What’s rich about Ditka’s analysis is the concern over Hillary’s Syria policy, as though we’re not flying aircraft in Syria now.
Concerns over Hillary’s application of American power aren’t entirely unreasonable, but Ditka and most other concerns conveniently ignore their own candidate. There’s comparison and contrast; it’s just Hillary sucks and that’s that.
Wanting better relations with Russia isn’t unreasonable either, but doing so because your president is most likely indebted to Putin and easily blackmailed is an entirely different matter.
More than that, she sticks to the book - she’s basically predictable. The last thing you want to be in an age when the political order is undergoing some possible realignment is to add to the level of instability by being unpredictable. Trump prides himself on being hard to read, which might work to his advantage when trying to stiff creditors, but in this context, it’s lethal. In fact, being unpredictable is the antithesis to diplomacy - you absolutely need clarity. Being unpredictable is a strength when you anticipate military conflict. This really ought to make it clear what Trump’s ultimate intentions are. The US is on the path to war with someone; it’s just a matter of against whom, and when.
I don’t particularly mind that we’re flying aircraft over Syria. I wouldn’t have particularly minded it if HRC ordered it either. The concern arose from her no-fly-zone policy. She was asked point blank if she’d order the military to shoot down Russian jets and her answer was something other than an unambiguous “no”. That’s alarming.
ETA: I think your post above about predicatability makes a lot of valid points, but those points don’t describe HRC’s Syria policy. It was ambiguous as hell.
It was campaign speak, Ditka - people are ambiguous and weaselish during campaigns. Even if Hillary got drunk and phoned up one of her generals to shoot down a Russian aircraft, it’s doubtful that it would lead to an all-out nuclear exchange. It would definitely increase tensions, but Turkey shot down a Russian plane and didn’t get nuked. Countries don’t get nuked for shooting down an aircraft; in fact we don’t really have a lot of precedent on what might lead to a nuclear confrontation other than the end of WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the false alarm in the early 1980s (the latter being the potentially most terrifying of them all). What the last two examples show, though, is that mistakes can lead to deadly war. Mistaken assumptions and perceptions. Not a fighter getting taken out in Syria, but things the mistaken perception that one country has a tactical advantage that leaves the other vulnerable - things like regime change, missile defense systems, missile batteries in strategic locations, etc. I agree that in this respect, Hillary wasn’t necessarily safer than Donald Trump, but Donald Trump’s complete lack of coherence represents an even greater threat not just to Russia but to other countries.
Interesting article, I read it the whole way through. Thank you for your evenhandedness in providing a cite that so comprehensively debunked your claim that “she has trashed the reputations of the women who accused her husband.”
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” – Adrendt
Hillary Clinton is responsible for the death and suffering of tens if not hundreds of thousands, and she hangs out with swell fellows like Kissinger and Negroponte. But if you compare her to other cogs in the machine is she particularly evil? Not really.
As a senator she voted for Iraq. As secretary of state she was a hawk who backed pretty much every war, bombing, arm shipment, and proxy war America took in that time period, including the drone campaign, the intervention in Libya, the troop surge in Afghanistan, covert actions in Syria, and a large sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, which were later used to devastating effect in Yemen. Libya is an interesting case, as behind the scenes accounts indicate Clinton played a decisive role in convincing Obama to go through with it.
Of course, Clinton and her allies would characterize these actions as pragmatic decisions to safeguard American interests around the globe, defeat terrorists, and spread democracy, and that any unforeseen consequences were despite America’s best intentions, the result of bad intelligence, or because the local populations were not sufficiently eager to accept America’s blessings.
Have you ever read her speech before her Iraq yes-vote?
Her yes vote was complex and nuanced and was predicated on Bushes word he would exhaust all diplomatic resources before entering into a hot war.
He lied. Seriously, read her floor speech if you haven’t already. It may just impact your opinion about that particular position.
She was also a senator from NewYork. I don’t know if you’re from New York, but the folks from NYC probably would have ripped her apart had she not voted yes.
It’s a lot more complicated than “she voted yes for Iraq”.
Hillary Clinton is a better person than Donald Trump. She’s a good person in general. She inspires great loyalty in those close to her and they are very consistent in their accounts of her personal decency.
Her problem has always been simply that she’s a very private person seeking high public office. It was never going to work, because she was never willing to open up to the people who were interviewing her for the big job, nor was she good at faking a persona. Caught between inauthenticity and being bad at faking it, she was probably always doomed to chase the office and never win it.
Now her scandals, most of that comes from Republicans simply taking advantage of her secrecy instinct. Which is why people who don’t want their lives to be an open book shouldn’t run for high office.
Actually, in one respect I’m being too kind. Another very consistent criticism of her by people who know her is how easily she lies. Her husband too. David Geffen during the 2008 campaign put it very accurately. The Clintons just don’t consider lying to be immoral if the cause is good. And the cause was them.
This is the thing: I can think of countless ways in which Clinton was a poor candidate, had character flaws, had disagreeable policy positions and had done morally and ethically questionable things in the past - but by every metric she was better than Trump. Voting for Trump because of Clinton’s flaws was like saying “I’m afraid that dog will bite me, so I’m going to hide in this tiger cage until it goes away.”
Her position was foolish. If you want Bush to exhaust all diplomatic resources before going to war, then you don’t authorize war until all diplomatic resources have been exhausted.
Senator Levin of Michigan proposed an amendment that actually promoted diplomacy: Bush could invade only if the UNSC passed a resolution authorizing it, or if Congress passed a second, “go it alone” resolution if diplomacy failed. Clinton opposed the Levin Amendment.
Oh, so she merely got caught up in a lynch-mob mentality directed at Middle Eastern Muslims, and had to satisfy her constituents’ blood lust? That’s not the sterling defense you seem to think it is.
Not really. She actively facilitated the worst thing the US has done in my lifetime.
For Republicans, Trump was a whole lot more likely to appoint a conservative Supreme Court Justice. From our perspective, that made him better, at least by that metric.