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Of course, I could be wrong.
Of course, everyone could have overestimated Sanders as a leader that stands firm, myself included. Of course, he could have just sold out and merely folded to Clinton after working his behind off competing against her, not only abandoning his supporters and most things he fought for, but literally throwing them all under the Hillary neocon Wall Street bus. Of course, this election could have been just a game to him, a nice little ego trip, a symbolic medal for all the years he has fought for his ideals as a minority in Congress. Finally public acknowledgement and support – a chance to be heard and to lead. A chance that came to what still feels like a very abrupt end today.
But why am I getting the feeling, now, after all this, after nominating Hillary, that he is up to something?
Wishful thinking? Definitely. But he might know something he ain’t telling. Just setting it up for now. I turned off youtube in the middle of the DNC roll call today because it was just too awful to watch. It was about 1100 votes to 700 then, Hillary-Sanders. And yet Sanders wanted the roll call. He set his foot down to have it happen today. He also organized with his brother, of his utmost trust and confidence, for the latter to nominate him. Then, after all this, he hands it over to Hillary, folding.
Now it had occurred to me in the past the simple fact that if anything were to happen to Hillary, it’s him for the Dems. Anything as in an indictment or wikileaks. With the Clintons having bought off the Justice System and the FBI, wikileaks is all that’s left.
And now I am getting the feeling that Sanders’ plan isn’t just to ride off into the sunset, head sunken, and write his little book on his (defeated and deflated) revolution, as he has announced. He looked almost ebullient as he announced his nomination of Clinton. Does that make any sense at all? What’s all the happiness about, just the symbolic fact that he still got many delegate votes?
For the life of me, I can’t find the final tally of the DNC’s roll call today anywhere on the Net. I suppose tomorrow it will be easier.
To finish, then, are all these little tidbits and clues about Sanders just mirages in the current political wasteland of American politics? Was Sanders bought off, did he quit, fold, or is something actually up?
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Updated August 1st, 2016:
OK, so I read that Sanders didn’t give Hillary his database of millions of supporters! And that he hasn’t denied he might run for president in 2020. Aha. So I think that’s his game. Fold now to work the bases so that he can run in 2020.
In any case, shameful. He could have run now. It doesn’t do much, but he’s helping Canova beat Debbie in Florida. Ha.
This is a really smart comment:
The man made an arena full of Republicans stand up and cheer as he pledged to protect the LGBTQ community.
The Republican party voted for a former Democrat liberal businesses man as their candidate.And the Democratic party picked a neo con big business backed hawk.
Indeed – and that just goes to show what a failure the US is as a country and as a political system. But you must be getting tired of hearing me saying it. Still, I find it rather bizarre. So again it’s this weird center that congregates most of the American voting public. Whether it’s more neocon (Hillary) or more anti-globalist but pro-military (Trump), you see that all the candidates that were very left on geopolitics/Wall Street (Bernie and Stein) or very right on culture war issues (Cruz, Carson, Rubio, etc.) lost badly.
Although Pence is really conservative and Kaine is somewhat conservative.
My comment left at Lionel Media’s video on Trump’s 60 minute interview:
Lionel is to his stupid support of LGBT “rights” what Hillary is to Wall Street and war. Shills who don’t have any decency or knowledge about what is a world with human rights. Just as we can’t expect Hillary to be honest about the damage that her agenda brings, we can’t expect Lionel to realize the problems with his homosexual agenda. He mentions he deplores the fact that today language has become crude and vulgar, along with the ideas expressed (or maybe he’s jumped on the “vulgarity is OK” bandwagon) – and who do we have to thank for that? Liberals (which includes the LGBT) – the people normalizing homosexuality, porn, and promiscuity, abortion on demand, adultery, and who are responsible for a lot of sexual harassment and sexual violence in society – as it couldn’t be otherwise.
In an exchange with a liberal troll the other day, he kept asking why Christians “hate women” because of the several passages in the Bible where women are mistreated, raped, etc. And I told him his question was rich given it came from a liberal that supports pornography (and I’m sure many more evil things), since there is nothing that contains more material that degrades and does violence to women than porn. Not just to women, because it’s one of the main venues for homosexual pigs to present themselves. The Bible is particularly tame compared to the extreme debasing of sex and women that all kinds of porn present. In short, that’s what the two sides of American society give us – either they are war perverts or sexual perverts – or both, such as the Clintons and also Trump, although I do agree with Lionel that Trump seems like a Clinton lite. My prediction is he will act quite similarly to Clinton if elected though.
