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Tag: John Kerry

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

November 13, 2008 /

Huh?

News outlets are reporting that Hillary Clinton is under consideration for Secretary of State. I guess Obama wasn’t kidding when he said he was considering the Lincoln model of a team of rivals.

There’s increasing chatter in political circles that the Obama camp is not overly happy with the usual suspects for secretary of state these days and that the field might be expanding somewhat beyond Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and maybe former Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia.

There’s talk, indeed, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) may now be under consideration for the post. Her office referred any questions to the Obama transition; Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to comment.

I’m a little puzzled by this one. I think she would be much better suited for a career in the Senate where she could work on issues like health care. She’s certainly up to the job, and she would have Bill Clinton as a resource, but it seems like there are many other options. On the other hand, it shows that he’s willing to bring in some of the best people in the party, and that he’s not afraid to have big personalities in his administration.

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Politics, Polls

John Kerry’s speech

August 27, 2008 /

As pointed out by Josh Marshall, John Kerry’s speech might have been the best one of the convention. The “brain trust” at MSNBC didn’t show most of it, so I caught it on CNN but didn’t get to see the whole thing. Later, MSNBC replayed parts of it, though they didn’t even have a camera covering Obama’s uncle who Kerry singled out in the crowd.

Kerry rips into McCain and the GOP, mocking them for some of the pathetic personal attacks we’ve seen so far despite McCain’s claim that he would run a respectful campaign.

Here’s the speech. It’s worth watching.

Democrats, President 2008

Truth starting to come out

December 27, 2005 /

Over the past several years, numerous statement made by President Bush and his administration have proven to be false, including statements about WMD, the Iraq war, the events preceding 9/11 and issues like torture and domestic spying. We can now add another one to the list – the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001.

During last year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and John Kerry argued over whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Kerry charged that Bush let bin Laden get away by not choosing to “use American forces to hunt down and kill” him. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

Now we have the CIA commander on the ground telling his side of the story in a new book to be released. Newsweek breaks the story:

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

I just saw Bernsten interviewed on MSNBC. The man is very credible. Again, we have incompetence from the Bush administration, and then they try to cover it up by denying the truth. Pathetic.

Foreign Policy, War on Terror

Chicken hawks attack Murtha

November 18, 2005 /

You knew it would happen. As soon as Jack Murtha called for a withdrawel from Iraq, right wing congressmen who never served in the military started going after Murtha, using terms like “cowardly” and “aiding the enemy.”

As a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania for the past 31 years, he has been a fierce hawk, championing conflicts in Central America and the Persian Gulf.

On Thursday, he was called a coward.

After Murtha stunned the Capitol with a news conference calling for a pullout from Iraq because our “troops have done all they can,” the denunciations came quickly and furiously.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., accused Murtha of delivering “the highest insult” to the troops. “We must not cower,” Hastert told the former Marine.

Majority Leader Roy Blunt, R-Mo., told Murtha that his views “only embolden our enemies” and lamented that “Democrats undermine our troops in Iraq from the security of their Washington, D.C., offices.”

Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., told the 73-year-old Murtha that “the American people are made of sterner stuff.” And Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, said the likes of Murtha want to take “the cowardly way out.”

Murtha, whose brand of hawkishness has never been qualified by the word “chicken,” was expecting the attacks: “I like guys who’ve never been there that criticize us who’ve been there. I like that.”

Carter, Hastert, Blunt and Hayworth have no military service record.

John Kerry is now on the floor of the U.S. Senate, blasting these clowns and Dick Cheney for these attacks on Murtha. There’s nothing wrong with a debate on what we should do to deal with this mess in Iraq, but anyone who dares to present an alternative to the disastrous policies of this incompetent administration is attacked mercilessly. What a joke.

Iraq War

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