Hillary Clinton on 'Morning Joe'

Hillary's interview with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski was lengthy and deep.  If you missed it, you can catch highlights at the Morning Joe website. Some of the conversation is in the tickers at the bottom of the pictures below.

Reports in the aftermath of last night's GOP debate refer to a Rubio-Cruz tag team going after Trump. In the run-up to this interview, I saw concerns from some of Hillary's supporters that something like that would happen here. It didn't.

This is just my opinion, but it seemed to me that the reason it didn't was because rather than Joe and Mika teaming up against Hillary, Joe and Hillary somehow were the tag team.  Her responses were reasonable, and Joe immediately responded to that in a positive way.  Mika seemed superfluous to the proceedings except for twice - once when the question of women being held to a higher or different standard arose, and again when the issue of millennials came up.  Hillary, in her signature manner, reached out to Mika and said, "You've got two."  So while Hillary was the one who said this is a generation who feel cheated and left out, it was Mika who called them willful and materialistic.  Hillary said that once the process is complete she thinks they will see the value of her plans.



Joe thought she was.  He said he saw the Hillary of 2008 again.  That explains, perhaps, his tone throughout.  In 2008 he called Hillary his "girlfriend."  Hillary agreed that she has sensed a change since Nevada.


The response below is very important.  I think one of the faultiest and most damaging views of Hillary is that she is somehow a woman of steel who can weather anything  - in many ways "inhuman."  She is very human. It is counterintuitive to think that someone whose policies so incorporate and address the pain of others does not feel pain herself.




The most dramatic response to how trustworthy Hillary is and the degree to which she keeps her word is the support she immediately gave the Obama campaign as soon as she suspended her own in 2008.  President Obama could count on her.  We all can.



Here is where her caring, deeply, about others was apparent.



Again, when everyone else is held to this standard, she will comply. If this is a Hillary-only standard, it simply is not fair.



I don't think she can remind people of this too many times.



She is not making any assumptions about who the GOP nominee will be.

#ICYMI: Hillary Clinton's Phone-In on Morning Joe

Hillary called in to Morning Joe today and spent several minutes explaining her proposals to the hosts.



Click on the pic or follow this link to the audio>>>>




Click on the pic or follow this link to the audio >>>>

Hillary, We've Got Your Back!

It is routine for news outlets that are less than objective to grasp at thoughtless remarks by centrists and loose canons on the other side of the political aisle.  That Newsmax swooped down on this ridiculous comment like a Spring robin on a worm is not surprising.  It is infuriating and reprehensible, however, that Zbigniew Brzezinski provided this fictional ammunition to those who are always at the ready to denigrate anything and everything Hillary Clinton does, has done,  or sets out to do.

Brzezinski: Hillary May Have Been Focused on 2016 as Sec. of State

Thursday, 19 Dec 2013 10:56 AM
By Wanda Carruthers

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have been too focused on a potential run for president in 2016 to have effectively negotiated the recent peace deal with Iran or other matters, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested Thursday.

"You can't help but wonder, was she more cautious because she thought, would she have been comfortable negotiating the Iran deal going into 2016?" Brzezinski said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"My point is, [if] she's being cautious because she's thinking of 2016, then she's thinking about the wrong things while being secretary of state," the former adviser to President Jimmy Carter added.

Read more >>>>

While there have been many times when it has been necessary to mount a defense here against right-wing and Tea Party operatives,  it is unusual to have to defend Hillary's record against someone supposedly on her side of the divide.  If this were coming from Jennifer Rubin (see refutation of her assessment of Hillary's legacy here), for example, I might have shrugged it off at this point since, like The Ancient Mariner, she continues repeating the same refrain ad nauseam.  It comes, however, from someone who should know better, has some credibility in some quarters, and therefore requires correction.

Hillary Clinton was never a shrinking violet on issues relating to Iran, not on their nuclear aspirations and not on their human rights record.  Here are some links that support this statement dating back to 2009.

Video: Secretary Clinton’s Remarks on Iran

September 24, 2009

Secretary Clinton: Further Remarks on Iran

September 26, 2009

Video: Secretary Clinton’s Remarks on Armenia, Iran, and Honduras

March 6, 2010

Three video shorts: Hillary Clinton in Estonia on Iran, Kyrgyzstan, and Syria

April 25, 2010

Videos: Hillary Clinton’s Remarks on North Korea and Iran

May 25, 2010

Secretary Clinton’s Remarks on the Anniversary of Iran’s Disputed Presidential Election

