But  I'm  not  a   Drudge  fan ,  by any  means.

I'm including the comment from professional twit Gloria Borger, who gives a clinic on the gratuitous slams twits such as Borger hurl around simply because Sen Clinton is even running.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: ... It's clearly an inconsistent campaign. She hasn't had one clear message. She's had three messages. One day she reaches over and she touches Barack Obama's arm. The next day she's saying, "Shame on you." The next day she's running as an experienced commander in chief. You know, it's difficult, Anderson, to win with one message, much less three messages. And I think, you know, this has all the trappings of a campaign that is having an internal argument about how to proceed because there isn't any clear direction. [...]

Yeah, you go, Glo! Why can't she push -- in a cute little jingle -- the bombing of Iranian citizens, then canoodle with foaming at the mouth bigots like Rev. Hagee and then dispense slow-cooked conservative red meat at the Just Us Patriots BBQ and Schmooze like versatile John McCain?

[cutting out Anderson "The Silver Fox" Kewper]

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: I agree very much with Gloria and everything she just said. The odd thing, Anderson, is that when you look at what Hillary Clinton has been saying on the stump the last three or four days, she's actually been giving some very good speeches.

She's coming out fighting for the middle class, for people losing their jobs; they're effective. And she's holding on to a big lead still in Ohio. She's definitely not out of the game, but, you know, to go from the love fest at the end of that debate to the, as you say, the rant on Sunday, the angry rant on her part, and then the sarcasm on Monday.

And now this ugly incident, which Matt Drudge says -- the disagreement is with Matt Drudge. Matt Drudge is saying that the Clinton staffers circulated this. But all that has obscured her basic message and it makes her campaign seem like a plane flying -- careening around in a bad storm.

And in contrast, as Barack Obama answers these various charges, he seems like the calm and steady one. It does not, I think, help her campaign. I think it strengthens him. (... More schwah...)

Amazingly, right and left pounced on this and assumed her guilty without even stopping to investigate. She was even castigated for not denying forcefully enough the propagation of an independently published, already-public photo which wasn't even offensive. (Who thinks it's offensive to wear local dress or otherwise honor a host?)

And just to apply a bit of logic, why would HRC or a staffer confide in Matt Drudge of all people, the matrix for every revolting, wending, vining poison rumor that dogged fmr First Lady HRC and fmr. President Clinton for two terms, and continued at an insane pitch during her office as Senator?

(Which leads me to say that BTD's and Jeralyn's concerted efforts to apply a more disinterested observer standard, even while disclosing their leanings, has allowed a more thoughtful and analytic discussion in the comments.  Finding lefty blogs that are not Obama or Hillary echo chambers is a lot harder than it should be.)

Russert brought up Farrakhan, Obama responded, Clinton opined that she didn't think "denounce" was strong enough, and Obama eventually agreed.  I fail to see how it is a bad thing to get a candidate to take a harder line on bigotry; both of them - one as a person of color, and one as a woman - who know first-hand what bigotry and prejudice are all about, should be setting a very high bar on these issues.

As near as I can determine, the Obama-in-native-garb pic was never proven to have come out of the Clinton campaign.  There was a lot of parsing and fly-specking of Drudge's story, but those should not be the standards for blaming one candidate or the other for anything.

ROSEN (3/1/08): Hillary Clinton's conduct during the Clinton impeachment does not inspire confidence in her respect for privacy. Kathleen Willey, one of the women who accused President Clinton of unwanted advances, charges in a new book that Mrs. Clinton participated in the smear campaigns against her. A federal judge found that the Clinton White House had ''committed a criminal violation'' of Ms. Willey's privacy rights by releasing her private letters. (An appellate court later criticized the judge's ''sweeping pronouncements.'')
SNIP
For the record, the unnamed federal judge to whom Rosen refers is the famous Clinton-trasher, Royce Lamberth. (Stephanie Mencimer: "During the 1990s, judge Royce Lamberth earned a reputation as a Clinton basher on par with independent counsel Ken Starr.") For some reason, the fact that Lamberth once accused "the Clinton White House" of something--and was "later criticized"--is presented here as evidence against Hillary Clinton. Go ahead--just try to explain that.

As for the rest, so Clinton was behind Russert asking his question and Kroft asking his question?

As for the garb photo, the Clinton campaign denied it and the only source for it is Drudge. Is that the new Josh Marshall standard?

"You don't believe that Senator Obama's a Muslim?" Kroft asked Sen. Clinton.

"Of course not. I mean, that, you know, there is no basis for that. I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that," she replied.

"You said you'd take Senator Obama at his word that he's not...a Muslim. You don't believe that he's...," Kroft said.

"No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know," she said.

"It's just scurrilous...?" Kroft inquired.

"Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors, that I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time," Clinton said.

whether or not Obama is a Muslim. Imagine the tepid repsonse if she'd been asked if Obama was a terrorist with a bomb factory.

They're not even remotely equivalent questions.

I know that politically and in the interests of actual truth, it's important for Obama to be very clear that he's not Muslim. But I would really, really like it if the blogs would stop acting as though Muslim = terrorist... while that's a political point people are making (and they're sadly often correct that the two are conflated in the minds of many Americans), I don't feel like most people do a very good job of wording it to matter-of-factly correct the rumor without sounding insulting to Muslims.

I'm not just throwing stuff against the wall here. I had an e-mail back and forth with Josh about his comment that the Clinton campaign's non-denial "spoke volumes."

Frankly, whether they intended to or not, I think they both did him a favor getting him to finally use the word reject.