The Mean Season
I’m actually going to give Chris Wallace a bit of a break on the whole Clinton Goes Postal thing. I’m not entirely buying the notion that Clinton’s explosion wasn’t staged. I suspect Bubba had been waiting for an opportunity to let the fur fly, and the smirking Wallace was looking for an opportunity to let him. I think both men did what they wanted to do, and my intelligence is a bit insulted both by Wallace’s claims of surprise and the Clinton camp’s phony outrage.
It’s just the mean season. And it’s going to get meaner. The GOP seems to be against the ropes (Rep. Mark Foley's stupid, stupid, stupid dirtymail with some pimple-faced page being the latest example), but I believe in the magic of Karl Rove, whom I believe to be a political warlock. This smells like a GOP rope-a-dope, like the balance of the apparently damaging NIE report (or, perhaps an updated NIE report) will be released in the ninth hour, and we’ll all feel good about Iraq again, or they’ll announce bin Laden’s capture (of course, my cynicism suspects they’ve had him all along).
The Democrats., being as dumb and clueless as ever, seem to be phoning it in, confident of a November GOP bloodbath. They’re more or less letting Clinton lead the charge (which makes a kind of sense since he’s their biggest name), but Bubba isn’t running for anything. And Rove likely salivates every time Clinton speaks because, every time he does he points out how much less eloquent and effective Hilary is, that Hillary is little more than a shell for Clinton Term 3. she’s the LaToya Jackson (okay, maybe she’s the Janet, but I don’t think Janet can sing, either) of the Clinton camp. Worse, I can’t name any other prominent Democrats running.
Even worse, the Democrats continue to stagger along without presenting any believable alternative to the Bush Crazyman Doctrine (is it just me, or does Bush seem ever more crazed and desperate every time I see him? He reminds me of Anthony Hopkins in the third act of Nixon). By now, the Dems should have come up with their own version of the GOP Contract With America, a comprehensive and feasible list of reasons we should give them power. It seems like every Democrat is running on the platform of I Am Not A Republican, which, honestly, is good enough for me, but I don’t have much confidence things will change much regardless of who wins in November.