Bill Clinton - having destroyed Monica, your presidency, Al Gore in 2000, & Hillary's campaign - won't you please go home ala Bill Bailey(and shutup while you're at it).

In sum you are correct. It is difficult to envision such viciousness, but this in fact is the case. Clinton's statements on Bosnia adds to the list; she lied when it was clear to many observers that her version of events was false, and repeated it. No rational reason can be stated for this behavior as the same political point could have been made without the false remarks.

Your essential theme which is political destruction of Obama is the clear intent to Clinton's approach. A likely near term effect is to provide Republicans with more legislative control in the Congress than otherwise they would have, almost guarantees McCain the White House if she gets the nomination, and if Obama gets it Clinton's actions reduces his chance at winning the White House. Some have long said her goals is 2012, given recent events this appears plausible. She has never lead the contest in pledged delegates and likely never will; she is not entitled to the White House nor has see demonstrated that she has earned the right to compete for it.

If this continues past mid June, public rebuke by the majority of the Super delegates is the only recourse. The Democratic Party would be better without the Clintons than with them. The issue is sanity, not patriotism.

On the notion of evil. What has the Clinton done to expand the Democratic Party? As another has noted the Clintons know you when they need you.

I think that the latest Obama smear against President Bill Clinton will be self-defeating.
Obama already got all insane people who believe that Bill Clinton, is a racist, that Bill Clinton did to African-Americans what he did to Monica Lewinsky that the government gives Blacks the drugs, that Bill Clinton is playing the McCarthy card, that this country created AIDS and so on
Now Obama has to prove to undecided voters that he is a sane mainstream person, and he is not helping himself at all with his latest insane smear against our great president Bill Clinton.

There is a strange metric going on here: we now find that Obama has to keep quiet when the Clintons fire off veiled hints that he just isn't, you know, man enough, or patriotic enough, or something else enough to be president, like McCain is. If Obama just keeps quiet then he won't be accused of bashing the Clintons. Of course then he also will be assumed to be agreeing that he isn't man enough, etc. Now, somehow that just doesn't seem to mesh very well.

Bill Clinton is a very intelligent man and Hillary Clinton at least equals him in intelligence. Neither of them can logically be said to just accidentally stumble into these veiled hints about Obama's unworthiness, compared to McCain. So, logic says the hints are intended, planned, and delivered with malicious intent.

But, Obama just has to learn to stay quiet and not suggest that a fellow Democrat is insulting him. Otherwise......what?

One thing this long, drawn out Democratic nomination process has done is clarify the character of the two Democratic candidates, and exposed the vacuousness of the McCain/media campaign. Here's my speculations about how this year is going to work out, starting with the demonstrated character of the candidates as displayed through their campaigns, then some speculations regarding the course of the campaigns themselves.

Bush was clearly not of adequate character to be elected dog-catcher, and if anything he has grown less qualified each day in office. But to my surprise, Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she is dishonest and not trustworthy either. Bush has never demonstrated good character, but Hillary's appears to be born out of frustration and ambition.

I was born before the baby boomers, and I am going to work for the election of Obama, and I will try to locally repair some of the damage that Hillary and her husband are doing to the Democratic party.

If the superdelegates do their job, they will be acting similarly to limit the damage to the Democratic Party. It's far from perfect, especially here in Texas where it has been moribund since Bush defeated Ann Richards in 1994, and there is little likelihood that there could be anything worse for this nation than another four years of Republican Presidency.

We are headed into a Depression and it will be admitted by Summer. All the weasel-words (worst economy since the end of WW II - by a primary architect of this economy, Alan Greenspan)are being spouted because no one in the media wants to be the first to admit that means "Depression." Bush is doing a superb job channeling Herbert Hoover. ("The government does not want to overreact and cause more problems than it corrects.") The Great Depression got as deep as it did and lasted as long as it did because Hoover, advised by the same kinds of Wall Street Bankers as Bush and Hillary are listening to did nothing for three years. A deep depression this summer assures the election of a Democratic President, especially as Bush's inaction continues. (He'll finally be convinced to act when his advisers can no longer lie to him. Again, about Summer.)

But Hillary clearly does not have the character to be President. She is proving that by the way she is either controlling her campaign staff or, if they are off the reservation - which I don't believe for a second - it's a two level campaign as demonstrated by Rove and Atwater.

I'm not sure of Obama, either. He is a pig-in-a-poke candidate. But from what I have seen of his character, especially when contrasted to Hillary, he is the man we need in office next January.

That's assuming he lives that long. I haven't forgotten JFK, Martin Luther King, or RFK. (Nor do I trust the reports that Sen. Paul Wellstone was accidentally killed. To accept that I would have to trust the Bush administration. Anyone who trusts the Bush administration is a fool.)

