Middle East Peace: Probably Not This Year

Hillary Clinton meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at his Ramallah headquarters 4 March 2009.
Here we go again?
By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 6, 2009

So now it's Hillary Clinton who begins to shuttle, looking for that grail that has eluded all her predecessors, a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Will things be different this time? According to former Senator James G. Abourezk, no -- unless the Secretary of State can lay aside the "glaring double standard" that blinds us to the realities of the Middle East situation and makes a just peace unattainable.

It's time for tough love with Israel, Abourezk is saying: there will be no peace settlement unless the U.S. tells Israel it must remove its settlements. Period.

One More Farcical Tour of the Middle East by a Secretary of State: This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn
By James G. Abourezk / March 5, 2009

It was almost dreamlike, watching Secretary of State Clinton make her visit to Israel, one that can be called the first of many trips pretending to encourage peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. It’s a dream I’ve had several times over; one needs only to simply fill in the names of the various U.S. Secretaries of State, say that they’ve met with the Israeli leadership and with Mahmoud Abbas, (who is about as popular with the Palestinians as Rush Limbaugh is with Democrats), and that no progress was made.

Aside from saying that Abbas heads the only legitimate government of Palestine, Mrs. Clinton did say that the building of new settlements was, “unhelpful,” or maybe it was the demolition of several Palestinian apartment blocks in Jerusalem that was unhelpful. It’s hard to remember which one did not help. She did conveniently forget that Abbas’ term as President of the Palestinian Authority has expired, and she also forgot that Hamas won the Parliamentary elections big time. It’s not that the Parliament has been meeting regularly, mostly because Israel arrested most of the Hamas members of Parliament, all of them still behind bars. It was the kind of election that the U.S. did not believe in. It was legal, and showed the preferences of the Palestinian public, something which the U.S. chose to ignore.

Mrs. Clinton did send two diplomats to talk to the Syrians, which is as hopeful as it is interesting. Syria has been on the bad, bad guy list since George W. Bush decided to act on Israel’s dislike of Syria and withdraw the U.S. Ambassador, Margaret Scobey. It was Syria’s support of US and Israeli-designated “terrorists” that caused that diplomatic rupture.

I had lunch in Damascus a few years ago with Ms. Scobey, who told me that the problem “we” had with Syria was that the country was not stopping insurgents from crossing into Iraq to fight the U.S. military. “Why don’t you just put American troops on the border to stop them?” I asked, “Why do you blame Syria for not policing the long border?’

“Well, we don’t have enough troops to do the job,” was her honest answer.

By publicly denouncing Syria, George W. accomplished his goal of making Israel happy, but he also trashed a valuable ally in his “war on terrorism.”

A few years ago, in the early part of Bush’s first term, I was in a meeting with Syria’s president Bashar al Asad. He mentioned that he had given the U.S. information he had uncovered on an attack planned by Al Qaeda on U.S. interests in the Middle East. That early warning allowed our people to disrupt the terrorists’ plans to do harm to us. (I assumed it was an attack planned on the U.S. Naval base in Bahrain, but I was never told exactly where it was). I saw the U.S. Ambassador, Ted Kattouf, shortly after that and asked him if it was true. His response was that, not only was it true, but Syria’s intelligence personnel had uncovered and had stopped more than one planned attack on Americans in the Middle East.

What a visibly irritated President Al Asad told me that day was that if George Bush continued to call Syria a “terrorist” country, he would never again give us warning of an attack.

News sources now tell us that Syria is playing around with the development of nuclear weapons. If that’s true, it’s not good news. But here again we are our own worst enemy with respect to nuclear proliferation. While our politicians loudly denounce Iran’s nuclear ambitions, nothing at all is said about Israel’s possession of over 200 nuclear warheads. The reason Israel’s nuclear arsenal should be openly discussed is that, not surprisingly, it is the cause of its neighbors’ drive to develop their own nukes. Self Defense is a powerful motivation.

