Hillary Clinton’s “Not Voted” Record
During campaign season, candidates shout and beat their chests as they proclaim rosy promises of a bright future in which our every wish is granted, we get our cake and three or four more, and the world will revert to Eden — if only we elect that candidate. We all know the promises are empty, but we cheer and buy bumper stickers and proudly cast our votes. A year or two down the road we shake our collective heads, wonder what went wrong, and jump on the next election train to a pie-in-the-sky destination.
With Hillary Clinton, however, we have a unique opportunity to compare what she says with what she does. An interesting place to start is “Project Vote Smart“, a repository of many votes our representatives and senators cast. It’s easy to see what a “no” or a “yes” vote means, and certainly, Hillary’s votes will be explored. But just as revealing are the “not voted” entries for it is here that we can see where a candidate avoids taking a stand for fear of alienating one or another group that candidate is courting.
Sadly, candidates whose choices are guided by the calculus of which votes to avoid are all to common. It is a sign of low integrity, but of course, after eight years under Bush the public’s expectations have been set remarkably low.
Enough with the banter however, let’s compare some of Hillary’s “Not Votes”:
- 08-08-2007: Clinton Proposes $10 Billion Bridge Repair Plan.
- 09-10-2007: Hillary Clinton does not vote for bridge repair legislation she co-sponsored.
Certainly drivers everywhere feel all the more confident in our nation’s roads because of HRC’s comforting words — who needs concrete and steel when you can have compassion?
So what about simulated drowning? We’ve all heard the term waterboarding given recent Attorney General nominiee Michael Mukasey’s unwillingness to call it torture. How odd, considering the fact that the United States prosecuted a Japanese officer for waterboarding as a war crime after WWII:
[I]n 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.
“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he said.
Given Mukasey’s inconceivable inability to call waterboarding torture, it should have been an easy vote for any senator with a single humanitarian cell in her body to refuse to confirm Mukasey, but by failing to vote against confirmation, Hillary Clinton is complicit in the acceptance of torture (terror).
Perhaps it is only drowning that is of so little concern Hillary Clinton, but given her war votes on Iraq and Iran, all of the compassion and concern she may profess on the campaign trail holds little water.