Unless of course it’s Election 2008. We’re getting close to the gloves coming off between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and mathematical longshot Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton and it’s only a matter of time before they’re duking it out like Madame Speaker cut the Senator off for the only open parking space at Krispy Kreme.

In the latest edition of “Honestly, This Is Getting Embarrassing”, Hillary Clinton’s lead fundraisers, with the tacit blessing of Mrs. Clinton’s team (and ostensibly The Candidate herself) have taken the time off from funding Hillary’s campaign to take a fire axe to the Democratic party to rattle off a thinly-veiled threat to Congresswoman Pelosi to keep her puckery, bug-eyed, zombie Mary Tyler Moore face out of the superdelegate fight and leave the arm-twisting to the big boys in the Clinton camp.

Of the letter, Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer claims “we didn’t know what was in it” but Clinton aides chimed in cryptically that “the letter speaks for itself.”

“There is clearly a broad feeling among many Democrats and many people who are active in the party,” said Singer, “that the role of superdelegates is to exercise independent judgment and make a decision that is best for the party and best for the country.” (Much like Governor Bill Richardson who pledged his support to Barack Obama and was promptly branded “Judas” by the Clinton team’s James Carville, who refused to apologize and even added, “A cattle rancher in eastern New Mexico or an advertising executive on the East Side of Manhattan would agree that proper branding is important. I wanted to be sure that Richardson’s act was branded properly.”)

Singer and the Clinton campaign, with the trigger-fingers of their fundraising surrogates, are taking aim at Speaker Pelosi for having the temerity to suggest that superdelegates “have an obligation to support the candidate who leads in the pledged delegate count as of June 3rd”.

The 20 donors who signed the letter have, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, donated nearly $24 million to Democratic campaigns over the last ten years. They were sure to make certain that the weight of their wallets didn’t escape the Speaker. “We have been strong supporters of the DCCC,” they wrote. “We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August.”

Or else. The Clintons’ extended Corleone Family of supporters have spoken: Nancy needs to fall in line or the Democratic Speaker with the razor-thin House majority is going to wake up with a bisected donkey in her bed.

Speaker Pelosi is 10 different kinds of wuss on going after any appearance of malfeasance within the Bush Administration, but don’t plan on Nancy backing down on this one. This is no less than the future of the Democratic party at stake, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Clintons are the past. It doesn’t have to be that way, but they’ve reached a level of entitlement that insists that if they can’t lead the party then no one should, and for that, they need to be cut off at the knees. Nancy Pelosi’s elevation to the first female Speaker of the House was historic, and she doesn’t want to go down in history again as a one-term washout. Without the party’s future, there’s no future for her, and she’s not ready to go back to sitting on a backbench to a McCain Administration and another all-too-familiar Republican Congress.

So, unseemly or not, get ready for senior women throwing down.

The kitchen sink is apparently empty, so Hillary’s gone to the tool chest to see what else she can throw at Barack Obama. In a Thursday campaign appearance, in touting her own fitness to be Commander-in-Chief, she found the claw hammer and let that fly: “I have a lifetime of experience that I bring to this campaign. Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he brings to this campaign–and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he made in 2002.” Lest anyone be ready to forgive her for a momentary slip of the tongue in the heat of battle, she repeated it again this weekend.

So much for party unity. It would appear that if Hillary can’t lead the ticket this fall, she’s certainly not going to let Barack go into the battle without knowing who wears the pantsuit in the family. It’s great fun tuning in everyday to see how Hillary is going to slip in another shot to Obama’s groin. Or at least it would be great fun if she wasn’t in the process of turning the Democratic Party into the Bikini Atoll.

I can respect an all-or-nothing strategy to a degree, but at a certain point it’s only prudent to think about the ramifications of “nothing”. We’re at a tipping point right now that if Hillary drags this race any further into the mud, she’s either going to be President or pariah. Like children, voters will forget certain things fairly quickly. As a politician you can make your point for the moment and no matter how you do it, most voters aren’t going to remember. Unless you take out the belt. They’ll remember that, they’ll hate you for it, and when they’re bigger or you’re vulnerable, or both, they will turn on you and stab you at the dinner table with a serving fork. Hillary may think her tough love is just what the record number of Democratic voters need right now as she takes the strap to the naive, audacious hope of Barack and his supporters, but if she succeeds in stealing the nomination from him in their “best interests”, and if the broad ripples of disgust she sets off hand the election to McCain, she dies an inglorious death at the polls in 2012 and Bill Clinton loses his status as America’s second-hippest swinging senior (ain’t no codger who swings the artifically-enhanced wood better than Hugh Hefner).

