The latest USA Today poll has Clark ahead of Bush 48-46%. Dean trails 49-45%. The others are about the same as Dean in the poll. What it shows is that the electorate is about the same as Election Day 2000. Also, Clark is a blank slate at present, too early to tell how he will pan out.

Still, an incumbent with these numbers is vulnerable. All of Bush’s pandering to minorities, immigrants (including those he brings in), etc., hasn’t moved him beyond the vote he got in 2000. He has dispirited those voters as well. Indeed, he goes out of his way to stick it to conservatives.

Wes Pruden’s latest column on Gen. Clark shows him to be rather ‘Clintonesque.’ ;-)

http://www.washtimes.com/national/pruden.htm

Fark had a couple of articles on this already. Now, I can’t say how Clark is going to turn out, but it looks like this may just be the spin machine starting up at the moment.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/sept0304.html#0922031004pm

The spin machine didn’t invent Clark’s statement about “people around the White House” telling him to say that “Hussein was behind 9/11,” and then his backing off that and saying it was some other people, somewhere else, who said that. The spin machine didn’t invent Clark taking two opposite positions on the war on two subsequent days. And the spin machine didn’t invent this (from the Pruden column):

——-
Telling fibs and stretchers can get to be a habit. After he told an Arizona radio interviewer that the White House tried to get him bounced from his gig at CNN, critiquing the war in Iraq, nobody at CNN could remember anything like that, either. The old soldier made a hasty, strategic retreat: “I’ve only heard rumors about it.”
——

And so on and so on.

The worst thing that I have heard about Clark is what Gen. Shelton has said about his firing after the Kosovo war, that it was “character and integrity issues” and “he won’t get my vote.”

But the other things do not seem to be more than normal misstatements at most. I read the text from the 9/11 and Saddam statement, and he does not say that “people from around the white house” were the ones who called him—although he does claim that the White House was supporting the Saddam and 9/11 tie.

His position on the war has been the one misrepresented most egregiously by pundits so far. From the text of his comments it is clear that he was supporting the resolution in Congress to give Bush the power to go to war—and also negotiate with Saddam. But he did not support the war itself. Which was also Kerry’s position, I believe.

As for the last statement, it seems that he was repeating rumors, which I agree was a flaw in his judgment, but a different thing than outright misrepresentation.

Again, I am not trying to say that Clark is an angel or anything—he certainly will not get my vote—but the spin machine is cranking up. What I have seen so far has been the usual misrepresentations by the press, who have a better share of liars than the politicians do, and the usual attack pieces. A more charitable interpretation is usually warranted for this kind of thing. It is hard for anybody to get through a campaign without blundering, no matter how honest.

Right now, the Republicans are more afraid of Clark than of any other Democratic nominee. I hope that Clark wins the Democratic nomination even though he is probably the biggest threat to Bush. Against any of the others, Bust will run as a moderate and rely on his war on terror credentials to get through. With Clark, Bush will be forced to run as a conservative and there will be intense debate about the war on terrorism throughout the next campaign period—which I regard as a good thing.

I believe the Clintons have put forth Clark, exploiting his highly visible personal vanity, for the purpose of distancing themselves from a coming Dean fiasco. The Clintons need badly to escape their image of “loathing” the military. There is little likelihood that the democrat primary voter base will support Clark who is, heaven forbid, a military man. So he is perfect for the Clintons; no chance to become viable on his own, but allows them to escape identification with any Dean fiasco. “Hey, we didn’t support Dean in 2004.” And the Clintons will point to the Dean blowout to tell their party they have to soft-pedal their anti-Americanism if they hope to return to power. No, this is setting up perfectly for the Clintons’ 2008 plan.

Thrasymachus writes:

“His position on the war has been the one misrepresented most egregiously by pundits so far. From the text of his comments it is clear that he was supporting the resolution in Congress to give Bush the power to go to war—and also negotiate with Saddam. But he did not support the war itself. Which was also Kerry’s position, I believe.”

Sorry, Thrasy, but this is rank nonsense. The resolution gave Bush authorization to make war on Iraq when and how he chose. One cannot say that one supports that resolution and then totally oppose the war, as Clark has done. Your reasoning here verges on a John Kerry-like rationalization that the war resolution was only about giving Bush the power to “threaten” war, not about giving him the power to make war.

The war resolution was about giving Bush the power to make war, which in turn gives him the power to threaten war. I can fully see the logic behind believing that an American President should be able to bargain from the strongest possible position and have the power to make decisions, even if one disagrees with which decisions he may make. Voting against that resolution was a vote for sabotaging American interests and sabotaging the power of the President in a time of crisis. Speaking out against the war, or speaking out against the particular way in which it was conducted, is something different.

