Wesley Clark has
come out against the Murtha plan.
The key sentence in his op-ed:
Yet a more rapid departure of American troops along a timeline, as some Democrats are calling for, simply reduces our ability to affect the outcome and risks broader regional conflict.
It has been pointed out that most of Clark's op-ed is every bit as unrealistic as the Bush policy. Clark claims to support eventual withdrawal, but he then gives a long list of tasks for American troops to do - patrol the borders, disarm Shi'ite militias - that would expand the scope of the already impossible task list they face. He even wants the US to tell Iraq to modify its constitution again, which would turn Shi'ites and Kurds against us too, and not help much with Sunnis.
But Clark's position is not really what I want to take issue with. Instead, I posit a single, hypothetical question.
What if Hillary Clinton had written an op-ed like this?
I'm pretty certain that there would have been an outcry of fury at the latest "sellout" of Kossacks' favorite punching bag. There is an enormous amount of anger at Clinton here, an anger out of proportion to anything the senator has said or done. Yes, she voted for the Iraq war, but so did 22 other Democratic senators, including Harry Reid. None receives so much hostility. And, quite unlike Clark, Clinton has issued an Iraq plan that is essentially the same as Murtha's - timed withdrawal, leave a rapid reaction force behind. When that was diaried here, the senator received only a torrent of bile. One particularly ugly comment on that thread: I was expecting to see a choice between missionary, doggie-style, and on her knees (apparently her husband's preference). Since when did we start regurgiating 1998 wingnut anti-Clinton rhetoric?
There have been a few diaries critical of Clark's position, but he hasn't evoked anything remotely resembling the fury that can be seen in the comments to the flag-burning story. (Even that outrage was misplaced; the actual bill was nowhere near as bad as the AP story made it sound.)
We seem to put Democrats into two categories: the Fighters and the Sellouts. Everything a Fighter does is good, everything a Sellout says or does is bad. Occasionally we do reclassify - Harry Reid is now a Fighter, while John Kerry seems to have gone from Sellout to Fighter and back again - but generally, once we've decided someone is not worth listening to, we tune them out entirely. We are getting to the point where we support ideas based not on their actual content, but on whom they are coming from. This bears more than a little similarity to the "chip thinking" on the right advisorjim once diaried about.
We forgive the Fighters easily, too easily. Russ Feingold voted to confirm John Roberts. Harry Reid voted for the war in Iraq, and more recently, the bankruptcy bill. Wesley Clark now opposes timed withdrawal. Jack Murtha himself not only voted for the war, but opposes abortion rights; in 2003-04 he had a 69 percent positive rating from Concerned Women for America.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is labeled a Sellout. Never mind that she was the last national politician to attempt to provide universal health coverage. Never mind that she is vilified by more wingnuts than anyone else in the country. Never mind her strongly liberal voting record (more liberal, in fact, than Reid).
I don't support Clinton for president; we don't need another dynasty, and she probably can't win due to the irrational hatred she provokes on the right side of the political spectrum. But it is more than a little disturbing to see some of that on the left as well. No, I don't agree with her position on video games, but nor do I agree with the many Democratic votes for Roberts, or the bankruptcy bill, or the Gonzalez confirmation, some of which were cast by people now deemed Fighters, and any one of which is worse than the video game issue.
Clinton is a fine senator and a fine person. And despite all her flaws, she is on our side.