He sat in the corner of the classroom trying to hide in plain sight with a sickened, scared look on his wide, white face. He had spent the morning deflecting the accusation hurled at him by his fifth-grade colleagues: Alan smells like pee.

It was my first week at my new elementary school, and I remember it like it happened last week. The poor kid might have actually smelled that way; I didn’t really sense it at the time. As Sarah Silverman attests, some people never get over the bed-wetting, and maybe he didn’t get around to washing up. Or maybe his house had an old incontinent cat. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I was just glad for a moment that the little monsters’ wrath that day wasn’t directed at the new kid.

And I will never forget what his face looked like.

There’s a tone that’s struck when a person that age makes that sort of statement about somebody. It’s the tattler’s inflection. First goes the up-talky “aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh,” then the echoed up-talky statement of the accusation. “Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, Alan smells like peeeeeeeeee.” That kind of thing.

So that’s what made me think of Alan. Because I can’t help but feel that I spend a lot of time these days hearing that inflection from grown-ups as well.

Like a few weeks ago, when the story broke that the Secretary of State had banged her head and was diagnosed with a life-threatening injury as a result that rendered her ineligible to spend any length of time in a pressurized cabin at 30,000 feet plus.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh,” they said. “She’s faking a blood clot in her head to get out of appearing before the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committeeeeeeeeee.”

Well, lookie there. Look where Hillary Clinton was at 9 a.m. this morning. She was sitting in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I also understand that when she was done testifying, Mrs. Clinton stood up and quoted Drew Barrymore in the film Charlie’s Angels: “And that’s called KICKING YOUR ASS!”

But remember, a couple of weeks ago, the lady was too much of a fraidy-cat to sit in that chair. And she and the entire State Department and the White House and who knows how many doctors at New York Presbyterian Hospital and not to mention the Board of Directors of that, the sixth-best hospital in the United States, were all involved in a conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton from facing off with the likes of John McCain and Rand Paul.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”

The latest case of Alan Smells Like Pee is involving the issue of guns. As we reviewed yesterday, the latest tattle is that Barack Obama is going to single-handedly come to every doorstep in the United States and demand that you haul all of your armaments onto the lawn for him to personally confiscate. But nothing could be farther from the truth; the only true regulation of gun ownership must be vetted in Congress and in my opinion is not likely to reach escape velocity from the House of Representatives.

And yet, every gun enthusiast around is all like “Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! Obama’s gonna grab all of our gunnnnnnnnnssssss!”

He’s not going to take your guns. And Hillary Clinton did not fake her illness to get out of answering questions. And President Obama did not try to indoctrinate your children. And there are no FEMA camps. And there are not 78 to 81 members of Congress who are die-hard communists. And President Obama is not a Muslim (not that it ought to matter as the Constitution explicitly reads: “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”).

So I woke up this morning seeing the news that Mrs. Clinton had made her way to the hotseat, having known previously that the State Department had sent two deputies in her stead and that, in fact, this Secretary of State had taken a vigorous buck-stops-here stance about this event, and I wondered, where are all the people who were spreading this manure a few weeks ago, where are they now to say, wow, I guess I was wrong about that, sorry for spreading such garbage all around like that, won’t happen again? Where oh where are they?

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, Alan smells like peeeeeeeeee.”