When the word "bitch" is in the news.

That's the case this week, thanks to "Saturday Night Live" and Tina Fey's defense of the female epithet and the way it's used against Hillary Clinton.

"Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch," said Fey, returning as a guest on Weekend Update.

"And let me say something about that: Yeah, she is, and so am I. And you know what? Bitches get stuff done," Fey said.

"Get on board. Bitch is the new black!"

The riff had feminists like me hooting and fist-pumping - and Zeisler braced for The Conversation.

She's cofounder of a magazine about pop culture that was named Bitch to help transform the word into a compliment.

"We hoped we could reclaim it for mouthy, smart women in much the same way that 'queer' had been repurposed by gay radicals," Zeisler wrote in a Washington Post article last fall.

But here it is, 12 years after the magazine's premier issue, a woman is running for president, and you don't have to be Hillary Clinton - or Andi Zeisler - to know that the mission has failed.

Yes, Zeisler told me yesterday, some women joined the movement to embrace our inner bitch.

"But at the same time, there's a stronger cultural force that has made the word even more entrenched as a bad word and has normalized it as a synonym for women."

It's certainly a synonym for Clinton, and it's used with impunity.

Witness the voter who asked John McCain at a rally how to "beat the bitch"; imagine if he'd used a racial epithet about Obama instead.

You think McCain would have laughed and said, "Excellent question"? Not a chance.

The last time I wrote about the bitch-word was, not coincidentally, also about Clinton.

It was 1995, when Newt Gingrich's mother confessed to Connie Chung on the air that her sonny boy thought the then-First Lady was, yup, a bitch.

But that constant characterization of Clinton has nothing to do with her history or her public persona or the legendary animosity some people feel towards her.

It's just the way powerful women are neutralized by a culture that cowers in the face of outspoken, assertive females.

"The very fact that there's a female candidate for president and she's automatically thought of as a bitch, when in fact nothing she's done has hewed to the classic understanding of 'bitch' - she's not petty, she's not mean-spirited. What she is is powerful and she says things people don't want to hear," Zeisler said.

Clinton has been called a bitch so often throughout her public career that she might consider adopting Fey's riff as a slogan.

Imagine: "Bitches Get Stuff Done" emblazoned on bumper stickers and campaign buttons.

Coffee cups with the initials BGSD on them. Sweatshirts, banners, flags with an icon of a multi-tasking woman: in a hard hat, holding a baby, running a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Clinton could enlist volunteers with a cheeky motto: "Don't just sit there and bitch; become one and get stuff done!"

Frankly, embracing the epithet might be better than the other scattershot strategies the campaign is pursuing at the moment, including possibly leaking inflammatory photos of Obama and berating him in press conferences.

But even Andi Zeisler no longer thinks the word "bitch" can be saved.

"There are so many gender-neutral insults you could use to say you don't like what a person stands for," she said.

"But when it comes to women, 'bitch' is the easiest one. It's always going to be the fallback."*

E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/porter