A point made by Mickey Kaus on Monday’s instalment of Bloggingheads.tv, regarding Gore’s appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. On the show, Gore said that removing troops from Iraq at this point could worsen the situation, and that we shouldn’t set a timeline for withdrawal. Mickey sez:

I thought it was very interesting that the guy who, people who hate Hillary because of her Iraq stand are promoting to oppose her, also isn’t for withdrawal. People like Arianna and Markos Moulitsas must feel very betrayed by Gore at this point.

I can’t speak for Arianna or Kos, but I have to say that my personal distaste for Hillary vis-a-vis Iraq has a lot more to do with whether it was right to invade in the first place. There were many people who saw through this charade from the beginning and found few leaders in Congress to fight for that position. Hillary let us down at that point, prefering instead to go with the then-popular president, while Gore emphatically did not.

Naturally, the reason that Hillary took that route is that believed that she has to court the center in order to win the presidency in 2008, but that is exactly why people like myself detest the woman. She’ll clearly take any position, right or wrong, that will increase her political standing. Whether or not he would make a good or bad candidate because of it, Gore has been free lately to take positions that reflect what seems to be his own moral reasoning rather than political posturing. In contrast with Hillary it is this fact, along with his initial opposition to the war, that make it easier to believe that Gore sincerely thinks that leaving will cause even more chaos, and that probably makes his position rather than hers a lot easier for the Left to swallow.