The nastiness that characterizes GOP talk about President Obama was also seen in the savagery with which Bill Clinton was pursued...the phony scandals (Whitewater), the conspiracy theories (the Vince Foster `murder'), Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment trial, etc.
We see now that radio trashtalkification has become so routinized that GOP candidates call each other liars, celebrate torture and war crimes, and obstruct governmental processes by threatening to not pay our bills, or to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Josh Marshall takes a long look back. - GWC
Revanche and the First Black President
by Josh Marshall // Talking Points Memo
This latest rebuke over the [Supreme] Court feels like another example of how Republicans have not simply opposed President Obama's policies - which is their right and if anything a sign of party discipline - but refuse to accord him the personal respect or respect for the office of President which has been accorded to every other chief executive. And yet for those of us who were adults in the 1990s, it is very hard not to see Republican opposition to Bill Clinton in at least a comparable light.
It is odd to think now, almost a generation after his presidency, after years in which Clinton was embraced as a beloved elder statesman and a sort of wizard of the political arts. But Republican hatred of President Clinton was so unbounded that in some respects it became their own undoing. Everyone remembers today that Clinton had approval numbers in the 60s for much of his second term in office; fewer remember that they only shot to those levels after the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal and its peak moments.
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