BartBlog

Ed Kilgore’s latest piece at Democratic Strategist highlights the growing competition between New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barrack Obama over how best to lead their party should one of them ascend to the presidency next year. Though each are campaigning on “change,” there are two competing viewpoints on how to bring about that change – restoration and revolution. Senator Clinton, of course, is the agent for restoration. She wants to restore the Democratic party to it’s successes of the 1990s under her husband, former President Bill Clinton, but without the faux scandals and with a Democratic congress this time around. Obama, on the other hand, is being fueled by the further left of the party. His message is more along the lines of “total change” from what was in place before. One would assume he means the Clinton administration as well.

The choices are obvious. The answer not so much. (more…)

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, June 24, 2007

WASHINGTON – It’s hard to imagine how Dick Cheney could get more dastardly, unless J. K. Rowling has him knock off Harry Potter next month.

Harry’s cloak of invisibility would be no match for Vice’s culture of invisibility.

I’ve always thought Cheney was way out there — the most Voldemort-like official I’ve run across. But even in my harshest musings about the vice president, I never imagined that he would declare himself not only above the law, not only above the president, but actually his own dark planet — a separate entity from the White House.

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, June 24, 2007

By this late date we should know the fix is in when the White House’s top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam’s aluminum tubes. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq — the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America — had officially begun.

America wasn’t paying close enough attention then. We can’t afford to repeat that blunder now. Last weekend the latest custodians of the fiasco, our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and our new ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, took to the Sunday shows with two messages we’d be wise to heed.

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