Hysterical woman vapors

"It is the most amazing thing that a young black man who was just a few short years ago unknown to most of his countrymen—really, unknown—could... win the presidential nomination of one of our two great political parties. It is even more amazing that this historic news could be overshadowed by the personal drama and spite of the woman who lost to him. I like it that she spent the campaign accusing America of being sexist, of treating her differently because she is a woman, and then, when she lacked the grace to congratulate the victor, she sent her stewards out to tell the press she just needs time, it’s so emotional. In other words, she needs space because she’s a woman."

- Peggy Noonan

Clinton blasts Bush for not stopping a project Bill OK'd

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Steven Thomma

Hillary Clinton loves to tell the story about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

It’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.

If she were president, Clinton says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support from working-class Democrats worried about their jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never includes in the oft-repeated tale is the role that prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband's administration.

In response, the Clinton campaign said that Bill Clinton's administration had gotten assurances at the time it approved the deal that production would remain inside the United States, and that the shift of jobs to China didn't occur until under the Bush administration.

“Hillary Clinton must have been hoping we Hoosiers have short memories,” Ed Dixon of Valparaiso said in a letter to a local newspaper after a recent Clinton visit. “Her husband was president at the time and allowed this to happen.”

“They would have us believe Bush was behind this sale,” added Fred Sliger of Valparaiso in another letter, “when in fact the Clinton administration rubber-stamped this along with the sale of numerous other high-tech secrets to the Chinese. …Let's get the facts straight.”

In an interview, Sliger amplified his view. "She blamed President Bush. I blame him, too, but she neglects to mention that it all started when her husband was in office," said Sliger, a mechanic at Valparaiso University. "They say those jobs went out the back door on Bush's watch. They wouldn't have gone out the back door if President Clinton hadn’t left the front door propped open. I blame everybody. I want the blame to go around." Dixon also elaborated in an interview. "She brought it up at a town hall meeting here," said Dixon, a computer network administrator from Valparaiso and a Barack Obama supporter.

What Clinton never includes in the oft-repeated tale is the role that prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband's administration.

"She tried to use us for propaganda. I thought, wait a minute. The plant may have moved in 2003, but it was sold in 1995. It was her husband who actually approved the sale of the company. We don't forget. What, we're not supposed to remember what happened a few years ago?"

Told that the Chinese buyers had assured the U.S. government that they wouldn't move the jobs or work out of the country, Dixon said that President Clinton should have been more skeptical. "Clinton should have stepped in and said no, he should have said, `No, I can't guarantee that they won't move after my presidency.'''

Here’s how Clinton tells it in a recent television ad she aired in Indiana.

“Right here, over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military's smart bombs to their targets,” the New York senator says.

“They were good jobs, but now they're gone to China. And now America's defense relies on Chinese spare parts. George Bush could have stopped it, but he didn't. As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here and to turn this economy around. I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approve this message because American workers should build America's defense." Here’s how she told it a few weeks ago at a union meeting in Washington.

“A Chinese company bought the company, called Magnequench, and they wanted to move the jobs to China. The people in Indiana protested, did everything they could to convince the Bush administration that this was a terrible mistake. Couldn't even get a hearing,” she said.

“The jobs went to China, but so did the technology. And now the United States military has to buy the magnets we need for the smart bombs we invented from China,” she said as the union members booed. Here's the complete story.

In 1995, General Motors decided to sell the Indiana-based Magnequench to a Chinese-American consortium.

The consortium included:

* San Huan New Materials and Hi-Tech Co, a company owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences;
* Onfem Holdings, a company controlled by the State Nonferrous Metals Industry Administration in the Peoples Republic of China;
* Soros Fund Management, headed by George Soros;
* The Sextant Group, founded by Archibald Cox Jr.;

Soros, of course, is the wealthy investor who has contributed vast sums to Democratic candidates and liberal causes.

He’s given more than $250,000 to Democratic campaign committees, tens of thousands to individual Democratic candidates and about $2.5 million to the liberal group Moveon.org, according to Federal Election Commission records.

He’s also contributed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and to Obama’s Senate and presidential campaigns. He contributed to Republican Sen. John McCain’s first presidential campaign, in 1999, when McCain was running against Bush for the Republican nomination.

Because Magnequench made magnets for smart bombs, the sale to a group that included foreign owners required approval under a 1988 law.

After a 30-day review, the Clinton administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes representatives of the Pentagon, approved the sale in 1995.

The buyers reportedly promised to keep manufacturing in the United States.

Yet in 1998, they started building a plant in China, close to the source of the raw materials used in the magnets.

The company reorganized in 1999, buying out Soros as well as Onfem Holdings.

In 2000, Magnequench bought a magnet factory in Valparaiso, the same year it started operations at its China plant.

In 2001, it closed its original plant in Anderson, Ind.

And in 2003, it decided to close the Valparaiso plant, laying off its 225 workers.

Indiana politicians asked the Bush administration to intervene.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., said the move would leave the United States without a significant domestic source of rare-earth magnets used in smart bombs. The Valparaiso plant made about 80 percent of the magnets bought by the Pentagon, they said.

The administration didn't block the move.

The Clinton campaign said she doesn't mention the role her husband played in the sale because it wasn’t relevant.

“In 1995, when this group bought Magnequench, there were assurances made that production would stay in the United States,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Jonathan Swain.

“The important thing is that in 1995, there was no indication that this production would leave the United States. Based on the information at the time this was reviewed, there was no indication that there was some risk to national security because these jobs would stay in the United States.”

Asked why the administration wasn’t concerned when the Chinese operators opened a factory in China, he said the real problem arose during the Bush administration when U.S. production was shut down.

Swain also noted that security was less of an issue in 1995 because the country had other producers of the magnets. By 2003, it did not.

