In announcing that “leading Iraq war critic” Joe Wilson has joined her campaign, Hillary commented:

I admire Joe Wilson’s courage in standing up to this administration and holding it accountable for the misinformation that led us into the Iraq war. . . . I’m honored to have his support as we do everything in our power to bring this war to an end and begin bringing our troops home safely.

Note the clever wordsmithing here. She says she admires his courage. She doesn’t reference his actual statements.

Given her use of the term, “misinformation,” I wonder what she has to say about the “misinformation” Mr. Wilson provided to the media. Given the problems she and her husband have with the truth, it’s interesting that her campaign would highlight the endorsement of a man who rose to fame by dishonestly accusing the Bush Administration of lying.

I’m just trying to fathom why her campaign would highlight the endorsement of a man who lost his job for the Kerry campaign when his “misinformation” was brought to light. Todd Beeton thinks it’s “clearly part of Clinton’s strategy to gain support among the liberal base, the blogosphere in particular, which she has conspicuously held at arm’s length.” According to blogger Cadillac Tight which alerted me to Beeton’s comment, Wilson is quite possibly “the biggest leftosphere celebrity extant.” (Via Instapundit.)

Interesting that a dishonest man would become a celebrity of the left-wing blogosphere. I mean, he’s most famous for saying something which, I repeat, has long since been discredited.

I thought I might be able to offer a more clever rejoinder to this endorsement, but am feeling a bit off today.

There are so many great things about this report from Iraq by John Burns of the New York Times, I wasn’t sure where to start commenting. 

First, General Rick Lynch gives an honest assessment of what is required to keep security in Iraq.  Second, Lynch and his fellow Americans have promised the Iraqi civilians they will not leave them in the hands of terrorists any longer.   Congress needs to make that same promise.

But it was this passage that really caught my attention.

General Lynch said he was “amazed” at the cooperation his troops were encountering in previously hostile areas. He cited the village of Al Taqa, near the Euphrates about 20 miles southwest of Baghdad, where four American soldiers were killed in an ambush on May 12 and three others were taken hostage. One of the hostages was later found dead, leaving two soldiers missing. Brig. Gen. Jim Huggins, a deputy to General Lynch, said an Iraqi commander in the area had told him on Saturday that women and children in the village had begun using plastic pipes to tap on streetlamps and other metal objects to warn when extremists were in the area planting roadside bombs and planning other attacks.

“The tapping,” General Huggins said, was a signal that “these people have had enough.”

General Lynch also challenged an argument often made by American lawmakers who want to end the military involvement here soon: that Iraqi troops have ducked much of the hard fighting, and often proved unreliable because of the strong sectarian influence exercised by the competition for power between Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political factions.

“I don’t know,” he said, how American war critics had concluded that the new American-trained Iraqi Army was not up to the fight. “I find that professionally offensive,” he said, after noting that there were “many Iraqi heroes” of the fighting south of Baghdad. “They’re competent,” he said. “There’s just not enough of them.”

There also are not enough American heroes in our political establishment as well.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)