Great post. I'm not sure exactly why Carville is drawing the line in the sand over this one. Its as if all Obama supporters are undeserving little shits who don't pay the proper respect to the Clintons. I'm not sure why approach it that way, its counter to everything the Democratic party represents.

I think, though, that it speaks to the overall "fight" mentality of the Clinton campaign. They see these elections as battles that serve only to keep them in power. Orating and parsing being weapons only in flash and sound, lacking meaning.

1. The message: Loyalty uber alles. We've seen how well that has worked out over the past 7+ years.

2. The meta-message: Never apologize, never concede. We've seen how well that's worked over the past 7+ years.

3. The messenger: Nothing communicates that Carville treats politics as sport better than the fact that he's married to Mary Matalin. They may scrap on the talk shows, but it's all in good fun. It's not like they're fighting over anything that has life-and-death consequences for anyone here or abroad. This sort of chumminess is a close relative of Carvillian "loyalty." What matters are the facts or the consequences-- we just have to all stay in bed together and protect the status quo.

What a buffoon. I can't stand Carville or his freaky, chattering skull-like visage. I hereby dub him Skeletor. Boo, Skeletor.

I think Carville's statement was fair. If you are a backbencher in Congress, and Bill Clinton, President of the United States, picks you to be Ambassador to the United Nations and then follows that up by making you Energy Secretary, it's implicit that you're not going to go out cut a deal to undermind the Campaign of his wife for the Presidency.

And even if you don't subscribe to the whole loyalty thing. I say yes, you do return Bill Clinton's every phone call. As a matter of fact you take everyone of Bill Clinton's phone calls. Ain't nothin goin on in New Mexico so important that you can't take a phone call from the President who made your career. Without Bill Clinton, Richardson wouldn't have gotten the .007% of the vote he got.

"I reject you, James,"

Right, articleman; but did you also denounce him?

Let me denounce him for you ;-)

Good post, articleman. The beauty of this is that between Carville and Richardson, not only does Richardson have the more honorable position from which to persuade the undecided SDs, he's gotta now be very highly motivated to get out and lobby on Obama's behalf within the Party. Nice work, Corporal Cueball.

We are in your own party and you reject us? One wonders what Obamaistas will do to folk that actually disagree with their views.

I fail to understand how no one ever objects to the branding of Obama as 'African-American' and as 'black' and nothing else.
The man has a white mother, so by definition he is as 'white' as he is 'black', and from the other side of the color spectrum real African-Americans could call him 'white'.
Not that his skin color makes any difference to me - I think he's the most qualified to lead the country, period.
But I suspect that categorical 'black' label puts him at a disadvantage in the subconscious of not a few white US voters.

That flash and sound metaphor about the Clintons. That's exactly it! They're so darned noisy!! They are ALWAYS FIGHTING . . . fight, fight, fight ,fight all the time. They fight when there's something to fight about and they fight just to be fighting. And they don't care how dirty they have to get to win--hence their thugs had the temerity to think they could threaten and intimidate The Speaker of the House of the Congress of the United States this week. What boggles the mind is that they were so sure that it would work that they never gave a thought to the fact that The Speaker might not be a political coward, that she might publish the letter and that the rest of us might not feel helpless. In that one act, they activated a huge contingency of people who have just learned that we can raise vast sums of money and effect enormous changes for the good if we work together. I suppose we could thank them because they surely have given a boost to our unification against dirty politics. So, thank you Mrs. Clinton. Now, please go home. No more dirty tricks.

Judas, James, and Scooter, indeed! Trick, or treat? Read on.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0605071libby10.html

Surely this is the best of all possible worlds!

What scares me about Carville's piece is his emphasis on loyalty above all else. That's W in spades.

Carville's comment was a Roveian piece of cynicism. Who knows what he really believes, moreover, who cares? The point was that it "controlled the narrative" regarding the Richardson nomination a bit. He correctly assumed that the boob-punditry would bite on the tabloid, mud-slinging dimension and give it equal airplay to the Richardson speech. Who cares about November? Who cares about doing a hatchet job on a recent Presidential candidate of your own party, if it controls the spin and keeps the Clinton fantasy alive? This is a desparate maneuver, which of course, none of the press idiocracy point out. Use of the politics of personal destruction is only one of many ways in which the Clinton machine has blurred the line between Republican and Democrats to the point where it is hard to say what the difference is, or what being a Democrat stands for. I don't fault Carville for astutely reading the pathetic state of what passes for "journalism" these days. One interesting question is whether you believe he was acting on his own.