MSNBC, NY Post, Drudge falsely claimed Clinton said "surge" is "working"

MSNBC, NY Post, Drudge falsely claimed Clinton said "surge" is "working"

During an August 20 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) said, according to The New York Times in an August 21 article, "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, it's working. ... We're just years too late changing our tactics. We can't ever let that happen again." The Times also reported that "ides to Mrs. Clinton said her remarks that military tactics in Iraq are 'working' referred specifically to reports of increased cooperation from Sunnis leading to greater success against insurgents in Al Anbar Province." Several other media outlets, however, have claimed that Clinton said the Bush administration's so-called "surge" policy is "working":

During an August 21 report on Democrats' positions on Iraq, an MSNBC Live on-air graphic read: "Hillary Clinton: Surge is Working, But Years Too Late For Change" -- even though the video clip of Clinton MSNBC aired during the segment itself showed her saying: "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some places -- particularly in Al Anbar Province -- it's working."

In an August 21 article -- headlined, "Iraq Surge Working, But Too Late: Hillary Clinton" -- the New York Post reported: " 'It's working. We're just years too late in our tactics,' said, referring to the beefed-up U.S. troop presence battling insurgents in Iraq, including war-torn Anbar province." The Post further asserted that "Clinton's positive assessment of the troop surge puts her in agreement with some high-ranking military officials and scholars, but in direct opposition to many fellow Democrats." But Clinton did not give a "positive assessment of the troop surge," and her statement was not in reference to "Iraq, including the war-torn Anbar province"; rather, she cited Al Anbar as one place where the "change tactics" has brought positive results.



On August 21, a banner headline on the Drudge Report read: "Hillary on Surge? 'It's Working' ..."

Entire article at: http://mediamatters.org/items/200708210008

well, that's just sad.

But hey, whatever. I personally don't think shopping lies and bullshit about people advances the debate.

Why do you have to pretend she didn't?

Stop carrying Drudge's water.

Her remarks did not talk about the surge, they talked about tactics over the course of YEARS. But don't let facts get in the way of your enthusiastic spreading of bovine fecal matter.

Look, you don't have to like her as a candidate, but when you flat-out LIE, the only person you're hurting is YOURSELF. You come off as a prevaricating bullshitter who cannot be trusted when you make things up like that. Your veracity, as far as I'm concerned, is not to be relied on. I won't be so ready to believe anything you say in future because of what you've said here.

And for the record, I'm not a HRC supporter. I'm an Al Gore endorser, and I won't be making up my mind for some time, I suspect. I'm enjoying hearing from all the candidates, and I like a lot of what the top three are saying.

But I DO have regard for the TRUTH. You, apparently, don't.

And that's a shame. For you.

What Clinton said is that the surge strategy (the new tactics) came years to late. She didn't say anything about changing tactics over the years, as that didn't even happen.

Now, if you would like to continue with your compulsion to <be mistaken>, please explain which "tactics" came years too late. Now, I know this is going to be difficult for you, as you will not only have to <be mistaken>, but you will have to write a little <mistake> story to back it, but please continue to show what you really are: A compulsive <mistaker>.

Thanks for your consideration.

of the tactics that have been used in country over the course of years. She's one of the best informed members of the Senate on these issues, based on her ASC position.

And if she were talking about the surge, she'd use the term.

Of course, I can see where you're coming from. And it's an ugly place, it is.

There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with a candidate on fundamental positions on issues, but making shit up to justify your dislike is just cheesy.

Thanks for nothing. I've got your number. I won't believe anything you say about any candidate, henceforth.

Then how is it that you know what the secret tactics are not? Are you on a need to not know basis?

These easily available facts are only "secrets" to people who do a lot of transmitting, and not much studying. You've demonstrated that you're quite the transmitter, now, so have a nice life.

I told you where to look. I even gave you the committee initials. You still didn't get it.

Let me cut and paste that asinine comment, though, just in case you realize how stupid that sounds later and want to edit out that embarrassing remark. You wrote:

Is she a member of the secret tactics committee?
Posted by BuyingThyme

why don't you just tell us what secret tactics she's referring to in regards to Iraq. Will you lose your pool privileges at the secret person's clubhouse?

Have you for even a moment wondered why that offends you?

important fact about Senator Clinton, here's the link, and here's why she knows a bit more than you do about the subject. And be sure to check the subcommittees, too.

http://armed-services.senate.gov/

Now have a nice, childish day.

to explain her statement is the one where she says the "tactics" referenced were implemented not by the American troops, but by Iraqis in the Anbar region. Now, even you can admit that that lie will not hold the cultists for long, so what are you going to be pushing next?

Edwards of late, or the Obama attacks of a week or so ago.

