COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

A vote for Hillary is a vote for war

Even critics understate how catastrophically bad the Hillary Clinton-led NATO bombing of Libya was


Even critics understate how catastrophically bad the Hillary Clinton-led NATO bombing of Libya was
The New York Times published two lengthy pieces this week detailing Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. Both are important documents, and provide much insight into how, as secretary of state for the Obama administration, Clinton played a uniquely hands-on role in the war.
Sec. Clinton pressured a wary President Obama to join France and the U.K. in the war, the Times reported. Vice President Biden, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among others, opposed the war effort. Numerous government officials recalled that her hawkish enthusiasm was decisive in the “51-49 decision.”

The Times spoke of “Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world,” but did not stress that this belief is rooted in an aggressive militarism. It did quote French President Sarkozy, who fondly remembered how the secretary of state “was tough, she was bullish,” but the Times’ reporting understated Clinton’s belligerence.

At 13,000 words in length combined, the articles are important contributions to the historical record. Yet although they are critical of Clinton and her leadership in the conflict, they fail to acknowledge the crimes of U.S.-backed rebel groups, and ultimately underestimate just how disastrous the war was, just how hawkish Hillary is and just how significant this will be for the future of the United States — not to mention the future of Libya and its suffering people.

The U.S. president does not have as much control over economic and social issues as many pundits, analysts and even voters often insist. One must not forget that the head of state does not control the Congress or the judiciary. But the president does have enormous power when it comes to international affairs, diplomacy and war. This makes foreign policy one of the most crucial issues in any presidential campaign.

Clinton’s leadership in the catastrophic war in Libya should ergo constantly be at the forefront of any discussion of the presidential primary.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton has tried to have her cake and eat it too. She has flaunted her leadership in the war as a sign of her supposed foreign policy experience, yet, at the same moment, strived to distance herself from the disastrous results of said war.

Today, Libya is in ruins. The seven months of NATO bombing effectively destroyed the government and left behind a political vacuum. Much of this has been filled by extremist groups.

Millions of Libyans live without a formal government. The internationally recognized government only controls the eastern part of the country. Rivaled extremist Islamist groups have seized much of the country.

Downtown Benghazi, a once thriving city, is now in ruins. Ansar al-Sharia, a fundamentalist Salafi militia that is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., now controls large chunks of it. ISIS has made Libya home to its largest so-called “caliphate” outside of Iraq and Syria.

Thousands of Libyans have been killed, and this violent chaos has sparked a flood of refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Libyan civilians have fled, often on dangerous smuggling boats. The U.N. estimates more than 400,000 people have been displaced.

A disjointed peace process, mediated by the U.N. and other countries, drags on, with no signs of the war ending anytime soon.

Hillary has, understandably, said little of these consequences. Yet, in debate after debate, with her call for more aggression on Syria and Iran, Clinton has only continued to demonstrate that she is an unabashed war hawk.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, looking back, the facts show that she did not just push for and lead the war in Libya; she even went out of her way to derail diplomacy.

Little-discussed secret audio recordings released in early 2015 reveal how top Pentagon officials, and even one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, were so wary of Clinton’s warmongering that they corresponded with the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in hopes of pursuing some form of diplomacy.

Qaddafi’s son Seif wanted to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. government, opening up communications with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Clinton later intervened and asked the Pentagon to stop talking to the Qaddafi regime.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich wrote a letter to Clinton and Obama in August 2011, warning against the war. “I have been contacted by an intermediary in Libya who has indicated that President Muammar Gadhafi is willing to negotiate an end to the conflict under conditions which would seem to favor Administration policy,” the Democratic lawmaker said. His plea was ignored.

A Pentagon intelligence official told Seif Qaddafi that his messages were falling on deaf ears. “Everything I am getting from the State Department is that they do not care about being part of this,” he explained.

“Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” the U.S. intelligence official added.

And not negotiate is indeed what she did. In fact, after Qaddafi was brutally killed — sodomized with a bayonet by rebels — Clinton gloated live on TV, “We came, we saw, he died!”

