Audacity of Truth
Rahmbo:
"Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil's spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive."
-Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) on Obama's COS, 3/7/10
Velvet Lair- Legends March 18, 2010
- Some things are just not cute March 18, 2010
- The adventures of the lady spider killer continue March 11, 2010
- Intermission February 19, 2010
- People who allow their dogs to poop in other people’s yards February 16, 2010
- Big Government
- Hot Air
- Open thread: House votes coming; Update: Ryan, Pence videos added; Update: 219-212; Update: GOP’s hail mary fails; Update: Roll added
- Last gasp: GOP may try to kill the bill by forcing a vote on Stupak’s language; Update: Pro-life group strips Stupak of award
- Pence to Stupak: You traded 30 years of pro-life law for a promise from the most pro-abortion president in history
- Michelle Malkin
- Video: Baghdad Jim McDermott rails against conservative “indecency”
- Attorneys general launch lawsuit backlash against Demcare
- The gloater-in-chief: “Another stone laid in the foundation of the American dream;” Pelosi jokes: “No money exchanged hands (laughter);” Slaughter: “There is nothing now that we can’t tackle”
- Jake Tapper
- Legal Insurrection
- Lynn Sweet
Bubba bumbles in criticism of Hillary’s competition
As the debate continues over Hillary’s playing the victim card after facing intense scrutiny and cracking under pressure at last week’s Democratic candidates’ debate, her hubby Bubba, desperate to get the Clinton paws on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue again, rallied to her defense yesterday by invoking the “swift boating” argument against her opponents (emphasis added):
“‘We listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff,’ [he] said. ‘And when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he’d done in his life. When that scandalous swift boat ad was run against Senator Kerry. When there was an ad that defeated Max Cleland in Georgia, a man that left half his body in Vietnam.’”
In essence, Bill Clinton is accusing Barack Obama and John Edwards, and anyone else who criticized his wife at the Dem debate of “swift boating” her. For Democrats, that is a serious accusation, considering how they feel about the Swift Boat Vets. In fact, I think it was the far left who invented the term “swiftboating” which they characterize as vicious, unfair, made-up attacks against a political opponent.
Obama responded to Clinton’s comments today:
WASHINGTON – Barack Obama said Tuesday that former President Clinton is making a leap to compare treatment of his wife in the presidential race to the “swift boat” criticism of John Kerry in 2004.
The former president had encouraged an audience in Nevada Monday not to let “trivial matters” take away the election from the Democrats as they have in the past. He cited the television ads during the 2004 presidential campaign that questioned Kerry’s patriotism and campaign commercials in 2002 suggesting that Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga. was soft on terrorism.
Both Kerry and Cleland won medals for their service in Vietnam, during which Kerry commanded a Navy “swift boat” and Cleland lost three limbs. Both were defeated after the ads aired.
Sidenote: Note the subtle bit of bias in that last sentence. Both were defeated “after” the ads aired. Well, anyone who has lost an election has done so after negative ads/attacks have been run against them. The article makes it sound like it was because of those ads/attacks specifically that Cleland and Kerry lost. But I digress.
Continuing with Obama’s response:
“I was pretty stunned by that statement,” Obama said with a chuckle when asked about the former president’s comment in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
He said that when debating last week whether illegal immigrants should be given driver’s licenses, Hillary Rodham Clinton “seemed to contradict what she said previously.”
Both Obama and John Edwards have criticized her repeatedly on that score, but Obama said in the interview: “How you would then draw an analogy to distorting somebody’s military record is a reach.”
Sen. Chris Dodd, another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called the Clintons’ response to the debate “outrageous.”
“To have the former president come out and suggest this is a form of swiftboating … is way over the top in my view,” Dodd said in a telephone interview.
“If elected to the presidency, there will be a lot of tough questions and if you can’t handle it in a debate without accusing everybody who has an issue with you of piling on or a sexist attack, somehow, first of all that’s unwise and, secondly, it’s false,” Dodd said.
While it’s somewhat amusing to see all this Dem infighting going on, I have to admit I’m surprised that 1) Hillary’s victim card playing backfired and 2) the Clintons are using tactics on members of their own party that I figured they’d wait to use after the primaries (assuming she gets the nomination) against the Republican nominee. Them using these tactics so soon gives the eventual Republican pick a chance to study the reactions the comments receive from other Democrats, comments that that Republican can, in turn, use on Hillary when the campaign season kicks into high gear next year.
Yuval Levin at NRO’s The Corner is on a similar wavelength:
But since then [the debate] she, her husband, and her campaign team have been in a kind of panicked stupor about it which has not abated much in a week and has continued (needlessly) to draw the worst kind of attention to the candidate and provide fodder for her opposition. Potential Republican candidates are certainly taking notes on this. When (or rather, if) she faces a Republican in the fall, she’ll get pushed around a lot more frequently and forcefully than this (I hope), and she and her team seem terribly ill-equipped for it at the moment.
