Hillary Clinton gave a speech on national security in San Diego Thursday, but it just as easily could have been a verbal declaration of war on Donald Trump.
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Clinton’s speech was much less than it could have been, however, by being structured around the criticisms of Trump and sounding as if she were defining herself mainly as the un-Trump. He said she was “sleeping” during the seige of us compounds in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in the closing months of her State Department tenure.
“Hillary Clinton says electing Donald Trump president would be a “historic mistake” for the United States”. Broad bipartisan consensus on the big foreign policy questions often overshadows relatively narrow partisan differences.
To be sure, nothing that Clinton said about Trump and his worldview is new.
“Donald Trump is unlike any presidential nominee we’ve seen in modern times and he is fundamentally unfit for the job”.
“Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran and its nuclear program”, she said. “America’s network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional. Our diplomats work side by side”.
Clinton also openly mocked Trump’s Twitter habit.
Trump has criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation alliance as obsolete and requiring too much money from the United States.
Clinton argued Trump’s foreign policy would isolate the USA and that countries like Russian Federation would be celebrating. She struggled to defend her support for the American-led invasion at a time when the war was widely considered a quagmire.
Mrs Clinton, who has formerly served as secretary of state, first lady and a U.S. senator, is vying to become the first female president in America’s 239-year history.
But Clinton’s performance, the latest and most effective in a series of putative “opening salvos” of the general election, was immediately hailed by Democrats as a welcomed change for a candidate who often struggles to transcend policy minutiae.
She added: “I will leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his attraction to tyrants” before taking aim at Trump’s claim that being a global business tycoon equips him with significant global knowledge.
That’s essentially what Obama is doing now, with perhaps a bit more octane. The subject was national security, and everyone was ready for a slobberknocker.
Indeed, getting under Trump’s skin seemed to be Clinton’s main objective. Bernie Sanders and his advisers spin it, Clinton will have amassed far more than the minimum number of delegates required to be nominated in Philadelphia in July.
Her campaign billing this as the major foreign policy speech of her candidacy. “She’s got a bad temperament”. “If you look at the war in Iraq, if you look at what she did with Libya, which was a total catastrophe”.
“He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or our admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has – quote – ‘a very good brain'”. “It made the Great Depressions longer, and more painful”. It was heavy on Trump attacks-and US flags! But she gets a free pass to hit Trump that way, with as much venom as she pleases? It is fitting that a former professional wrestler whose finishing move was known as “The People’s Elbow” would explore a career in public service. “And we’ve been campaigning in all the other states”.
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Hillary Clinton says the next president must bolster America’s security by investing at home and sticking together with longtime US allies. The U.S. still has a large troop presence in both countries, decades after they fought in the region.
