Election Skullduggery – Page 7

Veepy Dearest

Published on September 3, 2008

One more thing, and then I’m done with Palin, or at least until the next revelation (which’ll could be anything; her husband runs guns for Alaskan secessionists or was Jimmy Jeff’s date at Bohemian Grove – anything). Whatever it is it’s bound to be grubby.

Although Trooper/Sprog/TreasonGate has been great entertainment given the candidate’s expressed religious and political views, the family situation is hardly uncommon. 17 year old daughters do get pregnant (usually by complete dorks and ne’er-do-wells), and especially so when they’ve been kept ignorant of how not to because of a misguided attempt to keep them ‘pure’. It happens. My own sister was a grandmother in her early forties too, a situation which gave me many enjoyable hours of sisterly schadenfreude. Hi Granny!

This time it happened to someone running for veep. Other than the momentary amusement and the justified outrage at continuing Republican hypocrisy, after the first flush of pleasurable derision it’s really no-one’s business, though it does make McCain’s advance vetting look worse than useless.

McCain insists that his VP pick was throroughly investigated and that he knew of Palin minor’s pregnancy before he announced the nomination. He appears to think that makes it all OK.

To me if McCain knew of Palin minor’s pregnancy beforehand, but nominated anyway, that actually makes it much, much worse.

It means Sarah Palin, the woman being projected as future MILF to the nation, simultaneously portrayed as a babe-librarian or a gun-toting survival chick, but primarily marketed by her party as a glossy conglomerate of Ma Walton and Raphael’s Madonna, is a terrible mother. One of the worst.

I know from terrible mothers; I am one. Without going into private family history I can assure readers there’s little you can tell me about awful parenting decisions. That said, I’m apalled.

All of this means that Palin knew very well her daughter was pregnant when she accepted the nomination – and unless she’s been hiding under a rock for the past century she’d have certainly also known that the media, ever hungry for prurient detail, would dive on the story like they would a line of free coke. Even Alaska gets the internet.

She must have known that they’d pry into her child’s private life and even into her pants – how could she not? – yet she accepted the nomination with alacrity. Knowing it would be bound to hurt one of her children, she did it anyway. That’s cold.

Worse still, she and her husband also went on to publicly take any and all decision-making capability regarding herself and her child entirely out of their daughter’s hands.

Not only is Palin making her daughter’s decisions re the pregnancy for her (ie that she will get married and be happy happy happy and photogenic ever after, seemingly regardless of her feelings or that of the putative father) her one criterion for making those decisions appears to be what would advance her political career.

I don’t know about any other parents following this story, but I don’t know one no matter how self-interested, who would so deliberately ruin their child’s future for their own personal advancement.

Parents make some tremendously ill-judged decisions and yes, children suffer because some parents are overly ambitious. But it’s usually a passive kind of harm, not delberate; being elsewhere at important moments, not paying enough attention, fobbing them off with money instead of time, letting them do something dodgy because it was easier than arguing and you’re just so damned tired… but it takes some hardnosed ruthlessness to sacrifice your child’s future to your own interests, publicly, and be so proud of it too.

I certainly don’t condemn Palin because she has five children and I don’t see why someone who does should not be vice-president – neither do I question someone’s ability to do the job because one of those children is disabled and needs extra care. Leaving aside Cheney’s activist vice-presidency it’s not that much of a job and besides, that’s what nannies, schools and nurses are for.

But I absolutely and unequivocally condemn someone who would drag her child through the tabloid mire, deliberately and with malice aforethought. She’s building her own glittering political future on her own child’s ruined hopes.

Nevertheless the right seem in thrall – but then they are well practiced at cognitive dissonance The GOP faithful at the Convention certainly have no problem with it whatsoever. Hypocrisy barely registers. But if McCain and his party think to have secured the undecided, independent woman voter with this transparent ploy then they are very much deluded.

I can’t be the only mother who’s looked at this situation and thought “Jeez, what a complete bitch.”

Pour Encourager Les Autres

Published on August 31, 2008

“A crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit…”
Freda Adler

Glenn Greenwald witnesses the political police swing pre-emptively into action in Minneapolis/St. Paul ahead of the GOP Convention:

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as “Do you have Terminator ready?” as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.

It’s like Genoa all over again, bar the murder, blood and broken bones, and if there hadn’t been journalists and a camera there no doubt there’d’ve been those in the Twin Cities, too.

It’s not even a partisan issue; one can almost understand rabid partisanship taken to extremes, but this kind of suppression of dissent and political collusion with police is common to both parties. The only difference is in the degree of force used. As Greenwald concludes:

The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

Well, I wouldn’t say the worst tactics, exactly. There are much worse than those – just ask the Argentinians or Chileans.

