Sort Of Like Broccoli

I used to eat it before it was known as being good for you. Then it got popular, everyone started to eat it and now I can barely stand the stuff. Hillary affects me the same way. I loved her as First Lady, not so thrilled with her as a presidential candidate. So far. Modo gets to bash away at her like it was 1999.

Henny Penny Harridan - New York Times: "Until now, she has been unsubtly subtle about the most urgent issue facing the country, sending signals rightward, sending signals leftward, tacking here, tacking there. Some days she seemed to be signaling whether she intended to signal.

But now, suddenly, she’s a woman of passion, a model of concerned clarity. After an eon of calculated silence on most of the big moral questions of the day, there is a calculated breaking of the silence. The enigma won’t play anymore. It’s time for the drama.

But the drama played like “The Taming of the Shrew,” with the only question being, who was the shrew?

Hillary was trying to bring Rummy to heel, and Rummy was trying to exert manly control over Hillary.

The junior senator from New York staged a drama in three acts, first sending a letter summoning the reluctant Rummy to appear before the Armed Services Committee; then hectoring him with a litany of his “numerous errors in judgment”; and finally at the end of the day, like the Queen of Hearts, delivering her climactic demand for his head.

“I just don’t understand why we can’t get new leadership that would give us a fighting chance to turn the situation around,” Senator Clinton said after the hearing, summing up a truth acknowledged by everyone except W. and Dick Cheney, and particularly felt at the Pentagon, where the deeply unpopular defense chief has gone from self-styled matinee idol to self-destructing idle martinet.

During the hearing, Hillary unmanned Rummy, as Shakespeare would say, accusing him of incompetence, impotence and improbity.

“You did not go into Iraq with enough troops to establish law and order,’’ she said. “You disbanded the entire Iraqi Army. Now we’re trying to recreate it. You did not do enough planning for what is called phase four and rejected all the planning that had been done previously to maintain stability after the regime was overthrown. You underestimated the nature and strength of the insurgency, the sectarian violence and the spread of Iranian influence.”"

About time someone in office noticed. Oh, excuse me. Forgot you were running for re-election. The Middle East is in flames, our worldwide reputation is about equal to Mel Gibson's (but his has a chance of improving) and we should be hearing from North Korea (remember them?) any day now. The economy is tanking, the power grid is failing and the Secretary of State (remember when the right wanted her to run in 2008?) is giving concert recitals.

Bring the troops home and then we can play the blame game. There is plenty to go around.

How about we try something new? A government of the people, by the people, for the people. What a concept.

Tags: Iraq, Hillary Clinton, Rumsfeld, Maureen Dowd, Modo, Debsweb