Thrasy still doesn’t get it. He writes:

“Voting against that resolution was a vote for sabotaging American interests and sabotaging the power of the President in a time of crisis. Speaking out against the war, or speaking out against the particular way in which it was conducted, is something different.”

I’m certainly not saying that a vote for the war resolution robs one of the right to criticize anything about the actual conduct of the war. But Kerry and Clark went way beyond cricism of some aspects of the war and came out against the war itself. Their reasons were that they didn’t approve of its “timing” or the fact that we hadn’t gotten enough international support. But the war resolution did not say that “President Bush has authority to wage war on Iraq if he does it in the time frame we approve and if he gets France’s support.” No, the resolution gave him discretion to act as he saw fit.

In a more normal time in America, it would not have been necessary to go back over basic facts like these. But now we live in post-modernism, in which U.S. Senators vote for a bill and then bald-facedly act as if they didn’t vote for it, and in which the society treats such behavior as normal. The energy required to combat this pervasive intellectual nihilism prevents the society from dealing with its substantive problems.

So, maybe we shouldn’t blame the mainstream conservatives for disregarding urgently important domestic issues in the name of supporting the war on terrorism. When the left half of the country is acting in a literally insane manner, and even some right-wing thinkers rationalize the left’s insanity, what are the mainstream conservatives to do but combat that madness?

“The resolution gave him discretion to act as he saw fit.”

Certainly. But surely you are not saying that if Bush decided not to go to war, that no one in Congress could criticize that decision because they had given him the “discretion to act as he saw fit.”

Fuck You !!! Republicans are the devil , You Racist Bitches !!! Any democrat is better then your fuck buddy president bush !!!

Cindy - thanks very much for your inspired yet pithy summation of the Democrat weltenschauung.

Normally I would have deleted Cindy’s comment, but given Shrewsbury’s response, I’ll leave it in place.

However, Cindy’s comment is such a perfect illustration of the Bush hatred that I said constitutes the soul of the Democratic left, that one might suspect Cindy is really a pro-Bush agent provocateur.

Assuming for the moment that Cindy isn’t an agent provocateur for the Busheviks, I am mystified at her white hot animus towards a president who has sided with her fellow assorted leftists on scores of important issues and policies. “Diversity” now trumps the 14th amendment, the borders are wide open for invasion from Mexico, various Clintonistas are still in their bureaucratic jobs wreaking havoc, etc., etc., etc.

The only thing Mr. Bush hasn’t done to appease folks like Cindy is to surrender to Osama Bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein. Indulging Mr. Bush in his military adventure defending the nation’s interests overseas seems a small price to pay politically when you’re getting 90 percent of your leftist utopian agenda enacted here at home. It seems to me that a smart leftist would just vote for Bush and his country club cronies. Thus Cindy and her allies can completely dominate two political parties instead of 1 1/2 - so that all those voters out there will end up with a political choice similar to Henry Ford’s famous color option for the Model T. (You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.)

“Indulging Mr. Bush in his military adventure defending the nation’s interests overseas seems a small price to pay politically when you’re getting 90 percent of your leftist utopian agenda enacted here at home.”

Or, as Haley Barbour used to say when he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, “If someone agrees with you 90 percent of the time, that person is your friend and ally.”

But of course, the left doesn’t see it that way. It’s not enough to have a virtually open-borders program legalizing all illegals in the U.S. and allowing them to pursue citizenship by the normal channels even though they entered the U.S. illegally. No, they must all be given citizenship NOW. It’s not enough to endorse the idea of proportional racial diversity in university admissions and throughout American life, while pursuing them through slighly indirect means. No, there must be out and out racial quotas. Bush’s slightly more moderate positions on these issues makes him in the eyes of the left a right-winger, a racist.

But how can we blame the left for having such nutty notions? Who remains in the “respectable mainstream” to take a consistent principled stand against the leftists’ nonsense? Certainly not Bush and the “conservatives.” So the left is free to keep fantasizing Bush as a monster figure.

If no one has yet heard, U.S. GENERAL Clark told Paytah Jennings, at the recent debate, not once but twice that he Clark would have to “check” the facts before stating whether or not President Bush was a deserter. (Peter Jennings, miraculous.) Mr. Jennings immediately discerned the gravity of Clark’s first despicable utterance, and as a good investigator, asked the GENERAL again and got the same response. Bush, a democratic leader of a Mexican invasion; one of his major opponents, someone that might not stop at nothing.

Cindy J’s comment really has nothing to do with George W. Bush (for whom I hold no brief). It’s just codespeak for “I, Cindy J, am a virtuous person”. Liberals emit these cries, usually in order to identify each other in social settings, but occasionally just as an existential necessity. Pay no attention.