Hillary Unfit to be U.S. President-Part Two

According to journalist Rick Moran, the experts at StrategyPage.com now report that the violence in Iraq has decreased in most areas of the country by up to two-thirds what it was earlier in the year.

In fact, progress in Iraq can be attributed to another great generation of American soldiers who are "creative, innovative, resourceful, free thinking and brave," said Jay Carafano, a senior research fellow specializing in defense and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation.

But clearly, Hillary doesn't agree. To her, American military success has no meaning. To this day, she has not apologized to Gen. Petraeus for her unforgivably intemperate slur on his integrity. She has not acknowledged the success of the general's surge. And she has never once repudiated or even distanced herself from the Times' character-assassination ad or from its sponsor, MoveOn.org.

No wonder Republican Congressman Peter King, who returned from Iraq shortly after Hillary's slur, told a radio host how closely the troops were following politics in the U.S., and how angry they were about the MoveOn.org ad. "They specifically mentioned Hillary Clinton...for not denouncing MoveOn.org. It went beyond a political anger - it was a rage."

Even The Washington Post's liberal columnist Richard Cohen weighed in ("After Petraeus Is Slimed, Spineless Silence"), calling Hillary's swipe at Gen. Petraeus "the politics of personal expediency."

Questioning whether Hillary has "the spine" or "character" to be president, Cohen adds that this "was a moment for her to say that an Army general, under orders and attempting to fulfill a mission, should not be so casually trashed...That moment is gone - maybe because for Hillary Clinton it never arrived in the first place."

Michael Goodwin of the NY Daily News put it this way: "With her refusal to denounce the far-left MoveOn.org for its smear of our top commander in Iraq, Clinton has taken another big step away from the center of American politics. On the most important issue of our times - Iraq and the fight against Islamic terrorism - the Democratic presidential front-runner has thrown her lot in with the radicals, kooks and nuts...and she has turned her back on our soldiers and their leaders during wartime."

Just as damning, in a Congressional resolution to salute Gen. Petraeus and denounce MoveOn for calling him "General Betray Us," Hillary Clinton voted no! That made her only one of 25 senators to vote no, with 72 senators voting yes.

Goodwin calls this "a litmus test. By supporting one and opposing the other, Clinton put her ties to the radicals ahead of her ties to the military. Either you are viscerally comfortable with the people and the power necessary to defend our nation, or you are not. And with these two key votes, Clinton is showing not just discomfort, but hostility."

And don't be fooled by Hillary's vote on November 16 against the enforcement of large-scale troop withdrawals in exchange for $50 billion in war funding - yet another effort by Democrats to lose the war in Iraq by stalling President Bush's request for additional war funding until next year.

After screeching anti-war rants around the country, smearing General Petraeus, and bowing and scraping before the far-left factions of her Party, Hillary's vote was yet another attempt to have it both ways and engage in the kind of flip-flops that have become her hallmark.

Writer Raymond Kraft warns that: "No soldier, no army, can be inspired by a leader who disdains it, and we have heard the disdain of Hillary Clinton for America's soldiers, and for their mission. A Commander-in-Chief who embraces defeat cannot lead an army to victory. What soldier will fight for a Commander-in-Chief who believes that soldier's mission is wrong, and that he or she should surrender and withdraw?"

Hillary continues to stump on the premise that "this is George Bush's war!" says writer Bill Murchison. This "tells us everything we need to know...Bush is `the one this thing is all about - not Saddam, not the weapons of mass destruction nearly everyone believed him to have; not the `bumper-sticker war' on the homicidal maniacs who took down the Twin Towers, and whose imitators are multiplying.'"

"Campaigning for American defeat," Murchison adds, "proves that those who do so had no shame to begin with."

Nicholas Wapshott, in the NY Sun, writes that, "When [our troops] face the prospect of death or maiming each day, they do not deserve to be sniped at from the folks back home. Wars are also something the whole country shares. The Iraq War is no more "Bush's War" than World War Two was "Roosevelt's War."

Wapshott reminds us that, "In World War Two, those who objected to the aims of the war, or refused to play their part, were considered traitors to America and treacherous to their friends and neighbors. It was possible to hold private reservations about the war or the way in which it was being directed, but it would have been unconscionable to have undermined the war effort or threatened the withdrawal of funds for our fighting forces."

Yet, in her drumbeat, Hillary has thunderously "undermined the war effort."

Columnist Debra J. Saunders reminds us that Hillary admitted to CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she hadn't even read the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate before she voted for the war resolution, although she firmly believed that Iraq had WMD.

"Of course, she did," said Saunders, "when [Bill Clinton] was president."

In her new book, "For Love of Politics," Sally Bedell Smith provides a perfect example of Hillary's craven opportunism, which I maintain reinforces her unique unfitness to be president.

"In 1993 she talked her husband out of getting involved in the war in Bosnia because she thought it would be like Vietnam and would harm the chances for her health care plan. Two years later, after being secretly tutored by a State Department official, she became an advocate for the use of force in Bosnia because she feared Bill's inaction was harming him politically."

Hillary would also like the public to forget that last May, when Congress voted to fund the Iraq war without timetables or withdrawal dates, she was only one of 14 senators to vote no! This prompted the Wall St. Journal to editorialize that the vote (her vote) "won...praise from the likes of MoveOn.org, which threatened not to support anyone who voted for the bill."

Yet another reminder that Hillary's first allegiance is not to our troops, nor to America's victory in Iraq, but rather to George Soros' money and to polls reflecting hard-left sentiment that also find it easy to bribe her to betray our troops.

The Journal's editorial went on to say that Hillary (and her rivals for the presidential nomination) are "bidding to be Commander-in-Chief, and they vote to undermine U.S. troops in the middle of a difficult mission...which means that they were for the war when it was popular but are against it now that public opinion has changed."

As the "antiwar furies have built in her party, [Hillary] has bent with them and now says and does whatever it takes...This will complicate her Presidency if she ever does make it to the Oval Office. The Iranians, among others, will have seen that she can be turned when the going gets tough."

Is this the woman who anyone on earth believes would defend our country - with the full force of its military might and the full backing of our military leaders - as we continue to fight the jihad that openly threatens to annihilate us every minute of every day?