August 2, 2016
by Gary Leupp
The Democratic National
Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz in fact served as the Hillary Clinton
Coronation Organizing Committee, operating, step by step, to ensure that the
front-runner would become the party’s nominee.
Some of us assumed all along
that it was all preprogrammed. But then, on the eve of the coronation itself,
leaked emails revealed to everyone that, indeed, top DNC officials conspired to
defeat the Sanders campaign. Just as the party leaders were lavishing praise on
Sanders for bringing in so many new, enthusiastic activists—and stressing how close
Clinton and Sanders have become programmatically—somebody released these emails
that cannot but arouse further indignation among Sanders’ supporters (among
others, who care about fairness).
How do the party leaders
caught with their pants down respond? Not even bothering to pull them up, they
point a finger. Russia hacked us. Putin is trying to influence the U.S.
election in favor of Trump.
It’s a wise (and maybe the
only) political move available to these scumbags. The alternative would be to
say, “Well, sure, DNC officials had their private preferences and mentioned
them in emails. But she got more votes, she got Sanders’ endorsement in the
end, and the content of those emails is irrelevant now. Why make trouble? It’s
done. Let’s move on.”
No, they couldn’t say that.
They had to change the subject. And since it’s a cardinal fact of the U.S.
mainstream media that when you accuse Vladimir Putin of something—anything at
all, really—you will receive serious attention, the Democrats know that they
can transform this horrible “DNC Conspired Against Sanders” headline into an
“Russia Suspected in DNC Hacking” headline.
For some reason, I think of
Hillary’s ferocious ejaculation when being questioned by Congress about the
Benghazi episode.
“What difference does it
make?” spat Hillary, whether the attack on U.S. diplomats came from a crowd
angry about a Youtube film or from an organized terror group exploiting the
power vacuum created by the destruction of the Libyan state that Clinton had
laughed about.
You remember how she laughed about it,
right? An endearing, spontaneous moment in which Hillary relaxed and shared her
usually reserved self.
Had she been asked if it
mattered that Gadhafi had been brutally murdered and sodomized by a knife on
tape while men chanted Allah huwa akbhar she might have replied What difference
does it make? We got rid of a dictatorship!
And now, what difference does
it make whether or not the whole Democratic Party is rigged? When Russia is
expanding, threatening its neighbors, engaging in cyber warfare etc.? Don’t you
understand? It’s all about Russia.
That, at least, is what
Hillary (supported by the U.S. political class and its media props in general)
want you to think. Because Hillary in power will try to expand NATO to include
Georgia and Ukraine, provoking Russia.
The U.S. mass media swallowing
State Department talking points is accustomed to depicting the main historical
trend of these times (the relentless expansion of the anti-Russian, U.S. led
military alliance, which has grown from 16 to 28 countries since 1990) as its
opposite: the expansion of Russia.
It’s ridiculous. The Warsaw
Pact and Soviet Union disbanded in 1991. The NATO alliance, which George H. W.
Bush had promised Mikhail Gorbachev would not advance one inch eastwards, now
includes two Baltic states bordering Russia. The concept of Russian
expansionism is an absolute inversion of reality. It’s neocon,
“liberal-interventionist” Hillary-think.
And anyway (Hillary thinks), what
difference do the feelings of the Sanders supporters make? They lost!
Clinton the Earth Mother
reaches out, in words, willing to embrace the loser kids due to their precious
energy and idealism, while insulting millions (that she facilely assumes belong
to her now) with a convention-coronation finale so rich in positive references
to—of all things—the Iraq War!
(What better way to win over
millenials and Gen Z than by featuring Obama’s former CIA head and Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta, retired Marine Gen. John Allen, former commander
of U.S. troops in Afghanistan; Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., an Army helicopter
pilot who lost both her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade—propelled no doubt
by some Iraqi opposed to the criminal, disastrous invasion based on lies; and
Khizr Khan, who spoke about his son’s death in Iraq in 2004, as though there
was something heroic there?)
Donald Trump has famously
boasted that he could stand in the middle of 5th Ave. and shoot people and
wouldn’t lose voters. Clinton has shown how she can wreck countries such as
Libya and not even, throughout her campaign, have to defend her record as
secretary of state.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who
finally—after months of protests against her due to her (obvious) partiality
while she insisted (looking guilty) that she was “neutral”—resigned as DNC
chair in the wake of the email scandal, rewarded immediately (as though to
deliberately further enrage the Sanderistas) with a post in her campaign, could
perhaps now be tasked with building the case that Donald Trump is a Russian
agent.
And the content of the emails?
The suggestion that Sanders’ lack of religious belief could be used by the DNC
to help Hillary? What difference does it make? Isn’t it obvious that the bigger
question is Putin, and Russian expansionism, and the need to elect a woman
strong enough to risk World War III?
