Hillary, telephone!

[ProSense]

Obama: Clinton should have read more in 2002

by John McCormick, updated

WESTERVILLE, Ohio – Responding to comments made by Hillary Clinton earlier today in the same town, Barack Obama had his shots ready when he arrived at a high school gymnasium for a Sunday afternoon event.

"Sen. Clinton continues to insist that we provide speeches and she provides solutions," he said. "The press has sort of bought into this, I think, because they, you know, want to keep the contest interesting, and I understand that."

But Obama said he has provided specifics on "every issue under the sun" and that her claims of foreign-policy experience are overblown.

"She has, supposedly, all this vast foreign policy experience," he said. "I have to say, when it came to making the most important foreign policy decision of our generation -- the decision to invade Iraq -- Sen. Clinton got it wrong. She didn't read the nation intelligence estimates…I have enough experience to know that if you have a national intelligence estimate, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says you should read this -- this is why I'm voting against the war -- then you should probably read it."

more

Hillary Dec. 2007:

Following up on what Ambassador Richard Holbrooke told us earlier this week regarding Hillary Clinton's vote to authorize the use of military force against Iraq, we asked Sen. Clinton today if it was correct that Colin Powell had persuaded her that the resolution could be a vote to avoid war rather than a vote for war.

She replied: "No, it wasn't Colin Powell. it was Condi Rice. Condi Rice told me specifically when I was still weighing all of the evidence, and I had been to the White House one last time – I think, if I'm not mistaken, it was Oct. 8 -- and I'd had the whole presentation by the CIA and others and I hadn't asked any questions, I had listened. And I went back to my office, and Condi Rice called me and said, You didn't ask any questions, do you have any questions? I said I only have one: Will you use this authorization to put inspectors back in, so that we can find out whether any of this is true, how much WMD he still has or has reconstituted? She said, Yes, that's what it's intended to do. I think Dick might have gotten confused."

link

Edited to add link to cached text.

KERRY: Well, first of all, Wolf, the question applies to both of them. And the person asking the question really is culpable here of a fear tactic. I might add, you know, most of the time I think people are going to hear that phone ringing, and they're going to rush to answer the phone and not see the ad.

But leaving that aside, it strikes me that the ad is really deception and disingenuous. Hillary Clinton has never received a 3 a.m. in the morning telephone call as a senator or as a first lady. And secondly, when asked, when her campaign was asked, well, what crisis has she ever faced in which she's made a difference in foreign policy, they really couldn't answer.

They tried to say, well, she made a speech in China or something like that. The fact is that she had a red phone moment, as Barack Obama said. Her red phone moment was on the war in Iraq, and she chose the Bush course, the wrong course.

She had a red phone moment in Iran. When Senator Dodd, Senator Biden, Senator Obama, myself opposed the policy, she chose the Bush policy on Iran. She had a red phone moment. The fact is that Barack Obama comes to this race with more experience than George Bush, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton had in foreign policy at the national level. And the fact is that he has proven that it's his judgment that is correct. That's what the American people are voting for, and I believe they will see clearly that's a scare tactic. And in fact, it raises an issue which falls, in my judgment, in Barack Obama's favor.

link

Cue music


Oh and from Kerry: "they're going to rush to answer the phone and not see the ad."

:rofl:

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. "I don't know if I would have voted for the IWR"

[FrenchieCat]

4. That isn't a quote of what Obama has ever said.......but here's the one from 2004

that I believe you are refering to.

"What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made."

(The Clinton campaign left out that important last sentence when it e-mailed reporters with backup material for the inconsistency claim, which was also made by Hillary Clinton in the televised debate Saturday night.)

In an interview published in the Chicago Tribune the following day (July 27,2004), Obama said that he would have voted "no" on the Senate resolution
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/obama_and_iraq.html#more

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[FrenchieCat]

12. Calling me dumb is way out of line.....

considering that it is you who offers a quoted sentence with no link and not context.

Dumb is relative.....and so, I'm gonna go out on a limb and tell you that you are relatively dumb when judge by anyone with common sense.

