Her accuser Paul Fray, the man whom she allegedly vilified as a "fucking Jew bastard" during an election-night blowup in 1974, is in fact a Southern Baptist who has variously claimed that his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and grandmother were Jews.

Fray suffered a cerebral hemorrhage some years ago which his wife admits affected his memory (and led to the loss of his law license when he committed various improprieties). He, his wife Mary Lee and their friend Neal McDonald have all told various versions of what happened that night to as many as seven different authors -- apparently without mentioning the anti-Jewish slur until now.

And when Hillary Clinton emerged from her suburban Westchester residence to dispute the charges Sunday, her campaign distributed a maudlin, handwritten letter of apology sent to her almost exactly three years ago by Fray. That strange document deserves to be quoted at length (rather than the few truncated sentences that the Post mentioned parenthetically deep inside the paper):

Dear Hillary,

This letter has taken me some 23 years to come to the point that I must apologize for my actions toward you ... Now, just in the last three years, as a result of a number of interviews have I concluded that I am wrong, that I was wrong and that I have wronged you; I ask for your forgiveness because I did say things against you, and called you names not only to your face -- but behind your back ... At one time in my life I would say things without thinking, without factual foundation and without rhyme or remedy unless it furthered my own agenda ...

[My wife] has met with the FBI and some of the Independent Counsel's investigators and ... she always makes it quite clear that you are a person of the most high integrity."

In an even more jarring postscript, Fray recalls how she once read to his now-grown son Robbie, who now has a son of his own and wants Hillary to read to him. "Robbie has told me for years to write you and bear [sic] my heart and now I have done it because I want you to know that I do it out of my love for you ... Thank you Hillary for being Hillary."

It seems fair to draw an inference concerning credibility from this bizarre, scrawled and rather recent note. And it does seem both bizarre and incredible that its author's shifting recollections -- filtered through a journalism without standards -- have suddenly seized universal media attention. But such is the power of tabloid melodrama in an American political culture whose agenda can be set by the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

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