I think he meant it as a compliment. But Bill Clinton's praise for his wife might send a shiver down the spine of people who like to live their own lives, thank you very much. His remarks reinforce the image of Hillary as a big-government busybody, an It Takes a Villager, a smarty-pantssuit who wants to lean over your shoulder and kibitz on every decision you make.

Bill made his comments while campaigning recently for Hillary in West Virginia. If he had made the remark once, it might be written off as a slip of the tongue. But as per this article by Tom Searls in the Charleston Gazette, he did so twice. Here it is:

"This woman has spent a lifetime changing people's lives," the former president said.

And then:

"She's a genius at making changes in other people's lives," Clinton said.

Is it the province of a "correspondent" of an ostensibly objective network to proclaim the tactics of a presidential candidate "inappropriate"? Apparently so, when the network is MSNBC and the correspondent David Shuster. The frequent sidekick to Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann got into it with Pat Buchanan on today's Morning Joe.

Shuster spoke out against Hillary's rough-'n-tumble end-game tactics, while a feisty Buchanan defended Clinton's right to go down swinging. Shuster sounded less the reporter and more the DNC member concerned about damage to the party's presumptive presidential candidate. When Mike Barnicle got into the act, he wanted to be sure not to be seen as insulting the Clintons.

View video here.

DAVID SHUSTER: What is the plausible scenario for what she's doing now, and do you agree, the only plausible scenario is that she's just trying to permanently damage Barack Obama?

MIKE BARNICLE: What about this one, David? What about the fact that, listen, not speaking ill of either former President Clinton or Senator Clinton [God forbid!], but this is all they've ever done in their lives. They've never worked at a private job, they've never worked in corporate America [Rose law firm?], they've been public people for 30 years. All they know is running! That's all they know: that's who they are.

In 2007, ABC reporter Claire Shipman enthused that the race between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was one of "fluid poetry" versus "hot factor." On Tuesday's "Good Morning America, she rhapsodized about the spouses of these two Democratic candidates. According to Shipman, "...I think it says it all that [Michelle Obama's] Secret Service code name is renaissance."

Discussing the campaigning being done by the senator's wife in Indiana and North Carolina, the correspondent enthused, " More, more, more. Michelle Obama's straight style has always been an asset." (Shipman made no mention as to whether Mrs. Obama's claim that the 2008 campaign marked the first time she was proud of America was an example of this "straight style" or if that comment was an asset to the campaign.) As for Bill Clinton, Shipman declared that all had been forgiven for previous verbal gaffes: "And what's most interesting is this campaign has gone on for so long, we've seen one spouse go from asset to liability, to asset again." Marveling at the ex-president's exuberance, she applauded, "No event is too early, no schedule too full, no front porch too small."

Former President Bill Clinton pinged ABCNews.com's Political Radar on a pulpit-pounding campaign swing through the Tarheel State just two days before the North Carolina primary. But it appears the alphabet network's Web site not only got the name of an Asheville, N.C., church wrong, but it misspelled, three times, the name of a denomination within Protestant Christianity (emphasis mine) in this May 4 blog post (screencap below fold):

ABC News' Sarah Amos reports: Former President Bill Clinton spent time in two western North Carolina churches this morning, speaking more from his heart than any sort of political handbook.

"I didn't come here to ask you to vote for my wife," said Clinton, addressing the congregation at Church of the Pentacostal in Asheville, N.C. "I came here to ask you to pray for her. And to vote. Do whatever you want. Show up. Our country is in dire distress.

Last Wednesday, ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" exposed a serious flaw in a television advertisement Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is running in Indiana (video embedded right, h/t Gateway Pundit).

In fact, Indiana newspapers began pointing out the former first lady's mistake almost three weeks ago after she spoke at a school in that state.

Yet, according to LexisNexis, no other television network felt this issue deserved any coverage, nor did many major newspapers outside of Indiana.

