The glitch in the Hillary quote.

So it seems Hllary Clinton was on 5 Sunday talk shows. Sorry, I missed it all. I had other things to do on Sunday. But now I see that I missed some verbiage about Iraq, and I do appreciate good verbiage.

You know, I'm not going to get into hypotheticals and make pledges, because I don't know what I'm going to inherit, George.

She's talking to George Stephanopoulos there.

I don't know and neither do any of us know what will be the situation in the region. How much more aggressive will Iran have become?...

What will be happening in the Middle East? How much more of an influence will the chaos in Iraq have in terms of what's going on in the greater region? Will we have pushed al-Qaeda in Iraq out of their strongholds with our new partnership with some of the tribal sheiks or will they have regrouped and retrenched?...

I don't know, and I think it's not appropriate to be speculating. I can tell you my general principles and my goal. I want to end the war in Iraq. I want to do so carefully, responsibly, with the withdrawal of our troops, also, with the withdrawal of a lot of our civilian employees, the contractors who are there, and the Iraqis who have sided with us."

"The withdrawal of ... the Iraqis who have sided with us." See, that's the thing. The Iraqis don't get to withdraw. So why do we, unless we can defend the condition in which we leave them -- unwithdrawn?

We have a huge humanitarian refugee crisis on our hands. We have millions of Iraqis who have been displaced, some internally, some into other countries. The problems we're going to face because of the failed policies and the poor decision-making of this administration are rather extraordinary and difficult, and I don't want to speculate about how we're going to be approaching it until I actually have the facts in my hand and the authority to be able to make some decisions.

That's basically what Kerry said back in '04, except he couldn't straightforwardly say he wasn't going to tell us what he would do. But whatever it was, it was going to be careful and competent and just so darned better than what the other side would do.

The linked piece, by WaPo's Anne E. Kornblut sounds really irritated by Hillary's windy blabbiness: "Above all, though, in a morning of appearances that yielded virtually no news, Clinton illustrated her ability to talk. And talk. And talk."

Mmmm. Kerryesque!