Hillary's Conversation With America

Ann Althouse has a post about Hillary Clinton's campaign planting questions in her audiences. The title is very clever: "I'm beginning a conversation with you, with America, because we all need to be part of the discussion." The quote is from the included Youtube video of Clinton announcing her candidacy. I guess her staff decided we don't all need to be part of the conversation; just her and the sock puppets ostensibly representing America.

What makes it worse is that her staff is apparently lying about the latest incident. The news today is that a second person, a minister, has come forward saying he was approached by a Clinton staffer to ask a specific question:

In a telephone interview Saturday, Geoffrey Mitchell, 32, said he was approached by Clinton campaign worker Chris Hayler to ask a question about how she was standing up to President Bush on the question on funding the Iraq war and a troop withdrawal timeline.

[...]

Mo Elliethee, spokesman for Clinton's campaign in Iowa, told Fox that Hayler and Mitchell "had a previous relationship" and that a discussion about Clinton arose out of a normal conversation between two people who knew each other well.

[...]

Mitchell, however, said that he and Hayler did not know each other personally before the event.

"I had no previous relationship with him," said Mitchell. "I knew his name and by name only as some who worked for Sen. Evan Bayh. But we didn't know each other and I had never met him before this event."

Here we go again. Recall the hoopla the other day about the waitress who claimed the Clinton campaign didn't leave a tip:

The campaign claims it shelled out $100 in cash for a tip to go around the house after paying for lunch at the Maid-Rite in Toledo, Iowa, famous for its "loose-meat'' sandwich. And the campaign has produced photocopies of receipts showing $157.46 was paid for the meal on a VISA card on Oct. 8.

[...]

And it turns out that Anita Esterday, the waitress, got another visit from a Clinton campaign rep after the story aired on NPR yesterday-- with the rep delivering a $20 bill for that server who still maintains that she never saw any of the tip money spread around the place last month.

"I explained to her that our credit card machine, you know, doesn't add on the tip," Esterday told NPR, recounting the followup visit of the Clinton campaign rep. "And she said, 'Well, then, they left a $100 bill there.' And I said, 'Well, it didn't get divided up amongst us, because I had gotten nothing.'

"She just said, 'Well, there was one left,'" Esterday said. "She just kept repeating, 'There was one left.'

[...]

"Why would I lie about not getting a tip?" she told NPR. She also maintained that her co-workers at the restaurant had not received tips.

Let's digest what's presented here: The waitress said they weren't tipped so the campaign produced a photocopy of the receipt that only shows they paid for a meal, but doesn't show that the tip was left. What kind of BS is that? Nobody disputes they ate there. Then another staffer went back to the restaurant, gave the waitress $20 and kept repeating "there was one left". Now that just seems a bit creepy. "There was a tip left, you see, and here's $20 for you to shut up about it."

The pattern I see emerging here is that Hillary's staff consists of a bunch of dishonest hacks. They go around trying to hook members of the public into their narrative and when it falls apart they insinuate the people are lying. Oh, this quote from Mo Elliethee, spokesman for Clinton's campaign in Iowa in regard to the minister approached to ask a canned question is just precious:

"I'm not going to comment on what he said," Elleithee said, referring to Mitchell. "I'm going to discuss what our interpretation is. They had a previous relationship, the subject came up and there's nothing more to it than that. It's not newsworthy. It's innocent. It's not yesterday."

Got that? Mo doesn't care if the minister has a different story of what happened; they have their interpretation! That's their story and they're sticking to it! The yesterday he's talking about is the previous incident involving planting questions.

The phrase "It's not newsworthy" is the talking point the Clinton sycophants online are picking up and running with regarding the tip incident as well as the planted questions.

Bill Clinton: Stop Swiftboating Hillary!

Oh, for crying out loud. The Hillary campaign just keeps getting weirder. As you'll recall from last week, during the Democratic debate Hillary was asked about Eliot Spitzer's idea for giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Her non-answer was such a monumental flip-flop that the other candidates were well within their rights to press her on it, as was Tim Russert, one of the moderators.

Well, today we have this story from AP:

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former President Clinton on Monday compared Republican criticism of his wife's position on driver's license for illegal immigrants to the ads that helped sink John Kerry's White House hopes in 2004.

"I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again," Clinton told some 3,000 members of the American Postal Worker's Union at a convention.

At the end of a televised Democratic presidential debate last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton hedged on whether she supported a plan by her home state governor, New York's Eliot Spitzer, to issue licenses to illegal immigrants.

Republicans — and her rivals for the Democratic nomination — quickly criticized her answer, accusing her of trying to have it both ways.

But Bill Clinton said the issue is too complicated for sound bites.

"It's fine for Hillary and all the other Democrats to discuss Governor Spitzer's plan. But not in 30 seconds — yes, no, raise your hand," he said.

The former president told the union members not to let the Republican attacks distract them from the important issues of health care and education reform.

He compared the driver's license dustup to television ads during the 2004 presidential campaign that questioned Kerry's patriotism, and campaign commercials in 2002 suggesting that former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was soft on terrorism.

Oh, brother. Now it's "swiftboating" when Hillary is asked direct questions to which she can't give direct answers. I suppose it's time for Karen Tumulty to write an article for Time describing how Hillary is being mistreated.