Have you been poring over your new issue of National Review? Why, naturally. You can pore over it digitally, here. My contribution is a piece called “The Big He, Not for Me: A word against Clinton nostalgia.” I first addressed this theme in my October 19 Impromptus. And I quoted the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which reported on a Clinton appearance for Harry Reid. The paper quoted him as saying the following about Sharron Angle: “This is a woman who doesn’t want women to have mammograms, who thinks autism is some sort of a flaky made-up deal.” The paper then commented, “Actually, Angle voted for mandating insurance coverage for mammograms when she was a Reno assemblywoman. But in general she opposes mandates because she says they increase the cost of insurance for everybody.”

I went to town on Clinton, particularly for the statement “This is a woman who doesn’t want women to have mammograms.”

Later, I found other reports, which had a fuller, different quote: “It would be unbelievably negligent to say, ‘I know you’re right, but I’m just too mad. I’ve got to vote for this woman — this woman who doesn’t want women to have mammograms in their health-insurance policies, who thinks autism is sort of a flaky, made-up deal.’” (Did you get that “I know you’re right, but I’m just too mad”? Classic Clinton.)

I use this quotation in my magazine piece. And I say, “Angle, as she has stressed, does not hate mammograms or welcome breast cancer. She thinks that mandates on insurance companies ought to be rethought, for the sake of American health care overall. And she believes that too many problems and disorders are grouped — grouped sloppily — under the rubric ‘autism.’ But Clinton, flailing, does not have time for the niceties.”

In any event, the point of my post, here in the Corner, is this: Saying “this woman who doesn’t want women to have mammograms in their health-insurance policies” is different from saying, “This is a woman who doesn’t want women to have mammograms.” It is not quite honest and honorable: Angle does not want women to be unable to have mammograms in their health-insurance policies; what she questions is mandates. But it is different, less despicable. I take note of this, not only here, but also in that October 19 Impromptus, in an update and correction. These things live forevermore — don’t they? — in Internetland.