Ding-dong the witch is dead. Take, as evidence, Donald Trump’s profanity-laden celebration of rape, the tape of which has just surfaced (and is already being followed by more of the same) If that won’t drive a stake through his genuinely iniquitous heart, nothing will. How dead? Metaphorically, he’s as dead as Moammar Gaddafi whom Hillary gleefully dispatched with the words, “we came, we saw, he died.” Judged by the rather manic look on her face she sure got a kick out of it. But when the thrill was gone, Hillary left behind a dangerous, leaderless mess, rife with violence and terrorism. Such is the fruit of neoliberal intervention.
Still, there’s a certain giddinesss in the air. “Downward Spiral,” trumpets HuffPo, weighing in on the Donald’s campaign chances. “Trump Craters,” another of their headlines says.
For 2016 Clinton has attached herself to the relatively popular Barack Obama’s coat-tails. Do you think it will bother her, the way he’s forcing down the nations’s throat the TPP bill. I doubt it. Obama and his cadre of lobbyists has made sure the agreement is being forged in Stalinesque secrecy. But if Americans knew what was in TPP they wouldn’t like it, says Elizabeth Warren. It will cost jobs, says progressive superstar Robert Reich. You’re making a big mistake, say the 200 intellectuals and economists who wrote a letter to the president.
Tough, says the man of the people. You’ll get it and you’ll like it.
Now, Hillary has said she’s against TPP. But remember, she’s the one who, as the esteemed journalist Carl Bernstein has pointed out, has “a difficulty with the truth”. She and her people took special pains to banish specifically anti-TPP language from the Democratic Convention Platform. And then she goes and chooses as her Vice President Tim Kaine, Wall Street suck-up and, as a senator, would-be enabler of TPA, which will go even further toward grinding American democracy into the dirt, with its mandated up-or-down vote (no questions allowed). So much for reasoned, thoughtful discourse. What is the Hill trying to tell us with her choice of Kaine and with her choice of Ken Salazar as Transition Chief? Salazar, too, is a big fan of TPP (and, for that matter, fracking). Why, when it came time for the Vice Presidential choice, did she throw Elizabeth Warren under the bus? Did Wall St demand it? Was it some kind of public agenda, private agenda kind of thing.
We found out about that one (as if we didn’t already know) through her recently hacked Wall Street speeches; public agenda-private agenda is Hillary-talk for the bald-faced lying she does to the American people while telling the real truth to her friends and enablers on Wall St. And what if the vision of her private agenda eventually has us all living under the cruel boot heels of TPP? Look for more poverty. Less jobs. More misery. And, if Noam Chomsky is right – if the Trump phenomenon is a revolt of all the guys who work out on the loading dock, or have no job at all – then more Trumps.
And what about Robert Kagan, who threw a fundraiser for the presidential candidate in 2016. Rather than do the patriotic thing and rebuke him, she went after the proceeds with both hands. Now Robert Kagan is a neoconservative. His Project for A New American Century lobbied throughout the 1990s and into the new century for war in Iraq. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t bring that up during her campaign speeches and if Trump were anything else but a half-wit he would have challenged her on this matter during their first debate. But he’s not and he didn’t. It even makes you wonder if her penitential, oft-repeated apology for her Iraq war vote (it was a “mistake”) is merely part of her public, politically expedient agenda. It makes you wonder if her true feelings; i.e., her private agenda, sides with fanatics like Robert Kagan and the rest of the neocons. With the Hill in charge, get ready for ever-expanding, never-ending war in the Middle East.
And there’s Russia. Russia serves as a convenient foil for many of her recent embarrassments (i.e., email hacks, and the aforementioned Wall Street speeches). But check out Glenn Greenwald’s “In The Democratic Echo Chamber, Inconvenient Truths Are Recast As Putin Plots.” The ever-capable Greenwald shows that there’s no evidence whatsoever to prove the fact Putin or his countrymen had anything do with it and statements to the contrary are likely part of the formidable Clinton propaganda machine. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Clinton surrogate, has accused Putin of attempting to rig the US election. Foreign Policy magazine calls these kind of allegations “the very kind of thing a President Clinton might repeat to justify war with Russia.”
The Warrior Queen has lobbied for years for a no-fly zone in Syria, against the wishes of the Obama administration. She’s admitted in private that it will cost many Syrian lives to knock out the anti-aircraft batteries alone. And most of the anti-aircraft batteries are Russian-made. What happens if the Russians don’t like the idea? What happens if they want to put a plane in the sky? Good question. Chris Wallace asked it of Hillary in the third debate, to which he received no answer. This August she told an audience she will respond to (perceived) Russian cyber attacks with “serious political, economic and military responses.”
But chill, Clintonistas. Trump’s going to lose. What can you say about a guy who’s badmouthed John McCain (for being a prisoner of war), a set of gold-star parents (for losing a son in the service of his country), all women, President Obama and Mitt Romney and who has the blessing of the Ku Klux Klan, to boot. Trump, Trump. Take that Trump. Yes, there’s a gaiety in the air. Why, just this morning HuffPo ran the headline, “Cher Slams Donald Trump On the Today Show.”
But there’s some lines from a Springsteen song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” that some of us just can’t get out of our heads:
Shelter line stretching around the corner,
Welcome to the New World Order