It's so damned childish. :shrug:

wtf was she saying was working then? The electricity? :eyes:

It's as simple as that. What the hell are Hillary's followers reading?

and not Murdoch's rag The Post's cutting and pasting.

Why do you trust so much what Drudge and Murdoch's rag say? Oh right...it says something bad about Hillary. :eyes:

CLINTON

:crazy:


I mean wtf? The parsing at this point is inexcusable!

it's fucking disgusting, what's become of this party

and SOME around here have the audacity to point at repukes and mock them for allowing their party to become so rotten

fuckin sad

and wtf is wrong with reading comprehension these days??? It is amazing how far party loyalty will compromise a person.

Drudge and NY Post and taking it blindly as the Gospel Truth(tm), without bothering to look at the entirety of her remarks.

exactly like that.

having generals more officers in the field etc.

Why must it mean that it is the surge, cuz you want it to?

Hillary people live in a strange world.

It's just a very few of you who have access to the decryption protocols.

Looks to me like she said it was working, followed by a statement that the Bush amin screwed it up royally in the first place. Funny, to me that sounds like a politician trying to appease everyone. Just what we need, 8 years of solid Republican fuck-ups, followed by someone who is afraid to piss off said republicans so they take the middle ground.

Clinton said new tactics have brought some success against insurgents, particularly in Iraq's Anbar province.

"It's working. We're just years too late in changing our tactics," she said. "We can't ever let that happen again. We can't be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war."

A NEW fucking WAR?????

you would have to be drinking a fucking lot of something to rationalize that neocon shit!

Please share.

Never once did the word SURGE come up, but you sure wouldn't know that listening to your nonsense.

If she's not talking about the surge, what new tactics have been years in coming? And don't use that lie about the people in Anbar being the ones with the new tactics.

trolling and baiting on this thread, with absolutely no credible information to support your assertions.

Disgraceful. Like I said, you don't have to agree with her, but making shit up to suit your little agenda reflects badly on you. You're simply not credible.

Good day.

I can keep asking you for facts to back up what you've saying, but you're only able to attack people with childish nonsense.

Would you say that you are a member of a cult?

I don't argue with people who don't believe in being straightforward. There are enough dissemblers on the other team; I don't have time for your kind in this forum.

Which "kind" do you have time for? The ones who make up lies about Hillary's references to the surge working in some areas?

You're dull of comprehension, apparently?

My sympathies. GOOD DAY.

Thanks for asking.

display your profound ignorance.

Are you unmedicated? Is that why you're so frantically insistent and repetitive?

My sympathies.

the link has anything to offer which may shed light on Hillary's remarks about how new "tactics" are working in some areas of Iraq? If that was the case, wouldn't you have posted a sentence or two by now?

I'm done listening to these lunatic ramblings. You are stupid when it comes to what the purpose of the ASC is in both Houses and what sort of areas of responsibility those committees cover. And your PROUD of it, too.

Have fun being snarky and unschooled. It seems to be your forte.

I'd love for you to explain any of your ramblings, but we both know you're far beyond that now.

How about you write a little poem about Hillary Clinton?

Johnathan Alter thinks she shouldn't have said it is working when that is unknown.

Alter- "Hasty in her statements."

Allison-(filling in for KO)- "Since she spoke at the VFW do you think we should be on pander watch?"


Alter- "We should always be on pander watch."

Oh, wait... How 'bout ISN'T.

The whole fucking war is a nightmare.

It must end. That is the issue.

get the correct quotes. They just pick out what republican hate spreaders like drudge say and repeat it over and over. And it is only because they don't want to vote for a woman and their candidate is falling further and further behind.

What in the world makes them think people don't know what is going on with sites like drudge etc. And that their pick and choose posts are not changing any body's mind. Wonder what they would do if the new bunch of posters were constantly posting crap about their candidate....GO AFTER THE REPUBLICANS.........GO AFTER THE REPUBLICANS.............

"don't want to vote for a woman." That hasn't a fucking thing with my opposition to Hillary. It's the fact that she's the STATUS QUO Democratic candidate, who'll fix nothing, do nothing different, and leave us in the same goddamn boat her husband did with respect to the Republican media machine. I expect her to be a decent President...but we don't need a DECENT president, we need a fucking REMARKABLE president. Someone who's not beholden to entrenched corporate interests who wants to tackle the hard issues and restore actual Democratic ideals to America.

If SHE was that candidate, I'd vote for her in a second. It has nothing to do with her being a woman, it has to do with the fact that she offers no alternative to the corporate pandering that's infected the "mainstream" Democratic sector.

this has do do with her gender. To hit this low betrays the absolute lack of substance in your position.

If all woman candidates are worthy of support, should good Democrats vote for Jean Schmidt if che changes parties and runs as a Democrat?

