The Liberal Two-Step

It's always fun watching the left make excuses for their most ridiculous members. In her weekly Newsweek article, Eleanor Clift tries to make some valid arguments against the Republicans and the right:

And this week, (Hillary Clinton) stood shoulder to shoulder with two of the Senate’s most right-wing members, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, to introduce a bill to examine the impact of the dreaded evil media on children, the kind of legislation that normally sends shivers down every liberal spine.

Nowhere else in this article does Clift refer to Hillary as a liberal or a left-winger. It's the liberal two-step. Make sure you identify the right, but go out of your way to avoid mentioning the left. And if you do, be sure it makes no sense whatsoever.

Keeping company with Hillary is frustrating for the right because she’s proving to be something different from the caricature they made of her.

If calling someone who curses and yells "fucking jew bastard" a curser and racist, how is that a caricature?

Her recent comments on wanting to find common ground on abortion and her appearance at a press conference with such avatars of the right as Santorum and Brownback show she has absorbed the lesson of the ’04 election more systematically than anyone else.

She hasn't absorbed jack. She's parroting the conservative lines because she knows none of her own lines will make it with voters. Does Clift really believe a few words and appearances with Republicans will erase eight-years of her "It Takes A Village" mentality?

And in regards to Hillary's possible election to the White House in '08:

Imagine Bill Clinton once again rattling around the White House “doing God knows what” in the words of one of the dinner attendees. But Clinton himself has become more of a beloved figure. His role in tsunami relief combined with his illness allows the American people to see him in a different light.

Bill Clinton... beloved figure. I don't know whether to laugh or laugh really hard. So now the ruddy-faced frat boy is a ruddy-faced teddy bear? Give me a break. I think the most shocking thing about Clinton going to the hopsital for heart surgery was the fact that he actually had one. He could bite his trembling lower lip like the best of them, but he never really felt your pain.

Seeing him in a different light is right. We're used to seeing him as a lying, adulterous, "Let's-bomb-a-camel's-ass" criminal.

The question for any woman seeking the presidency in the post-9/11 era is whether she can be a credible commander in chief. Rice has the resume, but can she stare down the North Koreans and the mullahs in Iran? Clinton gets rave reviews from Republicans for her work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She is confounding them on a daily basis by defying the caricature they created. The lamp-throwing, cursing, calculating Lady Macbeth is gone, if she ever really existed.

So four years away from the Presidency is enough to not only forgive Hillary, but to absolve her from all wrongdoing? If it were just that easy. I only hope it doesn't take that long to show how great a President George W. Bush is.

Oh, wait...