All these idiots who are saying, “We know how repugnant Clinton is, but we don’t know what Trump will be like” are leading themselves into playing the role of Charlie Brown in Lucy holds the football.
And to this comment from One Man 1970:
It’s always the innocent who are killed in these “terrorist” attacks that pay the price for the horrible wars and killings the French are doing abroad.
…
The French, stupid and corrupt as they are, are not focusing on killing less innocent people abroad, nor destroying less other countries, nor bringing to justice their grotesque military and politicians who enable these wars and horrors. No – they want to stop the “terrorist attacks” – which are a reaction to all the killing the French are doing to other innocent people abroad, notably in Africa and the Middle East.
Every time I hear one of these people who were there on the Promenade saying, “Oh my god, it was like a war zone, with bodies all over it, so horrible,” I feel like telling them, “See? That’s what the French, the Americans, and the British are doing to poor people in Africa and the ME every single week.”
…
You have to agree that a lone wolf attack like this – with something that is not a standard weapon – is a brilliant attack from a tactical perspective, because it is very easy to carry out (relatively speaking), it requires basically only one person, it’s incredibly cheap, it raises no suspicions if carried out in a minimally smart way (and this guy was really smart about how he went about it), and it causes a huge impact. The damage and the media attention is just berserk. I mean, he alone killed about as many people as the November attacks which were much, much more complicated. Lastly, this kind of attack, as some authorities already underscored, is basically impossible to prevent.
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I was extremely impressed by an account of an “action guy” who died tried to get on the truck to stop the driver. From the little information that was given, the guy was on a motorcycle, and he cuts in front of the truck (?), then tries to grab onto the door near the driver, but the driver shoots at him, and he falls and dies overrun (?) by the truck. It was an eyewitness account and there wasn’t a lot of detail. But just with this little bit of information, I was just stunned at this guy’s capacity to just dive into action, like a scene from one of those action movies – except this was real life. Just incredible. Just amazing how someone could think about all this in a split second and just go into serious action, risking their life and all. I mean, just running out of the way of the truck is one thing, but this? Wow.
Updated on July 23: OK, so now the media has identified this guy (Franck) who told in more detail what happened. It’s still very amazing. His wife was with him on the motorcycle. His son was at the square the truck was heading to. He made a decision right then to try to save his son’s life even if he got killed in the process. He tells his wife to get off the motorcycle. He then nears the truck and ditches the motorcycle. He continues on foot, manages to jump and cling to the truck’s door with one arm and starts punching the driver with his free arm. He says the “terrorist” didn’t even flinch! Terrorist grabs his gun and points at his face but gun doesn’t fire. Finally terrorist hits guy on his head with the gun and the guy falls off. Another guy who was also on a bike (Alexandre Migues) tried to do something similar. And he obviously wasn’t shot in the head so we have to ask: did the terrorist actually have bullets? Or just a malfunctioning gun? However, the description of what took place from grainy footage in the news report describes things a bit differently.
…
What was the response from the Nazi French regarding this attack? They’ve just announced they are going to bomb more people in the Middle East. They are going to kill more innocent people – hence there will be more “terrorist” attacks.
We live in a world where there are big terrorist governments (e.g., the US, UK, and France) and small terrorist groups. The scale of horrors from the terrorist governments is much bigger than from the terrorist groups – although you’d never ever know this from Western media. And the so-called terrorist groups are often covertly funded by the terrorist governments in the West to fight their proxy wars. You have to say, it’s a horrible world.
I commented on the images in the media on my previous post about the attacks. I am just dumbfounded that we never see pictures of people dying and being blown up in the wars in African and the Middle East. They are being killed and killed and the Western media basically never show their bodies, their faces, their identities, they never interview the survivors, they never tell of their suffering…
You have to say, it’s very Nazi. It’s like the Jews just disappearing and disappearing and no one cared to know who they were.
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Not a good time for the Olympics right now – not only because of the terrorism threat. This is not a new thought for me – I had already really felt disgusted at the Winter Olympics last time and at other games before that. This is how I saw the last Winter Olympics: mostly just a huge expensive party for privileged kids from rich countries who promote a way of life that is totally disconnected from the horrible reality of many people around the world, including that brought about by poverty, oppression, and wars which their governments are profoundly enmeshed in producing. I was often disgusted while watching the Games because of this context.
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Added July 20:
LOL!
