Today Cursor points out this article from a newspaper in White Plains, New York, in which people from politics and journalism discuss what they hope Bill Clinton talks about in his book.

The interviewees are a mixed bunch: a few Republicans who find Clinton appalling, a few folks on the left who hope Clinton gives Kenneth Starr hell, a few other folks on the left who want Clinton to explain some shortcoming or other (gee, funny thing -- there are people on the left who criticize Clinton, but there's nobody on the right who has a kind word for him), plus a few non-ideologues who seem to hope for a non-ideological book.

And then there's Slate's Mickey Kaus. The compulsive Democrat-basher (and alleged Democrat) says that this is the question he wants Clinton to answer:

Why did he make the mistake of giving health care reform priority over welfare reform in his first two years? Was it because his wife was pushing health care, and he deferred to her because she had the implicit blackmail power of being able to reveal his sexual misbehavior?

What a lovely theory: The leader of the free world devoted much of his first term to health-care reform not because he believed in it, but because the castrating harpy he was married to had him by the short hairs.

I'm reminded of Joe Klein's Primary Colors. I don't have a copy here, unfortunately, so you'll have to do with this excerpt from Author Unknown by Don Foster, the professor who discovered that Klein wrote the book:

As depicted in Primary Colors, the Clinton/Stanton figure makes you mad. In fact, someone should punch him. Actually, someone does punch him: the Hillary/Susan figure smacks him right in the kisser on page 122. This from a woman who could "come at your scrawny little ding-a-ling with a pair of garden shears." ...

The two kinds of females in Primary Colors are bitches and bimbos.... For example, there's Libby, a 250-pound women's libber, who points guns at men's crotches and threatens to blast away their genitals, just like Hillary/Susan with her garden shears.

A lot of people loathe the Clintons, but it takes a special kind of Clinton-hater to conclude that the key to their marriage, and to his presidency, is that he was the sexual victim. Is this what's going through the heads of Klein and Kaus when they bash Democrats, while claiming not to be Republicans? When they think about Democratic liberalism do they envision a tough woman with a pair of garden shears?

(P.S.: Yeah, I know -- Klein and Kaus are both short. Well, I'm short too. That's no excuse.)