The dominant story from Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa was not her comments about combating rape and sexual violence in Congo.  No, the top story was Clinton's testy response to a question about what her husband thought of Chinese business interests in Kenya Congo.

That exchange prompted a whole story in today's New York Times by Jeffrey Gettleman ("Clinton's Flash of Pique in Congo"). While that's already kind of sad, it turns out that the questioner misspoke; he actually meant to ask what Barack Obama thought of these deals. But either way, apparently, you get to psychoanalyze Hillary Clinton:

After the forum, her aides told the traveling press corps that there might have been a mistranslation, and that the student actually wanted to know the opinion of her boss, not her husband. But that interpretation did not dispel the controversy either, since it gave new life to the nagging question of whether Mrs. Clinton felt marginalized in the Obama administration.

See? If the question was really about Obama, you can take the answer she gave to the question about her husband and use it to gauge her true feelings about her role in the Obama administration. Neat trick.

Gettleman's piece concludes:

No matter the issues she was talking about--encouraging good governing, ending Africa's wars, lifting women up from their lowly position in a place like Congo. The interest in this trip, it seemed, was not about the problems facing Africa. It was about her.

As one journalist covering her trip put it: "She is a celebrity. We have a celebrity secretary of state. When you have a celebrity, you get celebrity coverage."

Well, it's nice to know that journalists covering U.S. foreign policy see their jobs this way.

The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama's desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn't going to work:

The administration's strategy--to open up a constructive dialogue with Venezuela and avoid being cast as Mr. Chavez's Yanqui foil--is reasonable; it is also the same strategy as was tried, unsuccessfully, by the previous two administrations.

It's hard to imagine that anyone believes that the Bush administration's Venezuela policy amounted to "constructive dialogue." The Bush administration--at the very least--seemed to approve of the April 2002 coup that briefly removed Chavez from power. And Bush policy after that disaster was hardly more "constructive."

Even more curious is the Post's suggestion that President Bill Clinton had similar trouble with Chavez. That sounds implausible; Chavez was elected in 1998 and took office the following year--leaving very little time for Clinton's generous attempts at dialogue to be rebuffed by Chavez. Chavez, for his part, told Post co-owner Lally Weymouth that he "entertained the best of relations with the Clinton administration." (See Extra!, 11-12/06.)

But when it's Hugo Chavez they're talking about, apparently, for the Post editorial page the facts don't matter.