When we look back at history, outside of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Israel is the only country in that neighborhood that has attacked its neighbors. Iran has not, in the last two or three hundred years, attacked anybody. Nor has Syria. Even Syria’s misadventure in Lebanon was the result of initially being invited into Lebanon to help settle the Civil War back in the 1970s, but it was not a real invasion, not like the ones Israel has specialized in. Syria’s sin was to clumsily overstay its welcome in Lebanon.

What is not widely known, (and one wonders why?) is that both Syria and Iran have proposed a “nuclear weapons free Middle East,” -- proposals that were immediately scoffed at both by Israel and by the United States.

This double standard also applies to the Arab militias—Hizbollah and Hamas--that arm themselves to defend from Israel’s assaults on them and their freedoms. Calling Hamas and Hizbollah terrorist groups is, as Mrs. Clinton might say in another context, “unhelpful.” They are, under any definition, except for definitions by the U.S. and by Israel, “liberation groups.” They are trying to liberate their lands from foreign occupiers — namely Israel — an action which we here in the U.S. normally applaud. But Israel has asked our government to identify them as terrorist groups, which our government happily did. Doing Israel that favor was very much like the favor done by Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which was greatly encouraged by Israel’s fear of Iraq’s policies toward them. Of course, the influence of the neocons in the Bush Administration made the decision to go to war much easier to make.

The double standard is so glaring that it would be embarrassing if the American public were ever made aware of it. President Obama is now on record as supporting a multibillion dollar arms gift to Israel over the next ten years. Both Israel and the U.S. decry — in the loudest terms --arms being slipped into Gaza so the people there can defend themselves. The same is true for Hizbollah. Much is made about weapons “smuggling” to Hizbollah, which, like Hamas, does whatever it can to defend their people from Israel’s armed might. But American politicians and American journalists dutifully read Israeli talking points when the time comes to explain their feelings. Hamas’ crude weapons do not quite match the fighter jets, modern tanks, pilotless drones, cluster bombs, phosphorous shells and bombs that Israel inflicted on the civilians in the Gaza Ghetto. The new DIME weapon, which severely burns anything it touches, was particularly effective when used on the civilians of Gaza.

The most prominent talking point handed out by the Israeli propaganda machine during the assault on Gaza was, “We would not stand by and allow our families be targets of someone shooting rockets into our cities.”

Totally unexamined, that was a brilliant piece of propaganda explaining the slaughter of some 1,500 people in Gaza, most of them women and children. Like the Nazis trying to eradicate the Warsaw Ghetto, Israel willfully and deliberately slaughtered civilians who were unable to escape because of the fences that surrounded them. When they were caught doing so, the Israeli military merely said it would investigate. Nothing has ever come from such an investigation, if, in fact, it was ever investigated.

It is embarrassing to see the Lobby for such a small country cause our politicians to quake in their boots. Despite all the demolitions of Palestinian homes, despite the expansion of the settlements in occupied territories, despite the devastating invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and in 2006, the brutal invasion of the Gaza ghetto last year, and despite the holding of thousands of Palestinians in their prisons, most without benefit of charges or trials, we hear not one word of criticism from our Congress or our President. Amazing, is it not?

I have said this before, but it bears repeating—there will be no peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians unless and until the President of the United States tells Israel that they must remove the settlers from the West Bank, thereby allowing a Palestinian state to be formed. If he does not do that, Mrs. Clinton and George Mitchell will tire themselves out traveling to the Middle East under the pretense that they are sponsoring peace talks.

[James G. Abourezk is a lawyer practicing in South Dakota. He is a former United States senator and the author of two books, Advise and Dissent, and a co-author of Through Different Eyes. This article also runs in the current issue of Washington Report For Middle East Affairs. Abourezk can be reached at georgepatton45@gmail.com.]

Source / CounterPunch

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Shades of Whitewater : Media Attempts to Tie Obama to 'Blagogate'

Media Frenzy by Amer Sahoury of Clio High School in Michigan, from the 2008 Congressional Art Competition.

The similarities between the media's current behavior and their shameful performance in the 1990s doesn't stop with their bizarre suggestions that geography is destiny. ...One of the central flaws of the media's coverage of the Clintons was that they portrayed nearly everything as evidence of guilt.