It’s one thing to toss these kinds of brickbats at McCain in the fall. It’s no more palatable, as anyone who sat through Willie Horton and Swift Boat Veterans For Truth can attest, but the family isn’t going to hate you for it. It’s another matter entirely to kneecap your team by giving the opposing party’s standard bearer ammunition against your primary opponent in the event that you don’t win the nomination. Not even Tonya Harding played this dirty.

Even worse, they’re on the verge of affording legitimacy to the army of Clinton Haters who made a cottage industry of despising the First Couple in the 1990s. God help us all if there ever comes a day where we have to concede that Rush Limbaugh may have oozed out a credible point somewhere within all that bacon- and Oxycontin-laced flopsweat.

Her team is tossing out one disingenuous argument after another, day after day. Whether it’s Ed Rendell on Meet The Press calling caucuses “undemocratic” or the Florida-Michigan nonsense, or the Ken Starr pettifoggery, she and Bill are trying to trump the Bushes in the right to be called America’s Royal Family, and in doing so, they’re putting an extra dose of “nasty” in “dynasty”.

And if we’re going to carp about relative experience, I’m not entirely sure what singular expertise that retired Hippie Bill Clinton brought to the White House in 1992 after a handful of terms running the country’s 33rd most populous state where people spend their autumn Saturdays donning porcine noses and squealing en masse. If our wealth and power and perceived arrogance are why the terrorists hate us, places like Fayetteville, Arkansas during football season are why they don’t understand us.

It’s too damned bad it’s come to this. Like many Americans, I enjoyed my highest standard of living during the Clinton Years. I was the strongest proponent of John Kerry sticking it in the GOP’s eye in 2004 and choosing Bill Clinton as his running mate–which he would have been perfectly legal and within the rules in doing. But the ugly is coming out in volumes right now. They’re playing for all the marbles, and they’re going to destroy the Democratic Party in the process if this keeps up, and, at this point, I’ll have lost all my marbles if I support them.

Going into the 2008 Election, President Bill Clinton was touted as Hillary’s biggest asset. He was the party’s rock star, and a living memory of the halcyon days of peace, prosperity, budget surpluses, and blow jobs. As the campaign heats up and rounds the corner into South Carolina, the former President is looking more unhinged and less like one of the most respected Democratic Presidents of his century. If it’s chivalry, there’s a time and a place for it, and the kind of chivalry Bill Clinton is displaying this week is better suited to a man in a tavern defending his wife against two morons at the pool table who made a camel toe joke as she came out of the ladies room.

Bill calling Barack out into the parking lot is the last thing that Hillary needs right now. It’s not a winner either way–whether she stays inside on her barstool with a shot and a beer flirting with the bartender, or if she’s outside standing next to a Ford F-150 with a Camel Light hanging from her lips yelling, “Kick his ass, baby!!!”

There are a lot of Americans who want to see the Clintons in the White House again, but no one wants to see a bored retired husband coming out of his workshop and puttering around his wife’s domain, getting constantly underfoot, or yelling out from his Barcalounger.

While they’re not at DEFCON 1 yet, some damage control is mandatory, and now. The Arizona primary is February 5–and Super Bowl XLII is February 3. Put two platinum cards in his wallet, load an armada of 24/7-on-call town cars and limousines with liquor, and send Bill on a two-week Arizona campaign swing. Fifteen minutes in the Valley of the Sun and blondes with boob jobs landing like locusts, and they won’t hear a word from Bill until all the returns are in from Super Tuesday. They can talk on the phone every day or so (“Hey baby, how’d South Carolina go? Really–no, that’s two shots of Courvisier–sorry, baby. You won? That’s great, darlin’. I knew you could do it. Meetin’ lots of donors out here, just pressin’ the flesh, you know. Alright, I’ll talk to you Tuesday night, baby. Love you, too. Buh-bye…..Junior, rack ‘em up! Two shots each…”)

Come Super Tuesday, they send Hillary’s handlers to pull him out of a hotel room, wipe the lipstick off him, and bring him in for the victory celebration.

What–perish the thought of an adultery scandal? Please. This is Bill Clinton. Everyone’s understood this marriage for a long, long time. This is FDR and Eleanor on steroids. The worst that could happen with clearing Bill off the front lines would be a photo of a besotted Bill giving two thumbs up to a stripper wearing “Hillary ’08″ stickers as pasties–and that would probably bring out a few new Democratic voters who would otherwise sit around paying for lap dances on election day.

It’s these kinds of big ideas that reinforce my conviction that I’m the most underpaid temp worker in this city.