Warning: Candidate Diary

The title is the first warning.

Here’s the second: I need to rant a bit about something Clinton said today. That might not be kosher here, but I need to get this off my chest. If you’d rather not hear what I have to say, there are plenty of other great essays and comments to read, so I hope you’ll take advantage of all the other talent here.

From The Chicago Tribune:

In a Cabinet-style setting, surrounded by retired military leaders, Sen. Hillary Clinton said the public should ask whether Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama has met the criteria needed to become the nation’s commander in chief.

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

She said she and McCain had traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan together as she repeated a line that surfaced from the campaign trail. She and McCain “bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, Clinton said, while “Sen. Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002,” stating his opposition to the Iraq war as an Illinois state senator.

Does she mean this John McCain:

Or maybe this one:

WTF are you thinking Hillary?!!!! I don’t know about you, but I think John McCain would be an absolute disaster as commander in chief and has demonstrated NO capacity in that area. For you to even have implied that he has says to me that either your judgment is severely impaired or that you will say anything to win this nomination. What you said is really beneath you and all of us who hope for some light at the end of this long dark tunnel. I would only ask that you remember what it is that we as Democrats are supposed to be fighting for and which side of that struggle you are supposed to be on.

 

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  1. scrolls into oblivion with no one noticing, that will be fine with me. I just found myself so angry about this, I couldn’t sleep. I needed to say something and I hope in doing so I’ll be able to move on.

  2. then what’s the point? they need to be examined and looked at… you are not attacking her personally.

    you are questioning her judgement (and her statement) as a candidate.

    leeeee getimate imo and necessary to analyze the candidate, their positions, and statement.

    i hope we get more…

  3. Every lesson I was taught during the corporate executive phase of my life seems to be lost on her. These were lessons on leadership meant expressly for women who sincerely wanted to be respected by both men and women and included:

    Not Playing The Victim while at the same time lining up your next attack

    Crying in order to engender sympathy

    Changing both the rules and tactics so as to appear to be a loner and not a team player

    Not playing fair through the continued use of Dirty Tricks

    I could go on but you get the point. Sure I want to see a woman in the white house. But not this one. She is the absolute worst example of female leadership I have ever seen.

  4. Or, it would seem to me listening to Sen. Clinton.

    They could complete… each other’s sentences.

  5. Hillary’s had quite the peacenik makeover since last Summer when she voted to give Bush the green light on Iran.  

    Of course, her Kyl-Lieberman vote was just one in a long string of Thatcherite plays going back to before the AUMF, but this one finally woke people up to what a warmongering MIC toady she really is.  With her poll numbers tanking in the wake of that vote, Hillary found herself all of a sudden needing to run away from the ‘strong leader’ narrative she had been carefully constructing ever since her first Senate run against little Ricky Lazio.

    But never let it be said that a Clinton can’t spin on a dime. Through a remarkable series of obfuscations and (well let’s face it) bold face lies, Hillary, with the help of a complicit coroprate media, has able been able to make a lot of people forget that she has been one of the staunchest advocates (Dem or Gooper) of Bushist militarism  throughout his entire term.

    Yet, while Hippie Hillary stopped the bleeding, her anti-war me-tooism resulted in a blurring of her Valkyrie image to the point where she could no longer draw much of a distinction between herself and Obama.  This lack of distinction was no big deal so long as Hillary was still the front runner, but it is now of critical importance because she is trailing and needs to make up a lot of ground in a very short period of time.

    So here comes the old Hillary back with a vengeance, comfortable again in her neo-con skin and daring that wuss Obama to prove he’s got the balls she has.

    Pretty disgusting if you asked me.  But hey, on the bright side at least Hillary is finally being honest about who she really is and what she really stands for.

  6. lol …

    I’m really astonished at how often Hillary has said such politically stupid things.

    I like her fine, so am not angry with her for this … more shaking my head that she’s playing it all so badly.

