How Hillary Bangs the Drums of War

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

11 January 16

ould I approve waterboarding,” Donald Trump asked his supporters back in November. “You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works.”

And, he added, “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”

Had Dick Cheney returned from the near dead, reborn as a know-nothing carnival barker rattling the bones of American Exceptionalism without the Biblical bullshit? Demagogue for a new day, Trump brings to life our ancestors who stole a continent from Native Americans and then plucked Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from a rotting Spanish Empire. He gives voice to white supremacists, killer cops, and ballot-riggers who do not want the lives of black people to matter and do not want their votes to count. He panders to the growing ranks of nativists, each and every one the seed of earlier immigrants, who now despise the “huddled masses” from other parts of the world. And he speaks to the anxieties of white working-class underdogs whom he would inevitably betray.

Trump’s Republican competitors are no less toxic, and Ted Cruz could be worse with his loose talk about using nuclear weapons against Islamic State (ISIS) to see “if sand can glow in the dark.” But let’s not duck the more telling comparison. The nuanced and diplomatic Hillary Clinton could also be extremely dangerous on foreign policy, and much harder for the anti-war movement to fight against.

“This is a time for American leadership,” she told the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in November, just after the bloody massacre in Paris. “No other country can rally the world to defeat ISIS and win the generational struggle against radical jihadism. Only the United States can mobilize common action on a global scale, and that’s exactly what we need. The entire world must be part of this fight, but we must lead it.”

Hillary gave a brilliant speech that day, a masterful mix of detail and determination to establish herself as the have-gun, will-travel paladin of liberal intervention. She avoided the old-fashioned conservative nationalism of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, for whom might makes right. She sidestepped the neoconservative imperialism of Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol, who tie themselves to the needs of the military-industrial complex far more than to the desires of right-wing Israeli governments.

Hillary, ever the idealist, takes up arms for the good of others. It’s an old stance that harks back to FDR’s liberal internationalism and the earliest days of the Cold War, and now finds a modern-day echo in historian Robert Kagan’s 2012 book The World America Made, a favorite at the Obama White House. Co-founder of the two neocon flagships – the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the Foreign Policy Initiative – and husband of Victoria Nuland, a major player in the US-led coup in Ukraine, Kagan now shuns the neocon label and calls himself a liberal interventionist.

With Hillary as with Kagan, it’s staggering how much they fail to learn from mistakes of the past, whether personal or historic. Re-read Hillary’s speech to the CFR. For all her talk of relying on local troops, she believes with Cheney that the American military hammer should remain our prime response to every terrorist nail in the Middle East. She continues to think Washington should step in when local clients like the Iraqis fail to do our bidding. And she still wants the US to promote regime change.

Just remember. Hillary voted to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq. She helped organize the civil war against Muammar Kadhafi in Libya. She played a cameo role in the second Orange Revolution against the Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and she is again talking up regime change against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So many mistakes. So little learning.

“I worry,” warned Bernie Sanders, “that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be."

How kind Uncle Bernie was being! Among the consequences we know to expect is that a US-led war to drive ISIS out of Syria and Iraq may well succeed in the short-term, but would likely keep us tied down in the region for thirty to fifty years to come. As Mr. Rogers might ask, “Boys and girls, how do you spell neo-colonialism?”

Committed to American Exceptionalism and seeing America as the “indispensable nation,” Hillary’s experience and her ties to the rich and powerful make her deaf, dumb, and blind to the essential truth. American leadership in the Middle East is a big part of the problem, not of the solution.

Worse, she now wants to stir up even more trouble with her “comprehensive plan,” introduced in September, to counter Iranian influence across the region and bolster the confidence of our Arab partners, by which she means Sunni Arabs.

What could be more stupid than getting even more mired down in the middle of a historic sectarian war between Sunni and Shi’a Islam? You might well ask the same question of those who pretend to be part of the anti-war movement but now beat the drums to join with Russian and Iranian imperialism to fight against the Sunnis.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

White Rage and Obama’s Tears

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

11 January 16

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. To kick off 2016: Obama's gun-control push, the Donald dredging up Bill and Hillary's past, and the simmering rage of white America.

nce America decided killing children was bearable," one gun-control commentator memorably wrote when reforms failed after Sandy Hook, any effective debate on guns in the U.S. "was over." Does President Obama's emotional call for new measures this week create any political movement to change that?

Given the initial response by the GOP, a wholly owned subsidiary of the NRA, you’d have to say no: The president’s move was greeted with the usual hysterical blather about how “The cruel despot Obama is coming to take your guns!” and the usual pooh-poohing about how “Nothing he’s proposing would have stopped the mass shootings of Sandy Hook, Charleston, San Bernardino … ” And in truth, the effect of his proposed executive actions will be small gruel indeed — enabling, perhaps, some thousands of additional background checks. That’s a pittance in a nation where, in 2015 alone, there were more than 23 million background checks on gun sales, and who knows how many gun transactions requiring no vetting at all. And yet: Am I, a longtime pessimist about progress on this issue, completely delusional to see a tiny bit of movement in the right direction?

