Hillary Clinton told CNN the other day that she won’t be working for the President if there is a second term in 2012. Not just that she doesn’t want to be Sec. of State again, but wants no position at all in His Administration.
She told Wolf Blitzer that she doesn’t want to be Sec. of State again because she has the best job in the world right now.
Because I have the best job I could ever have. This is a moment in history where it is almost hard to catch your breath. There are both the tragedies and disasters that we have seen from Haiti to Japan and there are the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that we see right here in Egypt and in the rest of the region. So I want to be part of helping to represent the United States at this critical moment in time, to do everything I can in support of the president and our government and the people of our country to stand for our values and our ideals, to stand up for our security, which has to remain first and foremost in my mind and to advance America’s interests. And there isn’t anything that I can imagine doing after this that would be as demanding, as challenging or rewarding.
Er, and it wouldn’t be in a second term? That doesn’t add up. So why is she going to walk away after next year? No prizes for guessing what her staff is saying:
“Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”
He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretary of States — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”
Hang on, Mark Mardell has been telling us that The Obamessiah has been thoughtfully “deliberating”. So will he now claim that Hillary Clinton is wrong to think He’s been dithering because she’s “unfamiliar” with the concept? Or does she know better than the BBC North America editor because she’s, you know, on the inside actually dealing with reality and not making uninformed judgments from on high with a perfumed handkerchief held to the nose?
Clinton is said to be especially peeved with the president’s waffling over how to encourage the kinds of Arab uprisings that have recently toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and in particular his refusal to back a no-fly zone over Libya.
Waffling? I guess she just can’t grasp the nuance of His finely tuned brain. What will the BBC have to say about this? Or this:
Bill Clinton: We shouldn’t be letting the Libyan protesters “twist in the wind”
Will Mardell now dismiss the former two-term Democrat President of the United States and the current Democrat Secretary of State as people who are “obsessed with the notion of American decline” or gung-ho cowboys who want an “unapologetically aggressive America storming ahead”?
Clinton’s announcement was not only on CNN but also mentioned on the HuffingtonPost, so we know the Beeboids are aware of it, and can’t pretend it’s not an important enough story for them to mention. So far, though, they’ve censored this news.
In sum, Hillary Clinton just proved that the BBC North America editor’s interpretation of US news has been completely wrong. Why trust him ever again?
UPDATE: Mardell is at it again! This time he’s giving us the spin on the President’s speech about Libya. See the comments thread for more.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear that our politicians, at least, refuse to give interviews to the bbc. Or, if they do, then to upbraid the socalled interviewer every time they interrupt or put a leading question or dismiss what is being said. But I don’t see it happening.
They just wouldn’t get invited again, allowing even more thicko socialists to give vent to their opinions, unopposed…
“Why trust him ever again”
DP many of us never trusted him in the first place – but you knew that already!
ou got that right Umbongo
“can we fix it?”
“can we bugger” 😀
The BBC have a real problem here, they LOVE the Clintons and the ADORE Obama. What are they to do? Best to pretend its not happening and not report it.
But then come the pre election infighting who do they back? Well Obama is black (not really but his white mother is an irrelevance) and therefore should have the edge. However best to keep in with both, celebrate with the Winner and comiserate with the Loser. But what if a Republican should win !!! ATTACK !!!!
There’s only one way to find out!
Obama is finding out the hard way that its one thing to stand on the sidelines and moan and whinge at others perceived faults but its quite another to make the important decisions on the spot when the pressure is on and you have to stand by those actions and be accountable for them.
When it comes to the crunch Obama is out to lunch, come back later.
I’ve just realized that Mardell has been right all along and that the reason both Clintons are criticizing Him is that they’re racists. Come on, BBC, you know it’s true. Let’s hear it.
Niiiice observation DP 😀 .
Mark Mardell says on his blog “your comments are key. I read them all, so please have your say.”
If true, then he should know about this story as the comment field beneath his latest post is filling up at the moment with comments from his readers breaking the news to him!
He has no excuse for not reporting this now.
