Bill Clinton -- Toughen up, you whiners

Stop the presses; contact Guiness. I'm about to post something favorable about Bill Clinton. It seems that he has revealed that if you want to be in politics, you need more than flowery rhetoric. As Ace would say, you need b*lls of solid titanium:

Don't like the tenor of the Democratic contest?

Don't look to former President Bill Clinton for consolation.

Speaking to voters in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the 42nd president Wednesday said, "I don't give a rip about all this name-calling that's going on. They've been going on ever since Iowa. I've heard them say all these things about her.

"Apparently it's okay to say bad things about a girl," he said laughing, in an apparent reference to his 60-year-old wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, per ABC News' Z. Byron Wolf.

"The only thing that matters is, what happens to you?" said Mr. Clinton. "That's all that matters. If a politician doesn't wanna get beat up, he shouldn't run for office. If a football player doesn't want to get tackled or want the risk of an a occasional clip he shouldn't put the pads on."

Clinton also had a word to say about all the surrogates of both his wife's and Sen. Barack Obama's campaigns whom had been ejected, including former Obama campaign adviser Samantha Power, and former Clinton campaign finance committee member Geraldine Ferraro.

"I don't think any of these people oughta be asked to resign," said the former president. "All these guys that say bad things about any other campaign, they say should they resign? My answer is no, they're repeating the party line. They oughta stay right where they are.

"Let's just saddle up and have an argument," he continued. "What's the matter with that? That's what America's about, right?

"All this moaning and groaning -- none of these politicians are gonna have anything like the tough time half the people in this audience have already had for the last seven years. This is about you. Don't you let anybody take this election away from you."

Politics, by nature, involves having intestinal fortitude and testicular fortitude. If you want to be in politics, you better bring a fat bag of knuckles with you because your opponents aren't going to play nice with you. If you haven't been in the know since this campaign started, everyone has been throwing hammers at each other. It could challenge even the strongest of men (or women). People have opined as to why anyone would want to work int he government, let alone be an elected official, in this sort of visceral, vitriolic environment.

I occasionally joke that I'd be willing to accept an appointment to the Supreme Court because I think I'm pretty damn good at figuring out constitutional jurisprudence. I have studied the Constitution, and Supreme Court cases, for the last twenty-one years of my life. I couldn't do any worse than the worst jurists that have served on the court, and people could be confident that I would rule based on an originalist philosophy. But would I want to go into the pool of sharks known as the Senate Judiciary Committee? Would I want my life scrutinized by the media? Would I like to be slandered by liberal activists?

Those are questions I ask myself every time someone brings up the subject of my non-ascent to the high court. I'm not sure.

But Bill's right. There is no whining in politics just like there's no crying in baseball. You want to whine? Stay out of politics.

Publius II