Clinton urges start of Iraq pullout in 90 days
 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070217/...usa_clinton_dc

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has called for a 90-day deadline to start pulling American troops from Iraq.

Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, has been criticized by some Democrats for supporting authorization of the war in 2002 and for not renouncing her vote as she seeks the U.S. presidency in next year's election.

"Now it's time to say the redeployment should start in 90 days or the Congress will revoke authorization for this war," the New York senator said in a video on her campaign Web site, repeating a point included in a bill she introduced on Friday.

In October 2002, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to take military action in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.

Republicans blocked the Senate on Saturday from considering a nonbinding measure, adopted on Friday by the House of Representatives, denouncing Bush's decision to send another 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq.

In offering what she called a roadmap out of Iraq, Clinton said a visit there last month had made her more determined to start what she called a long overdue withdrawal.

Clinton's bill would cap the number of troops in Iraq at the January 1 level, prior to Bush's decision to add 21,500 to the approximately 130,000 soldiers already there.

The buildup is part of a push to quell growing sectarian violence but comes as opinion polls show the majority of Americans disapprove of Bush's decision to send more troops.

Clinton's bill would require congressional authorization to exceed her proposed cap on U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Bush, announcing the troop increase on January 11, said stepping back prematurely would collapse the Iraqi government, tear the country apart "and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale."

"If George Bush doesn't end the war before he leaves office, when I'm president, I will," Clinton said in the video.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, another Democratic presidential hopeful, said last week it was unclear how Clinton planned to end the conflict. Obama has called for a phased withdrawal to be wrapped up by the end of March 2008.

At a January 17 news conference after visiting Iraq, Clinton repeated her call for a phased redeployment as a way of pressing the Iraqi government to shoulder more responsibility for security. But she stopped short then of proposing a deadline for doing so.


Anyone want to start making bets what will happen in Iraq on Day 91?

Hillary
 

It absolutely boggles my mind that there are people in this country who cannot see through this woman. I've given serious consideration to the fact that she may be the antiChrist.

+1

The London Times on Hillary.
 

The Times January 26, 2007 The vaulting ambition of America's Lady Macbeth. By Gerard Baker

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle1296179.ece

"Hillary Clinton's shameless political reconstructive surgery"

You can measure the scale of an American president's troubles by the number of skutniks he deploys during his State of the Union address.

Every year during his big set-piece speech to Congress, the president will digress from the main thrust of his remarks to offer fulsome praise to some member of the audience in the gallery. This person will have been carefully selected in advance by the president's speechwriters as an exemplar of some virtue and placed there for the purpose. The television producers will have been alerted in advance so that at the right moment, as the president talks about the heroics of this American Everyman, he or she can rise self-consciously and receive the praise of a grateful nation. This now obligatory part of a constitutional ritual is called a skutnik after the name of the first person so honoured.

One January evening in 1982, Lenny Skutnik, a government employee, dived into the freezing waters of the Potomac River to rescue a victim of a plane crash. Two weeks later, during his second State of the Union address, with the US mired in recession, Ronald Reagan had Mr Skutnik sit in the gallery and paid a moving tribute to his heroics.

This week, for his penultimate State of the Union, Mr Bush had a veritable galaxy of skutniks; soldiers, military people, a firefighter. Whatever you might feel about the wisdom of Mr Bush's Iraq policy or the feasibility of his plans to wean Americans off petrol, you can't help but stand and cheer the good works of a decent person.

But there was something unusual about this year's constellation of ordinary American heroes, beyond the sheer numbers. Usually the skutnik is a presidential privilege. But so intense already is the competition for the 2008 presidential race that others have muscled in.

And so Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had a skutnik of her own. She arranged for the son of a New York policeman sick with lung cancer to be there. As it happened, the man's father died that day, and the son's grief became a sad and very visible coda to the event.

This little incident, the skilfully choreographed exploitation of a human tragedy, the cynically manipulated deployment of public sympathy in service of a personal political end, offered a timely insight into the character of the politician who this week launched the most anticipated presidential election campaign in modern history.

There are many reasons people think Mrs Clinton will not be elected president. She lacks warmth; she is too polarising a figure; the American people don't want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the Clinton presidency.

But they all miss this essential counterpoint. As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician's trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.

Fifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as "women who stay home and bake cookies".

Today we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance.

To grasp the scale of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment, all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs Clinton, who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.

And so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.

After that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient. Her first Senate campaign was one long exercise in political reconstructive surgery. It went from the cosmetic; the sudden discovery of her Jewish ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you've established a reputation as a friend of Palestinians¬ to the radical: her sudden message of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and everything else she had stood for.

Once in the Senate she published an absurd autobiography in which every single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002. This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea, even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.

Now, you might say, hold on. Aren't all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs. Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.

All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.

I don't find this surprising at all. She learned well from her husband's inexplicable TWO terms that your position is whatever the polls currently favor. Remember her attempt at shifting to a more moderate stance a year ago, when the polls still favored our presence and efforts in Iraq? Now the polls have shifted, and so has Clinton's position. It just more of the same.

And she knows that most Americans can't remember anything that is said or happens politically for more than a week..........

Jim

H. Clinton
 

Sounds like she's already looking at colors for her drapes in the Oval office. :rolleyes:

Apparently not when it comes to Newt.

They did such a good hatchet job on him that he is still hated by people who cannot even tell you who he is.

Polls show him the number two most disliked potential candidate, right after Mr. Socialism, Ralph Nader.

The sad thing is that Newt is the only likely Republican candidate who has real conservative creds, and didn't just find them yesterday.

TR

Seems like someone ALWAYS has the answer to what we should be doing. Frankly, I am tired on civilians an politicians who don't even know.....never mind when will it ever end ? :rolleyes:

After trying to present a "moderate" image that would be presentable to independants and maybe a few RINOs she finds herself with an extremely pissed off base. The Dem base includes a whole lot of leftist, socialist, freaking commie lovers AKA moonbats (please excuse my personal opinions slipping in).

If Iraq had went perfectly she would be taking as much credit as possible and trying to position herself to the right of Genghis Kahan.

How I despise this woman:mad: However she will be interesting to watch as she tries to get to the White House. I pray the American voter won't let her get there!

Newt Gingrich
 

Unfortunatley your are correct. I recently listened to Newt speak on the war on terror and he was by far the only Sunday morning guest that understood the MACRO-ECO outlook for the entire middle east, not just Iraq !

Newt kindly educated the other guests on the need for stability in the middle east, not by arguing Iraq's security and infrastucture, but by applying his knowledge of of the Saudi oil infrastucture, it's vunerabilities, and that Abqaiq is the Godzilla of oil processing facilities, that if attacked, would result in an economic collapse of the entire European theatre, and the United States.

He also armed hiself with numbers, in barrels of oil, that would need to be pulled from the reserve and the increasing price per gallon to the american SUV driver. "Taking down Saudis oil infrastructure is like shooting fish in a barrel" " It's not a question of opportunity, it's a question of how good your bang men are and what you give them to work with"

Newt had all guests on that Sunday morning suddenly looking desperatley through their notes, yet none could get that "Just pumped the neighbors cat" look off their face. :rolleyes:

You are correct on the hatchet job..... Newt says he is looking to see what comes down the road...... I think behind the scenes he is working to get back into the fray......if he does it will be up to those who see a light there to make the light brighter.....

Jim

Here..here..

The prisoners I had the opportunity to talk to stated that they knew killing other muslims, the subjugation of women and the killing of children was not in keeping with the Koran; but Allah would forgive this in a time of war.

The democrats will smear Newt, tell baldfaced and outrageous lies, and have voter registration in every cemetary (blue and red states); not in keeping with American values, but all would be forgiven in what they consider open warfare (what we consider a free election).

Amazing similarities...

The bitch is afarid if she get's elected, the war will be her problem. Trying everything she can to end it before the elections.

BMT, have some respect here! You shouldn't call her a bitch.......my dogs get offended. So how about using something like political whore......

Jim