The Last Word

“Savvy Democrats have found a way to capitalize on market fears. Just as they frequently attribute every hot day to global warming—not weather—now they lay every economic problem at Iraq’s door. If the economy is not strong, they blame what Obama calls the ‘Bush/McCain war.’ Sure, it’s fair to oppose the war and cite the cost to American taxpayers. Although, once a war has started, we have to pay for it. So when Democrats talk about how the war hurts the U.S. economy, it sounds to me as if they are arguing that U.S. troops can spill their blood in Iraq, but not if gasoline hits $4 per gallon. Then the cost is too high... Forget, if you will, that Clinton and 76 other senators voted (for the resolution) to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. This is America’s war. To troops stationed in Iraq, it doesn’t matter who started it. It does matter, however, that their sacrifices count for something. And it doesn’t help U.S. troops, whose morale has been boosted by the surge’s success, when Clinton announces, as she did again last week, that the Iraq War is ‘a war we cannot win.’... Last week, Clinton said in her Iraq speech, ‘The reality is that this war has made the terrorists stronger.’ Likewise from Obama: ‘Above all, the war in Iraq has emboldened al-Qaida.’ But if the terrorists are stronger and bolder, why are they losing ground in Iraq? Why are they in hiding elsewhere? And why have leading Democrats begun to frame the Iraq War, not just as a war that cannot be won, but as an expensive engagement that is driving up the price of gasoline for Americans?”

—Debra Saunders

Hillary's Ethical Problem -- the Turning Tide Gains Momentum

“As much attention as the decision of the stars of the Kennedy family to endorse Sen. Obama received [last] week, it has still not been given its due. This was a break with the establishment and from the expected, and it may carry a price. The Clintons are deeply wired into their party, they run many money lines and power lines, and Hillary Clinton is still, in the Super Tuesday states, in the lead. Will the lives of those who rebelled against her be made more pleasant if she wins? The Clintons have never had the wit to be forgiving. But all parties, all movements, need men and women who will come forward every decade or so to name tendencies within that are abusive or destructive, to throw off the low and grubby. Teddy’s speech in this regard was a barnburner. He went straight against the negative and bullying, hard for the need to find inspiration again. He is an old lion of his party, a hero of the base. But people do what they know how to do, and objects at rest tend of stay at rest, and Teddy has long led a comfortable life as a party panjandrum who knew to sit back and watch as the dog barked and the caravan moved on. In a way he seemed to rebel against his own tendencies... As a conservative I would say Ted Kennedy has spent much of his career being not just wrong about the issues but so deeply wrong, so consistently and reliably wrong that it had a kind of grandeur to it. So wrong that I cannot actually think of a single serious policy question on which I agreed with him. But...[h]is principled and uncompromising rebellion seemed to me a patriotic act, and adds to the rising tide of Geffenism. When David Geffen broke with Mrs. Clinton last summer, and couched his disapproval along ethical lines, he was almost alone among important Democrats. It took some guts. Now others are joining his side. Good.”

—Peggy Noonan

Who Was Hillary Clinton?

WSJ.com

Hillary Clinton is running for President based in large part on her experience, especially her eight years as first lady. So it is revealing that she and her husband don't want the media and others to have ready access to the records that might tell us a good deal more about that 1990s "experience."

We're referring to the controversy over records at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, which opened in 2004. At the time, Mrs. Clinton promised that "everything's going to be available." More than three years later, the library that is partly funded by taxpayers has released less than 1% of its records, and the withheld documents include two million pages covering Mrs. Clinton's White House tenure. As usual with the Clintons, they've managed to make the controversy seem so complicated that everyone has lost interest.

The story isn't all that hard to understand. The National Archives supervises Presidential documents, and in November 2002 Bill Clinton sent a letter asking the Archives to "consider for withholding" any "communications directly between the President and First Lady, and their families, unless routine in nature." He requested similar limitations on documents involving investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and independent counsels.

Mr. Clinton and his surrogates insist that this letter doesn't "block" the release of anything, and the implicit suggestion is that the Archives has discretion to release what it wants. However, a spokeswoman for the Archives in December acknowledged that it had already withheld 2,600 documents in accordance with Mr. Clinton's directive. Adding to suspicions of stonewalling is the fact that the Clintons' liaison with the Archives is none other than Bruce Lindsey. Readers may remember Mr. Lindsey as the longtime Clinton consigliere and keeper of the secrets going back to Arkansas.

The controversy flared briefly last year, after a Los Angeles Times editorial calling for the records to be released. Mrs. Clinton has responded by claiming she has nothing to hide and referring all questions on the records to her husband. Mr. Clinton, in turn, claims the Bush White House has slowed things down with its own review of the records. But the Administration denies this and there is no evidence it has interfered with the Archives. As for Mr. Lindsey, his explanation is that the archivists vetting the documents are moving as quickly as they can. The Archives are currently plowing through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in order of receipt.

This is all so, well, Clintonian -- arguing over what the meaning of "consider for withholding" is, and suggesting that the Clintons are merely prisoners of procedure. Mrs. Clinton is running for the highest office in the land, and voters have a right to expect that both she and her husband release everything possible about her record, subject to national security and the privacy concerns of third parties. The Clinton White House records may well contain information that would give voters insight into both her political philosophy and character.

They could relate to her role (if any) in such scandals as Travelgate and the Marc Rich pardon, plus policy disputes over health care, welfare reform, and Social Security. The gadfly litigation outfit, Judicial Watch, has been filing FOIA requests and recently pried out a few documents related to Mrs. Clinton's 1993 health-care task force.

