Hillary Watch

GO, GO, GONZALES. Hillary recently appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America," where she joined fellow New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and many of her other Democratic colleagues in calling for the resignation of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales. "The buck should stop somewhere," Hillary declared, "and the attorney general-who still seems to confuse his prior role as the President's personal attorney with his duty to the system of justice and to the entire countryshould resign." Gonzales is catching heat for the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by the administration. But Hillary's husband fired all 93 U.S. attorneys when he first took office in 1993. While Hillary is "deeply disturbed" and is "calling for a full and thorough investigation" right now, she definitely doesn't feel the same way concerning what the Clinton Administration did 14 years ago. 'There is a great difference," claimed Hill. "When a new President comes in, a new President gets to clean house. It's not done on a caseby-case basis where you didn't do what some senator or member of Congress told you to do in terms of investigations into your opponents. It is 'Let's start afresh' and every President has done that." But as the Wall Street Journal noted, the 1993 firings were indeed unprecedented, as previous Presidents had retained holdovers from the previous administration and replaced them only gradually as their tenures expired. And it should be noted as well that the main reason for at least one of the recent dismissals was that some U.S. attorneys hadn't been prosecuting voter-fraud cases diligently enough, and don't the Democrats care about voter fraud?

It's BAA-AACK. While in New Hampshire recently, Hillary brought up her favorite boogeyman: the vast, right-wing conspiracy. She was referring to an Election Day 2002 case of phone jamming in the Granite State, in which two Republican operatives pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and a third was convicted. "To the New Hampshire Democratic Party's credit, they sued and the trail led all the way to the Republican National Committee," said Hillary. "So if anybody tells you there is no vast, right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court." The RNC responded that Hillary's fellow Democrats "might be disappointed to learn that almost a decade later, the senator's playbook consists of little more than a resurrection of Clinton-era talking points." Meanwhile, Hillary's aides reminded reporters that she also used the VRWC label in 2003. when she said, "My only regret was using the word conspiracy, because there's absolutely nothing secret about it."

MAYBE TED. Hillary is now comparing herself to President John F. Kennedy, saying how he was the first Catholic President, and how she could become the first woman President. She told a group in New Hampshire that "[JFK] was smart, he was dynamic, he was inspiring and he was Catholic. A lot of people back then said, 'America will never elect a Catholic as President... But those who gathered here almost a half century ago knew better. They believed America was bigger than that and Americans would give Sen. John F. Kennedy a fair shake, and the rest, as they say, is history." She concluded by saying, "So when people tell me 'a woman can never be President,' I say, we'll never know unless we try."

GAY POWER. The New York Observer reports that Hillary recently spoke before a Gay Men's Health Crisis dinner in New York City, where she guaranteed her support of their issues "when I'm President." The paper detailed Hillary's "formidable list of established gay activists" that she has assembled thus far, including: Mark Walsh, who will be serving as staff fundraiser for the homosexual community; Fred P. Hochberg, the dean of Milano, the New School for Management and Urban Policy; Hilary Rosen, a former president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America; Jeff Soref, a prominent fund-raiser and former chair of the Democratic National Committee's Gay & Lesbian Americans Caucus; and Steve EImendorf, who managed Dick Gephardt's 2004 presidential campaign. The Observer also reports that Hillary "has locked down much of the gay power structure in New York."

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Mar 19, 2007
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