Checking in on The Hill

I linked over to Josh Marshall's Hill column from TalkingPointsMemo to check out his opinion on the Kerry/foreign leaders non-issue. Actually, as Marshall notes, "Boston Globe reporter Patrick Healy, who filed the pool report that included the quote in question, announced that he’d gotten it wrong. Kerry said 'more leaders,' not 'foreign leaders.' " Yeah, whatever.

(By the way: TPM has an excellent post about the down-is-up type of lying that the latest Bush political ads engage in).

I disagree that this was a foolish thing for Kerry to say: despite the self-righteous whining by various Bush mouthpieces--including the absolutely laughable statement from Dick Cheney, the Sultan of Stonewall--I find it incredible that ANYONE would consider this to be anything but what it is--the truth.

Bush has only two major allies, England and Israel. He's managed to augment this with various "coalitions of the bribed willing." I've posted before regarding just who exactly joined the Iraq coalition, and it's not exactly an top-flight list of nations--c'mon, Afghanistan? Albania? Gimme a break.

Marshall's criticism of Kerry is based on political considerations, i.e., he thinks the statement needlessly provided Team Bush with a little ammunition. I see the point, but I won't cede it. If I was running the show, I'd stay on offense: first, ANY statement from Dick Cheney about "coming clean" should be publicly thrown back into his face. Second, ask Bush to name any foreign leader who has expressed a preference for the pResident's re-election--and find out what Bush may have offered in exchange for such support. Finally--and this is why I DON'T run the show--while the general United States' public might well be deeply suspicious of 'feriners,' we are NOT in any position to go it alone as a country. That may not be a popular notion here in the land of fantasy-cowboys (see Bush, George W.), but like it or not, we'd better get used to the fact that we NEED to positively engage the rest of the world. It's just plain good from a business standpoint.

Which is yet another reason why the Crawford Cretin is a failure: he doesn't even practice good business sense. Goddamn--did he sleep through EVERY class session at Harvard?