Interesting Times

Three Ex-Presidents, One President-Elect, and the current office occupier on January 7th, 2008.

It cannot become 4 Ex-Presidents too soon.

Labels: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Carter, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush

posted by Stash @ 4:11 PM

0 Comments

Irony is Not Dead

I am a great fan of the musical satirist Tom Lehrer. I remember, as a teenager, devouring and memorizing the lyrics to Lehrer’s songs, “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park,” “Be Prepared,” “National Brotherhood Week” “Whatever Became of You Hubert” and the iconic, “Vatican Rag” - - “make a cross on your abdomen, when in Rome do like a Roman, Ave Marie, gee it’s good to see ya, doin the Vatican Rag.” I still have all Lehr’s records. I read somewhere that when Lehrer stopped making personal appearances and recordings, he did so because an international event had killed irony. The event? The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the war criminal, Henry Kissinger. But, as later day events have proved, Lehrer was wrong. Just remember for a moment George Bush awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, Paul Bremmer and Tommy Franks.
I was reminded of all this again last week when a “bipartisan” (oh, that word!!!!!), when a bipartisan task force of former top national security policymakers issued a report calling on Barack Obama’s administration to prevent genocide and mass atrocities overseas as a top U. S. foreign policy priority. What’s so ironic about that, you may wonder? One of the leading lights of that task force is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. “The central premise of our report,” said Albright, “is that genocide is unacceptable and that we can and should do more to prevent it.” That the war criminal Albright should be calling for the end to genocide is, well, ironic.
As Secretary of State she stood aside, with barely a word, while more than a million Rwandans perished. More importantly, Albright helped design and carry out the Clinton policy of genocide in Iraq.
Secretary of State Albright confronted military Chief of Staff Colin Powell in 1993 over the use of U. S. military forces when she demanded to know, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?” “Mesmerized by the prospects of putting American soldiers to work to alleviate the world’s ills,” writes Andrew J. Bacevich, “Albright soon enough got her way. An odd alliance that combined left-leaning do-gooders with jingoistic politicians and pundits succeeded in chipping away at constraints on the use of force.” During Clinton’s presidency, the United States conducted “tens of thousands of sorties into Iraqi airspace, dropped thousands of bombs, and launched hundreds of cruise missiles,” enforcing the “crushing sanctions regime authorized by the UN,” but carried out by the United States. The sanctions regime “complicated Saddams’ life” while limiting the amount of funds available from Iraqi oil. But the primary effect was “making the wretched existence of the average Iraqi more wretched still.” As early as 1996, UNICEF reported that the U.S. enforced sanctions had killed as many as half a million Iraqi children. When asked to comment on the UNICEF report, Madam Albright did not even question the figures. “Instead, she replied, ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - - we think the price is worth it.”
Worth it? Maybe Tom Lehrer was right. Maybe irony really is dead.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Colin Powell

posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 7:52 AM

1 Comments

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Don't Work!

Patrick Porter of Jurist Legal News and Research reports the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of an Air Force major who was fired when her superiors discovered she was in a lesbian relationship.

We're still looking for the official ruling, but here's a quick link to
AlterNet to get you started.

It's only an Appeals Court ruling, so the Supremes can overturn it and keep Clinton's farce going, but it's a good sign.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Gay Rights, justice

posted by Stash @ 5:11 PM

0 Comments

OMFG! Turn out the light... the party's over!

Hillary Clinton On Southern Working Class Whites In 1995: "Screw 'Em"

Sam Stein
The Huffington Post

During the past week, Sen. Hillary Clinton has presented herself as a working class populist, the politician in touch with small town sentiments, compared to the elitism of her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama.

But a telling anecdote from her husband's administration shows Hillary Clinton's attitudes about the "lunch-bucket Democrats" are not exactly pristine.
In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."

The statement -- which author Benjamin Barber witnessed and wrote about in his book, "The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House" -- was prompted by another speaker raising the difficulties of reaching "Reagan Democrats." It stands in stark contrast to the attitude the New York Democrat has recently taken on the campaign trail, in which she has presented herself as the one candidate who understands the working-class needs.

"I don't think Obama really gets it that people are looking for a president who stands up for you and not looks down on you," she said this week.

But those who were at the event say the 1995 episode fits into her larger political viewpoint. As Harry Boyte, the director of the who was at the retreat, told The Huffington Post: "[Hillary Clinton] sees herself as the champion of the oppressed, but there is always a kind of good guy versus bad guy mentality. The comment before that was that 'the Reagan Democrats are our enemies and they weren't on our side,' and she was agreeing with that comment. She said we should write them off: screw them."

Perhaps even more telling than Hillary Clinton's "screw 'em" proclamation, however, were the words from her husband that followed. As reported by Barber, Clinton "stepped in, calm and judicious, not irritated, as if rehearsing an old but honorable debate he had been having with his wife for decades."

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary's sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They're the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

If the tone and tenor of the above sounds familiar, it's because the message, Boyte says, is remarkably similar to what Obama was trying to convey in his now controversial remarks about small town America.

"Well, yeah, absolutely," said Boyte, when asked if Obama and Bill Clinton were expressing the same political viewpoint (Boyte said he and his organization are neutral in the presidential race). "I think Obama's better-or-worse versions of this have always been that people are complicated. It comes from an organizing perspective. You don't write off people, everyone is complicated. It just depends on the issue. And that's what Bill Clinton was saying. He was a sentimental populist."
Not to be lost in all this, as Boyte notes, is that Hillary Clinton has consistently been a "champion for the people who were helpless and powerless." But there is a political component to the mindset.

"Hillary Clinton has a very strong customer view: the citizen is the customer and the government the vender," said Boyte. "You can see it in Mark Penn's frame. In fact, last Christmas she had an ad of herself writing checks to different groups."
The Clinton campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Election 2008, Hillary Clinton, Obama

posted by Stash @ 1:08 PM

0 Comments

Bill Clinton's Commercial for Obama

h/t Progressive Daily Beacon

Labels: Bill Clinton, Election 2008, Obama

posted by Stash @ 1:17 PM

0 Comments

Bill Clinton's Commercial for Obama

Labels: Bill Clinton, Election 2008, Obama

posted by Stash @ 1:17 PM

0 Comments

MLK

Labels: Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Huckabee, Martin Luther King, Shirley Franklin

posted by Stash @ 8:29 AM

0 Comments

Clinton Hostage Crisis Brings Out Worst in Wrong Wing

Free Republic wrong wing nutbars unloaded their vile venom in the blogosphere.

We'll see how long it takes O'Reilly to get up in arms about it. We won't hold our breath.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Bill O'Reilly

posted by Stash @ 8:30 PM

0 Comments