“Nice est la ville la plus vidéosurveillée de France avec 1400 caméras visionnées par différents agents 24h/24 au CSU (Centre de supervision urbain). ”
So what do we find out now? Nice is the most camera-monitored city in France with 1,400 cameras! And yet the guy went ahead right under their noses. I saw an article describing the terrorist saying “he wasn’t very intelligent.” Maybe not, in the intellectual sense – but the guy outsmarted 60 million French idiots without much effort! The article above in francebleu also talks about the fact that France has two laws prohibiting these big trucks from circulating at certain times. And yet nobody told the truck not to circulate. Why not? Because the city needs to give out exceptions to trucks making deliveries, etc., to all the restaurants and bars, for example. You know the French can’t be deprived of drinking their wine and having their cheese while their military is murdering masses of innocent people in Africa and the ME.
So I see that we are full steam ahead in the post-attack “find the people to be blamed!” stage.
The police, the city council, the prefecture, Hollande and Valls, everyone is now the target of blame, criticism, and seething anger coming from everyone else in a big huffing and puffing circus.
The police has defended itself saying that while they have this enormous quantity of cameras, they can’t assign an agent simply to watch one little screen 24/7 – this would mean 1,400 agents just sitting there for each 8 hour shift, or 4,200 agents just sitting on their stupid French behinds for a round-the-clock coverage – not counting weekends, because you know the French don’t work on weekends. LOL! In other words, most of the their camera system is ineffective, not to say useless. Now what I’d be really curious about is just how many agents they currently employ to watch these 1,400.cameras. Like three? I would not be surprised.
The French president has also put a call out to French citizens to join their reservists. Oh, a militia! Here it is, folks. You’re watching it right before your eyes. The Milice française, or French Militia, is growing again.
What a disgusting world.
…
July 23, 2016:
Heh! New act in the Nice attack circus: the French government wants all video evidence of the attack destroyed. Unbelievable. Told ya – the French are corrupt to the core. I was surprised that the city of Nice stood firm and refused – but maybe they are afraid their heads will roll as scapegoats if the government has them destroy the footage – given all the compensation lawsuits that lie ahead.
Not only that, now my curiosity is extremely peaked at what that footage actually contains in this regard. I mean, it must be something quite damning about the police.
Added:
And I have found part of my answer: an interview with the policewoman (Sandra Bertin) that heads the police video surveillance center in Nice. She says that less than 24 hours after the attack, she was harassed by someone from the government to lie about the presence of French national police at the attack site – contrary to what appeared in the screens/videos she was watching at the time. She has refused to lie and she has told the media about it! Hah! And that’s one answer as to why the French government wanted to have them erase the security videos. They are going to be creamed with lawsuits – which are going to claim the government failed in its duty to provide the proper police security for such an event. The corrupt-to-the-core French are at it again! They lost this round however. Her full interview will be published tomorrow – it should make for an interesting reaction. 🙂
From prostitution (and porn and homosexuality) promoter magazine Vanity Fair: an article promoting prostitution for young people – especially with older adults. Surprise.
Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy
A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation? Nancy Jo Sales investigates.
Excerpts:
“Basically every gay dude I know is on Seeking Arrangement,” says Christopher, 23, a Los Angeles film editor. “And there are so many rent boys,” or young gay men who find sex-work opportunities on sites like RentBoy, which was busted and shut down in 2015 by Homeland Security for facilitating prostitution. “Now people just go on RentMen,” says Christopher.
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“We talked a lot about agency” when conceiving The Girlfriend Experience, says producer Steven Soderbergh (who directed a movie of the same name in 2009), “and the idea that you have this young woman who is going into the workforce and ends up in the sex-work industry, where she feels she has more control and is respected more than she is at her day job,” at a law firm.
[So since prostitution is a horrendous kind of activity – this really is just underscores how disgusting law firms in a grotesque capitalist society like the US are! ]
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Meanwhile, sugaring has its own extensive community online—also known as “the sugar bowl”—replete with Web sites and blogs. On Tumblr, babies exchange tips on the best sugaring sites and how much to charge. They post triumphant pictures of wads of cash, designer shoes, and bags.
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Really – designer shoes and bags. These young women are debasing themselves and sexuality for some designer shoes and bags – and they call this agency. They couldn’t be more daft, they couldn’t have more of a perverted understanding of what’s important in life and in themselves, they couldn’t be cheaper – and here they are desperate, desperate for some crap with some label on it. Just to feel valued in the grotesque peer environment they live in.
Agency for patriarchal sluts is like this. As I would say to them – patriarchy has you where they want you. Imagine this! Women brain-washed to prostitute themselves to men (who can care less about them and who have a deformed view of relationships and sex) and who tell themselves this is agency – and feminism. Agency starts with the capability to think critically and to have a healthy mindset. No ability to think – no agency. Just another brainwashed slut serving patriarchy (or its homosexual variant). Because you know what garbage of people LGBTs are.
