The year 2008 was a very important year in the history of the United States. There were chances of either a first woman or a first black person becoming the president of the US which had, in its 232 years history, seen only white men as presidents. So there was great excitement not only among blacks and women but also millions of others who also wished for such a change. The woman, Hillary Clinton, lost the Democratic Party’s nomination which went to a black person, Barack Obama. At that moment, Hillary’s female supporters realized they’ll have to wait for 4 to 8 more years before one of their own can try again for the White House. Hillary is back in the race, but this time the other Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, a white man with a progressive agenda, has attracted many girls and women to vote for him. This has proved bothersome to some of Hillary’s die hard fans.
Kate Harding
Kate Harding of Dame expressed her support for Hillary in these words:
“There has never been a president who knows what it’s like to menstruate, be pregnant, or give birth. …”
Harding is right about the above three qualities which none of the White House occupant up to this point has ever been endowed with. And, of course, Hillary is much more clever and intelligent than former president George W. Bush and some of the Republican presidential candidates. But it’s the issues which are more important. When compared to Bernie Sanders, one has to go for Sanders. Of course, Sanders is not a radical revolutionary – and if he was, the media wouldn’t have given this much coverage to his campaign, and the New York Times, which has endorsed Hillary would have opposed Sanders’ participation in the debates.
(In 2000, the New York Times had supported the exclusion of Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate, from debates.) (The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks has already started mourning Obama’s departure because “Sanderscare [Sanders’ healthcare program] would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customers, destroy the health insurance business and levy massive new tax hikes. This is epic social disruption.” Initially, like Sanders, Obama was for single-payer system but under pressure from insurance companies he caved in. It’s understandable that Brooks, who can afford $120,000 vacation, can’t afford any kind of social disruption.)
Coming back to Harding, Sanders do lack the three qualities: menstruation, pregnancy, and birth giving. He is, however, many times better than Hillary on social, economic, and political issues and will try to do something to reduce somewhat the intense economic inequality. If the female candidate was Barbara Ehrenreich or Lani Guinier or any other woman with concerns for economic, political, and social inequalities, many of the people supporting Sanders would have flocked to a woman candidate. But Hillary is not that woman. One night Hillary claims she is a “progressive,” and very next night she declares she is for a “capital punishment!”
Gloria Steinem
Last Friday, on Bill Maher program, feminist Gloria Steinem came up with a sexist explanation as to why young women were supporting Bernie Sanders and not Hillary Clinton.
“And, when you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie…”
However, a couple of days later, she apologized on her Facebook page.
Steinem is a strange feminist who, in her zeal to support Hillary, doesn’t mind portraying young members of her own gender in such a degrading term. She is an old supporter of Hillary. In 2008, in her New York Times’ article, she backed, not convincingly, Hillary. A few days later, on Democracy Now, when Amy Goodman brought up Hillary’s support of US war against Iraq in 2002, Steinem experienced a dilemma:
“Well, she [Hillary Clinton] said, [the war resolution says to Saddam Hussein] ‘arm or be disarmed.’ I mean, this is a conundrum. I utterly disagree with her vote, 100% disagree with her vote. If we had been in that position, being shown all this false information and so on, I don’t exactly know how we would have voted, but I certainly disagree with her vote.”
Steinem’s reasoning of “false information is simply lame. Even Steinem herself, like many of us, would have clearly seen that the information Bush administration was providing about Iraq had not an iota of truth in it. And about Hillary, she is as crafty as her husband and has seen similar false information during Bill Clinton’s tenure as president (1993 – 2001).
This time, Hillary’s role and record in creating chaos in Libya is out in the open. Hillary was craving for credit for her important role in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 but laid the blame on Obama when Libya turned into chaos by saying, “at the end of the day, this was the president’s decision.” Vijay Prashad describes Libya today: “The black flags of the I.S. [Islamic State] flutter on territory bombed not so long ago by NATO’s jets. Libya has not recovered from that ‘humanitarian intervention’”. Steinem’s fanaticism refuses to see such facts.
Hillary still has a chance
Harding and Steinem need not worry too much: Hillary lost New Hampshire and hardly won Iowa, but there are still 48 states left, plus Bill Clinton, called “Slick Willie” is also out to help her campaign. Bill is also known as “the Comeback Kid.” He’ll try his best to come back as the “First Gentleman.” Undoubtedly, gentleman he has never been. Then there is the Democratic Party establishment which favors Hillary. PAC (Political Action Committee) of the Congressional Black Caucus has endorsed Hillary. (Most of the time, it’s one’s own who does the most harm, and this time too, it will be the blacks in the establishment who will discourage majority of the blacks from going with Sanders.) The Clinton machine is working. And last, but not the least, Counterpunch’s editor Jeffery St. Clair reminds us about the mechanism of the selection: the super delegates can ignore the results of the popular votes and can vote for whomever they want. At this moment, Hillary has 394 delegates vs Bernie’s 42!
“Even after Bernie’s thrashing of Hillary in New Hampshire, the Vermont senator only banked four more delegates than Clinton. Why? Because 8 of New Hampshire’s 32 delegates will remain ‘unassigned’ until the Democratic Convention, where they will be instructed to vote for whomever … the party establishment demands.”
In New Hampshire, Bernie got 60.4% of the votes against Hillary’s 38%. To win the nomination, he or she needs 2,382 delegates. If Sanders wins the popular votes but the delegates favor Hillary then the game is lost, unless, unlike Albert Gore in 2000, Sanders decides to bring out his millions of supporters on the streets to demand respect of the people’s votes. Other thing is that there is/are some new revelation/s about Hillary’s email scandal.
