My little politics blog

Still, there are a few flaws in Clinton's trial-by-smear method. The first is that her attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he'd endure in the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they come from within one's own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He's inexperienced, lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly's Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message. If Obama's the nominee, he won't have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain's message every day.

Weekend Spin Patrol

A couple campaign statements caught my eye, and I wanted to point them out before the weekend. First, John McCain says of his supporter, John Hagee, "I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics." If they were anti-Catholic? Hagee called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and a "false cult system." So, yeah, that would seem to be pretty anti-Catholic. McCain construction is the classic non-apology apology -- I apologize if anybody was offended. Hey, some people might like being called "the great whore." Prostitutes, for example. But if others disagree, McCain feels their pain, too.

Second, Hillary Clinton's campaign says Barack Obama is "unable to make an affirmative case for his candidacy beyond ad hominem attacks." Meanwhile, her campaign is sending out a fundraising email saying "Stand Up to Attack Politics." Riiight... because if anybody is going to end attack politics, it's Hillary Clinton. If Clinton wins the nomination, the one lesson politicians everywhere will take from it is that attack politics don't work.

How do they say these things? All politicians, including Obama, spin. But the way the Clinton campaign says night is day is just especially audacious. It's as if they have internalized the attacks they suffered in the 1990s to such a degree that they believe to their core that the only way to win is to imitate their worst tormentors. I think Obama and his staff say things they at least believe to be essentially true. Working for Clinton has to be a soul-deadening experience.

I highly recommend Dana's comments on Samantha Power's regrettable departure from the Obama campaign. For one thing, this makes it less likely that a future administration will hire Power and Anne-Marie Slaughter at the same time, and I was really looking forward to writing about Secretaries Slaughter and Power. So that's a bummer.

I have noticed with great interest that Sen. Clinton speaks glowingly of her foreign policy experience and to prove it she brings up how she spoke for womens rights in China. She never pushes that too loudly possibly assuming that no one will remember exactly what happened at that time or has any connection to China that will expose her ridiculous story.

Let me fill you in.

I assume Mrs. Clinton is talking about the Beijing Woman's Conference in September of 1995.

My husband and had a company in Guangzhou China and we were involved in exposing the traficking of women and children for sexual exploitation.

Our group had been personally invited to talk to that conference by people in Beijing,,most especially one of the Vice Premiers of China, Wu Yi. Wu Yi was considered the second most powerful WOMAN in the world.

So my husband and I worked with women who had been in prostitution since the age of 8 to get them to talk on stage about what the situation was like.

Then in the June before the conference an Activist named Harry Wu was arrested entering China. Wu had videos of forced organ harvesting of Chinese prisoners.

The Clintons immediately jumped on the bandwagon to say that Mrs. Clinton would not be attending the conference until Harry Wu was released.

Well Harry Wu was surprisingly released and deported just in time for Mrs. Ckinton to change her mind.

It was all very sudden no one outside China knew why Wu had been released. Someday I will explain what happened but I do not want to stray from my point.

Mrs. Clinton rushed to speak and a big deal was made by the Clintons about woman's rights in China. We were bumped from the program to make room for her. Our women whom we had promised protection for speaking out, vanished into their under world.

And Hillary blathered about an issue from an AMERICAN perspective.

It changed nothing that would not have changed on it's own.

Today China has mobile execution vans.

You can be arrested and executed for being a member of the Falun Gong or because you are an orphan or a bicycle thief. China has a thriving black market organ trade You can order organs in advance.

Woman's Rights cannot be separated from human rights.

Why did Hillary say nothing about Harry Wu's charges? Was she afraid to insult the Chinese? What about today the Falun Gong? Where does she stand on them?

We know she can answer a phone at 3AM when it is choreographed and orchestrated but can she stand up to those who would violate human rights in the most hideous of ways-the black market- sex traders, human traffickers, the drug and armament dealers ?

She didn't when she had the chance and she covered her tap dance in the name of woman's rights!

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

"I don't know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don't want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.

It's as if they have internalized the attacks they suffered in the 1990s to such a degree that they believe to their core that the only way to win is to imitate their worst tormentors. I think Obama and his staff say things they at least believe to be essentially true. Working for Clinton has to be a soul-deadening experience.

Butrflynet, I found several sources for the Hillary Clinton-Harry Wu issue on this google page.---BBB

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Hillary+Clinton+protest+about+Harry+Wu+in+China&btnG=Google+Search

Our group had been personally invited to talk to that conference by people in Beijing,,most especially one of the Vice Premiers of China, Wu Yi. Wu Yi was considered the second most powerful WOMAN in the world.

So my husband and I worked with women who had been in prostitution since the age of 8 to get them to talk on stage about what the situation was like.

Then in the June before the conference an Activist named Harry Wu was arrested entering China. Wu had videos of forced organ harvesting of Chinese prisoners.

The Clintons immediately jumped on the bandwagon to say that Mrs. Clinton would not be attending the conference until Harry Wu was released.

Mrs. Clinton rushed to speak and a big deal was made by the Clintons about woman's rights in China. We were bumped from the program to make room for her. Our women whom we had promised protection for speaking out, vanished into their under world.

She's destroying the party in order to save it….that seems to be the conclusion of a some opinion writers today…

Please

I guess these things run in cycles. But let's get real and admit that Hillary Clinton is getting the free ride of all free rides on her repeated invocations of foreign policy experience. As part of her foreign policy experience Clinton claims "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland."

The whole quote is as follows ...

