We do live in a world full of ugly, lingering sexism, and yes, plenty of it has been directed at Clinton. But we also face plenty of ugly, lingering racism — some of it exploited by the Clinton campaign — as well as a collapsing economy, potentially devastating climate change, two ongoing wars, instability in critical parts of the globe, an ever-present threat of nuclear proliferation and the hostility of a solid portion of the world's population.

With so many evils to worry about, why should women feel constrained to support the candidate who happens to have two X chromosomes — especially when that candidate has gone out of her way to insist that she can be just as bellicose as the most testosterone-addled male?

Why is it still news when an ex-Bush administration flunkey reveals that Mr. Bush and Karl Rove are liars, that they relied on “propaganda” to sell the Iraq war, that Bush took self-delusion to heights once reserved for McKinley and the mountain that should never have been named after him, that Bush and his loyalists operated like a junta and the press let them get away with it?

As press secretary, Scott McClellan was the pudgy-faced front of the Bush administration from July 2003 to April 2006. He did what his predecessor, Ari Fleischer and his successors, Tony Snow and that lost Playboy bunny, were hired to do: craftily lie, deceive, disguise, misguide, beguile, defraud, swindle and chicane the press at every fabricated turn.

Well, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan got the media firestorm he was hoping for, which will make the unemployed propagandist millions of dollars, which, I'm sure, he was hoping for even more.

Old — sometimes even young — right wingers never seem to die; they just fade, and not even courteously away, into filthy and immensely undeserved riches.

But lest we forget: If Scottie had not been pushed out of Propaganda Central, he would still be standing there at the White House podium, spewing the vilest of deceptions and lies on behalf of his criminal keepers.