But still, this police/politician synergy is so strong that the wishes of the one are the policy of the other. There is way too much money to be made from modern paramilitary policing. There is a revolving door between policing, private security consulting and the trade in weapons and accoutrements. Take Blackwater for example….. there’s barely a police officer in the US who hasn’t attended it’s ~~mercenary training camp~~ police training centre. It’s the School of The Americas for cops.

Meanwhile in London, a senior police officer – no 3 on the force of the capital city – who is making a claim of race discrimination against the Met is so scared of death threats from his own colleagues he’s had to hire mercenaries himself. Who’s policing who?

In recent years it appears to have been been deliberate policy in Europe and in the US for police authorities to recruit right-wing meatheads who actively enjoy violence to do the politicians’ dirty work for them, and gladly.

Politicians and senior cops themselves needn’t get their hands dirty; when investigated it’s always a rogue cop what done it and in extremis there’s always medical or early retirement…

Paramilitary political police on both sides of the Atlantic need only a discreet nod from the pols (and sometimes not even that) to go in joyfully and with boots, taser and fists. They love that sort of thing: that’s why they’re police. For every saintly murdered copper, devoted village bobby or innocuous deputy sheriff there are ten barely-controlled thugs with plenty of hate and plenty of gusto.

Every now and then they get let off the leash and someone notices. This time is was Salon. Then it all goes back to normal and soon these incidents just become part of the wallpaper of normal life, like warrantless wiretapping, torture, routine tasering or prison rape.

For anyone to expect that police on any continent will do anything but suppress any person or movement that might put their industry or jobs in jeopardy is very naive indeed.

Attack Of The Thwarted Entitled

Published on August 27, 2008

The Democratic convention is playing beautifully well in the overseas media: Michelle Obama played a blinder, as is her wont (shame she’s not standing for something) and Hillary Clinton made opening speech of Campaign 2012 last night, to a sea of Obama/Unity placards.

Every Hillary supporting woman delegate interviewed by the BBC afterwards – most of them black, if I remember rightly, though I stand to be corrected without the video to hand; there may have been one white one – harped on, interminably on-message, on the theme of party unity. All was love and light and happy happy happy, with barely a dissenting voice to be heard.

Convention organisers and message managers in Denver can pat themselves on the back that they’ve managed to keep conflict so discreetly under wraps (so far; there are a couple of days to go still).

But what will really count is what happens in November (always supposing the election’s not completely Diebolded). Former pro-Hillary, now pro-Obama delegates can spout unity to the cameras in Denver as much as they like, but when it comes to X’s on ballots they’ll go with their gut instinct and their gut instinct as racist as hell. For ‘inexperienced’, read ‘black’:

Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Lisa Sisinni: Why I, a Clinton supporter, will vote for John McCain

Obama is inexperienced, fluffy and arrogant. I can’t back that.

Even though they managed by dint of much screeching and waving of rattles to have the Democrats put a wise old greyhair, a Hillary proxy, in charge of the hotheaded young black man, Hillary’s fans in the entitlement generation still aren’t satisfied and are threatening to throw their toys out of the playpen entirely, all the apparent convention unity notwithstanding – they’re not just abstaining, or passively supporting an independent, but actively campaigning against Obama and their own former party and in favour of McCain.

CNN:

66 percent of Clinton supporters — registered Democrats who want Clinton as the nominee — are now backing Obama. That’s down from 75 percent in the end of June. Twenty-seven percent of them now say they’ll support McCain, up from 16 percent in late June.

And nowhere was that statistic more prevalent than at the RNC-sponsored happy hour for Hillary.

Clinton supporters-turned-McCain converts at the event were not just angry at Obama’s campaign; they’re furious with the Democratic Party’s nomination process this year.

“The DNC really pushed [Barack Obama] on us. Now they’ve left us with two choices: somebody who has no substance or a Republican,” said Jessi Cleaver, 35, of New York. “And these are terrible choices, and they worked hard to select this candidate. … We’re watching the DNC pick this candidate for us.”

Aww, diddums. Did they really think Hillary, wife of a president, mother of a future president, was the spontaneous choice of the toiling masses?

But why are these supposed feminists being so destructive? Do they think they have to burn down the political village to save the feminism, or something?

