Bad Joke.
After the candidate she had supported and stumped for in the California Governor's race was thoroughly creamed, Hillary made some odd comments about the victor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In an interview on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," Sen. Clinton (D.-N.Y.) first observed that she thought the "recall was not a great idea. I wish them well now-they've got a lot of big problems out there." But she's "worried about serving in the Senate with the predator," referring to Schwarzenegger's 1986 film, Predator. Her comment was strange because, number one, she won't be serving with the Governor in any capacity, never mind in the U.S. Senate. One would think that someone so famously intelligent would know how our system of government works. Number two, it hardly seemed like Hillary's place to talk disparagingly about a man preying on women because, after all, her husband was Predator-In-Chief for eight years.
Hold On.
Although President Bush's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed out of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Clinton said she still intends to block the confirmation of former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt. Hillary had requested more information from the White House on the EPA report which found the agency was pressured by White House officials to prematurely assure New Yorkers the air pollution from the World Trade Center rubble posed no health threat, but after some "screaming arguments" between some administration and Hillary's staff, she was still not satisfied. "White House officials allowed politics to trump science," charged Sen. Clinton. "This reinforces the issues I have been raising concerning the inspector general's findings." Hillary and presidential candidate Joe Lieberman were the only Democrats in the EPW Committee who voted against sending Leavitt's nomination to the Senate floor, Hillary has vowed to place a "hold" on Leavitt's nomination, "until I reach agreement with the White House" about the August EPA report.
Watch Out, Oprah.
With all the recent news about Rush Limbaugh's travails and Al Gore trying to start a liberal radio network, it was interesting to learn that Hillary once had an opportunity to join the media fray. At a recent fundraising event, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein recalled that he made a "lucrative offer" to Mrs. Clinton before she left the White House that she could have her own television talk show (it may be remembered that Bill Clinton also toyed with the idea of becoming a talk show host, before his wife nixed it). Instead, Hillary "decided to run for office," and the rest is Living History.
Revising History.
It was recently learned that the Chinese government has censored various parts of Hillary's memoirs. It ends up that maybe the Communists were onto something, as Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu is now accusing Sen. Clinton of exaggerating the role she played in winning his release from a Chinese jail in 1995. While Mrs. Clinton wrote that Wu said he would be released from prison if "only if I agreed to come to [a 1995 women's rights] conference and refrain from critical remarks about the host government," Wu recently told a radio station that "I never believed that.
I never said that. I don't know why she put [those words] in my mouth . . . . I never had that kind of idea at all." Wu also claimed that the First Lady ignored his wife's pleas for help, even though Living History says that Hillary "was particularly troubled by a personal letter from Mrs. Wu, who was understandably very worried about her husband's fate and felt that my participation in the conference 'would be sending a confused signal to the leaders in Beijing about the resolve of the U.S. to press for Harry's release.'" According to Wu, his wife's letter "never got any single word of response from Mrs. Clinton . . . we never heard anything from her." Wu then slammed Mrs. Clinton by claiming that "she does not care about human beings' lives, human beings' fate. She just cared about attending the women's conference as a political obligation." Finally, Wu said that he had recently contacted the offices of every U.S. senator with an update on human rights abuses in China, and while "many, many responded," Sen. Clinton's office did not.
