Six weeks into the job, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is starting to roll out the Obama administration’s approach to the most prickly foreign policy challenges from Arab-Israeli peace to Russia.
In her second foreign trip, which ended early on Sunday, Clinton dipped into Middle East peacemaking and promised to work for a “comprehensive” Arab-Israeli peace. She tried to charm European institutions in Brussels and literally hit the “reset” button in strained U.S.-Russia ties during a dinner with Moscow’s foreign minister in Geneva, and then went to Turkey.
Clinton also took first steps to deal directly with traditional enemies, “testing the waters,” she said, of a campaign promise of President Barack Obama to engage rather than isolate protagonists as the Bush administration had done.
In Israel, Clinton announced two U.S. envoys would be in Syria this weekend to explore better ties and as part of a U.S. bid to get a more comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.
While at NATO headquarters in Brussels, she made the new administration’s first public overtures toward Iran by inviting Tehran to a conference on Afghanistan, possibly at the end of this month.
Right.
Let’s invite the Ayatollah’s pet crocodile and his murderous hench-persons to the table to talk about peace. Which of the two groups the crocs divide the rest of us into, do you suppose Hillary belongs? Will they simply kill her, or kill her and eat her?
And better ties with Syria? Will somebody please explain to me why we would want that? Syria has NEVER had any interest in peace with the West. Why would anyone actually believe they have suddenly come to Jesus?
She was criticized by Palestinians for not being tough on Israel . . .
Of course she was. I mean, heck, She’s an AMERICAN!
But in Israel, where hawkish prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to form a government, Clinton faced a tougher challenge in trying to push for Palestinian statehood, which Netanyahu opposes.
I expect Netanyahu is none too enamored of Clinton’s badgering interference in his attempts to form a government under crisis conditions that make ours look like ripples on the waters.
At an aid conference for Gaza in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, she continued the Bush administration’s harsh language over Hamas, saying not one dime of a U.S. aid pledge of $900 million would go to the militant group that runs Gaza.
Great. Nothing wrong with that, on its face. However,
Clinton’s rhetoric on Hamas was so similar to that of her predecessor Condoleezza Rice that the Palestinian newspaper al Quds ran a story with the headline “Condoleezza Clinton.”
I think that here is where the rubber meets the road. Clinton is no Condoleezza Rice. Doctor Rice had a handle on the issues, and also had the respect of both Israel and a grudging Hamas. It is quite evident that Clinton not only does NOT have that respect, but, having struggled to do so during her husband’s administration, has demonstrated to us that she still can’t find the handle.
Probably, to qualify for what she is failing miserably at doing now, she should have paid more attention to her Political Science classes at Wellesley, than to her initiation into Wellesley’s Alternative Sexual Orientation indoctrination.
Put the mail on, Hillary. Before the crocodiles decide we’re all like you.
Best,
Chuck
At first I thought you were describing OUR foreign policy for the last eight years!
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p>Demonizing nations with whom we have disagreements as subhuman is so childishly Bushian. I’m not surprised you would find your “simile” “appropriate” or some version of “reality,” given your political leanings, but in no way would “most sentient people” “agree.” Indeed, most sentient people recognize name-calling as a form of insult that is counterproductive and arrogant, the last stronghold of the intellectually bankrupt. People have rejected the “evil-doers” and the “axis of evil” rhetoric that characerized the Bush administration’s efforts of diplomacy. That sort of thing is so 90s.
The NATIONS mentioned are populated with peoples as oppressed as any in history. Uh, by their governments, which is what I’m demonizing, lightiris. Can you, with a straight face, tell me that the preponderance of behaviors by Kil Il Jung’s government have brought prosperity, benefit and freedom to the peoople of North Korea?
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p>Best,
Chuck
and his hench-persons rever to the government of Iran, not to its oppressed people.
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p>Best,
Chuck
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p>Your question is irrelevant, as no one has made such a claim. I will claim this, however: you from your Barcalounger and Bush from his White House will never bring “prosperity, benefit and freedom to the peoople of North Korea” by indulging your inner playground bully and calling these people names. Grow up.
I don’t speak the secret wingnut language so I’m not sure if this point is even expressible within it.
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p>Looking at foreign affairs as if it were game theory, Bush’s bullying (e.g., the Axis of Evil) basically had this message for creepy countries:
This had precisely the predicted effect.
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p>Had neo-conservatives remained in office longer, we would have seen nuclear tests from these guys.
the P.S.:
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p>
Do you think all strong women are lesbians or just the ones you disagree with?
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p>I really do wish there was an “unrecommend” button.
Unfortunately, you fell into the chasm of misinterpretation. My post does not imply that Hillary is a lesbian. But for an education on how the experience impacted her, go read her autobiography, and the biographies others have written about her.
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p>Best,
Chuck
Cause, gosh, it certainly seemed to be your implication.
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p>Maybe you’d be better served by a metaphor involving snakes… Or did they invoke the snake 11th commandment to stop you referencing them?