Mardell: “But by hanging back President Obama has forced others to take responsibility. This is not some abstract moral point. It has real consequences. The Arab League would have been loath to back a call that America had already made.”
But the Arab League backed a no fly zone six days ago. This has been followed by nearly a week of further dithering from Obama. Mardell’s assessment is, to put it mildly, rather kind to the US president.
Exactly. And like I said before, if He can’t get them on side to save their own kind, what was the point of all that bowing and scraping in 2009? We were told how that was going to get us back in the Mohammedans’ good graces.
One more thing: Mardell is gloating because he thinks the President has made the UN more relevant again, and that only conservatives think that’s a bad idea. But the damn President is supposed to be making the US more relevant, and not looking like we’re amateurs waiting for the right moment to jump on the bandwagon. We’re not mad because the UN looks good (they still don’t 🙂 , but Cameron does), we’re mad because He made us look like idiots. And especially we look like idiots to the very people asking for our help, and to whom we’re supposed to be proving that we do care about helping Muslims and not just killing them.
Again, why does Mardell think it’s silly to want the best position for one’s own country? Don’t moderates want the same thing? Good Liberals want their country to be subservient to the elite committee? That’s a far-Left, One World Government position, yet he’s allowed to espouse it openly time and time again.
I can’t make my mind up between
A)”Mardell is too clever for his own boots in the way he lies all the time”
or
B)”he’s just as thick as 2 short planks”
i’m leaning towards option B quite a lot…..
no…..definitely B
Mardell needs to be careful because we’ve seen this kind of revisionist editorial go wrong for beeboids before. Most of us can probably remember Harrabin getting twisted in knots as he tried to defend the Met Office screw up of the cold winter snap. Events ended up overtaking him and his efforts left him exposed.
Mardell finds himself in a similar position with his attempts to give credence to ideas he in reality has no idea whether or not they are true. He is trying to defend the President’s approach and act like he knows what’s going off. His writing suggests otherwise. Unlike political reporters following the UK administration, there’s no sense of inside sources tipping him the wink on anything. Journalists love to give the impression they’re close to a senior source, but there’s no evidence of that here. In short he’s left with nothing but speculation about the motivations for the President’s actions.
The problem is (as it was with Harrabin) that the events on this are very unpredicatable and may well leave him with egg on his face.
The situation in Libya is very fluid but there is now the agreement of the international community to take action in Libya. Since the agreement some aspects of the US administration are in part claiming some credit for driving this resolution forward. We also saw in the PM’s briefing to Parliament this morning, one Labour MP giving gushing praise for Obama’s Leadership on this issue.
Now that they have the go ahead, the action will (I would think) rely heavily on the US force projection capabilities if it is to be successful. If Obama’s administration dithers now in a way that impacts the orders to the military, there will be no editorial or blog post that Mardell could write that could rescue him. Gadaffi and the rest of the middle east will see the western powers scrambling around trying to pretend that they haven’t been neutered.
I think he does get insider information. After all, the White House spokesman is married to Katty Kay’s friend and business partner. Can’t get much more insider than that. But it seems to be the wrong kind of info. He’s being used.
Good point and one I’d forgotten. He will however twist himself in knots over this though if he continues to go down this route.
Well, the moderators over at Mark Mardell’s blog are taking their sweet time deciding whether to publish a comment I put on there at midday today. It was never published and the message ‘This comment has been referred for further consideration’ has been up ever since.
It was just a recycling of some comments I’ve made on David’s last couple of posts. What ‘house rules’ can it be breaking? Is it just censorship?
For the record, this is the comment:
This latest blog post is just extraordinary. What a volte-face from Mark!
Answering his own question from the other day about whether President Obama had been “dithering” or “deliberating” – of course he’s been deliberating, despite what the critics say! – Mark presents a thorough-going justification for all Obama’s actions. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, couldn’t have put a more positive gloss than Mark does here.
