CounterPunch Diary
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Ever since she realized back in early March that Obama was going to take
the nomination Hillary
Clinton’s long-term strategy has been to do her best to ensure McCain will
win this November so
she can become the Democratic nominee in 2012. But she had a short term
strategy too and on
Friday she deliberately made it explicit in a newspaper office in Sioux
Falls, South Dakota.
There she suggested that someone is likely to step up to the plate and
assassinate Barack Obama
in the waning moments of the California primary, just as Bobby Kennedy was
forty years go almost
to the day. The wish is mother to the deed. If anything does happen to
Obama in California Mrs
Clinton should surely be indicted as a co-conspirator.
How to else construe her grotesque remarks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
in the editorial
offices of the Argus Leader newspaper. Here she told the editors, "My
husband did not wrap up
the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in
the middle of June,
right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in
California. I don't understand
it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.
There is no other way to construe these sentences, not thrown over her
shoulder on a campaign
walk, but delivered in measured tones to the Argus-Leader editorial board,
but to interpret them
as Mrs Clinton’s more or less explicit statement that she is spending a
million a day just to
keep her hat in the ring because Obama might well get killed. Then, just
like the scenario at
the end of the Manchurian candidate, Hillary will straddle Obama’s
bleeding body, make the
speech of her life and become the assured nominee. In fact, right now
she’s probably sitting
down with some numbed vet and whispering coyly in her best Angela Lansbury
mode to the Lawrence
Harvey stand-in, “How about passing the time by playing a little
solitaire?" I pass on whether
Hillary reprises Angela Lansbury’s famous *****uous kiss on her son’s
lips. Perhaps Sid
Blumenthal is the stand-in, though I doubt he’s a very good shot.
To get added insight into what a truly nasty woman Hillary Clinton is,
remember that her remarks
on Friday came a couple of days after Edward Kennedy was diagnosed with a
malignant brain tumor.
Next thing you know, his fellow senator is saying that California might
well be celebrating the
fortieth anniversary of his borther’s murder by killing the candidate he
has endorsed for the
nomination.
Now Hillary Clinton is dutifully saying that she was misunderstood, that
she had no intention,
no thought, that she might be taking about SOMEONE KILLING OBAMA, SOMEONE
SHOOTING THE BLACK MAN
DEAD, JUST LIKE SOMEONE SHOT BOBBY KENNEDY DEAD IN CALIFORNIA, IN
CALIFORNIA, DEAD, REALLY DEAD.
Oh my heavens no, the thought never crossed my mind.
Recall too that as Jeffrey pointed out in his Wednesday piece here, Mrs
Clinton and her
mouthpieces have been steadily raising the volume on their
verbal-lynching. In South Dakota Mrs
Clinton lit the fuse.
The Death of American Liberalism
Now a word about the wider picture: There’s certainly no effective
liberal, let alone left
presence in mainstream American politics any more. The political primary
season, now in its
final throes, has resoundingly buttressed this fact, albeit disguising the
process by the crafty
expedient of making a black man the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.
Take the scene in ****tland, Oregon last Monday, on the eve of a vote in
that north-western state
which sent Barack Obama one step further in formally clinching the
Democratic nomination.
CounterPunch coeditor Jeffrey St Clair gave a most amusing and
enlightening account of it this
last Wednesday. How did Hillary Clinton try to remind Oregonians of her
claims to be the
authentic rep of white working-class America, without whose votes no
Democrat can ever win the
White House?
She held a press conference in the upscale ****tland suburb of Beaverton,
in a subdivision where
$500,000 homes have gone unsold for the past year. She spoke movingly of
the pain being
experienced by the developer. A few miles north, homeless Oregonians were
besieging the offices
of ****tland’s mayor, Tom Potter.
As noted above, almost exactly forty years ago John F. Kennedy’s younger
brother Bobby was
making a similar last-throw bid in California to win the state and seize
the Democratic
nomination, by dint of a populist campaign. Bobby reached out to
California’s poor. There’s no
way Bobby would have hunkered down with a property developer. He’d have
been heading the
homeless in a march to the mayor’s office to demand they be given
rent-free accommodation in the
unsold mansions.
As a reminder that some things don’t change, Bobby’s second strategy in
California was to court
the affluent Jewish vote on the West Side of Los Angeles. Just like Hilary
he implied that his
opponents were all too eager to parley with the sworn enemies of Israel.
He demanded that the US
government release F-4 Phantom jets to Israel. A young Palestinian called
Sirhan Sirhan read of
this demand in an article in the New York Review of Books by my dear
friend, the late Andrew D.
