Yep: S-N-U-B. And whether that’s due to our obsession with conflict-driven coverage, or to our fickle tendency to take down candidates even as we build them up—or to neither, or to both, or to something else entirely—the story quickly became yet another endorsement of the old “Clinton-as-victim” narrative. A narrative that, while it may (arguably) be of political value to the Clinton campaign, does little good for the rest of us. But, hey, it makes for a Dramatic Story. As Whoopi Goldberg put it, the Kennedy-endorsement-stripped Clinton who showed up so “bravely” at Congress on Monday was as exposed “as if someone snatched off her clothes.” And this morning, Fox News—giving more air time to The Snub* than to the Florida primary returns or any other news—took things, as Fox often does, a step further, explicitly and insistently turning The Snub* into A Female Thing. Under varying, and varyingly gleeful, taglines (DEMOCRATIC DIS, SNUB-GATE, SNUB-A-DUB-DUB), the folks at Fox & Friends offered their takes:

Steve Doocy: You’ve got to wonder whether or not, now, the Clinton campaign is trying to make hay of this unfortunate photo that’s out there, where you can see that Barack Obama has his back turned…it looks as if now, the Clinton campaign is saying, ‘This is bad for him, maybe we should play the female card.’

Alysin Camerota: I’m now playing the role of a woman—where, in the lunchroom in high school, the cool kids are sitting together, and it’s a clique. And you might have just been dissed by that clique, and you approach, gingerly, and you’re like, ‘Hi, guys, is there any seat available here?’ And they like turn their back, or they’re just talking among themselves.

Doocy again: Look what Barack Obama did - he turned away. This snub has got the National Organization of Women in New York absolutely in a brouhaha.

Doocy was basing his analysis of the “brouhaha”—as were several other commentators this morning—on the National Organization for Women’s New York chapter’s statement railing against Senator Kennedy for endorsing Obama. The statement was absurd—and, as we noted yesterday, it has been disavowed by NOW’s national office. But, more to the point, it had nothing to do with The Snub*: the statement Doocy et al were using as fuel for the latest Clinton-v-Obama fire was released hours before the State of the Union took place.

That false premise fits perfectly, though, with the whole Snub* story’s, well, snub-text. Sen. Claire McCaskill, with whom Obama was speaking at the State of the Union instead of shaking hands with Clinton, might have put it best. The Snub* has “been blown,” she said, “into something that frankly just wasn’t.”

Then again, she’s endorsing Obama.

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*or maybe it wasn’t

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