Tell Me She Was Kidding

by Paul on November 28, 2007

A New York Times Political Blog story:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been talking for some time now about how, if she is elected president, she will ask both Democratic and Republican statesmen to hit the road on her behalf to declare that “bipartisan foreign policy is back” in post-George W. Bush America.

While Mrs. Clinton has pointed to her husband as an emissary, it has been unclear for some time which Republicans she had in mind. But in South Carolina today, speaking to a group of black ministers, Mrs. Clinton dropped a name publicly that she has hinted at privately before.

“I won’t even wait until I’m inaugurated, but as soon as I’m elected I’m going to be asking distinguished Americans of both parties — people like Colin Powell, for example, and others — who can represent our country well, including someone I know very well,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a Fox News Web report. “Because I want to send a message heard across the world. The era of cowboy diplomacy is over.”

I’m not the biggest Hillary fan in the world, but I have to hope she didn’t really say that.

Seriously. How about we represent the country using someone who isn’t a possible criminal for starting a war of aggression in Iraq? Maybe a man who hadn’t personally told the United Nations that we had solid evidence of mobile weapons labs, anthrax, and other threats, based on the transparent fables of a man named Curveball?

If she must bow to the concept of bipartisanship (despite the GOP spending 15 years poisoning our politics with, among other things, attacks on her and her family), there must be other choices. (Though I have to say, it wasn’t a lack of bipartisan support that landed us in Iraq. A prominent Democratic candidate actually voted for the war, you know.)

But Colin Powell? Colin Powell? Does she really have to insult us by suggesting that Colin Powell has any credibility left overseas? While our soldiers are still dying in Baghdad, should he be doing anything other than begging our forgiveness, and working day and night to get us out of that mess?

Frankly, if a future US administration sends Colin Powell anywhere, it should be to the Hague. He’s got some explaining to do.

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