Opinion of Hillary Clinton

[Beet]

One of the biggest FF in modern American politics.

[Beet]

A Machiavellian

Understands that compromises must be made to be effective in the American political system.

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Thinks carefully, plans ahead, works hard, doesn't just hope things will turn out alright.

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Has self-respect, stands up for herself, knows how to enjoy things properly.

[Beet]

I think the point is, when a male politician is "Machiavellian", it's less likely to be called out as Machiavellian because there's more cognitive dissonance when a woman does it. Politics is Machiavellian. Some people are just better at hiding it than others. Since Clinton's already perceived that way, I'd say that actually makes her less of a threat from the standpoint of political machinations.

[Beet]

She voted the wrong way on the most infamous vote of the 21st century so far when the facts were there to justify voting the correct way, so definitely count me as not ready for Hillary.

I assume you were also not ready for Kerry and not ready for Biden 08 and not ready for Biden 12?

[Beet]

I still am perplexed at how people STILL use Iraq against her.

Iraq was a major policy decision. The vote on that war resolution demonstrates how a President Hillary Clinton will respond to the intelligence she is shown by her generals and military advisers. In 2003, she chose to go with panic over WMDs and a destructive war. That is still fair game.

However, to be fair to the former Secretary of State she has said she regrets the vote and this reflects a lot better on what her foreign policy may be as president.

No offense, but how old were you in 2002-2003? It's utter revisionist poppycock that president Bush just listened to the intelligence he was getting from the government and made an objective decision that Saddam had WMD. He decided to go to war first and then pressured the intelligence community to come up with "information" to support his political decision. However, that did not become fully clear until much later. The Downing Street memo was incendiary, but was not leaked until April 2005. Similarly, ambassador Joseph Smith's article saying Iraq had not bought yellowcake uranium from Niger did not appear until July 2003.

Hillary's sin, along with others who supported the war in both parties, was essentially to trust that the POTUS who had stood on the rubble of the WTC barely 12 months earlier was not manipulating intelligence to monger the country into a war. Congress has to be able to trust that the president is telling the truth when it comes to matters of national security. If they cannot trust him, who oversees the CIA, DoD, and State, who can they trust? No one. Then the system is fundamentally broken. Call me old fashioned, but I still think the president had a sacred duty to the Constitution to he truthful about such matters, where hundreds of thousands of troops are going into harms way. I still think that those who try to shift the blame to Hillary or other Senators here with the benefit of hindsight are implicitly letting Bush off the hook and assuming that a dishonest war presidency should be expected. I think that's a dangerous precedent.

There is a difference between Senator Clinton and those other Senators, Kerry, Biden, and Edwards, though. The difference was that more than 2,000 of her constituents had been killed in the most dramatic terror attack in world history just a year earlier. These were the people she was sworn to represent and whose interests to look after. Now a war president was claiming, with the backing of the whole edifice of the US government, that a new terror threat was being presented. Just imagine for a moment had she been wrong the other way- if she had opposed the war, (implausibly) stopped the war, and then the threat was realized and more if her constituents were killed in another terror attack. Can you even imagine the epic dereliction of duty she would have been accused of? These are serious matters which is why everyone must play their role. Intelligence was the role of the executive branch and the fault lies solely with the president who failed to carry out that role.

[Beet]

It astounds me that anyone could defend Clinton and speak of the President's "sacred duty to be truthful" in the same breath without being overwhelmed by irony.

You don't think the leader of the country has a sacred duty to be truthful when it comes to war? This is not on the same level as not being truthful about screwing interns.

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So you deny that there was a concerted, administration-led effort to mislead the public (including Congress) on the threat posed by Iraq, and this biased the information coming out of the U.S. government?

It's really amazing how True Leftists will shift over to the Right Wing position on a dime when it's convenient to attack Clinton.

[Beet]

It's really amazing how True Leftists will shift over to the Right Wing position on a dime when it's convenient to attack Clinton.

What are you even talking about? Considering a candidate's record on the Iraq War to be a critical issue and saying that Bush shouldn't have been trusted is the "right-wing" position?

