Incumbent Hillary Clinton... what?!

From Digby:

I don't know if anyone's noticed, but George W. Bush is being disappeared from the presidential campaign and everyone's running against incumbent Hillary Clinton. Subtly, but relentlessly, the public psyche is being prepared to deny Junior ever existed. And it could work. For many different reasons, most Americans want nothing more than to forget George W. Bush was ever president. So, we see a very odd subliminal narrative taking shape in which the blame for the nation's failures of the last seven years is being shifted to Clinton (and the "do-nothing" Democratic congress) as if the Codpiece hasn't been running things since 2000.

This is perhaps the strangest warping of reality yet. We've already seen Hillary being cast as The Great Satan among the right, even though she still has an enormous amount of popularity among the rank-and-file. (Her supporters probably rank as a plurality rather than a majority when all the polls are considered, but considerably more popular than the punditocracy would have you believe.)

But casting Hillary as the cause of the last eight years of heartache? Would the media really go along with this meme? We heard nothing but "Is Gore running away from Clinton?" during the 2000 campaign. Is the press going to give the Republican candidates the same scrutiny? By all accounts, the Republican candidates should have their noses rubbed in the refuse of the failed Bush 43 presidency and all the serious war, environmental, and financial issues that could cost us all more than we can afford. Instead, they're being allowed to live in their fantasy world of social security paranoia and Hillarycare. Frankly, I'm worried about the concept of someone as addle-brained as Fred Thompson being handed the reins of foreign policy, but you'd never know it was a concern if you read the mainstream news.

The concept of running against an imagined current Hillary presidency has been created whole from a looking glass world. Who needs hallucinogenic drugs when you have a convoluted fantasy world, created by desperate hacks and fully furnished for immediate move-in by the so-called journalistic set?