Vanity Fair's Hitchens somehow missed ample evidence that Clinton is respected by military leaders
SUMMARY: On MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, discussing the possible appointment of Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Christopher Hitchens said of Clinton: "It's only true that she's respected in the Pentagon if people go around saying so. I've never heard that before." In fact, media outlets have previously reported that Clinton "has gained a lot of respect among military leadership" and has "built relationships" with military leaders such as Gen. David H. Petraeus and Adm. William J. Fallon. Clinton also received the endorsement of numerous retired generals and admirals during her 2008 presidential campaign.
On the November 18 edition of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, David Gregory hosted Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens to discuss the possible appointment of Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. During the discussion, Hitchens stated of Clinton: "It's true that she's got a major name on the world stage. That's true by definition. It's only true that she's respected in the Pentagon if people go around saying so. I've never heard that before, I must say." In fact, media outlets have previously reported that Clinton "has gained a lot of respect among military leadership" and has "built relationships" with military leaders such as Gen. David H. Petraeus and Adm. William J. Fallon. Further, Clinton received the endorsement of numerous retired generals and admirals during her 2008 presidential campaign.
There have been numerous media reports that Clinton is respected by military leaders, including the following:
- On March 27, 2007, The New
York Times reported:
"Privately, two current military leaders who have testified before the
Armed Services committee, and who by custom do not comment publicly on political
figures, said they both found Mrs. Clinton conversant about the military and
thoughtful in her questions." The Times
further reported:
Active-duty generals have sought her out, and she has reached out to them. Among those with whom she has built relationships are Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and Adm. William J. Fallon, the new head of Central Command. Recently, too, James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marines, invited her to be his guest of honor at the "Sunset Parade" at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, a high-profile tradition. (She has accepted.)
- In an August 20, 2006, cover story, Time reported that, "When Hillary was first elected, General John Keane, then Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, sought an audience" with Clinton and that "[w]hen he finally got in to see her, however, the meeting did not go as he had expected. For starters, it lasted 45 minutes. 'She committed immediately to West Point and the 10th Mountain Division, with follow-up on-site visits,' he says. 'But it was her enormous depth of knowledge about the military and her sincerity about our people which surprised and disarmed me.'"
- On the January 27, 2007,
edition of CNBC's Tim Russert (accessed
via Nexis), NBC chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski stated:
And what may be surprising to quite a few Americans is the fact that Hillary Clinton has gained a lot of respect among military leadership because she seems to be more measured and thoughtful in terms of her dealing with the military. And when she was criticized for criticizing, herself, the U.S. plan in Iraq while she was in Baghdad, many compared her to Hanoi Jane when -- you know, during the Vietnam War. What she did is she was essentially telling the American people what the generals just told her in private. So it took me by surprise when I started hearing from some of the officers in the military, saying, "You know, that Hillary makes a good point."
- A December 12, 2005, Newsweek article (accessed via Nexis)
reported:
It is no accident that hawks inside and outside the military are reconsidering Hillary Clinton. She may have entered the Senate in 2001 with three strikes against her -- she was a woman, a Democrat and a Clinton. But Senator Clinton immediately began a methodical campaign to undo her image as a dovish liberal with no interest in military affairs. Post 9/11, she was quick to recognize that Democrats -- and especially one all but openly running for president -- were vulnerable on defense issues. It was a trap she has seemed determined to avoid.
[...]
For her efforts, she has begun to win respect within military circles. Retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former vice chief of the Army whom she's consulted about Iraq, says he's praised her to "the guys"--meaning the Pentagon brass.
In addition, a May 10, 2005, Village Voice article (accessed via Nexis) quoted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich saying of Clinton: "Senator Clinton is very competent, very professional, very intelligently moving toward the center, very shrewdly and effectively serving on the Armed Services Committee," and quoted Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution saying, "She's doing a fantastic job, and I'm not in any way a Hillary fan." The article added: "Neither are Republican members on Armed Services. Yet Clinton has managed to impress them with her thoughtfulness and knowledge. John Ullyot, the spokesperson for the Armed Services Republicans, calls the New York senator 'a very valued member of the committee.' "
Further undermining Hitchens' suggestion that Clinton is not respected by the military, Clinton was endorsed by numerous retired generals and admirals during her 2008 presidential campaign.
