The Voice of Experience

Here's Senator Clinton, as reported by MSNBC, citing her superior experience at the highest levels of government and diplomacy:

On the issue of China, Clinton sought to highlight her days as First Lady as experience. “You know, 12 years ago, I went to China, and the Chinese didn't want me to come,” she said. “And they didn't want me to make a speech. And when I made the speech, they blocked it out from being heard within China, where I stood up for human rights and, in particular, women's rights, because women had been so brutally abused in many settings in China.”

I hope you didn't have to read that twice in order to comprehend that Mrs. Clinton is boasting about having annoyed a foreign power and making a completely impotent gesture. For extra measure, here she boasts of enjoying unconstitutional, unelected, unconfirmed influence in executive counsels:

She added that she “certainly did” advise her husband, Bill Clinton, on China policy. “I not only advised,” she said, “I often met with he and his advisers, both in preparation for, during and after. I traveled with representatives from the Security Council, the State Department, occasionally the Defense Department and even the CIA. So I was deeply involved in being part of the Clinton team, in the first Clinton administration.”

This sounds more like an indictment of the Clinton Presidency than a recommendation for the Senator, and I hope it doesn't make me a sexist to believe that the President's spouse has no more right to advise the chief executive, much less advise his advisers, than any other American citizen. If that offends the sainted ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, so be it. Furthermore, if this quote is correct, Sen. Clinton should be chided for her atrocious, Bushian grammar -- "he and his advisers," indeed.

Now, from the New York Times, another Hillarious utterance from today's debate:

"If we want to listen to the demagogues and the calls for us to being to round up people and turn every American into a suspicious vigilante, I think we will do graver harm to the fabric of our nation than any kind of person-by-person reporting of someone who might be here illegally.”

The subject was the presumptive futility of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, but if you thought the subject might have been the Patriot Act or something to do with the War on Terror, you might be excused. The difference, you see, is that Sen. Clinton voted for the Patriot Act, the main consequence of which tends to be to criminalize dissent from American Middle East policy, while she would not have us inform on actual criminals (like that fact or not) in our midst. Now I concede the logistical difficulty of a universal roundup of illegal immigrants. All I ask from Sen. Clinton and other Democrats is consistency. If Americans ought not to be suspicious vigilantes, then we ought not to be a police state, as the state of war on terror requires of us. Some of the candidates, like Rep. Kucinich, show such consistency, but err on the side of indiscriminate solicitude for immigrants, legal or not. But since this is a Hillary-bashing post, I'll leave the rest for another time.