It’s funny how I see diaries from Hillary supporters (and it’s not just black diarists for those who want to inject race into one thing where it is actually irrelevant as I have seen whites use the same rationale) who use Hillary’s reaffirmation of Obama’s legacy as reason for voting for her. Her supporters of ALL races use that as one of their talking points too and praise her foreign policy acumen. Hillary and her surrogates have taken cheap shots at Bernie Sanders for insulting black people by daring to differ with Obama on some issues as if Bernie was trying to tarnish a black President’s legacy for racial reasons. All her years as NY senator, how many times did Hillary make statementss against the likes of Guiliani for the racist stuff that went on over there with cops shooting unarmed people like Diallo?
One of the biggest reasons why I voted for Obama over Hillary in 2008 was that I trusted Obama’s foreign policy outlook over Hillary’s. Hillary is a tired old politician who has shown a tendency to be more hawkish than needed(maybe to compensate for the stereotype of her gender or her ideology??) . She has shown a comfort level with NY and DC based neocons.
She respects war criminals such as Kissinger, a person who I would have no problem spitting on.
She gets advice from an amoral tool like Mark Penn who, in one of his emails to Hillary, called Obama’s Russian hot-mic moment ‘about the stupidest thing ever said by a president in foreign policy’.
I read a book where it was said that she was frustrated by obama’s inner circle keeping her out of the loop on certain foreign policy discussions and it was pretty much Obama’s inner circle who set the direction on a lot of issues. No wonder she distanced herself from Obama on certain foreign policy issues once she left the position. But now she needs Obama and shamelessly uses his name to get minority votes, even if she probably didn’t need to do it that way as the first couple from the 90s had enough name recognition and quid pro quo favors from democratic leaders in the south to beat Bernie in the primaries over in those states.
Here is a news item which points out other differences Hillary has had with Obama.
In fact, Clinton has frequently disagreed with President Obama’s policies in the Middle East, and embraced a leader who has repeatedly undermined President Obama– Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Bernie Sanders could make political hay with these disagreements, though doing so would entail being more forceful in opposing the use of force against Iran and Syria and calling out Clinton over Netanyahu– positions that Sanders seems reluctant to adopt, maybe because he still wants to acquire political capital among liberal interventionist elites. It’s a lot easier for him to talk about Henry Kissinger and Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war in 2002 than it is to talk about Netanyahu and Syria.
Here’s a list of Hillary Clinton’s disagreements with Obama foreign policy in the Middle East.
In summer 2014 she called Obama’s policy on the Syrian civil war a “failure.” Reuters:
Distancing herself from President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, potential 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said in an interview published on Sunday that the U.S. decision not to intervene early in the Syrian civil war was a “failure.”…
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad – there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle – the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said in an interview with The Atlantic…
At that time, Clinton also took Israel’s side in the Gaza slaughter, thereby distancing herself from the– very mild– criticisms issued by the Obama administration of Israel.
The Obama administration, while supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, has rebuked Israel at least once during the current conflict over the deaths of civilians.
[Clinton said,] “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the (Hamas) rockets. Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command and control facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by Israel difficult.”
Sanders himself said that Israel had “overreacted” in its attack on Gaza that left 2200 dead, including nearly 500 children. But he was reluctant to go much further. In that sense his position was very close to the Obama administration.
At that time, Clinton also knocked Obama’s famous non-interventionist doctrine:
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton said.
As an interventionist hawk, Clinton later called for American ground forces in Syria, in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations last November in which she sharply departed from Obama policy on several occasions.
- See more at: mondoweiss.net/...
I put out a diary where I selected the Obama-Kerry duo as the best recent President-SOS combo and talked about my reservations with Hillary. So this viewpoint has nothing to do with the Bernie race for President.
Oh, and lest anyone forgot, she was part of the moronic vote for the Iraq War and it took her years to admit her mistake.
Feel free to post more links in the comment section and I will add them to the diary. I am tired of Hillary insulting my intellgence with her obvious craven cozying up to the Obama legacy just in time for the debates. How convenient.
Nothing wrong with disagreeing with the President as Sanders himself will say. But don’t be a hypocrite about it , Hillary.