You can draw the historical comparisons as easily as I can, so I won’t bore you with them. Simple question instead: Should we cut this guy some slack for slobbering this way knowing that he’s just trying to make amends for jeopardizing his wife’s career? Huma was, and probably still is, a lock for membership in the White House inner circle if Hillary wins in 2016. The only baggage that might get her booted is you-know-who’s habit of doing you-know-what. If, after two years of public humiliation, Weiner wants to make it up to her by keeping a straight face while saying something like this on TV, who among us would fault him? Everyone atones in their own way. This guy just happens to do it by insisting that his wife’s boss is arguably more impressive than, say, Dwight Eisenhower. Or even John Kerry.

Plus, it’s hard to single Weiner out for criticism knowing that, as implausible as it may seem, this same surreal claim will be repeated endlessly in various forms by Democrats during the next campaign. The more people notice that Hillary, despite having moved in the highest circles of power for more than 20 years, has virtually nothing to show for it in terms of policy, the more frantically her credentials will be touted. Former first lady. Senator. Secretary of State. She racked up hundreds of thousands of miles in the air in her diplomatic travels. Hundreds of thousands — more than any other Secretary of State. Right?

Put aside the fact that the “more than any secretary of state” part isn’t actually true — Condi Rice flew more. When you ask, “Okay, what did she get for it?” you get a blank stare or you get some stuff about championing women’s rights. Two people have told me she did good work in Myanmar, but I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of that. I suppose I could look it up, but at the end of the day we’re still talking about Myanmar, which is not the locus of America’s most pressing international problems. (“That’s right, because Hillary prevented the Myanmarese hegemony,” someone at MSNBC just shrieked. “She stopped it cold.”) While the Wikipedia page on her tenure doesn’t even mention Myanmar, it does mention her championing of better cook stoves in the Third World. That’s good. And so is improving the plight of women in various countries where their status ranges between “Slightly More Important than the Village Mule” to “So Incredibly Delicate We Must Keep Them Covered with Burlap Sacks All Day Long Even Though It’s Like 115 Degrees in the Shade Today.”…

I’ve been saying for a while, if by a while you mean two decades, that Hillary Clinton has never lived up to the hype. She wasn’t an effective senator, she was effective at managing her image as a senator. She wasn’t an effective manager; HillaryCare was a paper behemoth that never even came up for a vote, but nonetheless helped her party lose control of the U.S. Congress. She isn’t a great politician; she’s the wife of one. She’s not even charismatic…

The fascination, the excitement, the thrill of Hillary Clinton is like a psychological potluck dinner for liberal Democrats and the Washington press corps: They bring their own. All she provides is the venue.

Her chief accomplishment as SoS wasn’t Myanmar, it was adding a new credential that would help expunge her Iraq vote in the eyes of the left. They’ll still resist her in the primaries, at least at first, but now she’s got a ready answer if/when she’s accused of being too quick to choose war: If there’s anyone who understands the value of diplomacy, it’s a former head of the State Department. She’s built relationships with foreign leaders (and built upon relationships that Bill had built years before). Jaw-jaw, not war-war. You can trust her now, at least enough not to disqualify her over old business.

And as for the new business that might theoretically disqualify her, her friends in the media know how to handle that. Click the image to watch.