From CNN's The Situation Room Wednesday afternoon:



A few highlights:

I never, ever heard a word of public complaint when Mr. Obama said Hillary was not truthful, and how character was poll driven, when he had more pollsters than she did. When he put out a hit job on me, at the same time, he called her the Senator from Punjab, I never said a word. And I don’t care about it today. I’m not upset about it.

No, of course he's not upset about it.  'In fact, let me describe everything they did to me that I didn't like, just to show you how not upset about it I am.'  I'm not a psychologist, but Bill appears to be a little upset about it.

The only thing I pointed out was that there was substantially no difference in her record than his on Iraq, and that he had said in 2004 there was no difference between his position and President Bush. And he said that was somehow dishonest, but he never answers how it’s not accurate. So this is crazy. This rhetoric is getting a little carried away here.

Wasn't it Bill Clinton that said, "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," in describing Barack Obama and his supposed stance on the war in 2004?  Who made Bill Clinton the rhetoric judge, especially when it's usually Bill who initiates the ramping up of the rhetoric in the first place?  

And let me remind you, my ultimate answer is this. There are still two people around her who marched with Martin Luther King, and risked their lives – John Lewis and Reverend Andrew Young. They both said that Hillary was right, and the people who attacked her were wrong, and that she did not play the race card, but they did. So I don’t have to defend myself from Dick Harpootlian.

This is classic Bill Clinton.  He's being accused of playing the race card, a la Lee Atwater, by Dick Harpootlian.  So Bill responds with appropriate disdain by playing the race card, citing John Lewis and Andrew Young, two high profile African-American civil rights activists and Congressmen, as if to say those from the Obama camp who have attacked Hillary of playing the race card were wrong, so says my two African-American friends who would know.  

I’ll just refer you to John Lewis and Andrew Young, and let him go get in an argument with them about it. Let him go get in an argument with Dolores Huerta, one of the founders of the Farm Workers, against what happened in Nevada.

Bill is not just playing a race card, he's playing several.  In fact, he's working on an inside straight.  Not only should you go talk to my two African-American friends who say we're not playing the race card, but go talk to my Latino migrant farmworker union friend, Dolores Huerta. 

And the final thing I’d like to say is you’re asking me about this, and you sat through this whole meeting. Not one, single, solitary soul asked about any of this, and they never do. They’re feeding you this because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for.

Ah, well, the resurrection of the vast right wing conspiracy, the Bill and Hillary Clinton Borg, which has now taken hold with ultra-liberal Barack Obama, and is sucking in the gullibly secretive, conservative news outlet, CNN.  If people knew of Richard Nixon's level of paranoia going in, it's hard to imagine him getting elected in the first place, let alone being re-elected.  Bill and Hillary have put paranoia on display several times from within the White House in the 90's, during her Senatorial career, and on the current campaign trail.  Why in the world would we want another four years of this? 

But this hurts the people of South Carolina, because the people of South Carolina are coming to these meetings, and asking questions about what they care about. And what they care about is not going to be in the news coverage tonight, because you don’t care about it. What you care about is this. And the Obama people know that. So they just spin you up on this, and you happily go along. The people don’t care about this. They never ask about it. And you are determined to take this election away from them, and that’s not right. That is not right. This election ought to belong to those people who are out here asking questions about their lives.

Alas, he lied again.  It wasn't his final word.  He shifted seamlessly into the 'I feel your pain' section.  It's hard to remember a bigger narcissist that ever occupied the Oval Office.  Is there seriously anyone out there who believes that Bill Clinton cares one whit about what South Carolinians care about?  He doesn't.  He's expertly trying to manipulate the media by accusing them of allowing themselves to be manipulated by his opponent.  And make no mistake about it.  Barack Obama is his opponent every bit as much as Hillary's.  

Harpootlian calls me Lee Atwater? I spent all my life fighting those people? And he wasn’t in Nevada. So he’s having a fight not with me, but with Dolores Huerta, who founded the Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. He should ask her. She was there. He doesn’t care what happened. He just knows he can call you a name, and you guys’ll cover it. They did not ask about this, and you don’t care what your own people care about. They care about what happens to the American people. That’s one thing John Edwards was right about in the debate.

So I'm confused. Bill is either saying he spent all his life fighting Lee Atwater, or people who play the race card as political dirty tricks.  In either case, he's wrong.  Lee Atwater's biggest claim to fame had nothing to do with Bill Clinton's Arkansas career, or his eight years in the White House.  In fact,  Atwater was ill and repented of his political actions in 1990, almost two years before he would become president.

He could also be implying that all Republican politicos and Lee Atwater are one and the same, that they all use dirty tricks, which is another dangerous thing for Clinton to say, especially with people like Harold Ickes, Bob Shrum, James Carville and Paul Begala around.  

As Christopher Hitchens said so well on Hugh's show Wednesday, 

And it’s interesting, too, because it shows he is completely out of control. In other words, he has a lot of good friends who keep telling him, ‘Bill, you must stop with this. You can’t just ramble and rant on in this mad way like some tenth rate huckster instead of behaving like a former president and chief executive of the United States.’ And he knows that they’re right, but he can’t not help himself. And it’s the same with everything else.  

He’s just a prisoner of his terrible appetites and his egomania. 

Kudos to CNN for airing this exchange.  Bill Clinton continues to prove himself to be a beacon of hope to the Republican Party that despite a bruising primary on our side, the Clintons will remain one of, if not the, single biggest unifying factor in American politics, leading to continued Republican control of the White House for the foreseeable future.