One memo, from a participant with the initials "P.S.," reads: "I can think of parallels in wartime, but I have trouble coming up with a precedent in our peacetime history for such broad and centralized control over a sector of the economy . . . Is the public really ready for this? . . . none of us knows whether we can make it work well or at all . . ." This is all relevant today given that health care is again her signature domestic policy.

This is also reminiscent of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, when he refused to release his tax records prior to 1980. That disclosure cutoff date was no accident. As we learned only after that election, 1978 and 1979 were the tax years when the Clintons reported income on her miraculous and highly embarrassing trades in cattle futures.

Democrats of all stripes have been discovering of late that they're finally tired of Clintonian mores, at least when applied against Barack Obama. The slow-rolling document release is more of the same. The Clintons should declare that they want the Archives to treat all document requests regarding Senator Clinton's White House days as a priority for release. She shouldn't be able to run on her White House experience and then hide the reality of her White House record from public view.

Hillary and Say's Law

WSJ.com

George Melloan

"But this stimulus shouldn't be paid for," Hillary Clinton said to Tim Russert in a recent interview, when he reminded her that she'd omitted a price tag somewhere. Shouldn't be?

Say hello to that old ghost from the past we thought banished by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. It's called "Keynesian Economics."

Ironically, even the brilliant John Maynard Keynes disowned it. After meeting with a group of Washington "Keynesians" in 1944, he said he was the only non-Keynesian in the room. His brainchild, government spending to stimulate demand, had been converted from its originally intended limited application to an all-purpose economic panacea by politicians, academics and journalists.

The fundamental principle of the Keynesians, one that Lord Keynes would have scoffed at, is that government can deliver something for nothing. To be sure, government does transfer income and wealth to favored constituencies, such as rice farmers or ethanol producers, from people who pay taxes. Washington calls that economic stimulus. The costless "stimulus" Sen. Clinton had in mind would be broader, although tilted toward low-income earners. The intent is to pump up consumer demand by showering "tax rebates" on people with a "greater propensity to spend."

But federal efforts to stimulate "demand" have had a dismal record. Herbert Hoover tried in the late 1920s to pump up farm prices and FDR in the 1930s with cartels. The Depression droned on and on. Pearl Harbor forced the U.S. to ramp up production of guns and planes and fight a war. But it was not "demand stimulation" that ended the Depression. It was the urgent need for production. Yet Jimmy Carter came back with the same old remedy in the 1970s when the economy was in the doldrums, mainly because of government spending and regulatory excesses. His $50 tax rebate was a pitiful failure, so he turned to -- what else? -- more government spending.

Some Democrats still think that government stimulation of demand is an antidote to a slowing economy. Yet economics has certain iron laws that the government violates at its peril. One of them has been called Say's Law, because it was first enunciated by the late 18th-century Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Say. He said "products are paid for with products." Or to rephrase the point, "a society can't consume if it doesn't produce." Hillary's assertion that her "stimulus" package shouldn't be paid for denies reality. Somebody has to pay for it. One man's consumption must be paid for by his own or someone else's production.

True, one man's consumption may exceed his production, for a wide variety of reasons that could include his use of credit, or his good luck inheriting a fortune created by a productive parent. Nation-states, too, can consume more than they produce through use of credit; but unless they attract compensating foreign investment, the difference will be adjusted by a decline in their national currency, as is currently the case with the U.S. dollar. The resulting price inflation will then cause a host of other problems, including erosion of the capital base. That is the real problem the U.S. economy faces, and it will not be addressed by throwing someone else's money out of airplanes to the waiting multitudes.

Mrs. Clinton also wants to intervene in the housing market by freezing interest rates and invoking a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures. The freeze, i.e., price controls, worked beautifully for Richard Nixon and a Democratic Congress in the 1970s, plunging the economy into chaos. The moratorium would remove the other mechanism markets employ to deal with stranded mortgages.

Many subprime mortgage buyers suffer little loss from foreclosure because by definition they had little equity in the house. The losses will be far worse, for both borrowers and taxpayers, if some injudicious measure of the type Mrs. Clinton proposes gums up the ability of lenders to take their lumps for their mistakes and continue lending.

Keynesianism crashed in the 1970s, when the U.S. suffered slow economic growth and high inflation: "stagflation." There was nothing in Keynesianism to explain this phenomenon. But there was an easy explanation available in classical economics, the simple principles that Ronald Reagan -- who learned at an early age that he had to work to eat -- understood very well. The so-called "supply-side" movement was nothing less or more than a return to these simple principles.

The explanation was this: If a government hampers production through heavy taxes and economic regulation -- or by inflating the currency -- production will slow down and there will be less to consume. To revive production, government must reduce the tax and regulatory burden and kill inflation -- which Reagan did to such good effect. Tossing dollars from planes doesn't do it; neither did Hoover's attempts to help farmers through protectionism, which proved disastrous, nor FDR's unconstitutional scheme to help producers with price-fixing cartels.

Clearly stock markets around the world aren't cheered by all the current talk of stimulus and a further cheapening of the dollar: They know all too well how politicians can convert adversity into catastrophe. Instead, the right policy is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and pull up regulatory weeds, like Sarbanes-Oxley. Sound money and relief for producers is the best anti-recession prescription. It worked in 1981 because it was good policy. Say's Law is just as valid today as it was 200 years ago.

Hoisted on their Liberal Petards. . .

James Taranto

The Lewinsky Decade

Sometime in 1997, a friend signed us up for the Drudge Report's email updates. We didn't quite understand what the Drudge Report was, but into our email box at irregular intervals would pop often-interesting news and gossip bulletins, written in a breathless, tabloidy style. (One of them, dated Nov. 9, 1997, declares, "WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE TOPS 150,000 PAID!")

