Exclusive: The question of “qualifications” is suddenly at the center of the Democratic race with Hillary Clinton’s backers touting her résumé but ignoring her many failures in job after job, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders questioning her qualifications to be President as “silly” – and looking at her résumé alone, she’d be right – but there is also the need to judge her performance in her various jobs.
What is troubling about Clinton’s record is that she has left behind a trail strewn with failures and even catastrophes. Indeed, her highest profile undertakings almost universally ended in disaster – and a person’s record should matter when voters are deciding whether to entrust him or her with the most powerful office on earth.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In other words, it’s not just a question of her holding one prestigious job or another; it’s also how well she did in those jobs. Otherwise, you have a case of the Peter Principle Squared, not just letting someone rise to the level of his or her incompetence, but in Clinton’s case, continuing to get promoted beyond her level of incompetence.
So, looking behind Clinton’s résumé is important. After all, she presents herself as the can-do candidate who will undertake small-scale reforms that may not move the needle much but are better than nothing and may be all that’s possible given the bitterly divided Congress.
But is Hillary Clinton really a can-do leader? Since she burst onto the national scene with her husband’s presidential election in 1992, she has certainly traveled a lot, given many speeches and met many national and foreign leaders – which surely has some value – but it’s hard to identify much in the way of her meaningful accomplishments.
Clinton’s most notable undertaking as First Lady was her disastrous health insurance plan that was concocted with her characteristic secrecy and then was unveiled to decidedly mixed reviews. Much of the scheme was mind-numbing in its complexity and – because of the secrecy – it lacked sufficient input from Congress where it found few enthusiastic supporters.
Not only did the plan collapse under its own weight, but it helped take many Democratic members of Congress with it, as the Republicans reversed a long era of Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Because of Hillary Clinton’s health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.
In Clinton’s next career as a senator from New York, her most notable action was to enthusiastically support President George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Clinton did not just vote to authorize the war in 2002, she remained a war supporter until 2006 when it became politically untenable to do so, that is, if she had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination against anti-war Sen. Barack Obama.
Both in her support for the war in the early years and her politically expedient switch – along with a grudging apology for her “mistake” – Clinton showed very little courage.
When she was supporting the war, the post-9/11 wind was at Bush’s back. So Clinton joined him in riding the jingoistic wave. By 2006, the American people had turned against the war and the Republican Party was punished at the polls for it, losing control of Congress. So it was no profile-in-courage for Clinton to distance herself from Bush then.
Not Learning Lessons
Still, Clinton seemed to have learned little about the need to ask probing questions of Bush’s team. In November 2006, she completely misread Bush’s firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replacing him with ex-CIA Director Robert Gates. Serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Clinton bought the conventional wisdom that Gates’s nomination meant that Bush was winding down the Iraq War despite warnings that it actually meant the opposite.
Former CIA Director (and later Defense Secretary) Robert Gates.
If Clinton had done any digging, she could have discovered that Rumsfeld was dumped not because of his warmongering but because he backed his field generals – George Casey and John Abizaid – who wanted to rapidly shrink the U.S. military “footprint” in Iraq. But Bush and his neocon advisers saw that as effectively an admission of defeat, so they got rid of Rumsfeld and recruited the more malleable Gates to front for their planned escalation or “surge.”
Not only did Consortiumnews.com spell out that reality in real time, but it also was explained by right-wing pundit Fred Barnes in the neocon Weekly Standard. As Barnes wrote, Gates “is not the point man for a boarding party of former national security officials from the elder President Bush’s administration taking over defense and foreign policy in his son’s administration. … Rarely has the press gotten a story so wrong.”
Barnes reported instead that the younger George Bush didn’t consult his father and only picked Gates after a two-hour face-to-face meeting at which the younger Bush got assurances that Gates was onboard with the neocon notion of “democracy promotion” in the Middle East and shared Bush’s goal of victory in Iraq. [The Weekly Standard, Nov. 27, 2006]
But the mainstream press — and much of Official Washington — loved the other storyline. A Newsweek cover pictured a large George H.W. Bush towering over a small George W. Bush. Embracing this conventional wisdom, Clinton and other Senate Armed Services Committee members brushed aside the warnings about Gates, both his troubling history at the CIA and his likely support for a war escalation.
In his 2014 memoir, Duty, Gates reflects on his 2006 nomination and how completely clueless Official Washington was. Regarding the conventional wisdom about Bush-41 taking the reins from Bush-43, Gates wrote about his recruitment by the younger Bush: “It was clear he had not consulted his father about this possible appointment and that, contrary to later speculation, Bush 41 had no role in it.”
