Bruce Gagnon is reporting, on his blog “Organizing Notes”, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has come out in favour of a long-term occupation of Iraq;
Hillary Clinton, who hopes to become president, is on the Sunday morning talk shows saying that our troops might be in Iraq for some time to come. “We’ve been in Korea for 50 years,” she said. “We are still in Okinawa,” she told the TV cameras. Right wing Sen Lindsay Graham (R-SC), sitting next to Hillary during the interview on Faze the Nation, chimed in that even though “Sen Clinton and I are on different ends of the political spectrum, we both agree that our troops will be here for a long time.
Gagnon goes on to say;
Hillary will try to rehabilitate herself with progressives by talking about social programs in the U.S. But how can we have social programs in the U.S. when we are spending our national treasury on an over bloated Pentagon and a disastrous war in Iraq?! How long will we be fouled by those “progressives” who claim that we can afford “guns and butter”?
I cannot confirm what Hillary said, since I have the Jon Stewart disease; I cannot watch punditry shows, where party hacks trade internal memorandum-inspired party-line talking points. It’s good work if you can get it, I suppose, but I will only consult these shows if I have a doctor-certified incurable case of insomnia (the shows do provide that one service, but I have to ask; is it worth the abyssal boredom inflicted on the unsuspecting audience?)
Nevertheless, one must wonder what anti-war Democrats will think of this sort of thing. HRC is making her big push for 2008, and this is part of it. The War Party, with its dual headlock on the two parties, must be appeased. I know what some of you anti-war Dems are thinking – she doesn’t really mean it; she’s just saying what she has to say at this point. Maybe, but I doubt it. Besides, how valuable can she be as a candidate if she can’t even stand against the War Party at this early date?