The Democrat party crack-up

There are so many news stories out there today about how much in disarray the Democrats are right now that it’s hard to know where to start. For the party that many believe has been in the driver’s seat since the 2006 elections to take the WH and expand their majorities in the House and Senate, you’d never know it as these days watching the various politicos and operatives duking it makes one wonder if we’re watching Real World: Sesame Street, live as it’s happening.

The furor continues unabated this evening from many of Barack Obama’s thin-skinned supporters who continue to whine that the deck was “stacked against” BO at last night’s ABC News debate (transcript here). Apparently they believe, essentially, that even though Obama is a grown man he should still be spoon-fed baby food rather than the meaty stuff we grown-ups eat. Disappointingly enough, instead of telling his supporters to chill out, that he was an adult who can take the heat, the frontrunner for the Dem nomination seemed to echo the sentiment expressed by his followers in a speech he gave today in Raleigh, NC (video here):

I will tell you it does not get more fun than these debates. They are inspiring debates. I think last night we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people.

It took us 45 minutes — 45 minutes before we heard about health care, 45 minutes before we heard about Iraq, 45 minutes before we heard about jobs, 45 minutes before we heard about gas prices.

Now, I don’t blame Washington for this because that’s just how Washington is. They like stirring up controversies and getting us to play gotcha games and getting us to attack each other. And I’ve got to say Sen. Clinton looked in her element.

She was taking every opportunity to, you know, get a dig in there…. That’s all right, that’s her right, that’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit….

Look, I understand though, because that’s the textbook Washington campaign, because that’s the politics that’s been taught to be played, that’s the lesson that she had heard when the Republicans were doing the same things to her back in the 1990s.

Comprende? George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson are right wing tools, people!

Are we detecting a pattern here? Just a few days ago, Obama was accusing Clinton of using the “GOP playbook” against him. It’s become one of several talking points he has adopted on the campaign trail to try and stifle criticism of him using the guilt card. Legitimate criticisms of him, according to not just his campaign but the man himself, boil down to a number of things: “racism,” deliberate attempts to “distract” from the ‘real’ issues, are borrowed from the “GOP playbook,” yada yada – you get the point. Anyone who levels criticism at him should viewed as being guilty of racism, deliberately attempting to distract from his “message,” and/or are harbor secret right wing agendas. And let’s not forget how he grumbled about how the media took Hillary Clinton’s media bias criticisms to heart in becoming tougher on He Who Walks on Water: V.2008.

Quite frankly I’m offended but not surprised that Barack Obama believes that character doesn’t and shouldn’t matter when a person is making a choice about which candidate to support. But sister, you might ask, where did he say character doesn’t matter? Let’s take a look again at some of what he talked about in Raleigh:

I think last night we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people.

The first half of the debate was spent primarily on character issues. Who are you? Why are you associated with so and so? Senator Clinton got asked by closet right winger George Stephanopoulos about a recent poll which indicated that a majority of respondents didn’t believe Senator Clinton was honest, hardly a softball question. Barack Obama was asked about his long term mentorship with Rev. Wright, his association with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, among other thing people have been curious about, and he tried to downplay every one of them.

Today he complained that who he has associated with and asking about what their influences might be on him, as well as pressing further on remarks he’s made that make him sound stuck-up and out of touch, that those are all things that “don’t matter” to the American people and that last night was, for the most part, a preview of what we’ll see happen to him in the general election. Well, he’s somewhat right on part of that: To many of his fawning supporters, the man could be holding the smoking gun at the scene of a triple homicide and he’d still be innocent. That’s the Cult of Obama in a nutshell. But unfortunately for Barry O, there are people out there, and not a small number, who still have a lot of questions about who he is and where his loyalties are, people who believe that yes, character does indeed matter. Last night’s first several questions were only a distraction for Obama’s campaign to hoodwink millions of people into believing he’s something he’s not: a different kind of politician. About the only thing different about him is the lengths he’ll go through in order to achieve that deception.

And one last point about his complaints about how he was treated last night: if the dude can’t take what George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson give him, how’s he going to handle the much rougher treatment he’s going to get from much more sinister outfits like, oh, Al Qaeda, for example? Will he accuse them, too, of using the right wing playbook?

Jim Geraghty hits the nail on the head here:

Hey, welcome to the big leagues, rookie. You’re gonna get some questions you’re not going to like. Not everybody gets to have their main opponent’s bid implode when their divorce records are unsealed and compete against Alan Keyes in a general election.

Seriously, if Barack Obama can’t handle questions like this from Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous, maybe the portrait of the cracking-under-pressure whiner depicted in the Saturday Night Live sketch isn’t as wild an exaggeration as we thought.

Some of us didn’t find it an exaggeration at all.

Obama’s so uptight about last night’s debate that he’s saying there shouldn’t be anymore. He’d prefer to campaign …. in front of a bunch of like-minded yes-men, of course. I guess this means the proposed North Carolina debate is out.

Moving right along ….

—- Did you know that the mighty far lefty Kos no longer considers Hillary Clinton a Democrat because he, too, believes she’s using GOP talking points against the saintly BO? An upset Big Tent Democrat at the Talk Left blog suggests to Kos that that is no way to unify the party. Read more about the stand off between Obama supporters and Clinton supporters via liberal Tom Watson.

—- In other, news: Although race-baiting DNC Chair Howie Dean has vowed not to make McCain’s age an issue of his campaign, that hasn’t stopped one Democratic operative from starting a website which focuses on that very subject:

Called “Younger than McCain“, the website is being run by Steve Rosenthal, a former political director at the AFL-CIO and executive director of America Coming Together, a massive soft money effort organized around the 2004 presidential race. Rosenthal is now a partner in The Organizing Group.

The current content amounts to a 90-second video listing the things younger than McCain — a list that includes the Golden Gate Bridge, plutonium, Coke in a can and Velcro among many, many other things.

[…]

“John McCain comes from another time, an old war-horse stuck in the past with an old-world view of things,” said Rosenthal. “Our videos — hopefully in a funny way — are aimed at pointing out just how old, out of touch and clueless he is.”

Rosenthal said he and a “group of twenty-somethings” in his office put the original video together and are already at work on the next one.

These types of sandbox antics makes you wonder if there are many adults left in the Democrat party.