Experience has been the watchword of Hillary's campaign. As she fights to explain the Bosnian story, I'm struck by the way that both popular explanations for her behavior are inadequate. Lying is damning, certainly, but seems to strain credulity. Once, perhaps, but Hillary was confronted and only retracted half her story. She's too skilled to not know the second half would come back to bite her. Misstatements? Not three times over the course of over three months.

I propose a third possibility: Hillary has had a decade - and perhaps several decades - with her eye on the prize: she wants to be President. Faced with the need to present a narrative for her selection as a superior candidate, cognitive dissonance has literally changed her memories.

There's more...

Cognitive dissonance is 50 years old this year! From arguably the best. wikipedia. entry. ever:

Leon Festinger first proposed the theory in 1957 after the publication of his book When Prophecy Fails, observing the counterintuitive belief persistence of members of a UFO doomsday cult and their increased proselytization after the leader's prophecy failed. The failed message of earth's destruction, purportedly sent by aliens to a woman in 1956, became a disconfirmed expectancy that increased dissonance between cognitions, thereby causing most members of the impromptu cult to lessen the dissonance by accepting a new prophecy; that the aliens had instead spared the planet for their sake.

I thought it was pertinent as I had some conflict between cognitions myself today. The first pertinent cognition was that Terry Jeffrey is an avowed conservative. The second occurred during Jeffrey's appearance on Hardball when he said the following about the decision by the Defense Department to go after Hillary Clinton for demanding to be kept in the loop on Iraq contingency plans:

I hate to say it but this was a very stupid move by the Bush Defense Dept. I don't think Hillary Clinton did anything wrong. I agree with Hillary.

Does...not...compute. He went on.

Congress not only has oversight over the Dept of Defense, the Dept of Defense works for congress. Article 1, section 8 of the constitution gives congress the power to declare war, congress can undeclare war, they can authorize a limited war, congress can authorize war under any terms it wants to, they can also authorize the end of a war. And clearly, clearly someone who's on the senate armed services committee like Hillary has oversight over whether or not the Defense Dept. is making appropriate contingency plans for any kind of withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, so what she did was legitimate and what the Defense Dept. did was stupidly play into her hands and give her the ability to politicize this issue.

It didn't end there. Not only did he defend conservative arch-nemesis Hillary Clinton, but he attacked conservative hero Rudy Giuliani:

I think there's a tremendous irony here. Rudy Giuliani has been pitched to a lot of my conservative friends as the most viable candidate because he's the best on security, you go back and look at the New Hampshire debate, he was asked "knowing what you know now, would you still invade Iraq," he said "yes!" He does not have a rational foreign policy and I think over the long run it will not withstand scrutiny."

Talk about flipping the script. Conservatives making sense just may be the sort of cognitive dissonance we'll need to get used to as the president and his administration loses even the stragglers who can no longer justify the cognitive dissonance they've been struggling with for years now.

There's more...