I've been watching the Obama and Clinton camps snipe at each other for the past few weeks and it hasn't been pretty. Obama made race an issue when Hillary tried to give some credit to Lyndon Johnson for the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1965, Obama saying in effect that to give a white man credit (even if he was president of the United States) for any aspect of civil rights diminished the stature of Martin Luther King. Hillary, of course, had to fall on her petard to extricate herself from that non-pc statement -- factually correct though it may be. In response, Hillary unleashed her attack-dog husband to get into the muck and excoriate Obama for a variety of perceived sins, calling his opposition to the war in Iraq a "fairy tale" and giving him all sorts of grief for a comment Obama made that mentioned Ronald Reagan (Darth Vader to the Democratic base) in an obliquely positive light. It was typical Bill Clinton -- all fire and brimstone. And, of course, totally hypocritical.

It is the nature of the Clintons that they believe in everything they say -- even when it is an outright lie. There is no objective truth for Bill Clinton, only the latest spin. So it is not at all surprising that he has said in recent speeches that he didn't support the Iraq war in the beginning (false), and has consistently spun his own record as president in vainglorious ways while campaigning for his wife on the stump (the fact that he talks about himself when campaigning for her tells us all we need to know about the size of his ego). The latest barrage against Obama's statements about Reagan are especially noteworthy because they are tepid in comparison to Bill's own positive comments about Reagan in 1991, when Bill was running for the same nomination that his wife now covets. Speaking to the editors of the Washington Post, Clinton said, that Ronald Reagan deserved credit for winning the Cold War. He praised Reagan's "rhetoric in defense of freedom" and his role in "advancing the idea that communism could be rolled back."

Now, that's a far more robust endorsement of the Gipper than what Obama actually said -- which was simply that Reagan had truly altered the trajectory of American politics in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had not. Ahh, there it is -- the real reason for Bill going after Obama with a hatchet on this. The not-so-subtle rebuke to the former president Clinton was far more than his healthy ego could stand, irrespective of his comments in 1991. As anyone who has ever crossed swords with the Clintons (and lived to tell about it) can attest, their thin skin leads to your blood being shed. There is a long and illustrious line of fallen "friends of Bill" in his wake to prove it.

So, there we have it; a former president of this great nation on the warpath in Nevada and South Carolina, sniping at reporter's questions and taking every opportunity to bash his wife's opponent. His tone is not simply tough, it is shrill and condescending, as if you should know better than to challenge him. He's smarter than ther rest of us -- or so he thinks. And it comes off in an ugly, ugly way.

Are we really up for four more years of this? Of the Clinton machine revising history, triangulating public opinion and squeezing the facts to fit their version of the truth? And to have Bill running amok, unfettered as he will be by the office itself, but with all of the vast bully pulpit (and I do mean "bully") with which to lecture us? Can we really want that as a nation?