As polling has long showed, more than 90 percent of Americans favor rigid background checks on gun buyers, making it a well-chosen focus for the president’s initiative. Even Bill O’Reilly came out in agreement with Obama on this point this week — potentially a more influential voice in changing hearts and minds than, say, the preaching-to-the-choir front-page editorials in the New York Daily News and Times. And, as the Times reported in a recent front-page news story, Michael Bloomberg’s serious capital investment in fighting for gun reform, initially fruitless, has quietly started to notch up a few political victories over the NRA at the local level.  

Meanwhile, those (on the left as well as the right) who have typed Obama ad infinitum as a passionless law professor can no longer say that he doesn’t have or show emotions — despite some attempts on the right to claim that his tears were a hoax. What did turn out to be a hoax was Jeb!’s oft-repeated anecdote that he was given a rifle by Charlton Heston when receiving the NRA’s Statesman of the Year Award — a claim revisited by BuzzFeed in the run-up to Obama’s press conference. There is no such award, Jeb! didn’t win it, and Heston gave him no rifle. It was another small but immensely enjoyable setback for Second Amendment fanatics this week.

Hillary Clinton has so far made good on her New Year's resolution to avoid talking about Donald Trump's personal attacks on her and Bill — despite seemingly constant pressure to do so from reporters following her as she takes the trail in Iowa. How many nonanswers can she give before the press stops pursuing Trump’s line of questioning?

If she sticks to her resolution, it will fade fast. And certainly many in the Republican Establishment, including some of Trump’s rivals, hope it will fade. That’s because they are smart enough to figure out that attacks on Bill Clinton’s unsavory sexual history, no matter how they are framed, are destined to backfire on the GOP rather than hurt Hillary Clinton. That political equation became clear in the aftermath of the scandals that led to impeachment in the late 1990s: The more salacious the headlines, the more sympathy accrued to Hillary Clinton, and the more Bill Clinton’s approval ratings went up, reaching a whopping 73 percent in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky revelations. It was not for nothing that Lindsey Graham, a so-called “House manager” of impeachment during Clinton’s 1999 Senate trial, declined to call attention to that chapter during his own presidential campaign even though it was arguably the most famous interlude in his political career. Rand Paul, the one 2016 candidate who did bring up Bill Clinton’s “predatory behavior” before Trump did, has fared almost as poorly in his presidential bid as the impeachment-stained Graham did in his now-kaput bid for the White House.

What’s been fascinating, though, is that one prominent enclave of the conservative Establishment, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, has ignored the lessons of Clinton-era political history, taken Trump’s bait, and elected to jump on Bill Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions” as if it were 1998 all over again. Back then, the Journal had been a dogged prurient chronicler of Clinton sexual activity, so much so that it published no fewer than six fat books collecting its reportage and editorials about Clinton administration scandals. In the aftermath of Trump’s attack, the Journal has run an editorial giving readers a primer on Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, et al., and chuckling that the “Clinton war on women” will trump any efforts by the Democrats to talk about the GOP war on women in 2016. One Journal columnist, William McGurn, went so far as to equate Clinton to Bill Cosby, and to rationalize Trump’s misogyny by drawing a moral distinction between his “aggressive male boorishness” and Clinton’s “outright sexual abuse.” Granted the Journal has an aging readership, but surely someone there must know that this sort of men’s-club blather is offensive and probably baffling to younger voters, at least some of whom weren’t born when the Lewinsky news broke. Hillary Clinton can only hope that more and more of her political adversaries will follow the Journal’s example in jumping on the Trump bandwagon and help assure her path to the White House.

An online poll on "American rage" released this week by NBC News, Esquire, and SurveyMonkey found that over the past year no groups had a bigger increase in self-reported anger about current events than white people and Republicans — angrier, in fact, than black Americans, who would seem to have more reason to be enraged in the 2015 of Ferguson, Charleston, Cleveland, and Chicago. Where does this anger lead?

This poll confirms what the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in the current issue of The Atlantic — that “the angriest and most pessimistic people in America” aren’t the protesters of Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or the DREAM-ers demanding immigration reform but the “people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor.” Indeed, this poll, unexpectedly, finds that black Americans are more optimistic about the future of the country, about the future of the American dream, and even about their own financial standing than white Americans higher up on the economic ladder.

Frum makes the point, with which I agree, that this anger and pessimism resides in both parties, and that neither party is addressing it, thus giving rise to both the serious insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders and the rage-fueled crusade of Trump. On the assumption that neither of them will be president, this rage is going to continue to boil, and boil over, in ways that could ultimately make the Trump disruption look relatively benign. Or such could be the case if whatever government takes charge on January 20, 2017, doesn’t address the grievances many Americans have against what Frum calls “the power of organized money” (whether that power is held on Wall Street or by the Koch brothers).

One footnote in this poll worth citing: The one unifying source of rage in the entire survey — the only national phenomenon that 90 percent of all Americans regardless of race or class or party are mad as hell about — is school shootings. This too may offer a sliver of hope that Obama’s leadership on gun-law reform this week might be a harbinger of change we can believe in, not just another impotent gesture in this long-running American tragedy.