The powers of a man’s mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks. ~ Sir James Mackintosh

It must be tough trying to portray yourself as a moderate to the country while at the same time making sure your base is convinced of your far left bona fides. It was the later Hillary was kowtowing to the other day.

“Believe me, I understand the frustration and the outrage,” Clinton said in a speech to the Democratic National Committee meeting that brought the party’s nine White House hopefuls together for the first time. “You have to have 60 votes to cap troops, to limit funding to do anything. If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as president, I will.”

I heard a sound bite of that last sentence on a radio news broadcast yesterday afternoon. She was definitely using her Shrill Hill™ voice; the same one she was using when she made this statement:

“And let me add one other thing, and I want to be very clear about this,” she said. “If I had been president in October of 2002, I would not have started this war.”

Dan Conley had this take:

Anyone who believes her, please raise your hand. Or maybe there’s some literal truth here that I’m missing … such as, like Bush, she’d wait until March 2003 to start it.

Or perhaps, given the extraordinary set of circumstances it would have taken for her to be President in 2002, she had somehow acquired a superpower, let’s say omniscience, in the late 90s and knew for a fact that Saddam had no WMDs. Of course, if Hillary knew everything that Bill was doing all these years … oh, never mind. (h/t James Joyner)

Her nutroots base may be happy to hear those sentiments,but I’m willing to bet she hopes the rest of the country wasn’t listening closely.