[MethuenProgressive]

8. Exactly! Obama: "What would I have done? I don't know." No Present button, eh Barack?

[flpoljunkie]

10. "I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made."

Too lazy to read past more than "I don't know"--or too duplicitous.

[ProSense]

20. I see you have no valid response to the OP. n/t

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Condi Told Her...

That's all I need to know about her gullibility...

[dkf]

3. Hillary believes Condi? Bad judgment there too.

[MethuenProgressive]

5. Obama: "There's basically no difference between my Iraq position and George Bush's"

:puke:

[flpoljunkie]

13. The complete transcript from Meet the Press on this...

MR. RUSSERT: You were not in the Senate in October of 2002. You did give a speech opposing the war. But Senator Clinton's campaign will say since you've been a senator there's been no difference in your record. And other critics will say that you've not been a leader against the war, and they point to this: In July of `04, Barack Obama, "I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don't know," in terms of how you would have voted on the war. And then this: "There's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's position at this stage." That was July of `04. And this: "I think" there's "some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war." It doesn't seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may have voted for it.

SEN. OBAMA: Now, Tim, that first quote was made with an interview with a guy named Tim Russert on MEET THE PRESS during the convention when we had a nominee for the presidency and a vice president, both of whom had voted for the war. And so it, it probably was the wrong time for me to be making a strong case against our party's nominees' decisions when it came to Iraq.

[sandnsea]

7. "Dick might have gotten confused"

ProSense, what the hell does that mean. The link is broken. What did Dick tell Hillary that might have been "confusing". And which "Dick" is Condi talking about? What does this have to do with the inspectors?

I wish Obama knew that WE know about the Wolfowitz/Perle ideology. That is what he got most right and that's what matters. He also has the good sense to choose advisers who DID NOT fall for the WMD intelligence lies, the way Hillary's advisers DID. And she is using the same ones who got it wrong the first time.

[ProSense]

9. Here is the cached text:

Clinton: Rice linked Iraq vote, inspections
Submitted by Monitor Staff on Fri, 2007-12-21 19:47.

Following up on what Ambassador Richard Holbrooke told us earlier this week regarding Hillary Clinton's vote to authorize the use of military force against Iraq, we asked Sen. Clinton today if it was correct that Colin Powell had persuaded her that the resolution could be a vote to avoid war rather than a vote for war.

She replied: "No, it wasn't Colin Powell. it was Condi Rice. Condi Rice told me specifically when I was still weighing all of the evidence, and I had been to the White House one last time -- I think, if I'm not mistaken, it was Oct. 8 -- and I'd had the whole presentation by the CIA and others and I hadn't asked any questions, I had listened. And I went back to my office, and Condi Rice called me and said, You didn't ask any questions, do you have any questions? I said I only have one: Will you use this authorization to put inspectors back in, so that we can find out whether any of this is true, how much WMD he still has or has reconstituted? She said, Yes, that's what it's intended to do. I think Dick might have gotten confused."

Monitor: And you had no reason to doubt her?

Clinton: "I did not. Because -- certainly I didn't rely on the Bush administration. I did a lot of my own due diligence, I talked to a lot of people in my husband's administration, I talked to Tony Blair, I talked to a lot of sources, and I had the same question: Do you think he still has these kinds of capacities? And the rationale made sense to me. When we got there after the first Gulf War, he was much further advanced in his nuclear program and we knew he had used chemical weapons. When we discovered his nuclear program in '91, the inspectors went in and for seven years dismantled everything that they could find. In '98, he threw the inspectors out, which at least to me raised the possibility that they were getting close to something, and therefore he wanted them out. The Americans and the British bombed every site that he prevented the inspectors from going to that we had a record of, but we had no good intelligence as to what was or wasn't there. And the idea behind any concern about Saddam Hussein was rooted in his personality and his governing philosophy. He was a megalomaniac.

