Official Conservative Narrative of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy takes shape: She’s forever doomed to vacillate between “centrist” pro-war position and “left-wing” antiwar stance.
And speaking of “centrism,” we’ve found what may be the ultimate example of a big news org’s mindless and reflexive use of the much-abused term. View it here.
With the news of Hillary’s big announcement today (I said ‘big’ not unexpected) The Atlantic has pushed its recent and arguably definitive profile of HRC in front of the magazine’s firewall.
Whoa . . . Steve Clemons calls out presidential candidate Bill Richardson on, um, well, as Clemons phrases it, the “blurring of public responsibilities and ‘what should be’ private behavior.” Man, that didn’t take long. Richardson just announced his candidacy today.
From TPM Reader TB:
I think you may have touched on this before, but I’d like to reiterate the single biggest mental block that currently makes me think I will not cast my vote for Clinton. It makes my stomach hurt to think that in twenty or thirty years I could look back at a list of presidents that includes “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton.” This country is far too great to have to rely on two families for so much presidential leadership. Think about it: a two-term Hillary would be TWENTY-EIGHT years of Bush and Clinton. It’s petty, but like I said it’s a mental block, and I’m just not sure how I can get over it.
I wouldn’t call it a petty concern.
This is precious. Apparently Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is going to go after outgoing Iraq commander Gen. George Casey in his nomination hearings to become the next Chief of Staff of the Army.
Said Sen. McCain: “”I have very serious concerns about General Casey’s nomination. I’m concerned about failed leadership, the message that sends to the rest of the military.”
‘Failed leadership’ here, of course, is code for toeing the Bush line for the last two years and then resisting the new effort to dig the US even deeper into the mess of Iraq. In other words, Casey becomes the lamb in whose blood the sins of the Iraq War dead-enders (Bush, McCain, et al.) are washed clean.
Comic, Orwellian, so many possible descriptions.
Remember the long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that the Bush Administration managed to push off completing until after the election? Well, the Administration has slow-rolled completion of the NIE past the introduction of the surge and the State of the Union address, according to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s:
The situation came to a head last week, during a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee. This committee expected to be briefed on the long-awaited NIE by an official from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates NIEs by gathering input from all of the nation’s various intelligence agencies. But the NIC official turned up empty-handed and told the committee that the intelligence community hadn’t been able to complete the NIE because of the many demands placed upon it by the Bush Administration to help prepare the new military strategy on Iraq. He then said that not all of the relevant agencies had offered input into the NIE process, and thus it had proven impossible to put together a finished product.
Why, yes, of course. They were too busy rolling out what they’re calling a new Iraq policy to prepare the NIE which should inform creation of that new policy. That tells you everything you need to know about the surge.
WaPo poll: Public trusts Dem Congress on Iraq over Bush by nearly two to one margin.
Update: And speaking of this poll, it looks like WaPo‘s editorial writers cherry-picked from its own poll data to bolster its case against Hillary Clinton’s electability.
Hmmm. Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wasn’t impressed by John Solomon’s debut story in the Post either.
From her internal Post blog, reprinted at FishbowlDC …
More than a dozen readers, both inside the newsroom and outside, were troubled by the John Edwards story on Page today. So was I. Most complainers thought that the story either wasn’t worth a story or wasn’t worth fronting or both. It was interesting enough to make an item in In the Loop, but not Page 1. I kept looking for the graf that would tell me that the buyers had some history with Edwards, that they were big campaign contributors, that there was some quid pro quo. Nada.
Ouch.