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Monday, August 6, 2007 12:00 AM

Cheerful boos for Hillary

At the YearlyKos convention, the mixed reception for Hillary Clinton is more evidence that the liberal blogosphere might not take sides in the coming Democratic primary.

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  • Monday, August 6, 2007 11:47 AM

    @E,PLURIBUS,UNUM

    Respectfully, this may be a pointless argument, and I'll grant that it's highly unlikely that Gore would have done such a thing, but I still think it's more than a little possible. You're giving too much credit to the Bush presidency alone for making the case for war on Iraq. Toppling Saddam, remaking the Middle East, lashing out at someone (anyone) else in response to 9/11--these were priorities among Republicans regardless of Bush's presidency. It's reasonable to expect that all these same players in the vast right-wing conspiracy would have been pushing the same agenda but in different roles, and a (dishonest) case would have been made for invading Iraq with as much intelligence as they could cherrypick and distort. And, much as I admire him now, Gore was not reknowned for his political backbone.

    More to the point, wouldn't it also have been amazing for anyone last November to believe that the new Democratic majority in Congress would give Bush full funding to continue the war without any commitment for withdrawal? And that it would give him everything he wanted on FISA "reform?" You say "To me the best thing about this Congress is it doesn't rubberstamp everything Bush wants to do," but I consider the Iraq war and the expansion of executive branch power without oversight to be the biggest issues we face today, and congressional Democrats have rubberstamped Bush on both of them. (And how about that Military Commissions Act?) They did just what a Republican Congress would have done. That's not "no news" coming from Congress; it's bad news.

    Finally, you say "Even if this Congress can't impeach Bush or force him out of Iraq, at least they are keeping him from making thing even worse." Well, they CAN impeach Bush and force him out of Iraq, they just refuse to do it, and in fact they're actively allowing him to make things even worse.

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