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On Facebook, there are private pages where babies find support for their endeavors as well. On one, members proudly call themselves “hos” (sometimes “heaux”) and post coquettish selfies, dressed up for “dates.” They offer information on how to avoid law enforcement and what they carry to protect themselves (knives, box cutters, pepper spray). They give advice on how to alleviate the pain of bruises from overzealous spanking and what to do when “scammers” refuse to pay. They ask questions: “How do you go about getting started in sex work? I’m honestly so broke.”
And here is where really begins to intrude the “sex work is just another kind of work” lies. Tips on how to protect themselves from violence? What for? Could it be because they are putting themselves at risk by being alone with some grotesque stranger? Tips for “alleviating the pain of bruises”? Bruises?
“Agency” for the most ideologically enslaved women is like this: bruises. Knives. Calling themselves “hos”. Look at the respect, the freedom, the “agency”.
Throughout this article, I also wondered how much of it was made up. Because you know, Vanity Fair. In any case, they tell us this about the profile of some of these young people:
They were squeezed by college tuition, crushed by student loans and the high cost of living. Many of their parents were middle- or upper-middle-class people who had nothing to spare for their children, derailed by the economic downturn themselves. And so they did “cake sitting”—a specialty service for a fetish that craves just what it says—or stripping or Webcamming or sugaring. Some beat people up in professional “dungeons”; others did “scat play,” involving sex with feces. They did what they felt they had to do to pay their bills.
Is this a complete fabrication from Vanity Fair? I mean, their description doesn’t seem to make any sense. If the parents are upper middle class, how can they have nothing to spare for their kids? The only way I see that happening is if the parents hate their own children, and are stingy – which happens with a certain frequency – but there’s no mention of that. They speak of upper middle class families as if they were living under a bridge.
One more:
“Being in the L.A. atmosphere, and at the age of 16 or 17 going out in nightlife—it’s all very based on appearance,” Alisa says. “Out here, as long as you’re wearing Saint Laurent and the newest items, that’s all people care about, so my friends and I were obsessed with fashion. I think with our generation, Instagram also has a lot to do with it—people are constantly posting what they have.” She’s explaining that she became a sugar baby in order to buy luxury goods.
You see why Fidel Castro is cool? Because he has a vision for young people to become doctors, engineers, social workers, to build a society together. I’m dying to go to Cuba to see “sur place” what is it like. Just how bad are the problems? Just how much have they been able to achieve despite the US having done everything to destroy them?
This is what the US has to offer to the world: a society of prostitutes and johns – with girls and boys who do it so they can have some designer bag! It’s enough to make you weep. But for Americans, it’s normal! And it wasn’t like that a couple of generations ago – but things are changing. For the worse.
And look at all that agency here:
“I haven’t done it [prostitution] in a really long time,” she says, “solely because of how it made me feel. Like it just makes you feel worthless ‘cause they don’t pay attention to your brain, they don’t care what you have to say. They just care that you’re attractive and you’re listening to them. I don’t want to ever have to look back and think, like, I made it to this point just because I used my body to get there.”
Huhoh! Couldn’t get more patriarchal than that, could it? And capitalist.
And look at the heaps of “feminism” here:
Jenna says that a friend of hers was sexually assaulted by a man she met on a sugaring site. “She didn’t want to report it,” she says, “because she didn’t want her parents to know what she was doing.”
Keeping quiet about being sexually assaulted is so feminist!
And look at how much respect they really get:
But it wasn’t real dating, and after a while it began to bother her, as she realized the men, although “generally nice,” didn’t actually respect her. “I think the sugar daddies just see the sugar babies as whores,” she says. “They would never consider a monogamous relationship with someone who would need to do this to survive. It’s like a class thing. They see you as beneath them, desperate.
No, idiot – prostitution is not dating. And here we can see how these young women have to create a completely fake persona, and can never be themselves – because agency!
Miranda is 22 and has the wavy bobbed hair and clipped mid-Atlantic accent of a 1930s movie star; she grew up in a Texas suburb. “I’ve learned how to look like this, talk like this,” she says. “I work hard at being this,” meaning someone who can charge $700 an hour for sex.
Then she adds:
Now, she says, she has a rotation of three regular “clients”—”a top Austin lawyer, a top architect, and another tech guy,” all of them married. She adds, “Their relationships are not my business.”
Well, I’d be curious if their families felt that way as well. You know, I mentioned this article to some married women I know, and I was surprised they all said they thought the wives of these three guys would certainly not agree if they knew. I rather had imagined them differently. I had imagine their wives to be quite the prostitutes themselves – only they are married to only one guy. In other words, I imagine them to want the designer bags and shoes – and that they would put up with these men and their affairs and use of prostitutes just so they could live an upper class life.
