Obama Responds

Turkana post here.

CBS NEWS reports:

"I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton☼ and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make and I think that is what happened here," Obama said in a radio interview today.

"Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it and I will take her at her word on that."

Two important points, both of which I'm sure will be roundly ignored:

1) The Obama supporters who have used this incident to once again demonize Clinton should learn from his own understanding and class.

2) The Clinton supporters who are using the hysteria about this incident to further rationalize thier intent to not vote for Obama, in November, should once again be reminded that he is a smarter, better, and more honest person than are many of his supporters; and even though this race has been hard-fought, and occasionally dirty, by both sides, Obama is not personally responsible for the endless streams of sewage flung at Clinton by the corporate media and the shrillosphere.

Turkana has this too (emphasis added).

I'd been without electricity for a day, and without internet for a couple days, so I'm late to the game, on the latest Clinton Crime Against Humanity.

Hillary Clinton made a clumsy comment about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and the reaction was typical. People who have spent months dishonestly post-parsing and demonizing her for every evil conceivable once again writhed and caterwauled in convulsions of self-righteous shrill, attributing to her the most heinous motives, and demanding that she leave the presidential race, and perhaps public life, altogether. Shocking that these people would once again find an excuse to behave like rabid rodents.

I've said it many times: the most disheartening and disgusting aspect of this presidential race has not been the discovery that prominent politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama behave like prominent politicians, it's been the complete meltdown of the supposedly liberal blogs, as they've collectively abandoned any pretense of honesty and rationality, transmogrifying into but a weak shadow of the corporate media they once were supposed to replace as the source of credible information. These people no longer have any credibility as political commentators or analysts, and less and less as people capable of even a modicum of human decency. What they are saying about the latest incident reveals less about Hillary Clinton than about themselves.

You know who does have credibility to talk about Clinton's comments? Robert F. Kennedy's son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is what he said:

"It is clear from the context that Hillary was invoking a familiar political circumstance in order to support her decision to stay in the race through June. I have heard her make this reference before, also citing her husband’s 1992 race, both of which were hard fought through June. I understand how highly charged the atmosphere is, but I think it is a mistake for people to take offense."

. . . I'll be blunt: the people using this incident to further promote their own despicable agenda by their own despicable means are every bit as despicable as their lies and distortions would make Clinton out to be. They are shameful. Their behavior is inexcusable. They like to accuse Clinton of being Rovian- and worse- but it is they who have most closely come to emulate the worst behavior of the worst Republicans. To whatever degree they have any political impact at all, they are a blight on political discourse, and they are systematically destroying everything the blogs were supposed to be. That some of them are now participating in the corporate media could not be more appropriate. They have become that which they were supposed to have been trying to change. I congratulate them on their success. . . .

I'm reminded of the ending of George Orwell's Animal Farm: