Jack Bass's Diabolic Scheme

Alive!
Dead!
I was inside your head
Had time well spent, I got your mind well bent
Snuck back into shade...
                    -- The Hives, "Diabolic Scheme"

I haven't heard a worse idea all year:

Once the campaigns agree on an Obama-Clinton ticket, Mr. Obama calls Gov. David Paterson of New York, lays out the situation and gets an agreement that if an Obama-Clinton ticket wins, the governor appoints the former president to fill Mrs. Clinton’s Senate seat, where he would serve until 2010. He could then run in a special election for the two remaining years of the term.

Upon being sworn in, Mr. Clinton would immediately be the most prominent member of Congress. He would carry the prestige of being a former two-term president — and he would be married to the vice president, who also happens to preside over the Senate. -- Jack Bass

Jack Bass must really want to make Barack Obama the most ineffectual, compromised, captive, clawless, creeping-coup-threatened, beseiged, one feels inspired to say token President of all time. And that's just the half of it; Bass must also want to make the Clintons into the sort of outfit that the Cheneys would be if Lynne changed her name to Lynnedon and became Master of the Senate. The transformation of the Veep office from sleepy backwater to Dept. of Protean Skulduggery under Cheney wasn't something everyone saw coming. But is there any doubt at all what one Clinton -- much less two -- would do with the chance to fulfill all the vile promise of the stillborn Reagan-Ford condominium?

'Two for the price' of one sucked eggs back in 1992. Without Hillary, Bill would have avoided both of the signature embarrassing failures of his Presidency: health care and adultery. Like the boy on the playground who's a little too old for his grade, there is no safe public place to put Bill Clinton; he will always be looking for someone's sandbox to traipse through, some game of hopscotch to mess up, some skirt on the monkeybars to find himself standing under.

Probably it would be amusing in a soul-sucking way to watch Bill make Hillary's life intermittently ridiculous and awkward the way she did his last time around. But meanwhile every nepotistic and cliqued-out abuse of power to run riot in the Bush White House would take larger, more blatant, egregious form, like certain species of dinosaurs at the height of a late-Jurassic bout of punctuated equilibrium. Superfluous horns! Giant faces! Full-body plumage! And of course conjoined twinning, or at least doubled heads. America cannot stand one more year of such a freak of nature, much less four eight.

Comments

[The Reticulator]

Very funny (and insightful, too).

I tried to trackback about it from my blog, but it seems not to have taken. Oh, well.