I can’t know – but there would be nothing better than to throw the names of these guys into the public light and find out. And that goes for all the men and women using these sites. Nothing wrong? Than do it openly.
Lastly – there’s a lot to say about the language used to embellish prostitution and to hide the violence and degradation inherent to it – but the use of the word “daddy” is particularly sick given its incestuous connotation.
Did this Tunisian/French guy, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, do this “terrorist” attack because of geopolitical reasons? I really don’t know. First, nothing in his profile presents any direct link to ISIS or any other specific political group. Second, he was not part of a mosque or of Islam. Third, as any sane person, I don’t believe a word of what French authorities say until independent proof is furnished.
Let me first say that I was surprised the French police just didn’t find the guy’s passport right next to the driver’s wheel, just misplaced there by oversight, with a refugee status stamp, with the date of the photograph taken the next day of the attack, if you catch my drift.
And now that “the usual suspects” have been rounded up (and taken into arrest – as if that were necessary – but in a police state, you know where fundamental legal rights lie: in the trash can), we find all weird things about the state of mind of the guy, but nothing, nothing that says he was wired into politics or “terrorism”. So he was a loner, and sometimes aggressive, and had been nasty to his ex-wife. OK, there are millions of people with this profile who aren’t political terrorists. Many millions.
And, ISIS, of all people, didn’t claim right away it was any of their doing. Nor did any other group. It took ISIS a long time to finally come out and state that the guy was a “soldier” for them. Big red flag. If he had directly been one of them, ISIS would have been screaming the fact even before people had finished running from the scene.
The problem here is that ISIS would have all the interest in the world to pretend this guy was one of them, even if he wasn’t, because it serves wonderful propaganda purposes for them – given the very successful and smart attack. And the French government, who wants to continue its mass murder and plunder of Africa and the Middle East, and needs to cover up its evil deeds with a phony claim of “war on terror”, would want to also lie and make this into another ISIS/terrorist/Islamic attack even if it wasn’t one.
Now, of course, maybe Bouhlel decided to do this attack for political ME/ISIS reasons. And he simply kept quiet about all his plans and just shuffled along until the final day. Maybe he was angry about French society, but not geopolitics in particular. Maybe he was suicidal and angry regarding his personal life, and wanted to be remembered as he took his own life, so he decided to take many people with him. Maybe his attack had to do with French politics regarding Tunisia – not ISIS. There are so many possibilities. One thing is clear, in the hypothesis that this was some other kind of suicide, both the French authorities and ISIS have lots of reasons to lie that his was an ISIS-related act. Therefore, we will probably never know the truth. At least not until real proof surfaces.
I did a little venting yesterday on the NPR site, in the comment section of this article:
‘Sheer Terror’ As Attack Along French Riviera Kills At Least 84
regarding the Nice attack. (Am I the only person that, when reading headlines in English about the attack, mostly goes default on the pronunciation of the word Nice as it is pronounced in English? 🙂
In any case, the comment section was infested by American neocons and Muslim haters who were shrieking there fanaticism at the top of their typing lungs. The majority of people in the US, UK, and France are incredibly primitive and Nazi-like when it comes to geopolitics.
So I vented a bit – responding repeatedly by highlighting the ugly simple truth of the world we currently live in:
The US, UK, and France have killed and continue to kill millions of innocent people around the world, especially in the ME and Africa, in their endless corrupt wars to put their grubby hands on resources and to exploit other people. They are terrorist governments and military and do a lot more evil and damage in the world than any little so-called “terrorist” group. These “terrorist” attacks in the West are a blow-back from all the death and destruction the West is currently inflicting on other people.
Sample retorts:
- ===========
the US, the UK and France have murdered or provided the weapons for
the murder of many more innocent people than the number killed by ISIS,
but please continue your nonsense. And most of ISIS’s weapons were all
provided from Western powers, which explains why they’re fighting Assad
and the US hates the idea of Russia killing them all.
_____________________
As you can see, I was “on message” all the time. Very Nicely on message. 🙂 Oh, and speaking of Nicely, two more:
Toulouse your head or not to Toulouse your head is the question in such a situation.
That would be Brest but I don’t think I Cannes.
________
Idk99: More senseless truck violence.
Alessandra Reflections: There are no Seine people left, I tell you.
