Originally syndicated September 6 | At this Democratic National Convention, I am going to be particularly interested in the crowds on the floor. Who cares about what Bill Clinton says? He does not mean it anyway. In the 1990s, he governed like a Republican after saying that "the age of Big Government is over." Incidentally, he governed pretty well. He would have made a good moderate Republican, so long as he had good conservative majorities in the House and the Senate to keep him — you will excuse the word — honest. Now, of course, he has committed another of his episodic tergiversations, writing a book in praise of behemoth government, as though the 1990s never happened.

The same can be said for Senator Jean-Francois Kerry. In 2004 he accepted his party's presidential nomination and continued his fiction that he was a war hero, ludicrously saluting the throng at the convention with "I'm John Kerry, and I am reporting for duty." As though the rest of the nation had forgotten that he came home from the Vietnam War, protesting it, and appeared before a taped congressional inquiry to incriminate his fellow servicemen with lies. Then he flew off to France to be used as a pawn by the Communist Vietnamese — war hero indeed. Possibly Senator Harry Reid could be interesting if he would only tell us what he knows about that cow he has been rumored to canoodle with, and, to be sure, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is always good for a few laughs.

The media are gushing and fawning over new poll numbers showing Barack Obama getting a bounce from the just ended Democratic National Convention putting him four points ahead of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Before they get too cocky, they might want to recall that after his convention ended in 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by seventeen points.

The New York Times reported July 26, 1988:

How would the media – which barely noticed the platform dispute at the Democratic convention in which the chair clearly didn’t get the required two-thirds majority from the floor to revise embarrassing platform gaps by adding a reference to God and identifying Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – react if such an incident occurred at the Republican convention?

On FNC’s Fox NewsWatch, Jim Pinkerton (his Twitter) on Saturday outlined his theory of how the news media, particularly the Today show and the New York Times, would have jumped on such an event if it had happened to Republicans. 

"Bill Clinton, whatever you want to say about how he conducted himself, had a very important and elevated view of the Office of the Presidency."

So amazingly said Politico's Roger Simon on PBS's Inside Washington Friday (video follows with transcribed highlights).

Appearing as regular panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, as he recounted former President Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention, liberal Washington Post columnist Colby King claimed that "the amount of hate that the Republicans have for Barack Obama is just astounding," calling it "raw, visceral hate."

A bit later, after right-leaning panel member Charles Krauthammer offered criticism of Michelle Obama's speech, King lambasted him for not giving the First Lady a pass from substantive analysis and ended up gratuitously suggesting that dying was the only thing President Obama and wife Michelle could do to make the conservative Krauthammer happy. King: