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Hillary is running for President on her “experience,” which, indeed, she has a lot of. But does she have much success?
In other competitive endeavors, like sports, unsuccessful individuals don’t usually get much experience because they quickly get fired or replaced. But Hillary has gotten a lot of experience by being married to a talented politician, who found it a good idea to claim that she really ought to be the president, and then when he got term-limited out, did the usual banana republic thing of running the wife in his place.
But her actual track record …
From the NYT a month ago:
Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall
The president was wary. The secretary of state was persuasive. But the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven.
By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE FEB. 27, 2016
By the time Mahmoud Jibril cleared customs at Le Bourget airport and sped into Paris, the American secretary of state had been waiting for hours. But this was not a meeting Hillary Clinton could cancel. Their encounter could decide whether America was again going to war.
In the throes of the Arab Spring, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was facing a furious revolt by Libyans determined to end his quixotic 42-year rule. The dictator’s forces were approaching Benghazi, the crucible of the rebellion, and threatening a blood bath. France and Britain were urging the United States to join them in a military campaign to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, and now the Arab League, too, was calling for action.
President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.
In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya. …
Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?
“She was asking every question you could imagine,” Mr. Jibril recalled.
Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”
Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.
Might I propose that when contemplating starting an international war of choice that 51-49 isn’t the right decision rule? Instead, 80-20 ought to be the minimum.
Obama has been selling out Hillary on the Libyan War lately. He wants it off his legacy and onto hers.
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.
This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
From the earliest days of the Libya debate, Mrs. Clinton was a diligent student and unrelenting inquisitor, absorbing fat briefing books, inviting dissenting views from subordinates, studying foreign counterparts to learn how to win them over. She was a pragmatist, willing to improvise — to try the bank-shot solution. But above all, in the view of many who have watched her up close, her record on Libya illustrates how, facing a national-security or foreign-policy quandary, she was inclined to act — in marked contrast to Mr. Obama’s more reticent approach.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, her director of policy planning at the State Department, notes that in conversation and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks of wanting to be “caught trying.” In other words, she would rather be criticized for what she has done than for having done nothing at all.
… The New York Times’s examination of the intervention offers a detailed accounting of how Mrs. Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms. The Times interviewed more than 50 American, Libyan and European officials, including many of the principal actors. Virtually all agreed to comment on the record. They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently.
… Libya’s descent into chaos began with a rushed decision to go to war, made in what one top official called a “shadow of uncertainty” as to Colonel Qaddafi’s intentions. The mission inexorably evolved even as Mrs. Clinton foresaw some of the hazards of toppling another Middle Eastern strongman. She pressed for a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias, an effort never before confirmed.
Only after Colonel Qaddafi fell and what one American diplomat called “the endorphins of revolution” faded did it become clear that Libya’s new leaders were unequal to the task of unifying the country, and that the elections Mrs. Clinton and President Obama pointed to as proof of success only deepened Libya’s divisions.
Now Libya, with a population smaller than that of Tennessee, poses an outsize security threat to the region and beyond, calling into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.
The looting of Colonel Qaddafi’s vast weapons arsenals during the intervention has fed the Syrian civil war, empowered terrorist and criminal groups from Nigeria to Sinai, and destabilized Mali, where Islamist militants stormed a Radisson hotel in November and killed 20 people.
A growing trade in humans has sent a quarter-million refugees north across the Mediterranean, with hundreds drowning en route. A civil war in Libya has left the country with two rival governments, cities in ruins and more than 4,000 dead.
Amid that fighting, the Islamic State has built its most important outpost on the Libyan shore, a redoubt to fall back upon as it is bombed in Syria and Iraq. …
… Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has seized on her role in the larger narrative of the Libyan intervention; during a recent debate, he said he feared that “Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change.”
President Obama has called failing to do more in Libya his biggest foreign policy lesson. And Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United Nations during the revolution, is deeply troubled by the aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only “300 miles from Europe,” a refugee crisis that “is a human tragedy as well as a political one” and the destabilization of much of West Africa.
… But a far more formidable lineup was outspoken against an American commitment, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser; and Mr. Gates, the defense secretary, who did not want to divert American air power or attention away from Afghanistan and Iraq. If the Europeans were so worried about Libya, they argued, let them take responsibility for its future.
“I think at one point I said, ‘Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?’” Mr. Gates recalled. Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”
Some senior intelligence officials had deep misgivings about what would happen if Colonel Qaddafi lost control. In recent years, the Libyan dictator had begun aiding the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda in North Africa.
“He was a thug in a dangerous neighborhood,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. “But he was keeping order.”
More notably, Kaffaffee had made a deal with the U.S. in 2003 to stop stirring up trouble abroad. This was the main positive accomplishment of the Iraq Invasion.
Mrs. Clinton had cultivated a close relationship with Mr. Gates. Both tended to be more hawkish than the president. They had raised concerns about how rapidly he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. More recently, they had argued that Mr. Obama should not be too hasty in dropping support for Hosni Mubarak, the embattled Egyptian leader, whom Mrs. Clinton had known since her years as the first lady.
But they had lost out to the younger aides — “the backbenchers,” Mr. Gates called them, who he said argued that in the moral clash of the Arab Spring, “Mr. President, you’ve got to be on the right side of history.”
Presidents should ban theirs aides from using their own bogus rhetoric on them.
In Libya, Mrs. Clinton had a new opportunity to support the historic change that had just swept out the leaders of its neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. And Libya seemed a tantalizingly easy case — with just six million people, no sectarian divide and plenty of oil.
But the debate was handicapped by sketchy intelligence. Top State Department officials were busy trying to evacuate the American Embassy, fearing that the Libyan leader might use diplomats as hostages. There was no inside information on whether, or on what scale, Colonel Qaddafi would carry out his threats.
“We, the U.S., did not have a particularly good handle on what was going on inside Libya,” said Derek Chollet, a State Department aide who moved to the National Security Council as the Libya debate began. American officials were relying largely on news reports, he said.
Human Rights Watch would later count about 350 protesters killed before the intervention — not the thousands described in some media accounts. But inside the Obama administration, few doubted that Colonel Qaddafi would do what it took to remain in power.
“Of course, he would have lined up the tanks and just gone after folks,” said David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former C.I.A. director.
My reading of the war in North Africa in the 1940s suggests that the rebels had the option of withdrawing from Benghazi and digging in in Tobruk, which famously held out for 241 days against Rommel before being successfully relieved. If the rebels didn’t have what it took to do that, they could be evacuated from Tobruk by land through Egypt or by air or sea. So the time pressure on the Obama Administration was actually less intense than they’ve made it sound.
… So, after some initial doubts, Mrs. Clinton diverged from the other senior members of the administration.
The comparison with Mr. Biden was revealing. For the vice president, according to Antony J. Blinken, then his national security adviser and now deputy secretary of state, the lesson of Iraq was crucial — “what Biden called not the day after, but the decade after.”
“What’s the plan?” Mr. Blinken continued. “There is going to be some kind of vacuum, and how’s it going to be filled, and what are we doing to fill it?” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous adage about Iraq — if “you break it, you own it” — loomed large.
