Enough Already!
by sarabeth at 5:25 pm on April 18th, 2008 in 2008 Presidential, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, HillaryHere’s more drivel from the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary. It’s getting so you can count on them to come up with irritatingly idiotic stuff every so often.
After the debate opportunity that ABC News comprehensively butchered on Wednesday night, the consensus of people without an axe to grind has overwhelmingly been that ABC News set a new low that night which may well stand for all time.
Putting it in a nutshell, ABC News spent way too much time on stupid “gotcha” questions about controversies that had already been pretty fully aired, and very little time by comparison on any substantive issues.
Apparently, no one put it in a nutshell for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
After Barack Obama criticized the moderators for not asking a single substantive question for the first half of the debate, Bill Clinton accused Obama yesterday of “whining.” And he went on to castigate Obama in pejorative schoolyard language: “If you don’t want to play, keep your uniform off.”
(Bill Clinton came out of his presidency with a certain amount of stature and goodwill—among Democrats, at least. That stature grew over the last few years, as his presidency came to look even more impressive by comparison to Bush’s pathetic and ignominious performance. But since Hillary Clinton started to fall behind in the campaign, Bill has continued to act and speak in ways that have diminished his stature. It’s already got to the point that we’re hardly surprised any more when he says stupid, dishonest, mean-spirited stuff.)
Hillary Clinton rushed in to out-Bill Bill today:
“I know he spent all day yesterday complaining about the hard questions he was asked,” Clinton said. “Being asked tough questions in a debate is nothing like the pressures you face inside the White House.”
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor and a friend of both the Clintons for forty years, who endorsed Obama today — and presumably enshrined himself forever in the Clintons Hall of Wrath (remember Bill “Judas” Richardson?) — got it exactly right, I think:
We have three terrible traditions that we’ve developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn’t possibly believe and doesn’t possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I’ve seen growing in Hillary’s campaign. … It’s old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical.
Is it that hard for this lady to differentiate between a complaint about hard questions and a complaint about inane questions? If yes, that speaks to judgment. If no, that speaks to dishonesty. Either way, do we really need or want four more years of poor judgment and/or dishonesty? Do we really want a President who will run the government like Hillary Clinton has been running this campaign? Could we possibly be that masochistic as a nation?
matt wrote:
reich has been out of the clinton camp ever since he left the cabinet.
surely bill clinton, whose office is in harlem, (home of killa cam himself) should know that this requires a “nullus”
Posted 18 Apr 2008 at 5:47 pm ¶
sarabeth wrote:
presumably, you also keep your uniform off if you do want to play.
Posted 18 Apr 2008 at 8:11 pm ¶
Greg wrote:
I’m not convinced that her campaign tactics are out of line, she did not create these controversies, and she would have been stupid not to capitalize on them.
Obama has the big time case of self inflicted “foot in mouth” disease, along with newly released evidence of some very very shady personal and political connections.
ABC was very controversial for asking the questions they did, but after 22 debates, we know what they think about issues, and I think devoting half of the debate to questions which are also on the minds of voters was not out of bounds.
Hillary did not ask for this, and you can’t expect her to stand by while this train wreck happens. If it is going to be Obama vs. McSame, his personal relationships and degrading words could cost the democrats the election.
Please don’t listen too much to Big Media’s negative hype about her. Hillary has always been a fighter, and she is on our side!
Posted 21 Apr 2008 at 6:59 am ¶
sarabeth wrote:
Congratulations! You have successfully managed to miss (or ignore) the whole point of the post.
Which was that Obama did not whine or complain about unfair questions, he criticized the moderators for focusing on inanities.
Bill and Hillary dishonestly distorted what Obama said. Maybe you need 4 more years of dishonesty, I sure as hell don’t.
Posted 21 Apr 2008 at 7:17 am ¶
Greg wrote:
Sarabeth, I must say that even though I agree with you most of the time, I have a hard time seeing malicious intent from her. She did not make up Rev. Wright, or bitter-gate, or William Ayers, and did not distort anything he said, his actual words actually said it all. Not a good choice of words for somebody with supposedly good judgment.
Obama regularly tries to brush off character questions as irrelevant, but the fact of the matter is that in a general election scenario, these things do matter. People can be swayed to vote against their best interests because of character questions, and republicans will undoubtedly exploit his relationships with Ayers, Wright, Rezko, Auchi, and Khalidi.
Information from the Rezko trial has come out that despite the fact that he has said he doesn’t recall having met Auchi, a witness in the trial placed him at a party in Auchi’s honor at Rezko’s mansion, and the Chicago Sun Times reported that not only did he meet him at Rezko’s house, but that Obama gave a toast to Auchi.
He also says he did not support a ban on hand-guns, but his hand-writing is on one of the 2 questionaires which were filed seperately by his campaign. Why would his campaign on 2 seperate occasions say this was his position if it were not, and why would he say he never saw that questionaire when his handwriting is on it?!?!
He also claimed in the debate that he had not gone negative against Clinton, when his campaign had in fact been campaigning negatively for quite some time.
My point being that Obama doesn’t have much room to talk about her being a liar, he not only talks out of both sides of his mouth, but he is a hypocrit about negative campaigning.
Posted 21 Apr 2008 at 8:15 am ¶
sarabeth wrote:
Once again, you’re ignoring what the post is about, and sliding off into a general attack on Obama.
Care to respond to the substance of what I said in my post? How is Bill and Hillary claiming that Obama whined about the hard questions he was asked not deliberate dishonesty? (And please don’t slide off into Obama has also been dishonest here, here and here; that’s no response.)
And, oops, she did it again, didn’t she? First, Obama made a loose statement:
And along came Hillary, right on cue, to distort what Obama said:
The funniest part, of course, is that if anyone has been cheering on McCain, it’s Hillary. Remember her repeated certification of how he has the experience necessary to be president, how he passes the “commander-in-chief threshold” while Obama doesn’t?
Any resemblance between her and a lying hypocrite is purely coincidental, huh?
Posted 21 Apr 2008 at 9:08 am ¶