At some point, I’m not sure when, Armando became as fierce a defender of Hillary Clinton as he used to be of Markos Moulitsas (before he was banned from Daily Kos). I can’t predict whether he will feel equally betrayed by the Clinton campaign someday, but I’d take that bet.

I honestly have no idea why Armando gives a crap about how I feel about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and I have even less idea why he would want to have anything to do with them (other than direct financial renumeration).

I can’t understand how anyone could have spent the last 3-4 years blogging, and not have internalized the deep contempt that Team Clinton has for the Netroots. And when I say ‘Netroots’ I don’t just mean a narrow grouping of well known and somewhat influential bloggers and blogging communities. I mean Dean Democracy for America and all their spinoffs, like Philly for Change. I mean MoveOn.org. I mean Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC. I mean the candidacies of Ned Lamont, Paul Hackett, Chuck Pennacchio, Christine Cegelis, Jerry McNerney, Jon Tester, Donna Edwards, Mark Pera, and Marcy Winograd. Team Clinton has had a lock on the DCCC and DSCC, through the chairmen Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer. Their idea of a great candidate is Harold Ford, Jr. or Tammy Duckworth. That’s the kind of DLC-driven politician Team Clinton wants in government. And when they are challenged, Team Clinton attacks the left, attacks the activists, attacks the blogosphere, and tries to create division.

It’s no secret that Team Clinton opposed Dean as chair of DNC. Remember this?

I was making my way into the new Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey’s celebration at the Hyatt in downtown D.C. when I spotted Begala, the former Clinton aide. I was going to just politely greet him and shake his hand, but I had an attack of conscience. After all that Begala and Carville have done to undermine Gov. Dean’s efforts at the DNC, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “I hope you will support the 50-state strategy,” I told him, expecting the shrug off or a “nice to meet you too,” but that isn’t what Begala had in mind…

…”Anyway,” Begala continued… “I don’t need some a**hole from Vermont telling me what to do.”

Begala (and Carville) weren’t just opposed to Dean on a personal level. They objected to everything he represents. Dean was a challenge to the status quo, which held that people like Carville and Begala got to control the levers of power within one of the two viable political parties in this country. And, on whose behalf did they wield that control?

Team Clinton’s attack of Dean began back in 2003.

“But the great myth of the current [Howard Dean] cycle,” DLC leaders Al From and Bruce Reed wrote in a May 15, 2003 memo, “is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of activists represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. “What activists like Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home.”

Bruce Reed was the chief domestic policy adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House.

When Team Clinton wasn’t bashing volvo-driving elitists they were covering up for Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby. This Arianna Huffington post from December 2005 eerily foreshadowed James Carville’s later decision to write Libby’s judge urging leniency.

Huffington presciently added another critique of James Carville-Stanley Greenberg.

But, instead of rethinking, the party is returning to the bone dry Carville advice well. He’s one of the guiding forces behind the influential Democracy Corps, which recently released a report [PDF] calling for the Democrats to run on a 2006 agenda focused on “health care, education and energy, followed by top end tax cut repeal and homeland security.”

Thud (that’s the sound of Democratic chances dropping).

Yes…Team Clinton, telling Dems to run the midterms against anything but the war. Stanley Greenberg…the Clinton’s old pollster. Here’s her new pollster:

Mr. Penn’s vision for the Democratic Party has consistently been one of a determinedly centrist entity—former Democratic consultant Bob Shrum called Mr. Penn “ideologically non-ideological”—that is fiscally conservative and strong on national security. He says that he was a Democratic Leadership Council Democrat even before the group existed, or before he became their resident pollster. And he and Mr. Schoen have for decades railed against Democrats running on “fairness” as a surefire electoral loser.

Ironically, Armando chides me for not making my criticism of Hillary about issues, but about respect. He’s wrong, of course. It’s about both.

There is a simple reason why I am not criticizing Hillary Clinton on her education plan, her health care plan, or any other plan. I don’t believe a word she says. I don’t even pay attention to what she says. I pay attention to what her TEAM says.

If you wanted to know what Bush would do in office, you couldn’t listen to him prattle on about a humble foreign policy and the silliness of nation building. You had to read the stuff that Cheney and Rumsfeld and Libby and Feith and Perle and Wolfowitz were writing and signing. That is what told the real tale. The rest was just packaging.

I don’t hate Hillary Clinton. I admire her in many ways. What I hate is the kind of politics practiced by her TEAM. If they win, all of us, all the people that fought so hard for our country and our party over the last four years…we will be the losers.

Why?

Because all the same people will be back in charge. Their collective response to Bush-Cheney will be the same as Carville’s to Libby. They’ll recommend a get-out-jail-free card. And the Central Asian land grab will go on…with a kindler, gentler face…with permanent bases in Iraq…with little to show for it all except that Hillary Clinton, like Mike Mukasey, is not Alberto Gonzales.