Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Stupidity that is CDS

Paul Krugman takes a whack at the latest round of CDS:

Clinton business issues

Everywhere you look, there’s stuff about Bill Clinton’s donors and all that, often with the implication that there must inherently be something dirty going on, because, well, just because.

But I guess that’s just the way things are. After all, do you remember all the grief President Bush got over his family’s questionable business ties?

Neither do I.

Any blogger who participates in the continued hunting of President Clinton by the right wing and the MSM rather than helping to shoot down the bullshit demonstrates that he's no different than Matt Drudge. Period.

The pernicious effect of CDS is that it has convinced vast swaths of the chattering class that the source of corruption in American politics is the Clintons, and that anything except them in a position of power is preferable to either of them having any authority, even if that means Republicans or a Democrat who insists on keeping the political opposition with their hands in the cookie jar.

The disconnect between their hysterical paranoia and reality would be amusing if it was not continually endangering the nation.

Without CDS, would we have had W in the White House? I think not.

Anglachel

5 comments:

Mike J. said...

I'll go on a limb here and say Hillary will not be offered the job. The whole "vetting" question tells me that will be the excuse someone else will become the SecState, because it is received wisdom that Bill Clinton is essentially a crook and therefore by definition incapable of passing a serious vetting process.

It may well be that Obama has seriously considered Hillary at some point, quite possibly promised her the position in return for her campaign support, but now that The Village has fired its warning shots, I think he is furiously backpedalling.

Historiann said...

Most of the people in the blogosphere who are suffering from full-blown CDS are either ex-Republicans who fully enjoyed (in Joe Conason's words) "the hunting of the President" in the 1990s, like Kos and Huffington. Or, like WKJM, they were so-called liberal war hawks in 2002 and 2003 who are ashamed at how easily Bush played them. Just as ex-smokers are sometimes the most annoying anti-smoking evangelists, and ex-drinkers are very self-satisfied by their own sobriety, so they have given their blogs over to punishing Clinton for her AUMF vote. (Funny how they never manage to work up the same ire over any of the other Senators who ran for president in 2004 and 2008 who, with the exception of Bob Graham, all voted like Clinton on the AUMF.)

I saw a clip on TalkLeft today of (of all people!) Bill Maher calling out Arianna Huffington's CDS, and telling her that any "drama" of the Clintons isn't the fault of the Clintons, it's the fault of the media people who cover them and who (in his words) "have no life" and like to invent drama about the Clintons for sport. Take it for what it's worth, because Maher has showed himself to be a huge pig this year when it comes to women pols, but he told it like it is and defended H. Clinton as supremely qualified to be Sec'y State.

Historiann.com

Falstaff said...

As you memorably noted -- http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/11/dignity.html -- it's the clearest mark of Hillary's remarkable character that she has truly and entirely risen above these miserable fucks and the smug, pathological hatred they spew and in which they themselves wallow.

Transcendence is a dish best served at body temperature.

Koshem Bos said...

History will do justice for the Clintons. Meanwhile hate turns the Democrats to GOP like creatures.

Hate is not a sport; it's a fatal cancer. Obama was elected on hate and not on change. He'll go to the books as a hate president. This what historians are after. He could have stop it early, instead he showed the finger.

nihil obstet said...

Without CDS, would we have had W in the White House?

The whole point of CDS, from its manufactured beginning in the Arkansas project through the pornographic stylings of Ken Starr, is to insure that the government stays in the corrupt hands of a good capitalist crony. W was the goal, not an unanticipated side effect.