Back to serious issues, the problem with this ugly ugly propaganda from the US, UK, and France was also summarized in a few other comments at The Guardian:
The Nice attack reminds us that France is at war –
Did Iraq or Afghanistan invade France, Australia, Britain or the US?
The US and NATO attack country after country even while financing and arming terrorists to cause even more attacks, and then use attacks on Western citizens (mostly by deranged individuals) to justify what they have been doing all along. It’s totally criminal and the citizens of the West have been propagandized to believe that they are innocent and undeservingly attacked.
No one needs reminding the whole world is at war, not least the millions who have died due to the proxy crusades. The attacks from both sides have become more deadly and more frequent. And in what, the name of oil? Each attack desensitises the world to death further, to the point that people are now suggesting criminals be deported.. To where – labour camps? That mistake has been made before and it seems it could again. War is profitable and there are no winners apart from those financing it.
Haiti atrocities
Genocide in Algeria
Indochina atrocities
Pacific nuclear tests
Rainbow warrior bombing
Bombing in Iraq and SyriaThe French aren’t the egalitarian, innocent victims they make themselves out to be. Then there’s Chad, Lybia, Mali, and all the Northern and Central African countries the French love to exploit and destroy…
The war against terrorism was invented by Ronald Reagan. Ironically the US is only country found guilty of terrorism in the International Court of Justice.
Thankfully many commenters commented on the idiocy of the article’s title repeating the same idiocy that Hollande proffered back in November: now France is at war!
Now! And when it was bombing and killing people in myriad wars and committing every kind of atrocity against innocent people around the world, it was what? Peace?
These people are such Nazis! The West is such a fraud, such a fraud!
Here is the best article so far on the Sanders’ sell-out to criminal, vile Clinton:
The worst disservice Sanders has done to his supporters, other than to lead them on a wild goose chase for real change, is to virtually ignore his rival’s vaunted “experience.” He need not have mentioned Hillary Clinton’s Senate record, since there was nothing there; her stint as law-maker was merely intended to position her for a run for the presidency, according to the family plan. But there was a lot in her record as Secretary of State.
As she recounts in her memoir, she wanted a heftier “surge” in Afghanistan than Obama was prepared to order. Anyone paying attention knows that the entire military mission in that broken country has been a dismal failure producing blow-back on a mind-boggling scale, even as the Taliban has become stronger, and controls more territory, than at any time since its toppling in 2001-2002.
Hillary wanted to impose regime change on Syria in 2011, by stepping up assistance to armed groups whom (again) anyone paying attention knows are in cahoots with al-Nusra (which is to say, al-Qaeda). In an email dated Nov. 30, 2015, she states her reason: “The best way to help Israel…is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”
In her memoir she criticizes Obama for not doing more to oust the secular Assad regime. She has repeatedly stated during her campaign that she favors a no-fly zone over Syria, like the one she advocated for Libya. That means conflict with Russia, which is bombing sites in Syria, with the permission of its internationally recognized government, under what Russia’s leaders (and many rational people) consider to be terrorists’ control.
Sanders–sorry, I cannot call him “Bernie” anymore, since he has become precisely as avuncular as Dick Cheney–could have effectively attacked Hillary the Skjaldmær (Old Norse for “Shield-maiden,” referring to an often berserk warrior-woman) for her role in the destruction of Libya. But no! Always referring to her deferentially as “Secretary Clinton”—as though her actions in that role merit respect—he rarely alluded to her greatest crime at all. That’s unforgivable.
(Yes, in one debate he mentioned Libya in passing—timidly, and with no follow-up. While he repeatedly mentioned how The Secretary had voted for the Iraq War and he hadn’t, he hardly exuded moral outrage about that or any other Clinton decision. His campaign was all about her Wall Street ties and well-paid, secret talks, the transcripts of which he once wanted to see but has now apparently lost interest. It was never about “foreign policy,” which is supposedly her forte. He may call himself a “socialist,” but he’s no anti-imperialist. He has voted in favor of every “defense spending” bill, supported the NATO assault on Serbia in 1999, supported Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014, etc.)
He could have attacked Clinton savagely—with the savagery of mere matter-of-fact honesty—by citing those emails exchanged between Clinton and her vicious confidant and former adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter, in which the latter—under the subject line “bravo!”—congratulates her on engineering Obama’s agreement for the bombing of Libya. (On March 19, 2011, as the bombing of Libya began, Slaughter wrote: “I cannot imagine how exhausted you must be after this week, but I have NEVER been prouder of having worked for you. Turning [Obama] around on this is a major win for everything we have worked for.”