    I think it’s become clear that if she wins the nomination it will be because of old-style machine politics rather than reflecting the will of the voters, and that’s not good for the Dem party or for progressives.  I don’t think she’s a neocon but I do think she surrounds herself with all the wrong kind of people.

    I think you make a good case for the fact she is showing amazingly bad judgment in her campaign.  And I agree.

  7. of my admiration to spread around.

  8. If you care about any of these progressive causes we fight for here at Docudharma then this is simply unacceptable.

    unacceptable

    by pushing this line of attack she has directly undermined the Democratic Party and those in the progressive movement who would not like to see a nutjob like John McCain become president.

    If you care about choice then this is unacceptable.

    If you care about the war then this is unacceptable.

    If you care about education then this is unacceptable.

    If you care about our climate then this is unacceptable.

    I could go on and on about issues that matter in this election. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign seems to care more about writing ads for Republicans then dealing with these issues.

    I have had ENOUGH.

  9. of sorts. Both essays seem related – at least to me.

    In pondering my own reaction to HRC and why it is so strong, I’ve begun to look at a chapter in my own life I am not proud of.In fact there is a lot of shame attached to it. I am going to write an essay on it at some point as I now realize how ones own personal experiences can be projected onto a candidate – fairly or not.

    Secondly, after listening to a sound byte of HRC last night talking about the role of Super Delegates and why they are needed due to their experience and wisdom – BS of course – it dawned on me how essential it is to rid our system of these super delegates as they are a tool of the power elite and have nothing to do with representative democracy. I think if more people understood this, it puts this latest elitist tactic by the Clintons in so glaring a light as to be near impossible to not see.

  10. Nezua over at The Unapologetic Mexican takes a deeper look at all this in a diary titled The Cognitive and the Material.

    First he quotes an article  by Brewer and Lakoff. Here’s a bit:

    There are two kinds of policy: cognitive and material. Material policies are familiar: they outline what is to be done in the world. For example, the details of a health care plan, or a plan for getting out of Iraq. Material policies each have a cognitive dimension, often unconscious and implicit. This includes the ideas, frames, values, and modes of thought that inform the political understanding of the material policy.

    And then Nezua adds this:

    As we’ve had made painfully clear to us for too long now, the Left is running around reacting and no longer trusts progressive visions enough to forward them boldly and unapologetically and borne on their own volition and timing. While the Right has had the patience and vision and tenacity and fearlessness (I’m being generous) to build (often preposterous) Cognitive landscapes in which to forward their (Material) agendas, the Left oddly remains caught up in parrying the burrs and low-flying shrapnel and bark peeling off of those landscapes. It’s been noted online in many places before, and it still baffles the mind. However, the mind is not baffled (or ought not be) when someone like Barack Obama comes along and does some Cognitive work, and people RESPOND.

    And what does the Old Clinton Machine do? It takes up the Right’s weapons, the Conservative Cognitive scaffolding already erected against the Left, and resurrects it to slam Obama’s new Cognitive-heavy platforms…because its been effective at winning. Sigh. And who loses? Because in doing this, the Clintons are working against the Left actually being progressive. Eh.

     

  11. I am a Hillary fan. I’ll vote for the nominee, but I lean toward HRC.

    Obama said, ina debate, that he has had no meetings of his subcommittee because he’s running for president. The subcommittee concerning Europe, our partners in NATO and Afghanistan.

    This doesn’t sit well with me.

    As one not hevily invested in the primary season– I am a yellow dog, after all, I don’t have many problems with the statement, other than it being somewhat undercutting.

    However it’s the primary season. Based on much of an adult life involved in state party politics, two movie lines come to mind, which might indicate why I don’t do as much any more, and why it doesn’t faze me:

    The first:

    “It’s not personal, it’s only business.”

    Both of the democratic contenders are politicians. There is no ‘new way.’

    The second:

    “Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

    Or to quote The Who: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

    I’ll voter for the dem, but there’s so little space between HRC and BHO that I am not particularly worried.

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