For weeks some Clinton supporters on the Web have pushed rumors about a video in which Michelle Obama goes on a rampage against “whitey.” They’ve hung their hopes and faith on this video, certain it will be the salvation of the Clinton campaign, as soon as it gets out.
I’ve suspected there is no such tape, because if it existed the Clinton campaign would have given it to Matt Drudge by now. But today some Clinton bloggers are certain a TV network has it, because someone on Faux Nooz says so.
Now, apparently, a few on the Left have discerned what’s on The Magic Tape. The BooMan explains that Michelle Obama criticized the Bush Administration:
Why’d he cut folks off medicaid?
Why’d he let New Orleans drown?
Why’d he do nothing about Jena?
Why’d he put us in Iraq for no reason?
If you take this out of context, “why’d he” does sound a lot like “whitey.”
Now, I don’t know that anyone on either side has actually seen The Magic Tape, but if it exists at all this recent explanation makes sense to me. And it’s also why The Magic Tape remains hidden. It’s powers will dissipate as soon as people realize what Michelle Obama really said.
What makes this even more pathetic is that the individual on Faux Nooz spreading this rumor is none other than Roger Stone. As Steve M. points out, this same Roger Stone is responsible for “the 527 group formed solely to insult Hillary Clinton with a sexist acronym — Citizens United Not Timid.” And now some Clinton supporters are embracing Roger Stone as an ally.
This, folks, is what insanity looks like.
Ben Smith reports that the Clinton campaign is heading back to New York and shedding staff. Getting ready to concede? Kyle Moore says maybe, maybe not. (See also “Breaking: Larry Johnson Lost His Last Marble.”)
I want to go back to something the BooMan wrote in his post:
This election has ruined a lot of friendships. I have tried hard not to let it ruin mine. But smears of this type are unforgivable. I have been forebearing. Perhaps, in retrospect, I have been too forebearing. That’s all I say. This is too painful to me.
I know exactly how he feels. The Clinton poison has ruined a lot of friendships in the blogosphere. It’s terribly sad. I’ve chosen not to attend Netroots Nation (formerly Yearly Kos) this summer because there are too many people I’d rather not see now.
See also “Clinton may lose key supporters soon” and Michael Tomasky, in which he writes that, in many ways, the prolonged nomination fight has made Obama a stronger candidate.
Everything that’s happened since Wisconsin – the emergence of Jeremiah Wright, the flap over the “bitter” white working class, and so on – has constituted Obama’s trial by fire. Far better that he had to answer all those questions in March than in October, with millions more voters paying closer attention.
But at the same time, we’ve been hostage to the Clintons’ inability to come to grips with the fact that Hillary was going to lose. Her final descent into rancid demagoguery about Florida and Michigan, comparing them to Zimbabwe and likening the “cause” of seating the states at full strength to the civil rights movement was, for some observers, the last straw. It was a rules dispute over two states that broke the rules; no one was jailed or lynched, and if anyone disenfranchised the voters of those two states, it wasn’t the Democratic party or Obama, it was the political leaders of the states themselves.
We have no idea whether the fuming Clinton partisans at Saturday’s meeting represent thousands or millions. But however many of them exist, the fact is that Clinton worked them into this lather – Eve Fairbanks of the New Republic filed a stomach-turning report for her magazine’s website on some of the things said about Obama outside the hall – and Clinton is responsible as things move forward for working them out of it. That means, for starters, ending her quest soon and letting her backers know that she’s not fighting on to the Denver convention.
If she doesn’t do that, I think her position as a leader in the Dem party will be over.