If any single topic best demonstrates the irrelevance of televised political punditry, it is the artificial buzz about a 2008 presidential race between Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Rice.

With deeper issues so often submerged in the media, it is depressing to have this kind of after-dinner politics mooted in public time, touting the nonexistent chances of “Hillary” and “Condi.” Perhaps that is the point.

Let’s start with Mrs. Clinton. Many of the attacks on Hillary Clinton have been appalling. Some “jokes” are nothing but thinly-veiled calls for putting her in harm’s way, and there is no excuse for media outlets’ being affiliated with sources of the attacks. Obviously some individuals out there, who tend to have a strange fondness for violent language, obscenity, and remote-control aggression via email, can barely tolerate the notion of a woman in public life, but news media need not pander to unhealed rigidities.

But the fact that she has borne unjust attacks does not mean that Mrs. Clinton has done a good job of standing up for the public. She hasn’t. She could have voted against the war resolution. She didn’t. She could have helped build her party from the grassroots, during the eight years her husband was in the White House. She didn’t. She could have spoken out against the illegal invasion of another country. She could have defended congressional investigators and others attacked by the administration.

It is thus all the more grating to hear Mrs. Clinton labeled by media propagandists as a “liberal” or a “feminist.” Hillary Clinton was probably a capable law student at Yale, but her law career in Arkansas was as the governor’s wife.

That said, let’s look at the academic career of Condoleezza Rice. There is a proud boast on the web site of the Hoover Institution, the ultra-rightwing think tank ensconced at Stanford University, that Rice started college at the age of fifteen.

What the web site does not mention is that Rice began college classes at the University of Denver when her father was briefly Assistant Director of Admissions there. According to the university, Mr. Rice moved from the Admissions office that year to another position with the institution. Perhaps someone noticed that coincidentally one of the university’s few minority students had a dad in admissions. In any case, Rice started college at fifteen, before graduating from high school, without having been a child prodigy and more importantly without having taken the SATs or the ACT. She skipped the strain of the normal application process that many of us have experienced directly and through our children.

She skipped a lot of things. She switched from a major in concert piano her first two years to a major in political science – because, she has said, that was one she could complete in two years – where her studies did not include, among other subjects, American history. Application for graduate school, mostly at U. Denver, was again facile. Who paid her grad school tuition is unknown; her stint in grad school included an internship with the Rand Corporation and a trip to the Soviet Union, paid for by whom left unstated. With a new PhD, while thousands of other PhDs were competing for hundreds (or dozens) of jobs, Rice went to a position at Stanford via the Hoover think tank, which appointed her a “Fellow.” Her initial teaching load is unspecified; after a year she joined the Stanford faculty through an affirmative action program.

Switching to the Republican Party in 1982, she worked closely with state and national political figures in the GOP, serving in then-Governor Pete Wilson’s failed effort to redistrict California in the eighties. In 1993 she was promoted to Full Professor at Stanford, on the basis of extensive service (in the first Bush administration) but scant publication and limited teaching, by a university president who fast-tracked her. Incidentally, he got his presidency after the previous Stanford president was ousted as the result of some damaging information.

Recently, Rice was National Security Adviser when 9/11 happened, not on its face a resume brightener, and was promoted to Secretary of State after Colin Powell’s greater credibility threatened the White House. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, now National Security Adviser, was one of the chief movers behind the Iraq war.

In short, corporate pundits are probably using Rice and Clinton largely to discourage public participation in democracy. But it could boomerang on them. A Clinton-Rice match-up would do wonders for third parties.