Hillary Clinton, Make It Stop:
Bill Clinton is wrong. In West Virginia, when he defended Hillary Clinton's increasingly quixotic (read: "delusional") attempt to win the Democratic nomination, he said, "I don't think any of these people oughta be asked to resign. All these guys that say bad things about any other campaign, they say, 'Should they resign?' My answer is no; they're repeating party line. They oughta stay right where they are."

That's wrong. As is every other pundit who has said something to the effect of "Hey, what's wrong with having candidates slug it out," with the notion that it toughens them up for the big game with the Republicans. No, it's just fucking wrong.

Go back to the campaign between Bill Bradley and Al Gore in 2000. It was February 21, in a debate at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, one of those wonderful sucking up fests that candidates do. Bradley was trying to rough up Gore, and he went on the attack - on the goddamn issues, like this about gun laws: "What you see is what I call an elaborate Gore dance...It is a dance to avoid facing up to your conservative record on guns." Bradley also called Gore the "poster child for the NRA" while in Congress. Gore labeled this a "personal attack." But it wasn't. That was just a bruising few punches on Gore's record.

What Hillary Clinton is engaged in now, and what she has drawn Barack Obama into, is a boxing match just before one of them has to face a knife fight. When Clinton, was sitting next to chief cocksucker of the brigade of cocksuckers, Richard Mellon Scaife, she said how she would have walked out if it had been her preacher saying some of the things that she wants to make sure white people remember Jeremiah Wright said. Sitting down with Scaife at his Pittsburgh newspaper was a betrayal of all those who she and her husband whipped into a lather over the vast right-wing conspiracy against them. It was also an attempt to turn that machine on Obama so that he gets what she's gotten.

Bill Clinton would be right if this was a battle over what issues will represent the party in the general election. But it's not. It's a Rovean game of gotcha, and it's playing right into Republicans' hands.

The Rude Pundit's sick of this stupid mutually assured destruction that Clinton started. And it's a goddamn shame, as he's said several times, because Clinton's record in the Senate, Iraq vote and a few others aside, is really pretty damn good. He doesn't wanna hate Hillary Clinton, but she and her increasingly manic husband are making a damn fine case for it.

By the way, the other wonderful thing Bill Clinton said in West Virginia was "I don't give a riff about all this name-calling that's going on. They've been going on ever since Iowa. I've heard them say all these things about her. Apparently it's okay to say bad things about a girl." The implication being that it's not okay to say bad things about a black guy. Does the patent insanity of that statement need to be explored any more deeply?