Richard Cohen Sings Rush

h/t TPM

Rudy doesn’t like the MoveOn.org
attack so he hit back. As for who is whose biggest nightmare, I’d say the facts are Rudy’s actual nightmare.

Giuliani quit the Iraq Study Group after two months. [Newsday, 11/17/06] Giuliani resigned in May 2006 from the Iraq Study Group – the 10-member bipartisan study group that provided assessments of conditions in Iraq and the surrounding region. [Washington Post, 6/1/06] The Iraq Study Group held nine official meetings, which it called “plenary sessions,” according to its final report. They included three that occurred during Giuliani’s tenure in 2006 but that he did not show up for, the sources said – working sessions on April 11 and 12, and May 18 and 19. There was also a kickoff event on March 15 that Giuliani and several other members did not attend, the sources said. [Newsday, 6/19/07]

Regardless, the MoveOn.org smackdown continues as all sorts of chatteratti decide it’s time to chime in. Unfortunately, actual effectiveness and the truth defy the blathering:

But for now, MoveOn has handed the Bush Administration a major victory–at a moment when all attention should be focused on whether we should continue to commit U.S. troops to this disaster. Just nauseating. Joe Klein

Making headway among Americans is not “nauseating” unless you want to continue the war. Proving how stacked the facts were in the White House report delivered by General Petraeus, in spite of the spineless Democratic dithering
by some, was the most important thing anyone could do. Now Richard Cohen has weighed in and his take
is positively laughable, mainly because he, like so
many others, are wrong. Like we need Ms. Estrich to lecture us on effectiveness.
She ran Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, so need I say more? But Cohen channels Rush (Sean too), going all the way back to the wingnut witch hunt of the 1990s to get the job done on Clinton. You see, because Clinton turned the MoveOn.org conversation towards Bush and his feckless handling of Iraq, in his eyes she missed her big chance.

The issue with Hillary Clinton is not whether she’s smart or experienced but whether she has — how do we say this? — the character to be president. Behind her, after all, trails the lingering vapor of all those gates: Travel, File, Whitewater and other scandals to which she was a party only through marriage. In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark.

After tens of millions of taxpayer dollars that could find nothing, Mr. Cohen
postulates that everyone still wonders about HRC because of Travelgate. There are Hillary
haters that revel in spewing wingnut talking points about Clinton, which hasn’t made a dent in her frontrunner status. Then there’s Cohen’s assertion that Clinton
was wrong to focus on Bush’s failures in Iraq in favor of getting sidetracked
by a newspaper ad. Too bad for Cohen (and others) that the truth offensive actually worked.

U.S. TROOP LEVELS IN IRAQ SHOULD BE…? Now Increased 6% Kept same 21% Reduced 39% Remove all troops 29% Pre-speech, 9/4-8/2007 Increased 11% Kept same 19% Reduced 35% Remove all troops 30% Most Say Bush Iraq Plan Falls Short

Read Glenn:

Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity and much of the chattering class insisted all week that it was “despicable” for Senators such as Hillary Clinton to suggest that The General’s claims of Progress were not believable. Yet most Americans are similarly “despicable,” as they appear to share that sentiment. A despicable 62% do not believe Gen. Petraeus’ sunny claims about Progress. In military dictatorships, War Generals have the right to demand that their claims about war be blindly accepted and believed, and that is the unquestioning mentality which Rudy Giuliani embraces and believes we should accord Gen. Petraeus (even in the face of a long history of highly dubious and inaccurate claims about the war) — “Hillary Clinton has no right to be attacking the integrity of an American general who has put his life at risk for this country,” Giuliani decreed. But most Americans, rather obviously, subject the claims of our military leaders to skepticism and scrutiny — the only rational course of action after being told for four straight years that the most disastrous war in American history was going swimmingly. … .. Limitless wrongness

As uncomfortable as the ad made some Democrats who preferred wingnut talking points instead the debate moved forward. That’s not only Rudy’s biggest nightmare, but the Republicans, too. They’re also tied tightly to Bush once again. Contrary to the chatteratti’s claims there’s no down side in sight.