Ugh. Another day of pettiness from Hillary Clinton and her crew — we have to sit through seven more weeks of this, just because pundits are bad at math? Sigh…anyway, after referring to Hillary Clinton somewhat off-the-record as a “monster,” (while promoting a book in England, and not speaking for the Obama campaign), author, journalist and genocide expert Samantha Power resigns as an Obama foreign policy advisor. This is mainly because the Clinton campaign called for her head (less than a day after Wolfson’s Ken Starr analogy, mind you) and apparently deemed her original apology not sufficient.
To put things into perspective, when SNL’s Tina Fey called Clinton a “bitch” several times over two weeks ago on national television, Bill Clinton called to thank her. (And, when Hillary Clinton suggested somebody kill Ralph Nader back in 2000, everyone just shrugged it off. Somehow, that seems worse to me than calling someone a “monster”…I’ll never understand why that didn’t cause more of a stir.)
In any case, Power is out (for now — I expect she can come back once the Clinton people internalize the reality of their loss.) To be sure, her remark was unfortunate in public, but she did apologize. But I guess the Clinton campaign just has a problem with strong women speaking their mind, when that mind is directed against Her Eminence. And particularly when the strong woman in question just happens to have way more national security cred than Hillary Clinton, and thus puts the lie to her recent slobbering over John McCain: While Samantha Power was risking her life to research The Problem from Hell and get a handle on the world’s most nightmarish dilemma, Hillary Clinton was toodling around Bosnia with a security detail, Sheryl Crow, and Sinbad. O, beware, my lady, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.
Update: Clinton dispatches Wesley Clark and Jamie Rubin to pile on. Charming. Rubin’s always been a stooge, but I thought Gen. Clark had more class than this. Guess I was wrong.
That’s a big loss from my point of view, as I think she has a lot to do with his foreign policy being markedly less shitty than Clinton’s. I hope she’s back in for the general. Again with the gaffe and and gotcha and soundbite crap trumping real substance. Well, you gotta play the game, and they had been almost perfect until the Goolsby mess and now this. Time to get back to the tight ship they were running earlier.
I don’t think Power is going anywhere, and she’ll still be a prominent foreign policy force in the Obama administration.
Wes Clark, on the other hand, will probably end up being relegated to the FOX News ghetto, after today’s stunt.