Regarding the mainstream news media’s wrongheaded take on his nomination, Gates wrote: “There was a lot of hilarious commentary about a return to ‘41’s’ team, the president’s father coming to the rescue, former secretary of state Jim Baker pulling all the strings behind the scenes, and how I was going to purge the Pentagon of Rumsfeld’s appointees, ‘clean out the E-Ring’ (the outer corridor of the Pentagon where most senior Defense civilians have their offices). It was all complete nonsense.”
Though Gates doesn’t single out Hillary Clinton for misreading the significance of his nomination, Gates wrote: “The Democrats were even more enthusiastic, believing my appointment would somehow hasten the end of the war. … They professed to be enormously pleased with my nomination and offered their support, I think mainly because they thought that I, as a member of the Iraq Study Group [which had called for winding down the war], would embrace their desire to begin withdrawing from Iraq.”
In other words, Hillary Clinton got fooled again.
Surging for Surges
Once installed at the Pentagon, Gates became a central figure in the Iraq War “surge,” which dispatched 30,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007. The “surge” saw casualty figures spike. Nearly 1,000 additional American died along with an untold number of Iraqis. And despite another conventional wisdom about the “successful surge” it failed to achieve its central goal of getting the Iraqis to achieve compromises on their sectarian divisions.
President George W. Bush pauses for applause during his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003, when he made a fraudulent case for invading Iraq. Seated behind him are Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. (White House photo)
Yet, the mainstream press didn’t get any closer to the mark in 2008 when it began cheering the Iraq “surge” as a great success, getting spun by the neocons who noted a gradual drop in the casualty levels. The media honchos, many of whom supported the invasion in 2003, ignored that Bush had laid out specific policy goals for the “surge,” none of which were achieved.
In Duty, Gates reminds us of those original targets, writing: “Prior to the deployment, clear benchmarks should be established for the Iraqi government to meet during the time of the augmentation, from national reconciliation to revenue sharing, etc.”
Those benchmarks were set for the Iraqi government to meet, but the goals were never achieved, either during the “surge” or since then. To this day, Iraq remains a society bitterly divided along sectarian lines with the out-of-power Sunnis again sidling up to Al Qaeda-connected extremists and even the Islamic State.
But Clinton didn’t have the courage or common sense to recognize that the Iraq War “surge” had failed. After Obama appointed her as Secretary of State – as part of a naïve gesture of outreach to a “team of rivals” – Clinton fell back in line behind Official Washington’s new favorite conventional wisdom, the “successful surge.”
In the end, all the Iraq War “surge” did was buy President Bush and his neocon advisers time to get out of office before the failure of the Iraq War became obvious to the American public. Its other primary consequence was to encourage Defense Secretary Gates, who was kept on by President Obama as a gesture of bipartisanship, to conjure up another “surge” for Afghanistan.
In that context, in Duty, Gates recounts a 2009 White House meeting regarding the Afghan War “surge.” He wrote: “The exchange that followed was remarkable. In strongly supporting the surge in Afghanistan, Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary [in 2008]. She went on to say, ‘The Iraq surge worked.’
“The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.” Obama’s aides disputed Gates’s suggestion that the President indicated that his opposition to the Iraq “surge” was political, noting that he had always opposed the Iraq War. The Clinton team never challenged Gates’s account.
In other words, having been an Iraq War hawk when it mattered – from 2002-06 – Hillary Clinton changed direction when that was politically expedient, apologizing for her “mistake,” but then returned to her enthusiasm for the war by accepting the benighted view that the “surge worked.”
Clinton’s enthusiasm for “surges” also influenced her to side with Gates and General David Petraeus, a neocon favorite, to pressure Obama into a “surge” for Afghanistan, sending in an additional 30,000 troops on a bloody, ill-fated “counterinsurgency” mission. Again, the cost in American lives was about 1,000 soldiers but their sacrifice did little to shift the war’s outcome.
Winning Praise
Again and again, Hillary Clinton seemed incapable of learning from her costly errors – or perhaps she just understands that the politically safest course is to do what Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment wants done. That way you get hailed as a serious thinker in the editorial pages of The Washington Post and at the think-tank conferences.
Virtually all the major columnists and big-name pundits praised Clinton’s hawkish tendencies as Secretary of State, from her escalating tensions with Iran to tipping the balance of the Obama administration’s debate in favor of a “regime change” mission in Libya to urging direct U.S. military intervention in Syria in pursuit of another “regime change” there.
On the campaign trail, Clinton seeks to spin all these militaristic recommendations as somehow beneficial to the United States. But the reality is quite different.
Regarding Iran, in 2010, Secretary Clinton personally killed a promising initiative sponsored by Brazil and Turkey (at President Obama’s request) to get Iran to swap much of its low-enriched uranium for radiological medical tests. Instead, Clinton followed the path laid out by Israel and the neocons, ratchet up pressure on Iran and keep open the “bomb-bomb-bomb Iran” option.
