So says Jack Shafer. The question is, if the leaks have really compromised her to the point that she can no longer be effective as SecState, is she still a viable presidential candidate?
16 thoughts on “Hillary Must Step Down”
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So says Jack Shafer. The question is, if the leaks have really compromised her to the point that she can no longer be effective as SecState, is she still a viable presidential candidate?
Comments are closed.
She’s a Democrat. That means prior missteps do not predict future incompetence.
If she were a Republican, of course, she would be declared non-viable by definition, regardless of track record.
That’s very interesting. Various folks have been asking Why didn’t the Obama Administration DO something about those WikiLeaks people a bit more effective than sending them a stern letter?
It could well be that this is why: to neutralize Hillary Clinton as a possible primary challenger for Obama in 2012. She needs to make the decision whether to primary Obama in the next 2-3 months. If she sustains a moderate amount of damage through the WikiLeaks “scandal” then she will probably decide not to, given the steep odds against defeating a sitting President in the primary already.
Score one for Team Obama. The one thing they do know how to do is play hardball politics.
Yes, Carl, like a virus, they’re really good at one thing.
That’s very interesting. Various folks have been asking Why didn’t the Obama Administration DO something about those WikiLeaks people a bit more effective than sending them a stern letter?
Another possibility is that the previous leaks only embarrassed the military and the Bush administration. This new set of leaks embarrasses the Obama administration and the State Department. That will not do.
The other question is, what were they supposed to do, in the “why didn’t they do something to stop this embarrassment” case?
Assassination? I sincerely hope not.
(Not that killing Assange would have stopped anything, either.
Plus it’d be far more wicked than anything revealed in the cables. That’s like killing a man for threatening to tell people you farted in church…)
Take them offline? Delaying tactic at best, since it’s trivial to distribute data in a way that can’t be stopped, even by a government, short of disconnecting the US from the Internet (which is an obvious non-starter).
Apart from rule of law and appropriate reaction questions, it’s not like they really could have used anything other than stern words.
(Then again, it’s kinda precious for people to imagine that “diplomats spying on diplomats” is actually a scandal. It takes an odd sort of naivete to imagine that that’s not exactly how everyone always expects it to work, because that’s exactly how it always works and always has worked.
The only difference appears to be that nobody can even pretend it doesn’t happen – but nobody serious ever believed it didn’t anyway.)
So far, apart from embarrassment before the utterly naive, I haven’t heard anything surprising at all in these cables. My reaction was much the one reported via Samizdata from the Telegraph.
These leaks were hardly something the US needed to run scared from, so far, at least.
I think the embarrassment factor is the worst part. The Secretary of State got caught asking for biometric data from world leaders. Clinton is just lucky she didn’t ask for a stool sample. Someone might give it to her next time she comes for a visit.
And of course, it really helps the US credibility to read confidential quotes from heads of state on the internet.
The other question is, what were they supposed to do, in the “why didn’t they do something to stop this embarrassment” case?
Assassination? I sincerely hope not.
Via HotAir, there’s this:
American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, outraged by their inability to stop WikiLeaks and its release this week of hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, are convinced that the whistle-blowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: The Russian government.
National security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.
“We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it’s been frustrating,” a U.S. law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. “The Russians play by different rules.” He said that if WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, follow through on threats to post highly embarrassing information about the Russian government and what is assumed to be massive corruption among its leaders, “the Russians will be ruthless in stopping WikiLeaks.”
Heh.
I think the embarrassment factor is the worst part. The Secretary of State got caught asking for biometric data from world leaders. Clinton is just lucky she didn’t ask for a stool sample. Someone might give one to her next time she comes for a visit.
And of course, it really helps the US credibility to read confidential quotes from heads of state on the internet.
Assassination? I sincerely hope not.
Oh give me a break. You don’t play power chess on the international level by Marquess of Queensbury rules. Not if you want to win.
Sure, if necessary, kill the man. Kill as many of his followers and helpers as is necessary, too. (Important lesson there: don’t stand next to the guy who paints a big target on his chest. Useful for the future.) Destroy the computers, ruin the ISPs, whatever it takes.
Personally, I don’t know that it’s necessary. There are probably lots of more creative solutions, e.g. a little well-poisoning, slipping a bunch of poison in the stream once you know where it’s going. Indeed, for all I know, this is going on. My main point is: do not assume that Team Obama is as “helpless” as they would have you believe. I suspect they were relatively cool with this happening. I’d be interested to know why, and I put out my first hypothesis above.
“Sure, if necessary, kill the man. Kill as many of his followers and helpers as is necessary, too. (Important lesson there: don’t stand next to the guy who paints a big target on his chest. Useful for the future.) Destroy the computers, ruin the ISPs, whatever it takes.”
It works best though if there no fingerprints. When you’re so clever that everyone knows you did it but no one can prove it, that’s when people leave you alone.
Carl, Glenn Beck was definitely not saying the other day that Soros and the Open Society Institute were behind, or at least funding, WikiLeaks.
Given that rumour has it that George is not best pleased with Obama, where does that leave the Hillary theory.
Maybe the plan is to kill two birds with one stone.
Eh, McG, I dunno. So what if there are fingerprints, hmm? Why would the President care, so long as it’s heartily approved by the American voters?
Let there be as many Libyan-authored resolutions of condemnation in the UN as amuses that body of solemn fools. Let stern denunciations flow from the usual sources. That and $5 will buy you a fancy coffee at Starbucks on the way to the Oval Office on a frosty January 20 morning, ha ha.
Kevin, Occam’s Rule of Paranoid Suspicions is that we should keep the number and presumed intelligence of members in the suspected conspiracy as small as possible. I’m just suggesting that when Team Obama sifted through what was in the WikiLeaks pipeline after the last release, they noticed that the only person to be really roughed up would be Hillary Clinton, and then they sat back, smoked a cig or two, stared up at the ceiling and smiled slyly at each other. Oh dear! I think our hands are tied here, aren’t they? Not much we can do aside from issue a very strong protest, and threaten to prosecute those bad people within a very inch of their lives. If we ever catch them, of course. Tee hee!
Actually a great solution to the problem of one living Julian Assange would be for him to be killed by an outraged father or brother of one of the women he is supposed to have raped.
What do you mean there aren’t any outraged fathers or brothers in this picture? *does not compute*
He is a spy without diplomatic cover. That make him fair game. Let him be captured and imprisoned until the government he works for makes a deal for him. What? No government claims him? I guess he’ll just have to wait until one does.
Yours,
Tom
Are we talking about this president, or a hypothetical one who’s actually qualified to hold the office?
If we’re talking about this president, why would he care if the American voters approve? What he wants is the approval of his peers, all of whom are his fellow thugocrats at the UN.
I was talking about Presidents in general, Mac.
Now whether this President cares what the voters think in 2012 is an interesting and tricky problem which I suspect is NP-complete.