Woodhall Hollow @ 48

Interesting. So that would mean that if Hillary won (though I hope that she and Barack cancel each other out), Clark wouldn’t necessarily be expecting a cabinet level appointment?

A recently retired general/admiral can accept any cabinet appointment except SecDef. The SecDef has a huge say in awarding defense contracts, so Congress wanted to build a buffer period between the time a general retires, and when he can become SecDef, obviously because upon retirement, he still has close ties with generals and admirals who want expensive toys.

Who knows whether this really makes any difference?

Interestingly, Dubya appointed a military corporate lobbyist as his Secretary of Defense.

http://www.miamiherald.com/421/story/182541.html

Quote: “In our interview, the senator from Illinois had been a bit more cautious. When I asked him whether he would meet with Chávez, he had said, “Under certain conditions, I always believe in talking. Sometimes it’s more important to talk to your enemies than to your friends”

I have been saying to friends for some time now, Obama is not doing well and his adviser Axelrod sucks. This could be the fatal blow.

The prediction here is that at the end of the day it will be Hillary/Obama.

I think the MSM will anoint Hillary and if Barack wants any chance he has to savage her to differentiate himself from her as much as possible. It will obviously be difficult since they are quite similar on policy positions (except for the Iraq AUMF vote).

I think we should sell Iran some nukes and get it over with…

Israel has more than enough nukes to guarantee it can turn Iran to glass. It’s a case of mutually assured destruction…

Next time one of the leaders of Iran straps on some explosives and carries out suicide mission let me know because then I might worry about what they’d do with a bomb… Leaders live a good life, why kill themselves? …

A war with Iran is moronic.

Just so. The Iranians are eventually going to get nukes; in fact they may already have one or two stashed away. And yes, war with Iran would be moronic, or else Cheney wouldn’t be pushing for one. Like Rudolf Hess, Cheney will have to reside in a one-person isolated facility during his term of life imprisonment; but unlike Hess loitering away his time in an otherwise empty Spandau prison, Dead Eye Dick’s new home will be a hospital for the criminally insane.

Here Edwards takes the high road:

Former Sen. John Edwards, in third place in the polls behind Clinton and Obama to become the Democratic nominee in the November 2008 election, inserted himself into the conflict and tried to take the high road.

“If you’re looking for what’s wrong in Washington, why the system is broken, one perfect example is what’s been happening over the last four days. We’ve had two good people, Democratic candidates for president, who’ve spent their time attacking each other instead of attacking the problems facing our country,” Edwards, the party’s 2004 vice presidential candidate, told an Urban League annual conference in St. Louis.

Woo hoo!

Hillary’s advisors have been poll-testing and decided to jump on Obama when he left a sliver of an opening. What is disasteful about this is that it was, really, just a sliver, and a meaningless one at that.

The question about promising to negotiate directly with Dr. Evil within the first year of your administration was a snare in which Obama got caught. It would have been easy enough to quote a simple policy about not making promises during the campaign to take some particular action by a particular date. Obama was talking about the general principle of negotiating without preconditions, which is a good contrast with Cheney’s intransigence.

Furthermore, did Obama mean, “Yes, Fidel can drop by any morning and have lunch with me”? The details of putting a meeting together are considerably more complex, and everyone knows that.

As for a negotiation about the negotiation needing to take place before the negotiation, that is only one symptom of the Cheney regime’s core problem: they don’t negotiate — hell, they don’t do anything — in good faith. I doubt that Hillary is a proponent of the “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke” or the just plain “fuck ‘em” style of negotiating that Rove or Dick can always be counted on to advance.