...would speak such that her aides don't have to explain her comments, and the right-wing can't misrepresent them so easily, if in fact that's the case here. It will be a long general election if we have to go through this process with each speech our candidate makes.

And all the Duers who fell for the right wing spin should re-examine their willingness to always believe the worst about Hillary.

The right wing will twist everything Hillary says and they should never be given any credibility.

.. as HRC is SUPPOSED to know full well that anything she says is subject to being taken out of context so DON'T SAY THAT.

As if she would do anything about this war if she could anyway.

The bad thing is that some people here on DU who don't like Hillary believe it.

is give the right wing ammunition right before petreaus's report. It doesn't matter how she qualified the statement. It was a mistake for any candidate to make and I'd say the same about anyone who said it.

But if anyone was going to do it.....

You say something ambiguous that can easily be mistaken for something else and the RW nails you for it.

Stupid, stupid move.

Way to go, Hillary. Lesson #387 in how NOT to frame your message.

mean by working---a decrease in violence-daily violence. and of course, violence has increased in other parts of the country---the North and now the South Basra.


But the political surge is not working---does not even come close.

Americablog has done a pretty good job of keeping up with specific developments in Iraq, and spent some time discussing the developments in al Anbar. They have also been adamant that it is not part of the surge - e.g., the extra troops weren't sent there, we just made an allicance with the Sunnis there against al Queda. The fear is that it will be claimed as part of the success of the surge and thus earn Bush and co. more time in Iraq, when really, as with the original work in Afghanistan, it was more a matter of using local groups, even those which, previously and in the long run, are the enemies of the type of western-style democratic state Bush states is his objective.

Here's one post from back in June; I'm reproducing it in its entirety because it's so hard to search the site that it might be hard for people to find and it's fairly short so hard to excerpt; I've included the url as well, but I got it from a search so the url might not work. I'm offering it as background to the topic, since there's such debate and interest in it, and it seems like a good summar; agree with it or not as you like.

http://www.americablog.com/2007_06_01_americablog_archive.html


Status quo in Anbar is not "victory"
by A.J. Rossmiller · 6/27/2007 09:48:00 AM ET


Rob Farley, who does great work on foreign policy and security issues at both Tapped and LGM, has an excellent analysis of the current situation in Anbar. The idea that some tribes in Anbar are sick of al Qaeda is hardly shocking, and while it's nice that they're not cooperating with foreign fighters, working with Sunni tribes on military operations is hardly an unmitigated win for the U.S. *or* Iraq itself. These are, after all, the same groups that we were fighting before we decided to join up with them. As Rob explains,

The US is currently enrolling in Iraqi police and military units tribesmen who were, ten months ago, part of the insurgency. The loyalty of such individuals can hardly be taken for granted; the tribal elite may decide, six months from now, that they are no longer pleased with the US and shift against us. Even if the tribal elites remain loyal, the alliance poses a larger problem for basic US war aims. The alliance with these tribes serves, necessarily, to strengthen them as political units . . . invariably weaken the central government. As the tribes are also among the least progressive and least interested in democracy of any Iraqi political constituencies, strengthening them also helps undercut efforts towards democratization.

I would even take it a step further: in addition to the potential for tribal leaders to take the money and run, it's not just that the tribes are illiberal, but there is a very real possibility that they could turn against the Iraqi government. Training and arming the disparate groups against each other in a burgeoning civil war is not a good strategy. NOT a good strategy.

She said it! C-Span had it on this AM too!

It's too damn messy.

excusing all of the deaths.

This battle for Orwellian revisionism is lost, but the war wages on.

that the tactics weren't actually American tactics, but were tactics used by the Iraqis to work with the Americans. It's going to be a long voyage, but they apparently plan on bringing the whole story together at some point in the future.

The furious defense of St. Hillary is now silent since the KO story. Or is that show just more Republican trolls too?

We'll see what the Hillary apologists have to say about this latest abomination by the morning. I bet it's not much.

"Aides to Mrs. Clinton said her remarks that military tactics in Iraq are 'working' referred specifically to reports of increased cooperation from Sunnis leading to greater success against insurgents in Al Anbar Province."

http://mediamatters.org/items/200708210008

Now, among the many problems with that line is that she originally said the "tactics" were working in some areas; not that the "tactics" were specific to the Sunnis in the Al Anbar area. So, there must be a tactical escalation with which we're not familiar which breaks down to sub-tactical strategies within the Al Anbar theater. Or maybe Yalies simply use words differently than we do. I've always been confused by the concept of area.

What did Keith say?

Allison filled in.

They first aired the Hillary clip, it seemed unambiguous. Next they discussed the context:

(from my post above)

It's not. Our troops have replaced one occupation with their own