Question
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General Government, Politics & Law
More than 11,000 pages of records of Hillary Clinton's days as first lady are released by the National Archives. The papers show what Clinton's schedule was like during the eight years that she argues help qualify her to be president. The move comes in response to a lawsuit brought by a conservative group.
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OBAMA'S SPEECH by Thomas Sowell (Black, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
Did Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright?
The polls and the primaries will answer that question.
The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it?
Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor Wright said those things from the pulpit, this still leaves the question of why he disinvited Wright from the event at which he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination a year ago.
Either Barack Obama or his staff must have known then that Jeremiah Wright was not someone whom they wanted to expose to the media and to the media scrutiny to which that could lead.
Why not, if it is only now that Senator Obama is learning for the first time, to his surprise, what kinds of things Jeremiah Wright has been saying and doing?
No one had to be in church the day Wright made his inflammatory and obscene remarks to know about them.
The cable news journalists who are playing the tapes of those sermons ...OBAMA'S SPEECH by Thomas Sowell (Black, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
Did Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright?
The polls and the primaries will answer that question.
The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it?
Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor Wright said those things from the pulpit, this still leaves the question of why he disinvited Wright from the event at which he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination a year ago.
Either Barack Obama or his staff must have known then that Jeremiah Wright was not someone whom they wanted to expose to the media and to the media scrutiny to which that could lead.
Why not, if it is only now that Senator Obama is learning for the first time, to his surprise, what kinds of things Jeremiah Wright has been saying and doing?
No one had to be in church the day Wright made his inflammatory and obscene remarks to know about them.
The cable news journalists who are playing the tapes of those sermons were not there. The tapes were on sale in the church itself. Obama knew that because he had bought one or more of those tapes.
But even if there were no tapes, and even if Obama never heard from other members of the church what their pastor was saying, he spent 20 years in that church, not just as an ordinary member but also as someone who once donated $20,000 to the church.
There was no way that he didn't know about Jeremiah Wright's anti-American and racist diatribes from the pulpit.
Someone once said that a con man's job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe.
Accordingly, Obama's Philadelphia speech -- a theatrical masterpiece -- will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now "move on," even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush's 2000 election victory.
Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama's speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the "useful idiots" useful.
Best-selling author Shelby Steele's recent book on Barack Obama ("A Bound Man") has valuable insights into both the man and the circumstances facing many other blacks -- especially those who were never part of the black ghetto culture but who feel a need to identify with it for either personal, political or financial reasons.
Like religious converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, such people often become blacker-than-thou. For whatever reason, Barack Obama chose a black extremist church decades ago -- even though there was no shortage of very different churches, both black and white -- in Chicago.
Some say that he was trying to earn credibility on the ghetto streets, to facilitate his work as a community activist or for his political career. We may never know why.
But now that Barack Obama is running for a presidential nomination, he is doing so on a radically different basis, as a post-racial candidate uniquely prepared to bring us all together.
Yet the past continues to follow him, despite his attempts to bury it and the mainstream media's attempts to ignore it or apologize for it.
Shelby Steele depicts Barack Obama as a man without real convictions, "an iconic figure who neglected to become himself."
Senator Obama has been at his best as an icon, able with his command of words to meet other people's psychic needs, including a need to dispel white guilt by supporting his candidacy.
But President of the United States, in a time of national danger, under a looming threat of nuclear terrorism? No.(less) -
http://www.washingtonpost.com...
Thats the link but i read it from somewhere else. She did what she could but i still don't see where so much of the experience comes in at. -
The Irish Times on Hillary and Northern Ireland
3/12/2008 10:09:32 AM
"David Trimble is reported as saying Senator Hillary Clinton played no part in the Irish peace process. That is not true. Senator Clinton played an important role in the peace process," he said. "I met the senator on many occasions when she was First Lady, and subsequently when she became a senator for New York State. I always found her to be extremely well informed on the issues."
Full story from The Irish Times after the jump.
