Today Fred Hiatt in WaPo dares to go beyond the obvious:
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton traveled to this crucial caucus state today to assure voters that she would keep U.S. troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future because "we cannot lose sight of our very real strategic national interests in this region."He's right, of course. Clinton is playing by the Presidential Election Rules that brought her husband to power over a decade ago (check this out). But things have changed since then. People are waking up. Even the WaPo is telling it like it is (right?)! The US blogosphere gasps in shock. You rock, Freddo!
You missed that news story? Me, too. It's not the message Clinton wanted to convey, and it's not the message that reporters took away from her speech.
But it would have been an accurate, if incomplete, rendition of her long address on Iraq policy. That she wanted to go on the record with such a view, but didn't want voters to really hear it, says much about the current Washington bind on Iraq policy.
But wait a minute. Here's Josh Marshall's analysis of the Fred Hiatt editorial:
The main point of the piece is to show that Hillary Clinton, despite what she wants Democratic voters to think, actually supports the Bush-Washington Post line of muscular foreign policy heroism. But along the way Hiatt manages to set up such a surge of straw men that he ends up arguing that Hillary, senate moderates and even President Bush all share one position, which is the Baker-Hamilton Commission position...So Hiatt (under extreme pressure from bloggers) is actually just using a pinch of truth to push a much larger lie. And Marshall is calling him out.
I'm tempted to say that this is classic high school debating society logic -- both clever and ridiculous, simultaneously. But given the author, isn't the key here a rather disingenuous effort to expand the circle of people who agree with his terrible discredited position?
Marshall's voice carries a lot of weight in the blogosphere, but Hiatt's voice carries far more weight in US political and media circles. Which message will best percolate through to voters? Hmmn...
Now, remembering that Howard was first elected PM just a few years after Bill Clinton became Prez, compare the Hiatt WaPo story above with last week's Ozblogistan spat. Aussie bloggers might claim a victory against the GG, but how many people read blogs? For that matter, how many read editorials in Teh Oz?
The battle continues. Level Two has been breached. Prepare for more complex engagements!