It is noteworthy that the diplomatic agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear program and to give up much of its low-enriched uranium required Clinton’s departure from the State Department in 2013. I’m told that Obama understood that he needed to get her out of the way for the diplomacy to work.
Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.
But Clinton’s signature project as Secretary of State was another war of choice, this time the “regime change” in Libya resulting in the grisly murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the descent of Libya into a failed state beset with terrorism, including the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, and more recently the emergence of the Islamic State.
Clinton and her “liberal interventionist” allies sold the Libyan war as a “responsibility to protect” mission – or R2P – but the propaganda about Gaddafi’s supposed plans for “genocide” against the Libyan people was wildly exaggerated and fit with a long and sorry pattern of U.S. officials deceiving the U.S. public. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Covering Up Hillary’s Libyan Fiasco.”]
Taking Credit
According to all accounts, Obama was on the fence about the wisdom of joining European nations in undertaking the Libyan “regime change” and it was Secretary Clinton who tipped his decision toward going to war. The U.S. military then provided the crucial technological infrastructure for the war to go forward. Without the U.S. involvement, the “regime change” in Libya wouldn’t have happened.
As the conflict raged, Clinton’s State Department email exchanges revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a “Clinton doctrine,” bragging about how Clinton’s clever use of “smart power” could get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But President Obama seized the spotlight when Gaddafi’s government fell.
But Clinton didn’t miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011, after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi’s demise with the quip, “we came; we saw; he died.”
However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic militants expanded their power over the country. Many, it turned out, were terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned. Some were responsible for killing Ambassador Stevens.
Over the next five years, Libya – a once prosperous North African country – descended into anarchy with dozens of armed militias and now three competing governments jockeying for power. Meanwhile, the Islamic State expanded its territory around the city of Sirte and engaged in its signature practice of beheading “infidels,” including a group of Coptic Christians slaughtered on a beach.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confronts Sen. Bernie Sanders in Democratic presidential debate on Jan. 17, 2016.
Yet, on the campaign trail, Clinton continues to defend her instigation of the Libyan war, disputing any comparisons between it and the Iraq War by rejecting any “conflating” of the two. Yet, the two disasters – while obviously having some differences – do deserve to be conflated because they have many similarities. Both were wars of choice justified by false and misleading claims and having terrible outcomes.
Clinton’s rejection of “conflating” the two wars has another disturbing element to it, the suggestion that she is incapable of extracting lessons from one situation and applying them to another. That inability to analyze, engage in self-criticism, and thus avoid repeating the same mistakes may indeed be a disqualifying characteristic for someone seeking the U.S. presidency.
So, is Hillary Clinton “qualified” to be President of the United States? While her glittering résumé may say one thing, her record – a litany of misjudgments, miscalculations and catastrophes – may say something else.
[For information about Hillary Clinton’s earlier career, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Clinton’s Experience: Fact and Fantasy.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Thanks for one of the most insightful overviews I have read in some time.
When one puts all the pieces together, It becomes a mosaic of a fatally flawed, PNAC neocon. She must hate to have to pretend to shift more to the center because of Bernie’s popularity. The fact that we little people are revolted at business as usual must stick in her craw like a sharp fish bone.
“Because of Hillary Clinton’s health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.” Actually, the Democratic Party still has not provided near-universal coverage. The ACA has cut the percentage of uninsured by only one-third. The percentage who are under-insured has increased. Meanwhile, single payer has been praised by Obama, Bill Clinton, Pelosi, and Reid but when action was important they all failed the American people. That is the nature of the Democratic Party as it now exists. Of, by, and for the corporations.
There has been 24/7/365 HIllary bashing going on almost everywhere you look now for 2 decades. No surprise to see this site join in too– especially as its bias is clearly Libertarian. Libertarian means anti-interventionist and anti-neocon, but in every other way typically Republican. Which means that if Hillary or Obama would cure cancer, bring about permanent world peace, and end poverty without any ill effects in the process, then Libertarians, like all Republicans, would feel obligated to find something wrong with that.
“Hillary Bashing” is going on because she DESERVES it!!!!
I am a 66 year old female who has been a Democrat for most of my adult life. I even ran for Congress as a Democrat against Jane Harman in 1992.
I would NEVER vote for Hillary Clinton based on her totally ROTTEN record!
If Bernie Sanders does not win the Democrat nomination I will write him in in November (along with the rest of his supporters).
no need to read what is nothing but another, following thousands before, hatchet job. you’re not getting another scalia, get over it.
SOME THOUGHTS DURING THIS CAMPAIGN SEASON
– Peace can never be brought about by violent means.
– Justice consists in doing what is fair and right and not necessarily always in accordance with law; proportionality is a key element of just punishment.
