THE White House is now calling them the "commentraitors" instead of the commentators. These are the former Clinton loyalists who worked at the White House and then quit to become TV pundits and write books showing the President as - well, let's say as less than perfect.
George Stephanopoulous, once the President's closest political aide, is the latest with his book, All Too Human. But he had already angered the President and his former White House colleagues in his role over the past year as a TV pundit for ABC.
Stephanopoulous writes sadly: "I heard that as far as Clinton was concerned, I was now a non-person - my name was not to be mentioned in his presence." It helps, of course, that he got a reported $2.75 million in an advance for his book.
Monica Lewinsky got her book out just before George and no one really knows what the President thinks about it or if he will even read it. He has "wished her well" but as George has revealed you have to decode the President's language.
When the President says he likes your tie he is really saying "f... you."
Others who have become non-persons at the White House where they once worked include two former press secretaries, Mike McCurry and Dee Dee Myers. Their frank comments on the Monica Lewinsky affair meant that in Margaret Thatcher's phrase, they are no longer "one of us".
Stephanoupolous recounts a stormy scene with Hillary Clinton while he was still in the White House when she shouted: "You were never one of us." But still she hugged him when he was leaving for good and said: "I love you."
Robert Reich, former Labour Secretary, a once close friend of the Clintons did not write a "kiss and tell" book in his Locked in the Cabinet, but he crossed the line when he expressed his disappointment with the President's rightward shift once in office.
Much lower depths in the White House version of hell are reserved for Gary Aldrich, an FBI agent who worked there in Clinton's first term and later published some lurid revelations in Unlimited Access; and Dick Morris, the disgraced political consultant who wrote Behind the Oval Office and has publicly speculated on the Clintons' sex life or lack of it.
It's not exactly fun working in the White House. Stephanopoulos almost had a nervous breakdown and had to go into therapy and medication. Former intern Monica also had to seek the psychiatrist's couch and Linda Tripp felt her life endangered over what she knew when in the White House.
Vince Foster, who looked after the Clintons' personal legal affairs, went into depression and committed suicide. The White House travel office was fired en masse. Other presidential aides are deep in debt over legal fees from being hauled before the grand jury.
A Washington Post writer has tried to analyse why so many Clinton loyalists fall out with him. "Are the former associates who tell their stories being loyal to the truth or disloyal to him?" John Harris asks.
Mike McCurry tells George magazine that he knows of "no one who is blindly loyal to Bill Clinton . . . They always see the faults, but they also try to explain what's so compelling about him."
Dee Dee Myers, who got some rough treatment from the President when she was press secretary, says that he does not inspire total loyalty. "Bill Clinton's most important goal is his survival and he's been willing to sacrifice individuals and issues to get what he wants."
But the other side of the coin is that people like Stephanopoulos, Myers and McCurry have done well from having worked for Clinton. It is their "insider" vantage point which has turned them into well-paid pundits and secured them huge book advances. Even the ultra-loyalists who have kept their silence when they left the White House have been able to make a lot of money because of their enhanced CV.
Stephanopoulos finds the charges of disloyalty from former colleagues "the most painful".
"I didn't think Clinton had `created' me, or that loyalty demanded defending behaviour I found abhorrent but Clinton had given me the opportunity of a lifetime and I did owe him some benefit of the doubt."
As the Lewinsky story was shaking Washington and the world just over a year ago Stephanopoulos as a TV pundit was asked what he thought of the man he had served for over five years. To the fury of the White House, he said that if the allegations were true, this could lead to "impeachment proceedings".
That is what happened some 10 months later but by then George was a White House non-person. "Now I felt like a dupe. I had done everything I could to make Bill Clinton president, and everything in my power to keep him there." But the scandal, he felt, cast a pall over the whole endeavour.
Thomas Friedman who covered the Clinton White House in the early years for the New York Times was amazed to find how little loyalty there was there. "All I could think was that while Mr Woodward needed `Deep Throat' to break the code of the Nixon administration, when it came to the Clinton administration he had `Deep Chorus' or `Deep Choir' - half the White House wanted to talk about their boss."
A Harvard political philosopher, Michael Sandel, puts it down to the end of the Cold War. When the President's finger was on the nuclear trigger, "leaks from the inner circle could imperil national security. But these days revelations about the President are now the stuff of entertainment and titillation, not a threat to national security."