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    • God As Idea, By Eric Anderson
      I woke up last night feeling like I was suffocating, because in my dream I was. It began in a church, or an old university lecture hall. Antique. And everyone in attendance was being asked to say little prayers honoring Jesus. Everyone was reciting little prayers that are common among the devout. But when it was my turn, I stood and exclaimed: Jesus was a ph […]
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Ask not what Obama can do for you, ask what you can do for Obama

"O-bama O-bama O-bama"


Inside the mind of a rabid Obot (no link, biohazard):

And it’s why I smile when I read people shrieking and rending their garments for him to do this or say that as if he were their servant.

Obama IS our servant you moron. Haven’t you ever heard the term “public servant?”

We don’t work for him, he works for us.

This fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Obama and the rest of the country explains a lot about Obots. It explains a few things about Obama too.

Anglachel:

Both of these actions are part and parcel of the movement style campaign politics Obama favors and which is so beloved of the righteous Stevensonians. It is narcissistic and a-historical (We are the one’s we have been waiting for), refuses to acknowledge politics as they are, and antithetical to mundane, interest-based transactional governance. It doesn’t want responsibility, only obedience and adulation, and so refuses to take it when things go belly up.

Barack Obama ran for office because he wanted to BE President of the United States. He wanted the perks and privileges of power, he was on the ultimate ego trip.

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president because she wanted to USE the power of the office to do things for our country, to make our nation a better place. She could care less about the trappings of power.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton have made public service their life’s work. And not just our nation, they have served the world. There is no higher calling than that.

Barack Obama came into office presumptuously comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. Today is the anniversary of Lincoln’s most famous speech:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I’m gonna make a prediction – 100 years from now schools and banks will be open on Barack Obama’s birthday.




What’s a “Liberal” Again?


President Obama is considered a “liberal” Democrat in denial by the Village. If you ask Obama about his “shellacking” (can I take the time to point out how lame that word is and how sick I am of hearing it?) two weeks ago he will say that it was a messaging problem. While he was toiling away with legislation trying to help us ingrates he just didn’t have the time to go out and say how all of it was going to benefit our ungrateful behinds so we punished him at the voting booth for not chatting with us enough.
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Is it any wonder they keep winning?

This is what a Democrat looks like


There is another CDS Fest going on over at Ian Welsh’s place:

Gosh , all the partisan BS about Clinton, Hillary and Obama. and ever wonder why the right wing wins ALL the time?

One of my earliest memories was the assassination of JFK – I was only three years old but I remember my mom telling me that our President was dead. Growing up I watched the Vietnam war and the anti-war protests on television.

I remember the Watergate hearings, the Nixon resignation, inflation, oil embargoes, gas lines, terrorism at the Munich Olympics, the Iranian hostage crisis, dead marines in Lebanon, US victories in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait. I even recall polyester leisure suits, platform shoes and disco.

The Democrats have controlled Congress for most of the fifty years I’ve been alive, but only held the White House for twenty-two of those years, including the first eight.

I recall my thirties as a time of peace and prosperity, a better time than any other period in my life. The guy who was in the White House back then was Bill Clinton. Lots of other people remember those eight years as a positive experience, which is why Bill Clinton still enjoys high approval ratings.
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Sunday News – All Hallow’s Eve Edition

Boo!!

Happy Halloween Conflucians!! What are you dressing as today and tonight? I hope you all have a great Halloween.

Other than bats in the belfry, let’s see what else is spooky out there. Some fun yesterday was the Steward/Colbert rally yesterday. I quite liked Jon’s sentiment at the end. He basically echoed what we’ve been saying for a long time. Namely that all this crap and mud slinging and race baiting and nastiness on both sides is causing great harm. He called progressives out as much as he called wingers out. Which was such a change where we tend to only ever see wingers called out and hardly ever progressives called out except here and a few other places. More of that please. It was also nice to see his message of hope about how real Americans are out there working together and get things done, unlike people in washington or in the MSM. I liked it. Here’s a bit of the Miami Herald’s take:

“This is not . . . to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do,” Stewart said as he turned serious in his closing remarks. “But we live now in hard times, not end times. We can have animus and not be enemies.”

