This via http://sweetness-light.com/archive/hillarys-ignorance-about-pakistan-elections
Last weekend after returning to my office from the television studios of a major network where I had done a brief segment on the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, I turned on CNN to watch their coverage of the Bhutto assassination’s aftermath.
Sen. Hillary Clinton was telling Wolf Blitzer that she didn’t think “the Pakistani government at this time under President Musharraf has any credibility at all.”
She then said something that betrayed a serious lack of knowledge about Pakistan and called her own credibility on the subject into serious question.
“If President Musharraf wishes to stand for election,” she told Blitzer, “then he should abide by the same rules that every other candidate will have to follow.”
My immediate reaction was: “Did I hear that correctly?”
As a Pakistan analyst, I know for a fact that Pervez Musharraf doesn’t wish to stand for election any time soon.
The upcoming elections are for the next parliament. Musharraf was just elected president of Pakistan, overwhelmingly, by popularly elected electors on Oct. 6. He’s just begun his five-year term as the president of the country. Why would he ever want to run for one seat in parliament? It wouldn’t make sense.
However, I checked the transcript of the interview later. That’s exactly what she said.
My next reaction was: “Maybe she misspoke. Candidates do a lot of interviews. Not every sentence comes out the way they want it to.”
After all, Sen. Clinton is a candidate who is running claiming big-time foreign policy knowledge and experience that she says her closest opponents in the Democratic Primary don’t have…………….
