Greg Mitchell’s account of Bill Clinton’s appearance on Charlie Rose:

Repeatedly dismissive of Obama — which could come back to haunt the Clinton campaign — the former president at one point said that voters were, of course, free to pick someone with little experience, even “a gifted television commentator” who would have just “one year less” experience in national service than Obama. He had earlier pointed out that Obama had started to run for president just one year into his first term in the U.S. Senate. [...]

[Clinton] also hit back at the charge that experienced politicians had helped get us into the Iraq war, saying that this was “like saying that because 100 percent of the malpractice cases are committed by doctors, the next time I need surgery I’ll get a chef or a plumber to do it.”

This is pretty aggravating. Hillary Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, before which she’d never held elective office. Barack Obama was elected to Illinois Senate in 1996, and to the United States Senate in 2004. It’s true that Obama doesn’t have a ton of experience in elective office compared to Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd or Joe Biden, but there’s a perfectly reasonable case to be made that he has more experience than Hillary Clinton does.

Meanwhile, this line on the war seems like a pretty pathetic dodge. Nobody’s actually suggesting that because many members of congress voted the wrong way on the war we should elect a television commentator instead. Indeed, almost no television commentators were right about the war. By contrast, a lot of politicians were right about the war. Nancy Pelosi was right. Russ Feingold was right. Carl Levin was right. Howard Dean was right. And Barack Obama was right. If Clinton’s going to run on her alleged greater experience, surely it’s fair to point to the content of that experience and ask whether or not it’s all good experience.

Now that Michael Mukasey’s fully outed himself as another pro-torture, anti-rule of law Attorney-General, Scott Lemieux reminds us of Ben Wittes’ classic argument that Senators shouldn’t care that Mukasey won’t call illegal torture “illegal” or “torture” because “The Democrats have a big club to wield over Mukasey’s head to make sure they don’t get snookered: Without a strong working relationship with them, he won’t be able to get anything done.”

The main thing an Attorney-General is supposed to get done these days, however, is to help members of the Bush administration avoid legal accountability for criminal actions undertaken in years passed. He doesn’t need any cooperation to do that job.

Googling for something else, I found this March 2005 Jeffrey Goldberg article that got me annoyed at Dick Holbrooke all over again:

At sixty-two, Biden has a cheerful vanity and an exuberant restlessness that make him seem far younger. Since the election, he has become a leader of a modest-sized faction—“the national-security Democrats,” in the words of Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton—that includes the most hawkish members in the Democratic Party.

Because, obviously, those Democrats who thought it would be a bad idea to launch a years-long bloody, expensive, and futile military operation in Iraq don’t care about national security. Those who were totally wrong may have gotten tons of people killed, but at least they’re not dirty fucking hippies. That seems to be the general idea. Anyways this kind of thing is why I think we can do better than President Hillary Clinton:

“She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband,” says Richard Holbrooke, the former envoy for Bill Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is a classic national-security Democrat. She is better at framing national-security issues for the current era than her husband was at a common point in his career.”

I mean, if those were just the words of some guy you could discount them, but he’s one of her top people.