Hillary Clinton for President

[Bob Juch]

[Bob78164]

Maybe someone here can answer the question that Hillary couldn't. What exactly are her accomplishments? Why should she be President other than:

1. Her husband's last name is Clinton.
2. She is a woman.
3. She raises a lot of money.
4. She is a democrat.

She was a senator and she was appointed secretary of state. What did she do while she had those positions? (I could list a lot of things, but tell me something that's positive).

And I could ask the same question of many prior Presidents, of both parties. What did any of them accomplish, prior to their accession to the office, that demonstrated their abilities as President?

I'm not looking for a check-off list of accomplishments because I believe there is no job on Earth that compares to the Presidency. I'm looking for someone who shares enough of my policy positions and can demonstrate at least a basic level of competence and judgment in domestic and foreign policy. Pretty much all Republicans flunk the policy test, and many of them (Governor Perry and Senator Rubio leap to mind) also demonstrate a lack of judgment or competence that I find appalling. --Bob

Yup. Can't do it, can you? Not one accomplishment.
Weigh that, Bob, against her failures, her ethical problems and her trouble with telling the truth. All things being equal, I think most of the republicans can pass that test, at least for now. But that doesn't come into your evaluation, does it? She could be a serial sexual abuser, and lie through her teeth to the American people, just as long as she's not conservative. (Whoops, I got confused with her husband, but you get the point I think.)

The party of Senator David Vitter really shouldn't be trying to make that point.

What did Harry Truman do before becoming President to demonstrate his qualifications for the office? FDR? Richard Nixon? George H.W. Bush? Or George W. Bush? Reagan? Kennedy? LBJ? Eisenhower?

What has Jeb Bush done to demonstrate he's qualified? Rand Paul, who was elected to the Senate from his opthalmalogical practice? Marco Rubio? Name an accomplishment of any of them.

Hillary Clinton was heavily involved in health care policy early, and it took a couple of decades, but we finally have one that approaches sanity. She is well regarded overseas due to her tenure as Secretary of State. She was well respected in the Senate. She is deeply familiar with many parts of the country (including Arkansas). She has decades of public policy experience, and generally reaches the same results I want my elected officials to reach. That's a lot more than many past Presidents (including her husband, whom I regard as a good President) could say at this point in the campaign.

Your turn. What have any of the Republicans who have announced accomplished? --Bob

[elwoodblues]

Being President is not like any other job. I don't think it is possible to "do" anything to prepare for it. All we have to go on is what they believe and what they want to accomplish. And that is where we differ.

[Vandal]

[themanintheseersuckersuit]

.

What did Harry Truman do before becoming President to demonstrate his qualifications for the office? FDR? Richard Nixon? George H.W. Bush? Or George W. Bush? Reagan? Kennedy? LBJ? Eisenhower?

What has Jeb Bush done to demonstrate he's qualified? Rand Paul, who was elected to the Senate from his opthalmalogical practice? Marco Rubio? Name an accomplishment of any of them.

Hillary Clinton was heavily involved in health care policy early, and it took a couple of decades, but we finally have one that approaches sanity. She is well regarded overseas due to her tenure as Secretary of State. She was well respected in the Senate. She is deeply familiar with many parts of the country (including Arkansas). She has decades of public policy experience, and generally reaches the same results I want my elected officials to reach. That's a lot more than many past Presidents (including her husband, whom I regard as a good President) could say at this point in the campaign.

Your turn. What have any of the Republicans who have announced accomplished? --Bob

Bob doesn't think Eisenhower accomplished anything before being President and Obamacare is working well, That is too big a gap for me to bridge.

[Bubba Squirrel]

I only have one question: Why?

Cuz I hear The First Gentleman gets the pick of the intern litter...

[Beebs52]

.

What did Harry Truman do before becoming President to demonstrate his qualifications for the office? FDR? Richard Nixon? George H.W. Bush? Or George W. Bush? Reagan? Kennedy? LBJ? Eisenhower?

What has Jeb Bush done to demonstrate he's qualified? Rand Paul, who was elected to the Senate from his opthalmalogical practice? Marco Rubio? Name an accomplishment of any of them.

Hillary Clinton was heavily involved in health care policy early, and it took a couple of decades, but we finally have one that approaches sanity. She is well regarded overseas due to her tenure as Secretary of State. She was well respected in the Senate. She is deeply familiar with many parts of the country (including Arkansas). She has decades of public policy experience, and generally reaches the same results I want my elected officials to reach. That's a lot more than many past Presidents (including her husband, whom I regard as a good President) could say at this point in the campaign.

