Tweets vs. War Crimes: Clinton’s Plan to Solve the Middle East

Twitter is not the world. But in this increasingly meme-ified election, it provides a venue for someone to try to set the agenda for the world. Sad!

It’s safe to say that even at the best of times Hillary Clinton’s social media outreach seems like just that — a reach. Unctuousness via semi-ironic millennial speech is still unctuous. It either comes off like “How do you do, fellow kids?” or, in a more charitable reading, like working twice as hard to reach as many as possible. 

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s still depressing as hell. On Wednesday, Clinton’s Twitter account sent out “A real plan to defeat ISIS.”

The plan is as follows:

1. Take out ISIS’s stronghold in Iraq and Syria.

2. Dismantle the global terror network.

3. Harden our defenses at home and prevent attacks.

A tautology is not an argument, and a plan whose first step just states its goals is not a plan. “I’m right because I am right” works no better than, “To reach the moon, we will get to the moon.” This isn’t planning; it’s acting like you have a genie and a fucking lamp. If declaring what you wanted to do achieved it, all New Year’s resolutions would be completed at 12:01 a.m. January 1st. Pornography would be irrelevant. In a time paradox, George W. Bush would have found the WMDs, Clinton would have voted against the Iraq War, 3,000 people wouldn’t have been killed in New York, and none of us would have to listen to “God Bless America” during the 7th inning.

What’s especially pathetic is that this is the second time this has happened, and that it’s likely the genius move of Hillary for America chairman John Podesta, who devastated ISIS with the same tautological plan back in November:

Hillary’s strategy to defeat Isis:
✓Defeat Isis in Syria & Iraq
✓Disrupt & dismantle terrorist infrastructure
✓Harden our defenses

— John Podesta (@johnpodesta) November 19, 2015

You can dismantle this dumbass checkmarked listicle in nine words. 

It’s difficult to overstate how childish and insulting this is. To a voting citizenry, to history, to the very idea of planning as a thing. 

The Clinton account uploaded a picture in that tweet (they could have used up to four) to circumvent Twitter’s 140-character limit. Theoretically, they could have shared hundreds of words, something verging on a real idea to drive discussion. They could have tried to virally propagate actual strategy. Clinton’s team skipped all that and instead went with 27 words unblemished by a single spot of effort.

What voters got was policy by wish list, where goals and strategy are so dumbed-down as to become synonymous. If anything, it feels like a Clinton campaign habit. “We will defeat ISIS by beating ISIS” differs little from I will bring Wall Street to heel by bringing Wall Street to heel. I will expand health care by making it cover more people. I will end partisanship by working together. Elect me to do things because I get things done.