The Chris Moeller Archives

The polarizer

The "vast right-wing conspiracy" continues to work overtime in boosting its choice to lead the Democratic ticket in 2008-- Hillary Clinton. A Pentagon official, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, responded in writing Monday to questions Clinton raised back in May about how the Pentagon planned to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. Said Edelman, "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia." He added that "such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

The intent of Edelman's preposterous statements, you see, is to lift Clinton's profile and standing among the opposition, the anti-war left, which understandably doubts Clinton's anti-war bona-fides. The radical right-wing wants desperately for Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. Edelman's statements about "reinforcing enemy propaganda" are so baffoonish that they could apply just as mistakenly to any one of the large number of elected representatives who have spoken out against the war in recent weeks. Hell, there was "public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq" for 18 straight hours on the Senate floor Tuesday night. The voting congressional members who have publicly opposed our current policy are as politically-diverse as Russ Feingold, Richard Lugar, Barack Obama, John Warner, Chuck Hagel, Pete Dominici, Lindsey Graham, and Dennis Kucinich.

But who does Edelman choose to single out? He chooses a person whose husband first raised the false specter of Saddam Hussein holding weapons of mass destruction, a person who voted to give the president the power to go to war in 2002, who has refused to concede that error, and who has said publicly (in March) that, under her leadership, we would have a "remaining military as well as political mission in Iraq," and that a large number of troops would have to stay because of our "remaining vital national security interests in Iraq." (Read: oil.)

Hillary Clinton is the preferred target of the right-wing hate squad, not because she's the biggest threat to their ideals and principles, but because she's perceived as the easiest Democrat to beat in the general election in '08. A poll released just today by the New York Times and CBS News casts Clinton as a front-runner, but finds that a whopping 40 percent of all voters surveyed view her unfavorably. (No other Democrat registered higher than 28 percent.) That means that two out of every five voters have already made up their minds about her, and don't like what they would be getting in a second Clinton White House.

Conversely, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, whom this blog has endorsed in the 2008 Democratic primaries, continues to poll most formidably, head-to-head, against each of the leading Republican candidates.

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I wish I could get more excited about Tuesday night's sleepover on the floor of the United States Senate. Unfortunately, however, that chamber already voted earlier this year to continue funding the war so it doesn't figure how attempting to extend debate in order to pass another non-binding resolution accomplishes much of anything. Harry Reid could hold his colleagues there all summer, but as long as the Pentagon gets its checks, the bloodshed in Iraq will continue.

This doesn't imply, however, that a gaggle of Republican Senators didn't act completely hypocritical. Lugar, Dominici, Warner, and George Voinovich all played the mainstream news media for fools this week. (Granted, not that difficult to do.) Each of them could be found on your television Sunday morning, scoring "maverick" points with the punditocracy "taking on the president" on the chat shows. But when it came time to defy Bush on the Senate floor, they each turned tail.

posted by CM @ 7:42 PM