He could have quoted that email from Sidney Blumenthal, that Svengali figure who has long been Clinton’s unofficial mentor (along with Henry Kissinger and others): “No-fly! Brava! You did it!” (Brava, if you’re interested, is the feminine form of Bravo.)
He could have repeatedly used that damning clip that reveals Hillary’s joy at the grotesque murder of Moammar Gadhafy—-who had become a friend of Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, and the CIA as of 2011—at the hands of Islamist thugs, who rammed a stick and knife up his anus on camera just to make it more humiliating. His ads could have started with some appropriately edited version of this. And ended with this. And left the people to draw their own conclusions.
He could have asked, “Why the hell did you appoint Dick Cheney aide Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Eurasia, and support and fund that coup in Ukraine in 2014 in your goddamn ambition to expand NATO?”
But no. He didn’t have it in him. And now he wants his youthful erstwhile followers to transfer their support to someone who is not only the embodiment of Wall Street, with all its blood-sucking and all its crookedness, but the personification of U.S. imperialism in an era when its depth of crisis has produced a state of perpetual war.
Savvy people in Syria and elsewhere surely understand what the Sanders endorsement means: Syria is the next Libya.
Hillary in the Oval Office, Binyamin Netanyahu at her side, will laugh as Assad gets her knife up his ass, chaos deepens, the draft is re-instated, and boys and girls—of all ethnicities, gay and straight together—march off to fight the Brava Wars drastically reducing youth unemployment and making legions more eligible for the GI Bill.
Even if Sanders doesn’t vote for the war (and why should there be a vote, after all, in this post-constitution era?), he will share responsibility.
Shame! And shame on any once “Bernie” supporter who follows him into his moral morass.
* * *
Feel the burn. The burn of the rigged system. Why be drawn into it—the object of Hillary’s praise, for switching so readily from him to her (for the sake of “unity”)?
What is there to unite with, but more corruption, exploitation, and wars based on lies?
The votes that matter are the votes on the street. Either Trump or Clinton will provoke mass upheaval. The key contribution of the Sanders campaign has been to lay bare for idealistic youth the magnitude of the rot in the system itself, while raising (however dishonestly) the prospect of “political revolution.”
It’s the hope Sanders has sold out. But yes, that’s what we need. Social, economic, and political revolution. Too bad he’s chosen the other side.
SteveM says (at The American Conservative):
July 8, 2016 at 9:18 am
Re: “If, knowing what we know of the congenital mendacity of Hillary Clinton, the nation chooses her as head of state and commander in chief, then that will tell us something about the America of 2016.”
Hillary is objectively a moral, ethical and performance based catastrophe. I.e., a corrupt, parasitic hack mediocrity.
That said, Hillary being where she is tells us two things about America in 2016.
The first is that the United States is run by a Deep State Crony Corruptocracy that allowed Hillary to be emplaced. And that pathological political-economic architecture cannot be unwound via the ballot box.
The second is that the American constitutional model (the 7 Articles delineating powers across the 3 branches of governance) is a fundamental failure. And because of its very nature, it cannot be repaired via constitutional means. I.e., the constitutional mechanisms for radically restructuring the 7 Articles are politically infeasible.
So there you have it.
P.S. Have I ever mentioned that you can stick a fork in America because it’s cooked?
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Indeed. The US has shown that its version of democracy is an abject failure. Financially, morally, and regarding systematic human rights violations, like wars – it is grotesque.
And, as SteveM wisely points to above, voting in for one political clown or another will not solve the problem, because it will not change the system that is enormously crooked. And, since Americans refuse to vote for honest politicians who want a true system change, they will not revolutionize the system through voted-in changes. What remains of this is that the ballot box serves in the end for nothing much. So much so that so many people in the US see no purpose in voting.
Thus the US’s Deep State Crony Corruptocracy and Mass Murder Machine is increasingly on display for all to see – in everyone’s face, as it couldn’t be otherwise – because it knows the American people are too corrupt, dizzy, mollified, or cowardly to take the powerful parasites on. The minority of honest and aware Americans who are aghast with the demise of ethics, decency, and rule of law in their usually beloved country can do little against a gigantic mass of idiotic and “march-along” citizens.
Which is one of the reasons I admire Fidel Castro so much. He saw how Americans plundered, how they destroyed people, how they treated everyone like dogs, unleashing horrible repression anytime anyone tried to have a minimally human society with human rights – always babbling along their idiocy about “freedom and democracy” while instituting the world’s most brutal dictatorships, along with their CIA torturers and their terrorizing – he saw the way Americans love to exploit the poor around the world as cheap labor and simply plunder all natural resources through violent coups, wars, and threats. Obviously a lot of American imperialism has been outsourced around to the world through local corrupt and brutal elites – which the world has never shortage of. It couldn’t be otherwise. This way, the US can pretend to its ignorant populace to be fighting for democracy abroad while bringing about death and destruction through all kinds of secret operations.