For some background, here's how ABC reported Hillary's flub on Wednesday (video available here):

Following Suzanne Malveaux’s gushing interview of Michelle Obama and her supporter Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg on Wednesday’s "Anderson Cooper 360," Gary Tuchman gave a glowing report on the campaign travels of Bill Clinton for his wife on Thursday’s edition of the program. After portraying the former president as a person "some have seen as a loose cannon and occasionally even a political liability," Tuchman observed that "[a]t times, it feels like he's running for a third term. After all, how many political spouses get handed the proverbial baby?"

It's turning out to be a red-letter day for Hoosiers. This morning, Joe Scarborough tricked Mika Brzezinski into agreeing that the famous coach of the Indiana basketball team was Bear Bryant, of all people, rather than Bobby Knight. This afternoon on MSNBC, when Howard Wolfson questioned the Hoosier bona fides of a superdelegate who today announced he was switching from Clinton to Obama, Andrea Mitchell turned the Clinton aide's gambit back on Hillary with a vengeance.

Superdelegate Joe Andrew, who in the 90s was elevated to DNC chairman with the backing of Bill Clinton, and who had earlier endorsed Hillary, today announced that he was switching his support to Obama. The timing is critical since it comes just days before the Indiana primary, and Andrew hails from the Hoosier state.

Mitchell, hosting her regular 1 PM ET politics show on MSNBC, mentioned that fact to Wolfson. When Wolfson tried to undercut Andrew's Indiana affiliation, Mitchell riposted in spades, citing the multiple states to which Hillary has claimed connection. Andrew later appeared himself, setting the record straight.

View video here.

Hillary Clinton's tax policy on gas and oil is "pointless" while John McCain's is "evil," according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But in explaining the difference, Krugman betrays either his ignorance of the flawed history of the so-called "windfall profits tax" on petroleum or his tacit approval of the tax despite its folly as public policy.

From Krugman's April 29 Conscience of a Liberal blog post (emphasis mine, paragraph breaks removed):

Anyway, John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no. [...] The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

Far from being pointless, a windfall profits tax produces negative effects on consumers and investors, as well as the health of the energy industry, say many economists, including former Bill Clinton economic advisor Robert J. Shapiro who focused his fire on the policy's damage to retirees' investments (see PDF of study here).

Washington Post reporters Alec MacGillis and Steven Mufson found another liberal economist with nothing positive to say for a windfall profits tax in their May 1 front-page article (emphasis mine):

Does it seem the ultimate of political ironies that media are using the same strategy that helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992 to prevent him and his wife from returning to the Oval Office in 2009?

After all, even people that haven't been around the political block a few times should certainly find the following all too predictable press strategy all too familiar (picture courtesy Times Online):

Well, sports fans, the highly-anticipated, years in the making interview of Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama on "Fox News Sunday" is over, and it's certain that folks on both sides of the aisle -- as well as all three remaining campaigns -- will find positives and negatives to glom on to.

In fact, some well-known liberal bloggers have already expressed their displeasure with Obama, wondering why he didn't attack Fox News as had been advertised.

But, before we get to such entertaining feedback, here are the questions posed by host Chris Wallace, which, to this writer's eye, appear to be anything but the normal softballs Obama has been thrown since he first tossed his name into the ring (full transcript here, h/t our good friend Johnny Dollar, video containing many of these questions available at the Huffington Post with full interview video now available at Raw Story, liberal websites both):

Honestly, the hypocrisy of liberal media members knows no bounds.

On Friday, Dan Abrams of MSNBC voiced extreme displeasure with the announcement that Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama is finally going to be interviewed by Chris Wallace on this weekend's "Fox News Sunday."

This from a man whose very network has hosted numerous presidential debates despite moderators Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann being clearly in the tank for Obama.