The Pentagon’s correspondence with Libya before and during the war has rarely been mentioned in media reports (it is not discussed in either of the two New York Times pieces) since the Washington Times originally reported it.
The irony in the media coverage of Libya is that the right-wing media, which tends to be more pro-war, has actually been more careful and diligent in its assessment of Clinton’s legacy in Libya. In a dogmatic bipartisan political system, perhaps these kinds of double standards have come to be expected.
Those to the left of the Democratic Party certainly took notice too, nonetheless. Jacobin, a firmly leftist magazine, published one of the most careful and scathing critiques of Clinton’s role in the war. Journalist and author David Mizner meticulously detailed the uncomfortable facts in a piece appropriately titled “Worse Than Benghazi.”

Hillary’s war in Libya is the real Benghazi scandal. As Salon has previously reported, mere hours after Clinton’s day-long Benghazi interrogation by Republicans in October, at least six Libyans were killed and dozens more were wounded when militants in Benghazi fired rockets at a protest against a U.N. proposal for a unity government.

Benghazi the city remains roiled in violence, and, in the words of the Associated Press, “shattered.”

In “Worse Than Benghazi,” Mizner shows how many of the excuses, especially the allegation — spread forcefully by Clinton — that Qaddafi was on the verge of carrying out genocide against his people, were largely baseless.

U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Times that the government had “gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos.”

The New York Times’ lengthy stories do call “into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.” They do also point out that Human Rights Watch reports later showed that media claims about Qaddafi’s repression of protesters, which were used to sell the war to the public, were grossly exaggerated, by an order of magnitude.

Yet the two articles devote little attention to what they acknowledge were “the rebels’ human-rights abuses.” U.S.-backed militants committed their own share of atrocities. In particular, Libyan rebels targeted dark-skinned, sub-Saharan Africans and minority groups.

Human Rights Watch warned in 2013, in the wake of the Clinton-led war, of “serious and ongoing human rights violations against inhabitants of the town of Tawergha, who are widely viewed as having supported Muammar Gaddafi.”
Tawergha’s inhabitants were mostly descendants of black slaves, and were very poor. Rebels ethnically cleansed the city of the black Libyans. Human Rights Watch reported that militant groups carried out “forced displacement of roughly 40,000 people, arbitrary detentions, torture, and killings are widespread, systematic, and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity.”

Moreover, there were reports that rebels put black Libyans, whom they accused of being mercenaries for Qaddafi, in cages, forcing them to eat flags and calling them “dogs.”

These horrific, racist crimes were not mentioned in the prolix New York Times pieces on Clinton’s legacy in Libya. Yet the U.S. backed many of the rebels who would go on to commit atrocities like this.

Other rebels groups who were at least indirectly supported by the U.S. have gone on to become its present enemies.

Many liberals simply assumed Clinton’s Libya escapade was a success because it led to the fall of a despot, to regime change. Qaddafi was certainly a repressive dictator. But so was Saddam Hussein, and we see few liberals eager to defend Bush’s war in Iraq. The ruins left of both countries is hard to overstate.
Removing a dictator is the easy part. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the abject failure of the NATO war in Libya is what we can see today: the chaos that reigns across much of the North African nation.

The war in Libya is often depicted by both Democrats and Republicans as an ostensible act of American benevolence. NATO, the putative preserver of democracy, violently overthrew a dictator, with Clinton at the helm. What is rarely ever interrogated about this trite trope, however, is the fact that the U.S. is simultaneously aligned with some of the most authoritarian countries in the world, in neighboring Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

If the U.S. was truly so concerned with overthrowing a dictatorship and bringing democracy to the Middle East, why doesn’t it start with the planet’s most dictatorial nations? That is to say, its own allies in the Gulf.

Could the fact that Libya has enormous oil reserves, and was one of the world’s largest oil producers before the bombing, be a factor? Or its billions of dollars in gold reserves? Or Qaddafi’s history of supporting militant left-wing and anti-imperialist movements?

