Is Ron Paul (re)considering a third party campaign this November? We report, you decide ....

I may have answered Richard’s objections to Barack Obama here, but I think, in judging a political candidate, one has to consider the issue in context: that is, who is the other candidate? The answer to this question should put everything in its proper perspective: Mad John McCain. Richard isn’t quite convinced that Obama in the White House would mean a “return to realism,” but then again, what’s “realism” when we’re measuring it against the views of a man who yearns for a Hundred Year War in Iraq—and throughout the Middle East?

I have to say I’m a bit surprised at Richard Spencer’s comments regarding my alleged “defense” of Samantha Power. If you read what I actually wrote—a very brief remark in the “Sniper’s Tower”—I was merely saying that she’s right about Hillary being a monster. Period. So what’s the problem?

As for her views on foreign policy, I dealt with that here—and that ain’t praise.

Truth-telling is now a hate-crime, as Samantha Power, an advisor to Barack Obama, found out when she told the Scotsman what every conservative—and anyone who’s been paying attention for the past twenty years—knows all too well: that Hillary Clinton is indeed a “monster.” Ms. Power has been forced to resign, to apologize, to grovel for saying what conservatives have been saying for years. It’s all a very big deal, another way for the Clintons to drag Barack Obama down to their level—could anyone go that low?—and more fodder for the talking heads to chew on. If and when Hillary takes the White House, however, her monstrousness will soon become all too apparent, and not just to conservatives.

Understatement of the week: Our award goes to David Remnick, of The New Yorker, who, in a profile of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s newly elected President, writes: “Catherine the Great was a passionate equestrienne.”

Well, uh, yes—you could put it that way.

To all those paleocons bored to tears by the spectacle of Hillary-versus-Obama, and brought to the edge of despair by the prospect of having to choose between one of the two and the McCainiac: Bob Barr may run on a third party ticket. Word has it that he and Ron Paul recently had a meeting to discuss future “cooperation.”

How dumb is this? The feds finally released the documents surrounding the making of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” leaked to the New York Times in 1992, which forumulated the policy we see put into practice today: the absolute necessity of US military and political hegemony on every continent, at all times. Leave it to the govenment to redact those portions of the text already published by the Times, as well as portions released by the Pentagon in 1993. Can’t these people do anything right?

I’m watching Keith Olbermann’s show, and he’s showing John Dickerson of Slate asking the Clintonites what foreign policy crisis underscores her experience. There was a 25-second pause before any of them could muster even the clumsiest evasion. Yet the answer is: Kosovo. As Gail Sheehy points out in Hillary’s Choice, it was she who insisted her husband launch military action against the former Yugoslavia. That they are ashamed to do so is a sign of the times—a good sign.

They’re scrambling over at NRO to cover up WFB’s dissent from neocon orthodoxy on Iraq, claiming he just looooved the “surge”—oh yeah, guys? Well, “surge” this.

Andrew Sullivan on how wrong he was about Iraq: “I plead guilty in retrospect, but am reassured that changing one’s mind in the wake of new facts is not a crime or a sin. It is a conservative virtue…” As for the nearly 4,000 Americans killed, and some half a million Iraqis—not to mention 90,000-plus American soldiers horribly maimed, disabled, mentally ill. Oh well, it’s not a sin—or is it?