Jeffrey St. Clair: Hillary's Berserker Ambition

Some (much?) of St Clair's piece is fevered well past where I would go (i.e., the stuff on Ford, Reagan, Carter, Obama) however, it's most useful for its collection of some of the sordid history of the Clintons. St Clair is the only one I've seen (doubtless there are others) who has hinted if not made the case that the Clintons purposefully worked to ensure a Republican congress in 1994, 1996 (2000?)so as to be able to resist pressure to enact a progressive agenda.

St Clair also leaves out Clinton's responsibility for WTC 93 and Oklahoma City both of which involved the FBI and perhaps (doubtless!) other government agencies.

St Clair mentions the bombing of Serbia. Has someone done more on Clinton & GW Bush (and GHW Bush?) and the KLA? If it were only GW Bush I could understand the connection to criminal enterprises. But why would three administrations ally themselves with the KLA, especially as GHW Bush had strong connections with the Serbs, their enemies? Nor do I understand why GHW Bush and Clinton allowed the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Many will recall that when Clinton needed to be reelected in 1996, he finally put a stop to the wars there very quickly.

St Clair also misses the point I've made elsewhere that Hillary's "mishandling" of the health care initiative was a deliberate and sophisticated operation intended to ensure that no universal single payer option would be allowed.
Ronald


March 24, 2008
Hillary's Berserker Campaign ... for 2012
Blonde Ambition

WWW.Counterpunch.org
http://counterpunch.org/stclair03242008.html

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Hillary Clinton can not win the Democratic nomination for president. The numbers tell the story. Even with robust victories in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, Hillary will trail Obama in popular votes and pledged delegates as they enter the convention hall in Denver.

Any other candidate would have been shamed into dropping out long ago. But these are the Clintons and they have no shame.

So why does Hillary persist? Because she hasn't abandoned her aspiration for the White House. Not in 2008, but for 2012. Here's the perverse logic at work.

If Obama defeats McCain in November, it will take an act of treachery beyond anything even the Clintons have ever conjured from their grimoire of political demonology for Hillary to challenge him in 2012. She will be 69 in 2016, almost ready to move into one of the Beverly Nursing Homes, owned by a company she once represented as a corporate lawyer, aggressively protecting the bottom line against such extravagances as healthy meals, clean sheets and proper medical care for the elderly.

Hillary Clinton is the prisoner of an unimpeachable mathematics. So she makes the most of a remorseless situation by doing what the Clintons do best: commit political fratricide. Quite literally, in this case, by knocking off a brother.

In order to realize her vaulting ambition, Hillary must mortally wound Obama as candidate in the fall race against John McCain so that she can run against McCain in 2012.

McCain is at best a one term president. The signs of this are as clear as the scar jagging down his face. McCain, whose resemblance to Lon Chaney becomes eerier by the day, is already an old man, older than Reagan when he was first elected. He is plagued by a cancer he refuses to speak about, a war he refuses to end and an economy that is collapsing beyond the point of recovery. Add to this prospectus, the fact that McCain is prone to the most self-destructive impulses of any American politician since Aaron Burr. His political fate will be sealed before he even swears his oath.

Thus Hillary's berserker strategy against Obama. (For more on "berserkerism" see the SF novels of Fred Saberhagen.)

Down in Mark Penn's dark computer lab, the data culled from pulse polls and focus groups probing the hidden prejudices in the psyche of white America are being packed like shrapnel into political landmines set for Obama: he's unpatriotic, he's un-Christian, he's a Palestinian symp and, yes, he's black. That's three strikes and one head shot.

Exploitation of racial panic is second nature to the power couple Ishmael Reed calls Ma and Pa Clinton. Bill Clinton launched his 1992 campaign by personally overseeing the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged young black man. He wagged his finger at the rapper Sister Souljah, denouncing her music and political opinions as a danger to young minds. The Clintons pilloried their one-time friend Lani Guinier, for her legal writings on the status of blacks and women and booted Dr. Jocelyn Elders from her position as Surgeon General for her refreshingly candid statements about the utility of condoms and masturbation for sexually active youths.

And that's how they treated people they knew. At a structural level, the Clintons' economic and social agenda, incubated at the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, struck directly at poorest precincts of America, targeting blacks and Hispanics with a fervor not seen since Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips crafted the infamous Southern Strategy for Richard Nixon. Hence, the dismantling of welfare, harsh federal crime bills, the refusal to intervene against racial profiling or redress the grievous injustices caused by the racially-motivated sentences handed out for crack cocaine.

The fallout from Ms. Clinton's racially-tinged blitz against Obama will spread far and wide across her party like the toxic particles from a nuclear blast. They've done it all before. The Clintons' reckless first two years in the White House, from the heavy-handed Travel Office fiasco to the fires of Waco and HRC's sophomoric bungling of the health care reform, spurred the GOP takeover of congress in 1994, which they used to their political profit. Then in 1996, Clinton refused to allocate DNC money to tight senate and congressional races, a miserly tactic that allowed the faltering Republicans to retain control of both houses of Congress. It was a cynical decision that many high-ranking Democrats believe constituted a deliberate sabotage of the party's prospects, designed to secure a monopoly-like control of the party apparatus for the Clintons, turning the DNC into their own private PAC.

Read more:
http://counterpunch.org/stclair03242008.html


Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, will be published this spring. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net

Alexander Cockburn: Hillary and Bill: Destroying the Safety Net

Hillary Rodham Clinton brags about bringing the right wing extremist, Dick Morris, into the Clinton administration. Even after Morris was exposed as allowing a prostitute, Sherry Rowlands, to listen in on conversations with the President, Morris still remained an important confidante of the White House and continued to shape White House policy until the very end of Clinton's term. (I have this on the authority of a member of Clinton's policy making team. "We'd be working for hours or days or more on a domestic policy issue. We'd send the memo to the White House and all it took was one phone call from Dick Morris and the policy was trashed."

When Clinton was elected, one of his problems was to block the reforms that he promised as a candidate but that he and Hillary -- who started out as a Goldwater girl -- opposed. So he did nothing about stopping the war in Bosnia -- perhaps his greatest crime. He totally folded on gays in the military when he could have made history and struck a blow for justice.

As a result he was soon a laughing stock on right wing radio and effectively gave Congress over to the Republicans. At that point he was comfortable since he now had an excuse not to push progressive legislation.

But before that, while he still had a Democratic majority in Congress, he had to deal with health care. What to do? The big threat was universal single payer health care which was enormously popular. But he was opposed to that because he is essentially a right winger and because the health care lobby was a big contributor. So he handed it off to Hillary who had the same problem but didn't mind facing down the opprobrium as long as nothing positive was done on the issue. What do you think she'll do when she becomes president?

In Alex Cockburn's March 3, 2008 Nation column he reminds us that it was Monica Lewinksy who saved us from the Clintons' plan to privatize Social Security. Here's the relevant excerpt.

This [handing over the Social Security trust fund to Wall Street] was never a job for Republicans, any more than was welfare "reform." Eradication of the social safety net is a job for the Democratic Party, and by late 1998 Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin and a secret team were far advanced in the attempt. As Robin Blackburn described it on the CounterPunch website in 2004, "It was a desperately close run thing. On the account of members of Clinton's secret White House team, mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts [to be] released to the captious mercies of Wall Street." Then came the Lewinsky scandal. Clinton needed the liberal Democrats in Congress to stave off successful impeachment.

Read the whole article:
http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20080303&s=cockburn
Note that copyright issues may apply.