Clinton, and the VRWC

If the Pennsylvania presidential primary was to be held today, I am not sure which announced candidate would get my vote. However I know that Hillary Clinton would currently not get my vote. I think she, as well as John Edwards, Barrack Obama and Bill Richardson would be at least competent and tolerable presidents who can make a very plausible path as to how they could get elected. There are several policy proposals that I strongly disagree with, and more importantly I have severe questions about her judgment on both policy and political grounds.

With that said, I have to defend her on two grounds from Joe Klein at Swampland who wrote:

"Jeez, if Hillary wins, are we going to have all these zombies in our faces yet again?..... Yes, it's unfair to Hillary. But when people talk about Clinton baggage, it's not just Monica, it's also the whole fetid, over-the-top gang of anti-Clinton obsessives who come to mind.

When I analyze problems and scenarios, I am interested in looking at the things which have the potential of changing. After a very short while, I only pay attention to constants when the laws of reality and physics force me to pay attention to them. I assume unhinged and substantially fact free attacks against Democrats are a prerequisite of any GOP campaign. I assume that these attacks will occur, and the only variance will be the internal details of the attack. If any Democrat wins the Presidency we'll have the crazy lunatic brigade of the VRWC trying to gin up a scandal where there is nothing there.

Secondly, this comment is one of the many reasons why the news media has a credibility problem. Glenn Greenwald in a magnificent smackdown of ABC New's assertion to just trust their news judgment raises the broader point that most news organizations have run through their accumulated stockpiles of public trust and credibility because they have gotten so many stories of great national importance wrong, dreadfully and totally.

Political punditry suffers from an even greater deficit of public trust because the pundits cheered on the pointless and never-ending investigations into the Clinton White House despite the fact that there was barely any smoke there except that which was being blown up their own asses by Mellon-Scaife whores. And then as soon as Bush came into office, oversight and accountability were gauche and vindictive payback. this is despite the fact that federal indictments for corruption and self dealing were coming down the pipe on a regular basis as the normal wheels of justice turned. The national poltical pundits ignored the leaking of Valerie Plame and consigned that story to a liberal conspiracy theory, and even one of Mr. Klein's co-bloggers revealed his lack of news judgement on the US Attorney pruge by first dismissing it as a pointless example in blogeustration.

I bring up this history because it shows the judgment or lack thereof of the elite political punditry class in this country. They judged that baseless claims and absurd and logically incoherent tales that harmed Democrats were important and therefore they pushed them. Yet when basic reality of outing CIA operatives for short term political gains and firing US Attorneys in a manner that never happened before, these issues were not important. So I just don't trust Mr. Klein's judgment here.

However there is some hope for Mr. Klein and the Washington cocktail circuit if Hillary Clinton is elected President. Those Mellon-Scaife crazies that you despise,as well as the stories that they push, well they only were able to get into the national discourse because you wrote about them, you encouraged them, and you tut-tutted people who looked at the supposed evidence and laughed at it. You have the power to shut off their oxygen and delegitimatize a new incarnation of the Arkansas Project. You have the power.