Maureen Dowd and brutal honesty!

You're a little late Maureen.
009 has been saying this for months now...

It's only 2005, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has already written off Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race. It may be true, she warns, that Democrats "are racing like lemmings toward a race where, as one moaned, 'John McCain will dribble Hillary Clinton's head down the court like a basketball.'"

Who does she yearn for?

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. At 44, Obama, she points out, is already a year older than John F. Kennedy when he became president.

"The weak and pathetic Democrats seem to move inexorably toward candidates who turn a lot of people off," she advises. "They should find someone captivating with an intensely American success story... and shape the campaign around that leader....

"The Democrats should not dismiss a politically less experienced but personally more charismatic prospect as 'an empty vessel.' Maybe an empty vessel can fill the room."

She adds that it may be true "that Americans, as one Democrat told me, 'will never elect a guy as president who has a name like a Middle East terrorist.'" But the Democrats, she says, do not "stand for anything" and they have "no champion at a time when people are hungry for an exciting leader, when the party should be roaring and soaring against the Bushies' power-mad stumbles.

"They should groom an '08 star who can run on the pledge of doing what's right instead of only what's far right."