There She Goes Again (Hillary Clinton vs. the Truth)

Talking Points Memo reports that Hillary Clinton is running an ad repeating the same type of lies she has been saying about Barack Obama’s recent statements. Again she quotes Obama out of context referring to the Republicans as the party of ideas, suggesting that Obama supported those Republican ideas.

I’ve already had multiple posts on this topic. Factcheck.org calls this attack “flatly false.” Eriz Zorn says the Clintons are lying. Obama has made his opposition to Reagan’s ideas quite clear when his actual statements are reviewed.

Seeing how easily Hillary and Bill Clinton are able to lie allows the Republicans to claim the final victory in their battles against the Clintons. While they overreacted with impeachment, they were certainly right about the Clintons. Bill Clinton lied about having sex with that woman. Both Bill and Hillary are lying about what Obama said.

Seeing this blatant dishonesty will make it very difficult to consider voting for Hillary Clinton should she win the nomination. I must add that this is destroying the claims of many on the left to be a part of the “reality based community.” For example, Talk Left claims “The ad properly points out that Obama did not express any criticism of the GOP ideas. That is the problem. Obama’s failure to speak out against these ideas.” There is simply no way to make such a ridiculous claim without either intentionally ignoring everything Obama has actually said since this controversy erupted or to outright lie (as Clinton’s even more shrill supporters like Taylor Marsh have done repeatedly).

Differences of opinion are one thing and I’d have no problem with either Clinton or pro-Clinton bloggers arguing over real disagreements with Obama. However, when one side repeatedly resorts to outright lying about what the opposing candidate has said in order to oppose him, I have zero respect for them and there’s little chance I’d vote for a candidate who resorts to such swift boating in the general election. Besides, the Clinton record sure is not very good with regards to either their own favorable statements about Ronald Reagan or their policies of triangulation to promote Republican policies. To attack Obama for not being sufficiently critical of Republican ideas, just like attacking him on his position on the war, are classic examples of the Karl Rove strategy of attacking a candidate on their strongest points. We hardly need another term of a Rove-style politician in the White House.

Update: Obama responds with an ad of his own. In contrast to the Clinton ad, it is totally free of lies:

It was Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, who quote “paid tribute” to Ronald Reagan’s economic and foreign policy.

She championed NAFTA – even though it has cost South Carolina thousands of jobs.

And worst of all, it was Hillary Clinton who voted for George Bush’s war in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything, and change nothing.

It’s time to turn the page.

10 Comments

  1. 1
    Mike P says:

    Mr. Chusid,
    Good post. You’ve been very spot on in calling out the crap that Clinton’s have been doing. One minor correction above, though…you mistakenly labeled Taylor Marsh as an Obama supporter, which she most definitely is NOT.

    She is, however, shrill.

  2. 2
    gracie says:

    the Clinton political motto is:

    STRONG and WRONG beats Weak and Right.

    It’s true.

    It’s ugly too.

    Obama is at a disadvantage because he does not have a surrogate attack dog to go after Bill Clinton.

    Although Barack is right on the issues and right on his position about the ugliness of the campaign, no one in the Democratic party has the courage of conviction to stand up and denounce WJC who is a popular former President, the titular head of the party and the first 2 term Democratic President in the past 40 years.

    No one has the guts to take on Bill for the good of the party because of the potential political costs to themselves, if the Clintons should take back the WH.

    If someone did have the political courage, they would lead a superdelegate insurgency to ensure that Hillary could not get the nomination.

    Unfortunately, no one in the Democratic Party has the testicular fortitude to do what is best for our country and our democracy. Al Gore and Teddy Kennedy have the political clout but apparently lack the political will to do so.

    Someone needs to get Gore to speak up before super Tuesday by reminding him of what he said in his book Assault on Reason:

    Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

    A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

    It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

    American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

    It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse.

  3. 3
    Ron Chusid says:

    Mike,

    This post was written very quickly in limited time when I was briefly checking the news and found about this latest example. Obviously I intended to write Clinton supporter, and have corrected the post.

