Choose Your Battles

For pete's sake, I can't believe Hillary and Obama are engaging in this tit for tat, all because of a snarky NYT op-ed from Maureen Dowd.

Nobody ends up looking good here. Nobody at all.

Not Maureen Dowd. I have to concede that when she's good, she's good. But when she and her media elite friends get upstaged, she gets annoyed and starts mocking the object of her ire in her signature catty way. Obambi? What the heck is that? Does she write an op-ed in the Times or a gossip column in US magazine? With cheap zingers like that, I sometimes wonder why the woman still occupies such prime journalistic real estate.

Not David Geffen. Spilling his gripes to MoDo of all people, who called Obama "testy", "irritated" and "conflicted". What was he thinking? Perhaps billionaires are used to speaking their minds, but this wasn't just about that. Geffen was getting back at his ex-friends the Clintons in a very public way. So Obama is his man, but almost everything he said about the Clintons reinforce nasty, pernicious GOP talking points which only help the other side. You remain unapologetic, but really, don't make their job easier David. Just don't.

Not Hillary Clinton. First, she refuses to say she made a mistake in voting to authorize the Iraq war. Then she thumbs her nose at those who demand she does. Then she takes a swipe at fellow Democrats on the terrorism issue. Now her campaign picks this ridiculous fight to score political points. If she's doing this to goad Obama, big mistake: Geffen isn't connected to the Obama campaign, he's a private donor. Demanding that Obama apologize for him only made Hillary look thin skinned and petty.

Not Barack Obama. Obama wagged his finger at fellow Democrats for not courting evangelicals, and espoused an end to political bickering and taking the high ground. Yet the first time a fellow Democrat takes a swipe at him, his campaign bites back hard by throwing a cheap shot of its own. If Hillary baited him, he fell for it hook, line and sinker; in his eagerness not to look weak, he looked hypocritical.

Bottom line: bashing each other is a battle nobody except the other side wins, so quit it. Our patience is running short. If you're itching for a battle, choose the ones worth fighting for: getting us out of Iraq and not getting us into a war with Iran.

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