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For this left-leaning Obama supporter Joan got it doubly wrong. The handwringing over Lieberman was silly; I predicted and hoped to my circle Obama would publicly call for Lieberman not to be punished and Im glad he did. The reason? Getting to 60 votes for cloture when needed. I hope that Lieberman has been given the message that he must support the president on cloture votes, and I suspect he will. Hillary on the other hand is a bridge too far or, to be more precise a "rival" too many. Knowledgeable foreign policy observers know that Hillary Clinton's Iraq vote was no accident as the Clinton policy toward Iraq led inevitably to the disastrous invasion and indeed matched the neocons in their messianic arrogance, if not their militarism.
Hillary Clinton not only has no real foreign policy experience, she has no foreign policy vision, having merely absorbed the tired blinkers of her party's hawks, heirs to the Cold War Democrats who landed us in the Vietnam mess, and today are uncritically supportive of Israel, pushing to back Russia into a corner, and conceived the dangerous myth of the "rogue state." What is worse, the Secretary of State's job is a job for a manager, more than a strategist and the one thing we know about Hillary is that she is no manager. If Obama is able to find others to do these jobs she may be a good "diplomat in chief" but that, ironically, will call on the skills she demonstrated most effectively traveling abroad as first lady, with no policy role.
As for Bill, I think the Obama administration would suffer far greater embarrassment than being spurned by the lady if it transpires that her husband's many shady clients give even the hint of conflict of interest to her actions. I know that the Walshes of this world have a hard time accepting that Clinton is as ethically challenged as the world knows him to be, but the rest of us can only pray that she turns it down.
