God, I hate agreeing with Joan Walsh...

There is a nice list of Liberal-slash-Progressive Pundits that frankly, I don't trust: some of those people I've talked about on this blog. Joan Walsh is on that list.

I've always found her, personally, to be a wishy-washy Limousine Liberal. Someone who talks a good game, but when it comes to the brass tacks of understand certain things (race), doesn't have the first clue.

And add to all that the fact that she was, at least in my mind, a Clinton Partisan during the Campaign.

The conventional wisdom has to give Obama the best shot -- he's got the most money, the freshest story, and in a year when everyone, including many Republicans, is craving someone new, he is that guy. I'm just not sure he can shoot beyond the 25 percent or so of the Democratic electorate to grab the lead.

And:

I still think the race is Clinton's to lose, and the media, having once overstated the perfection of her campaign, is now overstating its troubles.

I also won't mention that she's been a big Barry Bonds apologist.

Boy, times have changed alright. She's become a Obama Convert in the best possible way.

But when it comes down to a match between Christopher Hitchens and Joan Walsh...man there's no contest.




From her Salon Piece this afternoon, which for purposes of this piece, is pretty much the whole thing:

I had to debate Christopher Hitchens, Clinton-hater-in-chief, on "Hardball" today. I thought I held my own, but when I watched it I caught many outright falsehoods that I missed, like his calling Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist leadership the "main clientele" of former President Clinton. Hitchens has allowed himself to be deranged by his Clinton hatred, and it's unfortunate to see a smart guy disabled by his own bias.

My bottom line is, if Hitchens is right, and Hillary Clinton is an utterly unqualified political hack who only cares about her political future and her husband's, what does her selection say about Barack Obama? Either he's naive and wimpy, and hasn't availed himself of the superior knowledge of the Clintons that Hitchens claims (or he knows and doesn't care about it); or he knows everything Hitchens does and picked her anyway for craven domestic political reasons: to get the Clintons inside his tent, not outside of it, and to co-opt a potential 2012 rival. That would be more politically venal than almost anything Hitchens accuses Clinton of doing: sacrificing our nation's global diplomatic interests to his domestic political ambitions.

So now Hitchens is extending his baseless charges of corruption against the Clintons to smear Obama. This, of course, makes me admire Obama all the more: He's taken both Clintons inside his tent because he needs them and recognizes their formidable domestic and foreign political and policy skills. He's spending political capital on them, because he thinks they're worth it, and saying a big, polite "up yours" to the Clinton haters who've made a career out of spreading this garbage. Those are my words, not Obama's, of course; he's much more diplomatic.