Ten years ago today came the most interesting Drudge missive:

BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

**World Exclusive**

**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month.

The following day, Drudge named the intern as Monica Lewinsky, and a few days after that, the story was all over the mainstream media. It looked for a while as if President Clinton might not serve out his term. Even his dutiful wife commented on the "Today" show that if true, "that would be a very serious offense." But, insisted Hillary Clinton, it was not true. The real story "is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

One participant in that "conspiracy" was Attorney General Janet Reno, who had petitioned to expand Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr's mandate to include the investigation of possible obstruction of justice in a sexual-harassment suit filed by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas employee who alleged that then-Gov. Clinton had dropped his pants and issued a demand that she "kiss it."

Clinton's denials were politically expedient. By the time he owned up to his shenanigans with the youthful Miss Lewinsky, his supporters had accustomed themselves to the idea of presidential droit de seigneur, and they defended Clinton's conduct as being "only about sex." Because Clinton had issued false denials under oath, however, as a legal matter it no longer was only about sex but about perjury and obstruction of justice. Starr presented a report to Congress, which impeached him. In February 1999 the Senate found him not guilty.

Clinton survived the scandal by brazenly lying. Had he acknowledged the affair at the outset, he surely would have been forced to resign. This centrist president became the hero of the left, which actually believed that "right-wing conspiracy" talk. The impending impeachment produced a backlash against Republicans, who lost House seats in 1998, countering a historic trend in which the president's party almost always suffers big congressional losses in the sixth year of his term (cf 1986 and 2006).

The effects of the Lewinsky scandal continue to be felt. By some accounts it launched Mrs. Clinton's political career. The notion of a first lady seeking a Senate seat in a state to which she had no real connection was preposterous--yet she carried it off, in part by affording liberal New Yorkers an opportunity to poke the eye of the vast-right conspirators. Now she is a viable candidate for president. Who'd have expected that back in 1998?

Organized feminism lost much of its moral authority, as no less a personage than Gloria Steinem--in a famous op-ed that is mysteriously missing from the New York Times archives but we found here--explained away treatment of women that she never would have tolerated from a Republican or a private-sector boss.

The independent counsel statute, a post-Watergate abomination that no one thinks made government cleaner, finally went by the boards when Congress in 2000 declined to renew it. (The impulse behind the independent counsel, however, remains alive, as shown by the witch hunt in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.)

The paranoid style of politics took hold on the left, which blamed right-wing conspiracies for George W. Bush's victory in the disputed election of 2000, the liberation of Iraq, George W. Bush's victory in the undisputed election of 2004, Hurricane Katrina and, on the furthest fringes, the attacks of 9/11. A far-left subculture harbors fantasies of impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney as revenge, even though they haven't committed any high crimes or misdemeanors.

In reality, far from being the victim of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," Clinton was caught in a trap set for him unwittingly by the political left, which made sexual harassment both a legal offense and a political outrage, and which hatched the independent-counsel scheme. He was saved only by an exercise of raw, partisan political power in the Senate, where not a single Democrat voted for conviction.

Mrs. Clinton, facing a strong challenge from Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, finds herself in a weirdly parallel position. Once again, as we noted last week, Gloria Steinem has produced a risible op-ed for the Times, this time defending Mrs. Clinton as a feminist icon, even though she owes her political power to her husband, and even though she seems to have saved her chance at the nomination by coming close to tears.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun, in a report on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's controversial Afrocentric "spiritual mentor," notes that "that woman" has come up this year, in a new context:

On Sunday morning--amid intensified crossfire between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama over the use of race in the Democratic presidential campaign--Wright was preaching from the Gospel of John, using his powerful style to link the story of the loaves and fishes to a contemporary political message.

Man should not put limits on what God can do, but that's what people always do, he told the crowd. Just as God made five loaves and two fishes feed thousands, God has provided liberators for blacks in the past--from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and now Barack Obama. But, Wright said, there were always reasons not to follow them.

Some argue that blacks should vote for [Mrs.] Clinton "because her husband was good to us," he continued.

"That's not true," he thundered. "He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."

Feminism, the independent counsel, now racial identity politics: Before the Clintons have passed from the stage, maybe they will have been hoist by every liberal petard.

She Don't Like Ike

James Taranto - Opinionjournal.com

How desperate is Hillary Clinton in the face of the Obama juggernaut? So desperate that she is smearing a genuine war hero. And we seem to be the first to notice it.

The Politico's Ben Smith set off a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday when he noted that Mrs. Clinton, in an interview with Fox News's Major Garrett, seemed to be likening front-runner Barack Obama to Martin Luther King, and not in a good way:

[Mrs.] Clinton rejoined the running argument over hope and "false hope" in an interview in Dover this afternoon, reminding Fox's Major Garrett that while Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on behalf of civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson was the one who got the legislation passed. . . .

"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done."

Josh Marshall weighed in with a halfhearted defense of Mrs. Clinton. He quotes her at length:

"I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in peoples lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."

"It's an ambiguous statement," Marshall allows. "But her reference is to different presidents--Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, one of whom inspired but did relatively little legislatively and Johnson who did a lot legislatively, though he was rather less than inspiring. Quite apart from the merits of Obama and Clinton, it's not a bad point about Kennedy and LBJ."

Smith then defended his interpretation. What both of them missed was that passing mention about the Civil Rights Act being something "the president before had not even tried." In context, it is clear that this is a reference to the president before Kennedy--that is, Dwight Eisenhower--not to Kennedy himself, who did in fact propose civil rights legislation in 1963 but died before Congress could pass it.

This, however, is a smear against Ike, who was a much better civil-rights president than he typically gets credit for. As Bruce Bartlett explains in "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore):

In his January 10, 1957, State of the Union Address, Eisenhower renewed his request for civil rights legislation, which had passed the House but died in the Senate in the previous Congress due to Southern Democratic delaying tactics. . . .