Your turn. What have any of the Republicans who have announced accomplished? --Bob

Bob doesn't think Eisenhower accomplished anything before being President and Obamacare is working well, That is too big a gap for me to bridge.

Rec

[Bob78164]

.

What did Harry Truman do before becoming President to demonstrate his qualifications for the office? FDR? Richard Nixon? George H.W. Bush? Or George W. Bush? Reagan? Kennedy? LBJ? Eisenhower?

What has Jeb Bush done to demonstrate he's qualified? Rand Paul, who was elected to the Senate from his opthalmalogical practice? Marco Rubio? Name an accomplishment of any of them.

Hillary Clinton was heavily involved in health care policy early, and it took a couple of decades, but we finally have one that approaches sanity. She is well regarded overseas due to her tenure as Secretary of State. She was well respected in the Senate. She is deeply familiar with many parts of the country (including Arkansas). She has decades of public policy experience, and generally reaches the same results I want my elected officials to reach. That's a lot more than many past Presidents (including her husband, whom I regard as a good President) could say at this point in the campaign.

Your turn. What have any of the Republicans who have announced accomplished? --Bob

Bob doesn't think Eisenhower accomplished anything before being President and Obamacare is working well, That is too big a gap for me to bridge.

The first part is not what I said. How does being a successful general demonstrate qualifications for being President? World War II had many successful American generals.

Obamacare is working well. The uninsured rate has dropped considerable and it's coming in substantially cheaper than predicted. When Cathy McMorris Rodgers went to Facebook to solicit horror stories, she was instead deluged by Obamacare success stories (many of them literally lifesaving).

Where is your actual evidence that it's not working? --Bob

[themanintheseersuckersuit]

Where is your actual evidence that it's not working? --Bob

It did not reduce premiums, people lost plans they like so it is built on a pile of lies.

[BackInTex]

Bob doesn't think Eisenhower accomplished anything before being President and Obamacare is working well, That is too big a gap for me to bridge.

And the National Debt is irrelevant because countries can't go bankrupt.

[silverscreenselect]

It did not reduce premiums,

I'm not sure that's true if you take into account the number of people who have gotten government subsidies.

Of course, if you go from not having insurance because you're uninsurable to having insurance, then your premiums do go up.

There's no doubt that Obamacare accelerated the trend towards high deductible health plans but that trend was probably coming within a few years anyway. And I do think that the reason the cost is less than anticipated is because a lot of people are forgoing medical treatment because they would have to pay for it out of pocket rather than a fairly small co-pay. It used to be if someone got a cold, they'd go to the doctor knowing it would only cost them a $20 co-pay. Now, it's $100-200 to be told, most of the time, that they just have a cold. So a lot of people just medicate themselves with cold pills and get through it. But a few of those people who actually had something more severe than a cold also try to medicate themselves through it and wind up in a lot worse shape than they would have been had they seen the doctor in the first place. So, I'm not sure this is actually a good development.

Obamacare needs some serious work, but that's not going to happen as long as the Republicans keep mixing facts and fiction in their attempts to show it's the greatest evil that's ever been inflicted on the world. And the fact that they continue to do so and parrot the same half truths and mistruths left and right indicates their complete lack of knowledge on the subject, which makes trying to work out a reasonable fix very difficult.

[silverscreenselect]

Yup. Can't do it, can you? Not one accomplishment.
Weigh that, Bob, against her failures, her ethical problems and her trouble with telling the truth. All things being equal, I think most of the republicans can pass that test, at least for now. But that doesn't come into your evaluation, does it? She could be a serial sexual abuser, and lie through her teeth to the American people, just as long as she's not conservative. (Whoops, I got confused with her husband, but you get the point I think.)

Of course, i'm wasting my time posting here because Flock isn't interested in accomplishments; he's only interested in recycling the right wing talking points of the day as he is so apt to do over and over on this Bored. But here's an article that sums up some of what she's done fairly succinctly.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/04/13 ... -have-any/

Of course, I realize this pales in comparison to the the Bush administration's ridding us of WMD and setting up a peaceful democracy in Iraq, or wiping out Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan when they had the chance...