– Fanatics, whether religious or ideological, care nothing about truth, only about what they believe is The Truth. That is why they are impervious to any rendition of facts, the evidence of the senses, or logic.
– It is not rational to seek the answers to current problems in so-called ‘Holy Scriptures’ (whether Torah, Bible or Quran) written hundreds upon hundreds of years ago.
– Heroes are persons who perform actions beyond the call of duty. Just putting on a military uniform or those of a police officer or firefighter does not make one a hero. Nor does doing what a dangerous job entails make one, ipso facto, a hero.
– The debasement of our language goes hand in hand with the corporate media’s abandonment of investigative journalism.
– The corporate media’s operating principle in regard to government nowadays is: See no evil – Hear no evil – Speak no evil (unless it improves ratings, or bemuses, or misleads).
– If American exceptionalism ever existed, then the fabric of our Constitution and adherence to its principles and goals and the rule of law were the crux of any such exceptionalism. Our governments over the past 60 years have done their utmost to destroy that type of American exceptionalism.
– It is universally recognized that the United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war that put the nation, and the world, in further danger.
– There were almost 3,000 victims slaughtered by the terrorist attacks on the WTC, the Pentagon, and on the thwarted attack plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The United States-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted, by conservative estimate, in the deaths of more than 120,000 victims. But, of course, our forces are fighting for peace, justice, democracy and freedom. All those other dead are unfortunate but beside the point. [What hubris!]
– Torture is always a crime, despite what former military service dodger and former VP Dick Cheney may say or write in his self-serving books and interviews.
– After George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan will one day be seen to have been the second worst president this nation has ever had, replacing Richard Nixon. Mr. Obama is working diligently on being number four, nudging out Bill Clinton, who in turn eclipsed George H. W. Bush, followed by LBJ. Almost all of our present economic and foreign policy imbroglios can be found to have originated or been exacerbated as a result of one or another of these so-called leaders’ policies or lack of forthrightness.
– The United States is an imperial power, wrapped in the delusions of de facto abandonment of its ideals, and mocked by the contravention of its own principles, while mouthing what are now mere shibboleths: democracy, freedom, and justice.
– The calamitous problems of our democracy can be laid at the feet of both the Democrats and the Republicans – the two wings of the Corporate Party.
– To rational people, being opposed to particular policies of the Israeli government does not make one anti-Semitic, just as being opposed to particular policies of the U. S. government does not make one anti-American.
– Perhaps one day our government will declare its independence from the State of Israel.
– If Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Tom Paine were alive today, they’d most likely be organizing the people against the Powers That Be. I think even John Adams and Hamilton would join the effort.
Hillary is like Pigpen from Peanuts. She has left disasters wherever she has trod.
Donald Rumsfeld wanted troops out of Iraq in 2006? Even though he supported the war in Iraq and according to the book “Three Cups of Tea”, wanted to bomb targets in Iraq rather than Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks because it was easier? And President Bush fired him when he ACTUALLY DID THE RIGHT THING FOR A CHANGE – wanting troops out of Iraq (and out of the mess he helped create, along with Bush and Cheney?
Tulsi Gabbard
Thank you for the recap. Helps one maintain perspective. These are the type of articles I send to all of the women in my life who want a woman president and feel almost guilty not voting for H. I ask if they want a warmonger and liar for president and suggest they compare H. with Elizabeth Warren, who while not perfect, is a much better symbol to have represent the Woman for President movement. Its time for rebuilding peace in the world and moving on from Neocon policies.
May I suggest, Michael, that rather than comparing Ms Clinton to Ms Warren, who seems to be an entirely different sort of person, she should be compared to the late Ms Thatcher, whom she resembles, at least policy-wise, far more closely. Of course, the comparison is not entirely fair to Ms Thatcher ; while the latter did indeed benefit from her husband Dennis’ money, she did manage to make her own political career….
Henri
Two matters:
Hillary’s woman in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, was key in implementing the coup that destabilized Ukraine.
I read a Hillary email stating the French goals in Libya were seizing Gaddafi’s gold and destroying his Pan-African bank as well as controlling Libya’s oil, not humanitarian intervention.
Such a litany of benighted ‘experience’ surely disqualifies.
Coming soon. ” The Global Village ” . A wonderful place where the citizens make just enough money to pay their socialist tax and qualify for a bank loan….Hillary Clinton is well qualified to carry out this very long standing agenda….There is no turning back. Their agenda WILL be realized……Resistance will be met with swift lethal action world wide…….
The details in this article that should be relevant to any American who, if based on old time party affiliations, may want to exhibit a high level of loyalty to such a personage as Clinton for the role of President of the United States. These are well documented in this analytical article by Robert Parry.