Clinton also received the Military Coalition's 2005 Award of Merit, the Military Coalition's "highest honor" bestowed by the group, which is "comprised of 35 organizations representing more than 5.5 million members of the uniformed services -- active, reserve, retired, survivors, veterans -- and their families."
From the November 18 edition of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
HITCHENS: At least on health care, she knows enough about the subject to have really changed American health care for the worse in her time. But foreign policy -
DAVID GREGORY (host): And, yet -
HITCHENS: -- about foreign policy, she doesn't even know that much.
GREGORY: But, she's respected in the Pentagon. She's certainly --
HITCHENS: Says -- it's true if you say so.
GREGORY: -- has an important name - an import - an important name on the world stage.
HITCHENS: That's true.
GREGORY: And is more hawkish than the president she might serve.
HITCHENS: It's true that she's got a major name on the world stage. That's true by definition. It's only true that she's respected in the Pentagon if people go around saying so. I've never heard that before, I must say.
On some things, she's more hawkish than the president-elect, yes. But she tends to have acquired this reputation in what I'd call an opportunist manner. I mean, who - who really thinks that she felt that strongly about Iraq? She just didn't want to cast her vote the other way.
GREGORY: We'll leave it there.
Well, in general terms he's right about religion. Not much else, though.
Bill, are you not exhibiting the same sort of religious bigotry that you decry in others? I find it laughable that you are unable to see you're own intolerance.Do you not understand how hypacriticel you are being? I hope that you will recognize my facetious post as a parody of those wingnuts who will not, or can not, use contractions, in order to camouflage a complete lack of original thought with pretentious and judgemental scoldings.
Feel free to disagree.
Thanks for the great discussion! :-)
I disagree.
My pleasure. ;-)
I'm not usually one to condemn anyone to the fires of hell but I'm pretty sure that both you and Bill will be making that trip since you both live in one of them Blue states. And what hope does Hitchens have being a godless heathen and a foreigner?
Off topic but here's a website with questions our Christian children have for our president elect.
Worrier,
That's some scary stuff. Is this a comedy website? Do these people actually raise their kids spouting this nonsense?
...Lord Almighty.
yep it's a joke. It's from the same people who bring you:
http://www.whitehouse.org/
Col., if I grab the beer on the way to hell, will you grab some munchies?
No problem. I just feel bad for the wingnuts in my blue state who have to pay for my sins. Of course, they're out there in the not-real parts of Ca., like Fresno (FreeRepublic HQ). Ha ha!
That's funny. I like this one:
I think this guy is likely old enough for the sex and cigarettes. Why he hasn't proposed to his girlfriend yet is another issue.
Oh, man, I've been had. The more I read, the more I suspected that website was fakey-fake. And there I was, joking about the joke.
Don't feel too bad, MrH. That site looks pretty legit, it took me a bit of reading the first time to get it, and I can say the same for everybody I know who's visited it.
It just goes to show, once again, how difficult it is to satirize the far right. They're so nuts, it's almost impossible to go over-the-top doing parody of their stuff.
It's been one of my favorite sites for a year or so.
I thought it was legit at first too. But you're right. Theres a fine line between paraody and true wingnut logic.
But this site serves a purpose. Where else can you get answers to all of lifes's important questions like "Will I See My Grandpa Naked After The Rapture?"
The answer is quite simple. In Heaven, there'll simply be no need for genitals.
I'm pretty sure you introduced me to that site, King, and it's been on my favorites since. At least a year. I've sent links to it to many people, and everybody falls for it way longer than they want to admit.
That's where i found the secret homo handshake.
