Fear the Clintons!

Digby raises two very interesting points in this excellent post on Bush/Cheney and Clinton/Clinton today. First and most obviously, the idea that the Clinton's would represent some sort of threat to our Constitution because a President would be at risk of sharing power with a powerful alter ego is absurd in the face of the Cheney reign as the most powerful Vice in our nation's history. Every time that I come close to dismissing the tin foil hat notion that Cheney is really pulling the strings behind the administration's bald grab for executive power, and is responsible for the almost shockingly radical assault on the liberties and rights that we've fought for since the establishment of the republic, the facts get in the way and the tin foil conspiracy theories are found to be substantiated. The Frontline expose was about as shocking and disturbing a thing as you'll ever see on television, and it proves that the audacity and hubris of Cheney truly knows no bounds. He is a bloodthirsty old man, unconcerned with the niggling restrictions that we refer to as the balance of power. To wit:

I think it really meant that no one knew whether the national security adviser was playing her traditional role as the coordinator of all the different agencies involved in the national security process, or whether the vice president's office had slipped into that role. Remember, there were a lot of questions about who was going to be chairing the meetings, if the vice president was going to be regularly attending principals committee meetings? And there were a lot of uncertainties as to who was really running the show.

But the other notion that Digby alludes to is the conscious "disappearing" of Bush. Clearly the strategists on the right are working to grind into the electorate's mind that a Hillary presidency would be a continuation of the Clinton dynasty, as if the last eight years had never occurred. Not only does this ignore the reality of the true dynastic nature of the Bush family and its various extensions, but it ignores the pervasive damage that has been done to our nation since 2000. But it works very clearly to ignore the fact that Bush's approval ratings are roughly equivalent to John Wayne Gacy's, and that the real fear that we all face is the continuation of the nightmare epoch of that power mad harpie and her lecherous husband. It's clever stuff.

Grover Norquist got the ball rolling last week when he said:

“It will be ridiculous to have Mr President and Madam President in the White House,” he said. “We’re the United States of America. How can we say to President Mubarak [of Egypt], ‘You can’t hand off the presidency to your son, it’s got to be your wife’ or, ‘Hey Syria and North Korea, you’ve got to knock this stuff off and be like us’.”