Let's begin by giving Richard Nixon his due. To listen to the Watergate tapes is to hear a president desperately concerned with keeping his lies straight. How far we've come.
George W. Bush doesn't care if he lies...never has. He cares about getting through the day, ahead of schedule, if possible.
Which brings us to the Clintons. If this couple has proved one thing during their public life, it is that they are absolutely impossible to embarrass. They are genetically incapable of shame. Utterances that would cause a decent human being to rip their own tongue out are just another talking point to them.
No sane person can list all the lies the Clintons have told in this campaign without having the top of their head come off. Some in the media will take a half-hearted try along the lines of "Senator Clinton, you just said X, but we have video of you yesterday saying Y, and last month you said V and your husband said U"...cue the inappropriate cackle and the feigned ignorance of anything that has happened prior to that exact moment in time.
(Memo to the Taylor Marsh vagina-uber-alles-types: We always use the term "Clintons" because Hillary would be nothing without her poisonous marital blood oath. Unless you'd care to document an actual accomplishment of hers from 1973? Also...in the least discussed issue of the campaign, if the Clintons manage to steal this nomination, Bill Clinton could be back in the White House. There are only so many overseas missions for him and the Bushes, then what? He has conducted himself with all the charm of a syphilitic Tiberius...now can anyone imagine how he'll be with power?!)
All this presents a problem for Barack Obama because he is a worthy man who recoils from shit. The Clintons bathe in shit. It sustains them. And it sustains their hack mouthpieces. Witness Fast Eddie Rendell basically saying on Meet The Press that the Clinton campaign, unlike Obama's, never claimed to be honest. Watch in Indiana as Evan Bayh puts reality through a fun house mirror of vice presidential ambition. Name one officeholder supporting Obama who is even one tenth as vile?
There is nothing we don't hate about George W. Bush, from his delusional good humor in response to abject catastrophe, down to the prissy way he waves his tiny hands to a crowd. Yet there is now something we've grown to hate just as much...the Hillary "head-bob."
To witness that quasi-human drone, to hear lie after lie after lie, all the while the head nodding up and down, up and down, is to truly know what faces Obama. He is Richard Benjamin in Westworld, fleeing the remorseless robot Yul Brynner.
Clintonism is nothing if not remorseless. Let us hope, for the country's sake, Obama can find a way to obliterate it.