[Bob78164]

Yup. Can't do it, can you? Not one accomplishment.
Weigh that, Bob, against her failures, her ethical problems and her trouble with telling the truth. All things being equal, I think most of the republicans can pass that test, at least for now. But that doesn't come into your evaluation, does it? She could be a serial sexual abuser, and lie through her teeth to the American people, just as long as she's not conservative. (Whoops, I got confused with her husband, but you get the point I think.)

Of course, i'm wasting my time posting here because Flock isn't interested in accomplishments; he's only interested in recycling the right wing talking points of the day as he is so apt to do over and over on this Bored. But here's an article that sums up some of what she's done fairly succinctly.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/04/13 ... -have-any/

Of course, I realize this pales in comparison to the the Bush administration's ridding us of WMD and setting up a peaceful democracy in Iraq, or wiping out Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan when they had the chance...

Aw, c'mon, SSS. Let's talk about some real accomplishments. How often has Senator Clinton managed to shut down the government with no idea how to either convert the shutdown into a policy victory or to back away from the artificial and unnecessary crisis she created? --Bob

[Bob78164]

Bob doesn't think Eisenhower accomplished anything before being President and Obamacare is working well, That is too big a gap for me to bridge.

And the National Debt is irrelevant because countries can't go bankrupt.

Not what I've said. I've said that the danger of too big a national debt (for countries, such as the United States, that borrow in their own currency) is inflation. Inflation is not a problem now, and it certainly wasn't a problem during the Great Recession. This despite the predictions of conservative economists for most of the Obama Administration that high inflation was just around the corner and would hit any day, just you wait and see.

They were wrong. Paul Krugman was right. Evidence speaks louder than ideology. --Bob

[flockofseagulls104]

Bob doesn't think Eisenhower accomplished anything before being President and Obamacare is working well, That is too big a gap for me to bridge.

And the National Debt is irrelevant because countries can't go bankrupt.

Not what I've said. I've said that the danger of too big a national debt (for countries, such as the United States, that borrow in their own currency) is inflation. Inflation is not a problem now, and it certainly wasn't a problem during the Great Recession. This despite the predictions of conservative economists for most of the Obama Administration that high inflation was just around the corner and would hit any day, just you wait and see.

They were wrong. Paul Krugman was right. Evidence speaks louder than ideology. --Bob

So Bob, if the danger is inflation, then what happens when it starts rising? Do we reduce the interest rates to negative numbers? I assume at that point we will have to start reducing the national debt, right? How will that happen? Do we repeal all the entitlements we have established? Will Paul Krugman step in and pay off the debt for us? What exactly will happen when the debt reaches the point where inflation starts?

[Bob Juch]

And the National Debt is irrelevant because countries can't go bankrupt.

Not what I've said. I've said that the danger of too big a national debt (for countries, such as the United States, that borrow in their own currency) is inflation. Inflation is not a problem now, and it certainly wasn't a problem during the Great Recession. This despite the predictions of conservative economists for most of the Obama Administration that high inflation was just around the corner and would hit any day, just you wait and see.

They were wrong. Paul Krugman was right. Evidence speaks louder than ideology. --Bob

So Bob, if the danger is inflation, then what happens when it starts rising? Do we reduce the interest rates to negative numbers? I assume at that point we will have to start reducing the national debt, right? How will that happen? Do we repeal all the entitlements we have established? Will Paul Krugman step in and pay off the debt for us? What exactly will happen when the debt reaches the point where inflation starts?

Unless some idiot gets elected in 2016 who starts another war, the national debt won't increase. It will decrease if we have a Congress that will raise taxes on the 1% and close the corporate tax loopholes.

[Bob78164]

And the National Debt is irrelevant because countries can't go bankrupt.

Not what I've said. I've said that the danger of too big a national debt (for countries, such as the United States, that borrow in their own currency) is inflation. Inflation is not a problem now, and it certainly wasn't a problem during the Great Recession. This despite the predictions of conservative economists for most of the Obama Administration that high inflation was just around the corner and would hit any day, just you wait and see.

They were wrong. Paul Krugman was right. Evidence speaks louder than ideology. --Bob

So Bob, if the danger is inflation, then what happens when it starts rising? Do we reduce the interest rates to negative numbers? I assume at that point we will have to start reducing the national debt, right? How will that happen? Do we repeal all the entitlements we have established? Will Paul Krugman step in and pay off the debt for us? What exactly will happen when the debt reaches the point where inflation starts?