"Putting inspectors back in -- which the United Nations voted for, the Security Council was all in favor of -- was a way to really put some checks and balances to find out what he really did have. What we know now is that Bush had no intention of letting the inspections run their course. But the argument of putting inspectors back in, backed up by force -- because Saddam never did anything that didn't have at least the backup threat of force -- was not on its face totally illegitimate. So I was willing to give him the authority to do that, and he misused the authority."

link

[sandnsea]

19. Thank you

It looks like she meant Dick Holbrooke, but I trust his word more than hers anyway. Why in the world would Condi Rice be the one she trusted over Colin Powell?? That makes no sense at all.

[C_U_L8R]

11. one ringy dingy.... two ringy dingies...

oh hello, it this the person to whom I am speaking ?

[ProSense]

14. The 3 AM ad was an ill-timed disaster.

Wonder who among Hillary's team is responsible for it?

[Cha]

18. A wild guess..

mark penn's ingenuous contribution.

[ScottS]

15. ok...

[fedupinBushcountry]

16. K&R

:kick:

[Cha]

17. hilary didn't give a shit about the NIE..

she was all about preparing her big ol hairy speech for the Floor of the Senate to make her look tough and ready for day one.

Too bad that real people were going to die.

[ProSense]

21. That ad that launched a thousand parodies

all linked to here

[Major Hogwash]

22. It's bizarro land.

It's getting weirder and weirder by the day.

[ProSense]

23. Clinton Says Obama Was MIA on Afghanistan. But Was She, Too?

Clinton Says Obama Was MIA on Afghanistan. But Was She, Too?

In the past few days, as Hillary Clinton has intensified her attacks on Barack Obama prior to the all-important primaries in Ohio and Texas, she has claimed that he has been "missing in action" regarding Afghanistan. Clinton has been trying to make the case that she's better prepped than Obama to be commander-in-chief and more qualified to answer the phone at 3:00 a.m. when crisis strikes. To prove her point, she notes that Obama, who chairs a foreign relations subcommittee covering European matters, has held not one hearing on how to bolster NATO in Afghanistan. This weekend she told reporters on her campaign plane that he has failed in a "responsibility that is directly related to Afghanistan." She urged the journos to grill Obama on this. She said that Afghanistan is "one of the two most important challenges internationally." And she added, "I think he was missing in action...because he was running for president."

It's true that Obama has convened no meetings of the subcommittee, but his camp counters that he became chair of the subcommittee early last year, just as he was starting his presidential campaign. Clinton is technically correct that Obama could have used the subcommittee to conduct oversight of actions and policies related to Afghanistan. But the full foreign relations committee, under the guidance of Senator Joe Biden, has held several hearings on Afghanistan that covered NATO's role there. It's not as if the foreign relations committee did nothing on Afghanistan because Obama did not take on the mission. Also, as happens with many committees, the chair of the full committee reserves the right to handle the big issues him- or herself, and Afghanistan counts as a big issue.

Clinton ought to be careful about hurling stones in this area. As she always tells campaign crowds, she is a member of the Senate armed services committee. In February the committee held two hearings on Afghanistan. On February 8, it focused on appropriations for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was a witness. Eight days later, the committee zeroed in on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, holding a two-part hearing examining recent reports on Afghanistan. Key witnesses included senior officials from the State Department and the Pentagon responsible for the administration's Afghanistan policy.

Clinton attended neither of these hearings. She was on the campaign trail.

Many hearings occur on Capitol Hill without all members--or even a majority of members--of the committee in attendance. In fact, that's more common than not. At plenty of hearings, the committee chair is the only senator or representative present. So it's no surprise or scandal that Clinton was not there for these two Afghanistan hearings. (She did participate in two hearings on Afghanistan held by the committee in the first half of 2007.) But in a campaign season, a spinner could easily say that she's guilty of the same charge she tosses at Obama: putting presidential campaigning ahead of Afghanistan. Her neglect, certainly, is not the same as his: he held no hearings for a year; she attended no hearings this year. But as Clinton throws the kitchen sink at Obama, she ought to make sure nuts and bolts don't bounce back at her.

Hillary's hypocrisy, knows no bounds.

[ProSense]

24. Hillary, the Democractic Party is calling.

Disloyal Democrat: Hillary Clinton picks McCain over Obama


Amazing!