Slick Hillary

The way you'll see me defend Hillary Clinton on this site is from the rancid media attacks that take us back to the early 90s, when the Republican noise machine would throw any shit up against the wall to see if it stuck, and most of it did, despite it not being true and stuff.

Apparently the Slick Willie bullshit is back:

Slick Hillary? Former President Clinton earned the nickname "Slick Willy" for his mastery in the political arts of ducking and dodging. He had a knack for convincing people on both sides of an issue that he agreed with them.

His wife may not be as smooth, but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is doing a passable impression of the ever-parsing former president.

Clinton didn't "earn" that nickname any more than Hillary earned the new one. It was thought up in some Republican think tank and stamped onto every press release and pretty soon the media just started using it because "Hey, it's on the press release, it must be true."

In fact, as Greg Sargent notes, it's the reporter who's being slick here, if anyone.

Best of all, the piece also gives us this artfully dodgy passage:

She told the crowd Tuesday that she had been calling for a troop withdrawal "for some time," not mentioning that her rivals have held that position for a longer period. On the other hand, she said some troops will need to remain in Iraq to contain al-Qaida, protect Kurds, keep an eye on Iran, protect the U.S. Embassy and maybe train Iraqi forces.

The answer offered a little something for everybody, for or against U.S. involvement in Iraq. Pretty slick.

Pretty slick? Pretty slick of the reporter, actually. Note the weaselly way in which the story says that her answer offered something for people who are for "U.S. involvement in Iraq." That phrase, of course, means nothing. The rather imprecise wording was necessary, of course, because in the real world, there's no way anyone who wants a significant American presence to remain in Iraq would be happy about what Hillary offered here. In other words, her answer actually didn't offer something for everyone. Nope -- just not true.

Also note the inane way in which Hillary's being faulted here for "not mentioning that her rivals have held that position for a longer period." Yep -- she didn't tell the crowd how great her rivals' positions on Iraq are! God, what a massive phony! Slicker than Slick Willy himself.

Exactly, Presidential candidates have this nasty habit of highlighting their positions and not praising their opponents'. They should stop it, or maybe they'll get a nickname.

Hillary is not my preferred candidate, but she'd be such a "fuck you" to the right when she won that there would at least be some solace in her victory. However, having to re-fight these idiotic Clinton-era "party like it's 1999" battles would be almost exhausting, and I don't think any President could be expected to get much done in such an environment. More than any other reason, that may be why I don't support Hillary. That, and the fact that she essentially endorsed the status quo in the war on terror in the last debate.

UPDATE: Apparently there's been more of this going around. The press is claiming that Hillary was booed at the Take Back America conference for saying she supports the truth, when everyone who was actually there say she was booed for blaming the failure of the occupation on the Iraqi government, which honestly is ridiculous (and I would have joined in the booing). This is a classic scapegoating strategy that affirms the rightness of going into Iraq in the first place, which would have been fine if those lousy legislators didn't cock it up, I guess. It wouldn't be the reduction of everyone's homes to rubble, the failure to provide even the most basic infrastructure, and the idea that you could reconcile 1,600 years of Sunni-Shiite animosity in a week, no. It's Nouri al-Maliki's fault. Right. Because he had a chance in hell. Digby:

The progressives gathered at the TBA conference are not uninformed or likely to misunderstand the unpleasant implications of this approach and so are a very poor audience on which to use it. Nonetheless, Fox News and others who are making this into something else as a way to tar the candidates and liberals again with lack of patriotism are asses.