I see this campaign as working towards the nomination of Obama, with the Republicans and their able assistants in the media trying to start a game of "Why don't you Democrats fight each other?" Florida and Michigan? Those were states that violated the rules that would let their Democratic primary votes count. That's a state problem, not one for the National Democratic Party to solve. The Democrats in those states need to remove the officials in those states who deprived them of the right to participate in the nomination process, and if they don't, its still a state problem. Only the Republicans and the media want it blamed on the national party.

After that is settled down, the campaign between Obama and McCain is going to be centered on the Depression, Iraq, Republican fear-mongering (Muslims attacking our shores in waves and supported by a man with a dark skin whose middle name is Hussein? Gimme a break.), racism, the Depression, and more racism like the current Rev. Wright crap.

The TV media is loving it. They're covering up McCain's age and lack of intellectual capacity to keep the conflict (ratings) going, just as they are currently covering up the fact that Hillary has lost the nomination and is too proud to admit it. I wouldn't be too surprised to find that she, like all Presidential candidates and Presidents, is in a vacuum-proof bubble listening only to her own supporters, and none of them want to be the first to say it is time to pull the plug.

So Hillary is giving the Republicans and the media a series of gifts by continuing her campaign. Face it. Barack has ten times the money she does, and she isn't keeping up. It's over for her. She needs to go back to the Senate and replace Harry Reid and try to remember why she became a Democrat after supporting Goldwater. Her intelligence and experience perfectly suit her for that role. In the meantime, I understand that voter's registrations in Pennsylvania are up amazingly. All those newly registered voters across the nation would have been blocked out of the general election. Now they just have to wake up that Tuesday and decide to vote after the three week media bombardment that is going to go on in October. If I were a Republican, and especially a movement conservative, these are exactly the voters I would have been trying to keep unregistered and otherwise kept from voting.

And if Obama doesn't survive the campaign this year, Hillay is the perfect replacement candidate. But that's all she has left.

Of course, last Summer I expected the candidates to be Giuliani and Clinton. So what do I know? [There are no indicators in the economy that consumers will somehow gain more money to spend to resurrect the economy, and the Republicans and blue-dog Democrats want to give all the government help to banks, businesses, and investors. That means no demand in a demand-driven economic downturn. No one will invest without predictable demand, so the money will leave the U.S. It's already too late to fix that this year even if it could be fixed, which I doubt. That I DO know.]

Richard xx: The Big Lie War came into my scope when the first CBS radio bulletin convinced me of its likelihood. That was in the Spring/Summer of 2002. It was at that point I began to scrutinize them all, including H. Clinton, whom I found wanting. I'm curious. Your comment primarily concerned economics. To what degree does the moral equation of the war concern you in comparison?

I assure you, this is not a holier than thou inquiry.

I agree completely with our friend "Hoppy" from my own former home state of California. The Clinton Partners in Pathos practically pioneered focus-group "lizard language" testing of subliminal say-but-not-say (i.e., imply-but-don't-state) soundbites. They never utter anything publicly political without knowing exactly which voting demographic they wish to influence and in what way. This doesn't make them "evil." It just makes them "slippery." Most professional politicians would consider that a compliment. Certainly, Deputy Dubya Bush has paid the Clintons the sincerest form of flattery by imitating them. Just think Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer, and Scott McClellan.

Unfortunately for Bawl-and-Pillory's belated interest in actually EARNING the Presidency (with Ross Perot no longer around to grandfather them into it as he did twice previously), Senator Obama and his campaign staff know their semantics as well as anyone. They know how to illuminate the "lizard language" appeals to the sub-rational by elevating the primitive-fear-and-loathing stimulus up into the the rational part of the public consciousness so that the intended voter/consumer victims can see the bogeyman stripped naked in full view and looking rather comically harmless in the sunlight's bright glare. In short, the Clintons consider us binary, either/or, "fight or flight" animals while Senator Obama treats us as citizens who can think and reason if presented with intelligent arguments. Therein lies a distinction so vast as to constitute a revolution in contemporary American consumption-politics.

As Hoppy says, the Clintons want to play the say-while-not-saying game uncontested. They want to hit below the consciousness belt while still maintaining "plausible deniability," as the Nixon crowd used to put it. And when caught out cheating, they want to claim with faux-innocence that "We never called you dirty fucking pinko hippies 'traitors' or 'communists,' so how can you claim that we did?" I've had to witness this kind of Nixon/McCarthy shit from Republicans since I was in elmentary school in the 1950s. So, I know exactly what General Tony McPeak meant. Old "two-for-the-price-of-one" know what he meant, too. They just got royally pissed when the Obama camp pointed it out to everyone else to see.

