Well, well, well!
Just as I feared. Obama is bent on following in President Lincoln’s footsteps – tall order – to include opponents in his Administration. I wrote a few days ago that all Obama needs to make the Lincoln experience complete will be a Civil War. I predicted that with the Hillary Clinton appointment to State, a civil war was coming up.
Just imagine, Obama throws his loyal people under the bus and gives away the store!
Hillary plays hardball – The Independent UK
The first sign of friction in the Obama camp as Mrs Clinton demands – and gets – a purge of her critics before accepting Secretary of State role
Before Hillary Clinton has been formally offered the job as Secretary of State, a purge of Barack Obama’s top foreign policy team has begun.
The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady’s foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world.
In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department. She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.
The first victims of Mrs Clinton’s anticipated appointment will be those who defended Mr Obama’s flanks on the campaign trail. By mocking Mrs Clinton’s claims to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia or pouring scorn on her much-ballyhooed claim to have visited 80 countries as First Lady they successfully deflected the damaging charge that he is a lightweight on international issues.
Foremost among the victims of the purges is her old Yale Law School buddy Greg Craig, a man who more than anyone led the rescue of his presidency starting the very night Kenneth Starr’s lurid report into the squalid details of the former president’s sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky were published on the internet in 1998. Despite his long and loyal friendship with the Clintons, Mr Craig threw his lot in with Mr Obama at an early stage in the presidential election campaign. As if that betrayal to the cause of the Clinton restoration was not enough, Mr Craig did more to undermine Mrs Clinton’s claims to be a foreign policy expert than anyone else in the some of the ugliest exchanges of the battle for the Democratic nomination.
Until this week he was poised to be the eminence grise of the State Department, organising as total revamp of America’s troubled foreign policies on Mr Obama’s behalf. Its turns out that Mrs Clinton’s delay in accepting the president elect’s offer to be his top foreign policy adviser had much to do with her negotiating the terms of the job and insisting on the right to choose her own state department staff and possibly even some of the plumb Ambassador postings. She wanted guarantees of direct access to the president – without having to go through his national security adviser. Above all she did not want to end up like Colin Powell who was completely out-manoeuvred by the hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney who imposed neo-conservative friends like John Bolton on the State Department and steered the US towards a policy of using torture to achieve its aims.
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Does Obama not understand the Clintons can’t be trusted; they have no loyalty to anyone — that they have their own agenda and once they’ve used you to achieve personal ends you’re toast?
Is this Hillary vindictiveness not contrary to Obama’s reaching out? It’s Clinton all the time.
Memo to Barack Obama:
Enjoy the disaster of your own making. Whatever made you think you needed Hillary to take your 3:00 AM calls.
What a collapse of confidence!
Dispicable.