Media Matters: Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago
by Jamison Foser / December 12, 2008

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation's leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.

Whenever reporters think -- or want you to think -- they've uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies.

Yesterday, CNN's Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase "Blagogate" to stick -- the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix "-gate" to the end of a word.

Sanchez's efforts to create a catchphrase aside, the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich this week isn't the Watergate of the 21st century -- though it shows signs that it may become this decade's Whitewater.

Right about now, you may be scratching your head, trying to remember what, exactly, the Whitewater scandal was. Didn't it have something to do with a bank? Or a land deal? But didn't the Clintons lose money? How did the congressman who shot the pumpkin fit in?

But Whitewater is quite simple, when it is understood as it should be -- as a media scandal, not a presidential scandal.

As an endless series of investigations, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, revealed, the Clintons broke no law and violated no ethics regulations in connection with Whitewater. They lost money on a failed land deal in which their business partner cheated them. That's all there was. Republicans Ken Starr, Robert Fiske, Robert Ray, Al D'Amato, and Jim Leach, among others, investigated the matter, and none of them found illegality. There was simply nothing there -- except year after year of obsessive, and often dishonest, media coverage, fueled by conservatives who would stop at nothing to destroy the president.

As Joe Conason explains today, "The madness that was eventually classified under the quasi-clinical rubric of 'Whitewater' began, in no small degree, with the dubious idea that Arkansas, the Clintons' home state, was a peculiarly corrupt place -- and that any politician from Arkansas by definition was suspect (but only if he or she happened to be a Democrat)."

Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons noted in Fools for Scandal, his 1994 book about how the media invented Whitewater, "Scarcely a Whitewater story has appeared in the national press that hasn't made references to the state's uniquely 'incestuous' links between business, government, and the legal establishment -- concepts utterly foreign to places like Washington, D.C., and New York City, of course." (Conason and Lyons co-wrote The Hunting of the President, a book that -- along with Fools for Scandal -- are must-reads for anyone interested in the media or politics.)

By portraying Arkansas as thoroughly, and uniquely, corrupt, the media (and Clinton's political opponents) tied him to a long line of misbehavior that had nothing to do with him -- and created the impression that Clinton must be corrupt merely for being from such an ethical cesspool.

Of course, Arkansas was neither thoroughly nor uniquely corrupt.

In addition to the ages-old clichés -- big cities like New York and Chicago; the anything-goes Wild West of Las Vegas and Texas; perennial whipping boy New Jersey -- countless other states and cities have reputations for "unparalleled" corruption. People experienced in Connecticut politics will forcefully argue that their state takes a back seat to no other when it comes to the frequency with which public officials are caught in various degrees of wrongdoing. Then there's Florida, about which the less said, the better. And on and on and on.

Such reputations stem not only from actual examples of actual corruption -- California gave us Nixon; Maryland gave us Agnew; two of the Keating Five, including John McCain, hailed from Arizona -- but from the fact that many people, particularly those who work in politics and the media, tend to engage in a bit of tongue-in-cheek bragging about their home city or state's propensity for scandal.

The point isn't that everyplace is corrupt, or that nowhere is. It's that no location has a monopoly on crooked politicians (nor has there yet been a location over which crooked politicians held a monopoly) -- and that any claim of a city or state's unique history of public officials abusing their office should be taken with a whole shaker of salt. (For what it's worth, USA Today determined this week that "[o]n a per-capita basis ... Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007," behind both Dakotas, Alaska, Alabama, Florida and several other states.)

And yet, here we are again, with an incoming Democratic president who hails from a city we are all supposed to believe is the most corrupt place this side of Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. Chicago, we are told, is a den of villainy so irredeemable it defies credulity to suggest anyone could emerge from so much as a long layover at O'Hare without a closet full of skeletons.

This nonsense was well under way during the presidential campaign, during which John McCain suggested a lack of integrity on Obama's part simply because he is from Chicago. You might think that a man who was a participant in one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the U.S. Senate would be laughed at if he tried to claim his opponent lacked integrity simply because of his ZIP code. Instead, the national media laughed along with McCain, endlessly repeating his witty zinger about Chicago.