This is a stupid diary delivered in a tone of intellectual superiority. Given the diary’s topic, the praise lavished on Condoleezza Rice is particularly ironic: If Bush has achieved anything in the Middle East, it has not been to “establish a democracy” there. It has been to hand the “crocodile” an ally. At the center of Iraq’s current government are men whose connection and proximity to Iran goes back decades.
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p>From the stupid point of view advocated by Sec. Rice and our diarist, it’s okay to help the crocodiles in a big way just provided you don’t talk to them.
As for metaphors, we have a regression. The Bush Administration portrayed everything as a comic book.
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p>Here we have a children’s book about zoo animals.
Crocodiles are not wanton killers….they are predators, true, but not animals that kill for fun.
“Crocodiles are not wanton killers”
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p>Feed one until it is sated. Then, go frolic in the water with it.
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p>I will wait here for you.
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p>Best,
Chuck
No. I didn’t think so. Just joking with you. As a matter of fact, I watched the translation blunder on Russian Channel One and she handled herself very, very well and made the best out of an embarrassing situation. I’ll give her credit where due.
“I’ll give her credit where due.”
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p>Hillary is a brilliant legal mind, one of the sharpest in the country. While I disagree with her interpretations of the consdtitution, and the domestic programs she would implement based on those interpretations, I have respect and admiration for her intellect and approach to solving problems as she sees them.
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p>But domestic is the operative word here. IMHO, Hillary is a fish out of water in her current role, into which she was quite obviously placed to undercut her potential as a Barack Obama political adversary in the 2012 elections.
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p>Best,
Chuck
As an adjective, means slow-witted, dazed. It would seem that stupid intellectual superiority would be oxymoronic . . .
Lots of elementary school children, you know the type that read scary stories about crocodiles, speak in a tone of remarkable intellectual superiority as if they knew absolutely everything.
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p>This can be charming in a child. In an adult, it is stupid intellectual superiority.
So much rancor, so little time . . .
You apparently have time enough to write an enormous diary that was nothing more than a snark magnet.
why the obsession?
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p>will i be seeing you in olympia on march 19th (anti-equality lobby day)?
I don’t have time to attend such nonsense.
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p>And my post did not deal with homosexuality, other than the oblique reference to Hillary’s Wellesley indoctrination, with an implication as to its impact on her. Perhaps you can go in my stead . . .
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p>Best,
Chuck
“Wellesley indoctrination”: No one here, chimpschump, thinks your use of this term reflects badly on Hillary. It’s as if you expect everyone to be speaking the secret wingnut language.
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p>We don’t. We think it is idiotic.
intellectual superiority, KBusch, you can provide kinder, gentler language to describe Wellesley Indoctrination. Which is preciesly what it was. Calling a spade a frigging shovel doesn’t change it in the slightest.
where were you indoctrinated, Chump?
In the School of Hard Knocks, Division of Applied Psychology, which was operated by Grandfather Home for Children, Avery County, North Carolina. It was an orphanage at the time. Not having the wherewithal to attend an exclusive school, I entered the US Navy instead. It took me nine years to earn my first undergrad degree, thirteen to earn my first Master’s.
an enriched curriculum of freeper-style neoconservatism and rabid homophobic crackpottery can be had wearing nothing but boxer shorts, socks, and a coating of Lays potato chip crumbs in the privacy of one’s home.
Are we Cylons???
black socks with a hole in the left heel, boxers a shade of otherworldly grey, and Lays crumbs a little green around the edges, just to complete the palette. I’m certain, too, those crumbs are kinda tangled and stuck in the thigh hair….
You’re both catering to your inner playground bullys . . .
Perhaps then what you’ve just experienced is an object lesson in the futility of bullying?
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p>I concede that my behavior towards you in this exchange would qualify as bullying. You also demonstrate clearly that my bully you neither convinces you to conform to my wishes and nor reveals the “high road” of my thinking.
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p>So the lesson is this: bullying behavior by both nations and individuals is unproductive.
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p>Thanks for illustrating my point so vividly and succinctly.
You forgot the dirty T-shirt, lightiris . . .
I’m sure I could rewrite every diary offered by chimpschump and produce something tighter, easier to read, and more convincing. JohnD has this problem, too. Neither knows what to leave out.
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p>Just look at the first two paragraphs. The olive branches and the mailed fists, the two hundred years and Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy, the need to say both base and belligerent, it’s all extra crap. No good writer would leave it in an essay.
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p>Further, if you are writing to an ideologically hostile audience, you don’t lard your material with extra controversy. You choose one battle. You marshal a lot of evidence. You set out to win that one battle.
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p>Instead, this essay leaves one questions like:
I suppose it would be too much for you to site sources for your fantasies, day dreams, and talks with your stuffed crocodile.
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p>What Wellesley indoctrination?
foam at the mouth and overwork the adjective ‘stupid,’ go read Ed Klien’s book.
Your source is a gossipy, widely discredited book brimming with factual inaccuracies.
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p>’Nuff said.