Spin Cycle

The Washington Post reports today on advance copies of two new books about Hillary, one by Carl Bernstein and the other by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta. The Gerth/Van Natta book apparently discloses that our senator didn't take the time to actually read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before she voted to authorize war.

This, according to that noted book reviewer and literary mensch Howard Wolfson, is old news and a big yawn. "The news here is that it took three reporters nearly a decade to find no news," said Wolfson, who also acts as Hillary's spokesman. "Two overwhelming senate victories in the toughest media market in the country demonstrated that voters have put these issues behind them."

Maybe so, but the suspicion lingers that a lot of New York voters maybe missed that 2004 Washington Post report about senators who were too busy to read the NIE -- an NIE that, by the way, had a passage saying that Saddam was unlikely to use WMD against the U.S. even if he had them. In fact, given Wolfson's entertaining evasions of a debate with Jonathan Tasini last fall, it's kind of amusing to see him now acting like all these issues were fully ventilated.

In the past, apparently, Hillary has deflected questions about this by saying that she was "briefed" on the estimate. But hopefully, when Wolfson and the rest of the Clinton team are finished with their clever comments about how dumb the new books are, they'll take a moment to more fully explain why you'd vote for war without actually reading the relevant National Intelligence Estimate first.

Was she, like, too busy that week or something?