Madeleine Albright, ISIS’ granny
On February 6, at an election campaign event in New Hampshire, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton (2009 – 2013) was introduced by another former secretary of state Madeleine Albright (1997 – 2001, she was the first woman secretary of state). She repeated her own phrase, which has also been picked up by Taylor Swift and others :
“People are talking about revolution. What kind of a revolution would it be to have the first woman president of the United States?”
“Young women have to support Hillary Clinton. The story is not over!” “They’re going to want to push us back. Appointments to the supreme court make all the difference.
“It’s not done and you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you. And just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Hillary defended Albright’s remarks as “lighthearted but very pointed remark, which people can take however they choose.”
This is the difference between ISIS and it granny, Albright. ISIS simply sends you to hell whereas Albright gives you a choice: Hillary or hell. Albright is quite familiar with hell because she has turned many places into hell, between 1993 – 2001. (From 1993 to 1997 she was US ambassador to the United Nations and from 1997 to 2001 she was US secretary of state.)
Palestine, whose 78% territory is Israel since 1948, and the remaining 22%, Gaza and the West Bank, is under its indirect occupation will, if the United States wills, become an independent Palestinian state. But till then, the lives of the Palestinian people is hellish under the Israeli occupation. But Albright sees it differently:
“Those Palestinian rock throwers have placed Israel under siege.”
And so she did her best to help the occupying nuclear force Israel, the victim of the crushed, blockaded Palestinians in the following manner:
“At the UN my job was to try to work to get the UN to be more Israel-friendly, to stop passing resolutions condemning them, and to ultimately get them into various groups and all that. So there was an ongoing process.”
(Forget the crimes of Israel, none of the candidates have mentioned the plight of the Palestinian people.)
How cruel this ISIS’s granny is can be gauged from the following exchange between Albright and Lesley Stahl on CBS’ program 60 Minutes:
Stahl: “We have heard that a half a million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And–you know, is the price worth it?”
Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”
Two UN officials resigned in protest over the cruel sanctions.
Edward S. Herman notes the vast difference between carnage carried out by Islamists and the US government.
“In this case, however, although the numbers dead are mind- boggling–the ratio of dead Iraqi children to deaths in the WTC [World Trade Center]/Pentagon bombings was better than 80 to 1, using the now obsolete early 1996 number for Iraqi children–the mainstream media and intellectuals have not found Albright’s rationalization of this mass killing of any interest whatsoever.”
When in February 1998, the UN secretary general Kofi Annan went to Iraq to meet Saddam Hussein in a move to work out an agreement whereby the sanctions against that country can be brought to an end, Albright roared:
“It is possible that he [Kofi Annan] will come with something we don’t like, in which case we will pursue our national interest.”
There was a fear among the UN officials that Albright had “developed a personal obsession with President Saddam.”
The US accused Osama bin Laden for the bombing of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998. Within two weeks, the Clinton administration bombed Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory in Khartoum, Sudan, claiming that it produced chemical weapons and was linked to bin Laden. Neither it produced chemical weapons nor did it belonged to bin Laden. Many officials in Clinton government were against the bombing because there was no evidence to justify the bombing. Albright, along with a senior deputy, “encouraged State Department intelligence analysts to kill a report being drafted that said the bombing was not justified.”
About the destruction of Al-Shifa, a Pentagon official regretted to the New Yorker, that Albright uses force as a first resort. “Madeleine is willing to fire a missile at anybody.”
Albright’s philosophy about weapons is that if you have it, then you should use it.
Serbia, which was fighting a separatist war, was accused by the US and other Western countries of indulging in genocide and blamed for 10,000 deaths. It was a lie but the “figure became the baseline.” Albright was itching for a war and shouted at Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
So it was used. The US went to war against Serbia. The US also created The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The ICTY staff referred to Madeleine Albright as the “mother of the Tribunal.” Serbian leaders and others were tried though the US war criminals were exempted. (See The Dismantling of Yugoslavia.)
In 1994, between 500,000 to 800,000 Rwandans lost their lives in a genocidal killing. In July 2000, an independent panel commissioned by the Organization of African Unity charged the United States, Belgium, France, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches of intentionally preventing the killing. Albright was accused of preventing rescue mission through “stalling tactics.” Stephen Lewis, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and a former UNICEF official, and a member of the of the Organization of African Unity panel describes her role to Amy Goodman thus:
“… Madeleine Albright said that she has apologized and expressed remorse, as has President Clinton. That’s fair enough, although apologies are by no means enough. Both President Clinton and Madeleine Albright say that they were largely ignorant of what was happening. I don’t—forgive me, I don’t think that’s accurate.
…
Finally, Madeleine Albright says she was screaming about the way in which the Americans were mishandling the genocide; she thought their policies were wrong. Now here I have great trouble. If the screaming went on in Washington, I want to tell you it was absolutely inaudible in the rest of the world.Madeleine Albright, with a zeal which was virtually supernatural, pursued the mandate of preventing the U.N. from entering Rwanda in large numbers.She did it with a determined, methodical prosecution of her brief, in a way—I was an ambassador at the U.N.—in a way few ambassadors do. I would have thought that there comes a point in the life of a public servant, of a diplomat, where if you know that the results of your government’s inaction would mean the death of half a million to 800,000 people, which became early and clearly evident, then either you resign, as a matter of principle, or you yell from the rooftops. You don’t share the animus of your views quietly in the corridors of Washington. And that’s what disturbed the panel about Madeleine Albright.”
So now this hellish woman is out to scare women of hell if they don’t vote for another hellish woman!