And the book "Nancy Boy Chrissy, the Bed-wetting Sissy".
Update for you, WK. I sent that list of kids questions to my oft-mentioned Repub co-worker. He came over to me about 10 minutes ago, looking very confused, and asked "what kind of joke website is that?"
It must be disorienting to see a slightly exaggerated version of yourself that's really embarrassing.
*LOL* It's true. His breath would burn if anyone gave him a match. He thinks he's so smart, while, in reality, he's tanked 90 percent of the time, and laughably intolerant who don't spout off the same lines that he does.
Another goofy defense by MMFH that has nothing to do with it's purported purpose.
Who cares what Hitchen's thinks about what's-her-name. Besides, he's a liberal and the talk is of Hillary going to State not to Defense.
In no rational universe is Hitchens a liberal.
He used to be a communist and still considers himself a Trotskyite. However, after 9/11 he joined Dennis Miller in embracing his inner fraidy cat. He decided to endorse Obama in this election, which caused the right to retract their arm around his shoulders and raise their sniper rifle to his head once more.
As early as 2001 you can find interviews with Hitchens in which he is distancing himself from his leftist past and moving toward libertarianism. I'm not sure how he reconciles within his own mind his libertarianism with his support of foreign adventurism.
I'm not sure how he reconciles within his own mind his libertarianism with his support of foreign adventurism.
Hitchens is against totalitarinism and supports intervention when called for. Where he has diverged from his leftist past is (quite right I say!) in the support of many major international issues since 1989:
"First, everyone should have welcomed the fall of the Berlin wall and the overthrow of Ceausescu… As they should have been pro-Tiananmen crowd earlier that year. That's the baseline." Next, he continues, everyone on the left should have defended Salman Rushdie, "unequivocally, against the ayatollah." The left should then have perceived that the "semi-utopian, Fukuyama, end-of-history stuff" was an illusion, and that the age of the totalitarian state hadn't stopped. And when Milosevic invaded Bosnia, and Saddam invaded Kuwait, they should have been "not just for stopping that, but for overthrowing the people responsible… One has to be opposed to totalitarianism and its racist and theocratic version in particular. And the inescapable thing that lies behind all this is that it's bound to make 1960s people reconsider their view of the US… anyone who hasn't reconsidered it at all… I have no respect for."- Christopher Hitchens, May 2008
Forgot to give credit on this interview. Prospect magazine, Hitchens being interviewd by Alexander Linklater
Support? He expresses that you're a complete buffoon if you don't agree with his endearment of "foreign adventurism." Note that he doesn't have the guts to take up arms himself. C'mon, Hitchens. If you're gonna be tough, put down the bottle, do 11 weeks or so of boot camp and start shooting...and getting shot at!
How would you describe him? Surely he is no conservative!
Hitchens' politics haven't skewed left for almost 20 years. It goes kind of topic by topic, but foreign affairs and application of military force he's been more conservative than liberal for a long time. In recent years the most common victims of his ire in columns have been liberals. There might be a shred of liberalism in his economic perspective (it's hard to say when he doesn't really discuss it) but he's become an attack dog on liberals.
Bill,
Being critical of the Clintons and supporting the war in Iraq does not make Hitchen's a conservative. Neither issue is "conservative" even though many conservatives and liberals agree with Hitchen's on those two points.
Being a war monger should be a show stopper when it comes to being a liberal. To see an example, look at Lieberman. He is sociall liberal but a war monger. The smart Democrats of Connecticut had the forethought to get him out of the party. Man did that guy prove those people right.
I wasn't even thinking of the Clintons. I could produce a long list of liberals he has savaged in recent years. A start would be Joe Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and Sidney Blumenthal. He has, however, become friends with Paul Wolfowitz and Ahmed Chalabi. Even his endorsement of Obama was more accurately a rejection of McCain. He had little good to say about Obama.
There are few issues in recent years for which Hitchens is strongly liberal. As I've read a bit more, even his economic views have skewed more libertarian than liberal.
