Only a Clinton
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The phrase “Only a Clinton” entered our lexicon
in the nineties. Ever since then the unsinkable
Clintons have continued spewing outrageous lies and
ridiculous ploys that only a Clinton could get away
with.
Hillary
Clinton tried campaigning for the White House
without actually taking positions on anything. Iran
was a particularly touchy subject because the
Democratic Party has two constituencies that are
sharply divided on the issue. Jewish voters oppose
the deal while left-wing voters back it.
Hillary Clinton couldn’t pander to both at the same
time. Or could she?
Hillary Clinton endorsed the deal while in true
“Only a Clinton” style running against it. She
endorsed the deal using militant rhetoric that
threatened Iran with war. Her message is that she
endorses a deal that gives Iran near zero breakout
time to the bomb and lets it self-inspect and fund
terrorists, but that she’ll be the toughest terror
deal supporter you ever saw. No one will be tougher
on that deal than her.
Only a Clinton.
This isn’t the first time that Hillary Clinton
pulled that particular scam. Trying to get Americans
to forget about her infamous “Reset Button” photo,
she compared Putin to Hitler. (But if Putin was
Hitler, that would have made her Neville Chamberlain
or, considering her politics, Vyacheslav Molotov.)
It was over the top and even the media took her to
task for it.
Her Iran speech is equally over the top. It tries
and fails to cloak her support for a deal that lets
a terrorist regime get the bomb by sounding like
she’s about to drop the bomb. Like Dukakis trying to
channel Patton, it’s an awkward fit. But “Tough
Foreign Policy” Hillary is her brand. It’s how her
associates have been positioning her.
When Hillary Clinton mocks Putin, you’re supposed to
believe that she would be tougher on him than Obama.
In her Brookings session, she explicitly drove that
point home, in her usual lawyerly style, by
contending, "I am in the category of people who
wanted us to do more in response to the annexation
of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of
Ukraine."
Why couldn’t Hillary Clinton actually stand up to
Putin? The unspoken suggestion is that it was
Obama’s fault. The only thing keeping Hillary from
marching the Russians out of Ukraine was Obama.
But the “Reset Button” was Hillary Clinton’s idea.
When asked about it, she had said, “I thought it was
a brilliant stroke, which in retrospect appears even
more so.”
If you can follow Hillary’s reasoning, her
appeasement of the man she compared to Hitler was a
“brilliant stroke” of genius, but the only thing
keeping her from getting tough on “Hitler” was
Barack Obama.
The only person who could possibly believe that is
either a deluded idiot or a compulsive liar.
Comparisons to Chamberlain and even Molotov appear
unfair. A more accurate analogy might be to Petain
who at his trial insisted that his collaboration
with the Nazis had helped the Allies win the war.
Hillary’s Iran deal speech offers more of the same
schizophrenic worldview in which she promises to get
tough on her own appeasement.
She began back-channel talks with Iran, even though
she had opposed it while running for office. But her
opposition was just another Clinton lie. It was
Hillary who agreed to let Iran enrich its uranium,
formerly one of those red lines that her
administration would discard like confetti at a
ticker tape parade.
Now she is once again trying to distance herself
from her own foreign policy by pretending that she
would take a harder line on Iran as President
Hillary Clinton than she did as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
appeased Moscow and Tehran, but President Hillary
Clinton will really crack the whip by disavowing all
her own policies during the campaign.
Just like she did the last time she ran for office.
Hillary Clinton is trying to have her uranium
yellowcake and eat it too by pulling a bait and
switch. The foreign policy basis for the deal is
reapproachment and alliance with Iran. Hillary
Clinton is selling the deal as a means of fighting
Iran. Before Hillary’s speech, former Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta, a Clinton loyalist, defended
the deal in the same terms as a means of putting
pressure on Iran.
Panetta’s description of the deal had no
relationship to reality. It was just prep work for
Hillary’s brand.
The deal is not about pressuring Iran or building a
coalition against it. You don’t pressure an enemy
regime by giving it billions of dollars and you
don’t build a coalition against it by acting as its
lawyer.
When you remove sanctions from a terror state, that
isn’t a way of stopping its terrorism.
But in “Only a Clinton” style, Hillary Clinton has
decided to invent her own imaginary Iran Deal and
campaign on it. It’s a better choice than trying to
campaign on the real deal which only 1 in 5
Americans supports. It won’t fool Iran, but it might
fool some of her dumber Jewish donors.
And that’s what it’s really all about.
Hillary Clinton wants to break from Obama in style
rather than substance. Her occasional criticisms
infuriate Obama, whose skin is even thinner than
hers, but they are never more than stylistic. She
doesn’t differ with specific actions. Instead she
talks about attitudes and organizing principles.
The real message that she’s trying to send is that
with her experience, she can make Obama’s terrible
foreign policy work. But his terrible foreign policy
is really her terrible foreign policy.
Instead of getting a better foreign policy, Hillary
‘butches’ up the bad foreign policy of her old boss.
“Yeah, if I were the prime minister of Israel,
you’re damn right I would expect to have control
over security,” she barks to Jeffrey Goldberg. But
then she rushes off to apologize to Obama at a
‘hugging summit’. That theatrical “damn right” comes
from the same woman took Abbas’ side over Netanyahu
and whose husband had taken Arafat’s side over
Netanyahu. Their backing for the PLO destroyed
Israel’s security and took the lives of many
Israelis and Americans.
But it’s not hard to see where Hillary gets it.
Bill Clinton told a Jewish audience at a charity
dinner that if Israel were invaded, “I would grab a
rifle and get in the trench and fight and die.” Then
he claimed that there was no military solution to
terrorism. Only a Clinton.
Hillary’s Iran speech just borrows Bill’s “rifle” by
vowing that she "will not hesitate to take military
action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.”
Iran has been trying to obtain a nuclear weapon for
a long time now. That’s been the entire purpose of
its nuclear program. Hillary Clinton’s hesitation on
Iran’s nukes has lasted for decades.
It’s not just that Hillary Clinton is lying. We
expect to be lied to be politicians, especially if
their last name is Clinton. It’s that she’s trying
to sell a third Obama term by dressing it up in
combat boots.
Americans hate Obama’s foreign policy. They hate the
Iran Deal. They hate that the world is melting down
and that their government can’t seem to do anything
about it. Instead of offering real change, Hillary
Clinton is promising a tougher foreign policy that
is the same old policy, but tougher.
Hillary Clinton will still let Putin walk all over
her, but she’ll also compare him to Hitler and do
mocking imitations of him. She’ll still pressure
Israel to open checkpoints and make infinite
concessions, but she’ll occasionally offer a “damn
right” when addressing a Jewish audience. And she’ll
hold on to the Iran Deal, but make more empty
threats of military intervention… at least during
her elections.
"We should anticipate that Iran will test the next
president. That won't work if I am in the White
House," she boasts. But Iran has already tested
Hillary and found her wanting. When she gave up on
uranium enrichment, the race to pile up American
concessions to the terrorists was on. Everything
else was anticlimactic.
Hillary Clinton has already been discredited. So
she’s running against her own foreign policy. Only
President Hillary Clinton can make Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton’s discredited policies work
again.