One trait I admire about Secretary Clinton is her ability to not let criticism get her down. She has weathered so much meanness from her time as first lady to her tenure as a U.S. senator to last year's presidential campaign to her current post as secretary of state. Entire books have been written about what a terrible person she supposedly is. There's even a Hillary Clinton voodoo kit.
So, it's no surprise that, according to the New York Times, Clinton says she's amused and baffled by Tina Brown's Daily Beast piece that compares the secretary to a Saudi wife and declares, "It's time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa." Clinton just laughs at that kind of stuff.
The Times also reports that Clinton's aides say her habit is to just "brush off" all the talk about how she's toiling in the shadows with a low profile. They said that keeping her "head down" is also the approach she used early in her Senate career.
Meanwhile, reports the Times, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Clinton that he knew of no other time when there seemed to be less tension between the the State Department and White House. Further, Strobe Talbott -- a former deputy secretary of state who once wrote about marginalized secretaries of state for Time magazine -- told the Times, "There's a reflex assumption on the part of a lot of people that the secretary of state is going to be out there, on every conceivable issue. … But to do that on every conceivable issue is way too much, particularly when we have so many issues." (I should note that Talbott is friends with Clinton and her husband.)
Clinton is one smart woman. She knew what she was getting into when she accepted the secretary-of-state job. Dedicated to her position as her country's top diplomat, she's pushing forward, not letting her mean-spirited detractors get in the way.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
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