More decisive for Mrs. Clinton were two episodes from her husband’s presidency — the American failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the success, albeit belated, in bringing together an international military coalition to prevent greater bloodshed after 8,000 Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. …
When Mr. Jibril and his Libyan entourage showed up in Rome in May to meet with Mrs. Clinton, they expected a 10-minute check-in. Instead, they talked for nearly an hour.
The opposition leaders had already given her a white paper setting out a spectacular future: Political parties would compete in open elections, a free news media would hold leaders accountable and women’s rights would be respected.
In retrospect, Mr. Jibril acknowledged in an interview, it was a “utopian ideal” quite detached from Libyan reality. But Mrs. Clinton had been enthusiastic, according to those in attendance, and now she wanted to talk in greater depth about how to turn the vision into reality.
So how are women’s rights doing in Libya, anyway?
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So how are women’s rights doing in Libya, anyway?
Also they practice FGM Female Genital Mutilation .
Some of the rational behind it . Muslims are very high IQ , obviously .
OT: I found the Overton Window!
Hildabeast claims to be a Feminist, yet she makes money from Saudi Arabia by doing speeches for them. Saudi Arabia is a country that does not have safe spaces for Feminists. There is a special place in hell for self identified Feminists who vote for Hildabeast.
I’m pretty much a 100% fan of Steve’s work…
But I think Steve Sailer might be the only person left who’s still amused by the variant spellings of “Qaddafi.”
But I think Steve Sailer might be the only person left who's still amused by the variant spellings of "Qaddafi."Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein, @ScarletNumber, @JohnnyGeo
Steve is not the only one…
This is criminal insanity. America’s (and Europe’s) foreign policy should consist of three words: leave well alone. Intervention in the Muslim world has been a disaster. Of course, saying it was a disaster implies that the consequences weren’t foreseen, and that was by no means the case. Talk of “rooting out terrorists” in foreign countries is nonsense. Muslims are 22 per cent of the world’s population. By the tenets of their religion, they are by definition hostile to us. The only way to protect ourselves is to keep them out of our countries. A “good” Muslim country, from our point of view, is one that’s reasonably stable and not in danger erupting into anarchy and spewing its young male population on us.
Of course, he was an evil old WASP, so what did he know?
And I prefer being the hammer to being the nail.
That said, intervening in their affairs internally or attempting to improve, correct, educate, or change them is neither desirable nor necessary. Leave them alone unless and until they do something to us that necessitates a response, then make it more than they bargained for.Replies: @Stan d Mute
Anne-Marie Slaughter, her director of policy planning at the State Department
Great name. Back in the heyday of TV westerns, there was one about John Slaughter. Like all of them, it had a great theme song:
Texas John Slaughter,
Made ’em do what they ought ter,
‘Cause if they didn’t,
They died.
Just put in Anne-Marie for Texas John.
http://i.imgur.com/NoJWZjv.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/BEwKHrc.jpgReplies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Chase
Awesome. If you look close you can see it shifting.
Curses!
It disgusts me that Hillary is still a candidate. The Clinton Global Initiative is such an obvious influence peddling scam operating right there in the open. But yes, she has experience (?).
Something that has become obvious about Hillary is that she is inept and not very bright. Is there a single thing she has done in her professional life that has not been a total f**k-up?
Is Hillary even remotely curious when it comes to military or diplomatic matters???
Does anybody have any evidence that Hillary has read any books on foreign policy or military history in the last decade?
Does she even know who Samuel Huntington is???
Or is this all "mansplaining"???
Have read numerous book on Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief and the fact that in his first year as President he mastered numerous texts on military and diplomatic strategy. Yes, Lincoln struggled during his first year as President but emerged as an impressive wartime leader.
TR, FDR and Truman, along with Ike of course were presidents with strong military and foreign policy backgrounds.
Kennedy and LBJ really struggled with basic military strategic concepts. LBJ especially never understood the folly of attempting to fight the Vietnam war without first securing a left flank on the Mekong to choke off NVA/Vietcong supply routes.Replies: @Bill B., @fnn
"My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president. "
Of course, DeLong has long since deleted this from his website and is now endorsing Hillary.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030611041719/http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001600.html
In the throes of the Arab Spring, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was facing a furious revolt by Libyans determined to end his quixotic 42-year rule.
Quixotic?
Is that a good description? I’d say his rule was erratic, not quixotic.
“Talking in depth” and “unrelenting inquisitor” translates into every day English into whiny, nagging pain in the ass. Not much point in asking lots of questions when your judgment objectively sucks.No matter what data resulted wan’t collated into a smart decison by Mrs. Clinton. In fact sounds like a lot of alarm bells were going off to tell such a unrelenting inquisitor that fomenting instability in Libya was a bad idea no matter how awful Khaddafi was.
A partial list of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s more dramatic failures:
(1) Failed DC bar exam;
(2) Expelled from Watergate investigation staff for lying and other unethical behavior;
(3) A series of financial scandals as Arkansas’s first “lady”;
(4) Whitewater coverup;
(5) In charge of crafting Clinton health insurance bill, failed in a disastrous way that put off the possibilities of another Democrat bill for twenty years;
(6) Partnered with Bill in admitting Poland to NATO, starting a new round of unnecessary hostilities with Russia. [George Kennon describes this as one of the greatest diplomatic blunders of the 20th century.];
(7) Was losing NY senate election until Bill stepped in;
(8) Lost a “sure thing” presidential presidential nomination to the relatively unknown Obama;
(9) Within two weeks of becoming Secretary of State committed an epic diplomatic faux pas that caused Whitehall to publicly and officially repudiate the century long “special relation” between the UK and the USA;
(10) A bit later her incredibly stupid “reset button” gimmick publicly embarrassed Russian officials and widened the rift the Clintons had so assiduously created;
(11) Fomenting and aiding and abewtting the so-called “Arab Spring” which has permanently destabilized much of North Africa;
(12) Fomenting the overthrow of Qadafi in Libya which has turned that country into a failed anarchic mess and a haven for Islamo-fascist terrorists and helped spread terrorist movements like Boko Haram into much of central Africa;
(13) Failed utterly to protect US diplomats in Benghazi and lied through her teeth about the causes of that disaster and the role she played in it;
(14) While Secretary she violated an oath she took after being trained in how to handle classified materials, violated directly several section of the USC regarding the handling of such materials, and as a result exposed many US humint and elint inteeligence sources [people may have died as a result] Hillary’s apologists claim that she was unaware but anyone who will be handling materials like these is thoroughly briefed beforehand and signs oaths to obey the briefings. Only someone totally unsuited for any public office would fail to behave appropriately;
(15) While Secretary her office and underlings negotiated deals with individuals and groups from which Clinton or her “foundation” had received emoluments, giving at least the appearance of pay-to-play and once again violating provisions of the USC.
(16) And her marriage to Bill would probably be judged a failure by most normal people who value marriage as something other than a mutual support pact between two sociopaths.
I read somewhere that the Clintons admitted that people would not be able to keep their own doctors under their healthcare plan. Benefiting from their experience, Obama made a point of repeatedly and emphatically lying about that aspect of his own plan in order to help pass it.
So Obama is actually a more shameless liar than the Clintons.Replies: @Hersh
5.5) Aided and abetted Bill in his sexual abuse and harassment of women, all while loudly pretending with a straight face to be a woman's champion.
