Hillary as Secretary of State

During the democratic primary there were two different ways to select delegates. Straightforward voting and selection by caucus.

Hillary was able to convince a lot of people that she was a marginally better choice than Obama and so she tended to win the states with simple votes.

But when it came to attracting the committed to her side, getting the votes of those for whom it really mattered rather than votes of those with a mild preference, Hillary fell on her face. She couldn't do it.

The job of Secretary of State isn't a job of counting up votes of people with mild preferences. It's about getting countries with a serious stake in things to come over to your side.

Hillary proved to be incompetent at that. There's no way she'd be a competent Secretary of State.

Mistakes of Hillary Clinton

Columbia Journalism Review thinks most of the press gets it wrong when they try to analyze the mistakes Hillary made in her run for President.


Most of the press tends to focus on tactical campaign issues such as

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal led the pack with a front-pager headlined “Clinton’s Road to Second Place,” which identified four broad categories of mistakes made by Clinton and her campaign: “mismanagement,” a “flawed message,” a “failure to mobilize,” and “Clinton craziness.”

CJR attributes her failure to win the nomination to one thing -- her vote for the Iraq war a few years ago.
I think it was more a combination of things and what it told swing voters about who she really is.
She's just another opportunistic politician who looks to see which way the wind is blowing before she takes a position. She voted for Iraq when it looked like that was the popular thing to do. Without admitting it was a bad vote she later changed her opinion about the war when public sentiment seemed to turn against it. She was all for a temporary gasoline tax reduction because she thought it would show blue collar voters she "cared" about them.
The feminist nutcases think she lost because she was a victim of a woman hating society. The reality is that she lost because she was perceived as an opportunistic twit and people saw a possibility of actual personal honesty in Obama.

Hillary on the Supreme Court

Ann Althouse thinks Hillary doesn't have the right judicial temperament for the Supreme Court, whatever the hell that means.

And it doesn't even matter that she has no judicial experience and has never done anything to indicate that she is any sort of a legal scholar or has anything like a judicial temperament.

I think it just means that Ann doesn't like Sen. Clinton.

I don't think much of Clinton either and would not want to see her on the Court. But to argue that Hillary isn't qualified is just absurd.

Hillary has a law degree, from Yale. She worked as a government lawyer. She taught in a law school. She then practiced law and spent a few years as a partner of a large firm. She's a United States Senator.

She's never been a judge, but she certainly has plenty of experience in law wearing pretty much every other hat that can be worn. I'm not sure if she has a publication record, but that doesn't really mean much in law -- the academic journals in law are almost all student edited publications, peer review is not part of legal scholarship.

I think Ann is just letting her emotions about Bill having cheated on his wife get ahead of her brain on this one.

As far as temperament goes, 5 of 9 of the current Court believes in a guy who wears a funny hat who talks personally to God. Is that an indication of what Ann thinks of when she talks about judicial temperment?

Who you gonna call?

"It's 3 a.m. and your children are safely asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?"

I want the guy who's been up doing cocaine all night because he'll be awake and alert at 3 am. We don't want some woman waking up at 3 am and wondering where her husband is to answer that phone.

Update: Althouse thinks the ad's effective.

The Spoiler Candidate

Nader has decided to waste his time running for President again.

Some are calling him a spoiler candidate, one who won't accomplish anything but draining enough votes from the democratic candidate to tilt the outcome towards electing McMcain.

But with him in the race I think the spoiler candidate is Hillary.

Before he joined the race she had some chance of winning the election. Not much, but some. If she can beat Obama then she might be able to beat McCain. It's not a sure thing that she could, but she'd have a shot.

Not with Nader in the race. With Nader an option there's no chance in hell she could beat McCain in the general election.

If she manages to win the nomination she will not get at least some of the votes that would have gone to Obama. That's a sure thing. That's whether Nader is in the race or not. But enough democrats will refuse to vote for a republican that she might get enough of the Obama votes to carry the election. But if they can vote for Nader then it's very likely that enough of them would rather vote for him and let McCain win than they would see Hillary in the White House.

That's the way I feel about it. Richardson or Edwards were candidates I could support. Obama is one I could vote for. McCain is one that I don't think I could vote for, but I think he'd make a better President in some ways than Hillary.

The problem with the Hillary McCain matchup is that they're both evil, just in different ways. You can't really say one is the lessor evil. So, in that case, to hell with it, just vote for Nader as a protest vote. In an Obama McCain matchup you have Obama as both a protest vote and a vote for a guy who might actually make a good President.

Hillary should give it up. For the good of the country.

Clinton, Obama, and 60 minutes

I didn't watch 60 minutes this past Sunday but apparantly they had seperate interviews of Clinton and Obama. And apparantly 60 minutes has managed to turn itself into a boring softball game.

No difference between Hillary and Obama

I was in the car this afternoon, listening to Hannity.

He was talking about the Dems and kept saying that there's not a licks worth of difference between Clinton and Obama.

I guess to him there really isn't. They're democrats, they all look alike to Hannity.

But but when you have differences on topics like Iraq and the drug war and sexual harrassment of women in the workforce, I think most actual people can tell them apart.

Clinton and police misconduct

I'm becoming more and more convinced that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be very bad for America.

Criminal justice issues are core to the problems facing the country. It's about our image abroad, our personal freedoms, our international policies. The drug war and our incarceration policy and our use of the death penalty effect almost everything involving the federal government.