It’s as plain as a pikestaff to the average outside observer why they are doing this – it’s the colour thing, stupid. They’re racists, for all their feminist posturing, and their gut instinct says ‘don’t vote for the black guy’. Yes, they want change – but they want change for them and women just like them, change only on their terms – all others need not apply. Understandably many progressives find this political dog-in-the-mangerism utterly infuriating

I’m not American myself, so I’ll pass over to an American, Tim Wise of Lip Magazine, who puts it much more pithily than I ever could:

Your Whiteness is Showing:
An Open Letter to Certain White Women
Who are Threatening to Withhold Support From Barack Obama in November

[…]

Your threats are not about standing up for women. They are only about standing up for the feelings of white women, and more to the point, the aspirations of one white woman. So don’t kid yourself. If you wanted to make a statement about the importance of supporting a woman, you wouldn’t need to vote for John McCain, or stay home, thereby producing the same likely result–a defeat for Obama. You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she’s progressive, and she’s a feminist. But that isn’t your threat is it? No. You’re not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton’s birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? Could it be…?

[…]

See, black folks would have sucked it up, like they’ve had to do forever, and voted for Clinton had it come down to that. Indeed, they were on board the Hillary train early on, convinced that Obama had no chance to win and hoping for change, any change, from the reactionary agenda that has been so prevalent for so long in this culture. They would have supported the white woman–hell, for many black folks, before Obama showed his mettle they were downright excited to do so–but you won’t support the black man. And yet you have the audacity to insist that it is you who are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and the one before whom Party leaders should bow down, and whose feet must be kissed?

Your whiteness is showing.

Well, quite. Get over it already.

The irony is the question of race really is a surface issue for domestic consumption only: Obama’s politics are in essence the same as Hillary’s, at least in foreign policy – the Democratic platform calls for more neoliberalism, more expansionism, just as much overseas meddling as ever. This is is no way good for women worldwide.

The important choice here isn’t between race or gender at all. The world’s in one of the most politically precarious, nuclear-fuelled international situations in recent history. Identity politics be damned – it’s now a choice between having a president with a modicum of common sense or a psychologically unstable, hair-trigger-tempered nutjob with his finger on the big red button. Choose the wrong one, we could all be blown to kingdom come.

You’d think even entitled white American women would get that.

(Hattip to Donna)

“Shut Your Whining, It’s Only Fallout”

Published on August 21, 2008

More proof if any were needed that Democratic foreign policy’s no different to the GOP’s, whoever the front man or woman is.Billmon at Kos:

In February of last year, with the newly born Democratic Congress still waiving its little arms and spitting up mucus, Dick Lugar (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Joe Biden (the committee’s nominally Democratic chairman) introduced the “NATO Freedom Consolidation Act”. Like its predecessors, the bill authorized the President to immediately begin treating the Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name – with weapons sales, military advisors, etc. Senate cosponsors included Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and, naturally, John McCain (R-POW).

Also like its predecessors, the bill was whisked through both houses of Congress with about as much deliberation as a resolution praising the Future Farmers of Benton County for their fine showing at the Iowa State Fair – with no hearings, no debate, no roll call votes. President Bush signed it into law on April 9, 2007. The White House put out an official statement marking the occasion. It was one sentence long.

And so, with an absolute minimum of democratic process, the United States of America committed its full prestige and power (if not, just yet, a legally binding guarantee) to the defense of the two former Soviet republics, even though the Russians have repeatedly stated that they regard NATO membership by either country as a direct threat to their own vital security interests. As others have already noted, this is as if China had unilaterally announced a military alliance with Mexico and Cuba. Actually it’s worse: Imagine the US reaction if China announced a military alliance with Mexico, after which the president of Mexico started dropping public hints about taking New Mexico back – by whatever means necessary. (And if that comparison seems unnecessarily paranoid, consider the history of Russia in the 20th century. Even paranoids have real enemies.)

A careful search of Nexus and Google reveals that the number of stories appearing in the pages of major US newspapers and magazines, or on the wires of major American news services, taking note of this fateful decision, equals exactly one: a brief item out of UPI’s Moscow bureau, warning of the Russian reaction. The Georgian and Ukranian press, on the other hand, gave the new law saturation coverage – encouraged by their respective governments, both of which issued official statements describing their future NATO admissions as, in effect, done deals.

At the moment US policy seems to be to surround Russia (and Europe too incidentally) with a ring of former USSR satellites in which the US has deliberately fomented unrest; then while Russians are bogged down on their borders, instigate a new cold war and an arms race to keep them bogged down diplomatically. Hurrah, a new bogeyman, now 911 and and Al-Qaeda’s getting a bit stale! If a few Euroweenies worry that their countries may become the venue – well, let ’em, that’s just too bad. Shut up and get your troops to Kabul. Anatole Karensky in The Times:

Western politicians may ridicule such fantasies as Russian nationalist paranoia. But why shouldn’t the Russians worry about Western armies and missiles moving ever closer to their borders? This contributes to a territorial encirclement very similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by cruder means. The official Western answer is that Nato’s expansion is purely defensive, that no Nato country would dream of claiming even an inch of Russian soil. But the feigned innocence of the West’s baffled answer to the encirclement protests only intensifies Russia’s sense of fear and provocation – and there are at least three reasons why the Russians are right to feel aggrieved.

