Discussion for article #222839
Why does this article report Daily Beast article as if it were fact? Media Matters wrote an article that shows Daily Beast distorted the facts ⌠in short: Daily Beast article is another right wing lie
See: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/05/16/daily-beast-distorts-clintons-iran-comments-to/199364
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And this is a surprise⌠how? HASHTAG BENGHAZIIIIIIIII may be a clunker, but it was only natural that the Teahadists would go back over her time at State and use whatever they could to muddy the waters.
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Under Clinton State designated the principals in Boko Haram as terrorists. To state that Clinton did not designate the org itself is deliberately misleading and a perfect example of the dishonest smears we can expect from the right wing. Itâs Swift Boat season again already.
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If she is going to be a candidate, she has to get out in front of this in the purple states. Kerry ignored the swift boating stuff because it was patently ridiculous, and see how that turned out. Bill knows this. I wonder if her not doing anything about it reflects an ambivalence about running. If that is the case, she should move out of the way and give other prospective candidates some oxygen.
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Unlike the Benghazi nonsense, this is a fair question. Certainly one answer is that she avoided the grievous errors of her predecessors. She did not embroil the United States in needless conflicts that would only result in thousands of dead Americans and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dead in the country we were so kind as to âhelpâ.
Now, per Ross Douthat in yesterdayâs Times, and other critics, that isnât enough. It may have to be, though, since there is virtually no support among the American people for interventions to âfixâ other countries. Furthermore, as with Obamacare, where is the GOP alternative? Romney couldnât articulate any foreign policy area where he would act differently than Obama. Nor have any of the GOP contenders, except Sen Paul, who would be even less likely to intervene than Clinton (or so he says).
Itâs the dilemma you find yourself in when all you do is sit and complain about the other guys without any real ideas of your own.
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Bengoogley!
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Right from KKKarl Roveâs playbook. Attack your opponentâs strengths.
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So the GOP are going to use here tenure as Sec of State, a period in which she demonstrated incredibly competency, and was warmly welcomed by nations around the world, to attack her? Well, bring it on, because every time they open their mouths, people will be reminded of just how good a job she did.
Frankly, the GOP have lost their minds. Their massive and clearly calculated shift from attacking âObamacareâ and their pivot to #Benghazi are the perfect illustration that they have become nothing but bad actors. Nothing they do is based in principle. It is all calculated to try and appeal to the basest fears and hatreds in what they still calculate will be enough people to elect them.
Thing is, that demographic is shrinking more and more every day.
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One simple question for anyone who wants to start questioning Ms. Clintonâs tenure as Secretary of State:
âWhere would America be today in terms of our foreign policy if we had elected McCain/Palin?â
I rest my case!
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She could simply admit the mistake of outsourcing security to that private contractor who was nowhere to be found when the shooting started. Except she doesnât appear to believe it was a mistake.
The scourge of outsourcing would easily fit into a broad narrative about an MBA mentality slowly taking over the world, leading to death by a thousand cuts.
People are treated like commodities to be used up and discarded, and the corruption is so widespread that itâs distorted peoplesâ understanding how to treat one another.
Multi-tools are made so poorly that the pliers can be broken with the bare hand, and the cheap shit is so prevalent now itâs distorted everyoneâs understanding of what things really cost.
The idea of paying a fair salary for an honest dayâs work, is replaced with incentive and merit pay structures that encourage superintendents of schools to fudge their numbers while teaching to the test, and VA hospital administrators to keep phony sets of appointment calendars, just to pretend theyâre meeting their metric.
Benghazi weaves nicely into a lot of what I think a liberal politician should be saying is wrong with this country. Whether Sec. Clinton can weave it is up to her.
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Hillary Clinton demonstrated statesmanship.
Wars were wound down and/or averted.
That is a record for which Hillary Clinton can be most proud.
Her base and republican âsoccer momsâ will take statesmanship over hawkishness.
This is the reason Hillaryâs popularity remains quite high.
Republicans continue to grasp at straws that will continue to alienate many voters.
All I can say, âPlease proceed.â
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Well I used to enjoy the election process but that is long gone. The level of it all turns my stomach. Did not watch a single so called debate last time around and wonât this next go round.
Will do reading, following some respected reporting and base my vote on everything but the mainstream media.
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Buried way down in the story was the fact that the Nigerian government opposed designating Boko Haram as a terrorist group, and so did 20 academic experts on African affairs, fearing it would raise the groupâs international profile. But you donât get much of a career boost when you write that a situation is complicated and choices often fraught with peril no matter what course you pick. Thatâs just not news.
