The Mad Scientists Cook up a New Image for Hillary?

Iraq Make-over for Clinton

Posted by Glenn Thrush of Newsday

The mad scientists in the basement lab of the Clinton campaign have created a brand new, anti-Bush (anti-Obama? Anti-Edwards?) Iraq position for the senator to tout, lest she be accused of being too pro-war, too anti-war, too critical, too supportive or too anything else.
On first blush, Clinton’s Iraq make-over seems to raise as many questions as it answers. Here’s a rundown:

1. Create a troop "cap." A cap on the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq as of Jan. 2, 2007. (Question: What happens if the Pentagon doesn’t go along — will Clinton agree to cut off funding? On National Public Radio this morning she said she doesn’t support Ted Kennedy’s plan to block money for the surge deployment.) Not clear if she plans to even introduce legislation on this.

2. Don’t cut off money for the Bush troop surge — but block funding for the Iraqis if they don’t try to quell the insurgency, stop sectarian violence and institute political reform. (What if they really, really try and really, really fail? Do we just ‘copter away, leaving the well-intentioned Iraqis like we did to the well-intentioned Vietnamese who cooperated with us?)

3. Wants to start pulling U.S. forces out of Baghdad now, 180 degrees from Bush’s plan to put most of the 21,500 "new" troops into the capital. (What if the United States takes greater casualties because it doesn’t have sufficient forces to hold areas?)
Clinton’s core positions apparently remain the same: She’s still opposed to any end-date for U.S. involvement and believes the commander-in-chief — not Congress — should have the final word on war matters.
in White House 2008

charisma and charm that Bill does to pull off this crap, and that she doesn't?

Myself, I'm past the age of falling for rockstars or anything that even resembles charm. I want intelligent competence. And I want leadership.

My problem with Hillary is that she follows rather than leads. As in her war vote.

Beyond that, she has the intelligence to make reasoned compromise, to change her mind if circumstances change, and to make sensible evaluations of data.

Were you looking for someone who could win American Idol?

but I do acknowledge that it is the primary reason he got away with the shit he did, i.e. he is revered as a great Democratic President in spite of the fact that 90% of what he did in office was straight off the re:puke: wish list, while he utterly abandoned women, gays, the working and under classes, helped to further decimate the unions, foisted the entire corporate agenda upon us, etc.

The point is that HRC doesn't have that, and therefore, can't get away with it.

If the sense of the Congress is a troop cap, and BushCo ignores it, that's problematic for him.

Her money for the Iraqis is tied to performance on a wide variety of issues, to include their own security AND taking care of the Sunnis with a chunk of the oil money. And she's in line with Murtha on the 'redeploy to the periphery' theme. The idea behind that is that they can also prevent insurgents from penetrating the borders as easily. Of course, I don't relish the idea of US servicemembers serving as the Iraqi border patrol forever.

Certainly, her proposals could use some tweaking. That said, it beats doing nothing, and saying nothing. It's only with discussion, and alternative proposals, that plans gets made.

But the writer of that article has a bit of an agenda that has nothing to do with advancing the discussion of how we solve the Iraq mess.