7.1) Her figure as a politician came almost entirely without winning any actual elections. Her only election wins were as the US Senator from NY (where she doesn't really live anyway), the first election of which she only won only by a few percentage points after her initial marquee opponent (Guliani) dropped out due to marital problems and cancer and the Repubs had to scramble to put a placeholder no-name opponent into the race. The second she won more easily (albeit again against a no-name opponent), but Senatorial re-election rates are approximately the same as for re-election to the Soviet politburo.
13.1) The Benghazi failure/betrayal/cover-up was all the more galling in light of her 2008 campaign ad touting how she would be the experienced and wise one to respond to the national emergency 3AM phone call to the White House. Well, in 2012 that phone call came from Benghazi, and Hillary promptly stabbed the Americans in the back.
Also, she managed to compile this massive record of failure while having the uncritical backing of big media four-square behind her, so contrary to her whiny complaint of being a victim of (fictitious) "the vast right-wing conspiracy", she was in fact a beneficiary of the actual vast left-wing conspiracy and still manages to work her anti-Midas magic on everything she touches.
Whenever I meet a Hillary supporter (not very often, few citizens want to identify themselves this way), I ask why? What are her accomplishments? An awkward silence always follows.
Hillary is a failure as a person, a politician and a "public" "official". She may be the person in the US least fit for office. That she is the largest party's front runner says a lot about the party and the nation.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
Libya was actually the beginning of my red-pill journey. As a 19-year-old supporter of the Iraq war who learned his lesson, I honestly couldn’t believe it (literally) when NRO and other (((neocon))) types started calling for a no-fly zone and even further action. The results are as sad and terrible as they were predicable. In any sane country this would be grounds for immediate, shameful resignation by the SoD and SoS. Unfortunately we live in the terminal end of a decadent, dying democracy. Fail up.
Just another nail in our coffin.
http://i.imgur.com/NoJWZjv.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/BEwKHrc.jpgReplies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Chase
Please shift it right a couple feet for me. Thanks.
I think Trump will start in on her vast experience right from the beginning:
Her Marxist-Leninist senior thesis at Wellesley.
Bag lady for unreported Democratic Party cash in Arkansas.
Master commodities speculator who turned $1,000 into $100,000 in a single cattle trade.
Union busting strategist for Walmart as a Rose Law firm consultant.
Legal architect of the Whitewater land deal.
etc. etc. etc.
It was done by the simple method of booking two completely offsetting trades and only after there had been some movement booking the winner in Clinton's account and the loser to the donor account. I believe Tyson, of Tyson Chicken was mentioned at the time.Replies: @Jacobite
Ultimately you have to blame Obama for appointing Gates and Clinton to their positions, although I have always suspected that a deal was struck when it became apparent that Obama was going to to be the nominee that Clinton would throw in the towel in exchange for the juicy plum of Foggy Bottom.
That may well be, although Secretary of State is, nowadays, an unlikely jumping-off point for a presidential candidate. The last former cabinet secretary to become President was Herbert Hoover.
My blood was boiling when I read the original article a month back. She was talking about Libya like it was a high school project that went bad. Never mind that a few thousand people are dead, at least she got to use Caesar’s “Veni, Vidi, Vici” line.
This as we watched footage of gaddafi being beaten to death in public, including by anal penetration with wooden poles.
And they say Trump is unpresidential.Replies: @syonredux
The wise words of John Quincy Adams:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/repository/she-goes-not-abroad-in-search-of-monsters-to-destroy/
Of course, he was an evil old WASP, so what did he know?
But I think Steve Sailer might be the only person left who's still amused by the variant spellings of "Qaddafi."Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein, @ScarletNumber, @JohnnyGeo
Cecil Adams is as well. But according to him it is Gadhafi.
Could be tough. There’s a USCIS branch in the building. No joke.
In charge of crafting Clinton health insurance bill, failed in a disastrous way
I read somewhere that the Clintons admitted that people would not be able to keep their own doctors under their healthcare plan. Benefiting from their experience, Obama made a point of repeatedly and emphatically lying about that aspect of his own plan in order to help pass it.
So Obama is actually a more shameless liar than the Clintons.
It should not have been allowed. Democrats had both Houses of Congress at the time but the Republicans didn't squawk much either.
Personally I'd like to see the First Lady role defunded. They should live private lives if they aren't drawing a salary. Its an antiquated idea, First Lady.
“……although I have always suspected that a deal was struck when it became apparent that Obama was going to to be the nominee that Clinton would throw in the towel in exchange for the juicy plum of Foggy Bottom.”
That may well be, although Secretary of State is, nowadays, an unlikely jumping-off point for a presidential candidate. The last former cabinet secretary to become President was Herbert Hoover.
Cudoffey wanted to get all of Africa on the gold dinar, and require those dinars for oil payment instead of US dollars. But entirely unrelated to his demise, I’m sure.
One thing I recall from this noble endeavor –
There was some Libyan woman, I don’t know if she was a revolutionary or journalist or what. She was abused by whoever the bad guys there were. Clinton made a special case of her and moved her to the US. In my neck of the woods roughly.
There was an article in the newspaper. She had been moved to Boulder, CO. At US taxpayer expense. Put up in an apt, and offered help finding work. She complained about – snow, not being near the ocean, not getting enough money, and not having work that was fit for such a person as herself.
Compassion for refugees indeed.
(That said, glad she landed in Boulder. Hope she harangues the hell out of them. Lol.)
Thanks. This is something that should be posted on every street corner etc.
Hillary’s “experience”? Phul-eeeze!
Monica Lewinsky’s got more experience in the White House than Hillary does.
If we and Muslims are to coexist on the same planet, one of us must fear the other a great deal.
And I prefer being the hammer to being the nail.
That said, intervening in their affairs internally or attempting to improve, correct, educate, or change them is neither desirable nor necessary. Leave them alone unless and until they do something to us that necessitates a response, then make it more than they bargained for.
More basic question.
Is Hillary even remotely curious when it comes to military or diplomatic matters???
Does anybody have any evidence that Hillary has read any books on foreign policy or military history in the last decade?
Does she even know who Samuel Huntington is???
Or is this all “mansplaining”???
Have read numerous book on Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief and the fact that in his first year as President he mastered numerous texts on military and diplomatic strategy. Yes, Lincoln struggled during his first year as President but emerged as an impressive wartime leader.
TR, FDR and Truman, along with Ike of course were presidents with strong military and foreign policy backgrounds.
Kennedy and LBJ really struggled with basic military strategic concepts. LBJ especially never understood the folly of attempting to fight the Vietnam war without first securing a left flank on the Mekong to choke off NVA/Vietcong supply routes.
This is awful. Anybody who rolls up with a SJW crib note can turn a leader of the world's most powerful nation into a willing dupe.
Why is there no learning curve? Why didn't the Iraq disaster give pause? How come such a bloviating charlatan got to where she got?
(In another life my dealings with the Burmese opposition taught a lot about empty words designed purely for the reaction they would elect in eager foreigners unable or unwilling to imagine how the messy and unsatisfactory world at back really worked.)
In addition to the items ably complied here by Jus’ Sayin’, there is
5.5) Aided and abetted Bill in his sexual abuse and harassment of women, all while loudly pretending with a straight face to be a woman’s champion.