Many Americans are not very interested in international affairs. This could be due to a variety of factors (e.g., widespread acceptance of the notion that foreign policy does not directly influence one’s life, or the U.S.’s uniquely narcissistic demeanor, exemplified by the prevalence of “American exceptionalism”), but, regardless of why this is the case, poll after poll shows that foreign policy is frequently low on the list of average Americans’ concerns.
Clinton’s disastrous history in Libya shows precisely why this is folly, and why it is so dangerous to give short shrift to foreign policy.

The U.S. government spends an enormous amount of tax dollars on the military. The U.S. is responsible for more than one-third of the entire world’s military expenditure — even while it has just one-twentieth of the global population — and spends more on the military than the planet’s next nine-largest militaries combined.

Critics histrionically ask where the government would possibly get funds for social programs like universal health care, free higher education or social security (while ignoring the fact that every other country in the industrialized world already has universal health care and it works just fine, not to mention the widespread incidence of free or very cheap public higher education), yet look over this Brobdingnagian elephant in the room: military spending.
If Americans are concerned with these problems, they should be equally concerned with the prospect of a Clinton presidency. A vote for Hillary is a vote for war. Or, as economist Jeffrey Sachs put it in a recent article, Clinton “is the candidate of the military-industrial complex” and “the war machine.”
If Americans do not want to be marched toward more and more war, if Americans do not want the majority of their tax dollars spent on death and destruction, they should be very suspicious of Clinton and her record.
The destruction of Libya is the capstone of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record. And this singular symbol of her legacy is one of abject failure, indefensible atrocities and tragic destruction.

87 comments:

  1. Let's hope she's learned her lesson.

    And, as far as the Judiciary - Hell, the next President will appoint at least one Supreme Court Justice, and maybe as many as three. Not to mention all of the Lower Court Justices.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Do you see any hint that she has learned her lesson?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nah, not really. :)

      On the other hand, I really don't think that she's any more likely to "step in it" than any of the Republican yahoos.

      And, I really, really, really don't want any of the pubbies in charge of the domestic economy.

      Delete
  3. .

    Do you see any hint she has learned her lesson about ANYTHING?

    .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I detect progress of some kind in her barking.

      Delete
    2. Also, she's mastered two languages now:

      Black English

      and

      White English

      Delete
  4. The two main tribal division in Libya go back to Roman Times.

    An amicable divorce is called for.

    Divide Libya up just like divide up Syria and Iraq, and parts of Turkey too.

    "Small states make good neighbors."
    Anon

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm for Melania Trump for First Lady.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Put a Stripper in the White House

    Vote Trump.


    God, ya gotta love it. :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. That slogan is worth millions of red neck pickup drivin' armed votes.

    Make America Great Again !
    Put a stripper in the White House !

    ReplyDelete
  8. I noticed the video was missing from the post. Now fixed,

    ReplyDelete
  9. .

    Foreign policy is a done deal with Hillary. You know what you would get.

    However, on domestic policy, you also know what you would get, the same shit we have seen for the past 20 years. She is of the 'establishment' and it is the establishment and those that support it with big bucks that she will take care of.

    Sanders has caused Hillary to move to the left or at least to say she will; however, saying is one thing doing is another. The lady is a congenital liar. And the media as failed to ask her any of the hard questions.

    Bernie Sanders is a pussy not an attack dog. I would have loved to have seen Elizabeth Warren run for the nomination. She might not have won but she would have cut Hillary a new one.

    .

    ReplyDelete
  10. SHE HAS LEARNED NOTHING

    (from NPR interview)

    GREENE: Congresswoman Gabbard, you raised an interesting issue, which is the debate over how interventionist the United States should be. Are you suggesting that Hillary Clinton is too interventionist when it comes to foreign policy, in your mind?

