Hillary's Bhutto Flubs, Résumé Inflation

Another example of résumé inflation by hillary clinton. The Résumé Factor: Those 8 Years as First Lady (excerpt)By PATRICK HEALYThe New York Times12.26.07[D]uring those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president's daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.And during one of President Bill Clinton's major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her "eight years with a front-row seat on history."Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency....Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.She did not wrestle directly with many of the other challenges the next president will face, including managing a large-scale deployment — or withdrawal — of troops abroad, an overhaul of the intelligence agencies or the effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology.... Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics...Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. "There are a lot of them," she said....[O]ther administration officials, as well as opponents of Mrs. Clinton, are skeptical that the couple's conversations and her 79 trips add up to unique experience that voters should reward. She was not independently judging intelligence, for the most part, or mediating the data, egos and agendas of a national security team. And, in the end, she did not feel or process the weight of responsibility.Susan Rice, a National Security Council senior aide and State Department official under Mr. Clinton who now advises Mr. Obama, said Mrs. Clinton was not involved in "the heavy lifting of foreign policy." Ms. Rice also took issue with a recent comment by a Clinton campaign official that Mrs. Clinton was "the face of the administration in foreign affairs.""Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement — that's the hard part of foreign policy," Ms. Rice said. "That's not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady."... Asked about her role in Somalia and Haiti, Mr. Christopher said in an interview, "She wasn't at any of the meetings in the Oval Office or cabinet room, and didn't take any formal role that I saw." Mr. Christopher is supporting Mrs. Clinton for president.Nor was Mrs. Clinton a memorable player on Rwanda. Former White House officials say that no one — not the national security team, not the president, not the first lady — was seriously pushing for American military intervention to stop or slow the unfolding genocide there; the administration's focus was on confronting the ethnic bloodshed in the Balkans. Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on Rwanda.... The Middle East situation led to Mrs. Clinton's first big foreign policy-related problem as a candidate. In 1999, she sat silently, but with apparent discomfort, through an event on the West Bank as Suha Arafat, the wife of Mr. Arafat, accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases.Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who at that point seemed likely to be her Republican opponent in the 2000 Senate race, sharply criticized Mrs. Clinton for not confronting Mrs. Arafat over her remarks and for kissing her goodbye afterward; the incident also led some Jewish groups to be critical of the first lady.

Channel: News & Politics
Uploaded: December 28, 2007 at 9:32 am
Author: miat1111

Length: 04:14
Rating: 4.76
Views: 6552

Tags: congenital  dangerous  debate  doubletalk  dumb  hillary  liar  parsing  

Video Comments