Senator Clinton is a very shrewd politician. She's trying to pull off the nearly impossible: be tough on national security while not alienating too many Democratic primary voters. Her latest two-step is on the terror detainee bill. She opposed the bill and drew wild applause from the Left with this speech she delivered on the Senate floor:
The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty…. Once again, there are those who are willing to stay a course that is not working, giving the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check - a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people, including Americans, to be free of judicial oversight and accountability, to put our troops in greater danger.
Now, after the bill is off the front pages and the media focus back on Iraq, Clinton says that she's ok with torture if there's "an imminent threat to millions of Americans." She adds: "That very, very narrow exception within very, very limited circumstances is better than blasting a big hole in our entire law." But why didn't she offer such an amendment - one that gave "a blank check to torture" only under "ticking time bomb" scenarios -- when the bill was on the Senate floor and the Democratic grass roots fully engaged? I checked. She didn't. In fact, had her argument won the day our interrogation program, which has yielded solid intelligence, would have been shut down. Senator Clinton is trying to have it both ways and, judging from the press coverage of her latest torture remarks, she's succeeding.