Obama Campaign Accuses Clinton of Inflating Northern Ireland Role
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have clashed over the former first lady's record in Northern Ireland, with Mr. Obama's campaign claiming that she has exaggerated her part in the peace process.
Throughout the campaign, Mrs. Clinton has frequently identified her role in "helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland" as an important element of her foreign policy experience.
In a memo published yesterday, however, the Obama campaign accused Mrs. Clinton of inflating her role in the North.
"It is a gross overstatement of the facts for her to claim even partial credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland," wrote Greg Craig, a former state department official who is backing Mr. Obama.
"She did travel to Northern Ireland, it is true. First Ladies often travel to places that are a focus of US foreign policy. But at no time did she play any role in the critical negotiations that ultimately produced the peace."
The ...The Irish Times on Hillary and Northern Ireland
3/12/2008 10:09:32 AM
"David Trimble is reported as saying Senator Hillary Clinton played no part in the Irish peace process. That is not true. Senator Clinton played an important role in the peace process," he said. "I met the senator on many occasions when she was First Lady, and subsequently when she became a senator for New York State. I always found her to be extremely well informed on the issues."
Full story from The Irish Times after the jump.
Obama Campaign Accuses Clinton of Inflating Northern Ireland Role
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have clashed over the former first lady's record in Northern Ireland, with Mr. Obama's campaign claiming that she has exaggerated her part in the peace process.
Throughout the campaign, Mrs. Clinton has frequently identified her role in "helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland" as an important element of her foreign policy experience.
In a memo published yesterday, however, the Obama campaign accused Mrs. Clinton of inflating her role in the North.
"It is a gross overstatement of the facts for her to claim even partial credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland," wrote Greg Craig, a former state department official who is backing Mr. Obama.
"She did travel to Northern Ireland, it is true. First Ladies often travel to places that are a focus of US foreign policy. But at no time did she play any role in the critical negotiations that ultimately produced the peace."
The North's former first minister, David Trimble, made a similar assertion in the London Daily Telegraph last week, suggesting that Mrs. Clinton did little more than accompany former president Bill Clinton on visits. "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," he said.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams told The Irish Times that, although he admires all three remaining US presidential candidates and is not endorsing any of them, Mrs. Clinton is justified in claiming a role in the peace process. "David Trimble is reported as saying Senator Hillary Clinton played no part in the Irish peace process. That is not true. Senator Clinton played an important role in the peace process," he said. "I met the senator on many occasions when she was First Lady, and subsequently when she became a senator for New York State. I always found her to be extremely well informed on the issues."
Former SDLP leader John Hume has also come to Mrs. Clinton's defense, expressing surprise that anyone should doubt the importance of her contribution.
"I can state from first-hand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland," he said in a statement posted on Mrs. Clinton's website.
"There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton's support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward."
Mrs. Clinton visited Ireland seven times between 1995 and 2004, both as first lady and as a US senator. The Obama campaign is correct in stating that she played no direct role in the negotiations leading up to the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
She went beyond the traditional, ceremonial duties of first lady, however, particularly in facilitating the engagement of women in the political process by introducing Vital Voices, an international organisation she founded with former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, to the North.
Former senator George Mitchell, who chaired the talks leading up to the 1998 agreement, said this week that he believed that Mrs. Clinton's characterisation of her role was generally accurate. "She was helpful and supportive, very much involved in the issues. She knew all of the delegates," he told CBS News.
"Her greatest focus was on encouraging women in Northern Ireland to get into and stay in the political process and the peace process and as I've said publicly many times and wrote in my book, the role of women in the peace process in Northern Ireland was significant."
Since becoming a US senator, Mrs. Clinton has visited Ireland twice and is one of the most accessible figures on Capitol Hill for visiting Irish politicians. Her staff liaise regularly with Irish and British diplomats in Washington on Northern Irish issues and maintain contacts with all the parties in the North.
When they visited Washington last year, First Minister Ian Paisley and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness met Mrs. Clinton for an hour to discuss economic investment in the North.