And so this week, we've heard over and over how politics in Illinois are rotten to the core.

At Obama's press conference yesterday, the third questioner asked, "What's wrong with politics in Illinois?" Chris Matthews made sure viewers knew that "Barack Obama, of course, rose to political power in a city, Chicago, in a state, Illinois, known for corruption."

ABC's Rick Klein chimed in: "[W]ith one stiff wind, Chicago has grabbed Obama and his transition -- and blown it off-course. ... The underbelly of the Obama political operation, with all its Chicago tints and taints, is now fair game for reporters looking for a story." (Nonsense. If the "Obama political operation" has an "underbelly" featuring actual wrongdoing, it's fair game whether or not a governor is busted in a scandal that has nothing to do with Obama. And if that "underbelly" hasn't actually done anything wrong, Blago's bust doesn't change that -- regardless of tint or taint.)

On his radio show, Bill O'Reilly asked Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass if it is even possible for Obama to have existed in Chicago without being dishonest, leading Kass to reply: "Yes, that is possible. It's also possible that he was found as an infant in a reed basket floating in the Chicago River."

The similarities between the media's current behavior and their shameful performance in the 1990s doesn't stop with their bizarre suggestions that geography is destiny.

One of the central flaws of the media's coverage of the Clintons was that they portrayed nearly everything as evidence of guilt. Perhaps most perverse was the suggestion that the conviction of Clinton Justice Department official Webster Hubbell was evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. What made that so perverse? Hubbell was convicted, essentially, of stealing money from the law firm in which he and Hillary Clinton were both partners. Hubbell, in other words, stole from Hillary Clinton. The Clintons were Hubbell's victims -- and yet many journalists portrayed his conviction as evidence of their guilt.

Which brings us to Tuesday's New York Times. As Will Bunch has explained, the Times reported that Obama supported an Illinois ethics reform package that passed over Blagojevich's veto, which led to Blagojevich pressing state contractors for contributions before the reform takes effect, which "indirectly contributed to the downfall." Good news for Obama, right? He supported a reform package, even urging the state Senate to pass it over Blagojevich's veto. And yet the Times concludes that this story demonstrates that Obama "has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics" -- as though the fact that Blagojevich allegedly did something improper in an effort to avoid the effects of the reform Obama championed somehow taints Obama. Bizarre.

Most telling is the tendency of many journalists to speculate that the Blagojevich scandal may ensnare Obama without acknowledging that the complaint against Blagojevich contained absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing by Obama, or that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has said, "I should make clear, the complaint makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever, his conduct." (You may remember The New York Times' reaction to the Resolution Trust Corporation investigation that exonerated the Clintons of Whitewater wrongdoing in 1995: The "paper of record," which had been relentlessly hyping the non-scandal, all but ignored the RTC report and continued pushing Whitewater.)

Even worse than ignoring Fitzgerald's exculpatory comments, Time actually suggested they are bad news for Obama:

On more than one occasion during his stunning press conference on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald bluntly said he has found no evidence of wrongdoing by President-elect Barack Obama in the tangled, tawdry scheme that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly cooked up to sell Obama's now vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But for politicians, it's never good news when a top-notch prosecutor has to go out of his way to distance them from a front-page scandal.

Got that? Fitzgerald said there's no evidence Obama did anything wrong. Bad news for Obama! (For the record: The reason Fitzgerald "has to go out of his way" to distance Obama from the scandal is that news organizations like Time keep going out of their way to baselessly link Obama to the scandal.)

Such attempts to link Obama to scandal via tortured logic and geography rather than more substantive ties were necessary because of the complete lack of substantive ties.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the media's attempts to link Obama to the Blagojevich scandal has been the volume of news reports that are purely speculative -- and not only speculative, but vaguely speculative. That is, they don't even consist of conjecture about specific potential wrong doing. They simply consist of completely baseless speculation that Obama might in some way become caught up in the investigation at some point in the future, for some reason. It's little more than, "Maybe Obama will be involved." Well, sure. And maybe he'll play shortstop for the Washington Nationals next year.

