I was sitting in the studios at MSNBC on Friday, waiting to go on the air to discuss Rolling Stone’s endorsement of Barack Obama in the current issue, when Hillary Clinton appeared on the monitor next to me. She was very upset, it seems, that Samantha Power (above), an unpaid aide to Obama, had called her "a monster" in an off-the-record remark to a reporter. The incident, Clinton declared, "raises disturbing questions" about Obama’s campaign.

Disturbing questions? This, coming from a woman whose top campaign strategist, Mark Penn, is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the notorious Washington public relations firm that has represented some of the world's most brutal and repressive regimes, including Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the Indonesian thugs responsible for the East Timor massacres.

So let's review. Which is more disturbing: Obama getting free foreign policy advice from a Harvard scholar who wrote a landmark, Pulitzer Prize-winning work on genocide, or Hillary turning over her entire campaign's strategy — and shelling out more than $10 million — to someone who profits by representing the planet's most genocidal maniacs?

Seems pretty clear who the real monster is here.