I'd describe him as an obnoxious a-hole... Oh wait, that would make him a conservative. ;)
I remember being an avid reader of The Nation, where Hitchens was once a mainstay. I cancelled my subscription in the late 90s after several years of watching the magazine spend twice as much ink going after Clinton than dealing with its professed targets on the political right. Clinton by no means should have been above criticism by the mag, but it really became ludicrous how lopsided it became in its Clinton bashing. Hitchens was responsible for a good deal of that ink, mainly attacking Clinton from the left as a triangulating faux progressive (a charge which was admittedly somewhat correct). Fast forward a few years later and Hitchens was betraying most of what he supposedly stood for by endorsing Bush for president in 2004. You can call Hitchens many things, but "liberal" is probably a label that even he would deny.
Now he's a liberal again? Funny. He wan't a liberal when the right embraced him after he became a water carrier for Bush's illegal war.
OYGB,
I've always considered him a liberal. Or are you defining liberal simply as one who opposes Iraq?
You can consider him anything you want. People change and shift their positions. Hitchens is no different.
How many legs does a horse have if you consider a tail a leg?
Four. Considering a leg a tail doesn't make it one.
That should be "Considering a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
Darned lack of preview combined with lysdexia doesn't make things easy.
Been that, done there.
Well, one might also say that Clinton is not a liberal. But no matter what Hitchens is, what he said was misinformation (in that what he claimed not to have heard had in fact been reported), and furthermore, inasmuch as it was misinformation used to tarnish the credibility of a Democrat, it was conservative misinformation. So I have no problem with MM documenting it. Hopefully, by doing so, MM will assist the general public in coming around to your point of view that no one should care what Hitchens says about Clinton.
On a side note: MMFH? Typo, or humorously disparaging acronym? And if the latter, could you elaborate and provide me a chuckle?
It was the latter. ;-)
Aww. No chuckle?
ps. I find your reasoning very labored. Hitchen's gave his view, that is all. So it is not misinformation, it is simply his observation.
The "tarnishing of a Democrat" is simply your opinion about Hitchen's observation.
Trying to convert that into being "conservative" is pretty funny. I must admit that provided me with my own chuckle.
Okay, but since his view runs contrary to published reports, it's fair for MMFA to correct it, no?
I'll concede that it is merely my opinion that implying that Clinton is not respected by the military establishment is tarnishing her; also that it is subjective to call information used to tarnish a Democrat conservative. But I think also it's a reasonable opinion and that this subjective view is consistent for MMFA.
Also very consistent for you to call MMFA silly, and to argue that they are not fulfilling their mission in cases where I disagree with you.
Please tell me what the H stands for. I'm dyin' here.
mrh,
Oh come on... It ain't Hitchens.
ok thx
Liberal? He's as "liberal" as Lyndon LaRouche!
That;s interesting, MrH. I was thinking recently about what initially got me interested in politics, and I remembered some stuff from school related to advertising and marketing. I had an English teacher in high school who had worked in the advert. world, and we did a little part of the year on the language of advertising, and how it was designed to work.
I think if you're inclined to see it, you spend your whole life seeing the same techniques used in ads, politics, religion... it's all pretty basic human psychology. If you're not prone to critical thinking, you'll go along with the message, and fight anybody who tries to tell you differently.
Exhibit A is our friend AnutterAmerican here. If I'm not mistaken the "H" he's keeping from you is for Hillary. That was the message being put out by the media for a while, that MMFA was a vehicle to get HRC elected (funded by George Soros). AA was among several conservative posters here who swallowed it whole.
Then a funny thing happened; Obama got the nomination, and they all decided that it was an Obama campaign site, and it always had been. This is what the media told them.