June 12, 2010

Secretary Clinton’s Statement on Passage of Iran Sanctions Legislation

June 25, 2010

Hillary Clinton Speaks Out For Sakineh, Gays, and Greens in Iran

August 10, 2010

Hillary Clinton Speaks Out Against Persecution of Religious Minorities in Iran

August 12, 2010

Secretary Clinton’s Statement on Deteriorating Human Rights Situation in Iran

February 24, 2011

Video: Secretary Clinton Announces Changes to Iranian Student Visa Validity

May 20, 2011

Secretary Clinton’s Statement: Repression in Iran and Syria

June 14, 2011

Secretaries Clinton & Geithner: Joint Statement on Iran Sanctions

June 23, 2011

Secretary Clinton Commends IAEA Resolution on Iran

November 20, 2011

Secretary Clinton: Measures to Increase Pressure on Iran **Video**

November 21, 2011

Hillary Clinton: Significant Reductions of Iranian Crude Oil Purchases

June 11, 2012

China and Singapore Earn Clinton Credit on Reducing Iranian Crude Imports

June 28, 2012

Hillary Clinton’s Statement on Iran

September 14, 2012
Clearly,  Hillary Clinton leaned hard on Iran throughout her tenure at the State Department.  To suggest that she was pussy-footing flies in the face of the record.  To say that as Secretary of State she calibrated her actions according to a distant future campaign that remains imaginary to this day badly insults her strong performance on many fronts, not just Iran.  That this comes from a voice perceived to be within her own camp and the party in power as she carried out these policies is treacherous and dangerous in that the audience receiving this message is inimical to the progress of the administration she represented in this position. 

A last, and important factor that Brzezinski failed to address is the transfer of power within Iran since Hillary stepped down.  She was dealing with Ahmedinejad.   Secretary Kerry inherited the groundwork she laid with a hard line on sanctions (that worked) and a new, reform leader whose openness to a kind of glasnost was apparent from the beginning.

It is facile and pointless to compare the performances of these two secretaries of state.  It borders on slander to design a scenario wherein Hillary Clinton was operating not out of loyalty to her oath but rather out of a political ambition imagined by someone purportedly on her own side of the fence. 

Brzezinski is dead wrong on this.  He is wrong about the facts, and he is wrong to have invented a back story the intent of which only could have been to tarnish the record of a fine public servant who deserves our thanks for her very dedicated, selfless work for all of us.  These were graceless remarks.  He should retract them and apologize for misrepresenting Hillary Clinton based on no fact and no knowledge whatsoever.

Hillary!  We've got your back!

Shock and Awe! MSNBC Has No Idea Who BHL (Defender and Promoter of HRC) Is!

The sound that comes out of me is something between a sigh and a gasp. Warning:  There is nothing objective about the post below.  It is entirely personal.


Some of you will remember this post from March 31 of this year: CNN Video: Bernard-Henri Lévy Validates Hillary Clinton on Libya.   In short order after I posted it,  came the email notification that BHL was now following me on Twitter. (Yes, that one was a gasp.)  At that time, I was camping out at CNN almost exclusively, and Eliot Spitzer,  who frequently had BHL as a guest,  still had his show there.  Since he lost his show, I have made a slow but steady migration to MSNBC where I have seen Spitzer once at least, and where,  during the day, and increasingly in prime time we get to see the brilliant, beautiful Karen Finney on various panels. I keep encouraging the prime time folks to bring her on and tweet thank you tweets when they (Rachel, Ed, and, more often, Lawrence) have her.  The truth is that I wish they would give her one of the two hours they devote to Chris Matthews

So, when I turned on morning TV today, it was tuned to MSNBC and "Morning Joe," not hosted by Joe this morning (so he is off the hook perhaps) but rather by Willie Geist.  Imagine my  shock, and awe to see this!  (This is where the sigh/gasp occurred.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I am flabbergasted!  They do not know who he is!  They bring on as a guest the guy who wrote the article about him in New York Magazine!   Heavens-to-Betsy!  They could have gotten the man himself!  He gladly would have hopped the pond at his own expense to make the appearance.

Of course this further argues for Karen to have her own show since she would never have done anything that stupid.  (I mean she would never do anything stupid at all!)  First of all, she knows who BHL is - I don't have to ask her.  I know she knows.  Second, if she did not know how to contact him (he probably follows her on twitter and Facebook too), she would know how to find out.  Third, she would never have used a secondary source when she could have the primary live.

At the end of "Morning Joe" they always ask the question: "What did we learn today?"  The guest co-host this morning, former PA Governor Ed Rendell,  did not say that he found out who BHL is, because, like Spitzer, he probably knows the man personally.  Neither did Geist make this admission, but the fact that BHL was not a guest today betrays that ignorance.  Pitiful!

In conclusion: While it may ruffle some feathers,  (I see you there fuming,  MW,  but we did the right thing and avoided a massacre),  BHL rightly places the historical credit for the NATO action in Libya on Sarkozy and HRC.  As the year ends, I do not want to see the credit for the Libyan action shifted to Obama.  Upon declaring the No-Fly-Zone he began his address with the words. "I didn't want to do this" while a tiny, determined HRC stood right beside him.

No, that will not fly with me or anyone who knows the facts about February and March 2011.   This issue of New York Magazine will stand as the accurate record.  I am thankful that Wallace-Wells did the research and wrote the article which I plan to acquire and preserve, but I wish MSNBC were a little smarter.

**RANT OVER**