Hillary's New Friends?

"The media did a really bad job of covering the run-up to the war. Stipulated. But I'm not Judith Miller or Bill Kristol or any of the other people Moyers took to task; they can speak for themselves. I'm just a political reporter here at Time, not a columnist or a foreign policy expert or a media critic. And all I can account for is what I wrote and said. So last night, with some trepidation, I went back and looked at the cover story that I wrote on the eve of the congressional vote in September 2002. And you know what? It was a pretty good story, rooted in a lot of skeptical reporting by my colleagues. Please read the whole thing. We at Time didn't have the answers, but at least we were asking the right questions:

" ' Moral principles gain their power by being consistently applied. If it is dangerous for ruthless dictators to develop lethal arsenals, why attack Iraq but not North Korea? If the Iraqi people deserve to live in a free and democratic state, why don't the Saudi people? If we are willing to pay the price of toppling Saddam, will we also pay the price of staying to clean up the neighborhood? And the thorniest question of all: If the last Gulf War helped inspire evil in bin Laden, will a new one create many more like him?'"

The New Republic is a frequent target of Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Duncan Black (Atrios) and others in the lefty blogosphere, so I was interested in Jonathan Chait's take on how they are changing Democratic politics:

"Their newness makes them outsiders to the game. They are, by their way of thinking, self-made men and women who pulled themselves up from obscurity by dint of pure merit. They see the Washington establishment, by contrast, as a kind of clique, filled with mediocrities who attended the best schools or know the right people. The netroots shorthand for this phenomenon is 'Washington cocktail parties'--where, it is believed, the elite share their wrong-headed ideas, inoculated from accountability. 'They still have their columns and TV gigs,' Moulitsas wrote on his blog last December, describing the Beltway elite. 'They still get treated with reverence by the D.C. cocktail party circuit.'

"In point of fact, the most successful bloggers have been pulled into the warm embrace of the political establishment. Moulitsas consults regularly with influential Democrats in Washington. Presidential candidates hire popular bloggers or court them with private dinners. Last year, numerous top Democrats trekked to Las Vegas to attend YearlyKos, the liberal blog convention, where they sucked up to the attendees as relentlessly as if they were software executives . . .

"Like the New Right (and unlike the New Left), the netroots is committed to working within the two-party structure. They have relatively little use for street demonstrations and none at all for Naderite third parties. They fervently support Democrats and, with increasing frequency, work for them directly . . .

"For the netroots, partisan fidelity is the sine qua non . . . What they cannot forgive is Democrats or liberals who distance themselves from their party or who give ammunition to the enemy . . .

"In a posting about TNR, titled 'TNR's defection to the Right is now complete,' Moulitsas wrote that this magazine 'betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners.' Both the DLC and TNR are perpetually described as 'dying' or 'irrelevant,' yet simultaneously possessed of sinister and ubiquitous control over the national discourse . . .

"The Democratic Party, as Moulitsas has written, is indeed undergoing a comprehensive reformation, as is liberalism in general. At the end of this reformation, what will the left look like? It will look a lot more like the Republican machine that prevailed in Florida. It will be nastier and more ruthless, and less concerned with intellectual or procedural niceties."

Fred Thompson has been blogging up a storm.

The Law & Order man wins 52 percent in a GOP bloggers straw poll. Those voting must not like the field, for Fred is followed by Rudy (15 percent) and Romney (10 percent), with McCain below 3 percent. As for Tommy Thompson, 0.7 percent.

Just about everyone, as I noted yesterday, has been beating up on George Tenet, but few dish it out like Christopher Hitchens: