I didn’t realize that the Associated Press had gone in to the pharmacy business. If I had, I wouldn’t have been so astonished to read this emetic about the hostage situation at Hillary’s New Hampshire office yesterday.

I can’t guarantee that you will be able to keep your breakfast down if you read this before the ham and eggs are at least partially digested:

When the hostages had been released and their alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of calm in the face of crisis.

The image, broadcast just as the network news began, conveyed the message a thousand town hall meetings and campaign commercials strive for — namely, that the Democratic presidential contender can face disorder in a most orderly manner.

“I am very grateful that this difficult day has ended so well,” she declared as she stood alone at the microphone.

Holy Christ! “Fawning” would be an understatement here. The AP reporter Glen Johnson is literally kneeling at Hillary’s feet, looking at her with a doe-eyed worshipfulness as he pens this paean to the “regal looking” Clinton – a “picture of calm” drawn so lovingly one wonders if he doesn’t keep an autographed photo of the candidate on his nightstand – all the better to shortstroke his way to ecstasy when thinking about her.

My friend Jim Lynch is a little more prosaic in his analysis:

“Is the AP going to be charged with an in-kind contribution to the Clinton Campaign?”

If not, they should be.

Aides said Clinton was home Friday afternoon, getting ready to deliver a partisan speech in Virginia to the Democratic National Committee, when she was told three workers in her Rochester, N.H., headquarters had been taken hostage by a man claiming to have a bomb.

[snip]

Over the ensuing five hours, as a state trooper negotiated with the suspect and hostages were released one-by-one, Clinton continued to call up and down the law enforcement food chain, from local to county to state to federal officials.

“I knew I was bugging a lot of these people, it felt like on a minute-by-minute basis, trying to make sure that I knew everything that was going on so I was in a position to tell the families, to tell my campaign and to be available to do anything that they asked of me,” the New York senator said.

At the same time, the woman striving to move from former first lady to the first female president was eager to convey that she knew the traditional lines of command and control in a crisis, even if the events inside the storefront on North Main Street were far short of a world calamity.

“They were the professionals, they were in charge of this situation, whatever they asked me or my campaign to do is what we would do,” Clinton said.

Along with taking charge while giving the professionals free rein, Clinton offered up a third dimension to her crisis character: humanity. She said she felt “grave concern” when she first heard the news of the hostage-taking.

Where does one begin to dissect what could easily be Hillary’s newest campaign commercial, written for her by a reporter/flack/fan at the Associated Press? This is not a news story. It’s a campaign press release.

The image drawn is one of a take charge candidate, on the phones demanding to be kept up to date on the status of the negotiations. But that’s not all there was to her “crisis character” – a fictitious but inventive bit of idiocy by Johnson. We also discover via Mr. Johnson’s slavish, breathless “reporting” that Hillary is not a robot, that she has “humanity.”

How do we know this? Because she said she felt “grave concern” when she first heard about the hostages.

Holy Mother of God! My pet cat Aramas felt “grave concern” when he heard the news. I would suspect that half the people on the planet – Democrats and Republicans – felt “grave concern” when first hearing of the plight of her volunteers. If Johnson thinks 15 years of aloofness, cold-eyed calculation, and insensitivity can be washed away just because she felt “grave concern” for her volunteers, he obviously has more confidence in his skills as a huckstering Hillary sycophant than is warranted.

And would someone please tell me how it is possible for someone to know the “traditional lines of command and control in a crisis” while at exactly the same time ” taking charge” of the situation? Johnson was so eager to put the candidate at the center of the action (taking charge) he temporarily forgot that a paragraph earlier he had her deferring to “traditional lines of authority.”

Oh well. No hack is perfect.

The Associated Press has proven itself over the years to be the most shockingly partisan news organization on the planet – showing outright sympathy at times with the terrorists in Iraq and an animus toward Bush that defines BDS. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that one of their reporters has gone off the deep end and doesn’t even bother to make the pretense of being objective about Hillary Clinton.

Nor would it surprise anyone if Johnson ends up Hillary’s White House spokesman. He’s already got a leg up on the competition with this article.