Reply #53: Great anti-DLC rant from another Board (April 2003)

[Tinoire]

Not to put too fine a point on it, since it distracts from the primary struggle, which is with the "fascisti" in the WH; but a week ago every single Dem in the Senate, and most of those in the House, voted to support Bush "as commander-in-chief" and the troops ("Sorry, but the chick got in the way") as they maraud through the cradle of civilization. And it was Richard Holbrooke, the architect along with Mad "a hard choice, but yes, it's worth it" Albright of the destruction of Yugoslavia and the ethnic cleansing of the Serb population in Kosovo, who boasted a few weeks ago that he and Clinton and Sandy Berger didn't let such niceties as the UN get in the way of their assaults, and that Bush was a weak-kneed pantywaist for seeking a second resolution in the Security Council. "We don' need no stinkin' badges!" I may have missed something, but I don't remember Honest Al resigning over differences with Clinton on that score, or over the terrorist bombing and destruction of the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan that supplied most of the medications and aspirins to east and north Africa. As a matter of fact, it was Al who was dispatched to South Africa to warn them to stop making generic anti-AIDS drugs available to their HIV-positive population, as it interfered with drug company prerogatives (you know, the copyright they were given free of charge by the government, which used public funds to research the rugs) - the right to profit off people's misery, a sacred right under every president of either party in America. And isn't it Al whose investments in Occidental Petroleum are being protected, in the true spirit of bipartisanship, by the troops we fielded in Colombia?

So, sorry for the rant, but I agree with Roy - the details may differ, and certainly Dubya is far more reckless than anyone outside of John McCain, but the real reason the fascist right carried off their coup was for the loot: the tax cuts, the gigantic contracts, the unlimited fraud, the opportunity to steal on an unimaginable scale, the vast and unprecedented concentration of power and terror. The global imperium, one may safely assume (as the corporate crime lords in the CFR undoubtedly did), would be in good hands whoever won. That's why they fund the Republican wing of *both* parties, the wing which, in the case of the Democrats, nestled within the DLC, chaired for a time by Al Gore.

(Even with regard to Iraq, Clinton never wavered from his position that, contra UN 687, only the exit, graceful or otherwise, of Saddam and his associates would suffice to lift the sanctions, which killed over a million Iraqi civilians, around half of them small children, while he held office. Further, it was during his term that Saddam's son-in-law, the highest-ranking defector ever, revealed to the UN, the CIA and MI6 that he himself had been in charge of the Iraqi weapons program, and had personally overseen the destruction of the bulk of their chemical and biological and all of their nuclear weapons capacity after the first Gulf slaughter. His testimony on the size of the program, which was larger than the west had known, was considered credible enough to trot it out on innumerable occasions for the next eight years under both Clinton and Bush; his testimony that he had overseen the destruction (so that no commander would be tempted to use the weapons, which he and Saddam knew would result in the nuking of Iraq, under Clinton as well as Bush I and II) was fit only for the ears of his interlocutors, and effectively covered up by both presidents. (He was executed when he returned to Iraq the following year.) Finally, it was Clinton who ordered the inspectors out in 1998, after using them as spies to develop target locations for his planned bombing, which commenced immediately afterward. And it was Clinton whose sanctions were described by the head of the UN relief organization, when he resigned in protest, as "genocidal," a judgment concurred in by his successor, who also resigned for the same reason.)

So yeah, Gore or anyone else could hardly be as slimy as Bush, who is truly sui generis, but on the other hand, "good, honest and intelligent" though he may be, the US would most probably still be looking for weak, unprotected and helpless states to make an example of, because... well, because we can. "All for ourselves, and nothing for anybody else," was the way Adam Smith described the "vile maxim of the Masters of Mankind " in his day. Has anything really changed?

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