Bet My Money on the Bob-tailed Mare, Somebody Bet on the Bay

Yglesias has been on the journalists are morons disinclined to substance cuz it's hard beat for a few days now, and although I'm inclined to agree with him in general terms about the lazy habits of top journalists, I'm not sympathetic to the idea that their failure to parse the policy differenes of Clinton and Obama In Re: Meeting With Foreign Potentates.

The truth of the matter is that Obama and Clinton have outlined depressingly similar foreign policy prerogatives. Then they've thrown some red meat to the so-called base with applause lines built around the not-discreditable notion that everything George W. Bush has ever done in his entire life is an unmitigated disaster for children, bunnies, kittens, Mother Earth, Father Time, Iraq, Iran, and the Texas Rangers. The suggestion that Obama represents a sea change in consensus foreign policy while Clinton represents Tradition strikes me as more than a little fatuous based in large part on Obama's willingness to stand up before a roomful of people and talk unabashedly about invading Iran.

A break with current policy might sound like this:

Tim, "all options on the table" is code for a nuclear first strike, and this country will never use nuclear weapons offensively. The idea that negotiations with Iran can't occur unless they think we might nuke them is a murderous lie.

And indeed there are candidates who say such things. Their names are Mike Gravel and Ron Paul.

In other words, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. I notice a lot of pretty smart Donk bloggers and writers lamenting the press' inability to deal substantively with candidates, and certainly these are relatively more sophisticated, careful critiques than the old "Emessemm is Dhimmitude I am John Doe Aieeeeee!" that erupts, regular as Old Faithful, from the right. Yet when it comes to the plain facts that the leading Democratic candidates do indeed endorse "enduring bases" in Iraq, the idea that "the world cannot accept a Nuclear Iran," and the idea that we must win "the War on Terror" without the slightest ironical note when they pronounce that ridiculous turn of phrase, they are either silent or in the sack, chalking it up to mere political expediency and going on to speculate--just like the despised press corps--that they say such things purely for the sake of appearance in the horse race that is politics.