And yet Castro took on the deadly American machine. And he won.
It’s simple. People, once conditioned to follow a system, have an incredibly difficult time in re-thinking the system, especially its premises.
Why did people in so many European cultures, decade after decade, generation after generation, century after century, think of no alternative to the autocratic, violent, and undemocratic systems they had? Why did no one think of an alternative system to the strong-man rule cemented by a notion of “royalty”?
Likewise, Americans are on display for being incapable of thinking of any alternatives to their sham of a system, including the most important lies they have developed and hang on to.
For example, one of my favorites is the lie that you can separate government from religion, that it is possible not to have a state-sponsored religion. Americans love this lie. They have hung on to it fiercely. Part of this lie is the notion that Americans concretely separated religion from government and were able to create a satisfactory society.
As I have been saying, one must understand that an ideological system, whether it includes a notion of god (or gods) is irrelevant. Therefore, liberal ideology and Protestantism are both ideological systems – since every religion is an ideological system. At the same time, all ideological systems function as a religion does. What’s the main difference? Liberalism merely does not include the notion of a god.
When liberals say they have a government that has set religion apart, it merely means they have increasingly instituted their godless religion as the state-sponsored and enforced ideology, i.e., the state-sponsored religion.
But, given the stupidity and hypocrisy of liberals, they will refuse to admit that all they are doing is playing with labels, pretending that their liberal ideological system doesn’t function the very same way as any state-enforced religion.
Why this hasn’t been particularly obvious to most Americans, especially the religious ones, I cannot understand. I find it so obvious. But I rarely hear religious folks mention the above. Everyone remains so hung up on the label “religion” that they don’t look at the dynamics of both political ideologies and religion – wisely forgetting the labels.
That’s why I was very happy to see one comment, lone as it was, on The American Conservative, from a conservative, who seems is getting closer to seeing the light:
Dommerdog says July 2, 2016 at 4:28 am:
I’m no lawyer, and I’m certainly no constitutional scholar; but it seems to me that this ruling and all the other laws requiring people who run businesses to violate their own religious principles in order to accommodate consumers runs dangerously close to state establishment of religion.
I’m a layman myself, but you don’t have to be a scholar to see what is taking place. People are not blind. The pagan sex cult of the rainbow has just finished wrapping up its holy month with parades, politicians in tow, celebrating genitals and orgasms. It is the civic religion, the very thing that the founding fathers sought to avoid. Consolidation will be incremental but inexorable, and once the first amendment has been nullified (as advocated by Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet) the established state religion of sex and power will seek to ruthlessly crush its rivals, as has been broadcast in the NY Times and elsewhere.
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Indeed, the now dominant US liberals are saying, “Convert or be damned (and damned in this case means: suffer the state-enforced punishments for not following our liberal ideology-religion).”
As an aside, you also have to wonder about the American higher ed system. While it can be the world’s best in its most elite establishments, it fails completely to form a minimally intelligent populace. Or maybe this is because the percentage of people who finish college is dismal in the US (only 20%, and I speak from memory). And I don’t even know the percentage for those who go through grad school, obviously much tinier. And when I say “elite establishments”, I’m not speaking of fame (such as the myth of the superiority of Ivy League schools, or expensive private colleges), but of actual quality of teaching and learning.
And then, there is little a school can do if a person has firmly decided to cling on to a lie.
Which leads us to this other wonderful comment, also on TAC:
David Olm says:
July 2, 2016 at 12:46 pm
I think it was Jonathan Swift that said you cannot reason a man out of what he was not reasoned into in the first place, and that is what is scary about the society we are devolving into. You can demonstrate the patent nonsense of the left all day long (sexuality is as fluid as the ocean in transgenders but as fixed as Mt. Everest in homosexuals; the Bible actually condones homosexuality with the proper gnostic understanding of Hebrew and Greek translation) but it doesn’t matter with them at all. Because it is propaganda, not reason. And, as always, THE enemy of the Left is Christianity.
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And since the enemy of Christians is big, bad Russia and Putin – which everybody knows is just like Stalin; totally exaggerated threats from terrorists and ISIS; “communists”; or whatever 1950’s Cold War notions the commanders of the Right manage to twist around to manipulate the populace’s fears with in 2016, you could say that the stupid Right deserves the stupid Left in America – if it all didn’t have horrifying consequences for the world.
Reflections, Reflections by Alessandra 