Hillary Clinton: The New Nixon?
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com.
I'm in Las vegas, at yet another stiflingly full-of-shit Democratic debate, just breaking up now. The show tonight was a new low, with a suddenly cuddlesome troika of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards spending two hours giving each other friendly establishment back rubs while NBC played the Big Brother role, going to court to keep that meddling Dennis Kucinich off the stage. Afterward, the first flack to waddle into the spin cave is Mark Penn, Clinton's chief mouthpiece, one of Washington's most depraved and expensive lobbyist-whores.

Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he's fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm's length missing from the picture.

After Obama's win in Iowa, everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate could have set their watches by the Hillary camp's inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke. There is now a sudden sense on the campaign trail that the electoral chaos of the last year is a thing of the past, that this race is once again back in the hands of scaly Washington pros like Penn, the whole contest reduced to a series of empty PR ploys on the level of a staged crying fit and a series of back-channel character attacks. The Clintons are back, running things as they always have, with their back-stabbing, inside-baseball mastery, their fanatical, almost religious pursuit of the political fork in the road, their boundless faith in ruthless corporate bagmen of the Penn genus and other such faceless electoral point-shavers.

This all becomes punishingly obvious when Penn, smiling broadly, leans into the hive of spin-room microphones and announces with a straight face that Barack Obama's refusal to describe himself as a "chief operating officer" of the government bureaucracy marks a "critical distinction" in the race.

LINK to rest......