Witness the recent stir over Clinton’s ill-advised interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a colloquy quickly cartoonized into a rebuke of President Obama that never actually happened.
For now, the only important thing is to recognize how these media quasi-events take shape. Guided by Goldberg, headline writers focused on a throwaway line characterized by the inimitable Maureen Dowd as “a cheap shot at President Obama … calling him a wimp just as he was preparing to order airstrikes against ISIS.”
Clinton said this: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
Actually, President Obama’s version of the slogan was earthier. However, turning Hillary’s paraphrase into an insult required ignoring almost everything she said about his administration’s foreign policy.
Why had Obama used the phrase?
”I think he was trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy,” Clinton said. “I’ve sat in too many rooms with the president. He’s thoughtful; he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to pull us out of the hole we’re in. So I think that that’s a political message.”
Does that sound like a slam to you?
Elsewhere, Clinton added, “It was stupid to do what we did in Iraq and to have no plan about what to do after we did it. That was really stupid.”
She’d voted for the Iraq war, you may recall. Dowd certainly remembered. The erratic New York Times columnist bitterly blamed Hillary for the death of her friend Michael Kelly, the first “embedded” journalist to die there. Dowd neglected to mention Kelly’s own September 2002 column calling Al Gore “wretched,” “vile,” ”contemptible” and worse for opposing the invasion.
I guess she forgot.
But did Hillary really argue that if Obama had armed Syrian “moderates” as she’d recommended as secretary of state, that the United States wouldn’t have to be bombing ISIS fanatics in Iraq today — blowing our own tanks and APCs to smithereens that they captured from fleeing Iraqi soldiers?
That was another headline take from The Atlantic interview. Once again, no, she did not.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/29400780-452/media-wont-wait-until-2016-to-lie-about-hillary.html#.U_qXm_mwJcQ
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