All is forgiven?

Before getting to the yummy low-hanging fruit of Sarah Palin, let us take a last look at Hillary Clinton’s final act in which an entitled die-hard miraculously became an elegant, gracious loser.

Did anyone seriously think that the Clintons were going to openly take a crap in the Democratic Party nest they both plan to continue to live in? They probably could have hurt Obama pretty seriously (although perhaps not fatally) but only while setting fire to their own ship and being pushed out to sea in it. They would have royally pissed off not just the Obama voters but nine-tenths of her own.

On the contrary, they had to look like team players and avoid taking any blame for an Obama defeat even if they secretly hope for one. (Bill’s faint praise provides a cynic plenty of evidence that he does.) They did their job.

But what’s all this talk about Hillary’s glorious and laudable campaign? You mean the one in which she and her co-candidate dismissed Obama as just another Jesse Jackson (and the same color too!), reminded white people to vote for her, pandered to racist imagery with the 3 a.m.-little-white-girl-in-bed ad, dragged the whole thing on long past her candidacy’s demise, and worst of all, relentlessly pumped up the bogus notion that she really had won more votes and was somehow cheated of the post rather than defeated for it.

That last notion lingers on in the minds of the ignorant and is dutifully parroted by the Republicans, including yesterday as they talked up the goofy Palin. Thanks, Hill.

Nothing in last week’s performances suggests that either the Clintons or their camp followers regret having played a sneaky, dirty game that damaged the party they supposedly want to see victorious. It’s a measure of our debased politics that they get to walk away from their narcissistic slash-and-burn campaign trailing the glow of heroism. In a party truly concerned about national well-being, they’d be anathema.