Associated Press reporter Liz Sidoti set the standard for pointlessly speculative news reports with an "analysis" piece declaring that "President-elect Barack Obama hasn't even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him." In the very next sentence, Sidoti had to admit that "Obama isn't accused of anything" -- but that didn't stop her from continuing to offer ominous warnings that Obama could be implicated in the scandal, interspersed with concessions that he, you know ... isn't.

Not that Sidoti was unique in stringing together a bunch of coulds and mights and maybes and ifs to create something that vaguely resembles -- but is certainly not -- an actual news report.

ABC's Rick Klein, for example:

The scandal surrounding Blagojevich, the Democratic governor of Illinois, may or may not implicate members of Congress, in addition to at least the outer ring of advisers in the incoming Obama administration.

Got that? The scandal may or may not implicate members of Congress. Awfully hard to argue with that. The modifier "at least" is a nice touch, too -- suggesting that the outer ring of Obama advisers has already been implicated in the scandal (they haven't).

That was par for the course this week, as reporters breathlessly asked what Obama knew and when he knew it (the decidedly non-scandalous answers are apparently "very little" and "very recently").

If you want to make a "scandal" stick to someone despite the inconvenient truth that they aren't actually guilty of the purported wrongdoing in question, one thing you do -- if you're the media covering a Democratic president, or an overzealous conservative -- is continually expand the scandal's definition. So the "scandal" grows and evolves into an amorphous mass of innuendo as political opponents and journalists begin throwing everything against the wall, hoping something will stick.

Eventually what begins as a land deal (in which the Clintons did nothing wrong and lost money) includes an investigation of the tragic suicide of a White House staffer -- and the next thing you know, some B-list congressman is traipsing into his backyard with a shotgun, taking aim at a perfectly innocent pumpkin because the voices in his head told him that gunning down some produce would somehow "prove" that the staffer was murdered as part of an elaborate cover-up of ... well, of nothing. There was nothing to cover up, and no murder to cover it up. The pumpkin died in vain.

And so on Wednesday, the Associated Press issued an article headlined "Questionable associations of Obama." Prompted by the Blagojevich scandal -- which, again, involves no indication that Obama did anything wrong -- the article announces, "In his life and career in Illinois, President-elect Barack Obama has crossed paths with some notable figures who have drawn scorn and scrutiny."

From there, the AP proceeds to describe several such "notable figures," most of whom have little if anything to do with Obama -- or the Blagojevich scandal. What, for example, is Jeremiah Wright doing here? None of their connections to Obama involve so much as a hint of an allegation of legal or ethical wrongdoing. To the extent they are controversial, it is for their views. They couldn't possibly have less to do with the Blagojevich scandal; there is no conceivable reason for the AP to bring them up now -- except to try to fling a bunch of garbage against the wall in hopes of something, somehow, sticking. It's as though the AP, recognizing how tenuous Obama's ties to the Blagojevich scandal are, tried to make it look more substantial by tossing in a bunch of other "notable" ties.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz complained that it took Obama "24 hours" to decide that Blagojevich should resign, worrying "that kind of excessive caution" could "define his presidency."

Obama called for Blagojevich's resignation within 24 hours, and Howard Kurtz thinks that wasn't fast enough. It's so fast, Kurtz had to measure the time elapsed in hours rather than days. And yet, Kurtz thinks it constituted excessive foot-dragging. This is simply not a sane assessment. It's a desperate attempt to find something to criticize about Obama. Obama is not involved in the scandal, so Kurtz sits by with a stopwatch, trying to document Obama's slow response to it.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer announced yesterday that "some are calling this Obama's first presidential scandal." It isn't. There is no evidence he has done anything wrong. This is not Obama's first presidential scandal -- but it shows signs of becoming the first media scandal of the Obama presidency.

