"Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride." I don't know if I, of all people, ought to start by quoting Bette Davis, but since this is about a bitch, it's somehow apropos.

In 1992 a power couple, as they became known, was vomited from Arkansas onto the public stage, and greeted with rhapsodic cheers from the pseudo-intelligentsia in New York and Los Angeles--the people who, before they get on camera to take pot shots at anyone who might not have disinherited a child who had once voted Republican, had spent the hours before in a waxing parlor, if a woman, or a barber shop, if a man. These days all bets are off where each sex might go, and in 1992 they were off with Katie Couric.

William Jefferson Blythe Clinton oiled his way in front of the camera, drawing life from it to the point that I wondered if he fed on it, like a vampire on blood, and the buffoon and glad-handing, duplicitous attention-suck he was and remains is obvious. And his unlovely wife, our next Dear Leader, appeared also, occasioning research by Sennheiser for microphones which could take her shrieking voice. Volcanoes and thunderclaps were a walk in the park, but her voice--it is my opinion that's when audio engineers went to 24-bit sampling.

Once on an early morning show Katie Steinway Couric interviewed a man who was not a fan of Slick Willie. She inquired why not, in her best innocent fashion, instantly making me think of the crocodile in "The Elephant's Child" by Kipling. The man replied with admirable forthrightness the truth, that Bill Clinton has a bad character.

Ms. Boesendorfer pulled herself up to her full height in the chair, and the leather let forth several rather nauseating sounds, and she steepled her fingers and cocked her head and went into attack-vole mode.

"Do you think that character is important?" Sniff. Never before or since have I heard any single sentence so illuminating. Ms. Couric brayed to the world that she herself had a bad character. I have heard more Yoko Ono than Katie Couric since that time.

Shortly after Ms. Couric's thundering four-hoofed charge out of the immorality closet, I noticed a series of commercials with a woman chosen to look like Dear Leader. Hair, face and all. Bear in mind that this was before 16:9 television so all was not shown; 4:3 can only show so much.

In a short time these commercials disappeared, utterly. I don't know if they focus-group commercials (a vulgar neologism for a vulgar concept) but something made them stop hawking products with her Doppelganger. Wait. That's the evil twin. Her near double. I can't remember what products they were flogging, but I don't think that the sponsor was Betty Crocker.

(Although if the commercial for Brink's alarms had had her instead of a white man in a mask, running up a walk to break down a door with a kick, it would have been successful.)

As time wore on, and her husband came to resemble the Elephant's Child ("I did not inhale," which by the way has made it into Roget's), there were no more commercials trading on a likeness of Dear Leader.

Until today. While lunching at Dad's I nearly choked on a mouthful. Marvel. I don't mind. There is a commercial and the woman looks like Our Empress. I had never before understood the depth of confidence that the left has in its (earned) route of the Republicans, but is palpable in this. Flogging patent nostrums with a look-alike of Maximum Leader. Scared yet?

Well, it was for wrinkle cream.