Gary Hart is one of the many first-rate public men who have been denied a fair shot at the presidency by our trivial, ignorant and astonishingly gullible press.

Thanks to Don Heiny for calling my attention to the unanswerable arguments that Hart lays out in the essay from which this is taken:

Sorting through a great deal of obfuscation, Senator Clinton still seems to cling to the argument that Bush mismanaged the whole project, that it was worth doing but it was done badly. Thus, she seems to accept unilateral invasion as a first resort, even when intelligence, as it was in this case, is less than clear. She seems to be willing to follow policy makers, in this case neocons, who had a publicly announced imperial agenda in the Middle East. And she permits the impression to grow that "triangulation," in matters of war, requires placing protection of political career over protection of the national interest.