7.1) Her figure as a politician came almost entirely without winning any actual elections. Her only election wins were as the US Senator from NY (where she doesn’t really live anyway), the first election of which she only won only by a few percentage points after her initial marquee opponent (Guliani) dropped out due to marital problems and cancer and the Repubs had to scramble to put a placeholder no-name opponent into the race. The second she won more easily (albeit again against a no-name opponent), but Senatorial re-election rates are approximately the same as for re-election to the Soviet politburo.
13.1) The Benghazi failure/betrayal/cover-up was all the more galling in light of her 2008 campaign ad touting how she would be the experienced and wise one to respond to the national emergency 3AM phone call to the White House. Well, in 2012 that phone call came from Benghazi, and Hillary promptly stabbed the Americans in the back.
Also, she managed to compile this massive record of failure while having the uncritical backing of big media four-square behind her, so contrary to her whiny complaint of being a victim of (fictitious) “the vast right-wing conspiracy”, she was in fact a beneficiary of the actual vast left-wing conspiracy and still manages to work her anti-Midas magic on everything she touches.
Whenever I meet a Hillary supporter (not very often, few citizens want to identify themselves this way), I ask why? What are her accomplishments? An awkward silence always follows.
Hillary is a failure as a person, a politician and a “public” “official”. She may be the person in the US least fit for office. That she is the largest party’s front runner says a lot about the party and the nation.
If you pay attention, you'll notice that politicians will often reveal their own shenanigans by accusing their opponents of them. I suppose this is projection. You provide a good example in Hillary talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy when there is actually a vast left-wing conspiracy behind her.
Obama often complains about "petty partisan bickering" when as president he is the pettiest, most partisan bickerer I can recall. He'll talk about bringing us together when he intentionally exacerbates tensions for political gain.
The Clintons used to accuse their enemies of practicing "the politics of personal destruction" when they personally destroyed every enemy they could.
17) Helped Bill cover up numerous sexual assaults and silenced the victims.
[I guess if someone is cynical enough, Hillary could be said to be very successful in this regard. It’s scandalous when Trump tweets a picture of Cruz’s wife or when he might have made an allusion to menstruation in his spat with Megyn Kelly. But, the fact that the (naturally) Democrat former President of the United States commits acts of sexual violence, even the Republicans don’t talk about it.]
Ah yes. The unforgettable Philistine cackling: ‘we came, we saw, he died.’
This as we watched footage of gaddafi being beaten to death in public, including by anal penetration with wooden poles.
And they say Trump is unpresidential.
Hey, no need to feel bad about that one. Bill Clinton sounded out the Congressional Black Caucus and found out that they weren’t really interested in Blacks killing other Blacks* in Africa…..
*To be fair, they’re also not much interested in Blacks killing other Blacks in the USA.
So what’s the problem?
From the movie In-Laws [1979]
Sheldon:
You were involved in the Bay of Pigs?
Vince Ricardo:
Involved? That was my idea.
This as we watched footage of gaddafi being beaten to death in public, including by anal penetration with wooden poles.
And they say Trump is unpresidential.Replies: @syonredux
Echoing Napier’s “Peccavi” would have been more appropriate. Of course, the pun in English wouldn’t have worked , but one can’t have everything….
Also they practice FGM Female Genital Mutilation .
Some of the rational behind it . Muslims are very high IQ , obviously .Replies: @Merema, @BB753
its called congenital adrenal hyperplasia….
In men, CAH is linked to enlarged genitals and internal reproductive glands ie prostate and a likely overactive male sexuality. Some male pornographic actors may be examples of the effects of CAH.
Let’s not forget Vincent Foster. . .
A similar occurrence happened during the 1999 Kosovo intervention (aka bombing the Serbs) which Hillary supposedly pressed Bill on. We were told of a hundred thousand missing Kosovars and Serbs using Albanians as ‘living blood banks’. Yet after the action Kosovo became the drug and human trafficking capital of Europe and Kosovo ethnically cleansed most non-Albanians while brutally attacking the remaining Serbs. Libya wasn’t the first nation Hillary helped to wreck.
To paraphrase a line from Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, “I don’t consider a record of failure automatically grants you the right to lead.”
What should be decisive is not her experience, but our experience of her.
Remember when feminism was called “Women’s Libya”? Or something like that…
I remember a very good critique of it by some chick named Arianna years ago. Last decent thing she ever wrote.
Hitlery has plenty of unchecked ego, which is lethal when combined with an incompetent State Department. Those career backbenchers also helped W with his Iraq misadventure, that she supported. George Kennan and his late generation are missed.
“Mrs. Clinton was a diligent student and unrelenting inquisitor, absorbing fat briefing books, inviting dissenting views from subordinates, studying foreign counterparts to learn how to win them over. She was a pragmatist, willing to improvise…”
From what I’ve read about her work methods, I find this assertion hard to believe. She probably let others decide the fate of Coodaphi, while she Blackberried her friends about Wiener’s willy, or Willy’s wiener.
What does that have to do with Hillary Clinton? Oh, wait…
Refugee-generators, Libya & Syria. Clinton convinced Obama on one, perhaps Kerry on the other.
Soros got the refugees he wanted. Read Soros’ interview in Nya Blaledet, a Swedish magazine, in which he declares, “Let the white race perish in blood and suffering,” as described by Takimag contributor Manfred Con Pentz’s November, 15, 2015 article, “The Ghoul”. One could be forgiven if they thought the refugee-influx was the entire point of the military destabilizations, not a externality of them. What did we gain again? What did we inflict on Europe. I’m a veritable light sabre of cynicism, I admit.
Gates of Vienna has a transcript of a Pegida speech decrying Soro's influence on Merkel.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/03/tatjana-festerling-on-the-soros-brokered-migration-deal-between-europe-and-turkey/
What’s interesting is the one name omitted from this story: that mad Irish redhead Samantha Power. She, along with Susan Rice, was even more vocal than Hillary about removing Qaddafi.
Indeed, because of their insistence that the US had to intervene, some wags compared Clinton, Power and Rice to the three Weird Sisters from Macbeth.
Power is even more insane than Hillary.
Obama’s not the only one trying to shift the blame for the Libyan fiasco onto Hillary. I’d really like to see a list of the names of the parties who briefed the NY Times on this story…
Interesting to see the article quotes Mike Flynn. Heavily advising Trump and almost certain to take a prominent position. The US will be in very safe hands if that is the case.
Hillary’s Libya war was not only criminal but stupid. She should face legal accountability for what amounts to the war crime of starting an aggressive war.
Normally people talk about deterrence in foreign policy--you sponsor some terrorism in our country, we bomb your capital city. The attack on Libya was anti-deterrence--we rewarded Libya doing what we wanted them to do by bombing them and helping get their nasty dictator deposed and messily killed. I feel certain that every Iranian or Syrian decisionmaker took this message to heart--there's little point trying to get better relations with the US to avoid war. Better to follow Pakistan's strategy and get and keep a large deterrent of some kind, to make it clear that war with your country will be expensive.
Heh. Hillary is not known for her Napier wit… Still, ‘I have sinned’ would have been the plain truth.
I read somewhere that the Clintons admitted that people would not be able to keep their own doctors under their healthcare plan. Benefiting from their experience, Obama made a point of repeatedly and emphatically lying about that aspect of his own plan in order to help pass it.
