Kneecapping

I think Steve Benen has this right. Hillary Clinton's "Tuzla-gate," exaggerating her daring dive into Bosnia under sniper fire, is really hurting her campaign, her electability argument to the superdelegates, and her national security credentials. This is especially true because the exaggeration is not isolated; she's said the same lie on multiple occasions. So she had to change the conversation. And so here's how she changed it.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made.
"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

Obama's lead in national polls has slipped since clips of the retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright began being played on national news programs. The uproar prompted Obama to give a wide-ranging speech on race in America a week ago. The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was "hate speech."

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

This is just low and dirty. As Benen says, for two weeks, Clinton stayed out of the Rev. Wright controversy. She watched Obama hit a home run with his speech on race relations, and she watched him maintain his prominence in the polls in North Carolina and catch up in Pennsylvania. The Bosnia incident has created a major honesty gap. So it was time to push the Wright story back into the news. That's really disgusting. And she continued this outside the editorial board in Pittsburgh:



Mike friggin' Huckabee had enough sense to put the Wright issue in context. Hillary's knee-jerk response is to fall back on reactionary ideas and attacks to sustain herself and her candidacy. This was most emblematic in her promotion of Alan GREENSPAN, of all people, to take part in a "foreclosure emergency group," because "he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach." The default is to fall back on these narrow elites, on reactionary ideas and on right-wing attacks, pursuing as one DNC official called it the Tonya Harding option.

I'm so over this and I think that the Democratic Party is over this.