    GABBARD: I am, and I've looked at this very carefully, and for myself, you know, I'm a soldier in the National Guard. I've deployed twice to the Middle East. And I've seen firsthand very personally what the cost of war has been - the high human cost, what to speak of economic cost that we've taken here at home with the limited resources we have and the trillions of dollars that we've spent on these interventionist wars. Secretary Clinton's record actually speaks for itself. She voted for and championed the Iraq war. She was the architect behind and the major advocate for the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya within the administration, which has really strengthened our enemy in ISIS and al-Qaida having a stronghold there now. And now currently, present day with Syria, she’s advocated strongly for the overthrow of the Assad regime and is pushing for a so-called no-fly zone, which will escalate that war there.

    http://www.npr.org/2016/03/02/468860831/clintons-7-state-super-tuesday-win-forces-sanders-further-behind

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hillary is, basically, running for Obama's 3rd. Term.

    The Republicans are running as the "Anti-Obamas."

    I like Obama; I'm voting for Hillary.

    ymmv

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Obama folded with the banks. He folded with the military. He folded to Clinton on Libya and Syria.

    He held a hand that could have made him a great president.

    He folded.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He brought us back from the brink of disaster.

      He's my guy,

      and I'm sticking with him.

      :)

      Delete
    2. I think he would be great in his third term, but that is not in the cards.

      Delete
    3. .

      He brought us back from the brink of disaster.

      Nonsense.

      .

      Delete
    4. .

      He accompanied us back from the brink of disaster.

      .

      Delete
    5. Obama took us to the brink, and beyond, of disaster by that idiocy of taking the troops out too soon.

      All the disaster flows from that.

      And that idiot Iran 'deal' - good god

      Now ISIS is in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria etc etc

      Hell of a commander in chief O'bumble has been.

      Delete
  14. The US does not need another Bush or a Clinton.

    ReplyDelete

  15. The problem, the Democrats will not implode as totally or a quickly as the Republicans are in the process of doing.

    Though the act that Hillary is cinching the nomination with states she has no hope of winning in November, a clear sign of the impeding problem the Democrats will face.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's exactly the same way Obama did it. :)

      Delete
    2. She's won Iowa, Nevada, Virginia, and Massachusetts - all are states that she will win (probably) in November.

      Delete

    3. But the GOP ran the lowest energy campaign imaginable when they nominated old what's his name, my carpetbagger Senator, and Mrs Palin from that electoral college power house of Alaska.

      Delete

    4. There is no viable comparison of Mr Obama to Mrs Clinton.
      He had charisma and the ability to give a good speech, she has neither.

      By the same token, the GOP has formed a circular firing squad.
      Shooting at its own base. Which the DC power elite has ignored for twenty plus years.
      They just assumed the dirty white boys had "no where else to go".

      Same thing is happening with the Democrats and the "College Educated Millennials".

      Delete
    5. Nbc tells us ...
      One in four Democratic primary voters casting votes on Super Tuesday was black

      That will not be the case in November.

      Delete
  16. Sanders blew it when he gave Hillary a pass on her emails in the first debate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nah, he has limited appeal. The backbone of the Democratic Party is the Black vote, and he can't get'em.

      Delete
    2. .

      Until lately, he didn't understand he was in the primaries.

      Instead of running against Hillary, he was running against the GOP

      .

      Delete
    3. He still has a chance because Trump will demolish Clinton on the wars.

      Delete
    4. The hispanics don't care much for him, either.

      He voted against the 2007 immigration bill.

      Delete
    5. Sanders has no shot. He's gone.

      Coming up are Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina. He's getting killed in all of them.

      Delete
    6. .

      It will be interesting to see how the current enthusiasm gap will play out and whether it will continue.

      Currently, the Dems had about 2.6 people vote in their primaries. The GOP had over 5 million. I think it was Gallup (maybe CNN) that ran a poll and asked how enthused are you in this election. On the question, 19% of the Dems said they were 'highly enthused' while 38% of Republicans said they were.

      .

