Tuesday, November 30, 2010

I SPOKE TOO SOON

Yesterday I noted that the wingnuttosphere seemed awfully quiet in response to news that Hillary Clinton directed U.S. diplomats at the UN to spy on their counterparts from other nations. Was the Hitlery/Hildebeast meme really dead on the right? It seemed that way yesterday -- but not today:



Also Fox Nation is front-paging this Dick Morris blog post:

HILLARY IS UP TO HER OLD TRICKS

The Wikileaks documents show that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has, as Voltaire said about the Bourbon kings of France, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Her request that American diplomats at foreign postings and the United Nations gather personal data about their foreign counterparts is eerily reminiscent of her use of private detectives to unearth negative information on those who were politically inconvenient during the husband’s campaigns for president and his White House tenure.

At the time, I called these operatives, the “secret police.” Now, apparently, we call them the “diplomatic corps.”

The Wikileaks documents show that you can not only not teach an old dog new tricks, but you can’t stop her from doing the ones she has always done....


Yes, Condoleezza Rice did the same thing Hillary did, but -- somehow -- that doesn't disprove the fact that this reveals something horrible and rotten in Hillary's soul:

The fact that this current State Department covert operation was initiated under Secretary Rice does not lessen Hillary’s guilt for having pursued it. Mrs. Clinton, not Miss Rice, has run for president and is presumed to continue to be interested in the job. Her addiction to spies, dumpster divers, sleuths, and negative research operatives have always been a cause for concern.

Um, actually Hillary has said she'll never again run for elected office. But that was earlier this month, and in Dick Morris's mind it's always 1998.

My favorite part of the Morris blog post?

The jury has been out on how well Hillary is performing as Secretary of State. I have always been critical of her riding on her husband's name to achieve fame and power. But when she was appointed Secretary of State, clearly despite her husband rather than because of him, I felt it prudent to withhold judgment.

Scroll past this and you'll see that Morris links to two columns he wrote back when he was "withhold[ing] judgment": "HILLARY NOMINATION WOULD BE AN OBAMA-NATION" and "HILLARY APPOINTMENT: THE AUDACITY OF BROKEN PROMISES."

Oh, there's also this clip of Morris telling Sean Hannity that Hillary's acting like a big commie:



Elsewhere, the Fox-o-sphere is calling Obama a weakling: Bill O'Reilly says no one in the world fears the president, while Ralph Peters calls Obama a "gutless wonder."

Which means we're looking at the two quintessential evil-liberal archetypes: the all-powerful totalitarian and the limp-wristed stumblebum, in the persons of Clinton and Obama. Somehow, Democrats are always both of these things at once.

****

Meanwhile, Slate's Jack Shafer says Hillary will have to resign, not because she's evil but because that's what diplomats do when they get involved in espionage and are caught. So: the usual right-plus-center pile-on? Or will Hillary survive?

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