Personally, I’m not sure how one can get much clearer than this in regards to retroactive immunity in the FISA bill:

As matters stand now, I could not support it and I would support a filibuster absent additional information coming forward that would convince me differently.

I mean, isn’t that basically a logical tautology? No matter what issue, don’t most people support a certain position “unless they can be convinced otherwise?”

However, I guess not fully unexpected, it isn’t obvious enough for many liberal blogs:

Hillary Clinton is now the lone holdout among presidential candidates in the Senate, hedging on whether she will support a filibuster of any bill that contains retroactive immunity rather than just maybe one specific one.

This is almost (almost?!) obsessive parsing. Liberal blogs are so conditioned to bash anything and everything that Clinton does that, no matter what she says, there must be a way to parse it to make it sound like she’s hedging. To them, there is no possible way Clinton isn’t hedging. She could probably come out and say “I will support a filibuster on any bill that includes retroactive immunity” and they would find something wrong with it (what if it’s an amendment? What if they decide to call it something else, huh? Hedge! Hedge!). And, of course there are those who won’t believe what she says, no matter what she says. Why this is the case, I’m not sure, but the left’s hatred of Hillary Clinton is nearly as clinically obsessive as the right’s.

If you think my statement in one of my last posts about them thinking that Clinton would find changing a comma in this paragraph on this page as an excuse to vote for the bill was a joke, think again, as this comment illustrates:

All the Committee has to do is make some minor change — any change — in the bill, and Hillary will be free to say, “The bill has changed, and I can support Telecom Immunity with confidence.”

Of course, first off, they’re confusing Obama’s statement (“I can’t support the bill as is”) with Clinton’s, but of course that’s irrelevant to the point if you get a chance to bash Clinton!

In fact, it’s gotten so bad, I’ve seen a thread where people debated the difference between the words “would” and “will” and how Clinton saying “she would support a filibuster” is hedging versus her saying “she will support a filibuster.” Basically what they’re saying is “OK, Clinton, there is no possible evidence that should change your mind, so you should say that you won’t change your mind on it, no matter what information may possibly be revealed about the program.”

OK, I agree that I can’t think of anything that would make the program OK so that they should be granted immunity, but I can’t absolutely count out the possibility either. The problem is that we don’t know the specifics of the program. In a sense, Clinton is begging the Bush administration to release further information about the program, which is what the Senate wants anyway. I don’t see how that’s bad. And there is hardly a guarantee that any information that they’d release would cause her to change her mind.

Besides, one of liberal’s supposed biggest beefs with Bush is that he takes a position and absolutely sticks by it, no matter what further information is learned. I see that it’s only bad if the other guy does that.

If people want to read the most viriolic stuff on Clinton, skip the right wing blogs and visit some of the comment sections on liberal blogs. Some liberals make it sound like Clinton is worse than Bush. An amazing feat for a politician who gets something like a 70% liberal rating in the Senate, is against the war, and is married to arguably the most popular and successful president in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

Addendum: I just thought of this, but aren’t the liberal blogs killing their own momentum.  Today could have been all “the democratic presidential candidates are united against retroactive immunity!” in order to put pressure on Senator Reid to kill it outright.

But no, the liberal wing of the party succumbed to their knee-jerk Clinton-bashing and decided that time was better spent arguing over the grammatical usage of the word “would” rather than, you know, actually trying to create momentum to take the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill so we don’t have to have a filibuster.