So Obama is actually a more shameless liar than the Clintons.Replies: @Hersh
Regarding Hillary Clinton heading that healthcare task force – Imagine any other president’s consort given such official power.
It should not have been allowed. Democrats had both Houses of Congress at the time but the Republicans didn’t squawk much either.
Personally I’d like to see the First Lady role defunded. They should live private lives if they aren’t drawing a salary. Its an antiquated idea, First Lady.
“>>>Of course, he would have lined up the tanks and just gone after folks,” said David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former C.I.A. director.
Any senior government/military official who uses the world “folks” is unfit for the job.
I personally require my troops to say proper things like "exsanguinate" instead of vulgar white trash argot like "bleed out", under penalty of court martial.
> The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven…
Steve and probably three-quarters of his readership imagined at the outset that the Clinton/Obama intervention would leave Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven. It was a depressingly obvious forecast.
She turned her tenure as Secretary of State into a private business via her so-called ‘foundation’. Going back to her very beginnings the amount of sleaze involved starts to make one’s mind reel. Were she to have shown any competence to offset the sleaze then that might be a factor but she doesn’t even have that. Instead she’s tainted everything she’s ever touched. How do we get these people?
A. Hillary.
B. Hildabeast.
C. Hilligula.
D. Hitlary / Hitlery
E. Hillwhorey.
F. All of the above
G. And then some!
I pray that Trump will get the chance to run against this monster and expose all of the horrors starting with the bombing of Serbia up to and including the enthusiastic support for frau Merkel’s flooding of Europe with jihadists, and opening the southern border of the U.S., the aggressive encirclement of Russia risking WWIII etc etc. I would dearly love to see how the White electorate responds given a real referendum on these issues.
Is Hillary even remotely curious when it comes to military or diplomatic matters???
Does anybody have any evidence that Hillary has read any books on foreign policy or military history in the last decade?
Does she even know who Samuel Huntington is???
Or is this all "mansplaining"???
Have read numerous book on Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief and the fact that in his first year as President he mastered numerous texts on military and diplomatic strategy. Yes, Lincoln struggled during his first year as President but emerged as an impressive wartime leader.
TR, FDR and Truman, along with Ike of course were presidents with strong military and foreign policy backgrounds.
Kennedy and LBJ really struggled with basic military strategic concepts. LBJ especially never understood the folly of attempting to fight the Vietnam war without first securing a left flank on the Mekong to choke off NVA/Vietcong supply routes.Replies: @Bill B., @fnn
Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”
This is awful. Anybody who rolls up with a SJW crib note can turn a leader of the world’s most powerful nation into a willing dupe.
Why is there no learning curve? Why didn’t the Iraq disaster give pause? How come such a bloviating charlatan got to where she got?
(In another life my dealings with the Burmese opposition taught a lot about empty words designed purely for the reaction they would elect in eager foreigners unable or unwilling to imagine how the messy and unsatisfactory world at back really worked.)
Indeed, because of their insistence that the US had to intervene, some wags compared Clinton, Power and Rice to the three Weird Sisters from Macbeth.
Power is even more insane than Hillary.
Obama's not the only one trying to shift the blame for the Libyan fiasco onto Hillary. I'd really like to see a list of the names of the parties who briefed the NY Times on this story...Replies: @Bill B., @LondonBob
Yes. I bought Power’s R2P book anticipating a muscular political and philosophical work through of arguments for intervention, with strong examples designed to deflate objections and to show how it was possible finesse the problems of messy reality.
But no. Just a list of woes of the world and the necessity to do-something-about-it.
Ghastly, pompous nobody.
Soros got the refugees he wanted. Read Soros' interview in Nya Blaledet, a Swedish magazine, in which he declares, "Let the white race perish in blood and suffering," as described by Takimag contributor Manfred Con Pentz's November, 15, 2015 article, "The Ghoul". One could be forgiven if they thought the refugee-influx was the entire point of the military destabilizations, not a externality of them. What did we gain again? What did we inflict on Europe. I'm a veritable light sabre of cynicism, I admit.Replies: @Bill B.
With Soros we are clearly in secret lizard man territory.
Gates of Vienna has a transcript of a Pegida speech decrying Soro’s influence on Merkel.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/03/tatjana-festerling-on-the-soros-brokered-migration-deal-between-europe-and-turkey/
Hillary “and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya….Mrs. Clinton was won over.”
Had Hillary never heard of one Ahmed Chalabi?
Note this diary item from the lesbian propaganda bore Terry Castle (who thinks mistakenly she can write like Tom Wolfe) of a Silicon Valley booster for Hillary:
“Undaunted, with wineglasses in hand, we sidle up to a group of likely soulmates; worm our way into the conversation; and enjoy flirtatious rumour-mongering about Hillary and Huma. (‘Of course, the marriage to Weiner was …’) We have all noticed a Huma-lookalike in the crowd – part of the posse of female Clinton flunkeys who run up and down counting people, checking name-tags etc. I was almost fooled when I first saw her: dark, sleek, Gucci-clad, with onyx flame-thrower eyes that could set a tablecloth on fire were she ever to have a need to do so. But no way – sigh – can this frighteningly leggy person be the enigmatic Ms Abedin: she’s now hanging out with a Straight White Male companion – her husband, perhaps? Or one of the several Olympic Team sperm-donors trolling the crowd tonight?…
“It’s true: my hands have become mottled blue-grey ice clumps during the long wait. More than 90 per cent of all feeling has been lost. One knows just how Kate Winslet suffered while floating on that piece of prop department debris in Titanic. But then something uncanny happens. Despite my tiny pig’s-pizzle of a voice, Hillary Clinton – two-term First Lady, former New York Senator, US Secretary of State, legendary Iron Woman and all-around Smiling yet Fearless Maker of Executive Decisions on which our Great Country’s Future Depends – takes my frozen mitt in her own, enfolds it Don Giovanni-style, and now regards me with a rakish and appraising eye:
Well, Terry [she says]: We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)
Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it up! Bejeezus! (It’s getting positively toasty!) Not only that – my god! She’s giving me the Look! (What look?) The Look You Can’t Mistake! The Nanosecond Too Long Look! The Look you get when someone shows you her trowel for the first time! The Look you get when contemplating the Mysteries of Rosicrucianism! The Look that goes with – has ever gone with – the wordless poetical language of Secret Handshakes! (Loud camera click, momentary blinding flash.)”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n07/terry-castle/diary
The words of John Quincy Adams ring true. On the 45th Anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence, Adams, then Secretary of State delivered the following remarks to the members of the 22nd Congress in attendance.
Washington, DC — 4 July 1821
“She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
In women “Classical” or the most extreme and rarer form of CAH results in an elongated/oversized clitoris and labia in women. The radical variates of FGM in places like the Sudan may have evolved a a folk remedy to extreme forms of CAH.
In men, CAH is linked to enlarged genitals and internal reproductive glands ie prostate and a likely overactive male sexuality. Some male pornographic actors may be examples of the effects of CAH.
Now, I know that Hillary is a GoodWhite, and Obama is a SmartGoodBlack. I also know that Muammar Gaddafi was preventing African DREAMers from entering the EU, so he was a BadBrown. So, what I can’t understand is why I have a nagging sense that his death and concomitant sodomification (Is that just like Californication?) was a BadEvent for the world.
