Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

Well, it’s official. With the long-expected Clinton endorsement from “liberal” media bastion The New York Times, we can finally begin an earnest discussion about what “mainstream liberalism” actually means in this country. What it doesn’t mean is the revitalization of the social safety net, authentic socialized medicare, or a concerted revolution in inner city education. Neither does it mean a rapprochement in terms of foreign policy with the increasingly alienated Islamic world.

As far as the economic/political elite in America is concerned, this needs to be a century of emboldened militarism as they race across the RISK board/map of the world to secure resources for the next two generations. For realists, there just isn’t any other choice. And as “incandescent” as Barack Obama may be, the Times knows that Hillary will be able to make the kind of hard choices and bold moves that, frankly, George W. Bush couldn’t have made on his own. Call her neo-con lite… but that’s the reality. As the Times wrote in their January 25 editorial, Hillary has “used her years in the Senate well to immerse herself in national security issues, and has won the respect of world leaders and many in the American military. She would be a strong commander in chief.”

I agree with the appraisal, but for very different reasons than the Times has outlined.

What the Times, and no other mainstream publication, has had the inclination to say is that Hillary has been in the Pentagon’s good books for a lot longer than her time in the Senate. Is it such ancient history now, that these journalists can’t remember Iran-Contra? Or maybe we’ve all forgotten. Just ask yourself this simple question.

Q: Where was it that the infamous drug planes, carrying cocaine from Colombia and returning with weapons for the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras, were landing?

A: Mena Air Force. In Arkansas.

Forget the fact that Bill Clinton’s Little Rock (aka Crack Rock) became coke central once all the bags started being off-loaded from narco-courier Barry Seals‘ plane. Or the cover-ups of witness murders that became routine under Bubba’s tenure (GNN interviewed award winning Arkansas journalist Mara Leveritt about these charges and the facts are chilling). All you really need to know is that one of the closed-door witnesses to the Iran-Contra hearings was Hillary Clinton, then-partner in the Rose Law Firm which allegedly negotiated contracts for “tenants” at Mena Airport, including disgraced Clinton associate, and Rose partner, Webb Hubbell. And it doesn’t take a highly logical leap to understand that she wasn’t a closed-door witness because of some old airplane parts being stored at the airport. [And the fact that both Hillary and death-by-suicide White House counsel Vince Foster were both Rose partners doesn’t do much to quell the conspiracy fervor. Suffice it to say, these people were highly sophisticated actors in the realms of intelligence and national politics.]

Because Big Media never went that far in-depth into the story, little is publicly know about the Rose Law Firm’s role in Iran-Contra. But it’s become the stuff of conspiracy legend. I mean, you only need to goto Political Friendster’s page on the scandal to find this summary:

“Hillary was on the witness list for the closed door session of the investigations. Senior partner in Rose law firm which negotiated many secret CIA contracts at the Mena airport for various tenants…”

But that’s not really the point. The point is that the Clintons have been involved with US intelligence for a long time. And though much was made of the Clinton-Bush feud in the run-up to the ‘92 election as Americans were drawn into a so-called “culture war” between the left and right, the Clinton administration merely sustained the economic and military policies favored by the elite. As I wrote in Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing:

Writing in his book Contours of Descent, economist Robert Pollin noted dryly, “the general requirement of product differentiation in an electoral market entails that, at the margin, any Democratic president will offer more social concessions than a Republican of the same cohort. But we should be careful not to make too much of such differences in the public stance of these two figures, as against the outcomes that prevail during their terms of office.” Pollin’s book targets the supposed ’90s “boom” under Bill Clinton, explaining that, even while Clinton was seen as a friend of the poor, his policies actually did more to harm average workers whose wages stagnated as they faced more job insecurity than under his Republican predecessor, Bush Sr. So, the theory goes, while modern day political leaders trade off their party’s conservative or liberal legacy to keep voters entranced, in reality, as country music legend Waylon Jennings once said, “There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.”

Clinton pushed through the disastrous NAFTA, bombed Serbia (and effectively established the Bondsteel military base, which as Chalmers Johnson writes, is “the largest and most expensive base constructed since the Vietnam War”), and bombed and sanctioned Iraq for the entirety of his presidency, creating the “soft target” that became the legacy of George W. Bush.

Hardly the stuff of a bleeding heart…

The liberal establishment knows that whichever party is able to associate the other party with extremists, tends to win, as John Avlon, one of the strategists for the Giuliani campaign, told me. The reason Bill Clinton was the first Dem president to be re-elected since FDR was because he chose the middle way. As much as the fundamentalists in the red states hated him, the financial/political elite knew he was batting for them.

And so will Hillary.

And this endorsement from the Times just before the crucial - but not decisive - South Carolina primary, shows that the liberal establishment is putting their cards on the table. According to the Times, Hillary Clinton is “more qualified, right now, to be president.” But if there is one thing we have learned from the last 8 years, it is that the President is merely a figurehead. I mean, this isn’t frontpage news. But it’s never been so plain to see that someone could be elected President and still proceed with policy initiatives and military objectives without the intellectual capital required to make those decisions alone.

In that sense, Obama - who would clearly pull all the same advisers that Hillary would, should he gain the nomination - is just as capable a leader. The only difference is that he is not the choice of the Pentagon who see the next 8 years as critical to re-asserting American dominance in the world. Hillary has shown that she can keep secrets. And that she will do the bidding of the US military. Obama just hasn’t earned that trust. Whether we believe it or not, for these people America is at war. And I sincerely fear for Obama if he comes out strong in Super Tuesday. He has no idea who he is up against.

And clearly, neither does The New York Times.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.