Briar Patch Politics

Now ol' Br'er Hogg, see, he know a thing or two about people, sometime things they don't rightly know about theyself. Bein' a Hogg anyways is a connivin' line o' work, makin' sho the trough always full and yo' snout always in it. It ain't easy when alls ya got to work wit' is hoofs. So when Hogg not talkin' behind his neighba's back, he comin' hat in hoof, offerin' ad-vice 'n' in-sights 'n' such. When he get excited he give it away, 'cuz his little curly tail start to shake 'n' wag, 'n' he cain't he'p it.

Bein' a Hogg is a tricky thing.

[Hillary Clinton's] remarks helped wash away the memory of her angry replies to attacks at the debate's start. [Obama's] trash talking was an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard, and capped a mediocre night.

The other personal moment came on Monday, when a woman in Portsmouth asked her "how do you do it?" Mrs. Clinton's emotional reply was powerful and warm. Voters rarely see her in such a spontaneous moment. It was humanizing and appealing. And unlike her often contrived and calculated attempts to appear down-to-earth, this was real.

Third, the Clintons began -- at first not very artfully -- to raise questions about the fitness for the Oval Office of a first-term senator with no real accomplishments or experience.

Former President Bill Clinton hit a nerve by drawing attention to Mr. Obama's conflicting statements on Iraq. There's more -- and more powerful -- material available. Mr. Obama has failed to rise to leadership on a single major issue in the Senate. In the Illinois legislature, he had a habit of ducking major issues, voting "present" on bills important to many Democratic interest groups, like abortion-rights and gun-control advocates. He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn't know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.

Uh-huh. This is like Bobby Knight calling Bill Parcells a high-toned prick. This is the same "person" who, the last time Saint John McCain won New Hampshire, set Marion Robertson's flying monkeys loose on McCain and his "black love child", in the service of unleashing a figurehead legacy doofus whose sole achievement at the time had been trading Sammy Sosa for a sack of magic beans. Nothing like free, unsolicited oppo research proferred to the candidate with the highest-polling negatives. I'm sure he means well.

In any respectable profession, a creepy jockstrap-sniffer like Karl Rove would be disqualified from being heard by decent people. Which means he'll probably have his own New York Times column in another year or so.