Audio emerged tonight of former President Bill Clinton calling Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum a "sleazy... dishonest... slimy... scumbag." Former Times reporter Purdum, of course, is the guy who wrote the just-released article about how Clinton is running around the world on private jets, including one called "Air Fuck One," with billionaire scuzzballs like Ron Burkle, Steve Bing and Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton told a Huffington Post reporter Purdum was awful, and that the Vanity Fair piece has "five or six blatant lies," but then added he had never read it. But that didn't stop him from continuing to trash it, nor did the fact that Purdum is married to Clinton's former press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Audio after the jump, along with a text summary.

"The editor of Esquire— he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it."

"You know he didn't use a single name, cite a single source in all those things he said. It's just slimy. It's part of the national media's attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It's the most biased press coverage in history. It's another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in this church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn't do anything about it. The first day he said 'Ah, ah, ah well.' Because that's what they do— he gets other people to slime her. So then they saw the movie they thought this is a great ad for John McCain— maybe I better quit the church. It's all politics. It's all about the bias of the media for Obama. Don't think anything about it."

So, just to recap: Clinton utterly trashed a reporter based on a story Clinton had never read; dragged a competing editor into the fight based on a private email (that he may or may not have quoted accurately); then insinuated without substantiation that Obama pushed a preacher to make racial remarks about Hillary Clinton. It's getting hard to keep track of who, exactly, is sliming who with poorly-checked facts.

[Huffington Post]