Should Hillary & Bill Clinton Be Punished?

From my perspective -- and I've got plenty of company on this -- Hillary Clinton has more than made the case that she would be worthy successor to George Bush after waging a primary campaign predicated on outright lying, divisiveness, fear mongering and race baiting that grandmasters like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater would approve of, the latter at least until his death-bed catharsis.

Hence the notion that she and her helpmate husband should be punished -- from being cast out of the Democratic Party temple to being given pipsqueak roles at the national convention -- has gained some traction.

This includes Modo's latest cry for help in the form of an extraordinarily bad New York Times op-ed piece in which she suggests that Barack Obama get back at Hillary by offering her the veep slot and then shrinking it from its Cheney-esque heights to prune-like status. (Maureen, darling: It's time to change your meds.)

While the Clintons' electoral dumpster dive has been deeply disheartening to someone who twice voted for the Mister and until not long ago could have done the same for the Missus, expending any energy on sanctioning this sanctimonious pair is an enormous distraction at a time when the Democrats' guns need to be turned on John McCain.

I myself am a believer in the notion that history will be the harshest judge of the Clintons. I believed that when I was angry at them a few weeks ago. Now I merely pity them -- two people who have so much to offer but have repeatedly played lowest-common-denominator politics because they let their ego-driven lust for power get the best of them.

No, nothing will be quite as crushing to Hillary and Bill Clinton as their realization that they have gone far to squander their legacies and no amount of kissy face from here on out will change that. It seemed almost preordained that Bush would make a hash of things, but the Clintons have had to work extra hard at it. That they have succeeded is very, very sad.

I will leave it to the historians to judge whether the Clintons were merely fooling us all along.

I'm ambivalent. But the DF&C and I happened to watch Michael Moore's Sicko again last night and I was absolutely slapped in the face by Hillary's hypocrisy regarding health-care reform: From a supposed leader in 1993 in the push for universal care to the senator with the second largest amount of dirty health-care lobbying money in 2003.