Digby: Positioning

Matthew Yglesias explains why some of the Republican presidential candidates are inexplicably behaving like Bush cultists and some are not:

The oddity of the emerging GOP presidential field is that it's dominated by candidates -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney -- who are, in one way or another, importantly unorthodox conservatives. Consequently, they need to hew very closely to hawk dogma in national security policy to prove their bona fides even at the moment where political support for the hawkish position is collapsing. Sam Brownback, a distinctly second-tier contender but one who benefits from being a committed social conservative with standard conservative economic views, is taking the chance to be the exception and resist the urge to surge...