Obviously, the news media should aggressively investigate and report on actual involvement in actual wrongdoing by public figures. There was far too little of that reporting during the Bush administration. (Remember when the media refused to report on the Downing Street Memo? Good times.)

If the news media regains a bit of the skepticism so many of them set aside for the past eight years, that would be an unequivocally good thing, and it should be applauded.

But this week brought signs that much of the media is set to resume the absurd and shameful behavior that defined the 1990s -- guilt by association, circular analysis whereby they ask baseless questions about non-scandals, then claim they have to report on the "scandal" because the White House is "besieged by questions," grotesque leaps of logic, downplaying exculpatory information, and too many other failings to list.

If that happens -- if the media continue to behave as they did in covering Whitewater -- they will damage the country. It's really that simple. We cannot afford to be distracted from serious problems by overheated conjecture and baseless insinuation masquerading as journalism.

Not to mention the outright fabrications. To take just one of many examples, Jeff Greenfield and ABC selectively edited Hillary Clinton's comments during a Whitewater press conference, then accused her of lying -- an accusation that, based on Clinton's full comments, was clearly false. It was a shockingly dishonest report; Greenfield and ABC were simply lying about Clinton -- there's really no other way to put it. Those involved should have seen their reputations take a serious hit -- at the very least. Yet they suffered no consequences due to their dishonorable and unprofessional actions.

That's how the media behaved the last time we had a Democratic president. They devoted wall-to-wall coverage to invented "scandals," ignored exculpatory evidence, saw evidence of guilt everywhere, took people out of context in order to accuse them of lying, and generally behaved like a pack of wild animals who couldn't tell right from wrong or truth from fiction -- or who simply didn't care. As a group, they behaved without ethical standards and without regard for the truth.

It's our responsibility -- all of us -- to make sure it doesn't happen again.

[Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.]

Source / Media Matters

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H. Rosen : Hillary Missed Her Chance

I Am Not a Bargaining Chip, I Am a Democrat
By Hilary Rosen / June 4, 2008

Senator Clinton's speech last night was a justifiably proud recitation of her accomplishments over the course of this campaign, but it did not end right. She didn't do what she should have done. As hard and as painful as it might have been, she should have conceded, congratulated, endorsed and committed to Barack Obama. Therefore the next 48 hours are now as important to the future reputation of Hillary Clinton as the last year and a half have been.

I am disappointed. As a long time Hillary Clinton supporter and more importantly, an admirer, I am sad that this historic effort has ended with such a narrow loss for her. There will be the appropriate "if onlys" for a long time to come. If only the staff shakeup happened earlier; if only the planning in caucus states had more focus; if only Hillary had let loose with the authentic human and connecting voice she found in the last three months of the campaign. If only. If only. I have written many times on this site about the talents of Hillary Clinton and why I thought she'd make a great President

After last night's final primary, she was only about pledged 100 delegates behind him. Ironic that after not wanting to make the decision for so long, it was in fact, the superdelegates who made the decision. But I guess they did so for another reason. It just isn't her time. It is his time. It's a new day that offers a freshness to our party that many have longed for. We felt the rush of new voices and a new energy in the Congressional sweep of 2006 and the sweep continues. It has been an organic shift. And a healthy one.

The life's work of Bill and Hillary Clinton in partnering with so many African Americans uniting our purpose and promoting our mutual issues is as responsible for Barack Obama's success as our first African American nominee as anyone. And yet, that joy is being denied for them by themselves. It is so sad.

So, I am also so very disappointed at how she has handled this last week. I know she is exhausted and she had pledged to finish the primaries and let every state vote before any final action. But by the time she got on that podium last night, she knew it was over and that she had lost. I am sure I was not alone in privately urging the campaign over the last two weeks to use the moment to take her due, pass the torch and cement her grace. She had an opportunity to soar and unite. She had a chance to surprise her party and the nation after the day-long denials about expecting any concession and send Obama off on the campaign trail of the general election with the best possible platform. I wrote before how she had a chance for her "Al Gore moment." And if she had done so, the whole country ALL would be talking today about how great she is and give her her due.

