Dick Morris predicts that Hillary will respond to Obama’s Iowa challenge with the Clinton machine’s traditional no-holds-barred attack dog politics.

As her once-formidable lead in national polls dwindles and Barack Obama moves ahead of her in the all-important Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton will likely intensify her negative campaign against her rivals.

The Clintons’ political MO has always had a good dose of negative campaigning, especially when the going gets rough. There’s no reason to assume that they will alter their game plan now. ...

Their favored method of getting out negative material about their foes is to hire private investigators to dig up dirt, which they then release through feeds to friendly journalists.

Consider the Lewinsky scandal. When Linda Tripp got to be a danger, the Clinton people released her Pentagon personnel file to Jane Mayer (then a reporter for The New Yorker). A federal judge later reprimanded two Clinton operatives for this violation, and the government had to pay Tripp more than $600,000 – but the damage was still done.

Meanwhile, Clinton staffer (and Hillary favorite) Sidney Blumenthal peddled the line that Monica was a stalker to journalist Christopher Hitchens. And White House operatives told ABC News’ Linda Douglas of incoming House Speaker Bob Livingstone’s infidelity scandal before it was made public.

In the ‘92 presidential campaign, the Clintons openly disclosed their use of private detectives to dig up ammunition on women who had accused the presidential candidate of having affairs with them, disclosing that they paid detective Richard Palladino over $100,000 in campaign funds. But, of late, they avoid such embarrassing disclosures by hiding their detective bills in their legal expenses.

—————————————————
Meanwhile, James Lewis, at American Thinker, suggests that Hillary is so downright nefarious that she planted the press rumors of a lesbian affair as a diabolically clever means of self-immunization.

So you’re Hillary Clinton, and your past can’t withstand examination. What do you do? Well, try a little Black PR operation.

Call it a pre-emptive self-inflicted smear. Because you know your shady past is bound to come up, and a lot of that stuff happens to be verifiable. (Who does Norman Hsu remind you of?)

So you need to discredit so-called “Swift Boating”—which actually means telling the truth about you.

You plant in the London Times a truly outrageous and false rumor about your relationship with Huma, your young and beautiful Saudi aide. Along with a picture of you two walking side by side. Then you discredit the Huma Ruma. That’s pretty easy, because it’s false.

Huma Abedin relationship rumor postings
—————————————————
Hillary is clearly inspiring fear of just what she might be capable of in some quarters.

Twenty-two days after rumors that the Los Angeles Times was sitting on a fully developed sex scandal story involving democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton first surfaced on the Internet, the London Times made reference to the same rumor in a campaign story tsk tsk’ing all the bad behavior in the South Carolina Primary campaign.

The anonymous e-mails and letters began dropping into inboxes and through front doors this summer.

One claimed that Hillary Clinton was having a lesbian affair with Huma Abedin, her beautiful aide. Another online mass-mailing cautioned of the “dark secrets” of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. A blogger claiming to support John McCain said that Rudy Giuliani’s wife supported the killing of “innocent puppies”. Flyers appeared on cars accusing Barack Obama of being a Muslim extremist. An anonymous website said that Fred Thompson was a corrupt playboy.

Welcome to South Carolina, the foulest swamp of electoral dirty tricks in America. This state’s primary race has already become the sleaziest leg of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Here, political operatives know only one way to win: take your opponent’s head off.

The Times’ Olympian disapproval of such underhanded campaign tactics did not prevent their running the above photo though, did it?

Matt Drudge posted the Times’ photo this morning along with a bit of their moralizing, then finished with his characteristically ominous end tag: Developing…

0:50 video with Hillary & Huma, aide topples US flags.

November 1st original posting

Ron Rosenbaum writes at PJM:

So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that “everyone knows” The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. “Everyone knows” meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. “Sitting on it” because the paper couldn’t decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they’d had it for a while but don’t know what to do. The person who told me )not an LAT person) knows I write and didn’t say “don’t write about this”.

Mickey Kaus follows:

Rosenbaum’s Political Physics: Do you ever sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do. So does Ron Rosenbaum. I thought the Dark Star was the Edwards affair allegation. But Rosenbaum says “everyone in the elite Mainstream media” knows about another juicy scandal that the LAT is supposedly sitting on. I guess this is proof that I’m not in the elite, because I don’t know what he’s talking about. ... My vestigial Limbaugh gland tells me it must involve a Democrat, or else the Times would have found a reason to print it. ... P.S.: If it’s just Richardson, that will be very disappointing.

Luke Ford has a guess. And Atlas Shrugged is thinking along the same lines (with picture). And Big Head says it’s quite true.

Observer profile of Huma Abedin

August Vogue picture

The Daily – Nirali:

I’m not sure Hillary could walk out the door without Huma.”—Mandy Grunwald, Clinton advisor.

“Huma does make the trains run on time.”—Bob Barnett, the Clinton’s longtime personal lawyer.

“I don’t know if it’s a chicken-or-the-egg thing—Hillary affecting Huma or the other way around—but together they work.”—Mary Steenburgen, longtime Hillary friend and actress.

Can’t one just imagine all the things that could come out in a Giuliani vs. Hillary election campaign?