Progress Illinois

Dick Morris isn't a doctor. He just plays one on morning talk radio.

A former Clinton operative, Morris broke ties with the president in 1996 and went on to make a career of bashing the Clintons as a conservative pundit. Earlier today on WIND's John & Cisco In The Morning, he stopped by to spread the love. Near the end of the interview, the issue of Bill Clinton's campaign behavior came up and Morris made some irresponsible claims that shouldn't go unchallenged.

Citing the former president's recent colorful criticism of Vanity Fair reporter Todd Purdum, co-host "Big John" Howell asked Morris whether Clinton was starting to "go around the bend." Morris responded by suggesting that Clinton's behavior may be the result of brain damage incurred during his quadruple bypass surgery in 2004. Specifically, he remarked that doctors "always say you come out of that [operation] with less IQ than you went into it."

Take a listen:

Internal mp3

Presumably Morris is picking up on Purdum's recent profile of Clinton in which Dr. Thomas Traill of John's Hopkins University is quoted saying that patients' moods can be altered by open heart surgery. (He compared it to postpartum depression.) But it's quite a far leap from Traill's comments about depression to Morris' completely unfounded suggestion of possible brain damage.

If you want a more nuanced, convincing, and even poignant analysis of Clinton's sometimes emotional outbursts on the campaign trail, check out this recent post by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall. In a nutshell, Marshall paints Clinton as a once agile campaign operator who is way behind the times and unable to adapt to new media technology and our rapid-response political culture. It's a much better starting place to understanding the former president than Dick Morris' snake-tongued insinuations.

Here's the transcript of Morris' comments:

HOWELL: Is BIll Clinton starting to go around the bend as far as kind of loosely using some crude language. He's always had a temper. I know that. He's always said things behind closed doors. But he's been caught more often than not lately.

MORRIS: Exactly, and I'm wondering why. The Bill Clinton that I see on YouTube now is very similar to the one that I knew for 25 years, but not in public. And I’m really wondering why he, at the end of this campaign, allowed himself to do that in public. It could be that he’s tired. It could be that he’s frustrated. It could also be that maybe the heart operation had some impact on his ability to hold himself back.

HOWELL: I'm sure he knew the word "scumbag" before, but I'm surprised hearing him use it now that he's in public.

MORRIS: That's right. When I used to sit with him and we would watch somebody else on TV screwing up in politics, he would turn to me and say: “Ooh, I don’t think I would have done that.” And now he’s doing that.

HOWELL: Well maybe it is something to do with his health issues too. I mean, just the fatigue factor gets there.

MORRIS: Well there’s that and there's also a lot of doctors who have spoken about the impact of the heart-lung machine not delivering all the oxygen it needs to during open heart surgery. And that’s something that the doctors, I guess, don’t talk about much. But they always say you come out of that with less IQ than you went into it.

HOWELL: Dick Morris, thanks a lot for your insight.