Target: HIllary By: Mark W Adams

Joe Klein did what I was going to do this morning, before I got sidetracked. I fully intended to tear apart Rich and Dowd for their mocking of Hillary Clinton solely on style, not substance. Mind you, Joe doesn't go too far into substance himself either, and is once removed from the substantive story -- what does Hillary stand for? We learn nothing from any of them.

Instead, we learn this pithy lesson. . .

"Obama's a more elegant speaker than Clinton but about as spontaneous as a fence post,"

Thanks Joe, we're all better for knowing that.

I noted that Broder also took a shot at Hillary for the way she avoided loaded and insipid questions from corporate media's most useful tool, Tim Russert, in the non-partisan way that only Broder thinks is non-partisan. Mind you, it wasn't what she said, or didn't say that got under Broder's skin, but the way she didn't answer. Whatever Dave.

I was also going to compare this silliness with George Will's "audacious" slam on Obama using very specific policy questions. A change of pace. Unfortunately it was a grossly unfair series of loaded if not unanswerable questions, but at least he didn't talk about Barack's ears or if he was black enough, liberal enough, conservative enough, sincere enough, accessible enough, down to earth enough, or experienced enough. Will did indeed imply that Obama wasn't any of those things, enough, but he masked it so well in policy specific queries that made your eyes glaze over you hardly noticed.

But I got distracted and sat there in front of the keyboard trying to remember how to type. My mind was more than blank, it was erased, overloaded. A fuse blew somewhere. The world as I knew it was no longer there, no longer round. It was . . . Flat?

I just couldn't get over Thomas Friedman "getting over 9/11." It blew me away. Who was this guy and what did he do with Tom? There was "Mr. Six-More-Months" writing something that most of us outside the D.C. cocktail weenie circuit figured out at least six Friedman Units ago -- that 9/11 was cynically used by the administration.

9/11 didn't change everything, but 9/11 did give them cover to change everything anyway. They used it here to bulldoze the most ridiculously extreme form of right wing dystopia through the institutional stopgaps the Congress, courts and free press are counted on to check; and unleashed their crackpottery upon the blank canvas they created in Iraq.

Maybe Friedman got a hold of a copy of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. And maybe Tom thought she was talking about him, and not Milton Friedman in this excerpt.

"For three decades, Friedman and his followers had methodically exploited moments of shock in other countries - foreign equivalents of 9/11, starting with Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home.

Finally, someone with foresight. A Klein who'd been criticizing a Friedman for years. Joe, leave Maureen and Frank alone, and don't even bother with Tom. In fact, change your last name so nobody will ever confuse you with Naomi.

Milton Friedman's Chicago mob of economic gangsters are the problem, and always have been. Naomi was telling us right along what someone with Tom's background in the Middle East and economics should have instinctively warned us all about -- that nutjobs with delusions of grandeur were peeing on Tom's Flat Earth and convincing him and his enablers in the established punditry that it was a new fangled irrigation system.

Three years ago, Naomi watched the non-existent reconstruction, smelled the rat, and told the world why nothing in Iraq was going as it should be, or ever would. But nobody really listened, least of all the opinion makers in American media or any serious candidate for public office.

In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America's hands. This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.

Sad that at the same time neocon Norman Podhoretz was getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom (you know, the guy who is leading the bandwagon for war on Iran), Naomi Klein's assessments were left in the wilderness. Podhoretz still has the President's ear, and that of the GOP front runner too. God I hope someone like Hillary or Obama or Edwards are reading Klein -- Naomi, not Joe.

In fact, I hope they don't bother with the Times or WaPo op.ed. pages or any of the corporate media trivial "analysis" or outright propaganda. If they want to really know what's going on, they should read blogs. I mean, it's pretty sad when a MilBlogger can get face time with the President, even to ask questions that make me cringe like this . . .

"Mr. President, since you clearly see the war as necessary, and lasting beyond your administration, how do you set the conditions to ensure that the effort will continue beyond 2008, regardless of who wins the White House?"

. . . and NPR can't.