Friday, March 07, 2008

Hypocrisy, thy name is Clinton

The truth seldom catches up with the lie, so you may have missed this in the daily swirl.

Remember how Hillary Clinton pilloried Barack Obama, because one of his economic advisers allegedly told the Canadian government that he did not intend to pull the NAFTA house down? To begin with, that's not what the Canadian consul general in Chicago said in the memo written about the incident. According to the AP, as reported in The New York Times, the consul wrote:
On Nafta Goolsbee [the Obama adviser] suggested that Obama is less about fundamentally changing the agreement and more in favor of strengthening/clarifying language on labor mobility and environment and trying to establish these as more ‘core’ principles of the agreement.
Now, that is pretty much in alignment with what Obama said at the last debate. He did add that he would use the NAFTA provision allowing one nation to back out of the agreement on six months' notice as leverage; what leader would not do so to win his point?

Here's the kicker though. It turns out that while the Clinton campaign was expressing righteousness and outrage over Obama's behavior, its own people had engaged in the same kind of conduct. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports:
He [Ian Brody, chief of staff to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper] said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry.
Rank hypocrisy, then. But also stupidity. Did Clinton really think this wasn't going to come out? Or did she and her campaign make the thoroughly cynical call that they would suffer less damage because, as I said at the beginning of this post, the truth seldom catches the lie?

Not very presidential, in any event.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You know, perhaps she WON'T make a good president. The more of this stuff that comes out, the more it seems that she either does not have firm control of her staff or she is a hypocrite.

The latter confirms that she will say anything to get elected. And that is despicable.