Howard Kurtz calls either the story of Hillary trying to join the Marines, or my skepticism of it, “an odd little episode” and says he has no reason to think she’s making this up. He concludes:

So let’s review: Hillary Clinton says this strange incident happened. Journalists are skeptical because it doesn’t sound like her. No one with firsthand knowledge has contradicted the account. And one recruiter who knows nothing about the situation says it sounds impossible to him.Not much there, I’d say. But that’s not going to stop her detractors.

Look, Hillary’s attempt to join the Marines was used as an illustrative example of the senator’s enthusiasm for the use of military force in the New Republic. I remembered the original skepticism when she said this back in 1994 and wondered if there had ever been any source for this story other than Hillary, because A) let’s face it, the tale seems kind of contrary to the image of her as a war opponent and counterculture figure from her youth and B) the timing is extraordinarily odd, to say the least.

The suspicion is that she either made up this tale of trying to join the Marines, or she visited the recruiter for a very different reason, to “test” his tolerance for women applicants, and had no real interest in joining the military.

If I’m supposed to believe the conclusion of the New Republic cover piece (that Hillary refuses to apologize for her vote for the Iraq war because she is deep down, a hawk, and that as president she would not hesitate to deploy U.S. forces to enact internationalist and humanitarian foreign policy goals), then the evidence to support that conclusion has to be persuasive. (The rest of Michael Crowley’s article, BTW, is more persuasive, at least to argue that Hillary’s use of military force would be akin to her husband’s in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.) But the anecdote of Hillary is so odd and counterintuitive that even Crowley felt compelled to ask her about it, one of two questions he got to ask her in a rushed interview, and her answer was supremely evasive, almost hostile.

If Howard Kurtz doesn’t think this is worthy of at least a blog post or two… then I think he’s succumbing to Hillary burnout way too early.