Sob Stories

"What does Hillary mean by 'working'?" asks HuffPoster Frank Dwyer. "How is the surge working? What is it accomplishing? What is it meant to accomplish? What, in the war gospel according to Hillary, is the goal of the surge? Is it the same goal she had in mind when she voted to allow Bush to go to war in Iraq if he wanted to? Is her only regret now that our 'tactics' were flawed, i. e., we did not send enough Americans to accomplish whatever the Bush/Clinton goal is right from start?

"I suspect all she meant to do in Kansas City was pander a little to the Vets, be enough of the Hillary they want to get some of their votes, you know. But her declaration that the surge is 'working' and that we're just 'years too late in our tactics' goes beyond standard politician-pander to reveal something terribly wrong in her thinking. She has given us a glimpse beneath the mask -- there's the real Hillary."

But surge or no surge, says Dick Polman, it still comes back to Maliki:

"Breaking news! Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats eat crow and endorse President Bush's troop hike strategy in Iraq!

"So says the conservative media, anyway.In their latest attempt to spin the Iraq war as a worthy enterprise, in advance of the September Surge report, Bush's enablers have been very busy over the past 24 hours, spreading the story that Hillary, along with Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, have finally acknowledged that the Bush troop hike has improved security around Baghdad. For instance, The Drudge Report highlighted a fragment of a Hillary sentence ('it's working') that the Democratic candidate uttered during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars . . .

"While those [conservative] media outlets were crowing about Hillary and Levin, we also learned elsewhere - in The Wall Street Journal, where the news pages (at least for now) operate by traditional journalistic standards - that others share Warner's view that the Surge may well fail to coax the Iraqis toward reconciliation. Consider this quote: 'It would be a huge shame if after all the military has accomplished with the surge, we don't get a political accomodation. But I'm not optimistic.'

"That was Gen. George Casey, who until recently served as the top U.S commander in Iraq. He and Hillary are saying roughly the same thing.The basic problem facing the conservative media is that the Surge is no more capable of working miracles than a massive dose of morphine can heal a patient who is mortally ill. The Surge may well ease the pain in Iraq, as Hillary acknowledged, but a late dose of U.S. military power - after years of administration ineptitude - will not be able to cure the body politic."

The New Republic and the Weekly Standard have always had a spirited, ideologically based rivalry. But things have gotten pretty tense since the Standard led the charge against TNR's Baghdad Diarist, who the liberal magazine defends but who the Army says is a fabricator. Now comes TNR's Jonathan Chait with a thumb in the eye titled "The Thuggery of William Kristol":

"It's hard to believe that, not so long ago, neoconservative foreign policy thinking overflowed with ideas and idealism. The descent has been steep, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the pages of The Weekly Standard--particularly in William Kristol's editorials, which have come to consist of stubborn denials of any bad news, diatribes about internal enemies, and harangues against the cowardice of Republican dissenters.

"Kristol's sensibility is perfectly summed up in one representative passage from a recent issue. The topic was The New Republic's decision to publish an essay by Scott Beauchamp, an American soldier serving in Iraq, detailing some repugnant acts he said he and his comrades committed. Legitimate questions have been raised about this essay's veracity. (We've been publishing updates on our continuing efforts to get answers to them at tnr.com.) But Kristol rushed past these questions, immediately declaring the piece a 'fiction.' Offering up his interpretation of why tnr would publish such slanders, he concluded, in an editorial titled, 'They Don't Really Support the Troops':

"Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support. They sense that history is progressing away from them--that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country . . .

"Then there is Kristol's accusation that critics of the war don't 'support the troops.' I wonder if, back in his youthful days teaching political philosophy, Kristol ever imagined he would one day find himself mouthing knucklehead slogans like this. I shouldn't need to say this, but apparently I do: I strongly support and respect the troops and would desperately like them to succeed. My respect, unlike Kristol's, extends to soldiers who don't share my politics, and isn't contingent on the fantasy that all of them are saints . . .