The Times has a ridiculous piece with this ridiculous image as the banner, suggesting that the fact that Clinton is carrying on and apparently in denial about the fact that she is about to lose makes her somehow soldier-like. The following quote is illustrative:

If she is not temperamentally suited to reckon with the possibility of losing quite yet, advisers say, she is also a cold, hard realist about politics — at some point, she is known to say, someone will win and someone will not.

“She has a real military discipline that, now that times are tough, has really kicked into gear,” said Judith Hope, a friend and informal adviser to Mrs. Clinton, and a former chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Party. “When she’s on the road and someone has a negative news story, she says, ‘I don’t want to hear it; I don’t need to hear it.’ I think she wants to protect herself from that and stay focused.

Firstly, as James Taranto points out in Monday’s Best of the Web column, there are at least a couple of things in here which seem to suggest something other than military toughness – the fact that she is not “temperamentally suited to reckon with… losing” and that when she is faced with bad news she simply says, “I don’t want to hear it”. The latter is particularly reminiscent of the worst facets of our current president, and I’m really not sure we need that again. For all that people worried about Romney’s tendency to want to wallow in facts, at least there was no suggestion he wanted to avoid negative ones. Then there’s the fact that her “cold, hard” realism boils down to a recognition that, in an election, “someone will win and someone will not.” What startling insight! It would be worrying indeed if she didn’t acknowledge this fact, although it appears she doesn’t yet acknowledge that, in the end, “he will win and I will not.”

Of course, given what we know the liberal media and politicians think of soldiers (“You, uh, get stuck in Iraq“), perhaps this makes more sense than it at first appears… But this has to be one of the worst puff pieces in recent memory. And all apparently for nothing, unless the Times has another McCain-style smear article up its sleeve for release the day before Ohio and Texas vote.