Everyone knew that the critical fight on the civil rights bill would be in the Senate. . . . In that body, the key figure was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who represented the [former] Confederate state of Texas and had been installed in his position by Southern Democrats precisely in order to block civil rights legislation. Until the 1950s, Johnson's record of opposition to all civil rights legislation was spotless. But he was ambitious and wanted to be president. . . .

After dragging his feet on the civil rights bill throughout much of 1957, Johnson finally came to the conclusion that the tide had turned in favor of civil rights and he needed to be on the right side of the issue if he hoped to become president. . . .

At the same time, the Senate's master tactician and principal opponent of the civil rights bill, Democrat Richard B. Russell of Georgia, saw the same handwriting on the wall but came to a different conclusion. He realized that the support was no longer there for an old-fashioned Democrat filibuster. . . . So Russell adopted a different strategy this time of trying to amend the civil rights bill so as to minimize its impact. Behind the scenes, Johnson went along with Russell's strategy of not killing the civil rights bill, but trying to neuter it as much as possible. . . .

Eisenhower was disappointed at not being able to produce a better piece of legislation. "I wanted a much stronger civil rights bill in '57 than I could get," he later lamented. "But the Democrats . . . wouldn't let me have it."

Liberals criticized Eisenhower for getting such a modest bill at the end of the day. But Johnson argued that it was historically important because it was the first civil rights bill to pass Congress since 1875. "Once you break virginity," he said, "it'll be easier next time."

To put it mildly, LBJ was not a consistent advocate of racial equality. Bartlett (both in his book and in this article) quotes LBJ's explanation of why he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957:

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

You can see where Mrs. Clinton, with her finger-to-the-wind approach to some of today's most pressing issues, might feel a certain kinship with LBJ. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that LBJ's presidency was a necessary condition for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. If Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, had won the 1960 election and LBJ had remained in the Senate as majority leader, it's easy to imagine the latter--with an eye toward the presidency in 1964 or '68--shepherding the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and the former signing it.

LBJ was, after all, a very effective legislator. Can the same be said of New York's junior senator? Oddly, Mrs. Clinton has chosen to compare herself to a deeply flawed president. Odder still, the comparison ends up underscoring her failure to measure up.

Obama Wins, Clinton Concedes

washingtonpost.com

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) won the Iowa caucuses while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) seemed headed for a third-place finish, a stunning affirmation of his message of hope and a stinging rebuke of the long-time national frontrunner.

Clinton called Obama to congratulate him on his victory and to concede the race moments ago. With nearly 1,600 of the state's 1,781 precincts reporting their results, Obama led with 37 percent followed by former senator John Edwards with 30 percent of the vote and Clinton with 29 percent.

Obama's win sends a shockwave through the Democratic field as a candidate who was elected to the Senate from Illinois just two years ago has toppled the first family of Democratic politics. Clinton's apparent inability to beat out Edwards is likely to send warning signals throughout her campaign. The former First Lady now almost certainly needs a win in New Hampshire to reassert her status as the likely nominee.

Taranto: How Dangerous Was It?

James Taranto

Hillary Clinton wants us to believe that being first lady was a dangerous "job," and not just because it entailed being Bill Clinton's wife. Newsday reports:

Ever since Barack Obama suggested Hillary Clinton's eight years as first lady were a glorified tea party a few days back, she's looked for an opening to strike back.

On Saturday night in Dubuque she pounced, arguing she risked her life on White House missions in the 1990s, including a hair-raising flight into Bosnia that ended in a "corkscrew" landing and a sprint off the tarmac to dodge snipers.

"I don't remember anyone offering me tea," she quipped.

One cheer to Mrs. Clinton for that subtle jab at creepy Joe Wilson. But this gives us pause:

It turns out that Clinton wasn't quite flying solo into harm's way that day.

She was, in fact, leading a goodwill entourage that included baggy-pants funnyman Sinbad, singer Sheryl Crow and Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, then 15, according to an account of the March 1995 trip in her autobiography "Living History."

So Mrs. Clinton took her 15-year-old daughter on this death-defying junket? And now she wants to be our mother?

Caption this Photo

Honesty: Hillary's Glass House

By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal

Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?

The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama's character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that "in kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.' " (Emphasis added.) This, the Clinton release explained, gives the lie to Obama's claim that he is "not running to fulfill some long-held plans" to become president. Hillary was not, it appears, joking.

At a campaign stop the same day, Clinton added: "I have been, for months, on the receiving end of rather consistent attacks. Well, now the fun part starts." Indeed.

I will not excavate Clinton's own kindergarten confessions. Nor will I compare the honesty quotient of her campaign-trail spin with the dreadful drivel dutifully uttered by Obama and other candidates to pander to their fevered primary electorates.

Instead, let's take a trip down memory lane -- from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years -- to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary's first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie.

Gennifer and Monica. Former lounge singer Gennifer Flowers surfaced in early 1992 with claims -- corroborated by tapes of phone calls -- that she had had a long affair with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had arranged a state job for her. Bill Clinton told the media, falsely, that the woman's "story is untrue."

Although well aware of her husband's philandering history, Hillary backed his squishy denials, famously asserting on "60 Minutes" that she was not "some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette." More deceptively, she suggested to ABC's Sam Donaldson that Bill's contacts with Flowers were just an example of how he loved to "help people who are in trouble" and "listen to their problems."

"Hillary's words uncannily foreshadowed her insistence six years later to ... a White House aide that Bill had 'ministered' to [Monica] Lewinsky because she was a troubled young woman," Sally Bedell Smith writes in her fine new book about the Clintons, For Love of Politics. Hillary has continued to insist that she believed what she said about Lewinsky. But friends and former aides have told Smith and others that she knew her husband was lying all along.

