For a few minutes over the weekend, my wife felt vindicated. As an inveterate Hillary Clinton supporter, she's been feeling as besieged as her favorite candidate lately.

She stopped smiling at me shortly after Super Tuesday. She rants about the "misogyny and sexism" of mainstream presidential news coverage.

She takes Hillary Clinton's loss of 11 straight primaries and caucuses personally. I haven't had a home-cooked meal since Barack Obama took Virginia. She needed some cheering up.

On Sunday afternoon, the opening sketch of the previous night's "Saturday Night Live" was still on the DVR, so I played if for her even though it mercilessly skewered the media's fascination -- and infatuation -- with Barack Obama.

From the moment my wife caught a glimpse of Fred Armisen's brows furrowed in vivid imitation of Obama's facial tic, she was in hysterics.

Amy Poehler also captured Hillary Clinton's hapless resentment at last week's CNN debate as she struggled to overcome the "bias" of the faux moderator and the panelists.

"Are you comfortable?" Will Forte as Univision anchor Jorge Ramos asked Obama with obsequious concern. "Can we get you anything?"

"No. I'm fine," Armisen's Obama said with halting earnestness.

"They nailed it," she said after the sketch ran its course. She was convinced that for a brief, shining moment, America had been the recipient of some long overdue "truth-telling."

Little did we know that Hillary Clinton herself was speed-dialing nervous supporters across the country, encouraging them to watch the "SNL" routine online because it proved the media's bias against her.

Surely, nothing the candidate herself has done is responsible for her campaign's lousy performance in the last dozen or so contests. The pro-Obama media is obviously responsible for her campaign's missteps, arrogance, bad planning and cash shortfalls.

It's the media's fault that she has taken to mocking Obama's hope-and-reconciliation-drenched message as a messianic delusion, thus insulting millions of voters who prefer his optimism to her increasingly dark vision.

"[Obama's] riding a wave of euphoria," New York Times columnist and neocon talking head Bill Kristol said on Fox News Sunday two days ago. "She [Clinton] needs to puncture it. The way you puncture euphoria is reality, or to be more blunt -- fear. I recommend to Sen. Clinton the politics of fear."

As if on cue, a photo of Mr. Obama dressed as a Somali elder and posing with a tribal sheikh during a visit to rural Kenya in 2006 popped up on the Drudge Report yesterday, thanks to those concerned "ethnologists" at the Clinton campaign.

The Obama campaign has decried the circulation of the photo as a smear. Maggie Williams, Hillary's muscle, insists that it is the Obama campaign that is making the wearing of ethnic garb divisive.

Barack Obama should wear the outfit to the debate tonight and dare his opponent or the media to say anything. Millions of people would see that it isn't clothes or culture that make the man. It would be a powerful refutation of the politics of fear that Hillary Clinton has embraced in the twilight of her campaign. If nothing else, "Saturday Night Live" would have a lot of fun with it.

There are two events I plan to attend this week and I hope some of you will, too.

On Thursday at the University of Pittsburgh's Frick Fine Arts Auditorium at 7:30 p.m., historian Peter Linebaugh, professor of history at the University of Toledo, will read from his newly published "Magna Carta Manifesto."

Dr. Linebaugh is the first-rate historian who wrote "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century." He also co-authored "The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic" with Pitt's Marcus Rediker. I would walk over hot coals to hear this guy. It's free and open to the public.

On Saturday at 7 p.m., I'm emceeing the 40th anniversary celebration of the Community of Reconciliation at Soldiers and Sailors Military Museum & Memorial in Oakland.

Writer Anne Lamott, author of "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" and "Traveling Mercies" is the main speaker. The Renaissance Choir of Pittsburgh will lift spirits with beautiful music. I'm the only fly in the evening's otherwise beautiful ointment, but come anyway. Visit www.proartstickets.org or call 412-394-3353 for ticket information.