Clinton lauds Iran for its liberal politics

The redoubtable Ruth King sends this:

Subject: HILLARY’S HUSBAND ON IRAN…REALLY INCREDIBLE

Here is what Clinton had to say in a recent television interview with Charlie Rose:

“Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”

I agree it seems incredible … at first. But then one realizes that there is only a difference of degree between Clinton’s repulsive statement and similar statements by our “conservative” Secretary of State. Her Smugness has on several occasions suggested that Iraq is more advanced than America, democracy-wise, because it has a higher proportion of women in its national legislature (which by the way it is required to have by law, meaning that it has an affirmative-action-style sex quota for political office, imposed on it by the Bush adminstration, which Rice sees as superior to America’s own system that lacks such a quota). Both the Republican Rice and the Democrat Clinton are cheaply putting down America in order to talk up a third-world Muslim country; or maybe they’re cheaply talking up a third-world Muslim country in order to put down America, I’m not sure which. In any case, the real object of the plaudits is the speaker him or herself, for showing him or herself superior to the backward, retrograde America.

Also, when it comes to putdowns of America by Baby-Boomer presidents, let us remember that Clinton’s speech in Africa on slavery, at which conservatives were outraged, was not nearly as bad as Bush’s speech in Africa, barely criticized by conservatives, in which he said that America still has today the same racism that drove slavery. I’m not defending Clinton on any score; but he never said anything as obnoxiously anti-American as Bush has done.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 11, 2006 07:24 PM | Send