Health Care BS

Before the Iowa caucus, Hillary and her surrogates tried to swiftboat Barack Obama using his position on health insurance mandates as a pretext. After Iowa, however, they realized that misrepresenting him on mere issues was not going to be enough to slow Obama’s mementum, so they reverted to their trademark tactic—character assassination. The latest instance of that contemptible strategy is Robert Johnson’s comments in South Carolina:

I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing but he said it in his book.

This is, of course, only the latest example of this particular smear. Clinton’s minions have been slyly alluding to Obama’s youthful indiscretions involving drugs since before the New Hampshire primary, and they have been augmenting this tactic with subtle racial allusions. My favorite came from that paragon of objective journalism, Howard Fineman (emphasis mine):

If she is going to argue that Obama is unelectable in the fall – if she is going to argue that the Democrats cannot afford to take the risk on a Southside Chicago street organizer – she had better get to it in the debate this week.

The most Orwellian feature of this dirty tricks campaign, however, is Hillary’s charge that the whole race issue is being peddled not by her campaign, but by Obama himself. This takes a level of audacity we haven’t seen since her reference to the “vast right wing conspiracy.”

I think it’s important to set the record straight. Clearly we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this …I have no intention of … standing by when I think tactics are being employed that are not in the best interests of our country.

In addition to inflicting HillaryCare 2.0 on the country, Mrs. Clinton clearly plans to take us back to the politics of personal destruction for which she and her husband are justly notorious.  Do we really want another four or eight years of this BS?

UPDATE:

Here’s a video of Johnson making his Obama remarks:

Andrew Sullivan makes the following observation on this episode:

I think the Clintons have looked at Obama’s growing black support and made a simple calculation. If they can ratchet up their white votes by a constant drum-beat of Obama drug references, and they can ratchet up their female votes by portraying Clinton as a victim of male bullying in the media, then they can eke out a victory.