Obama and Clinton

Gloria Borger: Take the vile creature away!

I listened to Clinton's speech Tuesday night. She was strong, very complimentary to Obama, and emphatic about her dedication to support the Party campaign in the fall. By not formally withdrawing or "suspending" her campaign, she leaves herself maximum negotiating leverage. The Vice Presidency is obviously a big negotiating point, whether she wants it herself or has a favored candidate. The way she talked about the critical need for universal health care makes me think that some grand agreement between her and Obama that involves adopting a more aggressive health care plan than the one he's been pushing could be the basis of a Party unity deal possibly with her accepting the VP nomination.

Obama's speech sounded great. It was victorious and forward-looking without sounding in any way vindictive toward the Clinton campaign. On the contrary, I thought he was lavish but not over-the-top in his treatment of her in the speech. And he made a point to praise the accomplishments of the Clinton administration. He gave his opposition to the Iraq War and McCain's 100-year policy a very prominent role in the speech. He managed to talk about national unity and condemn the Republican politics of fear and demagogic divisiveness without slipping into any namby-pamby "postpartisan" fluff talk.

A great performance by both of them.

I was watching on CNN, and after Clinton's speech I made the mistake of listening to the strange beings they call "pundits". I should instead have hit the mute button and scraped my fingernails across a blackboard. It would have left me far more relaxed.

The thrust of their complaint was that Vile Hillary still won't concede like their tribe has been telling her to do since Febuary. Negotiating leverage? Respecting her supporters' determination? No, no, our wise pundits couldn't be bothered with such nonsense. Gloria Borger was practically apoplectic. She was livid that vile awful Hillary had done something so incomprehensible as not formally conceding the way great sages like Gloria Borger had expected her to! What low, repulsive, despicable motives could Vile Hillary possibly have for such unspeakably deviant conduct?

If there was one disappointment in Obama's speech, he passed up the opportunity to take a jab at the flat-on-their-faces incompetent press corps the way Clinton did in her speech. But I'm fast warming to the idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket. She could play the once-traditional VP candidate's role as the more aggressive partisan of the ticket. And her presence on the ticket will still have Chris Matthews and Gloria Borger and Timmy Russert so angry and hostile that they will have trouble giving us an unfiltered version of the Republican Swiftboat attacks on Obama.

I guess it will have to get to the point that the cable and network ratings crash to somewhere below Nickelodeon and reruns of F-Troop for them to figure out people expect news programs to actually cover news. I mean, a movie could be funny where you had reporters who operated according to a hierarchy where the stenographers are kind of low on the totem pole, and the top stars were people who listen to a speech and then sit around pretending to talk about the speech but actually just spinning their own little scripts which range from having no obvious connection to the speech they heard to having no sane connection to it at all.

I mean, if you had good comedic actors and creative script-writers, you could pull that off as a 90-minute flick.

But the first sequel would inevitably be as dreadful as Blair Witch Project II. In fact, the sequel would be about as entertaining as listening to Gloria Borger spew her outrage over a speech by Vile Hillary.

I'm sorry, I know I've been on a media-bashing binge lately. But even I was gobsmacked by how brainless the post-Clinton-speech commentary on CNN was. Clinton partisan James Carville was fairly decent, only because he was saying what was painfully obvious.

But as soon as Obama's speech ended, I hit the mute button and went to look for a blackboard.

Tags: barack obama, establishment press, hillary clinton, mainstream media, mainstream press