Clinton spooks the freepers , Wolcott weighs in, Digby on Drum

I was gonna put this up last night, but figured y'all would like to read it there first. As with Town Hall, CNN is something that could damage my beautiful mind. And unless you just crawled out from underneath your rock, you are probably aware that Bill Clinton is soon to go under the knife for arterial bypass surgery. The usual suspects, saw conspiracy. A new and welcome addition to the 'sphere, found parody. Our good friend Digby was watching a little CNN (so I didn't have to, the BM ya know).

*Sigh*

CNN is implying that Clinton must have covered up his health problems while he was in office.

Now, passing out eating pretzels and falling flat on your face several times while in office certainly doesn't merit such scrutiny. I'm awfully glad they aren't doing that.


On other hand, Tweety just said the race is over, so I'm going down to the beach.

Good to see that CNN is still up in the grill of power, unafraid to demonstrate that the Whoreth estate is still good for a walk around the block. I think this retroactive speculatude is a fine thing, and I am sure that the Whoreth estate will get on about the pretztel thingy in, I don't know, 5 or 6 years. Next we'll enjoy a bit of snark from the welcome new addition, James Wolcott's Blog.

With the transparent, calculating cynicism that marked his two terms in office, Bill Clinton chose to burglarize the majesty of President Bush's Churchillian convention address by conveniently entering the hospital for heart surgery. Unable to yield the spotlight, Clinton clutched his chest like Fred Sanford and called 911 in a desperate bid to deny Bush the "big mo" he was beginning to enjoy after addressing the nation last night from a mound of skulls at Madison Square Garden, each skull beautifully handcrafted by Thai sweatshop workers

Now that's just crafty, snarky, bloggy doupleplus goodness.

Now I used to spend a fair amount of time at Keven Drums old place, but grew tired of the troll infestation and his occasionally awkward lurches to the center. Digby examines a fine example of this annoying (to me at least) tendancy. From Digby, Drum starts off the party:

It's fine to hammer away on domestic issues with specific target groups. It's fine for John Edwards to focus on the two Americas. But anyone who thinks the primary message of Kerry's campaign should be anything other than national security is just deluding themselves. To paraphrase James Carville, "It's 9/11, stupid."

In fact, it's a no-brainer: somehow Kerry has to convince people that he can be trusted with national security and Bush can't and if he doesn't, he's going to lose. But I guess he still doesn't get that.

I'm finally beginning to think Mickey Kaus might be right: Kerry has spent too much time inside the liberal cocoon. It's going to cost him the election if he keeps it up.

I think that's a bit premature since nobody's seen the ads yet. It may be 9/11, stupid, but in my view, there is no reason that a harshly negative fear campaign cannot be waged using economic issues as one of the symbols of Bush's frightening recklessness.(If the ads are bunch of namby-pamby,kumbaya nonsense with Kerry and adorable children, then I'm discouraged too.)

The fact is that war (not 9/11 particularly, although Bush would like that) is the subtext of the entire campaign no matter what we actually say. All criticism, all negative ads all harsh rhetoric plays to insecurity about Bush's leadership --- and leadership is defined at this moment in history as wartime leadership.

[....]

As Kevin said, if we are going to wage a campaign of fear, it's got to be believable and Bush as some kind of scheming warmonger who wants to blow up the world is not believable. What is believable is Bush driving the ship of state into an iceberg because he's reckless and out of control.

To make that case, I think it's perfectly reasonable to use economic issues as well as national security issues to illustrate that point. At the end of the day, if the message is that Bush is a dangerous man for the health of this nation, it doesn't really matter what the subject is. People will make the association with national security all by themselves.