He lambasted the cable TV news mentality that amplifies outrageous statements, stokes fear and seeks out confrontation, singling out the left-wing media for equating tea partyers with racists and the right-wing media for “the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims.”

“The press can hold its magnifying class up to our problems,” he said. “Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire. . . . The press is our immune system. If they overreact to everything we get sicker.”

The message struck a chord with the large throng of people; the National Park Service no longer provides official estimates of crowds, but the National Mall was densely packed with many tens of thousands of people.

“It’s the first time a message like this has resonated with me,” said Jonathan Dugan, 37, a product engineer who flew from San Francisco to stand on the mall on a sunny fall afternoon. “We need to get people to talk to each other in a meaningful way.”

So as you’d expect, politics is in much of the news. WaPo has a bit about Obama’s “closing arguments” for the election:

Obama laid out a sharp contrast between his party’s agenda and the GOP, saying that Republicans have done little but play politics as his party has made hard choices to revive the economy, change the health-care system and regulate the finanical industry.

“We don’t want to relive the past. We’ve tried what their selling and we’re not buying,” he said. “We’re not going back.”

While Obama told supporters that the election two years ago wasn’t about him, Democrats are betting that his lingering appeal among first time voters, African-Americans and Hispanics will boost turnout – in Philadelphia volunteers handed out leaflets with a picture of Obama and his wife on one side and a plug for Rep. Joe Sestak, running for the Senate, and Dan Onorato, who is running for governor, on the other side. Polls show Onorato trailing behind Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett, and Sestak gaining ground on former Republican congressman Pat Toomey.

But the best part, and why I didn’t think of this before, he’s now out talking about, wait for it, party unity after the election, sort of:

Whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s election, it’s time to put aside partisanship, President Obama is telling Democrats and Republicans.

Yet his appeal for unity includes a jab at GOP leaders in the House and Senate for comments that the president said were troubling.

House minority leader John Boehner of Ohio “actually said that ‘this is not the time for compromise,’ ’’ Obama said yesterday in his weekly radio and Internet address. The president added that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky “said his main goal after this election is simply to win the next one.’’

The address was released shortly before Obama left Washington for a day of campaigning in Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Conn., and Chicago. The three states have competitive House and Senate races, as does Ohio, where the president was slated to hold a rally today in Cleveland.

In the weekly Republican address, Boehner said Obama has failed to deliver the change he promised. The man who probably would become House speaker if Republicans win control of the chamber also promoted party pledges to cut spending and keep taxes at current levels.

Meanwhile Bill Clinton is out campaigning his ass off. He was in Youngstown yesterday:

Clinton spoke to a crowd of 1,800 to 2,000 people, most of whom stood rather than sit during his speech, at Mr. Anthony’s.

The former president urged the audience to vote and urge others to do the same for the Democratic slate, particularly Gov. Ted Strickland.

“Where’s the enthusiasm gap? Where is it?” yelled Yvette McGee Brown, the Democratic lieutenant governor nominee. “You guys do us proud. We are winning on Tuesday because of you! I just want to tell you, this has been a long year. There are people who counted us out just like people counted out the Valley.”

National polls have shown that those most likely to vote lean Republican.

But Strickland said momentum is swinging in favor of Democrats at the right time.

Republicans “won this race in August,” he said. “We’re going to win this race in November, when it really counts.”

And Bill is returning to Orlando to help Meeks again in his campaign. You know, the guy the media lied about and said Bill pushed out of the race, even though everyone disagreed before they ran those stories. The Miami Herald article includes some of that:

Clinton will join Meek and the state’s other major Democratic Party candidates at a last-minute voter rally Monday night in Orlando, the Democratic Senate candidate’s campaign said Saturday.

The announcement comes after two days of media reports over whether Clinton privately asked Meek to step aside and endorse Crist, who left the Republican party to run as an independent. Meek and Clinton have denied those reports, even those confirmed by Clinton’s spokesman.

Both Meek and Crist trail Rubio, the tea party-backed Republican. To win, Crist would need at least some of the Democrats who plan to vote for Meek.