You're shifting blame for the Iraq war from Bush and Cheney to the "incompetence of the intelligence community" and disparaging Clinton for suggesting that there was a "right wing conspiracy" to make the war happen. As if the Iraq war was an accident that we just bumbled into due to honest bureaucratic mistakes? Come on.

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Yes, Graham was right (he could have carried Florida as well) - too bad we never nominated him in 2004.

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Warren and Sanders are from the same generation and Schweitzer isn't far behind. The problem isn't that older candidates are there, it's that the younger candidates aren't there - they're getting wiped out at the state level. In any case, younger is not necessarily better. Older candidates have had more life experiences and have earned wisdom from them - Hillary certainly has.

[Beet]

The number of problems with the True Leftists' judgement of Clinton on this issue are legion:

1. Selective prosecution. As mentioned numerous times, there wasn't nearly as much outrage over Kerry, Edwards or Biden as there has been over Clinton, the one who, representing New York, had the most to fear from terrorism. There was also virtually no support for Bob Graham, even though he was the only one who was in the Senate and actually voted against Authorization as jfern said, ran in 2004 and would have been probably the strongest candidate of the entire field. That's somewhat understandable since Dean took up the antiwar banner, but the ease with which Graham was dropped and forgotten about was amazing. Hillary's constantly held to a bajillion times higher standard than every other Democratic politician no matter what she does.

2. The vote for Authorization wasn't a vote for war. This issue gets constantly skipped, but the fact is that debate over the war in Iraq continued all the way up until March 2003. I remember attending an anti-war protest that month. Even days before we opened fire, Bush supposedly was giving Saddam one last chance to leave the country. Clinton's position, as well as many of those who were for Authorization, was always that weapons inspectors should have been allowed to finish their job. If they had been, we now know they would never have found WMD. So Clinton was against the war, technically, and the whole premise of this isn't even true.

3. The issue I mentioned above with the fact that you have to be able to trust the President and CoC when it comes to war. This isn't even a political issue, it's basic human relations. Think of a platoon of 12 men deep inside enemy territory. How well would that platoon operate if the members didn't trust each other - particularly their leader? How could they fight the enemy if they're fighting amongst themselves? If you were an infantryman in that platoon, would you feel comfortable knowing that your platoon leader would send you into what could be an ambush because he maybe didn't like one of the other members? I know we all expect our politicians to lie about everything, but war should be an exception, and it would never become a cynical matter of course than the President will lie about war. This is why Bush's pressure on the intelligence community, what were essentially lies, was worse than Bill Clinton lying about his sex life.

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Well that's my whole point... the Administration deliberately tried to mislead everyone about the war and put out a ton of claims that we now know weren't true but which weren't known at the time. The blame should fall entirely on them. Members of Congress shouldn't have to filter through biased information put out by the Administration on matters of war and terrorism.

[Beet]

We may seem a little sensitive, but remember, in 2008 Hillary was accused of being overconfident and acting entitled to the nomination. It doesn't matter how likely she seems likely to win, as a supporter, I am going to assume that she/we need to earn support of as many people as possible, and going to engage in discussion about her record with people whenever possible. The attitude isn't going to be, "I don't care what you think, she's winning," the attitude is going to be "here's why I support her/will defend her, and you may not agree but I'm putting this out there." Feel free to engage or not.

[Beet]

I do not object to Hillary's vote for the Iraq War Resolution - the Syrian Civil War calls into question the story that the Iraq War's strongest critics have been telling for the past decade, and I've begun to reassess my own views as a result

Wait, really? How do you figure? Most people I know seem to think that the Syrian Civil War vindicates that you need a Saddam-like strongman in charge.

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Well according to her, Gates was off the mark, although part of her problem with the surge was that it lacked political support at home at the time. Bush had, of course, long since poisoned the well by 2007 and turned the war into a partisan issue. Pretty much every Dem lined up against the surge, and Clinton and Obama actually released their statements against it on the same day. Given the state of Iraq today, the surge isn't looking as successful as it did a couple years ago.