That the UN resolution is much tougher, ‘at America’s insistence’, than anything those “gung-ho”, “sabre-rattling” Brits and French were asking for, apparently, is a good thing, because it’s “practical”. Mark may have been pretty openly opposed to military intervention in Libya up till now but (a) because his beloved Obama’s policy and (b) because it’s gone through the sainted U.N. (hated by all those nasty conservatives), suddenly it’s a sensible policy.
Mark’s other blog posts have left it very clear where this particular “impartial” BBC reporter stands on the issue at hand. Or did, before the president finally revealed his hand in favour of the policy Mark previously seemed so opposed to.
Evidence? As well as the give away use in one post of “it may be grown up, it may be sensible in the long run”, i.e the U.S. administration’s apparent opposition to military intervention in Libya, in an earlier post Mark wrote:
“A no-fly zone probably wouldn’t help the rebels an awful lot. But that is not its purpose. It would ease troubled souls in the West and satisfy those who feel something must be done without being over concerned about the consequences or logical implications of that something.”
In other words, Mark was openly arguing that it was the wrong policy, merely useful for soothing a few restless, reckless. illogical Western consciences. It’s a “gesture” that is “more about self-validation than problem solving”. The French and the Brits are “gung-ho” over the policy. They want “Top Gun over Libya”, unlike the “earnest” Obama and his “concerned” spokesman, who don’t. Sorry, didn’t.
An earlier post puts Mark’s position just as plainly, though he pretends to be reading the president’s mind:
“I suspect the Obama administration sees it as rather a distraction, dramatic and headline-grabbing, but neither as effective as putting legal and financial pressure on Gaddafi’s henchman, nor as urgent as easing the crisis on the border.”
In the article before that – the one about “Cameron’s no-fly zone fervour” – Mark openly criticizes the British prime minister’s “sabre-rattling”:
“Mrs Clinton’s testimony made it clear she thought America should lead the world through what she called “smart power”.
The UK still has to get used to a world where that doesn’t always imply smart missiles.”
(Very little of this squares with impartiality of course.)
What a difference a day makes!
Nick Watt of the ‘Guardian’ writes that this UN resolution is a diplomatic triumph for David Cameron, who played a key role in the lobbying of the deeply divided US administration.
Wonder what Simon21 makes of all this.
Well, the mods published it sometime overnight, after at least ten hours of “further consideration”. By that time a new Mark Mardell new post had been up for some time and was getting comments.
If I’m being cynical, I would say they waited till the old thread ran out of stream and then, because it was safe to do so, published my highly critical comment. If that’s the case it’s a pretty shabby (if clever) way for BBC moderators to behave.
Craig
I admire your energy in writing your comment. I’ve just dragged myself through the comments on Mardell’s blog – both the one in which your comment is listed and the later one – that’s another 20/30 minutes I’ll never see again! FWIW I join you in your cynicism. There was nothing in your comment requiring “further consideration” except further consideration to delay comment until, as you say, the steam had run out of that thread. In fact it was almost the only comment which actually addressed the lamentable quality of Mardell’s journalism and – I think – the sole comment which quoted, to devastating effect, Mardell’s previous reports against him. Indeed it was one of the few comments which tackled Mardell direct rather than commenting predictably on the wonder (or otherwise) of Obama, the wisdom of getting involved in Libya or how wonderful (or otherwise) is the UN. (Almost) needless to say, the more recent thread contains few (if any) comments on the quality of Mardell’s reportage.
Thank you Umbongo.
Yes, it’s usually the case that – except for a few regular sycophants – Mark Mardell seems to get surprising little feedback on his blog about the standard of his journalism. Unfortunately, given that he would have already ‘moved on’ by the time my comment was published, I doubt he will ever read it.
I managed to post a comment on one of his many Sarah Palin pieces a couple of weeks ago, which passed the censors, saying “Oh no, not another piece about Sarah Palin!” and listing a few more important subjects he might care to write about instead, such as Wisconsin, the Guantanemo u-turn, and the Left’s outrage at the alleged Abu-Ghraib-like treatment of the Wikileaking U.S. soldier on Obama’s watch. Given that I got it in at No.2 on the thread (by typing at top speed!), it may have had an impact, given that his next posts dealt with two of the topics on my list. Or it may not, as he might well have covered them anyhow. (Given that they were both embarrassing for Obama, however, that’s no certainty.)
