THE LOW POST: Hill on Fire

We live in a two-party system where both parties are pro-war; when the wars go badly, the system scrambles to find a way to prevent antiwar sentiment from taking the drastic step of mounting a meaningful opposition.

Therefore from time to time we have to suffer through the spectacle of some status quo dingbat letting his hair down and performing a tortured impersonation of a peace activist during an election season. He bounds to the podium all hot and bothered and indignant-looking, and he sounds like he's against the war. Only once you've listened to the tape five or six times do you realize that he's saying that he's actually in favor of the war, he just thinks it should have been prosecuted more effectively.

This was the basic message of Richard Nixon in 1968, and exactly the same message now belongs to Hillary Clinton, who unveiled her new pseudo-anti-war pose during an absurd clash of war collaborators with Donald Rumsfeld on the Senate floor last week.

Pitched as an effort by Senators to discover the truth about the "on the ground" situation in Iraq, the series of interrogations of leading administration officials was really a forum for Conventional Wisdom to publicly abandon the war effort. Generals admitted that Iraq was on the verge of civil war; senators gave gloomy speeches and re-positioned themselves for midterm election season. Even a slew of erstwhile media war-cheerleaders, most notably mustachioed Times dipshit Thomas Friedman, used the occasion of the hearings to throw in the towel, universally describing the war as both a lost cause and somebody else's fault (the hilarious Friedman formulation was "Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons . . . "). But the headline outcome was Hillary angrily demanding Don Rumsfeld's resignation, apparently for the crime of screwing up a perfectly good war.

Her semantically tortured apostrophic attack against Rumsfeld's "incompetence," in which she railed against the administration's "strategic blunders" but carefully avoided any discussion of the decision to invade that she and most other Democrats so enthusiastically supported, identified her as the status quo dingbat in this generation's version of the same old story.