Hillary Clinton: Bubble Woman!
by eriposte
There's sooooo much fun to be had shining light on all the extremely incisive analyses on the left-leaning internets of Sen. Clinton's warmongering, back-stabbing nature, her unprincipled, ruthless and naked ambition, and all around undying support for George Bush, evil corporations and the GOP. (I know, I left out the "she's nothing but a communoislamofascist socialist" bit, but that's mostly the incisive criticism from the Right).
The latest bit of astounding brilliance is in this diary by Paul Hogarth at Open Left (emphasis mine, throughout this post):
Hillary Avoids Tough Questions; Exposed as War Hawk
Yay! We have a new entry in the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary Rule Book!
Hillary campaigns in a Bubble! (Like that other President fella, er, um, what's his name? Someone please send Hogarth's post to Andrew Sullivan so that Sullivan can type up post # 1,000,001 about the most ruthless machine candidate ever.)
Now, I admit I'm just a bumpkin. Primarily because of that, I have this bizarre notion that the evidence that best proves someone avoids tough questions is, um, proof that they avoid tough questions. As it turns out, Paul Hogarth provides extraordinarily convincing pieces of evidence that Hillary campaigns in a bubble. In fact the evidence he provides is so compelling that I decided to add a couple of pieces of evidence of my own to prove his case. So, please take a few minutes to join the fun and discover yet another horrific and disturbing aspect about the ruthless and nakedly ambitious Sen. Clinton.
This post is divided into the following sections for clarity.
I. First Piece of Evidence
II. Second Piece of Evidence
III. Third Piece of Evidence
IV. Fourth Piece of Evidence
V. Fifth Piece of Evidence
CONCLUSIONS
I. First Piece of Evidence
Here's the first bit of evidence that Hogarth cites:
As the New York Times reported yesterday, in the past month Hillary Clinton has avoided taking direct questions from the public - sticking to a scripted campaign of stump speeches, talk show interviews, and fundraisers.
Don't you just love how Hogarth believes "talk show interviews" involve taking no direct or tough questions. Yeah, those bastions of Clinton-loving talk show hosts like Tim Russert and Chris Wallace - they never ask tough questions of her!
Then there is the New York Times, the supreme bastion of objectivity when it comes to reporting on the Clintons. Here's the most striking evidence from the Times:
As Adam Nagourney points out in a story in The Times today, she is running a classic front-runner campaign, holding fewer unpredictable events where voters can lob bombshells at her – even though such events that were once a staple of her schedule, and are still common for rivals like Barack Obama and John Edwards.
...
Mrs. Clinton, of course, does face questions and scrutiny at the debates, and she does grant interviews with individual reporters – appearing on the five morning talk shows one Sunday in September, for instance, and speaking to The New York Times (among others) about her plans for health insurance and scientific research.There have been a few question-and-answer sessions with voters, but hardly as many as she once held or as many as her Democratic and Republican rivals still hold. On Sunday, without much notice to the media, her “Organizing for Change” events in Iowa were turned into Q&As, raising questions among reporters about whether recent scrutiny of her front-runner strategy had led her to interact more directly with voters.
Get that? She's running a front-runner campaign, so she is doing fewer voter Q&As, but then she did some Iowa Q&As this weekend - could it be because she was running a front-runner campaign, or something? Of course, it all makes complete sense!
In any case, the first piece of compelling evidence from Paul Hogarth that "Hillary Clinton has avoided taking direct questions from the public" is that she "does face questions and scrutiny at the debates, and she does grant interviews with individual reporters" and "there have been a few question-and-answer sessions with voters"and "her “Organizing for Change” events in Iowa were turned into Q&As". As I said, I'm just a bumpkin.
II. Second Piece of Evidence
Here's the next piece of evidence that Hogarth cites:
Apparently, I'm not the only one whose question got under her skin...
In other words, Hogarth evidently asked her a tough question! His link goes to his post at Beyond Chron, from early Aug 2007 titled:
Yearly Kos Has Endangered Hillary’s Nomination
It sure has! It has endangered it so badly that she has been rising in the polls against the other candidates. But, let's not get distracted by irrelevant matters. Let's get to Hogarth's second most important piece of evidence that Sen. Clinton avoids tough questions from the public:
“Senator Clinton,” I said. “My name is Paul Hogarth, and I am from Beyond Chron in San Francisco. First, I’d like to thank you for having gone on the record saying that you would repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – which passed during your husband’s administration. I want to ask you about four other pieces of legislation that happened in the Clinton years, and whether you would be willing to advocate their repeal – the Defense of Marriage Act, the Telecommunications Act, NAFTA, and the Welfare Bill.”
Her answer to my question was absolutely awful. Like her statements in the Debate, it exposed her as an anti-progressive triangulator – and was the tensest moment of the break-out session. If Democrats wake up and realize that the Bill Clinton years (although far better than the Bush years) had some serious issues and we cannot trust Hillary to be a progressive leader to get us out of the wilderness, she can be defeated.
In other words, Sen. Clinton took a tough question from Hogarth, a question that he believed led to the tensest moment that exposed her true and terrible character. This of course proves again that Sen. Clinton avoids taking direct and tough questions from the public.
III. Third Piece of Evidence
Hogarth's third piece of evidence? It's this one:
...this weekend, she had a testy exchange with an Iowan who asked why she voted to give Bush an excuse to invade Iran...
