Today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a new biographical video to re-introduce a candidate who has been in public life for three decades. In the video, Clinton says of her 1995 Beijing speech:
“Many people in our own government, our Congress, did not want me to go to Beijing, but you don’t shy away from confronting human rights abuses.”
Somebody should alert candidate Hillary Clinton to the actions of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said human rights “can’t interfere” with economic issues when “we pretty much know what” the Chinese government will say:
CLINTON: Now, that doesn’t mean that questions of Taiwan and Tibet and human rights, the whole range of challenges that we often engage on with the Chinese are not part of the agenda either. But we pretty much know what they’re going to say. We know that we’re going to press them to reconsider their position about Tibetan religious and cultural freedom, and autonomy for the Tibetans and some kind of recognition or acknowledgment of the Dalai Lama.
And we know what they’re going to say, because I’ve had those conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders. And we know what they’re going to say about Taiwan and military sales, and they know what we’re going to say.
QUESTION: So can’t you just stipulate that at the beginning?
CLINTON: Well, I mean Matt, there’s a certain – I mean, look, there’s a certain logic to that. I mean no – I don’t mean to in any way to say that we know everything that’s going to happen. But successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these issues, and we have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis. We have to have a dialogue that leads to an understanding and cooperation on each of those.
And someone should notify the Clinton Foundation, which has a donor list full of regimes with brutal human rights records:
Instead, as Mrs. Clinton commemorates her 1995 women’s rights speech in Beijing in back-to-back events in New York, she finds herself under attack for her family foundation’s acceptance of millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms.
This was not how she intended to reintroduce herself to American voters.