NATO is now little more than the armed wing of neoliberal politics. That certainly won’t change, except purely cosmetically, whoever the president is. Obama may be the world’s favourite candidate but unfortunately we don’t vote and should he survive this campaign, even if he does get elected to the Oval Office, he’s still got to suck up to freedom-lovin’ DINO types like Biden and pals to get there.

Their view of the world as one giant globalised free-market sandbox for US corporations to play soldiers in is the prevailing orthodoxy of liberal and conservative elites alike, not least the Clintons themselves. After all it was the Clinton presidency and it’s reliance on corporate support for its Balkan adventures that laid the foundation for Bushco and Halliburton’s Iraq and now this meddling in Georgia and the Ukraine. Scratch a Clinton, find a pro-choice Bush, scratch an Obama, find another, less sullied Clinton. There are barely any real substantial foreign policy differences at all.

So why care that at the moment the Clintons and their embittered, blinkered supporters are succeeding in undermining Obama’s presidential bid and busy turning the convention into little more than a gala event for Hillary?

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s name will be placed in nomination at the Democratic National Convention, an emblematic move intended to unite the party after a divisive primary — but will it steal some of Barack Obama’s thunder?

During the Denver gathering, Democrats are to officially choose Obama, but the state delegations will do a traditional roll call for his vanquished primary opponent as well.

Obama and Clinton — fierce rivals then, reluctant allies now — agreed to the arrangement after weeks of negotiations. The two sides made the announcement Thursday in a joint statement.

‘Unite the party’. Oh, sure.

Obama’s campaign said he encouraged Clinton’s name to be placed in nomination to show unity and to recognize her accomplishment.

Earlier, he gave both Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, prime speaking slots during the convention.

Hillary Clinton is to speak Aug. 26, the second night of the convention. Historically, the state-by-state roll call occurs the next day.

Idiot. He deserves to lose just for that bit of political naivete alone.

Despite that we Europeans should care that McCain is – somewhat mind-bogglingly when you compare the two hopefuls – ahead in the latest polls. I don’t think much of Obama’s politics, but on character alone he’s the better candidate. At least he’s not visibly nuts. (Not that that appears to matter to the networks and newspapers. The content of Obama’s character is definitely outweighed by his skin colour when it comes to media representation).

This suits the Clintons just fine, thanks: their plan appears to be to steal (or just ruin) the Democratic Convention, either will do, and to deliberately scuttle the Obama campaign by handing McCain the White House, thus bolstering their own run in 2012. Way to have a nation’s interests at heart there, Hils and Big Dog.

It would be easy to get bogged down in this internecine Obama v Clinton stuff, or over who’ll be veep, and easier still to spend useless time boggling over the media’s continued kid-glove treatment of McCain’s obvious inadequacy. Sometimes it almost seems as though the Bush administration and its DINO and media collaborators are making Russia the new bogeyman merely to project McCain as the war hero who’ll keep the Russkies at bay and a black man out of the White House… But surely not. They wouldn’t be that cynical. Would they? Well yeah, they would.

But what’s really important to me is that what’s just political drama to the US voting public is being played out in Europe’s backyard – with real nukes.

~~Work experience boy~~British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s thrown our lot in with the US, with seemingly little thought to diplomatic nuance or to the future politico/ military implications of doing so. The UK is, as usual, slavishly supporting the US in writing cheques it’s ass can’t cash and in so doing is destroying European cohesion, such as it is.

The lessons of history mean nothing to these people in the US or UK; all that matters is what’s expedient right now in terms of careers and of their continued grip on power. If that means capitulating to the needs of US internal political forces – an encircled Russia, a divided Europe and a new, bigger bogeyman to unite against – the so be it, and screw the rest of us. What’s a bit of fallout when the US presidency is at stake?

That Deep Fried Portillo Feeling

Published on July 25, 20082 Comments

…With extra added vinegar.

Just watch how sour Scottish Labour MSP and failed parliamentary candidate Margaret Curran looks, as her Scottish Nationalist opponent is declared the new MP for the deprived Glasgow East constituency, up until now a secure Labour fiefdom. The acid’s fair steaming out of her pores.

Shorter Curran – “After all I’ve done for you ungrateful bastards!” At first I bethought myself of a pit bull chewing a wasp, but on mature reflection I’d say she’s more of a pit-viper gumming a grapefruit.

The funny thing is that immediately afterwards Curran demanded a recount – and when it was done, she had even fewer votes than in the first.