      Delete
  17. This is interesting, NATO is now admitting that there may just be some 'blowback' in meddling with foreign governments.

    The outcomes not always turning out to be as predicted ...

    A top NATO commander says the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) is “spreading like a cancer” within the wave of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria and other countries into Europe.

    U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, also accused Russia and the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad of “weaponizing” the refugee crisis as a means of attacking the West.


    http://www.newsweek.com/isis-spreading-cancer-waves-refugees-nato-commander-432319

    All this while Mr Assad has long accused the "West", to include NATO member Turkey, of sending terrorists to Syria, in their attempt to force him and his constituency from power.

    Blowback ... unforeseen consequences of poor execution of misguided policy.

    At least in Libya the execution of the policy went well.
    The US having no responsibility for providing Libya with stability, or good cheer.

    Those that think the US does, they are as misguided as the Neocons.

    The terrorist Colonel Q, finally eliminated from the field.
    After almost thirty years a US President achieved justice for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Melania is a fine woman, not a thing wrong with her !

    ReplyDelete
  19. We made settlement with Ghadaffi. We had no dog in the fight.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah, nobody cares, Deuce. It's Libya.

      Delete
    2. Just try to find a voter that even knows what she did vis a vis Libya (or Syria,) much less, one who cares. :)

      Delete
    3. I’m an infrastructure guy, I think of what we could have done without Bush and Clinton and with $3 Trillion in construction.

      Delete
    4. Well let's just go ahead and bomb northern Mississippi then. Nobody would miss it, nobody cares, it's......Mississippi.

      Ghadaffi was co operating.

      He got screwed over, then sodomized by a bayonet.

      Whether in this life, but certainly in the next, Hillary is going to get hers.

      Only the strongest imaginations can handle the thought of it.

      Delete
    5. Eyewash, Deuce.
      There is no Statute of Limitations on murder.
      Or we'd all let the USS Liberty fade into the memory hole.

      And that's not going to happen, is it?
      Payback can be long in coming, but it does come around.

      Learned a long time ago ...
      Payback is a medivac

      Delete
    6. "Counterfeit Bob" may really believe that Colonel Q was 'cooperating', but he was never co-opted.

      He readily forgives evil doers, criminals, so he can morally justify the pardon he gave himself.
      But he never pardons those that he accuses of crimes they did not ever commit.
      Political 'crimes' that are not proving to be crimes, at all.

      Delete
    7. Thoughts, words, and deeds......

      My God, even your thoughts are there to confront and accuse you.....


      aaahhahhheeeeeeeee help

      Delete
    8. Hell, Obama cut the "War Spending" by about $150 Billion. The reason it didn't go to Infrastructure was the Republican Congress.

      Delete
    9. .

      Bullshit, rat.

      You and I have been over this numerous times. You are such a hypocrite.

      You mentioned the USS Liberty. You'll note we didn't attack Israel. Are we attacking Hezbollah for the marine barracks? We attacked the Taliban in 2001. Yet, we have negotiated with them since.

      If you think our attack on Libya had anything to do with Pan Am Flight 103, you are out of your friggin mind.

      Try reading a little on the Libyan War. You might learn something.

      .

      Delete
    10. Bob Thu May 27, 12:52:00 AM EDT

      But I did rip off the bank for $7500 hundred dollars, when I was on my knees, and fighting for my economic life, on my aunt's credit card. But that wasn't really stealing, just payback. After all, I had paid them nearly 20% interest ...

      Delete
    11. We put a bomb in his desert tent.

      After that he turned in all his WMD stuff plans and all.

      Missed the Colonel but killed his daughter.

      "We put him back in his box' Schultz, who had a Princeton Tiger tattooed on his ass, said at the time.

      Quit the stalking, Stalker.

      Go fuck yourself.

      Trish:

      "There something really wrong with you, rat."

      Delete
    12. All I need are your words, "Counterfeit Bob", no 'mind reading' required.

      Delete
    13. .