Kopkind. Thus edified by Andy, Sirhan promptly scrawled “RFK Must Die!” in
his diary and headed
to the Ambassador Hotel. There, shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, he
shot Kennnedy dead
with a .22 Iver-Johnson revolver in the hotel kitchen, just as Bobby was
shaking hands with a
dishwasher. Bobby’s Israel and populist strategies had fatally collided.*
Bobby Kennedy’s younger brother Ted tried to sell the same populism as
Bobby in his run for the
nomination against Carter in 1978. Ten years later Jesse Jackson, the
first black American to
take a serious tilt at the Democratic nomination, led many a poor people’s
march to City Halls
across America.
Not any more. Hilary’s populism has been skin-deep in the literal sense of
the term. It’s not
been about rich developers, or predatory sub-prime loans. It’s only about
the color of Obama’s
skin, which Mrs Clinton opines is unsuitable in tint. You want irony? Try
tracing the thread
that runs from Fanny Lou Hamer and her comrades’ efforts to seat the
Mississippi Freedom
Democrats at the 1964 convention in Atlanta to Hillary Clinton’s claim
that in trying to get
Florida’s Democrats seated in the convention in Denver she’s taking us
back to the most glorious
struggles of the abolitionists against slavery.
The old truism about primary season used to be that Democratic candidates
have to run left to
capture crucial sup****t from the sort of politically active progressives
who vote in Democratic
primaries and caucuses. Then, with the nomination secured, the nominee
spends the rest of the
year running right, to win over middle America.
But Obama has achieved the amazing feat of being the almost-certain
nominee without barely a
phrase on the record with which John McCain can belabor him for
“loony-leftism” or even
“outdated liberalism” in the months to come.
Bloated Pentagon budgets? This favored target in past primary seasons has
flourished unscathed
this year, even though the arms-spending to which Bush’s former defense
secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, committed the US government promises certain budgetary
catastrophe across the next
fifteen years. Obama’s subservience to the US military has been evinced
numerous times, most
recently when he confided last week to David Brooks, one of the New York
Times’s profuse stable
of neo-con columnists, that “The [U.S.] generals are light-years ahead of
the civilians. They
are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”
What about Wall Street, whose leading bankers have devastated
middle-income America with the
sub-prime scams? Obama has been tactful, meanwhile hauling in hefty
campaign contributions from
these same bankers as Pam Martens has described on this website. Health
care? No relief for
America’s 45 million uninsured from Obama, who offers “reforms”
unreservedly deferential to the
insurance and pharmaceutical industries. What about labor and the right to
form a union –
something virtually impossible to do in America today, where it’s (barely)
legal to go on strike
but almost entirely illegal to win one. Seldom has a Democrat won the
nomination with less IOUs
to organized labor than Obama.
But, you say, surely Obama prevailed over Hillary in large part because
she voted for the war
in Iraq and he didn’t. This year Obama’s statements on the war have been
carefully hedged.
McCain will have a tough time painting him into a corner as a peacenik
without himself sounding
like a crazed warmonger, (which he frequently does). The war in Iraq is
not popular in America,
but the antiwar movement is effectively dead.
As a presidential candidate the only politically unorthodox item on
Obama’s record is that he
has a black skin. As he runs against an elderly, unstable Republican
candidate whose own
mottled epidermis raises constant uneasy questions about possible battles
with cancer Obama
should thank Bush 1 for making a black man chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and putting
Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court, and Bush 2 for making
Condoleezza Rice secretary of
state. See? Blacks can be trusted! And Obama should thank the Republican
Party for nominating a
candidate weaker by far than any he might have dreamed of only six months
ago. As a member of
the Chaos Party I’m none to keen on the man. If McCain choses a real
dunderhead as his running
mate, I must just go for the Republican ticket.
To save conspiracists the trouble of writing to me, I should say that
Kennedy had just passed
the dishwasher, then twisted back and to his left to shake hands, which
explains why the entry
wound in his head seemed to indicate a shot from a quarter other than
where Sirhan was standing.
Who Killed Colonel Sabow?
There was a time, I tell the younger crowd, when the first Arab-American
to win a seat in the US
Senate failed by only three votes to get a bill through the US senate
breaking up the oil
companies. This was Jim Abourezk, of South Dakota, who held one of South
Dakota’s senate seats
through most of the 1970s, and achieved much in his single term. In the
latest issue of our
newsletter Jim lays out in absorbing and convincing detail the evidence
that a colonel in the
USMC was murdered on base just before he was going to testify about
clandestine arms-for-drugs
slights to South America. Subscribe now. You’ll also get Alexander
Cockburn on the Amazon. . .
Hey, come back, y’all. I said, subscribe, dammit.
Footnote: ****tions of the first item ran on The First Post last Friday.
Alexander Cockburn can
be reached at alexandercockburn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relation****p between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relation****p to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Wa****ngton, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and
you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and
these will continue
till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of
these ideas, Negroes
will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as
they submit to those
devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men
may not get all they
pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we
ever get free from
the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.
We must do this by
labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the
lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
- - - - - -> More political discussion continues at
http://www.politicsusaweb.com/
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