Actually, she claims she’s angry at him for insulting Hillary by supposedly implying that Hillary’s somehow responsible for Bill’s lechery in the Oval Office. But that’s not what Paul’s saying. Hillary’s blameless for that, he reiterated today. The reason he brought up l’affaire Lewinsky this weekend is because, like every other Republican in America, he’s sick of being lectured on gender sensitivity by cretins who’ve spent decades apologizing for the Clenis and Ted Kennedy. His attack was an attack on the Democratic Party, not on Hillary specifically. The war on women garbage isn’t going to end, so he feels he has no choice but to use a blunt rhetorical object to back Democrats off. Here’s a nice swing: “I think that one of the things that have moved forward, one of the things that was rotten about the old patriarchal system we did have, was that bosses took advantage of young women in the workplace.”

What makes this blogworthy and considerably more irritating than Ruth Marcus’s giggling about “thong-showing” yesterday is that McCaskill herself once took a harder shot at Bill Clinton than Paul did. Remember this golden moment from “Meet the Press” when she was first running for Senate? That was the first strike against her in Clintonworld. Strike two came when she endorsed Obama for president over Hillary in 2008, a crucial bit of big-name support that helped establish him as a serious contender. She’s on the enemies list now and she knows it — a bad place to be with the Clintons poised to return to power in 2016 — so she’s decided she’s going to go all out to get back in the queen’s good graces. The Hill has a story out today noting that 57 congressional Democrats have now signaled that they support Hillary in 2016. That’s nothing: McCaskill formerly endorsed her back in June of last year, just eight months after Obama’s reelection. Now, to further make amends, she’s decided she’s going to play attack dog for Hillary on “war on women” crapola. Needless to say, if she persists in this role, she should be reminded of her bon mot about Bill and her daughter at every opportunity. She’s free to be an ass-kissing toady for Democratic royalty but she’s not free to do it without her old comments being mentioned.

Oh, she also claimed today that her mother formally apologized to her on behalf of her generation for not ending the debate over birth-control — on her deathbed.