It's time to reexamine the most durable liberal cliche of the Clinton era: that right-wingers have a unique, irrational hostility towards Hillary Rodham Clinton. This is completely false, it turns out. Lefties disdain her, too. Indeed, the only memorable abuse of the first lady these days comes from the left.
Here was Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin last week, welcoming Hillary to New York: "There will be 200 reporters following her every sigh and forced smile when she appears at Pat Moynihan's farm-house outside of Oneonta, New York.
"The 200 reporters can consider themselves suckers. . . .
"After the last four years, with her husband rolling around the White House hallways with Monica Lewinsky, after all this cheap, grubby lying, after Hillary Clinton's smug deviousness and untruthfulness, after all these character collapses, it is implausible for her to run for the United States Senate from New York.
"Clinton and his wife spread a layer of soot over this country and now she comes around without even brushing the soot from her sleeves, smiling all over the place as if it never happened, as if New Yorkers are the same as those in Appalachia or Arkansas or any of those other low-IQ areas in which the Clintons do best."
Harsh? Not compared with the rant loosed by Germaine Greer, interviewed by Barbara Ehrenreich in LA Weekly:
"Ehrenreich: How do you feel about Hillary?
"Greer: She shares a bed with the head of state, maybe, sometime. And, so what? She's an attorney. Big deal. There are women attorneys all over this country. She gets a job of huge importance . . .
"Ehrenreich: You mean health reform?
"Greer: Mm-hmm, and screws it up. Surprise, surprise, because that job should not have been given to someone in Hillary's position in the first place. So why is NOW so indulgent to Hillary and Bill? I just don't get it. . . .
"Ehrenreich: What do you think of Hillary's upcoming Senate run in New York?
"Greer: I was incensed when she was allowed to address a plenary session for the U.N. Women's Year in Beijing. Every time I've been to a Women's Year Conference, we've had the wife of a head of state telling us what was what, reading a prepared speech from nowhere -- and that included, I may say, the great Imelda Marcos. And we had to applaud. And of course Mrs. Clinton. Get out of my face. Now there are women all over the world who've kept their own burrow, who should be there talking to us. Not the widows or the wives of politicians."
Hmmm. Must be that Greer and Breslin can't stand a strong woman.