Meek has accused Crist of starting the rumors about Clinton and says Crist directly asked him to withdraw.

“I think he’s a nice guy, but I don’t think that that plays a role and I think it’s wrong to try to paint me into the corner and say that I’m the reason why he’s not winning,” Meek told reporters at Wilton Manors city hall, where he and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz were courting early voters. “I don’t blame the position of my campaign at any time on any other opponent.”

It was Meek’s only public event Saturday. He was resting up for 24 hours of nonstop campaigning across much of the state, beginning Sunday night in Tampa.

Meek said the rumors about him possibly dropping out of the three-way race have energized his supporters.

“What some meant for bad ended up being for good. People are now awakened of their responsibility to get out to vote,” he said. “Because now the ant bed has been kicked. Folks are highly disappointed.”

The other big news of the day was the apparent terrorist plot to blow up some synagogues in the Chicago area. It’s now being reported that Yemen has made some arrests:

Yemen has arrested a female student suspected of mailing the explosive parcels from the country to the US that sparked a global security alert, sources say.

The arrest took place on Saturday in the capital, Sanaa, after security forces surrounded a house where the suspect was hiding.

The woman’s lawyer said she was a “quiet student” with no known links of religious or political groups. Her mother was also detained, but was not a prime suspect, the lawyer said.

A Yemeni security official said the woman, a medical student in her 20s, had been traced through a telephone number she left with a cargo company.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, confirmed her arrest, saying: “Yemen is determined to fight terror but will not allow anyone to intervene in its affairs.”

Security officials have been on high alert since the UK and the United Arab Emirates intercepted two packages containing explosive material that were being shipped by air from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago.

Who’s to know if that person really had anything to do with anything. They need an arrest and need it now. I’m not sure the truth really matters. But we’ll watch the events unfold. BBC has a list of Sunday papers with stories on this issue.

In other news of the world, Brazil is having elections, and with all the economic problems, the main race is about which candidate is the crazier religious wacko:

The pocketbook is battling the pulpit in Brazil’s presidential elections Sunday, as government candidate Dilma Rousseff faces opposition leader Jose Serra in a runoff election to lead this burgeoning economic power of 190 million people.

Issues that most Brazilians thought didn’t belong in national politics — in particular, abortion — have taken center stage, and both candidates are catering to the concerns of evangelical and Roman Catholic voters.

By abandoning her previous public stance on liberalizing the country’s anti-abortion laws, and attending church before the television cameras, Rousseff, a former atheist, appears to have outmaneuvered Serra. A national poll Thursday night gave her a 13-point advantage over the former governor of Sao Paulo state.

That’s some crazy shit. And I thought my congressional race was bad.

That’s a bit of what’s in the news. Chime in with what you’re doing for Halloween and what else you’re finding in the news.

Bill-Bash II

Bill Clinton and Kendrick Meek


This is the kinda stuff that pisses me off. Andrew Malcolm at Top of the Ticket:

 

Once again, Bill Clinton tries unsuccessfully to nudge an inconvenient Democrat from a Senate race

Bill was asking one of the few African-American candidates in the country to quit? That sounds pretty bad. Are there more details?

Well, now after campaigning several times for Rep. Kendrick Meek in the crucial Florida Senate seat race, BC is back at it. He’s trying — perhaps on his own, perhaps not — in these last desperate days to convince Meek to quit, give up, abandon his hopeless Sunshine State struggle.

See it would work like this: Meeks drops out and endorses (former Republican now independent) Charlie Crist, who then can defeat Mad Hatter Marco Rubio.

The expectation is that an supposedly independent Sen. Crist (he of the huge economic stimulus Obama hug onstage last year) would caucus in Washington with Harry Reid’s crowd, albeit a diminished one. Think Joe Lieberman and Bernie Saunders.

The story is a disaster for Meek’s effort to claim continuing viability for Tuesday’s voting. It broke late Thursday on Politico, saying Clinton and go-betweens came ever so close to convincing Meek to become a martyred hero last week.

