Hillary's Felony? - It's the security clearance!
Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 10:45:48 AM PDT
I made the mistake of posting this in the middle of the night over Easter weekend, when the thought came to me, and one of the comments suggested I repost it when people are awake, so here goes -
Hillary has staked much of her campaign on the claim that she is better able to answer the phone at 3 am -- and has passed the "commander in chief threshold" -- because of her experience working with Bill at the White House. There can be no question that this is a lie, or that Bill and Hillary committed repeated felonies in the White House in violation of this nation's secrecy laws. They have a choice here, and either answer kills her campaign for the White House, but we've been too distracted by all the media circus to ask the right question.
Bottom line, it has been repeatedly reported that Hillary never had a security clearance during her White House years. www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/us/politics/26clinton.html ("But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance.") This is the fatal flaw that puts the lie to all of Hillary's claims of foreign policy experience that supposedly enables her to know how to answer that phone.
Anyone with government experience knows that, without a security clearance, you are essentially disqualified from any serious responsibilty in this nation' s foreign policy apparatus. Folks should remember that, during the McCarthy years, the route of attack often was to get a target's security clearance revoked, and their career would be automatically over. And, more recently, Paul Wolfowitz helped his "companion," a foreign national, get a security clearance because "she had to receive a security clearance to work at the State Department." www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/04/19/wolfowitz/
What does this mean? Simply, that Hillary never had legal access to any of the incredibly voluninous information this nation generates that is designated 'confidential', 'secret', 'top secret,' etc., without which no informed foreign policy judgment is possible. If she did, she and Bill were violating this country's security laws. Don't think she and Bill want to admit that, do you?
It's about time that the media and the web community pressed Hillary and her campaign on exactly how she could have earned any foreign policy experience that qualifies her to be commander-in-chief, when she didn't have the security clearance without which it is impossible to function as even a low foreign policy functionary. It doesn't add up.
Instead, the false (or, if we're charitable, incredibly stretched) claim is consistent with Hillary's claims to be dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, when instead she was being greeted on the tarmac by a young child declaring a
state of peace.
BTW, there is also nothing inconsistent with the fact that Hillary did have a prominent role in the failed healthcare initiative. Last time I looked, domestic health care policy, unlike foreign policy, doesn't require access to classified material such as CIA analyses (which Hillary didn't even bother to read once she got to the Senate and presumably finally got her clearance).
This is not a detail. Do we want another President who doesn't live in the reality based community, but just makes it up to fit the politics of the moment. It's up to us, and the media.
Hillary needs to be pressed hard on this. How, madam senator, did you gain the "3 am" experience during your White House years as First Lady, if you didn't even have the security clearance a state department clerk needs to keep his or her job? It doesn't add up, and it's time to put this particularly brazen lie -- on which her entire campain of 'experience' is founded -- to the test. What's your answer maam?
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