Free Republic

We are regularly told by our prognosticating betters that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might as well already be the Democratic PartyÂ’s 2016 nominee. She is inevitable; more inevitable, in fact, than the last time she was inevitable. But there has been grumbling on the progressive left about Clinton for months. She is seen by many in the Democratic PartyÂ’s left-wing as too close to Wall Street, too hawkish on foreign affairs, and behind the eight ball on social issues like supporting same-sex marriage rights. Will they settle for Hillary? Sure. Are they enthusiastic about a second Clinton...

President Obama’s international woes give his former secretary of state good reason to seek political distance. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent foreign policy criticisms made that clear. Domestically, their interests diverge in a different way. A Republican takeover of the Senate this fall would hurt Mr. Obama for the final two years of his presidency, but it might help Mrs. Clinton if she runs to succeed him. Republican control of both the House and Senate would provide Mrs. Clinton a clearer target to run against in courting voters fatigued by Washington dysfunction. The longer an unpopular president and his more-unpopular partisan...

Injustice for All: An Excerpt from Sellout: The Inside Story of President Clinton's Impeachment By David Schippers October 2000 In October 1996, in one of the first public accounts of this matter, former Center Senior Fellow Rosemary Jenks testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration about many of the abuses surrounding the Citizenship USA program. Ms. Jenks concluded that due to pressure from the White House, and in particular the Vice President’s office, the Immigration and Naturalization Service disregarded many of the requirements of the naturalization process that ensure that only qualified immigrants with no significant criminal history may...

Hillary Clinton has come under fire this summer for her speaking fees, including some charged for events at universities and colleges where many students put themselves deep in debt to get their education. Clinton and her defenders insist that those fees get paid out by donors, not the schools themselves, and that some of those fees get donated to the Clintons’ charitable foundation rather than into her pocket. Those pockets get a pretty cushy ride back and forth to these events, though, as the contract for her UNLV speech uncovered by the Las Vegas Review-Journal details: According to a...

Whatever the Hillary Clinton team had in mind for this summer, this certainly can’t have been it. Her book Hard Choices got panned as political pablum, and she stumbled throughout her promotional tour on what should have been easy and easily-foreseeable questions about her personal wealth and tenure at State. Over the past week, she picked a fight with the White House by attempting to distance herself from Barack Obama’s lack of “organizing principles” in foreign policy, only to make a quick and embarrassing retreat when rebuked publicly by David Axelrod.At the beginning of the summer, Clinton’s popularity put...

The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed. Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media. In the words of El-Mogaz News, Morsi’s wife “is threatening to expose the special relationship between her husband and Hillary Clinton, after the latter attacked the ousted [president], calling him a simpleton who was unfit for the...

The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed. Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media. In the words of El-Mogaz News, Morsi’s wife “is threatening to expose the special relationship between her husband and Hillary Clinton, after the latter attacked the ousted [president], calling him a simpleton who was unfit for the...

You’re probably wondering how the Great Hug-Out over at Vern’s house went last night. While it started out a bit awkwardly: “I’ll never let you down again.”By all accounts Hillary apologized profusely to Big Guy, “I’m sorry I threatened to eat you, little dog. I completely forgot you were black for a minute there.”And now everything is the way it used to be:“You can stop chewing on my ear now.”And now Hilz and Beary are best friends forever again.And remember kids: Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you: Obama, we have been told, is frustrated, “restless,”...

HILLARY AT THE BEACH - graphics and limerick

"In politics there are no accidents,if it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."--FDR All the talking heads and the chattering classes are in a tizzy about Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about Obama's "stupid" foreign policy. Is she daft? What would posses her to criticize him so bluntly? And how could Obama be so "unpresidential" calling it horses**t? This is all so phony I can't believe anyone thinks this was unplanned or unexpected. The terms of endearment were agreed to long ago. Hillary would become Obama's dutiful Secretary of State and Bill would enthusiastically campaign for Obama. In...

Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday apologized to President Obama for remarks many pundits deemed critical of the administration’s foreign policy. Well, “apologized” might be putting it a bit strongly. What Mrs. Clinton really did was clarify and extend comments she made in an Atlantic interview published last weekend. Among other things, Clinton told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg it was a “failure” to not arm moderate rebels in Syria. She said the administration’s mantra of “don’t do stupid stuff” was not a fit organizing principle for a major power in the modern world. But that was then. This is now: On...

President Obama must really be teed off. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his once-loyal secretary of state and his likeliest successor, has gone rogue, criticizing his foreign policy as too timid.

In a new interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, former secretary of State and probable candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Hillary Clinton went further than she has to date in openly criticizing the foreign policy of the president that she served under from 2009 to 2013. Specifically, Mrs. Clinton draws a direct line from the president’s failure to act in Syria to the rise of the Islamic State and the problems it now poses for Iraq and the rest of the region, and generally criticized the president for a having a foreign policy that had no clear sense...

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is now publicly responding to criticism from Hillary Clinton of Barack Obama's foreign policy. "On the broad thrust of our foreign policy, she was fully on board," Rhodes tells Politico. Hillary Clinton did a recent interview where she was seen to have been bashing elements of Obama's foreign policy. President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion....

Good Morning. Did everyone enjoy the SuperMoon last night? If not, Big Fur Hat at iOTW has recreated it for you here. Apologies in advance.And not to toot my own horn - well, okay, I am tootin’ – butt I first covered this cheeky move way back in 2012: “Visas, Volts, and Cheeky Ads.”And speaking of big butts,I see that Hillary is trying to haul hers out of deep crevice by distancing herself from Barry’s failed Peace Policies in the Middle East: Clinton attributed the rise of jihadists affiliated with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL)...

Bill and Hillary Clinton are making the most of their downtime in the Hamptons. The former U.S. President and his ex-Secretary of State wife were pictured this morning enjoying a stroll on the beach in Amagansett, where they are paying $100,000 to rent an $18million five-bedroom property for three weeks. The couple, who were accompanied by their dogs as well as a Secret Service agent, were dressed in very casual clothes, with President Clinton decked out in black SoulCycle shorts and green sneakers and his wife in a bright blue muumuu and slippers. [snip]

Alas, given the backstory of DoD not wanting to arm the rebels, and given the unintended consequences of 2011/2012 from Operation Zero Footprint, and given an upcoming election in November 2012, you can see why in post September 11 of 2012 the Obama administration would want to discontinue this operation and throw a bag over the events of the past 17 months.

With prospects for major legislation nonexistent, Obama is looking to plant seeds that he hopes his successors can cultivate.President Obama spent much of his first term fending off criticism that he hadn’t done enough for the black community, and that he wasn’t paying enough attention to Africa, where his father was born and where expectations soared after his election. In his second term, he’s making up for lost time. Earlier this year, he launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative aimed at boosting opportunities for boys and young men of color, and this week, he hosted 50 heads of state from...

The rollout of Hillary Clinton’s new memoirs, Hard Choices, was not a resounding success for the former secretary of state. She stuck her foot in her mouth regarding her family’s vast fortune. She had trouble answering questions about her evolution on gay marriage. Critics, on the whole, found the book tired and shopworn. Yet her poll numbers remain surprisingly solid. Surveys conducted by Quinnipiac University, Fox News, and Rasmussen Reports—all taken since the book’s release—show her with comfortable leads nationally over Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush. A mid-July CNN poll shows her with generally strong favorable ratings, although...

By James Bovard Monday, August 4, 2014 Former President Bill Clinton continues to be feted around the world as a progressive champion of human rights. However, a European Union task force last week confirmed that the ruthless cabal he empowered by bombing Serbia in 1999 has committed atrocities that include murdering individuals to extract and sell their kidneys, livers and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and...