That’s some pretty cold-blooded politics, and it sure don’t sound like the Big Dawg I know. Wait, what’s this paragraph two-thirds of the way down the article say?

A Meek spokesman said: “The article is not true. Kendrick Meek was never dropping out of this race, is never dropping out of this race, and will never drop out of this race.”


 

Studies have shown that people reading articles in magazines and newspapers tend to stop reading after the first few paragraphs. So we have an article that makes it sound like it is totally undisputed that Bill Clinton did a shitty thing, and they buried the denial near the bottom.

This way Andrew Malcolm and the LA Times can truthfully say they presented both sides of the story. But they’re still lying.

I’m guessing this story is going to be made into one more of those political urban legends “everybody knows” about the Clintons that just ain’t true.

CDS never dies.


“Home, home on deranged . . . “



 

Flyover Country


Our houses are protected by the good Lord and a gun
And you might meet ’em both if you show up here not welcome son
Our necks are burnt, our roads are dirt and our trucks ain’t clean
The dogs run lose, we smoke, we chew and fry everything
Out here, way out here

We won’t take a dime if we ain’t earned it
When it comes to weight brother we pull our own
If it’s our backwoods way of livin’ you’re concerned with
You can leave us alone
We’re about John Wayne, Johnny Cash and John Deere
Way out here

We got a fightin’ side a mile wide but we pray for peace
‘Cause it’s mostly us that end up servin’ overseas
If it was up to me I’d love to see this country run
Like it used to be, oughta be, just like it’s done
Out here, way out here


Among the many things that set our so-called elites apart from “the great unwashed” is that rednecks feel absolutely no shame about their humble origins.

These American proletarians ain’t too proud to ask advice, but they don’t want nobody telling them what to do. Some of them may not know what the word “hubris” means, but they understand the concept of overweening pride. They call it being “too big for your britches.”

Pretty much all of them have been to a big city at least once or twice. They watch television, wear shoes and know how to read. Hardly any of them are married to their cousins.

Even when they go off to fancy ivy-covered colleges and universities to get edjamucated they don’t start “puttin’ on airs” and thinking they’re better than other people. They might have a post-grad degree and make lots of money but they still drink beer, call a violin a fiddle and eat BBQ with their bare hands.

They vote, too.

When Barack Obama talks about his (allegedly but not really) impoverished childhood, he does it to say “Look how far I’ve come, aren’t I wonderful?

When Bill Clinton talks about his childhood he’s saying “I haven’t forgotten where I came from.

That’s one big difference between the Man from Hope and the guy selling Hopenchange®.


Bill-Bashing

This is what a Democrat looks like


Scary-smart Anglachel:

Which leads me to that last little snark of Mr. Marshall’s. Since I’ve got at least ten years on the guy and my background is political science (specifically, political theory – the study of systems, idea and ideologies), I figure I have both experience and subject matter knowledge on him, though I’m smart enough not to try to make a living analyzing politics. My memory is long and my knowledge of political events a hell of a lot clearer than WKJM, who has been part of the myth machine for several years now. What I recall about the1994 mid-terms was that Bill and Hillary had been put through the meat grinder over their whole-hearted but losing attempt to enact health care reform, they were reviled by the press (those hicks who trashed our lovely little place!), the Democratic party was in the last throws of losing the southern Dixiecrats, and Reaganism was still the norm. He enjoyed none of the advantages that Obama enjoys in terms of party and media support, and had much more respected opponents. The Democrats themselves were dealing with scandals in the House, and Newt was rolling out the Contract With America.

WKJ’s quote “Clinton was considered toxic politically in broad swathes of the country” begs the question of just who thought he was toxic. The majority of voters didn’t, but they weren’t voting for Bill. They were voting for their Congress Critters, just as they are today. The media certainly wasted no effort to inform me how horrible Clinton was as a president, which is how it earned the moniker the “so-called Liberal media”. Stevensonian cultural elites sat on their hands and refused to aggressively counter the Right-wing Noise Machine, all of which is documented in Somerby’s Incomparable Archives. In short, those of us who actually were, you know, there at the time and not invested in CDS understand the very different environments and opportunities. Not agreeing with Clinton or thinking that health care was handled badly is very different than thinking he was “toxic”.