Travelgate. The first Clinton scandal after Bill became president started in May 1993, when Chief of Staff Mack McLarty fired the seven employees in the White House office that arranges travel for the press corps. The White House cited gross financial mismanagement. (The charge was never substantiated.) The sudden firings created a media uproar, especially when the dismissed employees were quickly replaced by friends and relatives of the Clintons.

Hillary later told the General Accounting Office, in a document prepared by her attorney, that she had no role in the decision to fire the employees, did not know the "origin of the decision," and "did not direct that any action be taken by anyone" other than keeping her informed.

But her statements were contradicted by evidence, including a long-concealed memo to McLarty and a written chronology prepared by White House aide David Watkins that came to light years later. Hillary, Watkins wrote, had said that "we need those people out and we need our people in" and had made it clear that "there would be hell to pay" unless she got "immediate action." Another aide wrote that Hillary intimate Susan Thomases had said, "Hillary wants these people fired."

While saying that no provable crime had been committed, Robert Ray, who had succeeded Kenneth Starr as independent counsel, reported in October 2000 that Hillary's statements had been "factually false" and that there was "overwhelming evidence that she in fact did have a role in the decision to fire the employees."

Cattle futures. The New York Times revealed in March 1994 that in 1978, just before her husband became governor, Hillary had made a $100,000 profit on a $1,000 investment in highly speculative cattle-futures contracts in only nine months. Hillary's first explanation (through aides) of this extraordinary windfall was that she had made the investment after "reading The Wall Street Journal" and placed all the trades herself after seeking advice from "numerous people." It was so preposterous that she soon had to abandon it. Eventually, she had to admit that longtime Clinton friend James Blair had executed 30 of her 32 trades directly with an Arkansas broker.

In an April 1994 press conference, Hillary denied knowing of "any favorable treatment" by Blair. But the astronomical odds against any financial novice making a 10,000 percent profit without the game being rigged led many to believe that Blair, the outside counsel to Arkansas-based poultry giant Tyson Foods, must have put only profitable trades in Hillary's account and absorbed her losses. The heavily regulated Tyson needed friends in high places, and Bill Clinton helped it pass a 1983 state law raising weight limits on chicken trucks.

Removal of Vince Foster documents. During the same press conference, Hillary was asked why her then-chief of staff, Maggie Williams, had been involved in removing documents from the office of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster after his suicide. Foster had been a partner of Hillary's at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. "I don't know that she did remove any documents," Hillary said. But it was reported three months later that Hillary had instructed Williams to remove the Foster documents to the White House residence. Then they were turned over to Clinton attorney Bob Barnett.

Castle Grande. In the summer of 1995, the Resolution Trust Corp. reported that Hillary had been one of 11 Rose Law Firm lawyers who had done work in the mid-1980s on an Arkansas real estate development, widely known as Castle Grande, promoted by James McDougal and Seth Ward. McDougal headed a troubled thrift, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and had given Hillary legal business as a favor to Bill. McDougal and his wife, Susan, were the Clintons' partners in their Whitewater real estate investment. Ward was father-in-law to Webb Hubbell, another former Rose Law Firm partner, who was briefly Clinton's associate attorney general in 1993. Later, Hubbell went to prison for fraud, as did James McDougal.

Castle Grande was a sewer of sham transactions, some used to funnel cash into Madison Guaranty. Castle Grande's ultimate collapse contributed to that of the thrift, which cost taxpayers millions. Hillary told federal investigators that she knew nothing about Castle Grande. When it turned out that more than 30 of her 60 hours of legal work for Madison Guaranty involved Castle Grande, she said she had known the project under a different name. A 1996 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report said that she had drafted documents that Castle Grande used to "deceive federal bank examiners."

Prosecutors later came to believe that Hillary had padded her bills; she "wasn't guilty of [knowingly] facilitating nefarious transactions -- she was guilty of doing less work than she took credit for," Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. explain in their 2007 biography, Her Way. Hillary herself never took refuge in this explanation.

Billing records. Hillary's billing records for Castle Grande were in a 116-page, 5-inch-thick computer printout that came to light under mysterious circumstances on January 4, 1996 -- 19 months after Starr's investigators had subpoenaed it and amid prosecutorial pressure on Clinton aides who had been strikingly forgetful. For most of that time, Hillary claimed that the billing records had vanished. But a longtime Hillary assistant named Carolyn Huber later admitted coming across the printout in August 1995 on a table in a storage area next to Hillary's office; Huber said she had put it into a box in her own office, without realizing for five more months that these were the subpoenaed billing records.

This implausible tale, on top of other deceptions, prompted New York Times columnist William Safire to write on January 8, 1996, that "our first lady ... is a congenital liar."

The next day, the White House press secretary said that the president wanted to punch Safire in the nose for insulting his wife. Five days later, the president invited Monica Lewinsky to the Oval Office for what turned out to be one of their 10 oral-sex sessions. Two years and 13 days after that, Hillary was on the "Today" show suggesting that her husband's Lewinsky affair was a lie concocted by "this vast right-wing conspiracy."

And now she is citing Barack Obama's supposed kindergarten "essay" as evidence of dishonesty. Astonishing.

The Bad Good Old Days

“[N]one of the [Clinton] scandals were bolder and publicly vexing than the fact that whole cases of FBI files of Clinton opponents or antagonists were missing and mysteriously popped up in Hillary’s possession. The fact that many of the names found in such files were also under special audit from the IRS—many for several years in a row—under the Clinton regime troubled the few Americans who followed the news closely enough to understand it. The willingness that such executive power would be focused to abuse their ideological enemies is revolting and repulsive. In the years since Hillary has repackaged herself as the ‘moderate’ Senator from New York thus further distancing herself from the trouble of the Arkansas days. But make no mistake—everything ugly associated with the word Clinton is back. Rigged appearances, intimidation of the press, and the discovery that research hacks are even now sitting in some campaign office basement putting together strategy hits for the assassination of their current opponents—its all back.” —Kevin McCullough

Hillary - Fraud Abounds

Hillary Clinton's campaign has been raking in money from New York's Chinatown, the Los Angeles Times reports. A single fund-raising event in April brought in $380,000. John Kerry, by contrast, raised $24,000 from Chinatown in the entire 2004 campaign.

