Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Hillary Clinton’s lack of a position on the Iran deal is proof of her courage deficit according to Jennifer Rubin.
… This is the calculated careerism for which she is famous. Timid when the stakes are high (e.g., she was mum on gay marriage until even Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman made known his support), she has never been one to carve her own intellectual or political space. She was a dutiful senator with no particular achievement. She was a secretary of state with oodles of frequent flyer miles but no doctrine or accomplishment. Like so many celebrities famous for being famous, she is presidential only by virtue of racking up items to put on her resume and coveting the presidency. Perhaps it is time she earned the presidency through political courage or imaginative policy.
In refusing to make known her views on this, as on the Syria debacle, she is trying to deprive critics of later criticizing a misstep. But in fact the misstep is having uppermost in her mind only the zeal for public office. She has her own foreign debacles to deal with (e.g, Benghazi, siding with Hugo Chavez’s stooge in Honduras and the Russian reset). Add to those her reticence on the most important national security issue in decades and you have a 2016 contender who, like the 2008 Hillary, is more a gender symbol than a leader. Perhaps that is why she is beatable by a charismatic and/or truly accomplished competitor.
Seth Mandel posts on the faint praise that the Dems damn Hillary with.
Though it’s probably not intended this way, Politico Magazine editor Susan Glasser’s verdict on Hillary Clinton’s legacy as secretary of state is revealed before readers get to the first sentence. The headline of the piece is, naturally: “Was Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State?” But the subheadline gives it away: “And does it matter?” Thus, the article seems to be making excuses for Clinton before even revealing what must be excused.
The problem for Clinton is that she has a sympathetic judge in Glasser, who penned a Foreign Policy cover profile of Clinton last year that was celebratory despite not having much to celebrate. Yet when Glasser asks around the foreign-policy community about Clinton’s accomplishments at State, those on the left side of the political isle seem to all bypass the question itself and move right onto why she had no accomplishments. You have to wonder what the answers would be if Clinton weren’t presumed to be the next Democratic nominee for president. …
Daniel Greenfield posts on all the awards given to H. Clinton. Greenfield goes on a liitle too long, but it’s still fun.
Hardly a week goes by without Hillary Clinton receiving another award.
Last month she was named a “Global Champion” by the International Medical Corps at a gala Beverly Hills event crowded with celebrities, received the American Patriot Award at the National Defense University Foundation in the Ronald Reagan Building and the Hermandad Award from the Mexican American Leadership Initiative.
Considering that Hillary Clinton is as much of an American patriot as is she is a Mexican-American leader… both awards seem equally deserved.
Hillary was honored by Malaria No More for taking the controversial position of being against malaria and by the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice for supporting internet freedom. Because nothing says a deep commitment to internet freedom like sending a man to jail for a year over a YouTube video that offended Muslims.
The President of Georgia (the one in the Caucasus) honored her with the Order of the Golden Fleece. That’s considered a high honor in Georgia, but back in the United States it just reminds everyone of Whitewater and the Rose Law Firm.
The Queen of Spain gave Hillary Clinton and Antonio Banderas gold medals and Oceana honored her for saving the oceans. And that was a slow month after Yale Law School gave her its Award of Merit, Chatham House gave her a prize and Citizens for Research in Epilepsy honored her for taking a courageous stand by opposing epilepsy.
The American Bar Association had already given Hillary its highest honor for “her immense accomplishments as a lawyer”. The National Constitution Center awarded her the Liberty Medal (an honor she shares with such Constitutional scholars as Bono, Hamid Karzai and her husband) and Elton John gave her an award for fighting AIDS declaring himself “honoured to honour her”.
(If you’re keeping track, Hillary has come out against malaria, epilepsy and AIDS. No word on her position on shingles—but reportedly she’s against it.) …
… The more you listen to Hillary, the more you realize that she doesn’t have ideas, she has cliches. String together a bunch of cliches and you have a Hillary speech. String together a bunch of Hillary speeches and you have a candidacy that is as empty as it is inevitable. Hillary isn’t even Chauncey Gardiner. Her cliches lack even accidental poetry. Instead they’re as empty as she is.
What does Hillary stand for? A casual observer would be forgiven for assuming that she stands for nothing. After eight years in the senate, the only thing about her time there that anyone bothers to mention is her vote on the Iraq War. That’s because there isn’t anything to mention.
If Hillary had not accidentally taken what would become a controversial position, while trying to cast a safe vote, all that anyone would remember about her time in the Senate is that she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for “opening new pathways for women in leadership”.
That was quite an accomplishment considering that she was the 32nd female senator. …
… Hillary is obsessed with winning and certain that she will lose. Everything she has done throughout the years was calculated to make defeat as unlikely as possible… including taking the position of Secretary of State while doing as little as possible in that role. Instead of inspiring people, she has built up a bulletproof resume while taking as few risks as possible. And that insecurity may be her undoing.
For 13 years, Hillary has done little except abuse public office to map out her future presidential run. By the time the election actually takes place, she will have spent nearly two decades or a third of her adult life focused on running for president.
At the Benghazi hearings, Hillary famously demanded to know what difference it made. The same can be said of her life.
Jennifer Rubin also posts on Hillary’s baggage.
Hillary Clinton may be the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but she’s going to have to deal with some knotty problems sooner or later. She can’t ignore forever either her party or the media’s entreaties to talk on important subjects.
The first problem surely is health care. President Obama won’t allow it to be repealed, so the Affordable Care Act will be hanging there, damaged and disliked for Clinton to address. Will she throw it and her former boss overboard, call for a single-payer plan as a sop to the left and risk scaring off the electorate in Nov. 2016?
It’s not like the problem is going to go away. According to one poll, a majority of young people think the law will be repealed — next year. You can bet these people won’t bother to sign up for a program they consider a goner. Couple that with news reports of scamming and a 10 percent error rate and the incentive for the millions who must sign up to make the scheme work pretty much vanishes. Obamacare threatens to hang over Clinton’s campaign like low-hanging fog. Frankly, before long she may be begging Obama to get rid of it so she doesn’t have to deal with it. (It won’t help that Obamacare closely resembled the health-care plan she ran on in 2008.)
The other problem is her record at the State Department. It is supposed to qualify her for the presidency. Instead it’s becoming a burden. …
The Atlantic has a look at higher education done right.
LaGuardia Community College is a GED machine. At this urban school, near the Long Island Expressway in the New York City borough of Queens, the prep courses for the state’s high school equivalency exam aren’t just textbook reviews—they are professional-development classes. There is a course for would-be health workers, another for business students, and yet another for anyone interested in technology and engineering.
LaGuardia’s free classes, funded by state, city, and foundation grants, have a months-long waiting list. Students willing to pay for courses (at about $3.50 per hour of instruction) can usually get a spot in the next scheduled class, although those fill up, too. Most students are black or Latino.
Gail Mellow, LaGuardia’s president, says postsecondary educators who don’t reach out to high school dropouts are ignoring many of the young people who most need their help. In big cities such as New York, almost 40 percent of students who enter high school don’t finish. “To really educate the American populace,” she says, “we cannot forget people who did not graduate from high school.” …