Tuesday
Aural Thrush*
On the radio today, Glenn Thrush of the Politico, while discussing Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State confirmation hearings, said that Obama had done Hillary a big favor by taking on all of her positions once he entered the general election campaign (this is a paraphrase). Thrush specifically noted that Obama had dropped his position in favor of meetings with leaders of rouge states in general, and Iran in particular, without preconditions; a position which had separated him from Clinton during the primary campaign (it's a 17:00 minute segment that I can't listen to right now, I'll update the post later with when exactly he said it).
The only problems with this claim are that it is totally false and pretends that the ideas Obama was supporting when he won the election were more conventional than they in fact were. That in turn allows people in Washington who are uncomfortable with challenges to conventional wisdom (I know that's a vague description, sorry) to pretend that the challenges don't exist and aren't widely supported by the American people. Of course, Pres. Obama can undo that damage in this particular case by actually engaging in high-level diplomacy without preconditions, but it's part and parcel of the were way in which large swathes of the people dominating the media conversation responded to the election results by declaring the U.S. to be a center-right nation.
*This is the best pun of all time.
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The only problems with this claim are that it is totally false and pretends that the ideas Obama was supporting when he won the election were more conventional than they in fact were. That in turn allows people in Washington who are uncomfortable with challenges to conventional wisdom (I know that's a vague description, sorry) to pretend that the challenges don't exist and aren't widely supported by the American people. Of course, Pres. Obama can undo that damage in this particular case by actually engaging in high-level diplomacy without preconditions, but it's part and parcel of the were way in which large swathes of the people dominating the media conversation responded to the election results by declaring the U.S. to be a center-right nation.
*This is the best pun of all time.
