Wrecker-tary Of State

Hillary Clinton has officially gotten to the "I would have done a better job than President Obama" part of her triangulation phase of her "I'm not actually running for president" campaign, just in time to remind Democrats why she lost to Obama in 2008.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events.

So yes, President Hillary Clinton would have gotten us into Syria's civil war.  Awesome.  Just what we needed!

Of course, Clinton had many kind words for the “incredibly intelligent” and “thoughtful” Obama, and she expressed sympathy and understanding for the devilishly complicated challenges he faces. But she also suggested that she finds his approach to foreign policy overly cautious, and she made the case that America needs a leader who believes that the country, despite its various missteps, is an indispensable force for good. At one point, I mentioned the slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit” (an expression often rendered as “Don’t do stupid stuff” in less-than-private encounters).

This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

Of course.  This is why I voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries.  "Don't do stupid stuff" is very much an organizing principle, and if Hillary can't see that, and if she's going to spend the next 27 months running on how she would have done a better job than President Obama and expecting those Democrats who disagree with her to just shut up and fall in line, she's got another thing coming.