As someone who spent a month working for the Obama campaign in Iowa, and who has nothing but contempt for the way shallow and disengenuous way Hillary Clinton has run her presidential campaign, I nonetheless believe with all my heart that attacking Clinton on the issue of the Bosnia "Sniper Fire" trip is complete and utter bullshit.
Attacking Clinton over this story is just one more asinine "gotcha" story that embodies everything that is wrong with our politics today. Don't get me wrong--Clinton has perfected this kind of bullshit attack in this campaign. And there's a part of me that chuckles at seeing her taking heat for a bullshit issue after trying to stir up so many herself. None of this changes the fact that this is all nonsense that has nothing to do with who should be president of the United States. Who really gives a fuck whether Clinton was under sniper fire or not when she was in Bosnia? I don't. And to those who think this was a deliberate and calculated falsehood, you've got to be dumber than rocks to do that when the entire thing was on video.
Ah, but there are those who think this goes to the heart of the Clinton experience argument. I've got news for you. There never was any experience argument. She never had any. She was the first lady, not someone in an elected or cabinet position. Her trying to boost the importance of her travels goes under the heading of "nice try."
But a scandal this is not. It's about as much of a scandal as when Tim Russert asked Howard Dean how many troops we had in Iraq and Dean responded 110,000 and the answer was 120,000 (or something like that). So please, by all means, take your shots at Clinton for the crappy campaign she has run--The baseless attacks, the insults of most states, the failure to run a real ground game, the incompetence of Mark Penn, her Iraq war vote--There's a million real things to criticize.
But not this one. Don't go into a feeding frenzy on a bullshit issue like this one that has nothing to do with anything. You see, I care about this passionately, because Barack Obama is going to have to overcome total bullshit issues to get elected president, and every time they come up it makes my blood boil. We're in a war of unimaginable stupidity, throwing away blood, treasure and the respect of the world; our economy is as bad as it's been since the great depression; we're facing a candidate in McCain who thinks it's just dandy to stay in Iraq for another 100 years and who admittedly knows little about the economy. But of course the press doesn't write about any of that stuff anyone cares about; they care about what a candidate's former pastor said in his sermon. We're going to have to fight through fields of bullshit from now through November. Don't get too happy throwing that
stuff around.