In 2003 Hillary Clinton was still the new kid on the Senate Armed Services Committee when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified during the Bush administration’s run-up of the war in Iraq.
Under questioning as to why investigators had failed to turn up a single cache of Saddam Hussein’s infamous weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Rumsfeld famously retorted, “The absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.”
If only Hillary had answered, “Sometimes it is,” she could have avoided the blunder that would prove fatal to her initial presidential campaign.
But no one on the committee, nor in the media for that matter, exposed the fallacy in Rumsfeld’s glib response: that if you search everywhere that something could possibly be and you don’t find it, then the only reasonable conclusion is that it doesn’t exist.
The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld axis of evil wanted the nation to conclude that everybody knows Saddam has WMD and therefore the failure to turn them up only proves how fiendishly clever he is, and so he must be destroyed. (To this day, they fend off reporters’ questions with “All our European allies believed he had them,” as though that constitutes actual justification.)
Lacking a defensible reason not to (i.e., wussing out), Hillary tragically surrendered to this windbag of massive deception (wmd) and voted with the majority of Congress to authorize the war in Iraq.
Fast forward to early 2008 and she held a commanding lead in national polls among all segments of Democratic voters – especially women and blacks – save for the anti-war faction. Then the results of the Iowa caucuses of the Iowa Caucasians came in. Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate, claimed a shocking victory.
Overnight, Clinton’s campaign staff and strategy imploded. Meanwhile, black voters in South Carolina turned to one another and said, “White folks voted for Obama! Good lord, if they can, I can, too.”
And the rest is history. Clinton’s campaign continued its meltdown, as Obama’s gained momentum until the nomination was his.
Moral: Presidential wannabes can’t afford to be cowered by sophomoric aphorisms.
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