President Hillary Clinton

No, it’s not a special Halloween edition – The Three Scariest Words. Frankly, President Rudy Guiliani and President Mitt Romney are scarier, although they would be faced with Democratic majority in Congress which would be more likely to fight them than they would Hillary. The Shorenstein Center did a study on the early months of the campaign in the main stream media which noted that there was an emphasis placed almost entirely on the horse race rather than on the policies and potential Presidencies of the respective candidates. Since Hillary is the most likely winner, I figured I’d take a shot at this less frequent kind of analysis.
Now analyzing Hillary is tricky, since it involves parsing her positions in search of the truth, as well as looking at her history. Given that I believe little of what she says on the campaign trail, since most of it is what her pollster, Mark Penn, believes to be what people want to hear, this becomes exceptionally difficult. Let’s look at various issues to see what President HRC would be like.
Her name: I said President HRC but she is now running just as HC – the Rodham having disappeared for this campaign. I assume because polling data indicates that Bill Clinton is far more popular than anyone named Rodham. I assume that once elected, she’ll return to the name she used as Senator.
Iraq: In the early months of the campaign she screamed her big Iraq declaration “If George Bush doesn’t end the war in Iraq by January, 2009, I will!” She doesn’t say that anymore. She refuses to say she’ll end it by 2013. She’s the only Democrat who has not declared that U.S. troops will be out of combat operations in 2009. It’s clear she thinks she has effectively convinced the soft-headed Democrats that she’s anti-war, so she can return to the center for the general election. Her real position on Iraq is slightly to the left of Joe Lieberman. Despite her lie that she voted for the war just to give Bush the leverage to negotiate, there was not one piece of evidence that she opposed military action there, before or after it happened. Bill Clinton publicly supported it, she hasn’t split from him yet. It was not until Mark Penn told her she had to be anti-war to get the nomination that she spoke out against it. Look for the war to continue, albeit with fewer troops, which would happen no matter who the President is. The only way she gets us out is if she thinks she needs to to get reelected.
Iran: She voted for the retarded Senate resolution declaring Iran’s Republican Guard a terrorist organization. She was the only one of the Democratic candidates to do so, I assume because she figures she needs to vote that way for the general election. That the vote could be used by Bush to justify military action against Iran is irrelevant to her, since all that matters is her getting elected. Now that’s irresponsible, but the other interpretation, that she actually believes this to be a good idea is even worse. It demonstrates a frightening lack of understanding of Iran’s internal politics and bodes poorly for her ability to navigate in that part of the world. Of course, her Iraq position sort of does that already, but this is a little scarier. Will she, as a woman, feel the need to never look weak? Will this lead to military actions against Iran? If you aren’t a little frightened of that possibility, you are ignoring both her personality and her history.
Health Care: She will get nothing done on this because she has no ability to reach across the aisle for votes. The GOP will use her as a way to raise money and fire up their loyalists. What she will try to do is come up with a system to get more people health care without hurting insurance companies profits. Good luck with that one.
Trade: Given the amount of money her campaign has received from Chinese sources, many of them questionable, we can expect us to continue her husband’s policy of kowtowing to the People’s Republic. Given her close connections to big business and her husband’s support of Republican trade policies, we can count on more free trade agreements with some cosmetic side agreements which will generally be ignored.
Judicial Appointments: Pro-choice judges will be allowed to apply. The Supreme Court will get it’s first pro-choice judge in a decade, and maybe even a non-Catholic.
Torture: One could assume she would be opposed to it and would also close Guantanamo. But that could run into the “weak like a woman” thing she wants to avoid, so I’m less confident about these things than I might be. Look for more authoritative statements opposing these things, but I’m not sure they will be really meaningful.
Personal Freedoms: Here it gets tricky. The best hint we get of Hillary’s likely position on these things is the concept of “It Takes a Village”. She is a big believer in the nanny state. One of the few issues she has stepped to the forefront of is violent video games, where she shared the lead with Joe Lieberman. My expectation is that she will continue to oppose these things, along with misogynist lyrics in rap music, internet porn, and internet gambling. Both because she probably believes in those things and because it will allow her to show the religious right that she’s not the devil incarnate.
That's right, I'm not a fan. Many of you may find these positions just fine. If that's the case, to quote Hillary herself, she's your girl.

Simple Policy, Hard Decisions

It all seemed so logical and simple. We, and the rest of the civilized world, would root out terrorists, would fight them, would fight those countries who gave them haven, and those countries which supported them. This makes sense – if terrorists are the problem, those who help them are part of the problem. As time has gone by, the enforcement of this doctrine has been more and more difficult. One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. King George surely had a different attitude toward the Sons of Liberty than we do now. Trying to define Hamas is nearly impossible. When the Russians tried to crush Chechnia, the Chechin rebels were either freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on whose side you were on. It left us paralyzed, between those who seemed to be fighting for independence and a nation-state under attack by rebels using tools which could be described as terroristic.
As bad as those are, the latest problems involving Turkey and the Kurds are far worse. It is very clear that Turkey is being attacked by a terrorist group, the PKK, trying to undermine their government and trying to “liberate” the Kurdish areas of Turkey. They are doing this by crossing the border from Iraq into Turkey and killing Turkish soldiers. It is clear and unequivocal terrorism. The Turks have given parliamentary approval to pursue these people into Iraq. This is where it all gets quite messy for the U. S.
The Kurds are our best friends in Iraq. The Turks are our best friends in the Islamic world – the only stable, secular democracy among Islamic countries. They are a member of NATO and have a government which wants to be part of the western world. In fact, one could say that we are obligated, as a NATO ally, to help defend Turkey against these attacks. Unfortunately, this would cause us to attack Iraq, which means attacking ourselves, which...okay, we’re getting more than a little messed up here. The government of Iraq has little control over Kurdistan. The dirty little secret is that the government of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region has little control over that region. The PKK has effective control over much of the area and stopping them from their goals will be very difficult. Most likely, their first choice would be Turkey attacking the Kurds, which, they probably feel, would unite the Kurds in opposition to the Turks. Yet what choice does Turkey have? The longer they do nothing, the longer they allow incursions by terrorists to result in the death of their soldiers, the worse they look. And if the secular government of Turkey looks weak, a religious party could well look to seize the opportunity. You can hear the speeches now: “See what allying with the West gets us? See how being friends with the U.S. Is worthless?” Thousands are in the streets now, following the killing of 12 Turkish soldiers and the injuring of 17 civilians in a wedding party with a roadside bomb. Meanwhile, the Kurds have made it clear they won’t tolerate any Turkish invasion to get PKK rebels. Iraq has reacted angrily to the threat of a Turkish invasion of the north.
For many months, experts have been warning that the north of Iraq was going to be the biggest problem there. Those warnings are coming true now. The Turks, justifiably, based on our stated policy and their alliance with us, are demanding we help them against the PKK. The Iraqi government is adamantly opposed to that and our best friends in Iraq, the Kurds, are particularly against it. What’s a superpower to do? The best we can hope for is that faced with such an immensely complex decision, Bush and Cheney’s heads explode. More likely, given their previous performance in the region, they’ll attempt to solve the problem by attacking Iran.