In recent days there have been quite a few comments on Hillary Clinton’s recent behavior.  Along with the near universal condemnation of Clinton’s venomous and often groundless attacks against Barack Obama, there has been a fair amount of questioning what, exactly, she is trying to do.  Can’t she see that this is out of bounds?  Can’t she understand that Democrats are not going to be attracted to her side if she is trashing our party’s frontrunner?  Doesn’t she see how she is confirming all of the negative images that people have had of her in the past?  Etc., etc.

I too have been giving a lot of thought to what Clinton is trying to achieve and have come to believe that there are two possible explanations for the recent whole-hearted dive into the gutter after what had been, until about two weeks ago, a relatively cordial primary.

The first is that on some level Clinton knows that she has lost but can’t quite accept that and is lashing out at the upstart that has taken what she had always viewed as her rightful position.  That seems to be what quite a few people are thinking.  I am not sure that they are wrong.  However, there is another possibility which is infinitely more disturbing.

Clinton Camp Rolls Out New Strategy

In a dramatic, even startling, development in the campaign for the Presidency, CNN has learned that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will use a campaign rally in Cincinnati on Monday to announce that she is "really bad at math" and has "never had much of a head for figures."  According to knowledgeable sources in the Clinton campaign, the New York Senator has decided to build on her dismissal of the importance of language by going after numbers as well.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency has been marked by a shocking degree of ineptitude and incompetence.  By contrast, despite a few notable missteps, Barack Obama has by and large conducted his campaign brilliantly.  As a result, a first-term junior senator from Illinois who was largely unknown to the American public when the campaign began is now the front runner in his race against the former first lady and senator from New York.

Henry Adams once described politics as " the systematic organization of hatred."  There can be little doubt that, at least as far as this definition holds, the GOP is superior to the Democratic party as a political machine.  I don’t mind that so much because, Adams’ cynicism notwithstanding, I, like the vast majority of Democrats, would like to make politics about something more noble.  As such, I am glad to leave the hate-mongering to the GOP.  That said, it never ceases to astound me how Democrats seem to believe that good intentions will solve the world’s problems.  We invariably beat the Republicans when it comes to the popularity of our ideas, but when election day comes we find that they have done their homework, organized hatred with frightening efficiency, and won far more than they deserved to.  I fear that future generations will look back on us and render the same harsh judgment that Theodore Roosevelt once passed on William Howard Taft, his former protégé and successor: We mean well.  Feebly.

Republicans are devious and shrewd, but they are not subtle.  They cannot afford to be.  In the last two presidential elections their strategy has been to create an overarching narrative and to stick through it the entire campaign, come hell or high water.  They created the narrative early and let everyone know exactly what they were going to do.  In neither case did Democrats effectively respond.  Well, over the past several days the GOP has tipped its hand and it’s quite clear what their plans are this time around.  The only question that remains is whether Democrats will be able to respond this time around.

I admit to having my reservations about many in the Progressive cause.  I myself am a Harry Truman liberal, something that puts me to the right of my party's center on a number of issues.  The most important of those is national security.  The Democrats' policies on national security are utterly incoherent.  Still, I prefer them to the Republicans' policies which are all too coherently disastrous.  However, the Dems are always afraid to take on the issue and I really don't know why unless its an inherent discomfort in discussing the use of force.

All too often the Democrats have allowed their very good chances to win elections be defeated by attempts to stay away from national security and change the subject to an area where some idiot pollster tells them that they have an advantage.

In many ways this scandal is unbelievable.  In others it is clear that we never should have expected anything more from the Republican Congress.  What we are seeing here is the arrogance of power writ large.

Republicans have now, without any supporting  evidence whatsoever, and indeed with evidence suggesting otherwise, claimed that Democrats must have known for months and sat on the story.  Setting aside the fact that even if true this would put them in a select group of people that is now limited to the entire Republican leadership of the House, The St. Petersburg times, Fox News and the FBI.  It would certainly be hard to hold the Democrats as somehow uniquely responsible if this were the case.

Even allowing that it is (which frankly, I doubt) it would mean that the major difference between the Democratic operatives who might have leaked this story and the rogues' gallery of folks who didn't would be that the Dems were the only ones who eventually did ANYTHING about it.

According to the website Iraq Casualty Count there have now been 2738 Americans killed in Iraq.

According to Wikipedia (best source I could find at the moment) this is the same number of Americans that were killed as a result of the September 11 attacks.

I think this is something that people should be following up.  Incidentally, as to the question of total casualties including non-Americans, there can be no doubt that Iraq is the bigger disaster by far because it includes all of the Iraqi casualties.  Even if one does not include the civilians, the new Iraqi army and police have lost thousands.  Recall that during the debates, Cheney was very big on stressing the sacrifices of the Iraqis themselves.  The result of this is that by any reasonable measure, George Bush is now responsible for the deaths of as many Americans and many many more people than was Osama Bin Laden.  I think we ought to make an issue of this.