Once More 'Round The Bend

Okay, so, Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton's criticisms of him sounding like the sort of thing Bush or Cheney would say. According to Marc Ambinder, in a not-yet-aired interview with CNN, Clinton responds "“Well, this is getting kind of silly. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but I’ve never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly. We have to ask what’s ever happened to the politics of hope?"

Here we have Clinton riding what's surely her greatest asset. Everybody knows that the right has a unique loathing for Hillary Clinton so it just seems incredibly implausible that she could have any sympathy for the Bush/Cheney view of the world. Nevertheless, Clinton must know that a lot of people think that the more hawkish faction of the Democratic Party are, in fact, proposing to put put the Bush Doctrine under more competent management rather than actually abandon it. She follows up with, "I have been absolutely clear that we’ve got to return to robust and effective diplomacy. But I don’t want to see the power and prestige of the United States President put at risk by rushing into meetings with the likes of Chavez, and Castro, and Ahmadinejad."

Obviously "rushing" into meetings is a bad thing, but this idea that the "power and prestige" of the president would be "put at risk" by meeting with the leader of a foreign country with which the US government has various issues worth discussing really does sound like what Bush thinks about these things. I should also note that by most accounts the Clinton campaign is deliberately seeking to woo the vile Cuban exile lobby with this Castro business which most people I know in DC seems to think is very clever of her.