Speak No Evil, I Swear.
Hillary's office has denied last week's story that she criticized President Bush in an interview with an Arab-language newspaper. In fact, her office claims that she never spoke to the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat. Almost immediately after the story broke in the Agence France-Presse wire service, Sen. Clinton's office contacted key media sources to tell them that the story which said she slammed the President was completely fabricated. Torture Comments.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hillary is in a position to comment on the prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. She was interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on the topic, and said she was "shocked" because "there had been no notice to anyone on the committee, no briefing, not even an inkling and we've had a number of meetings with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, other civilian leaders from the Pentagon, as well as military." Hillary also implied that the administration purposely withheld information on the treatment of the prisoners, and said, "The bottom line is that leadership has to be responsible and held accountable and that is not just in the prison in Baghdad. That goes all the way up the chain of command." When she was asked whether the treatment of the Iraqi prisoners might have adverse ramifications for American military personnel, she replied that it might encourage "personal revenge against any individual American, military or civilian." My Good Friend Chuck.
Hillary's sometime nemesis, New York senior senator and fellow Democrat Chuck Schumer, was recently questioning Bush judicial nominee Brett Cavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Roll Call, "Schumer was trying to get Kavanaugh to say the Starr report went too far into former President Bill Clinton's sex life, and Kavanaugh was artfully dodging the question." When Schumer grew tired of Kavanugh's evasions, he asked the nominee straight out whether he would have voted to convict President Clinton and remove him from office had he been a senator during the 1999 impeachment trial. When he still didn't get a straight answer, Schumer blurted out, "Would you have voted 'Aye' or 'Nay'-and you can't use Scottish law!" referring to Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Arlen Specter's infamous "not proven" Scot's vote at the end of the Senate trial. Several hours after his exchange with Kavanaugh, Hillary met Schumer, grabbed him by the shoulder and, in full view of reporters, exclaimed: "I heard you were brilliant! I heard you were brilliant!" No word whether Hillary already thanked Schumer for voting against her husband's impeachment twice, once against the articles while he was a Congressman, and then casting a "Nay" vote a month later as New York's newly sworn in senator. Al's Mentor.
Al Franken is reportedly considering running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2008, even though he hasn't lived in the state for decades. So he has contacted his current hometown senator-New York's own Hillary Clinton-for advice on how to carpetbag. "I asked Hillary, 'Can you give me some suggestions about running for Senate in a state you haven't lived for in a while, or in your case, ever?'" recalled the liberal comedian. "And she said, 'This will be a long conversation,' so we agreed to have a long conversation about it." Bill's Mentor.
Bill Clinton's former political guru, Dick Morris, has written a book titled Rewriting History rebutting Hillary's memoir Living History. He writes, "Just like the moon. . . Hillary Rodham Clinton has a face she never shows us, a side that is never visible, never on display. This is a voyage around that side of Hillary-the parts of her personality and history that have been rewritten, reinvented, or omitted from her memoir, and her other writings or public statements." Morris says that as someone who has known Hillary and her inner workings for 25 years, he is well qualified to write the truth about her. Morris acknowledges that Hillary conveniently forgot to mention her devious misdeeds in her autobiography, but he also has said that "a lot of the stuff she hides in Living History is positive. She is a great manager. She is someone who doesn't procrastinate like he [President Clinton] does. This hiding of the facts, according to Morris, is because she "has a deeply seated view that if we knew the real Hillary, we wouldn't like her."
