Joe Klein has a good roundup of recent chatter about Jim Jones and Bob Woodward, Hillary Clinton and Sid Blumenthal. It's an entertaining parlor game, but ultimately I'm not sure what it all means. I've been working on a piece about the foreign policy machine which you can read soon, but ultimately it seems to me--as Klein also notes--that all the debate about who's up and who's down is curiously detached from actual outcomes. So far, the Obama team has managed its policy pretty well, if not always to perfection.
Certainly things are going a lot better than they did for Bill Clinton did in his early months. By fall of 1993 Clinton had made a hash of gays in the military, had endured the traumatic "Black Hawk down" episode in Somalia, and had lost some serious face in Haiti. According to David Halberstam, Clinton had taken to yelling at his national security advisor, Tony Lake, including one "particularly violent tirade" after the Haiti fiasco.
Incidentally, has Barack Obama ever been known to berate anyone? I'm not aware of it.
--Michael Crowley