You don't stop inflation by lowering interest rates. You stop it by raising them. The Fed has more than a little room to do that.

That's why monetary and fiscal policy have become so important. There's no real practical limit to how high the Fed can raise interest rates when it's necessary to slow an overheating economy. There's a very real limit, though, to how low interest rates can go when the Fed needs to give the economy a boost. The Fed has been trapped at the "zero lower bound" for pretty much the entirety of the Obama Administration.

Bear in mind also that inflation helps pay off the national debt, because the debt is incurred in constant dollars but can be repaid with inflated dollars. --Bob

[jarnon]

IMHO, Hillary's biggest accomplishment was rebuilding relationships with allies around the world, strained by the Bush foreign policy, especially the Iraq war. To do this, she traveled personally to 100 countries. That laid the groundwork for cooperative efforts in recent years, such as coalitions against Gaddafi, Assad and ISIS, sanctions against Iran and Russia, and economic and environmental deals.

Now Republicans, notably Jeb Bush, are arguing that so much cooperation with foreigners is a sign of "weakness" and "abdication of American leadership." I think it's the most effective way to achieve our goals.

[BackInTex]

IMHO, Hillary's biggest accomplishment was rebuilding relationships with allies around the world, strained by the Bush foreign policy, especially the Iraq war. To do this, she traveled personally to 100 countries. That laid the groundwork for cooperative efforts in recent years, such as coalitions against Gaddafi, Assad and ISIS, sanctions against Iran and Russia, and economic and environmental deals.

Now Republicans, notably Jeb Bush, are arguing that so much cooperation with foreigners is a sign of "weakness" and "abdication of American leadership." I think it's the most effective way to achieve our goals.

Yes, the Clinton Foundation has benefited tremendously.

[flockofseagulls104]

IMHO, Hillary's biggest accomplishment was rebuilding relationships with allies around the world, strained by the Bush foreign policy, especially the Iraq war. To do this, she traveled personally to 100 countries. That laid the groundwork for cooperative efforts in recent years, such as coalitions against Gaddafi, Assad and ISIS, sanctions against Iran and Russia, and economic and environmental deals.

Now Republicans, notably Jeb Bush, are arguing that so much cooperation with foreigners is a sign of "weakness" and "abdication of American leadership." I think it's the most effective way to achieve our goals.

At first I thought this was satirical. Yes she did travel a lot, if you want to count that as an accomplishment. Other than that, I do not see any improvement in foreign relations. Al Qaeda is on the run, huh? They just took over Yemen. ISIS has become a world wide force, recruiting westerners over the internet, Putin thumbs his nose at us, Iran is laughing at us, China and North Korea are hacking into our computers, we have abandoned Israel as an ally in the Middle East, the list goes on and on. But as someone put it, "What difference does it make?" People like you will vote for her no matter what. Not because she is anything special, but because you have been conditioned to hate conservatives more than islamic terrorists.

[silverscreenselect]

Putin thumbs his nose at us,

I think this article puts Putin's "nose thumbing" in perspective.

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... utin-tries

Putin is a lot like the Republicans here in the US. He talks tough in order to mask the many shortcomings and failures of his administration, just as the Republicans talk tough (without any concrete action plans) to hide their own dismal agenda.

[Beebs52]

Putin thumbs his nose at us,

I think this article puts Putin's "nose thumbing" in perspective.

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... utin-tries

Putin is a lot like the Republicans here in the US. He talks tough in order to mask the many shortcomings and failures of his administration, just as the Republicans talk tough (without any concrete action plans) to hide their own dismal agenda.

I can't believe even you used that comparison. Pehaps a new Godwin's law. Khrushchev's law?

[silverscreenselect]

Putin thumbs his nose at us,

I think this article puts Putin's "nose thumbing" in perspective.

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... utin-tries

Putin is a lot like the Republicans here in the US. He talks tough in order to mask the many shortcomings and failures of his administration, just as the Republicans talk tough (without any concrete action plans) to hide their own dismal agenda.

I can't believe even you used that comparison. Pehaps a new Godwin's law. Khrushchev's law?

Putin's tactic of talking tough to mask his failings is very much like what the Republicans do here.

[Beebs52]

I repeat my previous post as you did.

[flockofseagulls104]

Putin's tactic of talking tough to mask his failings is very much like what the Republicans do here.

Demonizing republicans and conservatives is exactly what the democrat party does to retain power. And it's the only thing they do.