Up until now, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, have always been reported as two aging leftists unable to stand each other. "Friends now, trouble ahead," reads some of the headline of a 2016 Politico news story.

Get a load of how those times have changed, according to NBC News:

The two women have kept a line of communication open since the Massachusetts senator decided to run for president — though only a conversation around the time of Warren's launch has been previously reported — according to several people familiar with their discussions who spoke to NBC on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of private interactions.

And the pair have been talking a lot, to the point of Hillary Clinton seemingly backseat-driving the Warren campaign. According to NBC:

It’s hard to know exactly how many times they’ve reached out to each other — or precisely what they’ve discussed — in part because neither camp wants to reveal much of anything about their interaction and in part because they have each other's phone numbers, and there are many ways for two high-powered politicians to communicate that don’t involve their staffs.

One source was aware of just one additional call between Warren and Clinton since then. But a person who is close to Clinton said the contact has been substantial enough to merit attention, describing a conversation between the two as seemingly recent because it was "front of mind" for her.

Very typical Clintonian - which is to say behind the scenes and non-transparent.

And while the two share the same left-wing extremism, and their blonde-white-woman brand of pantsuit suburban socialism (Hillary was always much farther left than her husband Bill), the Warren relationship is probably more about exerting political muscle.

Warren may still not be able to stand Clinton, but Clinton is useful to Warren for rigging the Democratic nomination.

According to NBC:

More important, an explicit or implicit blessing from Clinton could help Warren if she finds herself battling for delegates and superdelegates at a contested Democratic convention next summer.

"Hillary Clinton would absolutely have influence over a number of delegates to this convention," said Deb Kozikowski, the vice chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

So instead of Democratic voters choosing their candidates freely, quite unlike the 2016 fiasco where Hillary Clinton's operatives rigged the nomination process against Bernie Sanders, Clinton is doing the same thing she did in 2016, putting her thumb on the scale of Democratic party politics, this time for a willing and ambitious Elizabeth Warren, to put the fix in on delegates. That ought to go over real well for Democratic turnout once they realize another fix is in.

Meanwhile, Warren is now useful for Clinton, who still wants to be president, but now can't be. In Warren, she now has a useful puppet for getting her agenda and surrogates into the White House. That would not only get her the socialism she craves, it would also protect her from the long arm of the law.

The personnel issue is interesting because "the slots" have always been of paramount importance to Hillary, ever since she fired the White House travel office staff because "we need the slots."

Back when the pair couldn't stand each other, Warren was backseat-driving to Clinton's campaign, vetoing Clinton's "people" in a battle over "slots." Politico reported:

But there’s tension on the horizon: If Clinton wins, Warren has promised to rattle the gates of a Clinton White House — as she did to President Barack Obama — pushing for progressive, anti-Wall Street crusaders to fill posts as top economic advisers and, most importantly to her of all, Treasury secretary.

Warren and her staffers have already been feeding to the Clinton campaign lists of individuals they would consider appropriate for those posts — and signaling in unsubtle terms those whose appointment they would fight to block.

The reverse could be just as true, with now Clinton backseat-driving who the appointments would be, who's in, who's out, as the pair plan a socialist takeover.

None of this is good news for the Democrats. A jurassic political powermonger, and a far-left fake Indian trying to come off as having sane ideas, doesn't represent a bright new generation with fine fresh ideas, just the same old machine politics, rendered worse by extremism.

If the Democratic emails get hacked again this year, oh, what a story those emails of this alliance of two leftists who secretly loathe each other might just tell.

Image credit: Tim Pierce, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0