BLOODSPORT

Politics is a bloodsport. And Bill and Hillary Clinton are its leading vampires. They can be ruthless, relentless and clever - but vampiric nonetheless. They can go from teary to whiny to fang protruding in the blink of an eye. Their competition is never political opposition, merely enemies and potential victims. To paraphrase former Clinton supporter and present Barack Obama supporter, Hollywood mogul David Geffen, the ease of their mendacity is troubling. Yet the media has always been genuinely shocked and awed by each mendacious assertion they have uttered over the past 15 years. The Clinton response to Mr. Geffen's charge was to blame Senator Obama. Sadly, the press indulged the unfair, unwarranted and dishonest attack by making it between Obama and the Clintons instead of Geffen and the Clintons.

The Clintons feign anger and disappointment that Senator Obama has not received the media scrutiny that Mrs. Clinton has. If she has been truly scrutinized, that would be Bill Clinton's real fairy tale. She has repeatedly laid claim to her "35 years of experience." At what - being married to Mr. Clinton! She is never adequately challenged when her decades of "experience" becomes the mantle that makes her "ready" to be president. Let us examine some of her experiences. The state of Arkansas finished one of the worst four of the fifty states in virtually every quality of life category such as jobs, economy, education and crime under Bill Clinton's gubernatorial leadership. What role did Mrs. Clinton's "experience" as first lady of Arkansas contribute to those horrendous outcomes? While first lady of the state and partner in the Rose Law Firm her legal expertise and experience is open to question as Madison Savings & Loan went belly up with Mrs. Clinton as one of its legal principals who worked on the account. Her "experience" with the Whitewater real estate investment saw more than a dozen convictions for various and sundry felonies. Thus, her experience with judgment becomes likewise questionable.

And it was that experienced, questionable judgment that followed them to the White House. The firing of the career employees of the Travel Office in an exposed attempt at patronage, the forced resignations, investigations and indictments of cabinet officials and other federal appointees and the president's own involvement in a conspiracy to fix a federal case. He has subsequently admitted before a special prosecutor that he did indeed commit the offenses for which he was impeached when accepting the suspension of his law license. To this day, the "experienced" Clintons are loath to understand how a former bar bouncer who worked on the 1992 presidential campaign "qualified" to become head of White House security or who actually sanctioned his ascendance. Even more bizarre, or absurd - take your pick, their former bar bouncer was responsible for the attainment of over 900 FBI files of innocent citizens for an allegedly unknown purpose. At least unknown to the experienced Clintons. A career White House employee insisted that he saw Mrs. Clinton's White House Chief of Staff carry files out of the White House Council's office after the death of Vince Foster. Her staff member denied removing any files, however the missing, subpenaed files, last seen in Foster's office, somehow were discovered in Mrs. Clinton's White House residence. And otherwise respectable women who lodged complaints about Bill Clinton's behavior, past and present, were denounced as stalkers, bimbos and trailer trash.

In 1993, the Clintons first year in the White House, six people were murdered and hundreds were injured when a truck bomb exploded in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York. It was subsequent to that attack that our knowledge of the aims of Al Qaeda became known. The Clinton response to their declaration of war against America was to decimate the military. And after Al Qaeda repeatedly murdered Americans and the native citizens at overseas locations, the Clinton regime waged no aggressive response although he repeatedly promised to "hunt them down and make them pay" each time he eulogized the flag-draped coffins that came home.

Mrs. Clinton's 35 years of experience includes the ridiculous notion that it was "a private, personal matter" when a government employee, receiving a public paycheck, provided "personal favors" for the president during working hours. And her thirty five years of experience informs us that it would "require a leap of faith" to vote for Senator Obama - as though faith is a bad thing. The Declaration of Independence is based on faith. Faith successfully propelled us through the Civil War, slavery, Jim Crow laws and a civil rights revolution. Thirty five years of "experience" is not a positive sign of ready leadership when those years have been riddled with mendacity, poor judgment and the abandonment of faith. And it is the long experience with those particular character traits that should make it difficult to inspire confidence from the electorate.