    I also hope that readers realize that my choice of title was a quick way of figuratively giving the finger to those who act like any reference to Ronald Reagan, regardless of the context, is in itself a crime.

  4. 4
    Ron Chusid says:

    Gracie,

    Agree that the Clintons are posing a danger to our democracy by the dishonest manner in which they campaign. Republicans have posed this same danger for the last several years and we must not fall in line to support the Democratic candidate when she performes the same acts which I have been protesting from Republicans. I also have no confidence the Clintons would be any less dishonest in office should Hillary win.

  5. 5
    Luv says:

    It’s astounding that the Clintons don’t realize that they guarantee that they’ll lose the general if they get the nomination. Vast swaths of the progressive movement is so disgusted by them that they WILL NOT support them in the general.

    I know, I’m one of them.

  6. 6
    Mich says:

    I’m sure you won’t let this stay or be posted but…for the sake of liberal values and fair play, I’ll try it anyway.

    Sorry, I don’t see any difference than what the Clinton’s are saying than what Obama’s team did with Hillary’s statement about LBJ and MLK and how the Obama team went out of their way to foment uproar about that. And gladly, GLADLY “misinterpreted” and “misconstrued” to the extreme and used it to whatever benefit they could get out of it. And boy, did they win on that one. Believe me, now that was a calculated political move. Obama saw the jugular and went for it.

    So, Hillary lied? Bill lied? Sorry, no more than the Obama team has done on numerous occasions against them in this smear campaign that has been going on, obviously both here and around the blogosphere…all with Obama turning a blind eye and PRETENDING his hands are clean.

    Get over it. You know better. This is tit for tat. And that’s the way political campaigns are done.

    And, ah, yes, think of Reagan in your worship of Obama. Beware the teflon you give your gods. It’ll come back to bite you

  7. 7
    Ron Chusid says:

    What tit for tat?

    The Clintons resorted to injecting racism into the campaign to try to stop Obama. There’s no misinterpretation here. This was an intentional act by the campaign, and Obama responded to it.

    All the lying is coming from Bill, Hillary, and their apologists. Obama has done absolutely nothing which comes close to the manner in which th Clintons have outright lied about what Obama said about Reagan, or outright lied in their mails on Social Security policies. Nor has anything Obama said come close to the Clinton first lying about their own positions on Iraq and then trying to rewrite Obama’s position.

    There is no tit for tat at all. This also has nothing to do with worshiping Obama. It is about opposing people who are ethically unfit to be president, such as Hillary Clinton.

  8. 8
    markg8 says:

    Shorter Bill Clinton today when speaking to the CNN reporter:

    “Voters aren’t interested in pushback against or factchecking of our lies and distortions about Obama. At least not any I just talked to. They want to hear you echo our lies and distortions.”

  9. 9
    Bess Horsefall says:

    The mask of the dysfunctional Clinton duo is melting off their faces. The psychological trauma Bill put his wife and the nation through is being rubbed in our faces with their arrogant behavior that assumes Hillary deserves the office. I don’t mean to be mean, but if we don’t set a person in the office of president who can reverse our foreign policy reputation, nothing we want to do domestically matters too much.

    Bill Clinton was the laughing stock of the world, even if noone said so aloud. I’m afraid the psychodrama of his behavior and Hillary’s rage is not what we need in the White House.

    Senator Obama is the best man running to go out into the world and inspire a change in foreign relations on every front. I’ll be sick with anyone else and their egotistical agendas…Aaaack.

    And, please, can someone tell me why anyone in the black community thinks they owe anything to Hillary Clinton? Why do women think she should lead after submitting to Bill just so she could have a crack at the presidency? I’m sorry, but I think she is in this for the wrong reasons and her “act” is fading fast.

  10. 10
    Patrick W. Greene says:

    If Bill and Hillary lie now, what makes you think they will tell the truth if the occupy the White House. Truth in politics yea right that’s why we have such great ethics laws.

    Perhaps they need to read the read the ” Declaration of Independence ” but this time try to understand it.

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