Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou

One of the sideline happenings of the week--which has been a bit depressing from the perspective of being a lifelong Democrat and Clinton supporter for so many years--was Bill Clinton's toein' to the BushCo line, even going so far as to parrot the "we could never have guessed this could happen" meme. Arianna Huffington over at the Huffington Post has a few words for Bill:

But it's mighty hard to have a teachable moment when you have Bill Clinton, still the reigning symbol of the Democratic Party, failing to connect the dots between the Bush administration's chronic abandonment of the poor and its recent abandonment of the poor in the Big Easy -- as well as the dots between the war in Iraq and the undermining of our security here at home. And as if all this wasn't enough, there he was defending the indefensible. "I'm telling you," he said in a White House sit-down with CNN (along with Bush, Sr.), "nobody thought this was going to happen like this...they had problems they never could have foreseen." Which is absolutely, incontrovertibly, and provably untrue (many, many times over). And he is too smart not to know it. Instead of acting like a Bush lapdog and gratefully accepting his role as Co-Disaster-Fund-Raiser-in-Chief, imagine the impact Clinton would have had if he had stepped up and made the connection between the increase in poverty and the stagnation in incomes for the fifth straight year and the post-storm suffering among the poor in New Orleans. Or imagine if he had spoken out about how the GOP's beloved new bankruptcy bill is going to further the misery of those ruined by Hurricane Katrina. Chances to radically shift the national debate, alter the nation's perspective, and rearrange our priorities don't come along very often. President Bush squandered the teachable moment provided by 9/11, calling us not to national service but to shopping. Bill Clinton is now making it harder to use the current disaster as a wake-up call about the pent-up anger bubbling just beneath the surface of our country, about the Other America largely hidden from view, and about the urgent need to redefine national security.

What with Hilary's continued move to the center to champion moral values issues like video game ratings (though I found her attempts to reframe the abortion debate holding some promise), the Clintons are certainly not at the top of my dance card for 2008.