There is little that Ms. Clinton can say about her marriage that ever helps her. Her latest contretemps is naming a giraffe and a bracelet of cubes as romantic gifts – evoking raunchy mirth among freepers on the right and quite a few in the center too.

I dislike HRC’s politics, agree that the interview in Essence where she came up with this was probably calculated to play off against the molto married Guiliani, and also agree she doesn’t have what is usually regarded as a winning personality, but the limitless rage she evokes from people baffles me. Why not let her just be a person who’s stuck it out in a difficult marriage? Why does she have to be painted a kind of cross between Evita, Leona Helmsley and Madame Mao, whose sole motive in staying married was to keep that “Clinton” behind her name?

A more sympathetic view here at Mother Jones:

“Suddenly female voters saw in Hillary every woman who has had to put up with demeaning crap from men. And a lot of male voters simply saw an underdog standing up and rallied to her side. She crushed Lazio by 12 points. In November, John Spencer, who will be remembered only for calling Hillary ugly, went down to a defeat three times as ignominious.

It’s amazing to see just who can rush to Hillary’s side when the issue becomes the bare-naked question of trying to bring down a high-achieving woman. During a discussion of snipes at Martha and Hillary on Tina Brown’s TV show, Laura Ingraham, who once wrote a book called The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Wrong Places, confessed, “I’ve gone through that. I’m the right-wing info babe. That’s the box I’m put in…. Powerful women carry a heavier burden…. No one likes to see a woman get too powerful, too fast, too smart.”

And no, don’t tell me trashing the personal lives of politicians is some kind of public service. It simply caters to our basest appetites, letting us give free reign to our envy of the powerful, the long streak of misogyny we still harbor (coupled simultaneously with a kind of overfeminization of the general culture), a good helping of prurience and voyeurism. Ressentiment. The venom of the weak.

Mrs. Clinton is a capable, well- qualified woman, with many years of work behind her, a mother, almost 60 years old. I would not talk in private about a street- walker the way people think fit to talk publicly about a woman who is running to be president of the country.

And I dislike her politics intensely.