There’s a new distortion floating around, so it must be a day ending in “day.” Obama’s being accused of attacking Clinton about her records while not releasing his own.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Barack Obama, who’s been scolding Hillary Rodham Clinton for not hastening the release of records from her time as first lady, says he can’t step up and produce his own records from his days in the Illinois state Senate. He says he hasn’t got any.
“I don’t have - I don’t maintain - a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records,” he said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. He said he wasn’t sure where any cache of records might have gone, adding, “It could have been thrown out. I haven’t been in the state Senate now for quite some time.”
Obama’s statement that he has no papers from his time in the Illinois statehouse - he left in 2004 - stands in stark contrast to the massive Clinton file stored at the National Archives: an estimated 78 million pages of documents, plus 20 million e-mail messages, packed into 36,000 boxes. While any file from Obama’s time in the state Senate would be far smaller, the idea that no papers exist at all is questioned by one historian.
Wait wait wait little apples and oranges, stop right there. Obama himself didn’t keep any papers, personally. Neither, in fact, did Clinton. His papers from his time in the State Senate are with the State of Illinois. Her papers are with the National Archives. No one has insinuated Hillary Clinton cough up personal papers, just the papers that are required by law to be kept by the National Archives for future release to the public.
This became an argument because the Clinton’s specifically asked the Archives to set aside all correspondence between Bill and Hillary for review prior to release. Obama has authorized the release of his State Senate papers, and he responded to this stupid “controversy” on Meet the Press:
“In the state Senate, every single piece of information, every document related to state government was kept by the state of Illinois and has been disclosed and is available and has been gone through with a fine-toothed comb by news outlets in Illinois.
“The stuff that I did not keep has to do with, for example, my schedule. I didn’t have a schedule. I was a state senator. I wasn’t intending to have the Barack Obama State Senate Library. I didn’t have 50 or 500 people to, to help me archive these issues.”
Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign hinges on the idea that she is qualified to be President because she was deeply involved in policy as First Lady, but refuses to release her papers showing how involved she was with policy while First Lady. And let’s not forget that those papers are in the NATIONAL ARCHIVES.
All we’ve learned here is that Obama is not a packrat and Hillary is really bad at the Ad Hominem Tu Quoque fallacy.
While we’re at it, I’m going to start a meme, right here, right now, demanding to see Biden’s 10th grade math tests and for Dodd to fess up and tell us, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, if Carrie Fisher was any good in bed.
