Would a woman known for enjoying an occasional ethnic joke and clumsily tailoring her message to minority audiences really stoop to a stereotype like this? Well … yeah, probably — but she didn’t. We picked up the ABC item in headlines last night and the Freepers have been in hog heaven with it for hours but in fact the “brooms” line is campaign boilerplate for her. The boss snarked about it months ago. No “macaca moment,” then. Or, if you want to apply the Time magazine standard, maybe it is!

Here’s a little candy to make it up to you. First, from WaPo’s report on Hillary’s desperate distortion of Obama’s comments on Reagan:

For some rank-and-file Democrats, the tack against Obama is prompting a reevaluation of Clinton and her husband. Bill Clinton gained enormous popularity among Democrats in the 1990s partly because of his ability to achieve tactical triumphs over Republicans. Now, watching the use of rough-edged tactics against a fellow Democrat, some of those who supported him then are having second thoughts.

“They’re obvious distortions,” said Ralph Byrd, a retired electrical engineer in Greenville, S.C., who voted for Clinton in 1992 and 1996. “We’ve had enough spin in the White House the last eight years, and we don’t need any more. It’s deliberate distortion that we don’t need.”

And second, this. Go crazy — like a Hillary worker with his own free hotel room!