTS

Spotted on Twitter a little while ago:

So this showed up unbidden. Recall his last book was #1 @nytimes while largely ignored by MSM. Out next week pic.twitter.com/75D91mVfSz

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) June 20, 2014

Yes, it's our old pal Mark Halperin, scolding us again (preemptively this time) for our awful liberal media bias. And it's all because we won't give credence to a guy whose 2005 book The Truth About Hillary got reviews like the following from conservatives.

John Podhoretz:

This is one of the most sordid volumes I've ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn't have to suffer through another word.

Joe Queenan:

... it sleazily intimates that Hillary Clinton is a lying, scheming, smelly, left-leaning lesbian and a non-maternal parent who consorts with lawyers who defend mobbed-up unions and bears a striking character resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Madonna, and who tacitly approved of her husband's rape of a young woman at a time when Mrs. Clinton may or may not have been bathing, washing her hair or shaving her underarms, while hanging out with short-haired women from the sapphic charnel house Wellesley College.

Its most notorious claim is that Chelsea Clinton was conceived as a result of marital rape.

Klein went on to coauthor a 2010 book called The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?), in which a CIA agent named Theodore J. "Higgy" Higginbothem III goes in search of the truth about Barack Obama.

Higgy and his crack operatives discover startling secrets about the 44th president of the United States-a man some call "The Chosen One" and others refer to as "an Obamanation." Among the many startling revelations in THE OBAMA IDENTITY: * What Obama's Kenyan grandmother says about his birthplace * How a Muslim imam taught young Obama to apologize for America and bow to foreigners * How the Reverend Jeremiah Wright taught Obama to use the TelePromTer * What happened to the videotapes showing Obama high-fiving the Reverend Wright after one of his anti-American sermons * How financier George Soros brought about the collapse of the American economy to help elect Obama * Why Obama blames everything on George W. Bush except Katie Couric's dismal ratings * How the Russians blackmailed Obama into canceling America's anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe * Who came up with the idea of carving Obama's face on Mount Rushmore right next to Abe Lincoln's?

The "last book" Halperin refers to was The Amateur, which, among other things, retailed the notion that Bill tried and failed to persuade Hillary to challenge Obama for the 2012 Democratic nomination, a discussion with dialogue so bad it would embarrass Danielle Steel:

"Why risk everything now?" a skeptical Hillary told her husband, emphasizing that she wanted to leave a legacy as secretary of state.

"Because," Bill replied, his voice rising, "the country needs you!"

"The country needs us!" added Bill....

"I want my term [at the State Department] to be an important one, and running away from it now would leave it as a footnote," Hillary argued.

She said she had the option of running again in 2016.

But Bill wouldn't let go.

"I know you're young enough!" Bill said, his voice booming. "That's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried that I'm not young enough."

"I'm the highest-ranking member in Obama's Cabinet. I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?" she responded.

But of course Halperin would be chiding the mainstream media for not taking Klein seriously. He's been doing that sort of thing for nearly a decade. Back in 2006, Glenn Greenwald memorably captured Halperin's groveling before right-wing talker Hugh Hewitt: Halperin bristled at being called a liberal (by a guy who thinks everyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a liberal), boasted of positive feedback from Power Line, praised himself for positive coverage of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, and fawningly asked Hewitt, "Can I introduce you to my interns from Bob Jones University?"

(It was silly of Halperin to try to toady to the right by hiring interns from Bob Jones, because by the mid-2000s the religious-right school of choice was Patrick Henry College, source of many Bush administration interns. But never mind.)

And the new book -- the one Halperin wants us to take so seriously? It's about how much the Clintons and Obamas allegedly despise one another. It's going to be taken extremely seriously by the Murdoch media -- you know, the same folks who just got through telling us that the president timed the arrest of Ahmed Abu Khattala so Hillary could boast about it in her interview on Fox.

Mark, I'll let those folks carry Klein's water. I'm not going to bother.