A Stitch in Haste

From Sunday's Democratic joint press conference*:

BLITZER: Senator Clinton, the question was: Was your husband's decision to allow this "don't ask/don't tell" policy to go forward — he was president of the United States; he could have changed it — was it a mistake?

CLINTON: No, it was an important first step, Wolf.

That, as Christina said to Mommie Dearest, is a lie:

Throughout his 1992 campaign and the first days of his presidency, Bill Clinton pledged to end the ban on gays in the military. Facing vehement congressional opposition, he shifted his position in July 1993, when he announced "don't ask, don't tell."

Advocate reporter Chris Bull noted that Clinton's policy "sparked protests in cities throughout the country, and gay legal groups vowed to quickly prepare lawsuits to challenge it." Torie Osborn, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force executive director at the time, called it "a repackaging of discrimination."

Bill Clinton broke a campaign promise -- end of discussion. It was not a "first step." It was not a "compromise." He compromised on nothing except his ethics — something he became very, very good at as his presidency progressed.

Meanwhile, if Hillary Clinton has become so much the politician that she simply no longer understands the difference between "breaking a campaign promise and "an important first step;" if she has become so much the moral defective that she can no longer distinguish between the simplest manifestations of "truth" and "lie," then what will become of us if she is elected president?

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*Words have meaning, including the word "debate." What happened Sunday night was not a "debate."

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My only other hasty stitch about the joint press conference is to express my not-new indignation over seeing the four sitting senators hypocritically raising their hand in the unanimous "let's abolish DADT" lovefest. If Biden, Dodd, Obama and Clinton are all so yippee-ki-yay to abolish this abomination, then why haven't any of them actually introduced a bill in the Senate to do so? Recall that the House version already exists (although it is languishing in committee) — all any Senator has to do is introduce the same text. So far: bupkes.

Clinton of course gets triple-damned above and beyond Dodd, Obama and Biden, not only for her dyspeptic "Bill was a champion for gays" revisionism, but also because she sits on the Armed Services Committee — precisely where a DADT repeal bill would be debated and where she would be uniquely positioned to champion it — if she truly wanted to.

More thoughts on the debate, the debaters and their all-talk-no-walk blather from Caucus, Republic of T., Politico, Outright Libertarians, PHB, Citizen Crain.