Fair point. And I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I admit that can’t be proven. I’m just noting that it is odd that this (and several other) qualifications don’t ever seem to have been mentioned before.

liberalrob: “Color me unreasonable then. I don’t see it.

Not sure how to state it plainer than I did so consider yourself, uh, colored?

But doesn’t it seem at all odd that there would be no mention of such a significant act anywhere until now?

Was it ever important until now? Is there anything you’ve ever done that seemed routine or that you forgot you had done, until at some later point something happened to spark your memory? No, it doesn’t seem odd. It only seems odd because it’s so relevant today.

Well, if you read further in the article and actual responded to the points made, you’d see that:

At no time prior to her campaign for the presidency did Senator Clinton ever make the claim that she supported intervening militarily to stop the Rwandan genocide. It is noteworthy that she failed to mention this anecdote – urging President Clinton to intervene militarily in Rwanda – in her memoirs. President Clinton makes no mention of such a conversation with his wife in his memoirs. And Madeline Albright, who was Ambassador to the United Nations at the time, makes no mention of any such event in her memoirs.

So, can anyone prove it didn’t happen? No, negatives can’t be proven. But doesn’t it seem at all odd that there would be no mention of such a significant act anywhere until now?

Exactly. Nobody reasonable would put forth the argument that, because she was married to Lennon, that Yoko could replace him.

Yet the argument has been put forth that, by being married to Bill, Hillary has somehow gained qualifications to do the same job.

Seems to me you’ve hit the relevance square on.

Last year, former President Clinton asserted that his wife pressed him to intervene with U.S. troops to stop the Rwandan genocide. When asked about this assertion, Hillary Clinton said it was true. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that this ever happened.

And we all know it never happened, because just like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton is a big fat liar who will say anything to get elected!

The Clinton Rules! Right here, right now!

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1720720,00.html

Just run down all the “anti-Clinton” arguments in that article, cross out all the pro-Clinton ones, and you practically have the press release. Hmm.

Here you go, SpiderJ:

On May 5, Macedonian officials had shut the border to refugees, blaming the West for allowing more than a quarter-million people to overwhelm the country. Despite later government insistence that the border was open again, Serb soldiers appeared to be blocking refugees’ exit, and only a trickle passed through on May 13, the day before Clinton arrived, according to an AP story written at the time. Refugees were reported to be afraid even to attempt the crossing.

Fact claim: “I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland.”

I hire people all the time and so I often put statements like this in the context of my hiring conventions. (She is after all asking me to hire her as my president.) If I read that statement on her resume, I would assume she were pretty deeply involved, and that explains the wording. She wants us to believe that, so it is a legitimate line of questioning to ask what she actually did.

When you look at the historical record and the corroborating evidence, it looks TERRIBLE for her on this score. Even George Mitchell, the diplomat’s diplomat could not do more than offer a tepid endorsement, and he is backing her campaign. On the other side, Greg Craig and David Trimble basically say she had no important role, and they would certainly know. If I was using Clinton metrics, I guess you could say that I helped bring peace to Northern Ireland because I bought U2’s “Under a Blood Red Sky” in 1985!

So getting back to hiring practices, I see resume padding all the time. They range from the mild exaggerations to mendacity. This is probably more of the former than the latter, but I generally try not to hire padded resumes because chances are they are not trustworthy employees. It would be wise for you to consider this as well.

The sad part for Hillary and her supporters is that she is very strong on domestic issues and can make a reasonable case that she would be a stronger and more knowledgeable domestic candidate than Obama. Furthermore, we are more in need of domestic issue engagement. Had she been handled by someone other than Penn and the idiot parade, she might have made a case, but now she is stuck defending her Irish tea sittings…

But this kind of ham-fisted spinning, invention of non-facts, distortion of truth and forwarding of right-wing talking points is exactly the wrong way to go about demonstrating that you are a better candidate.

Yeah, Hillary. Cut it out.

And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/us/politics/26clinton.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

how can anyone with a straight face contend that Hillary had NO knowledge of these policy debates, NO input with the President, and NO impact on the decisions he ultimately made? It’s ludicrous on its face.

Well, that’s all very well and good. Why not make those discussions public, then?

This press release about how Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy experience is all made-up, exaggerated and phony strikes me as the kind of underhanded spin-filled baloney we should have had more than enough of courtesy of Karl Rove and the MSM in 2000 and 2004.

She may be a very good advisor. But being married to the CiC doesn’t make you cross the “threshold” of being able to do the job.

And actually, I notice you stopped right before Kosovo. Please refute the matter of the border-opening date discrepancy.

Aaah, who cares. This is the Internets.

Once again we see the tired old argument “but she wasn’t on the National Security Council, she didn’t attend the meetings, she didn’t have a security clearance, so what possible knowledge or impact could she have had on policy decisions?” As I’ve said before, she was married to the man who DID have those responsibilities. Knowing Bill Clinton and knowing Hillary Clinton, knowing how marriages work, and knowing how this “power couple” had campaigned as “two for the price of one,” how can anyone with a straight face contend that Hillary had NO knowledge of these policy debates, NO input with the President, and NO impact on the decisions he ultimately made? It’s ludicrous on its face.

Spin is always out there, twisting facts to support your preferred viewpoint. Look at the Northern Ireland claim. The Obama release waxes indignant about Hillary’s “gross overstatement of the facts;” yet how is it an overstatement to claim “I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland” when right there in the press release “[t]he person in charge of the negotiations, former Senator George Mitchell, said that “[The First Lady] was one of many people who participated in encouraging women to get involved.” Hillary never said she was the ONLY person who participated; that is an invention of the Obama staffer. But it slides under the radar, because the Clinton Rules dictate that anything Hillary says or does is for the aggrandizement of Hillary Clinton alone. Therefore we simply assume that the Obama staffer was accurate in his characterization of Hillary’s public statements. He was not, by the content of his own press release.

Isn’t this line of argument exactly the same one used against Al Gore, when it was alleged that “he claimed to have invented the Internet?” Is that the kind of argument that makes up a “good counter-punch?”

On Bosnia: do a search for “hillary clinton bosnia dodged bullets;” the top result that comes up is from Michelle Malkin’s blog. Is that a source of memes Obama wants to be spreading? Read la Malkin’s post and compare it to the press release; practically identical in tone if not in content. And while it literally may be true that Hillary was on a USO tour, it also may be literally true (as reported by the quote Malkin posted) that the flight into the war zone was not exactly dull.

That’s the first two down; need I go on?

If you want to highlight the fact that Obama argued against the Iraq AUMF while Hillary voted for it, fine. That’s a legitimate point. But this kind of ham-fisted spinning, invention of non-facts, distortion of truth and forwarding of right-wing talking points is exactly the wrong way to go about demonstrating that you are a better candidate.