Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Hitchens on Hillary's Moral Perfidy.

Christopher Hitchens reminds us of the full extent of consummate opportunist and serial liar Hillary Clinton:
Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?

Of course, Christopher is referring to Clinton's 1992 campaign promise to end the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, a pledge that was over-ruled by Hillary because she thought this would affect her health-care initiative. By the time she reached the airport four years later, 250 thousand Bosnians had been "cleansed."
In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:

Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

Hitchens keeps walking down his own memory lane, and remembers alleged wife-beater and recent DWI offender Sidney Blumenthal spreading his own atrabilious spin on the situation, along with an anecdote from the Secretary of Defense:
I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care "initiative."

It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.

Hillary, like her obnoxious spouse Billy Jeff, has no self-knowledge or moral courage. It's always all about her.

Thankfully, the landing at Tuzla has been recorded and the YouTube version watched millions of times displaying HRC and her homely daughter being greeted by a young woman in pigtails, without any attendant gunfire or sense of urgency whatsoever.

Along with the Clintons, we should all resolve that drunken driver Sidney Blumenthal should never work in or near the Whtie House again. Even if it means, God forfend, another Democrat in the Oval Office.

But McCain would have the integrity and grit that is sorely lacking in the Clinton moral makeup. Health care for Americans is not worth a quarter million lives of any foreign ethnic group. [Of course, her headstrong incompetence did not allow for US healthcare to get out of the starting gate.]

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