In all seriousness, the only people in the US who care about Hillary’s record directing State Organs are already aghast at the idea of Hillary as president.
One of the US’s most impressive national characteristics is our capacity to forget, not forgive, but forget, scandal and corruption in the ranks of our governing class. Couple that with the fact that, since only a tiny percentage of the population has served in the military/national defense apparatus, only a small percentage appreciate things like how incredibly arrogant/stupid somebody would have to be to send classified information over a consumer email system.
I’ve had conversations with people who are tacitly supporting Hillary, who when I remind them of Benghazi and the IRS targeting of conservative groups are not sure what I’m talking about.
Voters tend to be better informed, but still not really well-informed. There are sources to become well-informed if you want to be, but those take time and mental energy and they're pretty boring compared to the latest celebrity scandal or two-minutes'-hate over some racist remark someone made on Twitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMLrUeYsHrI&feature=youtu.be
Trump will make Hillary’s record front and centre of any campaign.
Indeed, because of their insistence that the US had to intervene, some wags compared Clinton, Power and Rice to the three Weird Sisters from Macbeth.
Power is even more insane than Hillary.
Obama's not the only one trying to shift the blame for the Libyan fiasco onto Hillary. I'd really like to see a list of the names of the parties who briefed the NY Times on this story...Replies: @Bill B., @LondonBob
Add in Victoria Nuland to that cabal, Samantha Powers is certainly the shrillest of the R2Pers and deserves a special place in hell.
Interesting to see the article quotes Mike Flynn. Heavily advising Trump and almost certain to take a prominent position. The US will be in very safe hands if that is the case.
Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh
– Listening one of these ‘scientists’ was mistake number one
In retrospect, Mr. Jibril acknowledged in an interview, it was a “utopian ideal” quite detached from Libyan reality.
– Must be nice to peddle your science and not be held accountable.
Let’s be fair. Hillary’s accomplishments in the Senate and at State have been about what one would expect from any former First Lady.
Also they practice FGM Female Genital Mutilation .
Some of the rational behind it . Muslims are very high IQ , obviously .Replies: @Merema, @BB753
It could well be true in the case of Hillary.
I know some of these types, and when they are aware of these “stories” they attribute them to the vast right-wing conspiracy trying to block America’s next date with destiny.
Obama 2011: Just before he left for a 10 day vacation at Martha’s Vineyard…
“For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”
December 2015:
“After years of insisting that Assad had to go, last month Obama spoke of a political process in which “we can start looking at Mr. Assad choosing not run.” From the Oval Office on Sunday, he made no mention of the dictator whatsoever.”
Total death estimates 152,895 to 368,520
Refugees 4 million+
There’s this, her position in favor of getting rid of Assad, her recent statement that anyone on our southern border who gets one foot onto American soil will never be deported, to say nothing of a long history in support of free trade, and pundits maintain Trump will never beat her in November. Ha!
Manpads delivered by the CIA to Libyan rebels were used to shoot down US helicopters in Afghanistan…
“Within months after delivering weapons to the Benghazi and Darnah rebels (May, June and July 2011) we began facing MANPADS in Afghanistan.
By September 5th 2012 in the preceding nine months we had lost 11 helicopters to shoulder fired missiles in Afghanistan. The following headline hit the media:
America Suffers Worst Airpower Loss Since Vietnam
[O]n July 25, 2012, Taliban fighters in Kunar province successfully targeted a US Army CH-47 helicopter with a new generation Stinger missile.
They thought they had a surefire kill. But instead of bursting into flames, the Chinook just disappeared into the darkness as the American pilot recovered control of the aircraft and brought it to the ground in a hard landing.
The assault team jumped out the open doors and ran clear in case it exploded. Less than 30 seconds later, the Taliban gunner and his comrade erupted into flames as an American gunship overhead locked onto their position and opened fire.
The next day, an explosive ordnance disposal team arrived to pick through the wreckage and found unexploded pieces of a missile casing that could only belong to a Stinger missile.
Lodged in the right nacelle, they found one fragment that contained an entire serial number.
The investigation took time. Arms were twisted, noses put out of joint. But when the results came back, they were stunning: The Stinger tracked back to a lot that had been signed out by the CIA recently, not during the anti-Soviet jihad.
Reports of the Stinger reached the highest echelons of the US command in Afghanistan and became a source of intense speculation, but no action.
Everyone knew the war was winding down. Revealing that the Taliban had US-made Stingers risked demoralizing coalition troops. Because there were no coalition casualties, government officials made no public announcement of the attack.
My sources in the US Special Operations community believe the Stinger fired against the Chinook was part of the same lot the CIA turned over to the Qataris in early 2011, weapons Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department intended for anti-Khadafy forces in Libya.
They believe the Qataris delivered between 50 and 60 of those same Stingers to the Taliban in early 2012, and an additional 200 SA-24 Igla-S surface-to-air missiles.
In Afghanistan the DoD field response was immediate; all Close Air Support was cancelled.”
http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2014/08/09/the-benghazi-brief-the-entire-story-of-operation-zero-footprint-in-libya-and-why-further-committee-hearings-are-futile/
Any senior government/military official who uses the world "folks" is unfit for the job.Replies: @AndrewR
Yes how dare someone use an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word when there are fancy Norman French words to use?
I personally require my troops to say proper things like “exsanguinate” instead of vulgar white trash argot like “bleed out”, under penalty of court martial.
It was worse than a crime–it was a blunder. After the second Iraq war, Libya dismantled their WMD program and made nice with us, even to the point of jailing and torturing some people on our behalf.
Normally people talk about deterrence in foreign policy–you sponsor some terrorism in our country, we bomb your capital city. The attack on Libya was anti-deterrence–we rewarded Libya doing what we wanted them to do by bombing them and helping get their nasty dictator deposed and messily killed. I feel certain that every Iranian or Syrian decisionmaker took this message to heart–there’s little point trying to get better relations with the US to avoid war. Better to follow Pakistan’s strategy and get and keep a large deterrent of some kind, to make it clear that war with your country will be expensive.
I wonder what the odds are of Trump using the “We came, We saw, He died” line against her with reference to her dead ambassador.
Someone should dig out her anti-Obama piece about “Who do you want taking the 3.am phone call” and point out that she couldn’t take an 8 pm call.
Most people are ill-informed about the operation of the government. The MSM provides a little information to those who are interested (albeit diluted with a lot of fluff), but most people don’t care that much. That’s why a lot of folks are still convinced Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and few have any idea why Iran might be hostile to the US other than their apparent “hatred of our freedoms.”
Voters tend to be better informed, but still not really well-informed. There are sources to become well-informed if you want to be, but those take time and mental energy and they’re pretty boring compared to the latest celebrity scandal or two-minutes’-hate over some racist remark someone made on Twitter.
I caught “Morning Joe” this morning and they were talking about the LA Times story about Clinton’s emails, and investigating her aides. A national security expert they had on said you can’t prosecute Hilary because she’s running for President. Joe asked: “Which statute is that?” The guy said there isn’t a statute, but those are the “rules.”
We’re doomed.
If it comes down to Trump v. Clinton, the anti-war and anti-intervention positions will be officially sexist. I can see the Salon headlines now:
“The Anti-War Movement Is About What You’d Expect: Lots of Straight White Men.”
“The Disturbing Patriarchal History of the Anti-War Movement.”
