Hillary disagrees with Obama's "Don't do stupid shit" policy

It's not just me. Another veteran of the 2008 blogworld fight-for-Hillary has privately asked me: "Is it possible we dodged a bullet with Obama?"

Obama has (privately) defined his foreign policy as "Don't do stupid shit," and Hillary has made clear that she disagrees: She wants to do stupid shit. For what reason? I dunno. Something about great nations needing "organizing principles." At least she didn't use the word "vision," the usual go-to term for all politicians who want to justify the doing of stupid shit.

You know what's really stupid? It's stupid for Hillary, who wants to be president, to insist that we should have armed the Syrian rebels even though all polls indicated that the American people hated the idea. It's stupid for her to pretend that there was a way to unseat Bashar Assad without empowering the jihadists. And it's stupid for her to anger so many liberals by taking an unpopular stance over last year's historical decision point. There are no do-overs in history, unless your name is Dick Nixon.

We live in a profane age, and Obama has been using some surprisingly earthy language of late, calling the criticism of his Syria policy "horseshit" Apparently, Hillary is not the only neocon Dem spewing fantasy:

Top Democratic lawmakers agreed with Corker and Clinton that doing more to support the moderate rebels would have at least had a chance of averting or mitigating the current crisis, which has now spread to large parts of Iraq as ISIS expands its newly declared Caliphate.

Oh, for chrissakes. This "moderate rebel" horseshit (if I may be forgiven the presidential terminology) is, and always has been, nonsense. These alleged moderates had neither the numbers nor the motive.

I'll say it again: To topple a government, you need sunzabitches. Fighters. Zealots. In the Middle East, that means Islamic zealots, there being no other kind in that region.

The American Conservative gets it (partly) right. We trained and equipped the entire fucking Iraqi Army: How well have they fared against ISIS? Even if these hallucinatory Syrian "moderates" were real, could they have successfully fought both ISIS and Assad?

More likely, the weapons supplied to “moderate” rebels would have been lost through conflicts with jihadists, or “moderate” rebels would have used those weapons to weaken the regime’s control and help to expose even more of Syria to the depredations of the most fanatical rebels. Insofar as the “moderate” opposition and jihadists coordinated against the regime, there would presumably be some pooling of resources, so it is also conceivable that U.S. arms would find their way into jihadist hands with the agreement of the Washington-approved rebels.

"Conceivable?" It actually happened! Hell, there was a point when the "moderates" claimed that America was leaving them high and dry while the Nusrah Front was getting all the armaments they could wish!

The elephant in the room -- the thing that neither Hillary nor Obama can talk about in public -- is that we did, in fact, aid the jihadists. Many previous posts have discussed this fact, and those posts all cited credible reports taken (mostly) from mainstream sources. We made sure that the anti-Assad Islamists got arms -- including arms from post-revolutionary Libya. We trained the jihadis in Qatar. We trained them (reportedly) in Jordan. We trained them in the use of chemical weaponry. We even let these crazies fly in and out of our country, despite the "no fly" list.

Everyone knows that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar tossed a lot of money at the jihadists who have now coalesced under the ISIS banner. This is not a controversial point. It is naive to think that these countries, whom we consider friendly, would have funded a massive Sunni uprising without our blessing. It is undeniable that these countries did what they did with our knowledge and without any public complaints from this administration.

The above-referenced American Conservative piece discusses the impossibility of "vetting" the rebels to make sure that they weren't Islamic wackos. While truish, this point misses the deeper truth: We welcomed Islamic wackos. We encouraged them.

Any stick to beat a dog, and Bashar Assad was the dog.

Iran. Hillary's instantly notorious interview was neo-connish in all sorts of ways, and not just on the topic of Syria. While discussing Israel, she made clear that everything bad everywhere is the fault of Hamas. ("Robin Williams killed himself? Damn you, Hamas...!) And Iran...? Yow. Don't get her started on Iran:

Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no such right.

By what right does she say they have no such right? Where is "no enrichment" written in international law? If Iran has no right, then why does Israel have a right? Why do we have a right?

I'll tell you what nations have no right to do: They have no right to piss on the very concept of national sovereignty. They have no right make war against a country at peace with other countries. Like it or not, the phrase "at peace with other countries" describes Iran a hell of a lot better than it describes us.

As Digby says:

This is a very scary interview. Much more hardcore than I expected.

It's possible she's doing this to speed things up so an agreement can be struck before Obama leaves office --- kind of a Reaganesque madman move --- but considering her hard line on everything else, I'd guess not.

Yikes.

The reason why. So why is Hillary saying what she is saying? Here's a clue, via the WP:

Josh Block, president of the Israel Project, said it is “important” to see a Democratic leader laying out a worldview “that recognizes the role of our values and very real threats and trends facing the U.S. and our allies today.”

“It struck me as the reemergence of common sense in Democratic foreign policy after a period of drift and indecision,” Block added.

Whenever the Israel-Firsters try to sell war as "the reemergence of common sense," may God help us all. Note the use of the term "values": That's another go-to word, like "vision."

More historical revisionism. Just to make the situation pluperfectly surreal, we have have an insane Bloomberg piece by Megan McArdle, titled "When Obama Beat Hillary, We All Lost." This piece posits that Hillary -- unlike that pinko Obama -- would have governed much further to the right, and that this would have been a good thing.

I think that Hillary Clinton would have been more cautious when dealing with Republicans, and therefore ultimately more successful in some ways. At the very least, she would not be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress.

This is nonsense, of course: The behavior of the Republicans during the Bill Clinton years was totally nutzoid. Remember the militias? Remember their supporters in Congress? Remember Ken freakin' Starr?

The writer then engages in the fantasy that Hillary would not have backed anything like the Affordable Care Act (even though she is on record as having done just that) and that there would have been no Tea Party -- because, in this view, the ACA is what created the Tea Party. McArdle also says that the American people have rejected the ACA because it is too radical, even though polls in 2009 indicated that a majority of Americans wanted full-bore Medicare-for-all.

Does McArdle really believe this crap? The Tea Party was never a grassroots movement; it was astroturf created by Wall Streeters to insure that the country focused on deficit reduction instead of stimulus. (The trick worked.) And does McArdle really expect us to think that Obama has given us a librul pinko foreign policy? Until very recently, he has been outrageously hawkish -- drones, Gitmo, unbridled spying, all sorts of devious covert ops, Israel ueber alles...

To his credit, however, Obama has kept this country from participating in direct military intervention, even though the Washington elite keeps finding new reasons to press him into "going Dubya" in this or that region of the world. When Obama says "don't do stupid shit," he really means "Don't send in the Marines unless you truly have to." Alas, that kind of stupid shit is precisely what our elites demand of a president.

Hillary Clinton, I will always treasure my initial delusions about you. I thought you stood for peace. But now...? Well, all I can say is this: If you really insist on imitating George Bush, I'll be happy to send you some brushes and oil paints.