I want to like Hillary better, I really do. The Democratic Party has pretty much reduced its political agenda to government giveaway programs, unrestricted abortion, and the acceptance of buggery. They need to get serious about being a national party again, and Senator Clinton (D-Standbyourman) is one of the few leaders who can stand up to the shrill, narrow constituencies of her party.
So when I see her get tough on North Korea and their nukes, my heart is gladdened. During her time in the Senate, and especially with her work on the Armed Services Committee, she has tried to be a serious voice, and by all accounts she works hard to understand the issues under their purview. States are primarily about enforcing worldly justice, by enforcing the law internally and by defending against external aggressors, and anyone who wants to be president must take that seriously.
Yet through it all, she is a Clinton, and being a Clinton means that you have to get in a nasty cheap shot while ostensibly doing something for the public good. When Admiral Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, delivered the assessment that North Korea has the capability to put nuclear warheads on missiles that can reach the U.S., Clinton called it
...the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States....Put simply, they couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can.She apparently forgot that her husband was president when North Korea promised to stop its offensive nuclear program in 1994, in exchange for fuel and other goodies. Well, they took the fuel, continued the program, and that's why we're in this situation today: because her husband accepted the word of an insane tyrant. The problem didn't start with President Bush (and, in fairness, it didn't start under President Clinton, either), it was inherited by him.
Disagreeing about the best way to defend the nation is healthy and good, but using the subject primarily for political ammunition is a grave betrayal of public trust. Someday, there will be a nationally-known Democrat with some degree of intellectual honesty whose name is not Joe Lieberman. Maybe that person will be Senator Clinton. She's got about three years to make it happen.
She won't make it. Three years is not long enough. You are quite generous to give her a chance, though.
I'll never be able to abide Hilary's absolute support of a legal right to abortion. There is a democrat on the horizon who I have an eye on - Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, as staunchly pro-life as his father, the late governor. Casey is running for the Democratic nomination to oppose Rick Santorum for the U.S. Senate, and current polls show him *leading* Santorum by 14 per cent in a hypothetical head-to-head race.
I'd hate to lose Santorum, but it would be interesting to have him replaced by a pro-life Catholic Democrat.
Santorum will lose. With Casey running against him, he won't be able to syphon off the Casey Democrat vote and some of his own Republican base might think twice about voting for him, remembering the Specter fiasco last year. On top of that, Casey probably won't have a problem with the socially liberal wing of the PA Democratic party due to their absolute loathing of Santorum and their thirst for electoral victory, any electoral victory. Given that PA is a Democratic state to begin with, Santorum's toast. I agree that it is unfortunate, but given that he bears a good amount of responsibility for Specter being the judiciary chair I can't feel too sorry for him.
Please don't fall for Hillaryspeak. Unfortunately, somehow NY state ended up with her as our senator. She is making a concerted effort to appear reasonable to good people, but it seems to be all calculated from my point of view (read insincere). My niece is in the army in Iraq. The Hilldabeast(whoops, is my opinion of her showing?) flew through there seeking photo-ops. My niece said she had it fixed so any poor soldiers from NY were ordered to line up when she got off the plane. She posed for a pic with all of them(no one in the picture EXCEPT Hillary is smiling) and then she jumped back on the plane(or was it a chopper?). Other people, like Rumsfeld for instance, talked to the soldiers, etc. Not Hillary - she had places to go, things to do.
I'm sorry, Eric, but I cannot believe Hillary is serious or that a President Clinton 2.0 would be serious if faced with Kim Jong-Il in 2009.
As you pointed out, she couldn't even say the obvious about North Korea without making a partisan political point out of it, because that's all she is -- a partisan political hack, the perfect embodiment of postmodern francobabble's "decentered subject." She even went with different surnames -- first Rodham, then Clinton, and now Rodham Clinton -- according to political advantage.
I mean, does anyone believe that someone who opposed using force against Saddam Hussein, and who cited a lack of UN support therein as a serious argument, would have the stomach to do it against North Korea. Hint: the North Koreans unquestionably have WMDs and so we are deterred; and unlike Iraq they have a veto-wielding Great Power protector at the UN. Hillary is looking to curry early a political stance on an issue for 2008 where Bush is vulnerable, and therefore by extension Republicans could be vulnerable.
She's doing the same things on immigration (where again, the Wall Street Republicans have been worse than awful) and abortion (where the pro-life movement is also frustrated with the speed of Bush's progress and the perceived fecklessness of the GOP establishment). Is there a pattern here?
Sure, her celebrity and her (yes) personal toughness would allow her to stand up to the party's liberal-fanatic base. But only if it were to her political advantage. If it would help her with Korean-American voters, she'd kiss Kim Jong-Il's butt or lobby her husband to free Korean-American terrorists who tried to assassinate a previous president (er ... if there were any).
So yeah, she might talk tough on limiting immigration or abortion. But can anyone really believe she'll go for long against, or do anything more than irrelevant symbolism on, the rabid orthodoxy of her party which says the former is racism and the latter misogyny.
In other words, I could see Hillary do something like what her husband did to Sister Souljah or Rickey Ray Rector. And some conservatives might smile for a second. But look at what happened once *he* got in power -- when the rubber hit the road, he always toed the line of racialist orthodoxy -- those dreadful lip-biting apologies in Uganda and Tuskegee, never even "mending" affirmative action, the National (One-Sided) Conversation on Race, support for Census sampling, the Church-burning hoax. And by the end of it all, he the first black president.