Political strategy -- who owns the "trust" issue?

Republicans are going to try to make "You can't trust Hillary Clinton" a major theme of their campaign.   But, as Marty Kaplan pointed out in his column in the Jewish Journal, this could backfire on the Republicans.

They are relying on examples of Clinton changing her position on some issues.   Two examples:  voting to authorize the Iraq War and the current TPP, which she supported in the early stages but has become more cautious about as the agreement has been formulated.  These are honest evolutions of thinking with new information or changed circumstances.   And then there's all the baloney about emails and about Benghazi, to say nothing of leftover trash-talk from Bill Clinton's White House days.

BUT:  The truth that this meme will bring up -- and the Republicans don't seem to realize -- is that the Bush administration were the ones feeding false information about WMD in Iraq that led to the war.   They are trying to finesse this by blaming it on "faulty intelligence."   But it was Dick Cheney and his minions that shaped it the intelligence the way they wanted it. 

Kaplan writes, "this can boomerang. . . .  'faulty' is the wrong word.  The right word is 'fraudulent.'  If the intelligence justifying the invasion was later found to be unsound, well, that's unfortunate, but people aren't perfect. But if the intelligence was manipulated, concocted, cherry-picked, distorted, falsified, rigged -- if we were lied to -- then it's not a matter of knowing then what we know now.  It's a matter of what we were bamboozled into believing then.   As [RNC Chair] Priebus would say, 'it's a matter of trust.'" 

So maybe the Republicans shouldn't go down that road of talking about trust.

Kaplan continues:  "So the Republicans risk being caught in a trap of their own devising. The master narrative they're going with -- dishonesty -- is as dangerous for them as they want it to be for Hillary Clinton. They want the 2016 election to turn on the question 'Can you trust her?' But Democrats can use jiu-jitsu and make the election turn on the question 'Can you trust the people who duped you into Iraq?'

"Republicans may cling to the "faulty intelligence" story, but each day brings new evidence of deceit. Michael Morrell, the former CIA deputy director and acting director who gave George W. Bush his daily intelligence briefings, has now acknowledged that Dick Cheney was lying when he told us in 2003 that Saddam Hussein 'has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.' Cheney and the neocons (who've now set up shop in Jeb Bush's inner circle) told us there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but Morrell told Chris Matthews that that's 'not what the intelligence community' concluded. . . .  the factory for manufacturing the phony case for war was headquartered in the vice president's office.  Cheney, not W., is the real albatross around the neck of the Republican presidential field."

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Let's hear it for the jiu-jitsu team ! ! !    And let's hope the Clinton campaign is getting all geared up to use the opponent's momentum against them.    This could make for some great debate responses to any jabs about honesty.

Ralph