“We f***** up in Ohio,” she admitted. “In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.

“She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,” Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: “Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

Ergh? For someone slated to be high up in the Obama administration, she comes off awfully unstateswomanlike. And for a former Pulitzer prize winning journalist, she doesn’t seem to have internalized enough paranoia about speaking to reporters.

The Clinton camp is predictably enough asking for her resignation. Though from all indications losing Power would be a huge blow for the Obama team, I for one would feel much better if Power was replaced. She’s the biggest reason I don’t feel comfortable with Obama’s foreign policy direction to date.

UPDATE: And there she goes!

Dowd is describing here the conversation that took place in her “office”—which happens to be the newsroom of *The New York Times*—between what are undoubtedly very Serious Journalists, including one who covers (said with whispered reverence) “security issues.” And in this one short passage, on vivid, revolting display is every repellent attribute that defines the Standard Modern Political Journalist.

Right. And it defines John Edwards too. And I’ll be perfectly candid: when I heard the news of Hillary’s weeping, I made a joke along the exact same lines. In short, her ploy didn’t work on me, or on most males given the election results slowly being parsed out from New Hampshire—Hillary’s bounce came from vigorous support of older women. That Greenwald finds casual water-cooler sexism repellent and revolting only tells us that Greenwald is more of a feminist than your average male, nothing more.

There’s a further point here worth debating: the particularly American obsession over an impartial press. It’s a debate which goes largely ignored in the rest of the world, where readers recognize that various media outlets represent various interests in their societies. News nevertheless gets reported and people still get their information—democracy functions just fine. The expectations Americans have of their media are wholly puritanical as evidenced by the holy rage of people like Greenwald upon finding evidence that our journalists are biased too.