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The average person couldnât name a single accomplishment of any Secretary of State whatsoever, or even simply name a secretary, current or past. If Hillary Clinton had singlehandedly and personally repelled a wave of attacking alien spaceships, people might remember for a year or so. Anything else, I doubt it. If the Republicans can offer candidates with a more impressive set of accomplishments, then they should trot them out, cause we havenât seen 'em yet.
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These days, Republicans have a hard time seeing their nose in front of their face. Itâs what happens when your collective head is up your collective @$$.
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The eventual 2016 GOP nominee is gonna be boxed in by the GOPâs failure to land a blow when itâs all said and done.
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The Beast is such a hack rag.
Congress was trying to sabotage sanctions on Iran by pushing for a bill that would have started a trade war with US allies if Obama hadnât vetoed it. The Republicans werenât fighting Iran, they were fighting the President and trying to score points. Just like they always are.
The US canât force its allies to impose sanctions on Iran. Republicans like to think that the US shits on the rest of the world, allies included. But that isnât how the world works.
Boko Haram is really just a bunch of bandits like the Lords Resistance Army. Their primary focus is theft, not ideology.
The big tell of course is that in both cases the Republicans are complaining that Hillary didnât thump her chest and grunt in the right way, just like a Republican would. Because as we all know, chest thumping is what gets real results in world statescraft.
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When you consider the absolute mess that BUSH left, yes, we were hated every where for the cowboy style of the BUSH foreign policy, Hillaryâs primary job as Sec of State was to get us seen as reasonable actors once again. A very difficult job considering what she inherited.
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On October 23, 1983, a 19-ton yellow Mercedes-Benz stake-bed truck drove to the Beirut International Airport, where the U.S. 24th Marine Amphibious Unit was deployed. The 1st Battalion 8th Marines , commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Larry Gerlach, was a subordinate element of the 24th MAU. The truck was not the water truck they had been expecting. Instead, it was a hijacked truck carrying explosives. The driver turned his truck onto an access road leading to the compound. He drove into and circled the parking lot, and then he accelerated to crash through a 5-foot-high barrier of concertina wire separating the parking lot from the building. The wire popped âlike somebody walking on twigs.â The truck then passed between two sentry posts and through an open vehicle gate in the perimeter chain-link fence, crashed through a guard shack in front of the building and smashed into the lobby of the building serving as the barracks for the 1st Battalion 8th Marines.
The sentries at the gate were operating under rules of engagement, which made it very difficult to respond quickly to the truck. Sentries were ordered to keep their weapons at condition four (no magazine inserted and no rounds in the chamber). Only one sentry, LCpl Eddie DiFranco, was able to load and chamber a round. However, by that time the truck was already crashing into the buildingâs entryway. An Iranian national named Ismail Ascari,detonated his explosives, which were later estimated to be equivalent to approximately 9,525 kilograms (21,000 pounds) of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story building into rubble, crushing many inside.
"A former defense secretary for Ronald Reagan says he implored the president to put Marines serving in Beirut in a safer position before terrorists attacked them in 1983, killing 241 servicemen. âI was not persuasive enough to persuade the president that the Marines were there on an impossible mission,â Caspar Weinberger says in an oral history project capturing the views of former Reagan administration officials.
[H]e said one of his greatest regrets was in failing to overcome the arguments that â"Marines donât cut and run,â and âWe canât leave because weâre thereâ" before the devastating suicide attack on the lightly armed force.
âThey had no mission but to sit at the airport, which is just like sitting in a bullâs-eye,â Weinberger said. âI begged the president at least to pull them back and put them back on their transports as a more defensible position.â
Shortly after the barracks bombing, President Ronald Reagan appointed a military fact-finding committee headed by retired Admiral Robert L. J. Long to investigate the bombing. The commissionâs report found senior military officials responsible for security lapses and blamed the military chain of command for the disaster. It suggested that there might have been many fewer deaths if the barracks guards had carried loaded weapons and a barrier more substantial than the barbed wire the bomber drove over easily.
(Notably absent was any organized attempt by Democratic Congressional House members to investigate the Administrationâs knowledge of the militaryâs defense strategy regarding the barracks.)
It wasnât like the Reagan Administration had no inkling of the possibility of attacks on U.S. personnel in Lebanon. Six months prior to the Marine barracks attack, on April 18, 1983, a suicide bombing against the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 63 people, mostly embassy and CIA staff members, several soldiers and one Marine. 17 of the dead were Americans. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that time[.]
Following the attack, the embassy was moved to a supposedly more secure location in East Beirut. However, on September 20, 1984, another car bomb exploded at this embassy annex, killing twenty Lebanese and two American soldiers.
By Darrell Issaâs standards, Reaganâs corpse should be exhumed and the rotting Gipper should be forced to answer questions in front of his committee about the nearly three hundred Americans who were murdered in Lebanon while he was President.
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