      Ah, nobody cares, Deuce. It's Libya.

      That is either ignorant or its disgusting.

      Either you don't have have a clue what went on there or you know what went on and don't give a shit.

      You come around daily accusing everyone here of racism. Yet, you ignore what happened to the blacks in Libya because of the unfounded rumors we started about them being mercenaries brought in by Ghadaffi.

      .

      Delete
    14. Trish:

      "There's something really wrong with you, rat."

      Delete
    15. "Counterfeit Bob' don't you remember what you said about Trish ???

      bobal Fri Mar 20, 06:03:00 PM EDT
      Trish always was a syphilitic slut

      Delete
    16. The Black Americans are my brothers and sisters, Quirk. I went to school with them, went with them to war, played sports with them, worked with them, lived with them, and played with them. So did my children, and so will my grandchildren. I want them to be treated well (equally.)

      Now, as for the Libyans: Do I think Hillary got out a little ahead of her skis? Yeah, I do. Like I said, I'm hoping she might have learned something from it. Am I ready to jump off a bridge because of it? Nah.

      Delete
    17. Galopn2,

      You're sound like Bob: blacks vote...Hispanics vote....now you are even spouting the canard 'I have a black friend ' cover.

      Delete
    18. While you were hiding out in Canada, I had black guys covering my ass. Don't think for a second that I won't take one of my black American brothers over your chickenshit Canadian ass.

      Delete
    19. .

      Black 'American' friends. As nativist as Trump.

      .

      Delete
  20. Btw, while I'd feel bad for those poor people down there if someone bombed them, it wouldn't affect me, personally. As I stated at the time, I moved from there a year ago.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd feel bad for them too, truth be known.

      They certainly don't deserve to be bombed.

      And, most will probably end up voting for Trump.

      Delete
    2. "Counterfeit Bob" has called for genocide, butchery and cannibalism to be visited upon the people of Arizona.
      Carpet bombing Detroit and its environs.
      And now for bombing Mississippi.

      "Counterfeit Bob" a thief, a draft dodger, chicken hawk and a true blue hater.
      Yep, he is a "Real American" and a Trump supporter, much like that David Duke fella.

      Delete
    3. Trish:

      "There's something really wrong with you, rat."

      Delete
    4. "Counterfeit Bob' don't you remember what you said about Trish ???

      bobal Fri Mar 20, 06:03:00 PM EDT
      Trish always was a syphilitic slut

      Delete
    5. Your misogyny cannot be buried, "Counterfeit Bob"...

      Especially after you sentenced your 96 year old Aunt to death in an institution.

      Delete
    6. You could bury the body, but not your guilt.

      Delete

    7. Bob Thu May 27, 12:52:00 AM EDT
      ...

      ... They couldn't do a damn thing about it, I put her in the rest home, age 96. What you going to do, when she is institutionalized?

      You stole her honor, then you killed her.

      Shame on you, Robert Peterson.

      Delete

    8. We do not have to read your mind Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson, your own words are the testament to your twisted soul.

      Delete
    9. Trish:

      "There's something really wrong with you, rat."

      Delete
  21. Justice Dept grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton email server...

    FBI MAY QUESTION HILLARY........Drudge


    :):)

    ReplyDelete
  22. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson signaled on Wednesday he was quitting the Republican presidential race, leaving three candidates facing Donald Trump as the party establishment struggled to find a way to halt the outspoken businessman.

    ...

    The party's 2012 nominee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, is considered likely to criticize Trump in a speech on Thursday.

    ...

    Anti-Trump Republicans have yet to coalesce around a single strategy to halt him, but the conservative group Club for Growth claimed credit for slowing Trump in some primary states by running attack ads. It said it would air a new advertisement in Florida as part of a $1.5 million ad buy.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Dang!
    My damned browser didn't give me the latest edition 'til now.
    For my best and funniest stuff, go here:
    http://2164th.blogspot.com/2016/03/neocon-freakout-over-trump.html

    ...or do you want to remain ignorant about Kyu Sakamoto, Flight 123,
    Ash Wednesday, "Ue o Muite Arukō" and Rufus's face?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ...and a great update from "Paul" on Donald's school of BS.