Next to the proven failures and inhumane actions because of the false exceptionalism of the likes of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, well supported by the people’s apathy, this trio’s criminal indictment is the only thing capable of cleansing America of its now tarnished and disgraced history. But in America, they are still heroes. Is it any wonder therefore that such a devious schemer as Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner? Anything goes today. No one is shocked any more.
How does one ever forget the outburst of wild enthusiasm and joy by this same Clinton on the Bush announcement of a criminal one-sided turkey-shoot war against Iraq? Then from the mouth of Hilary Clinton, the now familiar “we came, we saw, he died”. Libya. Just look at it now after once being an advanced society in Africa. Just a taste of things to come. If you are of no value to the mighty USA and don’t toe the line, their line, you can be reduced to rubble. Just look at history.
So as one despairs over the choices you have, come November, remember how you, the voters, have allowed this all to happen. You have allowed the country to accept the outrageous offer of US 150 million dollars pledged by a Republican casino owner, Sheldon Adelson for the candidate of his choice. It’s legal, it’s happening daily and no one views such behaviour as corrupt. USA 2016.
But this woman has a level of arrogance like no other aspiring candidate before her in US history. It is safe to say that this is based on the Israeli disease, known to all observers of world events. Owned as she is totally by Israel and manipulated by Netanyahu’s dual-passported so-called American disciples, who, through a carefully contrived plan over half a century, now have total control of the world’s #1 military power. Media control, financial bankster fraud, corrupt legislators and the control of electoral funding by locally bred but foreign-controlled US citizens, will make this task very easy from here on in. Add to those qualities the ability to co-opt people like Christian lobbies to tow the Zionist line, some like Hagee, Robertson, Falwell and Lindsey in many ways even more committed to Zionism than their Israeli masters. A well managed campaign that has paid dividends, many times over.
Such people have served the cause well as has Wall Street, public servants by the score and the weak governments in the West who have succumbed to the US acceptance of dominance by Israel. What do you think is the clear perception by France, Germany, Canada and the UK as examples when literally multi-billions of US taxpayer dollars are passed over freely to the latter-day Third Reich called Israel, year after year and which is known to find its way back into the USA to be used for corrupt purposes? This practice is endorsed by America. Must be OK. Right in the middle of all that generosity, are the approvers, perhaps as high as 65% of the elected representatives in the USA, manipulated by Israel’s AIPAC, now regarded internationally as the default government of the once-respected USA.
But this makes little difference any more. The damage has been done. This is now normal, accepted practice, reports colored to suit by the Zionist-owned media.
The hard work has been done, with the character of Americans well analysed, totally understood and used to Israel’s advantage. To consolidate their philosophies, for the next generation their drive into academia has been fruitful through generous University grants and the like. Next generation, here we come. No estimate appears to have been even conducted into this sphere of influence but it was identified as one of their objectives decades ago. This practice applies to every Western country today.
Clinton would have been privy to all these manipulations over time and all supported by her and her sycophantic anti-American followers, well funded, extremely well organised and managed by Israel, every step of the way.
She is their mouthpiece, has been for twenty years. So if all the dedicated Democrats can tolerate what that would mean, then all she needs is your support come November, a clear vote for World War III.
Check with Israel for the final details of that war and in November, follow the AIPAC how-to-vote cards. The elected US government has been following AIPAC’s directions for years.
Seems inconceivable that there is a continuous cover-up of Hillary’s stupidity in 1999 in urging (hubby) President Bill Clinton to bomb Serbia, an ally in two world wars. What gives with that, as we hear nothing on that front? Sure seems it’s part of the ongoing deception about Hillary, a warmonger if ever there was one.
The qualifications for president of the United States are detailed in Section 1, Article II of the US Constitution :
«No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.»
From what I understand, all the remaining candidates to become the presidential nominee of one or another of the two dominant US political parties (with the possible exception of Rafael Edward Cruz) fulfill the above criteria and thus are legally qualified for that office. The problem, as Mr Parry demonstrates above, with Ms Clinton is not that she doesn’t fulfill the constitutional requirements for the office, but rather than in her public life, she has demonstrated singularly poor judgement, which has led to harm being done to large numbers of people, both in and without the United States. Nothing in her campaign rhetoric indicates that she would exercise any better judgement, were she to come to the Oval Office as anything but a spectator on 20 January 2017….
In other words, while Ms Clinton is certainly «qualified» to be US president, she is hardly fit to do so. We can only hope that those choosing the Democratic Party’s nominee for that office realise – and act on – this fact….
Henri
May be the people promoting her candidacy LOVE her boldness in carrying out policies which ends in death and chaos! May be these are the objectives that her funders want to accomplish worldwide, causing death and chaos!
The question is: what do American voters being accosted get out of the domestic and international chaos?
Two matters:
Hillary’s woman in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, was key in implementing the coup that destabilized Ukraine.