You know, I was involved for 15 years in, you know, foreign policy and security policy. You know, I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland. I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo. I've been standing up against, you know, the Chinese government over women's rights and standing up for human rights in many different places. I've served on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And I was the only senator of either party asked to be on an important task force put together by the Pentagon under this administration to figure out what to do with our military going forward.

Now, the Chicago Tribune reports that the borders in question were opened the day before Clinton arrived in the region. But the Northern Ireland claim is the kicker. George Mitchell, who's obviously a friend, has called Clinton's role 'helpful', according to CNN. But the UK papers today have David Trimble, a key unionist leader and former First Minister and Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan both pooh-poohing her claims. Coogan says her role was "part of the stage effects, the optics."

These are the sorts of puffed up claims that get other candidates held up to mockery and derision. But Clinton is using them as cudgels in her effort to portray Obama as a lightweight with no experience dealing with foreign policy crises. And basically she's getting a pass. I guess it speaks to the advantages of staying on offense, which can never be gainsaid. But she's still getting a big pass on this and a lot else.

Democratic infighting a mixed blessing for McCain

By CRAIG GILBERT
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Four years ago at this time, GOP nominee George W. Bush was sitting on more than $100 million, launching a huge national ad campaign and building the most sophisticated army of volunteers his party had ever seen.

John McCain is way behind that pace on every count.

So it's with relief and glee that many Republicans are embracing the dramatic standoff between Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a messy marathon that gives McCain more time to put his own campaign together "without a gun to his head," says Mark Graul, who organized Wisconsin for Bush in 2004.

Even better, the Arizona Republican gets to watch the two Democrats not only beat each other up but use some of McCain's own arguments in doing so, questioning each other's credibility, Senate record and foreign policy experience.

"They'll be making it more believable and more credible when McCain uses (those lines of attack) because they will have been saying it for months," says GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who has worked for McCain.

Political scientist Barry Burden likens it to a football team that gets a bye in the first round of the playoffs and can watch its potential opponents play each other first.

"They have all the film. They can look at all their weaknesses," says Burden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That doesn't mean it's an unqualified blessing for McCain to have the Democratic race plow on through spring and into summer, no clean end in sight.

"A long Democratic battle doesn't automatically help the Republicans," longtime Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, two days after Clinton's victories in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island revived her candidacy. "In fact, it hurts the Republicans in certain ways. Mr. McCain becomes less interesting to the media. Stories about him move off page one and grow smaller. TV coverage becomes spotty and short."

Nor is it automatically bad for Democrats for the race to go on. At a minimum, it will mean weeks of intense effort now by the party in the key fall battleground of Pennsylvania (which votes April 22) and possibly the swing states of Florida and Michigan, if those contests are "replayed" after a party rules dispute. It will mean sustained attention for Obama and Clinton, and it could harden and elevate the future winner.

But depending on how long and nasty the race is, it also could embitter key parts of the party's base and scar both Clinton and Obama. The likelihood that neither will have an undisputed claim on the nomination is a formula for resentment [..].

The two Democrats increasingly are using what will be GOP talking points against each other: Clinton raising the specter of a scary foreign policy crisis and suggesting that Obama would not be prepared to handle it; Obama questioning Clinton's own foreign policy experience and offering reminders about Clinton's political baggage.

"I don't think this race has been destructive so far," says GOP pollster McInturff of the Democratic contest. "But I think there's a good chance in the next two or three months that what the rest of this race will produce could effectively diminish both of them. Now she has started with, `He's not ready to be president.' . . . Imagine if John McCain is running that ad."

Marquette University political scientist John McAdams said that process is especially perilous for Obama.

"Until recently, he's largely gotten away with portraying himself as being somehow above politics," says McAdams. "The more he has to mix it up, the more he looks like just another politician."

Many, though not all, GOP insiders view Obama as a potentially tougher fall opponent. So they welcome not only a protracted Democratic fight, but Clinton's comeback. [..]

And while the Democrats duel, McCain has more time to get his house in order, raise money, assemble a national staff and field teams in the battlegrounds, and flesh out a policy agenda that some believe has major gaps in it. [..]

Hillary spokesperson Phil Singer is adamantly denying a report this morning in The Politico quoting an anonymous campaign official suggesting that the Clinton campaign will pursue Obama's pledged delegates. Singer sends me this:

We have not, are not and will not pursue the pledged delegates of Barack Obama. It's now time for the Obama campaign to be clear about their intentions.

It doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process.

Bill Clinton claims that Hillary Clinton urged him to intervene militarily in Rwanda:

And then, using a more somber tone, he explained that she had wanted the United States to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, when hundreds of thousands of people died in a genocide that lasted just a few months. Clinton has often said that not acting in Rwanda was one of his biggest regrets. It's a decision, he said, for which he continues to try to make amends. Had he listened to his wife, Clinton said, things might have been different. "I believe if I had moved we might have saved at least a third of those lives," he said. "I think she clearly would have done that."

When Hillary Clinton was asked whether this was true, she said "It is."

[...]

So: Clinton didn't mention that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda in her memoirs. Neither did Madeleine Albright. Neither, as far as I can tell, did anyone else. Military intervention was not considered as an option, "never even debated", which means that any advocacy she did engage in must have been pretty ineffective.

[...]

Of course, I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration. It ought, by rights, to have a place in Hillary Clinton's "thirty five years of experience working for change." Or perhaps she might claim that she wasn't that interested in foreign policy at the time, or that for whatever reason she just didn't pick up on the genocide in Rwanda until it was too late to act. That would at least be honest.

But if, in fact, Clinton missed the chance to urge her husband to help stop the Rwandan genocide, then she should not pretend that she was, in fact, right there on the side of the angels all along. That's just grotesque.