Hypocrisy: Hillary's War On Facts

Headline:

Hillary Clinton, expert shape-shifter

"During her book tour, the question was whether Hillary “We Were Dead Broke” Clinton had become disconnected from ordinary Americans. Now the question is whether she is disconnected from all principles, not to mention the details of her own biography.
epa04302274 Former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presents her new memoir 'Hard Choices' in Berlin, Germany, 06 July 2014. EPA/MAURIZIO GAMBARINI
Hillary Clinton presents her new memoir, “Hard Choices,” in Berlin on July 6. (Maurizio Gambarini/European Pressphoto Agency)

The running gag with Clinton used to be about her ever-changing hairstyles. Those are nothing compared with the bobs and weaves she has undertaken since her presidential-killing vote to authorize war in Iraq.

Let’s see if we can trace things from the start of Clinton’s war with her own record. As a junior senator, she had her eye on the White House, and therefore, like other ambitious Democrats, she voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. But the war went badly for a time, and President George W. Bush became unpopular. So having supported the war for political gain, she felt obliged to oppose the surge — to rescue the war she voted for — again for political gain. She lost the nomination in 2008, extracting the lesson that you can never be too dovish on foreign policy for a party captured by McGovernism.

When President Obama called on her to serve as secretary of state, it was a great time to show that she could be the un-Bush and regain foreign policy bona fides in her party. She talked about “smart diplomacy,” bragged about the light footprint and stuck to the president like glue. But then wars went badly, and her support for the president she had backed to recover her political footing became a liability.

So — deep breath (are you keeping up?) — she therefore had to convince us that when she served the president, watched from afar for about a year after leaving office and made numerous supportive statements, she was actually faking being supportive of Obamaism and instead she really disagreed with him. She was more like the hawk that voted for the Iraq war, which she later had to make amends for by voting against the surge. (But for the sake of comity in the White House, she obviously had to conceal her disagreements with the president so that everyone there thought she was on board. Obviously.)

“Hard Choices,” certainly the least-fitting title of any recent political book, and her disastrous book tour were followed by the collapse of Iraq. She now had to convince voters that she had been a hawk all along, just like voters suspected in 2008 when she tried to convince them she wasn’t by voting against the surge. Now in 2014 she needed to sound like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mitt Romney, telling us that she really opposed Obama’s Syria policy even when she praised the president’s cop-out (erasing the red line) in the fall of 2013."

Ol' Hill's a hoot n half...