I read a Hillary email stating the French goals in Libya were seizing Gaddafi’s gold and destroying his Pan-African bank as well as controlling Libya’s oil, not humanitarian intervention.
Such a litany of benighted ‘experience’ surely disqualifies her from holding any government position.
Without doubt Generalisssima Clinton is eminently qualified to be what has become the “standard” US president: a mendacious, money-serving, murderous, war-criminal, hypocrite-in-chief.
America, and the rest of the world, does not need, and can ill-afford, another one of those.
Being an avid Blues fan I think of Hillary often. Many of the songs have lines in them professing a desire for a big-legged woman. Well she sure fills that need, Those pant suits with the long jackets just aren’t enough to hide those drumsticks.
She makes me think of bubblegum music,the baseline of modern creativity.
The preset global situation requires cool nerves and fast thinking. Nothing in Hillary background reveal the right experience. Hillary showed she cannot think on her feet under stress. This is no time to PROVE we treat women equally. Any woman worth her salt would know that and be the first to say:
“we want to defeat the danger not prove a point. So find someone better”
I trust Hillary as far as I can throw her.
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation
The only people qualified to be president are the ones who have walked the walk, that Americans simply refuse to vote for: Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and more. The media never gave these guys the light of day even though they have been right a million times and have not made the same “mistakes” that all the so called candidates today have made.
A lot of people on here are going to say, but wait, Bernie is different! He is as different as Obama was in 2008. Let’s review what Ron Paul had to say about Bernie Sanders, someone Paul has worked with when asked if he would vote for him:
“No, because he’s an authoritarian. He’s just a variant of Trump. Even the things I worked with on Bernie, some of the foreign policy, he’s a part of the military industrial complex. He was a big voter for militarism. He’s an authoritarian of a different color, but Trump’s a super authoritarian. Trump wants to be the boss….My biggest beef is that from a libertarian viewpoint there’s no meaningful difference between Hillary and Trump. I mean, they both support the military industrial complex, the Federal Reserve, deficits, entitlements, invasions of privacy. It is super-nationalistic populism versus socialism. That is so remote from what we need to be doing. We need to be moving ourselves away from tyranny towards liberty.”
What “candidates” are talking about the following:
Prosecuting American War Criminals? None.
Freeing Manning, Assange, and Snowden? None.
Tackling corruption in the Federal Reserve Bank and System? None,
Ending Neocon wars, closing US bases, and apologizing to those countries that were invaded? None.
They know the people are selfish and that’s why they promise only a better economy (Trump) or handouts (Sanders).
Ralph Nader
If there is a hell I expect Nader to be there for his great assistance in putting GWB in the White House. The man is an arrogant ass who is totally full of himself.
Ron Paul is a racist ‘libertarian’, and I know (and care) nothing about Kucinich.
Democratic Party Myth That Nader Gave Us Iraq War Haunts 2016 Election by Kevin Gosztola – https://shadowproof.com/2016/04/05/democratic-party-myth-nader-gave-us-iraq-war-haunts-2016-election/
Disclaimer: I intended voting for Gore because he was “anybody but Bush” but the Gore-Lieberman campaign was so phony and contemptible I said to hell with both of them. As for any claims that Gore might have been such a good president, consider Madeleine Albright’s claim that “We thought it (sacrifice of half a million Iraqi children because of sanctions) was worth it.” Gore was in the White House when the sanctions were imposed on Iraq, so it is a good bet “we” included Gore. Then there was the time when Gore was ready by pandering to the Cuban-Americans in Florida to sell little Elian Gonzalez down the Miami River instead of returning him to his father – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli%C3%A1n_Gonz%C3%A1lez_custody_battle.
With Senator Lieberman (D-Israel and Connecticut) in the vice-president’s office the possibility of Gore supporting a war on Iraq could not by any means be ruled out.
Senator Lieberman, sitting in the US Vice President Office with Al Gore as the POTUS, would have made Dick Cheney’s co-Presidency with W. a CHILD PLAY! What most people seem to forget that the war mongers( elites running the shadow US government) are bipartisan.
Since she left the White House, Hillary has taken so much cash from this group that she cannot say NO to their agenda! They have invested too much in her!
Gore was in the White House when the sanctions were imposed on Iraq, so it is a good bet “we” included Gore.
I don’t recall Gore as having any particular influence on the Clintons. Maybe he did, but it’s not in my memory.
With Senator Lieberman (D-Israel and Connecticut) in the vice-president’s office the possibility of Gore supporting a war on Iraq could not by any means be ruled out.
I really don’t know Gore’s real beliefs with regard to Iraq, and it’s pointless for me to try to learn them now. But I agree that Iraq would probably have been attacked anyhow. With Lieberman one heartbeat from the Oval Office, a reluctant Gore would surely have had some sort of unfortunate and premature death. Lincoln made a horrible choice with Johnson, and the same is true of the Gore/Lieberman pairing.