The Clintons have found themselves in a contest with an adversary who understands them. Just because Senator Obama would like to deal with us as people, doesn't mean that he doesn't understand how animal-training works. Skinnerian operant conditioning can often work to train people just as easily as it works to train pigeons. I served almost six years in the United States Navy, so I know. It took me years of hard work to learn how to think for myself again.

The end game approaches, though; so I'd like to take just a moment to leave the tactical semantics for a discussion of campaign strategy. America doesn't have one national presidential election; it has fifty of them. The same goes for the party primaries. "What's past is prologue," as Shakespeare said, and so forty states already have voted while only ten remain to do so. Nothing that will happen in the future changes what has already happened, at least among the pledged delegates chosen by the people in their individual state elections. I don't see Senator Obama's support deserting him, and he seems to continually pick up more of those "superdelegates" as time passes, so any reasonable pick-up of a few more delegates in any likely combination of a few more states puts him ahead at the end of the process. Therefore, all he really has to do is hang on and keep on keeping on. He has the score, the field, and the clock in his favor. He doesn't need to win everywhere and by huge margins like You-Know-Her does simply to finish not quite so far back in second place. He only has to win in a few more places while losing too badly in a few others. In a game of cumulative small totals, he only needs the greater sum total in the end. The individual pieces don't matter once the puzzle has fallen into place, revealing the final picture. Most people can see the picture clearly at this late date.

You-Know-Her has a "strategy," too, as far as I can tell. It appears likely that she will just try to knock over the table and insist that someone else come along to put the pieces back together again in her favor. She obviously feels entitled to do this. If Senator Obama and his voters object, You-Know-Her will then try to weep for sympathy and claim that those mean old men just won't let her have what she wants. This really doesn't look like much of a "strategy" but it remains for us to see if the Democratic Party will go along with her loser temper tantrum.

I know that I won't waver in my support for Barack Obama, because I want an articulate President of a literate country; not a pigeon trainer of a flock of fools. Nonetheless, if the Clinton Partners in Pathos don't stop running to John McBomb for validation of their "country-loving" Republican credentials, I may have to start writing checks to the Obama campaign. At least I feel fairly confident that he will know best how to not waste my donation.

Thanks again to "Hoppy" for the stimulating observations.

I think Bill Clinton wants to be President again. I was against limiting the Presidency to two terms but have changed my mind and think that term limits might be a good idea for Congress as well. If Hillary puts Bill back in the White House who really will be in charge? Of course, I might not have the correct information about who was making the decisions during Bill's two terms.

tnathan:

"... Clintons words and tone are so good, reasonable and measured, that by keeping this fake scandal alive, Obama is doing favor to Clinton."

I agree with you on that. I'm not saying the Obama camp is smart to push this issue. I was disputing your original comment which claimed (absurdly) that these are 'insane smears' against Bill Clinton. It's Bill Clinton who is choosing to suggest to voters that Obama is someone who may not love his country.

I'm not offended by the description of "aging Baby Boomers", since it's true. I are one, too.

But I'm not worried about being shoved out of the way. I'm for Obama in a big way. So generalizations are not all that useful.

This is a power struggle between the old and the new, though. I'm rooting for the new.

And by the way, in case you haven't noticed, terms like "cultist", "Obamaoids", and "Obamaistas" aren't exactly complimentary terms, either. I think it's probably a good idea for both sides' anonymous posters to take a good, long look in the mirror and shut up. It's a whole month until the Pa primary, and everyone is getting sick of the way this race is degenerating.

"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election between two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interests of the country..".

Does Bill Clinton believe there has ever been a presidential election in which that has not been the case? If asked, of course, he would say, "no". He probably has already.

Then why did he make such a idiotic remark?

Because he knows his wife's campaign is doomed, and is embittered.

Speaking as someone who rallied to The Office of the President when he was impeached, I say now, and for the first time, that I deeply begrudge being forced to support such a pissant.

Every credible survey of voters shows that its the baby boomers that have been Hillary's biggest supporters. Obviously, not all baby boomers--including me, incidently--support Hillary.

My point is this is also a battle for influence, not just the nomination. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, "No one can make you feel insulted without your consent". That's your choice.

It would be interesting to go back and see some of Bill's responses when folks were spending time talking about his draft-dodging and trips to Moscow.

Excellent quote from Eleanor Roosevelt about insult requiring one's own co-operation. Personally, I prefer the Buddha's admonition from about two-thousand-five-hundred years ago to the effect that "No one can give offense to anyone unwilling to take it." Something like that. Therefore, the Clinton Partners in Pathos cannot offend us if we refuse to grant them the power to do so.

On the other hand, Bawl and Pillory's conflicted political androgyny does exude a fairly Greek hint of entertaining drama as we await the fated retribution of the Furies who don't much care for over-reaching human arrogance.