Hillary fires campaign strategist

Turns out he was working for the Colombian government on a policy Hillary was publicly opposed to on the campaign trail. Then he was fired by both Hillary and the Colombians, LOL. The duplicity and complete contradiction between what Democrats tell their supporters and what they actually do behind the scenes is absolutely breath-taking.

Clinton Chief Strategist Pushed Out

April 06, 2008 6:38 PM

ABC News' Jake Tapper, George Stephanopoulos and Eloise Harper report: Mark Penn is giving up his role as chief strategist with Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in the wake of "the events of the past few days," campaign manager Maggie Williams said.

Penn realized that he needed to step down after it was discovered this past week that Penn, who also is chief executive of the lobbying and public relations firm Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, had been hired by the Colombian government to help secure a trade deal that Sen. Clinton has said she opposes, sources told ABC News.

Penn's resignation from his role as chief strategist came under pressure from an angry Sen. Clinton, who believed that Penn had recused himself from any clients who might pose a conflict for her campaign.

On Saturday, the Colombian government said it was firing Penn's firm after he said Friday through the campaign that his consultations with Colombian officials were "an error in judgment that will not be repeated, and I am sorry for it."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/04/clinton-chief-s.html

Yeah, correcting conflicts of interest is totally despicable.

Didn't she just fire a campaign manager right after Super Tuesday?

Mark Penn had supporters and lied to them? Or do you mean Clinton had supporters and Mark Penn lied to her? Do you have anything to offer beyond guilt by association?

You haven't supported your claim that Democrats have told their supporters and then done something different. As always, your evidence is lacking.

But it happens over and over again, and not just with Hillary.

-Her husband talked about not signing NAFTA unless there were protections for the environment included in the agreement. As soon as he became president, he signed NAFTA unconditionally.

-Obama, pandering to voters in Ohio promised to re-negotiate NAFTA once he was president. Then he had flunkies fly to Ottowa to reassure Canada it was all bullshit to get elected and he didn't mean it.

-Obama wanting to pull all forces out of Iraq and leaving just an embassy guard behind, and maybe a 'strike force' on hand. Then his actual advisors say that America's staying in Iraq for a very long time to come.

Doesn't the dissonance, the constant, facile lying to your face, the willingness to say whatever needs to be said to win your vote, knowing that once elected they'll just betray their promises to you, bother you in the least?

Can you pull out a legitimate, objective source for any of that?

of course it does. would you like to compare stats with bush? or mccain?

He's still polling and shit for her so what's the diff?

I can't wait for Obama to ask McCain what being one of the Keating Five was like.

I just assumed you are an informed person who follows the news.

No, when McCain and Bush tell me things they are going to do that I don't like, they are extremely straightforward and truthful with me. Examples like:

-Bush promising to sign the extension of the Assault Weapons Ban if it reached his desk. Made me mad, but thankfully it never got to that point.

-McCain and Bush both encouraging the amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants and special treatment of them ahead of legal immigrants. That infuriated me, but Bush and McCain never promised me one thing to my face and then stabbed me in the back.

Not true, troll.

Not true, troll.

You are an ill-informed US soldier hating troll.

No, it is true. Your messiah is telling the people dumb enough to vote for him one thing and doing the opposite once the cameras are off. Smoke and mirrors. You're being played. Sorry.

On Feb. 9 Austan Goolsbee, the senior economic adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, had a meeting with Georges Rioux, consul general for the Canadian government. The two men met in Chicago, where Rioux maintains a consular office for the states of Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin and where Goolsbee teaches economics at the University of Chicago. (Slate readers may also remember Goolsbee as a onetime "Dismal Science" columnist.) Afterward, Joseph DeMora, a consulate staff member, wrote an enthusiastic summary (see below and the following two pages) for Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson. In the memo, DeMora praised Goolsbee's "intellectual prowess ... approachability, curiosity and youthful enthusiasm" and alerted Wilson that the Obama brain-truster "appeared genuinely ... impressed by the magnitude" of the economic relationship between the United States and Canada (see below).

For the Canadians, a key point of concern was Obama's sharp criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement. DeMora wrote Wilson that in the Chicago meeting, Goolsbee "candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign" but reassured Rioux that Obama's NAFTA-bashing "should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans." Three weeks later, Canada's CTV News reported that a "senior member" of Obama's campaign had phoned Wilson personally to advise him to "not be worried about what Obama says about NAFTA." The Obama campaign denied that story, which (if you believe DeMora's account) was only slightly off the mark, and declined to elaborate. On March 3 the Associated Press released the DeMora memo, which by then had circulated widely within the Canadian government. Asked once again to comment, Obama said his campaign provided Canada no such reassurance while Goolsbee maintained that DeMora "misinterpreted" his comments. For its part, the Chicago consulate smoothed things over with a statement saying, "there was no intention to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private." It looks like President Obama may owe one to our friendly neighbors to the north.

http://www.slate.com/id/2185753/entry/2185754/

A key adviser to Senator Obama's campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security. In "Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement," Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government "the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000%u201380,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)."

Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign's working group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper appeared on the center's Web site as a policy brief.

Both Mr. Kahl and a senior Obama campaign adviser reached yesterday said the paper does not represent the campaign's Iraq position. Nonetheless, the paper could provide clues as to the ultimate size of the residual American force the candidate has said would remain in Iraq after the withdrawal of combat brigades. The campaign has not publicly discussed the size of such a force in the past.

http://www.nysun.com/politics/obama-adviser-calls-troops-stay-iraq-through-2010

If you Google "McCain lies," you get 516,000 hits.

And Bush told the whopper of the century to get us to bomb and invade Iraq.

You're really not very smart, are you?

I am. I also know the difference between your conjecture-laden opinions and what really happened. As part of my ongoing efforts to develop a universally-applicable ratio which can be used to discern exactly how you get such bafflingly off-point ideas from events as they occur, I like to check into your source material.

Fixed.

Seriously though stock, are you saying Democrats are any more duplicitous than Republicans?

okey dokey. Well 2 out of the three are above, I am having problems finding postable info about Clinton's campaign promises vs what he actually did, as he said them in presidential debates with Bush and Perot. But I'll find it.

Oh yes, most definitely.

Yes. Although in Penn's case he 'resigned' as Cheif Political Consultant; however he's going to keep him and his company around as a REGULAR consultant.
In other words, this was an empty jesture which is attempting to smooth over the mess while still retaining the man's services

*rolls eyes*

I know that those Alaskan winters are cold (I lived up there for two years myself) but, really, you've been frozen for the past 8 years?

Politicians lie, thats a given, but to claim that the Republicans have, in the past 40 years, done so LESS than the Democrats is ... well, a bit wrong headed at best and, at worst, shows a complete disregard or lack of knowledge of modern history.

Wait, did you just call George W. Bush and John McCain "extremely straightforward and truthful"?

Please stop using up all the irony on the Internet.

The Trolling-Force is weak with this one . . . particularly since FTR mentioned it about half an hour earlier here.

Just weak. Go away, Stockula. You lose at the internet.