Your analysis of Hitchens' remarks and the transparency of them is right on. Fortunately for the media talking heads, AA is probably only slightly below average among Americans in the "figgerin' out stuff for himself" dept. I think about half of Americans are as easily manipulated as he is, and while that type may skew conservative, there are sucker all across the political spectrum . I think it goes beyond education, income, and many other barriers, too.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
When Hitchens posted his nonsense supporting liberalism, many unthinking liberals couldn't get enough of him, praising his bombast, full of innuendo and short of facts--when not outright wrong--as intellectualism. Now that he has switched sides, the liberals defame Hitchens as a drunk. But Hitchens always wrote and thought and wrote poorly. Don't blame it on his drink. Go back and read what the fool wrote when he supposedly stood for our side.
The man is pure fool, always has been, and has gotten away with disguising stupidity with big words. I could never stand the clown.
I couldn't agree with your assesment of Hitchens more. Its the vocabulary, the fact that he speaks aggressively (people interpret a message delivered aggressively as true), and, as shallow as it sounds - the British accent, which seems to lend credibility to whatever rubbish is uttered.
His "logic" is so pitiful, it's almost embarrassing to read it.
I'm glad MMFA is documenting his nonsense - he gets way too much credit from the media for credibility.
funnyman,
The fact is, I have read things by Hitchens with which I agreed, e.g., his book on Mother Teresa. (I was with him one day while he was selling his book on Henry Kissinger. Lots there said the book wasn't good so I didn't get it.) But Hitchens has become kind of LaRouchey, a turncoat, and just can't seem to let it register that he may be wrong.
And it's true too that he drinks like a fish.
I think MediaMatters should concentrate on correcting statements that are just factually wrong. Otherwise the entire enterprise becomes somewhat ludicrous. What Hitchens said is this: "It's only true that she's respected in the Pentagon if people go around saying so. I've never heard that before, I must say."
Now, I have never heard anyone claim that drinking a bottle of Scotch a day promotes longevity, but I'm sure the claim has been made. If Media Matters gives up on the distinction between "Something is something" and "I've never heard someone say something", then it will lose all credibility.
Nickelit, while those items about statements that are obviously and simply factually wrong may be the easiest to read and understand, and the most clear examples of misinformation, there is a good reason to mention Hitchens' statement.
As these commentators become more aware that they're being monitored, they become more careful with the straight-out lies (some of them, anyway) and rely on weaselly stuff like this. Stating that one is unaware of information that is available tells the audience that the speaker is unreliable for one of two reasons; ignorance or dishonesty.
Your bottle of scotch analogy is using an example that is factually incorrect. Better would be if you claimed that you'd never heard anybody say that regular exercise and a healthy diet promotes longevity. It's not necessarily a lie, you may have never heard that, but it would reveal something about you as a source.
The point of the bottle of Scotch analogy was really just to demonstrate the distinction between a personal opinion ("I think Scoth facilitates thinking") and a factual claim ("Scotch, on average, raises an I.Q. by 2 points). While I agree that some monitoring might hopefully make pundits more careful to avoid straight-out lies - unfortunately, as of yet, I see very little evidence for that - my point precisely was that Hitchens was not straight-out lying. Frankly, I didn't know that Mrs Clinton was so revered in the Pentagon either, although it doesn't surprise me much. And to assume that Hitchens actually knew that Hillary had the endorsements of some generals but chose to feign ignorance about it and thus was straight out lying is a claim in need of verification.
I mean, what's next then? Where do you stop? And which opinions do you pick? Do you choose to counter Bill Kristol's "I think that Sarah Palin is a misunderstood, nice, warm, human being" by digging up reports of her strangling a moose to death with her bare hands, or John Kerry's "I think that Bush is presiding over the worst economy since 1929", when actual data shows that it's only the worst economy since 1932? (Both ficticious examples). Isn't MM then in danger of trivializing its intent and purpose? That is why I'd prefer if MM were to limit itself to correcting straight out lies.
Hitchens was more fun when he was drinking.
Hitchens is living proof that if you speak softly with an English accent you will be taken seriously no matter the drivel that you spew