Letters to the Editor

Hillary the prudent Democrats burning for the inspirational uplift of Barack Obama or the left-leaning edge of John Edwards may not be ready for an authentic moderate. By Walter Shapiro [2007-03-13]

• Reads like Hillary fan mail

  I'm committed to refraining from comments about writers, but I've felt for a long time that Walter Sharpiro is a DLC fellow traveller.

  And this article reads like DLC fan mail:

  "they portray her reluctance to recant her Iraq vote as an act of intellectual honesty" Shapiro writes. "What she regrets is the way that Bush misused the authority given to him by Congress and grotesquely mismanaged the war."

  This is exactly the position of the DLC crowd that runs the Progressive Policy Institute. Tufts University Poly Sci professor Tony Smith lays it out:

  "Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.

  …

  Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides damning Bush's handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the invasion. It has criticized Bush's failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better."

  Hillary's position to a tee—Dems can do George Bush's policies, but better. We need real change in the leadership of the US, not just another attempt at the same neoconservative thing coming from a different place on the political spectrum.

  -- Johnalive
  [Read Johnalive's other letters]
  Permalink Flag Monday, March 12, 2007 07:28 PM
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