"Chinatown's newfound role in the 2008 election cycle marks another chapter in the centuries-old American saga of marginalized ethnic groups and newly arrived immigrants turning to politics to improve their lot," the Times says. But much of its story raises questions about this feel-good description. "Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton's campaign treasury," the Times reports.

The paper tries, without much success, to figure out who these people are and how they can afford to write big checks to Mrs. Clinton:

Of 74 residents of New York's Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment. . . .

The tenement at 44 Henry St. was listed in Clinton's campaign reports as the home of Shu Fang Li, who reportedly gave $1,000.

In a recent visit, a man, apparently drunk, was asleep near the entrance to the neighboring beauty parlor, the Nice Hair Salon.

A tenant living in the apartment listed as Li's address said through a translator that she had not heard of him, although she had lived there for the last 10 years.

A man named Liang Zheng was listed as having contributed $1,000. The address given was a large apartment building on East 194th Street in the Bronx, but no one by that name could be located there.

Census figures for 2000 show the median family income for the area was less than $21,000. About 45% of the population was living below the poverty line, more than double the city average.

In the busy heart of East Broadway, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, is a building that is listed as the home of Sang Cheung Lee, also reported to have given $1,000. Trash was piled in the dimly lighted entrance hall. Neighbors said they knew of no one with Lee's name there; they knocked on one another's doors in a futile effort to find him.

Salespeople at a store on Canal Street were similarly baffled when asked about Shih Kan Chang, listed as working there and having given $1,000. The store sells purses, jewelry and novelty Buddha statues. Employees said they had not heard of Chang.

Another listed donor, Yi Min Liu, said he did not make the $1,000 contribution in April that was reported in his name. He said he attended a banquet for Clinton but did not give her money.

Reading the story, one suspects--although the Times never raises the possibility, and offers no direct evidence that this is the case--that one or more contributors are evading the $2,300 donation limit by either giving money under phony names or laundering contributions through busboys and others who would not normally make political contributions.

Hooey Clinton

"Sen. Hillary Milhous Clinton has been lumbering around the political landscape talking about herself as commander in chief. She joined the Senate Armed Services Committee as a freshman seven short years ago and has managed to pick up enough military jargon to sound like an Army major on his third tour of duty in the Pentagon’s administrative office. She has taken on the world-weary sound of a veteran European diplomat—although she has not carried out even one day’s duty as a diplomat... Prior to being elected to the Senate in 2000, her only recent professional employment had been as a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark., while her husband, coincidentally, was governor of that state. She represented clients who sometimes had an interest in getting to know her husband better. She has never managed anything larger than a Senate office, although she did exercise the traditional first lady’s prerogative of trying to get various members of her husband’s staff fired... She doesn’t have the government management experience of a Reagan, Carter or Bill Clinton. Nor does she have the international, military or naval experience of an Eisenhower, Hoover or a Franklin Roosevelt...[T]he cliche that she is the experienced candidate is just hooey." -- Tony Blankley

Unpardonable Hypocrisy

NY Post

White House press secretary Tony Snow didn't mince words last week:

"I don't know what Arkansan is for 'chutzpah,' but this is a gigantic case of it," he said of criticism by both Bill and Hillary Clinton of President Bush's decision to commute I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence.

And that's putting it mildly.

The Clintons aren't the only Democrats who've attacked the president for the Libby commutation. But they're surely the most hypocritical.

"This commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice," wailed Hillary.

Hmm. Back in 2001, when her husband left office by extending outright pardons and/or clemency to 176 people, all she had to say about it was: "It's a presidential decision."

Apparently, Bill Clinton's pardon of his own brother (a cocaine-trafficking conviction), as well as of folks who'd paid Hillary's brother tens of thousands of dollars for presidential clemency, had nothing to do with "cronyism."

Oh, but there's a difference, claims Hillary. "This was clearly an effort to protect the White House," she said. As opposed to, say, Clinton's pardon of Susan McDougal, his one-time Whitewater business partner, who sat in prison for 18 months rather than testify against the Clintons?

As for the former president, he charged that the commutation "is consistent with [the Bush administration's] philosophy; they believe that they should be able to do what they want, and that the law is a minor obstacle."

Now, that's an especially interesting observation - given what Clinton himself had to say back when his own pardons, made in the closing hours of his presidency, caused bipartisan outrage.

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Clinton wrote that under the Constitution, a president has "broad and unreviewable power" to grant pardons "without limit" - including, he noted, out of "a belief that a sentence was excessive or unjust."

This right, the ex-president wrote, "is inherently controversial," but was made "to assure that the president would have the freedom to do what he deemed to be right, regardless of how unpopular a decision might be."

And in a direct precedent for the Libby case, Clinton noted that he granted some pardons "because I felt the individuals had been unfairly treated and punished" by a special prosecutor - just what Bush and many others came to believe about prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

"I want every American to know that, while you may disagree with this decision, I made it on the merits as I saw them, and I take full responsibility for it," wrote Clinton of his pardon for politically connected rogue financier Marc Rich.

Which is about what George W. Bush is saying about his commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence.

Case closed.