“How Not Intervening in the Middle East Hurts Women Most.”
"The Peace Movement's Diversity Problem"
this stuff writes itself
Disingenuous of Obama administration to “blame” Clinton; good CEOs always assume responsibility for an organisation but at the same time silently and effectively root out the weak link..
Funny, though, how many who complain about Clinton’s incompetence actually favour Trump, who’s at least as incompetent in foreign affairs.
"Undaunted, with wineglasses in hand, we sidle up to a group of likely soulmates; worm our way into the conversation; and enjoy flirtatious rumour-mongering about Hillary and Huma. (‘Of course, the marriage to Weiner was …’) We have all noticed a Huma-lookalike in the crowd – part of the posse of female Clinton flunkeys who run up and down counting people, checking name-tags etc. I was almost fooled when I first saw her: dark, sleek, Gucci-clad, with onyx flame-thrower eyes that could set a tablecloth on fire were she ever to have a need to do so. But no way – sigh – can this frighteningly leggy person be the enigmatic Ms Abedin: she’s now hanging out with a Straight White Male companion – her husband, perhaps? Or one of the several Olympic Team sperm-donors trolling the crowd tonight?...
"It’s true: my hands have become mottled blue-grey ice clumps during the long wait. More than 90 per cent of all feeling has been lost. One knows just how Kate Winslet suffered while floating on that piece of prop department debris in Titanic. But then something uncanny happens. Despite my tiny pig’s-pizzle of a voice, Hillary Clinton – two-term First Lady, former New York Senator, US Secretary of State, legendary Iron Woman and all-around Smiling yet Fearless Maker of Executive Decisions on which our Great Country’s Future Depends – takes my frozen mitt in her own, enfolds it Don Giovanni-style, and now regards me with a rakish and appraising eye:
Well, Terry [she says]: We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)
Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it up! Bejeezus! (It’s getting positively toasty!) Not only that – my god! She’s giving me the Look! (What look?) The Look You Can’t Mistake! The Nanosecond Too Long Look! The Look you get when someone shows you her trowel for the first time! The Look you get when contemplating the Mysteries of Rosicrucianism! The Look that goes with – has ever gone with – the wordless poetical language of Secret Handshakes! (Loud camera click, momentary blinding flash.)"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n07/terry-castle/diaryReplies: @5371, @Dr. X, @Jack D
Reading that diary entry is like having a very loud insect trapped inside one’s headgear.
Is Hillary even remotely curious when it comes to military or diplomatic matters???
Does anybody have any evidence that Hillary has read any books on foreign policy or military history in the last decade?
Does she even know who Samuel Huntington is???
Or is this all "mansplaining"???
Have read numerous book on Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief and the fact that in his first year as President he mastered numerous texts on military and diplomatic strategy. Yes, Lincoln struggled during his first year as President but emerged as an impressive wartime leader.
TR, FDR and Truman, along with Ike of course were presidents with strong military and foreign policy backgrounds.
Kennedy and LBJ really struggled with basic military strategic concepts. LBJ especially never understood the folly of attempting to fight the Vietnam war without first securing a left flank on the Mekong to choke off NVA/Vietcong supply routes.Replies: @Bill B., @fnn
I think LBJ was a psychopath who really just didn’t give a f*ck. We all know the stories about LBJ’s vile personal behavior, but most telling to me is that he was OK with the Israelis sinking the USS Liberty and then the next day disingenuously fumed with rage at his staff because the story wasn’t on page 1 of the NYT.
But I think Steve Sailer might be the only person left who's still amused by the variant spellings of "Qaddafi."Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein, @ScarletNumber, @JohnnyGeo
Hate to be an internet pedant, but I think you meant to write “K’ataffy”
"The Anti-War Movement Is About What You'd Expect: Lots of Straight White Men."
"The Disturbing Patriarchal History of the Anti-War Movement."
"How Not Intervening in the Middle East Hurts Women Most."Replies: @gruff
“Opponents of Syrian Intervention are Even More White and Male Than You Thought”
“The Peace Movement’s Diversity Problem”
this stuff writes itself
5.5) Aided and abetted Bill in his sexual abuse and harassment of women, all while loudly pretending with a straight face to be a woman's champion.
7.1) Her figure as a politician came almost entirely without winning any actual elections. Her only election wins were as the US Senator from NY (where she doesn't really live anyway), the first election of which she only won only by a few percentage points after her initial marquee opponent (Guliani) dropped out due to marital problems and cancer and the Repubs had to scramble to put a placeholder no-name opponent into the race. The second she won more easily (albeit again against a no-name opponent), but Senatorial re-election rates are approximately the same as for re-election to the Soviet politburo.
13.1) The Benghazi failure/betrayal/cover-up was all the more galling in light of her 2008 campaign ad touting how she would be the experienced and wise one to respond to the national emergency 3AM phone call to the White House. Well, in 2012 that phone call came from Benghazi, and Hillary promptly stabbed the Americans in the back.
Also, she managed to compile this massive record of failure while having the uncritical backing of big media four-square behind her, so contrary to her whiny complaint of being a victim of (fictitious) "the vast right-wing conspiracy", she was in fact a beneficiary of the actual vast left-wing conspiracy and still manages to work her anti-Midas magic on everything she touches.
Whenever I meet a Hillary supporter (not very often, few citizens want to identify themselves this way), I ask why? What are her accomplishments? An awkward silence always follows.
Hillary is a failure as a person, a politician and a "public" "official". She may be the person in the US least fit for office. That she is the largest party's front runner says a lot about the party and the nation.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
so contrary to her whiny complaint of being a victim of (fictitious) “the vast right-wing conspiracy”, she was in fact a beneficiary of the actual vast left-wing conspiracy
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that politicians will often reveal their own shenanigans by accusing their opponents of them. I suppose this is projection. You provide a good example in Hillary talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy when there is actually a vast left-wing conspiracy behind her.
Obama often complains about “petty partisan bickering” when as president he is the pettiest, most partisan bickerer I can recall. He’ll talk about bringing us together when he intentionally exacerbates tensions for political gain.
The Clintons used to accuse their enemies of practicing “the politics of personal destruction” when they personally destroyed every enemy they could.
And I prefer being the hammer to being the nail.
That said, intervening in their affairs internally or attempting to improve, correct, educate, or change them is neither desirable nor necessary. Leave them alone unless and until they do something to us that necessitates a response, then make it more than they bargained for.Replies: @Stan d Mute
Wasn’t that the Reagan policy on Libya? As I recall, Qadhafi (from a Smithsonian article on the subject) was suspected of some shenanigans resulting in a discotheque bombing in Berlin where *one* American soldier was killed. President Reagan responded by ordering an air strike on Tripoli that only narrowly missed God-awfully himself and reportedly took out one of his children. Quad-off-fly was very demure on the world stage for decades afterwards.
All these replies and yet all so wide of the mark. Do you all refuse to see that all of this depends entirely on what the definition of “failure” is? The bottom line is that Hillary absolutely did not have sexual relations with that woman..
We're doomed.Replies: @jill
I heard another commentator say that by prosecuting someone running for the presidency we are behaving like a third world country. The guy certainly has it backwards.
And yet, as best I can make out, Trump’s positions on foreign policy have been vastly more on target than those of Hillary, Obama, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and the entire idiot brain trust that has done nothing but make for the greatest possible ugliness in the ME.
