2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Once the dust settles... [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)But I will repeat that I will vote for every Democrat on my ballot except Hillary should she win the primary.
I do not want a vote for Hillary on my conscience.
Here is an issue that troubles me greatly:
Hillary's relationship with Henry Kissinger and her embrace of his foreign policy theories.
Hillary Clinton often plays the hawk card: She voted for the Iraq war, dissed President Barack Obama for not being tough enough on Syria, and compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. This is to be expected from a politician who has angled for a certain title: the first female president of the United States. Whether her muscular views are sincerely held or not, a conventional political calculation would lead her to assume it may be difficult for many voters to elect as commander-in-chief a woman who did not project an aggressive and assertive stance on foreign policy. So her tough talk might be charitably evaluated in such a (somewhat) forgiving context. Yet what remains more puzzling and alarming is the big wet kiss she planted (rhetorically) on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger this week, with a fawning review of his latest book, World Order.
Sure, perhaps there is secretary's privilegean old boy and girls club, in which the ex-foreign-policy chiefs do not speak ill of each other and try to help out the person presently in the post. Nothing wrong with that. But former-Madam Secretary Clinton had no obligation to praise Kissinger and publicly participate in his decades-long mission to rehabilitate his image. In the review, she calls Kissinger a "friend" and reports, "I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels." She does add that she and Henry "have often seen the world and some of our challenges quite differently, and advocated different responses now and in the past." But here's the kicker: At the end of the review, she notes that Kissinger is "surprisingly idealistic":
Even when there are tensions between our values and other objectives, America, he reminds us, succeeds by standing up for our values, not shirking them, and leads by engaging peoples and societies, the sources of legitimacy, not governments alone.
Kissinger reminds us that America succeeds by standing up for its values? Did she inhale?
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/hillary-clinton-henry-kissinger-world-order
I had to read one of Kissinger's first books way back in a college class in the 1960s. It nauseated me then, and I do not understand why, after all the failures and bad situations we got into, after all the damage to our national reputation due to the adventures that he counseled, he is still listened to.
And above all, why is Hillary such an admirer?
Argentina anyone?
Guatemala?
Cambodia?
Johnson's peace talks with the Vietnamese?
How many lives would have been saved if Johnson had been able to negotiate peace with Viet Nam in 1968 without the interference and meddling of Kissinger?
And that is just one of the problems I have with Hillary's policy stances.
It's not about Hillary for me.
It's about Hillary's weak and far too right-wing for my tastes stances on the issues that are the problem.
I want Bernie to be our next president. Nothing less will do.