The Clintons, if nothing else, are two of the savviest political animals out there, and to see them throwing some of their cards out on the table this early in the game to me suggests that there’s some worry within the campaign that Clinton’s high poll numbers betray what may turn out to be the real story, which is that Hillary’s popularity perhaps has a lot more to do with primarily name recognition more so than substance, and that with a couple of months to go til Iowa, the other candidates still have a chance to zero in on Hillary’s weaknesses and turn her into the Howard Dean of the 2008 campaign season, which has team Hillary running scared.
By the way, her supposedly clarified stance on Gov. Spitzer’s order to legalize illegals in NY with driver’s licenses? Not so clear. Again. And if polls are any indication, Hillary’s on the wrong side of this issue by simply not coming right out and saying she’s against Spitzer’s plan.
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The blogosphere reax to this story are rolling in at Memeorandum.
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Perhaps he’s not suggesting so much that only HALF of her body should be left in Vietnam.
Just that she’s not right maybe……..
James Pinkerton has an article in Newsday comparing her illegal immigration stumble with Dukakis in 1988 being crippled by the Willie Horton controversy.
Thank GOD for those Swift Boat Vets!
And I predict that what they did to Kerry was as nothing compared to what’ll come out about Hillary if/when she gets her Party’s nomination…
What does “swiftboat” mean when used as a verb? To tell an inconvenient truth, and expose a lie.
Lovin’ every minute of it
Would you believe Kerry said he’d be ready and destroy the Swift Boat vets the next time he runs. I wonder what Kerry is smoking, or did he pay for a hit squad to liquidate all the Swifties?
Sister, I gotta dosagree. B.J. is the savvy politician. Mrs. Clinton is only a corrupt lawyer.
Bill’s Wagging His Finger Again
In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous performance in the last Democratic debate, her “gallant” husband, Bill, has joined in the ludicrous attempt at spin to limit the damage to Hillary’s credibility. In spite of the campaign’s insistence that Hillary is not playing the female victim of the “Boys’ Club” of presidential contenders, we still see the anger at Tim Russert for having the temerity to ask a pointed question with a pointed follow-up. Believe it or not, the Clinton camp thinks that Hillary has been victimized by the news media in their questioning. (Mainstream News Media no less). For once, someone had the courage to ask her a hard question and insist on an answer. Now, Bill has jumped into the fray.
This time, Bill has once again wagged that famous finger of his at the press and warned them not to “Swift-Boat” his wife. I have a couple of thoughts about Mr Clinton’s words. First of all, the last time we saw Clinton wag his finger, I believe he was telling the press and America that “he did not have sexual relations with that woman” (Ms Lewinsky). That, it turned out, was one of the greatest and most convincing lies a president ever told the American people. Most of us have thus concluded that whenever Mr Clinton wags his finger (or bites his lower lip), falsehoods are on the way.
In addition, Clinton’s protests belie the claim that Hillary is strong enough to run on her own, independent of Bill. The truth is that she has ridden his coattails ever since he entered public life. Does anyone really believe that Hillary would be a presidential candidate or even a US Senator had she not been married to Bill? Of course, we are expected to believe that her experience as First Lady “uniquely qualifies” her to be President. Yet, the Clintons have succeeded in keeping any and all documents from the Clinton Administration that pertain to Hillary from public view.
But I degress. As for his reference to “Swiftboating”, Mr Clinton was referring to the campaign by Viet Nam Swiftboat veterans in the 2004 election that questioned John Kerry’s Viet Nam War experience. Now, I have written before, and will repeat that I, as a Viet Nam Era veteran who served in Germany, would never criticize or question Kerry’s military credentials. As for the Swiftboat veterans, in my view, they did have the standing and the right to speak out. That leads me to my point: How dare Bill Clinton make any negative references to those Swiftboat veterans-people who served in Viet Nam while Clinton was hiding from the draft through trickery, lies and deceit? Bill Clinton is a bonafide, certified draft dodger, and anything relating to Viet Nam is an area he would be best advised to stay away from.
But with his cojones, you can bet Bill will keep digging himself deeper. The question is whether the Mainstream News Media will follow Russert’s lead and keep asking Hillary the questions they should have been asking for years, which they must know she cannot handle well. I have a few suggestions.
One- Mrs Clinton, do you and/or your husband have any overseas bank accounts in, say, Switzerland for example-or any other country?
Two- In the light of the release of Kathleen Willey’s book, do you believe that charges made by her, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaderick and Jennifer Flowers were false?
Three- Could you please tell us what, if any actions, you took to have those women investigated and discredited.
Now, I have no idea how Mrs Clinton would answer those questions- whether she would lie, deny, spin or what. But wouldn’t it be worthwhile to get her on record in a public forum?
It must have been a great shock to the Clinton camp when Russert asked her about illegal licenses for illegal aliens. Now I can understand why the Democrats refused to debate in front of Fox News. We should watch Hillary closely in her answers, and we should watch the Mainstream News Media closely in their questions.
gary fouse
fousesquawk