Pardon Hillary

Michael Goodwin

Pardon Hillary

She blasts Bush over Libby case, but the Clintons abused the power

One of the weaknesses of Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign is that imagining her in the Oval Office brings to mind the scandals that marked her husband's time as President. Especially now, when she is trotting old Bubba out to rev up the faithful, the sordid past undermines her and boosts Barack Obama's promise for a different kind of politics.

The list of investigations, allegations and a few convictions during the Clinton administration was so long and tangled that the cases now morph into a fog. Distinctions among Travelgate and Whitewater and FileGate and GiftGate and the $100,000 commodities windfall get lost, with only Monica and the stained blue dress forever vivid.

Now and then, that fog is pierced by something that reminds us what a grubby time it was. The case of Lewis (Scooter) Libby does that.

When President Bush commuted Libby's prison sentence Monday, Sen. Clinton was quick to denounce him. Under Bush, she said, "cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice."

She's right in general, though the arguments on Bush's behalf this time are considerable. But when I stumbled on a list of Bill Clinton's pardons posted on the Drudge Report, I was instantly back on Jan. 20, 2001. That's when Clinton, in his final hours as President, opened the floodgates, issuing 140 pardons and 36 commutations.

The list of people Clinton let off the hook was a rogue's gallery of drug dealers, petty criminals and the politically well-connected. One was Bill Clinton's brother Roger, one was a college friend and another was a former business partner. Their lawyers' connections were key in others, including the lawyer for a man who laundered more than $100 million for the Cali cartel.

Some cases reeked of blatant corruption. Hillary's brother, Hugh Rodham, collected $400,000 from two big-time criminals who got pardons. When the news of the payments broke, the Clintons claimed surprise and demanded Rodham give the money back.

But Bill Clinton never gave Denise Rich her money back. The former wife of disgraced financier Marc Rich gave $450,000 to Clinton's presidential library and raised and contributed more than $1 million to campaigns of the Clintons and other Democrats. Her husband, who had fled the country rather than fight charges of massive tax fraud and trading with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, suddenly received a pardon. "Utterly false," Bill Clinton later said about charges he sold the pardon. "There was absolutely no quid pro quo."

Among those he cited who supported the pardon was Scooter Libby, a lawyer for Marc Rich.

Denise Rich, asked on TV whether she "bought" access to the Clintons, said, "Oh yes, that's true, of course." A grand jury looked at it, but no charges were brought.

Another Clinton pardon that drew a grand jury probe involved four Hasidic men from suburban New York. They had cheated the government out of tens of millions in anti-poverty programs and received prison sentences of up to 6-1/2 years. They, too, got a get-out-of-jail card, though it was not necessarily free.

As Daily News reporters later proved, leaders of the sect the men belonged to hoped that by supporting Hillary's 2000 Senate campaign, they would be rewarded with a pardon.

"They thought if they unilaterally showed support for Hillary, maybe they would get a pardon," their lawyer told The News.

And that's just what happened. On the advice of the group's rabbi, the community voted for Clinton over Republican Rick Lazio by 1,400-to-12. A month later, that rabbi had a White House meeting with Bill and Hillary Clinton and pleaded for the pardon. He got it. Again, a grand jury came up empty.

Clinton said yesterday that her husband didn't play politics with pardons, but that Bush has with Libby. Depends on how you define politics.

Clintonian Contradictions

New York Sun Editorial

Just days ago, Senator Clinton won the debate among Democratic presidential contenders by announcing that, if America were hit by another terrorist attack, she would quickly respond militarily. She didn't say anything about asking Congress for permission. Yesterday, Mrs. Clinton contradicted herself, joining Senator Byrd to announce she will introduce legislation that she claims would "sunset the authorization for the war in Iraq." The legislation will propose October 11, 2007, the five-year anniversary of the passage of the war resolution, as its expiration.

This is Senator Clinton at her worst. It is political posturing without substance. President Bush would surely veto the legislation, and Congress is unlikely to override it, so it will have no effect. And even if Congress attempted to enforce it, it is unlikely that it could. Mr. Bush would have a strong argument if he were to argue in court that he has the authority to use force in Iraq under both the Constitution and the post-September 11 resolution passed by Congress, as well as, perhaps, under the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions. A federal court would be unlikely to referee this fray, and, if it attempted to do so, Mr. Bush would be out of office by the time a court managed to rule definitively on it and the matter worked its way through the appellate process.

What's more, Mrs. Clinton's approach is dangerous. What are our troops supposed to do between now and October 11, knowing of the threat that Congress is attempting to undo everything they accomplish in Iraq between now and then? It doesn't exactly create an incentive to make a success of things. An arbitrary five-year limit on the length of American wars means that America would have just given up in the Cold War, which lasted generations, and in the American Revolution itself, which stretched over eight years. It amounts to announcing to our enemies in Iraq the date of our retreat.

Mrs. Clinton's approach would hamstring her own power should she ever be elected president. It would put her at the mercy of a Congress that could be controlled by an opposing party. If she doesn't want to take our word for it, she could ask her husband or his state secretary, Madeleine Albright. Mr. Byrd tried the same stunt on them when President Clinton used American military force in the Balkans. Ms. Albright responded by telling Senator Byrd, "This is playing with fire. In the Balkans, signs of impatience can be misinterpreted as symptoms of weakness. We cannot afford that in a region where weakness attracts vultures."

Ms. Albright went on, "We will not achieve our goals in Southeast Europe if our eyes are always on the clock and our focus is solely on what others do. We are more than bookkeepers and spectators. We are leaders, and our fundamental objective in Southeast Europe is not to leave. It's to win." The same reasoning applies to Iraq. Mrs. Clinton sounded presidential the other night in the debate, but if she keeps collaborating with Senator Byrd on ways to weaken the war powers of a president, she may end up like him, serving out a long career in the Senate into old age.