The howls of indignation at Russian
hacking of U.S. citizens” communications! Have whistle-blowers not made it
known to us that the NSA maintains records on the phone calls and internet
activity of virtually everybody, everywhere? That they have capacities unknown
to the bad old KGB and Stasi? That they routinely monitor the communications of
Angela Merkel, the pope, the UN Secretary General etc. without any sense of
shame?
The rational person’s response
has to be: What difference does it make who hacked those emails and made them
public? What’s true is true. The whole U.S. political process is rigged. We
need to grasp that.
The youth who drove the
Sanders campaign have every reason to reject the rigged system itself.
Millennials were just reaching adulthood when, in 2000, George W. Bush became
president with a minority of the popular vote, when the Supreme Court
intervened to prevent a vote recount in Florida. The unelected president went
on to invade two countries and left office deeply unpopular, exposed as a liar
and mass-murderer. Youth helped bring Obama into power as the progressive,
peace candidate. But he turned out to be the Drone President, the president who
incomprehensibly made the incomparably hawkish Hillary Clinton his Secretary of
State.
After the disappointments of
the Obama years, when things only got worse for youth, including African-American
youth; after the massive in-your-face proofs of a totally skewed electoral
process year after year—why should any intelligent person (including the
ex-Bernie supporter) get upset by anybody, anywhere who helps reveal the fact
that the U.S. two-party electoral system is rigged?
What difference does it make,
Hillary, who exposes you for what you are, and your campaign and party for what
they are?
* * *
The Telegraph reports July 29:
“Hillary Clinton will order a
‘full review’ of the United States’ strategy on Syria as a “first key task” of
her presidency, resetting the policy to emphasise the ‘murderous nature’ of the
Assad regime, foreign policy adviser with her campaign has said.
“Jeremy Bash, who served as
chief of staff for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, said Mrs
Clinton would both escalate the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant, and work to get Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, ‘out of there.’”
I’ve been predicting for
months that if Clinton becomes president she will announce next January that
the U.S. and its allies are declaring a “no fly zone” over Syria, preventing
the Syrian Air Force from striking at the al-Nusra dominated “opposition.” This
will come at a time when the Syrian state forces and Hizbollah and Iranian
allies backed by Russia have steadily gained against ISIL and al-Nusra. It’s
just possible that, in part due to U.S.-Russian cooperation in hitting al-Nusra
and ISIL targets, the Assad regime will be in better shape and the Syrian Air
Force feel less need to bomb five months from now.
But whatever the degree of
success Damascus and its allies have in defeating the al-Nusra dominated armed
opposition, as well as ISIL, and preserving the secularist Syrian state,
Hillary decided in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad had to go.
She and those 51 “dissidents”
in the State Department think there’s been too much focus on ISIL in Syria, and
not enough on bringing down Assad. Instead of seeing the professional national
army as the bulwark between Iraq’s multicultural society and murderous
extremism, Hillary sees Assad’s refusal to heed her imperious command to leave
as the very stimulus for al-Nusra and ISIL.
But taking out Assad means
taking on the Russians, who are proud of their successes in Syria, in shoring
up the state that Hillary wants to smash, Ã la Iraq or Libya. There will be no
UNSC resolution this time. (The Russians and Chinese regret abstaining from the
2011 vote authorizing the U.S./NATO “humanitarian mission” over Libya that
turned out to be a naked regime-change effort.)
That means threatening Russian
naval and air bases in Syria, and creating more chaos in a region near Russia—a
country much more threatened by “Islamist terrorists” than the U.S.
For Hillary it’s all about
Russia. As a Goldwater Girl she supported an extremist anticommunist for
president in 1964. And even though the Soviet Union that Barry Goldwater
envisioned as the enemy has been gone for 25 years, Hillary retains an
instinctive Russophobe belligerence.
So it makes good sense for her
when confronted withy evidence of fraud behind her coronation, she changes the
subject to Russia, trying to—of all things!—influence a U.S. election.
(As though the U.S. has not
tried time and again to influence elections in other countries, with help from
the “non-partisan” National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros.)
And it makes sense to continue
vilifying Putin, even as Trump continues to say (in his simple, clumsy, unclear
way) that he wants the countries to be friends. Because Hillary wants to
provoke Putin, and when she does, she wants Leon Panetta, Robert Kagan, Barack
Obama, John Allen and the whole gang, along with the GBLTQ community,
African-American clergy, aging old-school feminists and all who can be united,
to encircle Russia and ensure U.S. global domination for the rest of the
century.
Or rather, the domination by
the top Ten Percent of the One Percent in the U.S. over the world.
What difference does it make?—that
Bernie got shafted—when such things are at stake?
Gary Leupp is Professor of
History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the
Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a
contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be
reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