      Delete
    2. Donald's my kind con man.

      If he's good enough to con the country into voting against Hillary, he's good enough for me.

      March 2, 2016

      I Want a President Who is My Kind of Con-man

      By Christopher Chantrill


      Many conservative pundits and principled Republicans are recoiling from Donald Trump on the grounds that he is a con-man, a confidence trickster. To which my retort is: So?

      Is not all politics a confidence trick? Is not Bernie Sanders a confidence trickster for conning the Millennials with the fantasy of free college? Free for whom? Students? Parents? Taxpayers?

      When Democrats of all stripes hammer away on equal pay for women, are they not conning the worthy women of America? Studies show that young women in their twenties are outearning men, but many women, like humans everywhere, are attracted to politicians that treat them like victims.

      When Barack Obama promised $2,500 savings in health insurance premiums and people keeping their doctor, who was he kidding? What comprehensive and mandatory government program ever cost the nation less and delivered more than a market-driven system?

      And what about the Republican chestnut, that tax cuts create more revenue? It has some basis in economics, but who are we kidding? If we want to cut big government, it means cutting spending.

      The novelty of Donald Trump is that he is opening a new front in the Darwinian evolution of the political confidence trick. He will build a wall; he will teach the Chinese a lesson. He will make America great again. What is not to like if you are a white working-

      \class man who has seen bupkis in the way of wage gains in the last two decades?

      The truth is that we all believe in the fantasies of politicians. It’s just that different people believe in different fantasies......


      http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/02/i_want_a_president_who_is_my_kind_of_conman.html#ixzz41nxJzSEd

      Delete
  24. Dr. Ben Carson ran an honorable campaign and was the best person in the entire race, proven by his previous life, and his honesty during the campaign.

    I'm sorry he didn't do better. Maybe there will be a next time....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He'd make a good Surgeon General with portfolio to fix ObamaCare.

      Delete
  25. Romney Praises Trump
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlD4hwzGhdY&feature=youtu.be

    ReplyDelete
  26. The stench of burning plastic hung over the “Jungle” migrant camp yesterday as dozens of riot police moved in for a third day to demolish the Calais shantytown.

    ...

    France wants the migrants, mostly fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and north Africa, to move into other accommodation and reception centres.

    ...

    Yesterday’s bad-tempered meeting between aid workers and refugee leaders was cut short to organise a funeral after a Sudanese man in his fifties, who had been suffering from respiratory problems, was found dead in his shack.

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  27. I read some of the Nordic moslem migrants are heading home. Too cold.

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  28. German chancellor Angela Merkel has praised Europe's approach to the burgeoning catastrophe.

    (Translated)"Now, the task for the European Union -- and we fight for this, I personally fight for this and thank everyone for the plentiful support despite all the questions that are being raised -- is that we will manage it in Europe, that we take on this challenge of globalisation according to our values, but also according to our ability to secure our borders and still take on humanitarian responsibility."

    The EU is meeting Turkey on Monday because Turkey is a main dispatch point for many people trying to reach European shores.

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  29. Hillary's internet set-up guy is squealing like a stuck pig right now.

    :):)

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    Replies
    1. But galopin2 is standing by his woman !

      Delete
    2. Grand Jury !

      Grand Jury !!

      Grand Jury !!!

      Delete
  30. BOTTOM LINE

    Would you rather have the man whose casino went bust or the woman whose war setup an entire country for ISIS?

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  31. The GOP Likuds Force and the Democratic Party have lied themselves into this $4 trillion dollar mess of a government and disenfranchisement and destruction of tens of millions of American and foreign lives .

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  32. Hillary’s vote for the Iraq war, her allegiance to Wall St., Her machination for war in Libya and Syria, all tutored under Bill Clinton is more than I can take.

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