Instead she left her supporters empty, Obama's angry, and party leaders trashing her. She said she was stepping back to think about her options. She is waiting to figure out how she would "use" her 18 million voters.

But not my vote. I will enthusiastically support Barack Obama's campaign. Because I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat.

Source. / The Huffington Post

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Gore Vidal on Obama and Clinton

I knew JFK, says Gore Vidal, and believe me Obama’s the better leader

Gore Vidal, the writer and long-time Clinton supporter, tells why Hillary is insane to keep on fighting

By Melvyn Bragg / May 18, 2008

At 82, Gore Vidal has reached an enviable position: he is an influential man of letters, a political activist, a scion of the New World aristocracy and a friend of the powerful and famous, including the Clintons.

So what does he think of Hillary Clinton’s stated intention to fight on to the bitter end for the Democratic presidential nomination? The reply is instant and searing: “I think her strategy is more or less insane.”

He continues: “I’d always rather liked her. She’s a perfectly able lawyer . . . But this long campaign, this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy.”

In his view Barack Obama has won; and if the nomination is taken away from him, “I fear what our black population might do. There has never been a revolution of blacks – yet”.

During the Clinton administration, Vidal admired Bill’s understanding of the poor and of black people. His devotion to the Clintons has now been laid aside, however. By clinging on to her campaign, waiting for the small chance that Obama will make a terminal mistake, Hillary has crossed a line, he believes.

As for Obama, Vidal has taken time to warm to him. “I liked the idea of him, but he never managed to get my interest. I was brought around by his overall intelligence – specifically when he did his speech on race and religion.”

In Vidal’s opinion, “he’s our best demagogue since Huey Long or Martin Luther King”.

I ask if he thinks Obama has a similar charisma to that of John F Kennedy, whom Vidal got to know because he was related to his wife, Jackie.

“I never believed in Jack’s charisma,” Vidal says shortly. JFK, he believes, was “one of our worst presidents”; Bobby, his brother, was “a phoney, a little Torquemada”; and their father, Joseph, was “a crook – should have been in jail”.

So much for Camelot. “But Jack had great charm,” he adds. “So has Obama. He’s better educated than Jack. And he’s been a working senator. Jack never went to the office – he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him.”
There’s no guarantee, of course, that the Democrats will triumph later this year, even if Obama does win the nomination. Does he think Obama can beat John McCain?

His views on the man the Democratic candidate will have to beat are even more brutal than his views on Hillary: “ You could beat McCain! I’ve never met anyone in America who has the slightest respect for him. He went to a private school and came bottom of his class. He smashed up his aeroplane and became a prisoner of war, which he is trying to parlay into ‘war hero’.”

In his view, McCain is “a goddamned fool. He was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he does not know what a mortgage is. His head rattles as he walks”.

However, in Vidal’s eyes, McCain is just a symptom of the real malaise affecting America today: the cynical subversion of the US constitution. “The Bush people”, he says, “have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back.”

By now he has worked himself up to a crisp fury: “Those neocons, lawyers, the big corporations – worse than that, extremists – want to get rid of the great power of oversight of the executive. See what they’ll try to do to Obama. They’re crooks. They’re just gangsters. They are the enemy of the United States. There’s no such thing as a war on terrorism. It’s idiotic. There are slogans. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we’ve invented and developed. It’s lies.”

Vidal has never been less than fully engaged with the politics of his country – but he seems angrier than I have ever seen him before. This may be because he has returned to live in the States only recently, after spending more than 30 years in Italy. He seems revived and refreshed by his furious reengagement with American politics.

For him, the biggest lie has always been to keep quiet; and the best life-enhancer is to provoke, unsettle, rile – in short, to make people face the truth. He remains a rarity.

Source. / Sunday Times, U.K.

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

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Class is not a Clinton Forte

Seeds of Destruction
by Bob Herbert / May 10, 2008

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

The last time the Clintons had to make a big exit was at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president — and they made a complete and utter hash of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you might have thought the Clintons would be on their best behavior.

Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.

Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.

Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.

Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.

Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”

It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.

So class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

Source. / New York Times

Thanks to Steve Russell and Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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