All of which goes to show that one must look, not at the resumes of those who aspire to power, but to their decisions and actions, and see how well they have panned out. Who needs a harpy/cretin like Samantha Power, for example, despite her resume, and polished writing skills, when everything she has ever done or argued for seems to have led to chaos?
It may be that Trump will present his own big problems, but I think his instinct for what’s a productive use of power and what isn’t is a lot better than what we’ve already seen from the “brain trust” for the Republican, and the “brain trust” for the Democrats.
Yeah, I thought I was observing that too. Then I realized gruff was tricking us by moving the camera lateral to the ground.
Curses!
"Undaunted, with wineglasses in hand, we sidle up to a group of likely soulmates; worm our way into the conversation; and enjoy flirtatious rumour-mongering about Hillary and Huma. (‘Of course, the marriage to Weiner was …’) We have all noticed a Huma-lookalike in the crowd – part of the posse of female Clinton flunkeys who run up and down counting people, checking name-tags etc. I was almost fooled when I first saw her: dark, sleek, Gucci-clad, with onyx flame-thrower eyes that could set a tablecloth on fire were she ever to have a need to do so. But no way – sigh – can this frighteningly leggy person be the enigmatic Ms Abedin: she’s now hanging out with a Straight White Male companion – her husband, perhaps? Or one of the several Olympic Team sperm-donors trolling the crowd tonight?...
"It’s true: my hands have become mottled blue-grey ice clumps during the long wait. More than 90 per cent of all feeling has been lost. One knows just how Kate Winslet suffered while floating on that piece of prop department debris in Titanic. But then something uncanny happens. Despite my tiny pig’s-pizzle of a voice, Hillary Clinton – two-term First Lady, former New York Senator, US Secretary of State, legendary Iron Woman and all-around Smiling yet Fearless Maker of Executive Decisions on which our Great Country’s Future Depends – takes my frozen mitt in her own, enfolds it Don Giovanni-style, and now regards me with a rakish and appraising eye:
Well, Terry [she says]: We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)
Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it up! Bejeezus! (It’s getting positively toasty!) Not only that – my god! She’s giving me the Look! (What look?) The Look You Can’t Mistake! The Nanosecond Too Long Look! The Look you get when someone shows you her trowel for the first time! The Look you get when contemplating the Mysteries of Rosicrucianism! The Look that goes with – has ever gone with – the wordless poetical language of Secret Handshakes! (Loud camera click, momentary blinding flash.)"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n07/terry-castle/diaryReplies: @5371, @Dr. X, @Jack D
That is just plain sick.
They both went to work for the McGovern campaign. Bill was on the road all the time, so they only saw each other on weekends.
He slept with about three or four different women every week.Replies: @ScarletNumber
Her Marxist-Leninist senior thesis at Wellesley.
Bag lady for unreported Democratic Party cash in Arkansas.
Master commodities speculator who turned $1,000 into $100,000 in a single cattle trade.
Union busting strategist for Walmart as a Rose Law firm consultant.
Legal architect of the Whitewater land deal.
etc. etc. etc.Replies: @Bill Jones
It wasn’t a single cattle futures trade, it was a series of them.
It was done by the simple method of booking two completely offsetting trades and only after there had been some movement booking the winner in Clinton’s account and the loser to the donor account. I believe Tyson, of Tyson Chicken was mentioned at the time.
You nailed it. Only I’d say a hornet in one’s motorcycle helmet having just hit 125 heading east out of West Wendover.
The hornet would be preferable. Even with that long period of suspense before you can finally put soles to earth and raise the visor. And the inevitable moment when it gets between your eye and your sunglasses, or even crawls on your face.
Though it’s pronounced very differently in Arabic.
I remember the exact moment I went from disliking Hillary intensely to hating her with a white hot passion akin to battle frenzy.
It was the moment about five years ago she pandered to the UN’s Department of Newspeak and called it “genital cutting” rather than mutilation.
Coz, you know, gotta respect different cultures and all.
And after all, cutting is practiced by many upscale girls.
Chelsea for starters….
It was done by the simple method of booking two completely offsetting trades and only after there had been some movement booking the winner in Clinton's account and the loser to the donor account. I believe Tyson, of Tyson Chicken was mentioned at the time.Replies: @Jacobite
In other words fraud.
Time to pull out this great quote from economist Brad Delong:
“My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president. ”
Of course, DeLong has long since deleted this from his website and is now endorsing Hillary.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030611041719/http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001600.html
"Undaunted, with wineglasses in hand, we sidle up to a group of likely soulmates; worm our way into the conversation; and enjoy flirtatious rumour-mongering about Hillary and Huma. (‘Of course, the marriage to Weiner was …’) We have all noticed a Huma-lookalike in the crowd – part of the posse of female Clinton flunkeys who run up and down counting people, checking name-tags etc. I was almost fooled when I first saw her: dark, sleek, Gucci-clad, with onyx flame-thrower eyes that could set a tablecloth on fire were she ever to have a need to do so. But no way – sigh – can this frighteningly leggy person be the enigmatic Ms Abedin: she’s now hanging out with a Straight White Male companion – her husband, perhaps? Or one of the several Olympic Team sperm-donors trolling the crowd tonight?...
"It’s true: my hands have become mottled blue-grey ice clumps during the long wait. More than 90 per cent of all feeling has been lost. One knows just how Kate Winslet suffered while floating on that piece of prop department debris in Titanic. But then something uncanny happens. Despite my tiny pig’s-pizzle of a voice, Hillary Clinton – two-term First Lady, former New York Senator, US Secretary of State, legendary Iron Woman and all-around Smiling yet Fearless Maker of Executive Decisions on which our Great Country’s Future Depends – takes my frozen mitt in her own, enfolds it Don Giovanni-style, and now regards me with a rakish and appraising eye:
Well, Terry [she says]: We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)
Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it up! Bejeezus! (It’s getting positively toasty!) Not only that – my god! She’s giving me the Look! (What look?) The Look You Can’t Mistake! The Nanosecond Too Long Look! The Look you get when someone shows you her trowel for the first time! The Look you get when contemplating the Mysteries of Rosicrucianism! The Look that goes with – has ever gone with – the wordless poetical language of Secret Handshakes! (Loud camera click, momentary blinding flash.)"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n07/terry-castle/diaryReplies: @5371, @Dr. X, @Jack D
Is this supposed to be a reference to to Freemasonry or some kind of lesbian slang for lady parts? Hey, baby, would you like to see my trowel? I’ll let you butter my bricks with it….
Bill and Hill met in their college library. Bill was oogling her from another table, and she was oogling him back. So she got up, walked over to him, and said, “If you’re going to keep staring at me, and if I’m going to keep staring back at you, then we should at least introduce ourselves.”
They both went to work for the McGovern campaign. Bill was on the road all the time, so they only saw each other on weekends.
He slept with about three or four different women every week.
Monica Lewinsky's got more experience in the White House than Hillary does.Replies: @ScarletNumber
In the Oval Office, at the very least
They both went to work for the McGovern campaign. Bill was on the road all the time, so they only saw each other on weekends.
He slept with about three or four different women every week.Replies: @ScarletNumber
ogling, not “oogling”
OK, that makes two.