[....]
... this weekend in Iowa, Randall Rolph of Nashua managed to pierce the Hillary campaign bubble. At a forum in New Hampton, he asked why she voted for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution that calls the Iran Revolutionary Guard a "terrorist" group - a move that could give the Bush Administration a green light to start another pre-emptive war. Clinton disputed the premise of his question, and then accused Rolph of being a plant by saying "somebody obviously sent this to you." She later apologized, but the exchange was testy.
...It exposed how much of a war hawk she really is - despite her anti-war rhetoric...
Ahh! The resolution that calls the "Iran Revolutionary Guard a "terrorist" group"! It revealed yet again how Sen. Clinton is a unique enabler of George W. Bush. Such an enabler, that Chris Dodd and Barack Obama, along with numerous other progressive Democratic Senators co-sponsored another resolution saying almost exactly the same thing earlier this year.
Anyway, let's not get distracted. Let's get back to Hogarth's devastating evidence that Hillary is in a bubble. The fact that Sen. Clinton allowed Rolph to ask a tough question that put her in a spot proves beyond any doubt that she ruthlessly avoids tough questions in public forums. In fact, you can see how ruthless she was right here, in the video that Taylor Marsh has helpfully provided in her post "What Really Happened in Iowa":
I feel for Mr. Hogarth, so I will, on my own, provide additional evidence to bolster his case that Sen. Clinton avoids tough questions and thereby campaigns in a bubble.
IV. Fourth Piece of Evidence
After fielding many questions ranging from mental health care to veteran affairs at a Town Hall Meeting in Hampton, NH, Senator Hillary Clinton received a heated question about Iraq. A woman who had traveled from New York asked Sen. Clinton if she had read the report given to her in 2002 on intelligence and the Iraq war.
Clinton said she had been briefed on the report, and the woman screamed back, "Did you read it?!" Notably uncomfortable, the Senator repeated that she had been briefed. This exchange went back and forth about three times.
The woman sat down and Clinton explained, "If I had known then what I know now, I never would have voted to give this President the authority." Clinton also said she believed she was giving the President the authority to send U.N. inspectors to Iraq.
When Clinton finished the answer, the woman continued to scream but was drowned out by applause for the Senator. The woman was escorted out of the building.
If that doesn't convince you that Senator Clinton avoids tough questions from the public, let me offer you one more bit of evidence, OK?
V. Fifth Piece of Evidence
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton just had an awfully testy exchange over universal health care with an audience member here at the National Association of Black Journalists conference – a lively moment that ended with an artful diss from Mrs. Clinton that had the audience hooting.
The audience member – who later identified himself as Kiara Ashanti, a freelance writer and blogger and a Republican – asked Mrs. Clinton why she was “still insisting” on bringing British- and Canada-style “socialized medicine” to the United States, asserting that such forms of universal care would hurt the black community.
“Oh man, I can’t answer that in 30 seconds, that was a string of misrepresentations,” Mrs. Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, told the gathering of more than 1,000 black reporters, editors, and other journalists.
“I have never advocated socialized medicine, and I hope all the journalists hear that,” she said. “That has been a right-wing attack on me for 15 years.”
Mr. Ashanti interrupted her with persistent criticism of government-run health care; Mrs. Clinton challenged him at one, asking if he thought Medicare was socialized medicine, and he indicated that he did.
“You are in a small minority of America, because Medicare has literally saved the lives and saved the resources of countless generations of Americans,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton praised the health systems in Canada, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe as having better outcomes and results on some performance measures than the United States. Then she offered to share her statistics with the if he wanted to introduce himself to her staff.
That is, she added, “if you’re interested in being educated instead of being rhetorical.”
It was a snap! moment that garnered Mrs. Clinton her biggest applause and cheers of the 40-minute forum.
If that didn't convince you that Sen. Clinton avoids tough questions from the public, nothing will. So help me God.
CONCLUSIONS
In this post, I reviewed the extraordinarily brilliant observation by Paul Hogarth in his diary at Open Left that "Hillary Avoids Tough Questions".
I discussed three compelling pieces of evidence presented by Mr. Hogarth to support his case.
- The first piece of evidence is provided by the NYT which stated that Sen. Clinton takes questions from journalists and talk show hosts and does unscripted Q&As with voters on the campaign trail
- The second piece of evidence is from Mr. Hogarth himself - his tough question to Sen. Clinton at Yearly Kos 2007 on the Defense of Marriage Act, the Telecommunications Act, NAFTA, and the Welfare Bill
- The third piece of evidence is the recent incident in Iowa where Sen. Clinton allowed a tough question on her recent vote on the Kyl-Lieberman Iran "Sense of the Senate" non-binding amendment
I supplemented Mr. Hogarth's case with two other pieces of evidence.
- A question that Sen. Clinton was asked on her Iraq war vote and whether she read the 2002 NIE, by an angry member of the public
- A question asked by a Republican in a public forum who challenged Sen. Clinton's inclination for "socialized" medicine
The common thread in many of these questions? They were a sample of tough questions asked by various people in Sen. Clinton's public forums or interviews this year. Taken together, they prove Mr. Hogarth's devastating case against Sen. Clinton. In other words, they prove conclusively that she avoids tough questions!
Meet Sen. Clinton. The person who lives in a bubble, like our current boy genius in the White House!