He’s 61 years old, has a heart condition, is exhausted from months spent pumping a dry well of support for his loser wife’s candidacy, and now finds himself face to face with a bunch of snot-nosed deciders-in-training daring to question The Legacy? He felt your pain for so many years. The least you can do is feel his.

What you’re seeing here, in fact, is a microcosm of why most conservatives prefer (or should prefer) Hillary to Obama. The Messiah takes the principled liberal position on the Defense of Marriage Act: He wants both prongs of the statute — that the federal government will not recognize gay marriages made in any state and that no other state need do so either — duly repealed. Hillary wants the first prong repealed but not the second. Why? BJ offers a substantive argument towards the end but the truth, as is so often the case with the Clintons, is probably political. They know gay marriage is a wedge issue, don’t care terribly much about it, and are unwilling as a matter of simple pragmatism to get bogged down in a crusade to force feed it to the states. Which leaves them in the unlikely position of defending … federalism. Savor the spectacle of the man who once declared the era of big government over narrowing his eyes, glaring at a budding doctrinaire progressive, and declaring with accusatory gusto, “So you don’t care what the practical implications are?” As Ace might say: Well played, Clenis. Very well played.