[…]

Yes, Obama came in to office with a hellacious mess on his hands – and a majority in both houses and an electorate screaming for change. He had the political opportunity of a lifetime to transform the fundamental terms of political engagement, just as both FDR and Reagan did. He could have taken on the banks. He could have charged ahead for substantive health care reform. He could have pounded the shit out the failed policies of the Reagan Revolution and pinned the blame for everything on them, and the country would have lapped it up exactly the way they responded to FDR. But he didn’t and now he will play (at best) catch up for the remaining two years.

WKJM is not the only one who is trying to avoid talking about the reasons for party discontent by presenting a half-assed and historically inaccurate picture of the 1994 mid-term election. What he doesn’t seem to get is that because the majority of the nation doesn’t hold the Clintons in contempt the way he and the other Purchased Fellows do, every time he (and others of his ilk) make this comparison, he keeps reminding us about the way Bill never quit, never gave up, never stopped articulating his vision of what the party should be and how he was going to work to achieve that end. And that resulted in retaining the White House in 1996, and gaining back House seats in the next three elections – 1996, 1998, 2000.

There’s a bunch more.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence but lately there seems to be a whole new movement of people dedicated to the revisionist-history version of bashing Bill Clinton. Some of the faces are new but some, like WKJM, are well known shills for the Democratic establishment.

They all seem to have a laundry list of reasons to hate the Big Dawg, and they throw around statistics like beads in NOLA but they have no personal anecdotes. It’s like they’re all just reciting stuff from a book. They claim that the prosperity of the Clinton years was all an illusion (the “dot-com bubble”) and blame him for our current economic mess.

I remember the Nineties, as well as the decade before and the one after. These Bill-Bashers describe a period very different from the one I lived through. They also describe a dark, evil and malign president, which is nothing like the Bill Clinton I watched in the news every day.

For one thing, he didn’t “betray” any of his constituents. He openly supported NAFTA and welfare reform when he was running. After he was elected, he still supported them. Don’t we WANT politicians to keep their promises?

The Bill-Bashers hate him for the promises he kept and ther hate him for the promises he tried but failed to keep. He gets all of the blame and none of the credit. They even hate him for the genocide in Rwanda, as if he could have single-handedly ended the crisis.

Most or all of the newer faces (and a few of the old ones) claim they don’t support Obama, but they really don’t seem to hate him. Not like they hate the Big Dawg, anyway. It’s like they would rather bash Bill than talk about the current situation.

I’m seeing a pattern, and wondering what is behind it. We know Obama is afraid of Hillary and for good reason. If she ran against him in 2012 she would beat him in a fair fight, and maybe even one that was supposed to be fixed. They can’t attack her as long as she is Secretary of State, so are they attacking Bill in an attempt to cast a stain on her?

Three years ago I would have just thought I was being too paranoid. That was before I saw Left Blogistan get covered in astroturf. Now I wonder if I’m not being paranoid enough.



The Nineties as viewed through the CDS looking-glass

Bill? Is that you?


From the comments over at Ian Welsh’s blog:


We paid for that “prosperity” later …

The “clinton” economy benefited from the initial stimulus of cheap goods imported into the US from the free trade agreements… the exported jobs would take more time, the explosion of consumer credit, greenspan’s irresponsibility in nourishing a huge stock market bubble, and wall street being set lose in a major way on the world’s markets. Workers fell further behind during those wonderful clinton years in wage inequality …. even behind what they were during the republican dominated 80s.

“Both the average wages for non-supervisory workers and the earnings of those in the lowest 10 percent of wage earners,” notes Robert Pollin, “not only remained well below those of the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations, but were actually lower than that even than those of the Reagan/Bush years. Moreover, wage inequality — as measured by the ratio of the 90th to the 10th wage decile — increased sharply during Clinton’s tenure in office, even relative to the Republican heyday of the 1980s.”

http://dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Street0929.htm

Yeah, clinton did a great job with his secretary of treasury deregulating everything in sight, carrying out polices that led to hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children, passing welfare reform, increasing the H1-B visa limits, relaxing the limits on media ownership, preventing college students with marijuana possession convictions from getting federal financial aid, and passing The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which helped lead to this wonderful growing police state we live in and increased the amount of inmates by 50% during his reign.