Dr Paisley said he appreciated the sacrifice Mrs. Clinton was making in taking time out of her presidential campaign, which was already intense a few weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses.
"We are old hands at electioneering. We know what it takes," Dr Paisley said. "Here you are losing money today by talking to a Ballymena man and a Londonderry man."
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The Washington Post: "First Lady Brings Publicity, Aid to Macedonia:" First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first high-ranking American to visit here since the Kosovo crisis began, brought two messages to Macedonia today. Touring a refugee camp of 18,000 people, Clinton urged Americans not to become "immune" to the plight of more than 740,000 Kosovo Albanians expelled from their homeland since NATO began its air war against Yugoslavia on March 24. "We are trying to do everything possible to make these lives and stories real, not to let them fade into the background," she said… And she soothed the irritated government of Macedonia, which has taken in the refugees only reluctantly and at the price of more foreign aid. Clinton today added another $ 2 million to the pot -- the first installment of a $ 21 million reallocation of funds for Macedonia… Even as Clinton toured the camp, a few refugees were entering Macedonia from Kosovo. For 10 days, almost no one has crossed the frontier -- initially because Macedonian border guards were blocking refugees, then because Serbian authorities were not allowing them to leave… After her camp tour, Clinton met with Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, parliamentary president Savo Klimovski and local aid officials, and her message could not have been more straightforward: "I want to clearly express our appreciation to the government of Macedonia for the efforts they have made. It has been an incredible burden on Macedonia." [Washington Post, 5/15/99]
Hillary met with Macedonian officials 'trying to diffuse any anti-American sentiment and to bolster Macedonia's fragile coalition government. "Hillary Rodham Clinton swept through Macedonia on Friday on a visit that illustrated the Clinton administration's continuing struggle to balance the diverse strands of its Kosovo policy…Ethnic Macedonians, who make up roughly two-thirds of this country's population, generally oppose NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. They also fear that if ethnic Albanians -- who made up roughly one-third of Macedonia's population before the crisis -- continue to pour in from Kosovo, Macedonians will be reduced to a minority in their own country. So although Clinton spent the morning addressing the suffering of the refugees, she spent the rest of the day trying to defuse any anti-American sentiment and to bolster Macedonia's fragile coalition government, a mix of Macedonian and Albanian parties." [Austin American-Statesman, 5/15/99]
Hillary met with the Macedonian President and Prime Minister offering an economic development package. (Hillary) "Clinton heard her story Friday morning on her trip to Macedonia, which was aimed at highlighting the plight of ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo and assuring the poor Balkan nation that the United States understands the stress the influx has placed on it. Aid officials say Macedonia has taken about 233,000 of the nearly 800,000 refugees. Clinton met with Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov and Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski. She announced the release of the first $ 2 million in a $ 21 million economic development package for Macedonia that is designed to help the fledgling democracy create new small businesses." [Chicago Tribune, 5/16/99]
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What have they got to do with my posts concrning her experiences in foreign affairs? I just got in from work. If they were released, I haven't seen them yet, but don't really care, because I knew her as First Lady and saw and heard her then. I don't need any convincing.
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Answered Yes. It will show her true experience as first lady.
Hillary Clinton is relying at least in part on her experience as first lady in saying she is the most prepared candidate to be president. I don't see anything wrong in taking a look at what she actually did during that time so that we can judge whether it is or is not presidential preparation. I don't get to put my husband's job experience on my resume, so Clinton needs to be able to stand on what she actually did. People who might "judge her for not controlling her marriage" (I guess because she should have been home in the kitchen?) have already made up their minds about not supporting her anyway. -
Answered Yes. It will show her true experience as first lady.
Hillary Clinton is relying at least in part on her experience as first lady in saying she is the most prepared candidate to be president. I don't see anything wrong in taking a look at what she actually did during that time so that we can judge whether it is or is not presidential preparation. I don't get to put my husband's job experience on my resume, so Clinton needs to be able to stand on what she actually did. People who might "judge her for not controlling her marriage" (I guess because she should have been home in the kitchen?) have already made up their minds about not supporting her anyway.