I suspect that he does read many of his comments, as he says, albeit not all of them and probably few of them very thoroughly – for which, like you, I wouldn’t blame him in the slightest!
What did Hilary Clinton do or say in her period as Secretary of State to indicate she isn’t entirely in step with Obama?
Check out Mardell explaining to us all, as if we were children learning about world affairs for the first time, how the President was not dithering at all, but had a consistent theme of international cooperation the entire time.
Read the last sentence in that quotation again. In a speech of just over three pages he repeats this point.
Mardell then breaks out each sentence from the speech where He mentions this theme, and highlights it like a seminary priest explaining a passage about something Jesus said to the disciples.
“Not once….not twice…..not three times…but more….”
All to make sure he drives his Narrative home that, well, there’s no other way to say it: Mardell is saying that everyone else on the planet is wrong. Only he understands the heart and mind of The Obamessiah. Well, he and Jay Carney understand, at leat.
So you might have gathered, the US is not going it alone. Throughout his declaration Mr Obama makes it clear how different this is to the Iraq war. Not only the international consensus, but the limits on action.
Just in case anyone wasn’t aware of the parallels that everyone’s been talking about ad nauseum for the last month, right? Oh, and what happened to all those anti-this war types who used to scream about how evil Bush was for saying military action in Iraq would go pretty quickly? This is even sillier, as everyone else is saying it will take more than a few days. Yet there is no criticism from Mardell, only praise.
But I think we are seeing something new. He is using a crisis thrust upon him to set out an Obama doctrine of sorts, to make a statement about America’s relationship with the world. While he is in charge, he is saying, America will not go it alone, will set limits on what it does, and won’t impose its will. Some will not like this, and the world will find it difficult to adapt to a president who almost seems determined to lead from behind.
How devotional can he get? “Leading from behind” is good, and anyone who doesn’t like it just doesn’t get it. White House propaganda at the BBC.
A person’s own folly leads to their ruin,
yet their heart rages against the LORD.
Proverbs 19:3
Mardell is becoming insufferable David. The (pro-Obama) partisan regulars on his blog are lapping it up though (as they usually do.)
that o’Barmy is a right genius,isn’t he? 😀
BBC-Democrat Mr A North (of the wonderful Obama Washington branch), says this of Obama’s policy on Libya:
“The administration was reluctant for some time to back a no-fly zone, fearing it could lead to a third US war on a Muslim country, after Afghanistan and Iraq.
“It only did so only after it got support from Arab states and European allies.”
Mr North does not expand on this so-called ‘support from Arab states’. Does he mean this?:
“That’s The ‘Arab Participation’?”http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/33257
See, the thing is, the President is right to wonder – at first, if He’s not been paying attention – if it’s not a good idea to get involved in yet another full-on war against a group of Mohammedans. If, like the BBC, one doesn’t give any credence to all those Libyans crying out for help, or any credence to the various Mohammedan countries who have been saying something should be done for a couple of weeks already, then sure, one could reasonably think we should sit on our hands for another few weeks out of concern that this will radicalize even more Mohammedans against us.
Except that’s not what’s been happening at all. So either He’s completely tone deaf (you’ll never hear the BBC say that), or He is ideologically opposed to most of what the world is telling Him. Take your pick. Either way, this is NOT leadership. It’s reactionary and equivocating behavior.
No wonder Hillary Clinton is announcing her departure about a year before most Cabinet officers do. News of which the BBC is still censoring, of course, as that would harm the agenda of protecting Him.
” . . either He’s completely tone deaf (you’ll never hear the BBC say that), or He is ideologically opposed to most of what the world is telling Him”
How long before Mardell & Co describe His policy as “masterly inactivity” per this http://www.bartleby.com/73/1038.html ?