I knew back in 2000 that Bush was a twit and a phony, but it took the overt theft of the White House to get me really agitated. By contrast, had Gore been elected we might have had a fighting chance of surviving Global Warming. After seeing how Obama turned his campaign promises into 100% lies, I’m no longer willing to make any absolute claims regarding Gore. That we might have had a chance – that isn’t anything to sneeze at. The Supreme Court Coup was surely a turning point in the history of the US, and probably of the entire planet Earth.
1) Ralph Nader had/has as much right to run as Gore or Bush or 2x Clinton.
2) There would have been no Bush/Cheney if Gore had been able to win the electoral votes of his own state.
3) Bill Clinton’s all-around idiocy as regards the Ms Lewinsky debacle did way more to elect Bush/Cheney as it mobilized GOP voter turn-out to make the contest close enough to be stolen by (standard*) republican election fraud.
4) You admit to knowing nothing about Kucinich. Do you know how WJ Clinton managed to get elected in 1992?
5) The 2000 election WAS stolen with the aid of the SCOTUS Inc., signaling the end of the American republic.
The vast majority of US presidential candidates, since WWII, from both major parties, are/were not worthy to gather up Nader’s political toe nail clippings.
(I’ll concede your a) view of Paul and 2) hindsight is no less perfect than that of anyone else.)
*see mid-eighties court order, still in effect, against the RNC’s “caging” technique which has been successfully transferred to the state level.
Paul racist?About the same as all of us,black white or brown.
Purists in an impure world.sheesh,Jesus just announced for POTUS.
We are in the same pickle as Lot.
There were other factors that caused Bush to become president instead of Gore: (1) Jeb Bush’s accomplices in Florida whose shenanigans cut back on Gore’s vote; (2) the Republican wing of the supreme (?) court that gave the presidency to Bush; (3) unlike the Ukrainians who took to the streets to protest corruption in their government, Gore, the leaders of the un-Democratic Party, and the party’s rank and file suffered from something like Stockholm Syndrome and meekly accepted this additional blow to our fragile democracy.
That so many people voted for Nader instead of Gore was not the problem in 2000. The problem was that so many people voted for the standard bearer of the un-Democratic Party instead of Nader.
9/11. None.
Clinton, Hillary: Rising political star, and a servant of oligarchs and despots. Similar to the festooned generals strutting the halls of power, untouchable and oozing hubris concurrent with a ranking member of the empire. Why we bother to dissect the simple fact that our ruling class is made of nothing other than facilitating servants or is part of a globalist oligarchy determined, as a succubus or incubus, to consume all in order to possess all, is a rhetorical question.
Yet here we find an unqualified egomaniac, myopic, shortsighted, and flippant regarding human life, being forwarded to the populace in a propagandist version of Stalin’s Organs as our most stable and able choice for President. As this article makes clear.
If an ability to condemn people to death is required of a US president, then Hillary Clinton has shown she has the right stuff beginning with supporting spouse Bill in the judicial murder of Rickey Ray Rector in 1992 then continuing with the wars in the Balkans, pummeling of Iraq and the sanctions that cost an estimated half million Iraqi children their lives. Madeleine Albright said of that crime against humanity, “We thought it was worth it.” “We” would have included both Clintons and all their top team players in the White House. Then there was support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and acquiescence in the various Israeli massacres in Gaza. As secretary of state she was complicit in the regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria, all three of which are now homicidal basket cases.
What does that say about the United States when this person is a candidate to be the next president and she is supported by around half of all registered Democrats, almost all, if not all, of the Democratic Party leadership, many leaders of major labor unions, almost all, if not all, of the Congressional Black Caucus and, not surprisingly, Wall Street and the Military-Industrial complex?
One of the few consolations for observers of the American empire comes from the younger generation supporting Bernie Sanders who suggest they have higher moral standards than the morally degraded generations that preceded them.
I think this article is a stretch, a bit of oversimplification. Hillary Clinton was unable to enact a comprehensive health care law, but went on to work with Senator Ted Kennedy and others to help enact SHIP, the health care coverage for low income children, in 1997. While the health care initiative might have contributed to congressional losses in 1994, Democrats had also enacted a wide ranging tax increase bill in 1993, with not one Republican vote. This was used against them as well.
The vote for Iraq was obviously a big mistake, which was also made by Senators Tom Harkin, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle and Harry Reid. In fact, the vote of 77 to 23 means that about half of the Senate Democrats supported the measure. The vote came a year after 9.11, and tensions were still running high.
