They Don't Call Him "Big" John For....Wait, Who Are We Talking About Again?

I'm confused; didn't the White House try to make a Boehner scarecrow a few weeks ago and quickly give up on it because hardly anybody knew who the heck he was?  Does this mean they're giving up on demonizing Tea Partiers (again) and conceding The One has become too unpopular to really demonize ANYBODY so they're trying to get a leg up on dubbing the next presumptive Speaker another Bill Clinton instead of another Newt Gingrich?:

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

“Catching Boehner with a mistress is the only way to destroy him politically before the election,” a source said.

A rep for Boehner’s office said, “This is bull[bleep]. The American people oppose Washington Democrats’ job killing, so their desperate liberal allies are resorting to outright lies. It’s low, and it’s dirty.”

Er, what?  Can we itemize the lameness of this futile gesture?

1) Yeah, the Slimes smeared Darth Queeg with a diddly-daddly story - in late February of 2008, or eight and a half months before Election Day, and several weeks after he'd clinched the GOP nomination.  Hard to see how that hit piece would have swayed anything.

2) How would claiming that Boehner is porking another woman sway every House and Senate race across the country?  Stories like that have come out about Senators David Vitter and John Ensign in the last couple of years with no detectable ill effects, casting doubt on whether it would affect even Boehner's own re-election bid.

3) Remember how Democrats insisted that a politician's private life was completely compartmentalized from his public job during the Clinton impeachment saga?  That infidelity was "just sex" and "didn't matter"?  And Americans largely bought it?  Why would they believe that those same Americans whom they convinced en masse of the acceptability of sexual libertinism in elected officials suddenly believe that pushing a condemnatory story of same in a member of the opposition would shock them enough to suddenly repudiate his entire party and embrace the ruling party that has done so much to scorn, alienate, and damage them and the country at large?

4) Most Americans will say the same thing they did a few weeks back: Who the heck is John Boehner?  And when they see who he is, their next question will be: HE has a harem?  THAT guy?  He looks like my high school shop teacher.

This is worse than "dirty," worse than "despicable," worse than "pathetic".

It's....irrelevant.

Exit quote from Ace:

If he did have an affair -- then what? What? If he had an affair, then a 17% real unemployment rate is super-cool? Then we give up and go home because you took John "Captain Adrenaline" Boehner from us?