efore the 2008 presidential campaign commences at least another dozen books will have been published about Senator Hillary Clinton. I'm told that more than thirty have already been written about her and most of them are highly critical. She looks more and more likely to be the Democratic party candidate, but anything can happen. On the Republican side, to the moment, Senator John McCain is by far the most outstanding personality. It would be a tough race between the two of them.
Conservative Republicans have long had distrust for the renegade Republican for his tendency to break party ranks. The primary battle with Bush in 2000 was bitter and McCain voted against so much that was near-and-dear to the president; he voted against Bush's tax cuts, he lead on the subject of campaign finance reform and has been for the ban on torture. When it suits his purpose he knows how and when to be the party loyalist. A description of the man recently written, in Salon.com, by Walter Shapiro claimed that McCain was by far "the only face-card in the Republican deck" and stated that he has "the best chance" to beat Hillary Clinton or whoever else the Democrats select.
It's so early in the game the race and the battle for the nomination on either side remains wide open.
I'd find it perplexing to be a Republican right now, with the GOP's appeal to the masses in decline and a president who is no longer the appealing populist. I think the party has an enormous identity crisis - there are the conservatives, the neo conservatives, the fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians and the Christian right.
McCain won't get many Democratic votes once his conservative votes are sufficiently known; he is one of the most Conservative members of the Senate.

As the war in Iraq enters another year and with casualties and violence mounting, I turn to the current edition of Foreign Affairs which includes an article by the man who was in charge of intelligence on Iraq until 2005, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. Mr. Pillar said the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He stated that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and listened only to those analysts who supported them.
Where is Mr. Pillar now?