The jury is probably still out on Clinton’s term at State, and it will take awhile for historians to sort out. The Libyan intervention appears to have been a mistake, Obama goes into some of the details in his recent Atlantic interview. In a sense, the Clinton experience with the Bosnian conflict in the mid 1990’s may have given them a false sense of bloodless wars. I see that same instinct with UN Ambassador Samantha Power, a type of moral imperialism based on a desire to save weak populations from their rulers.
I hope that if Clinton wins the nomination she picks a strong candidate for Vice President, like Elizabeth Warren, who will speak up and challenge her. I think that Joe Biden has done some of that in the Obama administration, taking on the more hawkish forces.
I understand your sentiment regarding the possible role of the Vice President, however this isn’t the case in the present America the Exceptional and Indispensable, Empire of Democracy and Freedom of the Earth and Solar System. The only time recently in which the VP has acted in accordance with philosophical and political ideology rather than the policy of the White House, understood to be that of the President, was Cheney under Bush. Bush who didn’t even understand that he was being contradicted or that policy itself was coming from the office of the VP.
Was the American intervention in the Bosnian conflict bloodless? Is there a source for me to read?
Here’s a Wikipedia article on the NATO action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Deliberate_Force
Bloodless in terms of NATO casualties, not bloodless for those on the ground.
I hear that it was a bridgeless conflict.
The vote for Iraq was obviously a big mistake, which was also made by Senators Tom Harkin, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle and Harry Reid. In fact, the vote of 77 to 23 means that about half of the Senate Democrats supported the measure. The vote came a year after 9.11, and tensions were still running high.
There were many people paying attention who realized they were being lied to by the pro-war cabal so a “mistake” is no excuse. Pro-Israel constituents and campaign donors are more likely reasons for these pro-war votes. There was a story going around that Bob Schrum, a Democratic Party operative, advised John Kerry he would have to vote for the Iraq war if he wanted to run from president. If true, that will demonstrate how morally degraded the un-Democratic Party was (and still is).
I hope that if Clinton wins the nomination she picks a strong candidate for Vice President, like Elizabeth Warren, who will speak up and challenge her. I think that Joe Biden has done some of that in the Obama administration, taking on the more hawkish forces.
Except for toeing the Israel Lobby line, Elizabeth Warren is probably one of the last people Clinton would want anywhere near the Oval Office if, heaven forbid, she continues sullying of that office. As for Joe Biden, let’s just say we have different opinions of that person.
What’s with the “enact” baloney? The woman’s had only to write a respectable bill, and of that she was incapable.
OK, that makes it clear your job here is to excuse anything the dreadful woman did.
That remark alone demonstrates the woman is unfit to be elected to anything beyond County Clerk of some backwoods area of Arkansas.
Wishful thinking Jim Hannan. Things are much worse than Robert Parry has explicitly said and he is fully aware of that. Simply put the United States will never admit real motifs and real atrocities committed since 1917 and up to date and she should not. Russia is a very good example of how extra sincerity of the government can inflict more damage that the bloodiest war. Being totally brainwashed by unscrupulous education system, which corrupts its clients from cradle to death bed, people like you should really work very hard raise their level of understanding how real world works before presenting their “opinion”.
Clinton will never pick a strong VP and certainly not Elizabeth Warren. She has thrown in her lot with the plutocrats and that is who she will serve..
Clinton, like Obama, are inept, because they are stuffed shirts. The scariest thing about a Hillary Clinton presidency is the degree to which she is being propped up by the Counsel on Foreign Relations. The CFR web site has a ‘Clinton Page’ which offers up alleged Clinton quotes, but the vocab and verbiage is way over her head, exceeding the style and substance of anything she’s ever uttered. It might be wondered who is writing for her and why, but the answer is obvious; A vote for Hillary is a vote for her CFR ventriloquists.
And then, there is Honduras.
her involvement in the coup urgently needs to be brought up. considering how unstable the situation in many countrys south of the us border are, a clinton presidency would threaten the social democracies alarmingly.
james rubin, bill clinton’s former assistant secretary and member of neocon think tank center for american idiocy, yesterday appeared with an opinion piece in the nyt, to shift the blame away from madam secretary and stick her disastrous record onto obama. i wonder if he will respond behind the scenes or watch them spin her warmongering into his failure.
to be clear, obama bears responsibility for letting her run in the first place and also for not restraining her. there’s simply no apology for his biggest blunder. but the clinton circle around the psychos kagannuland are trying to whitewash krazee eyez killary’s four year terror record. don’t let her get away with it, bernie!
Here is an article that looks at one of Hillary Clinton’s legal cases that gives us an inside look at the “real Hillary”:
http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2016/04/hillary-clinton-children-and-law.html
While Ms. Clinton keeps reassuring the American public that she has “evolved”, one has to wonder whether her “evolution” has been bred by political necessity or desperation.