In Brief: Someone Tell Hillary Clinton That Barack Obama Isn't Part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy:
Let's be grown-ups here for a second. When Bill Clinton said, "The whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," he was talking about Barack Obama's stand on the Iraq War, not Obama himself. When Obama said during a debate that Hillary Clinton was "likeable enough," it was a stupid attempt at a joke in response to an idiotic question on Clinton's likeability. And, yeah, you know what? No shit that Martin Luther King couldn't actually sign anything into law, that only Lyndon Johnson could do that in 1964 since JFK was RIP'ing. Whatever the hell Senator Clinton was trying to say by bringing it up, it was simply the statement of a patently obvious fact.

People are the sum totals of their treatment by the world. When you adopt a dog that's had the shit beaten out of it again and again by its first owner, no matter how gentle and kind you are to it, that poor beast's got scars that'll never heal. And sometimes when you reach your hand out to pet it, it'll recoil like it's about to get smacked once more. Or it might even lash out, maybe bite, maybe get back at that motherfucker that pounded it day after day, even if that motherfucker isn't in the picture anymore.

Thus it is with the Clintons. Back in the 1990s, there was a vast right-wing conspiracy out to destroy Bill, often through savagely ripping into Hillary. That slavering horde is drooling puddles at the idea of another President Clinton to sink their decayed teeth into. So, yeah, the Clintons are always ready to arch their backs and attack in self-defense. It's the only way that Bill Clinton's presidency survived.

But in Bill's sad self-debasement of his legacy as his anger flashes again and again in going at Obama, in Hillary's depressingly content-free interview with Tim Russert, whose Meet the Press interviews with candidates have nearly solely been about cult of personality than shit that actually will have an effect on people's lives, the Clintons are reverting to that form, seeing the persecuting Scaifes and Starrs where there are but low-level operatives, at best, and phantoms at worst. They can't help it, even if they should, even if they could, because it's what we did to them for so very long.

The slow creep of sexism and racism into the Democratic nomination campaign stinks of Rove. More on that tomorrow.