Racist "Senior White House Official" Says Obama Too Lazy To Be President--RNC Says The Boss Is Right, Obama Is all "Razzle Dazzle."

Wurlitzer Prize winning wingnut Bill Sammon of the Examiner.com reports

President Bush, for the first time, is predicting that Hillary Rodham Clinton will defeat Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries. "She's got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary," Bush said in an interview for the new book, The Evangelical President. "And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated."

But Bush is convinced the junior senator from New York will then be defeated in the general election by the Republican nominee.

He goes on to quote Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's belief that the election will be very, very tight. Then Sammon does something not all that remarkable for White House Stenographers protecting important officials who say things that they wouldn't want to say in public, he goes off the record to quote a "senior White House official's" critiques of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. What is said by the "senior White House official" about Barack Obama is so racist and so remarkable Sammon should have insisted it be on the record. According to the "senior White House official"

the freshman senator from Illinois was "capable" of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

"It's sort of like, 'that's all I need to get by,' which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And a laziness, an intellectual laziness."

Give me a break, I guess the unnamed senior White House official (Bush is the only current Senior White House official mentioned in Sammon's hit job) thinks Barack Obama, former President of the Harvard Law Review, would do well as a black preacher, preaching a little gospel on Sunday and selling sunshine the rest of the week, but he lacks the willingness to work hard needed to be President. When I read Sammon's piece the wretched memory of "steppen fetchit" came to mind.

More after the break.


As for Hillary, well

paradoxically, she may have too much experience, according to White House aides. They suggested that voters would be weary of her by November 2008. After all, by then Clinton will have eight years under her belt as an unusually high-profile senator, plus another eight as an unusually high-profile first lady.

"This process is not going to serve her well," a senior White House official told The Examiner. "Think about it. She's going to be essentially saying: 'Elect me president after I've spent the last 16 years in your face. And you didn't like me much when I was there last. Give me eight more years so I can be a presence in your life for 24 years. And Bill will be back in.' So no, I think this is not a helpful process for her."

Obviously the Hillary criticism is pretty routine and probably wrong.

According to Josh Marshall the RNC has confirmed that the attack on Obama as a light weight is part of a deliberate strategy

The RNC just shot off an email building on the slur. With the headline "Razzle Dazzle", the email continues the theme that Obama is just another black fancy-pants with a slick smile and nice turn of phrase but either without the candle-power or stick-to-it-iveness to actually get things done.

"Chicago Star Obama Continues His All Show, No Substance Campaign With Event On Broadway," the email begins.

Democrats and Republicans alike should be enraged by the Obama part of the story. Basically the claim is that Obama is just another "lazy, no account 'negro'" with nothing more than a ready smile and easy charm. That kind of crap has no place in 21st century politics. By refusing to identify the official who made the comment (Rove, Cheney or Bush are the three candidates although technically Bush is the only one who is a current "Senior White House Official") Sammon is protecting racism at the highest levels of government. That this racist crap is being embraced by the NRC proves just how determined they are to become a permanent minority regional party.

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Is The Long Neo-Conservative Nightmare Really Over?

Glen Greenwald says the Republican noise machine, and their allies in the corporate press are no longer able to gain traction when they try to unfairly tar and feather Democrats. Trex echos Greenwald in a post called the "Incredible Shrinking Right." He points to the long overdue collapse of David Broder from "from Beltway Godhead to Bleating Dickhead in just a few short, easy steps" as an example of the rapid decline of conservatism. Kevin Drum points to an article by Michael Finnegan in the LA Times indicating that Republican regulars are too embarrassed by their party to answer poll questions. A commenter named Dave over at TMP (I can't find the comment right now) points to a significant decline in the number of comments at Redstate.com. It's true. You go to Redstate and they are posting, but nobody is commenting. You would think the site is a start-up like WTWC instead of a site that became valuable enough to be sold by the founders for real money.

What does it all mean? First, Americans are fed up with Iraq. They have been to the mall and have returned to discover the President has tied down our army occupying a country that doesn't want to be occupied. It is a country that only one American really wants to occupy. Sadly his name is George Bush. Second, Americans were appalled by Katrinia, and the lack of response shown by the administration to other Americans during their hour of need. It has dawned on many Americans that this administration puts the success of a small gang of cronies above all. Not many of us are in that small gang, which is really a subset of a subset of a subset. Third, the Alberto Gonzales hearings have demonstrated that for this crowd the department of justice is just another political tool. David Iglesias was on Bill Maher the other night. Maher gave the story perspective. At the end Iglesias was called a hero for putting his country ahead of his party. Maher's house Republicans sat on their hands looking embarrassed.

It sounds like our team is on a roll. We are finally winning. Well, during all of this I have been reading a series of books about the Civil War. You know, during the Civil War there were any number of battles where one side or the other thought it had won. Their soldiers stopped fighting. Sometimes they started looting. The other side rallied and ran the "victors" right off the battlefield.

Yes, Republicans are down right now, but they are down because of their own failures. Primarily they are down because they realize they have supported a maladministration that doesn't really share their core values. They are embarrassed because they have been hosed by the neo-cons. Folks, the Republican base will recover and will gain control of their party, maybe not in time for 2008, but recover they will.

The Democrats have yet to actually achieve anything. The war in Iraq continues unabated. We don't have universal health care. America's industrial base continues to decline. We still face a host of complicated social issues that have yet to be addressed. George Bush's maladministration is still in power. The justice department is still a wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC and is being run by Karl Rove.

Don't become complacent. Don't start bragging. The battle isn't won. If we let up they will rally and we could be run from the field. We need to make sure we remember that right now the Republican rank and file probably feels betrayed. I don't think they have abandoned their basic principles. We need to make sure we are inclusive and thoughtful when arriving at suggested solutions for Americas problems. Some of their basic principles are pretty much basic Democratic principles. Some aren't but there is room for compromise on many issues. This is a time for Democratic compassion.

There's more: "Is The Long Neo-Conservative Nightmare Really Over?" >>

Fred F. Fielding to Congress--You Can't Handle The Truth on the RNC Servers

Well it has been an interesting night. First we were told that a lot of the NRC emails, especially those of Karl Rove, have "inadvertently" gone missing. The New York Times reports that

The White House said Thursday that missing e-mail messages sent on Republican Party accounts may include some relating to the firing of eight United States attorneys

If they do, then the RNC email accounts were used on official government business, and not on political business. That is a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Numerous experts have said that while copies of the emails might have been "deleted" by Karl Rove and others from their machines, those deletes wouldn't affect backed up servers.

Apparently the White House didn't think about server back ups. The Times story says that White House's lawyer Fred F. Fielding, ever the champion of executive privilege, is now asserting that the White House controls the emails on the RNC servers and that the White House doesn't have to turn over e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. I guess he figures we, the people, can't handle the truth of what our employees have been trying to hide.

It is all very murky, but I suspect we are inching ever closer to a Constitutional showdown. Those never turn out well for Presidents trying to hide wrongdoing from the Congress. Just ask President Nixon.

TPMmuckraker says another document dump is coming. More documents sanitized for Karl's protection. When do the subpoenas start flying? I think we can handle the truth.

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