The delusory “healthy” clinton economy was the results of easy credit, the technology boom, the initial benefits of cheap goods from the free trade agreements that he couldn’t do enough of, his abhorrent secretary of treasury, rubin, talking greenspan into exploding the money supply to reflect the “productivity miracle”, and the consequent stock market bubble. In the end, we all saw how real that was when many highly capitalized dotcom companies never developed viable business models and went bankrupt with wall street walking away rich. It was mainly based on bullshit and it started to fall apart even before the abominable bush came into office. And, also, that initial wave of corruption that finally surfaced from enron and worldcom and the like in 2002 or 2003 … that didn’t start the moment bush came into office, it started when clinton was president. It obviously got a lot worse under the worst president in our nation’s history, but the economy did not just start to fall apart in January 2001.



Here’s another
:


And the children in Iraq who were being slowly starved to death, or having cruise missiles lobbed at them might disagree as to the whole peacefulness of Clinton.

Clinton embellished his foreign policy with “humanitarian” aims and ideals, but in Iraq and beyond, he displayed the customary indifference of US presidents to human rights and the suffering of innocents. On his watch, military aid to Turkey, engaged in a scorched earth campaign against its Kurdish minority, and to Colombia, conducting a dirty war against left-wing insurgents, skyrocketed. The embargo on Cuba was tightened. Global efforts to block the militarisation of space were derailed while a stringent, self-serving neo-liberal economic regime was promoted through NAFTA and the WTO. Hundreds of thousands perished in Rwanda without Clinton lifting a finger, but he found time to bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that his officials falsely alleged was producing chemical weapons.


Wow. It’s a miracle the nation survived.
/snarkfont

What’s really weird is these lefty purity trolls HATE Bill and Hillary more than than they dislike Reagan, Bush, Bush II or Bush III.

I don’t know what they’re smoking but I don’t want any of it.


Run for your lives! Here comes peace and prosperity!

 



That’s why he’s the Big Dawg


Howard Fineman:

I see that Dr. Rand Paul has taken out after Bill Clinton, dredging up Monica Lewinsky. And I know why Paul did so. The former president was here in Kentucky yesterday and in this state, as in many others, he is a far more potent and popular foe than President Barack Obama.

[…]

Like Voldemort’s, Obama’s is a name no one dares utter — and that includes Clinton speaking to Democrats.

[…]

Rail-thin but not frail, wearing a tweedy professorial sports coat and his signature rueful, knowing smile, Clinton was treated with a respect bordering on awe. His familiar mane of white hair, thinning now, was translucent in the sun, giving him an almost otherworldly look: the Sage from a Better Age.

Clinton is beloved In Kentucky. He won the state twice. He speaks the local dialect, which contains Appalachian notes of working-class pride, suspicion of big shots and Baptist revivalism. But more than that — and more than just in Kentucky –Clinton’s economic record (22.7 million jobs created, and he tends not to forget to mention the .7) looks spectacularly good in the context of what has followed.

These days there is almost an Old Testament, milk-and-honey reverence for that economic record, at least as expressed by former Kentucky Sen. Wendell Ford. An old-school podium pounder, Ford — stooped but still strong voiced at 86 — talked of the former president in messianic terms. “Bill Clinton found us the path to gold!” he shouted. The crowd of 2,000, most of them students, didn’t laugh. They seemed to think he was right.

[…]

But Clinton is all too happy to show Obama how it’s done. As a campaigner and as president, Clinton’s gift was his ability to untangle the knots of even the most complex policy issue and explain it in plain language to people suspicious of the powerful — but eager not to be screwed by them or to be seen as dupes.

What? People remembering better economic times under someone named Clinton? Isn’t that KKKentucky? Where are all the bitter clingy racists who just didn’t want to vote for a black guy?

Let’s go back to Salon and see what Steve Kornacki thinks of Fineman’s piece:

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