Here’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?