Hillary is an extreme hawk on criminal justice issues. She's over the top. Probably even worse than George Bush.

Grits for Breakfast has a comparison of Hillary and Obama.\

Willie Jeff is taking the official position that a guy who defends himself when his home is invaded by thugs in uniform is an unrepenant cop killer.

Clinton and Obama

I think a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket is a really, really bad idea.

I just think Hillary would be a very poor executive in either slot.

Inflation and purchasing power

Double Blind has a good post about inflation and it's relationship to purchasing power. It's written by a Canadian, so the references to dollars are about Canadian dollars.

But it's a topic American's need to be paying attention to. The American dollar is losing purchasing power at a very dangerous rate. You can thank government policies about lower taxes and higher spending for that and I don't see any indication that Clinton or McCain will do anything to change that direction in a meaningful way. Maybe Obama will save us. Maybe he won't.

Another reason to support anybody buy Hillary

I only realized this when I read a post from The Agitator, but Hillary is the only democratic candidate that didn't support the recent federal change in mandatory minimum sentences to make sentences for crack cocaine the same as those for powder cocaine (they had been much, much higher).

That pretty much makes her a drug warrior right in line with Bush/Cheney. We don't need more of that kind of crap. The drug war creates all kinds of problems for us and throughout the world. It's eroding our constitution, it's wrecked the economy of Mexico, which causes our immigration problems, it fills up our prisons to a point where we imprison more citizens than any other country in the world, and on and on.

We don't need Hillary Clinton.

Waterboarding and the race for President

This is why you should realize that they're pretty much all worthless. It appears that none of the candidates where in this meeting, but the leading contenders are part of the culture that the ones in this meeting come from.

This country does not need another religious and anti-science nutcase running the whitehouse, but Huckabee at least has some sense of moral scruples. Something Hillary and Obama and Romney and Rudy simply don't have. We don't need any of those worthless people in power.

I'm still a fan of Richardson or Paul but somebody like Huckabee or Edwards might be worth considering, depending on how things play out. None of those four leading contenders mentioned above are worth any consideration at all.

None of them are worth voting for

Earlier I suggested a reason that it would be a good idea to vote for somebody other than Rudy.

Here's links to a couple of posts that suggest a reason to stay away from Hillary.

It just looks more and more to me that Bill Richardson or Ron Paul are the only actual rational choices. Bill Richardson because he actually has some competence in government, Ron Paul because he actually has a moral compass.

Hillary is insane

According to CNN

A Clinton adviser compares the plan's so-called "individual mandate" -- which requires everyone to have health insurance -- to current rules in most states that require all drivers to purchase auto insurance, according to The Associated Press.

I've spent time in jail because I didn't have automobile liability insurance. Is that the plan?

Have health insurance or go to jail. What a country. Now we'll never be able to close Gitmo.

Update:
One reason that mandatory insurance of any kind is a really, really bad idea.

Update:
Maybe she's misrepresenting her own idea in an attempt to sell it. Maybe the point is to provide universal insurance, not to require insurance. But she's still insane.

Update:
If we really want universal health care it's not that hard to do. You just do it slowly, expand medicare, increase grants to community clinics, stop trying to impose religious dogma on medical providers, etc.

But we don't really want universal health care. We want universal control.

Update:
I'm not the only one who thinks Hillary's idea is the idea of a nutcase. She's no longer pushing universal health care, she's pushing a government mandated market for approved insurance providers.

Experience? Or just another version of Imperial Presidency?

The cable news channals are talking about the Hillary and Obama difference on the willingness to commit to meeting to rogue countries.

Obama says he would.

Not Hillary. She would not agree without first establishing pre-conditions.

Hillary says Obama is being niave and irresponsible. the idiot talking heads are claiming Hillary wins that part of the debate because it makes her come off as the more experienced of the two.

Huh?

To me she's just coming off as self-important.

Update:
Althouse gives the whole thing a much more detailed look. I agree that Obama hasn't handled it well, but I still think Hillary is just being self-important.

I'm not impressed by either one of them.

Update:
Psotd seems to agree with me.

Hardball just keeps getting worse

MSNBC's hardball is on a downward spiral of booking cartoonish guests in ploys for ratings. Ann Coulter, Al Sharpton, and more recently Judith Miller. Nutcases with nothing of substance to say, no reliability, but a promise that they'll say something provocative.

Provocative has become the Hardball keyword, not informative.

Today (Friday) they had a couple of segments on Hillary. The first was a focus on the horrors of her showing a very trivial amount of cleavage in the Senate (See just how trivial). The second was an examination of the question of whether she's engaging in excessively masculine posturing in her position on Iraq.

Too much cleavage? Too much masculinity?

Which is it, boys? Did you have a guest who actually made a comment about the color of Hillary Clinton's pearls? Or was I dreaming.

It's really become a pathetic excuse for a TV show.

Update: Added a link to a photo of the cleavage. Hattip to Althouse for the photo link

Update. More comments on the Hillary cleavage nonsense. TigerHawk Firedoglake hat tip to Instapundit for these links

The democrats two lead weasels

Ann Althouse is offended by Hilliary and Obama having voting against the unrestricted Iraq funding bill.

I'm offended by the way they behaved like weasels in not taking a public position until all the other votes were counted.

Ann doesn't appear to care about the character of our candidates, just about whether they vote they way she thinks they could. I think character matters a lot and both these candidates lack character.