Report says Hillary Clinton's office denies having spoken to "the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat" attributing anti-Bush statements to Her that inspired PoliSat.Com's caustically satirical "Hillary Workout Tape" commentary, so PoliSat.Com hereby issues a "correction" as tepid as Hillary's denial.

April 30, 2004:* #01 Political Satire/Commentary where satire is always commentary but commentary isn't always satire™
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*Editor's note: Due to delay awaiting further relevant news reports, this update for April 29 was not uploaded until April 30, 2004.

Report says Hillary Clinton's office denies having spoken to "the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat" attributing anti-Bush statements to Her that inspired PoliSat.Com's caustically satirical "Hillary Workout Tape" commentary, so PoliSat.Com hereby issues a "correction" as tepid as Hillary's denial.·

As late as midnight, April 29, 2004, EDT, NewsMax was the sole news-source reporting that Senator Hillary Clinton's office issued a "news release" asserting that she "had never spoken to the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat," which had quoted her as having harshly condemned Bush's policy in Iraq and having characterized Iraq was a "quagmire" in which U.S. forces would remain "trapped." Quotations attributed to Her (disparaging Bush's policy in Iraq) in foreign media reports citing Asharq al-Awsat as their source (of which Mehr News, Tehran, Iran Dateline April 26, 2004 is an example) "prompted a firestorm of outrage from her critics" and also inspired PoliSat.Com's April 28, 2004, caustically satirical commentary and "Hillary's Workout Tape" animation. Such quotations were certainly at variance with the milder criticisms of Bush's handling of post-Saddam Iraq she had expressed to Larry King on CNN on April 20, 2004.

According to NewsMax, her "news release" described the reported interview as having been "made up out of whole cloth." Her news release also stated:

The comments attributed to Sen. Clinton, first cited by the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper and picked up by major foreign media, is at sharp variance with Sen. Clinton's public positions regarding the president and the Iraq war.
In the Senate, Clinton has voted for the Iraq war and supported President Bush's $87 billion in reconstruction aid, a measure opposed by many leading Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry.
Mrs. Clinton has generally been supportive of President Bush's war on terror, including his Iraq policy. Recently, she did offer criticism, now shared by many Republicans and Democrats in Congress, that the Bush administration had not adequately prepared for a post-Saddam Iraq.

Assume, argendo, that Senator Clinton's reported assertion that she "never [spoke] to the London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat," is true. Assume further, arguendo, that she feels genuine outrage at having been inaccurately portrayed as having made statements people with common sense would perceive as likely to encourage our terrorist enemies, demoralize our troops, and undermine our troops' ability to maintain confidence gained, and regain confidence lost, among Iraqis. Notwithstanding such assumptions, one wonders why she has limited her expression of outrage to that of a staff-issued press-release asserting that the report that she had given such interview to Asharq al-Awsat "had been made up out of whole cloth."

We know she knows how to convey her outrage in a way to capture worldwide attention, such as when, she made a speech on May 16, 2002, on the Senate floor giving credence to an inaccurate media report that "Bush knew [about the 9-11 plot in advance]." See Editor's Note below. Therefore, given the highly damaging nature of what she disputes merely by having her staff issue a press-release denial, one must wonder at the shallowness of her judgment-- if not seriously doubt the sincerity of her denial-- in choosing not to issue such denial in a way not only to capture world attention but, more important, to undo the worldwide damage done by the report she disputes. If she were to have scheduled a news conference to personally, forcefully and unequivocally repudiate the views attributed to her in those foreign-media articles, her doing so would have received instant, worldwide attention. She could have (and should have) thereby: (a) forcefully repudiated the comments attributed to her in the article, (b) forcefully re-stated her support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and (c) forcefully stated that even though she may have serious disagreements with many aspects of Bush's policy, she agrees with him that the United States will apply whatever effort may be needed to prevail over those seeking to prevent Iraq from achieving a form of government respecting human rights, eschewing weapons of mass destruction and denying haven to terrorists.

If I were serving in Iraq, I would be angered by the callously tepid nature of her denial that she had made such statements given their wide dissemination throughout the Mid-East, the effects of which have been to encourage those trying to kill me and make it even more difficult for me to maintain trust I'd earned, and regain trust I'd lost, among Iraqis. For these reasons, PoliSat.Com is making this "correction" of it's commentary about her yesterday as tepid as her efforts to remedy the damage done by what her press release describes as an inaccurate report.

Hillary's Workout--Lite.

I'm Hillary Clinton in strife
from stories on me that weren't right.
My method to show
the stories aren't so?
A "Hillary Workout" that's "Lite."

A Mid-Eastern paper proclaimed
that I expressed views to disdain
our chances to win
Iraq as a friend
and cleanse it of terrorist strains.

So angry am I, I get vapors
when statements that Mid-Eastern papers
attribute to me
are false as can be,
but how should I chasten those papers?

The damage I'll seek to allay
by having a staffer display
a tepid denial
unlikely to rile
my friends in my Leftist soirees.

I'm Jim, who writes satire with verve.
On learning that falsified words
in mid-eastern news
at Hill'ry were spewed,
I'm fixing my mocking of Her.

However, in straight'ning my curve,
I'm tracking corrections by her.
With careful discretion
I've made this correction
as tepid as Hill'ry made hers.

Editor's Note: Regarding the accusatory tone of Senator Clinton's May 16, 2002, speech, PoliSat.Com promptly thereafter published a series of commentaries, which, inter alia, then identified the "wall" prohibiting sharing of intelligence between the FBI and CIA as a primary factor preventing the "dots" being "connected." Such common-sense insight was already self-evident to anyone reasonably knowledgeable about history without the need for a multi-million-dollar, transparently partisan inquisition such as that being conducted by the 9-11 Commission. Indeed, the 9-11 Inquisition has belatedly exposed such wall's causative effect (to the dismay of the highly-partisan "representatives" of the "9-11 survivors" in the 9-11 Inquisition Gallery who applauded the transparently partisan interrogation of Bush Administration witnesses by Commissioners Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie Gorelick as well as the testimony of anti-Bush witnesses alleging negligence and/or culpability in failing to prevent 9-11) despite Ben-Veniste's and Gorelick's nakedly partisan attempts not only to obscure the centrality of the "wall" as a causative factor but also to conceal the fact that Gorelick, as Deputy Attorney General under Clinton, had issued directives making that wall wider, taller and thicker than the law required. When Soviet and Chinese regimes in the 1950's conducted proceedings such as this, we called them "show trials."

--Jim Wrenn, Editor@PoliSat.Com.

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