House of Eratosthenes

To be fair to Clinton, she isn’t the first secretary of state to issue cables telling U.S. foreign service officers to spy on other diplomats. According to the leaked diplomatic cables, Condoleezza Rice likewise instructed State Department diplomats to collect such intelligence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if previous secretaries of state encouraged if not instructed their diplomats to push information-collection all the way to intelligence-gathering.

But what makes Clinton’s sleuthing unique is the paper trail that documents her spying-on-their-diplomats-with-our-diplomat orders, a paper trail that is now being splashed around the world on the Web and printed in top newspapers. No matter what sort of noises Clinton makes about how the disclosures are “an attack on America” and “the international community,” as she did today, she’s become the issue. She’ll never be an effective negotiator with diplomats who refuse to forgive her exuberances, and even foreign diplomats who do forgive her will still regard her as the symbol of an overreaching United States. Diplomacy is about face, and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton’s scalp.
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How embarrassing are the WikiLeaks leaks? A secret cable from April 2009 that went out under Clinton’s name instructed State Department officials to collect the “biometric data,” including “fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans,” of African leaders. Another secret cable directed American diplomats posted around the world, including the United Nations, to obtain passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, and other data connected to diplomats. As the Guardian puts it, the cables “reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network.”

Pretty big stuff. Salon isn’t exactly a mouthpiece of agenda-driven Mellon-funded neocons, by any stretch. If it does shake out this way you can forget all about Hillary in 2012, and likely in 2016 as well. Or afterward.

Good riddance. I hear so much about…ah…a certain other woman being “unqualified” and Hillary, from the moment I first heard about her, has always been given a pass. The idea of an eight-year-term as First Lady being some kind of useful experience is one I have always found laughable…and it has not escaped my notice that Hillary seems to have a person or party to indict, in some way, whenever she talks about anything.

Even looking past the right-wing left-wing politics of the situation, I just think the world has become too complex to be engaged by any authority figure whose modus operandi is to find blame for every little thing. There are problems out there that just…are. Nobody caused ’em. They still need to be addressed, and blame is not leadership.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: The world will be a better place when her public “service” career comes to a permanent end. Let her make oodles of money on the lecture circuit, where she will surely use more spurious arguments to blame more people for more things. But, there, she will be just another bucket in a vast, toxic ocean. That’s where she belongs. Let her stand in line, peddling her ideas, pocketing some big coin for doing it. Better that than legislating or executing any actual policy. I’d love to hear the argument about how that’s done us any good.

As bad as she is I fear they will undoubtedly replace here with someone worse.
- Duffy | 11/30/2010 @ 09:21
Until Glorious Leader came along, Hillary was the perfect leftist — shrill, disagreeable, accomplishment-free, and, as you note above, a perpetual victim. She was, in short, what every proggie woman longed to be (certainly including the “at least occasionally boffing Bill Clinton” part; c.f. Nina Burleigh). She, like Glorious Leader, remains the perfect illustration of why you never let Ivy-educated academics run anything, ever.

(I’ve almost gotten into fights with liberal friends over this. Whenever they express frustration with Holy Man’s administration, I reply “why, it’s almost as if he’s a doctrinaire academic Marxist with no executive experience whatsoever!” Always good for a larf).

Sadly, as Duffy notes above, these people are a dime a dozen. Having attended one of the “right schools” myself in a former life, I can assure you that Hillary! remains the patron saint of every undergrad girl in the Ivy League.
- Severian | 11/30/2010 @ 11:10
I found this one interesting because of a video somebody sent me recently.

You’ve probably already seen it, but if not, enjoy.

http://keepamericaatwork.com/?p=11427
- vbierschwale | 11/30/2010 @ 17:43

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“It’s Impossible for Hillary Clinton to Continue as Secretary of State”Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

“It’s Impossible for Hillary Clinton to Continue as Secretary of State”
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010