Hillary Clinton may have been across the commander in chief threshold, but she isn’t any more.
Perhaps the biggest single problem with America for the past 6-7 years is this: We have a Commander in Chief that cannot be trusted.
Any experience Senator Clinton accumulated over the years that would occasion her to meet that standard of her own invention, the “commander in chief threshold”, has been cancelled by her fabricated story, as puerile as it was brazen, of a sniper dodging heroic plunge into a war zone.
When President Bush said of the authorization to use force, “it’s not a vote for war, it’s a vote to keep the peace”, it was a lie. We know he lied because of the Downing Street memo, comments by the President of Spain, intelligence cherry-picking, and common sense.
When the President said the United States doesn’t torture, that was a lie.
The result of these deceptions, and others, is a President who lost the trust of the American people, countless top military officials, and our foreign allies.
So too, now, has Senator Clinton lost that trust, or any ability to develop it, assuming, for sake of argument, it existed in the first place, or could have been cultivated.
John McCain may be a confused old man, but he’s a war hero that was wounded in combat and endured tortuous years as a prisoner of war.
Even some far-left progressives like myself who disagree with Senator McCain’s presumption that the occupation in Iraq can be distilled to a simple binary choice of “win” or “surrender”, don’t think he is a liar. I think he’s a fool for what he says, but I at least believe he believes it.
So now we are presented with an opportunity to elect a new President. Don’t we deserve to have confidence that person is telling the truth when addressing the American people from the podium?
Snipergate is worse than Bill’s big lie. It is germane to her fitness for office, as it was a premeditated lie stylishly presented to the public for personal and political gain. (Can Sam Powers have her job back now?)
It wasn’t just “a” lie, by the way. It was a motif, exhibited several times, and when initially called on it, she stuck with her story. After video proved the story was false, she capitulated, but even then only with another prevarication: “I misspoke”.
The real damage, however, is not to Senator Clinton, as the nomination was all but lost already. The real losers are Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. This lie isn’t going to go quietly away, it will keep coming up so long as Hillary insists on prolonging the inevitable. Each time it rears its ugly head the only defense will be “but Obama…” and we’ll suffer hyperbolic arguments for why Barack is just as phony as Hillary. Clinton apologists already have, and will continue, to do everything possible to drag Obama down to the same level of disrepute.
Any hope at all Senator Clinton had of convincing uncommitted superdelegates that she is more electable than Obama is out the window. She made this a race about commander in chief credentials, an argument that, applied head to head with Senator McCain, has evolved from merely untenable to humiliatingly laughable.
I just want a president I can believe, and be proud of. Is that so much to ask?
