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How can you diss a man who has no pride to start with?
Doug Powers, the regular blogger at Michelle Malkin’s site, overstates Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s butting in on a follow-up question intended for Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Meet the Press last Sunday after Gates had said that Libya was not a “vital national interest.” Powers calls Hillary’s move a “stunning power play,” and says that “the look on Gates’s face at the end of this clip after Hillary took a hand-off intended for him and ran away with the ball speaks volumes.” In fact, Gates has pretty much the same expression on his pinched technocrat’s face at the end of the clip as he did at the beginning.
More importantly, who cares if Hillary butted in on Gates, dissed Gates, dishonored Gates? If the man had any integrity, he would have resigned his post when the president launched this insane war which Gates himself had warned against and said would lead to a stalemate. But no one resigns any more from political positions in the U.S. government over issues of principle and policy. The very concept has become foreign to us. We live now under the neoconservative dispensation which (as Jim Kalb once put it) sees the maintainance of one’s career as the highest ethical imperative. The last time I can remember it happening was when liberal David Edelman, husband of Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, resigned from the Clinton administration 15 years ago over welfare reform. Email entry |