Amazingly, this contradiction continues to elude the good folks at MSNBC as demonstrated by the following partial transcript of Friday's "Verdict" (readers are cautioned to have a trash receptacle handy in case of involuntary retroperistalsis):

In Chris Matthews's mind, a bigot is someone who's "culturally conservative" on race. Matthews equated the two on this evening's Hardball in attempting to explain exit polling from yesterday's PA primary showing that 38% of white Catholic Democrats wouldn't vote for Obama in the general election.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, somebody who doesn't like that group of voters might call them Archie Bunkers. I'll call them Reagan Democrats, John [Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News], they're Reagan Democrats: people who are culturally conservative, maybe a little culturally conservative on the racial front, on the ethnic front. They like to think of themselves as Democrats on the economic issues, but when it comes to the squeeze, on some of these cultural issues--didn't this all come up earlier about three weeks ago in San Francisco, this conversation.

In the second half of today's "As The Left Eat Their Own," the New York Times' Bob Herbert goes after Democrats for "doing everything they can to blow this presidential election."

And that was just the first sentence of his scathing rebuke of all things currently left-leaning.

With that as an appetizer, readers are advised to strap themselves into their comfiest chairs with a nice bucket of popcorn at their sides, and prepare for a ride guaranteed to thrill beyond their wildest expectations (emphasis added throughout):

If the anger from the left over Wednesday night's debate on ABC continues to manifest itself this way, an old phrase concerning women will have to be altered to "Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned."

Having been bludgeoned by the Washington Post's Tom Shales, and all manner of Netroots denizen, moderator George Stephanopoulos is now the subject of a YouTube video depicting him as dead and "In Memoriam."

For those not getting the so-called joke, "In Memoriam" is a segment near the end of each installment of "This Week" when folks that have died the previous week, including military members serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, are memorialized.

In this video (embedded upper right), it is Stephanopoulos himself being so "honored," as the text rolls across the screen:

By now you've likely heard about Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's recent gaffe concerning high unemployment in small towns making Americans "cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

With this in mind, if media really are in the tank for Obama, and want to help him navigate this minefield he's created for himself, maybe they should look at some speeches Gov. Bill Clinton made in 1991 and 1992 that typically involved some form of the phrase "economically insecure white people."

Although Clinton was typically talking about how, in his view, Republicans tried to use race to gin up votes amongst financially struggling Caucasians, the similarities would certainly be enough to deflect attention away from Obama, assuming this was the press's modus operandi.

For instance, the Los Angeles Times reported on September 17, 1991 (emphasis added, h/t Huffington Post):

Should Hillary make it to the White House, don't look for Bill to be taking an early twirl on the Inauguration Ball dance floor with Nancy Pelosi. Appearing on today's Face the Nation, Madame Speaker made a nasty joke at the former president's expense.

Host Bob Schieffer [who might have experienced some schadenfreude this week with all the talk of Katie Couric being pushed out of the Evening News anchor chair he kept warm for her], asked Pelosi what might have prompted Bill Clinton to resurrect the issue of Hillary's tussle with the Tuzla truth. He had famously chalked it up to the tribulations of a tired 60-year old late at night. In answer, Pelosi sardonically suggested Bill might have had a senior moment of his own.

Hillary Clinton is kissed by Elton John on stage at a fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York City as former President Bill Clinton looks on. Picture: AP

NBC News has grown so pro-Obama that their coverage of the 2008 election has become rabidly anti-Clinton. Matt Lauer began his interview with Chris Matthews by highlighting Bill Clinton’s revival of the Hillary Clinton sniper controversy and the former president’s inaccurate defense of his wife’s inaccurate statement. Matthews even brought up Clinton’s notorious line "it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is."

Moving on to the Clinton camp’s complaints about media coverage, Matthews drew a sports analogy that "when your losing you blame the ref. When you’re winning you don’t." Matthews, who claimed to have a "thrill running up [his] leg" when he hears Obama speak, is hardly a referee in this game.

At the end, Matthews did offer kind words to John McCain opining he has a good reputation and has "been fighting for this country all these years."

The entire transcript is below.

 

MATT LAUER: Chris Matthews is the host of "Hardball" on MSNBC as well as "The Chris Matthews Show." Hey Chris, good morning to you.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Good morning Matt.