Makes You Wonder

When Hillary Clinton sits down for an interview with an editorial board for a newspaper run by Richard Mellon Scaife, a guy who spent a whole lot of money in the 1990's to prove that she had murdered Vince Foster, and the upshot of the interview is that Sen. Clinton happens to mention that she would have left the church if her pastor had preached sermons like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it kind of makes you wonder whether the whole thing wasn't planned out that way.

At least that's the conclusion of Josh Marshall at TPM, and I can't say I don't wonder the same thing myself.

Then there's the whole Bosnia trip thing and how Sen. Clinton "misspoke." That's an amateur gaffe that you'd expect from someone running for a freshman term in Congress... or John McCain. (But then he'd get a free pass for it because he has so much credibility from the media anyway.) With all the talk about how carefully Hillary Clinton has crafted her campaign and, according to the Orcosphere, how she's so coldly calculating and never leaves any fingerprints on anything she does -- why, she's Karl Rove in drag! -- how could she make such a blunder?

So juxtaposing these two stories -- the interview with the far-right editorial board and the bush-league Bosnia blunder -- it makes you wonder whether she's as smart a campaigner as the conventional wisdom would have you believe (and her detractors hope she isn't), or if she's just as prone to the kluztery and fallibility as everybody else? Or maybe the Bosnia gaffe was really planned just to lull everyone into a false sense of security so they wouldn't see it coming when she does whatever voodoo she does to win the nomination, win the election, and finally vanquish all her foes in one fell swoop.

Or maybe we're all getting in way too deep with all of this overanalysis and nobody outside of the blogosphere and punditocracy really gives a rat's ass. I wonder.

(Cross-posted.)