Loud & Clear Discussion of Tulsi's Lawsuit Aginst Hillary (1/22/2020)

Gabbard sues Clinton for defamatory “Russian asset” comment

Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard yesterday filed a $50 million libel suit against Hillary Clinton, saying that the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee defamed her when she called Gabbard a “Russian asset” in an interview. Meanwhile, other Democratic candidates and major media outlets have lined up to criticize Clinton’s comments from Monday that Bernie Sanders was unlikeable and ineffective in the Senate and that she may not endorse him if he is the nominee. Clinton has since said that she would consider endorsing Sanders. Brian and John speak with Jim Kavanagh, the editor of thepolemicist.net.


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Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

Investigation Nation: Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics

Washington Examiner

So the Mueller investigation is over. The official “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” has been written, and is in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, who has issued a summary of its findings. On the core mandate of the investigation, given to Special Counsel Mueller by Rod Rosenstein as Acting Attorney General in May of 2017—to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”—the takeaway conclusion stated in the Mueller report, as quoted in the Barr summary, is that "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.¹"

No Laughing Matter: The Manchester Bomber is the Spawn of Hillary and Barack’s Excellent Libyan Adventure

PA via AP

On November 20, 2015, two jihadi militants attacked the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, seizing about 100 hostages and “leaving bodies strewed across the building.” When it was over, 22 people (including the attackers) had been killed. As the New York Times reported:

Mali has been crippled by instability since January, 2012, when rebels and Al Qaeda-linked militants — armed with the remnants of late Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s arsenal — began advancing through the country’s vast desert in the north and capturing towns.

Not much has been made in American and Western media of this attack. Most of the dead were Malians, Russians, and Chinese—and, hey, it was in Africa; Shit happens. Especially there. How many people reading this even remember that it happened? Follow-up analysis? It was Africa. That kind of coverage. (I did post about it at the time, making many points that unfortunately bear repeating here.)

Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked," to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, As Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”

Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by "the West" to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.

Hillary’s Hide-and-Seek

This Sunday’s New York Times (NYT) article by Amy Chozicko, headlined “Issues in Hillary Clinton’s Past Leave Her Muted in Furor Over Donald Trump” (“Clinton Treads Lightly Amid Furor Over Trump” in the print edition) provides a fine example of how the mainstream press covers up Hillary Clinton’s problems, even when they claim to be reporting on them.

The article introduces itself as explaining Hillary’s “virtual silence” regarding the issues of Donald Trump’s piggish treatment of women—issues that she herself raised in this campaign. The article mentions, in the most non-specific way possible, that she’s an “imperfect messenger” for these issues because of her “missteps” in dealing with her own “husband’s history” of piggish behavior. It alludes to her “role in countering the women who accused him of sexual misconduct” as part of a “painful past” that “haunted Mrs. Clinton last Sunday” when Trump brought some of her husband’s accusers to the debate.

The article goes on at length to quote from Michelle Obama’s speech, to elucidate how Hillary slyly changes the subject to cat videos when asked, and to talk about how she struggles to overcome the electorate’s lingering resistance to a woman president. It mentions how, “without mentioning the accusations against Mr. Trump,” she says things like: “This election is incredibly painful. I take absolutely no satisfaction in what is happening on the other side with my opponent.”

What the article does not do is mention a single specific “misstep” or “imperfection” in the way she “countered” her husband’s “accusers” and verified mistresses. In an article of some 1300 words, there is not one that clearly describes any of the things that Hillary Clinton did and said in that regard—the precise things that cause Hillary to “tread lightly” about Donald Trump’s abusiveness, and cause her the discomfort the article purports to explain.

Waiting To Exhale: Hillary, In Sickness And In Health

What’s wrong with Hillary? Since her collapse on 9/11, that question has become inescapable.

I am not going to try to prove that Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s Disease, or some other serious, degenerative neurological or neuro-vascular condition. I suspect she does, especially since her collapse on 9/11, and the acknowledgement that she was passing off as an allergy what she now claims is pneumonia. Suddenly, the various videos of her strange tics, and the diagnoses thereof, have been less easy to dismiss. One can’t help but wonder what better explains her lackluster campaign?

But the speculation is futile at this point. Either she has some serious condition or she doesn't, and if she does, it will likely manifest itself in undeniable ways. If her head-shaking, coughing, and collapsing episodes are effects of discrete, trivial things like allergies and overheating, these episodes will stop, and she'll continue merrily along with her campaign (and likely presidency). She'll have a lot of public appearances, perform well in the debates, hold regular press conferences, etc., without incident. Of course, the obvious and best thing for her to do, if she’s really healthy, would be to show full medical files with raw test results.

If she does have a serious and degenerating neurological condition, she will try to avoid press conferences, lengthy public appearances with lots of people, and any stressful event where she cannot be physically managed by handlers. But avoiding all that in a presidential campaign is virtually impossible, starting with the debates. So if she is seriously ill, it’s inevitable that obvious symptoms will re-appear, in public and with more frequency.

We shall see.

Democrats Promote Lies and War To Attack Trump

Newsweek.com

With his outrageous response to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq, Donald Trump has demonstrated once again that he is one of the nastiest and most narcissistic assholes in the known universe. His penchant for saying the perfectly offensive thing, on cue, does make one wonder if he hasn’t been put up to this whole thing by his friends, the Clintons, to split the Republicans and ensure Hillary’s victory. Then again, as a New Yorker familiar with his bloviant personality, I’m fairly certain his journey into historical ignominy is self-propelled.

But, like the proverbial clock, Donald’s unstoppable tongue is right twice a month or so. And egged on by the Clinton campaign, a lot of people are reinforcing various packs of dangerous lies in order to up the ante in trashing Trump. None of these is worse than the warmongering narrative about Russia and Ukraine that’s been reinforced by the bipartisan liberal-conservative commentariat after Trump’s recent interview with George Stephanopoulos. ThinkProgress, run by Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta, put up a story by Aaron Rupar on this that is being passed around the internet, with the title, “Trump Appears To Be Ignorant Of A Major International Conflict.” Translation: “Trump Goes Off-Script On Ukraine. Must Be Punished.”

Plan B Is Not Bernie

I admit: It’s all speculation.

On April 4^th, I wrote on Facebook: “My prediction: the next President of the United States will be someone who is not yet in the race. (e.g., Possible alternative Dem ticket: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.) How crazy am I?”

This wasn’t just a wild guess. It was based on a few considered convictions.

The first major conviction is that Bernie Sanders was not going to be Democratic nominee.

To begin with, the Democratic Party, an institution dedicated to plutocratic class rule and imperialism, would not allow Bernie Sanders to be their nominee. The plutocracy will not permit Bernie Sanders to be the CEO of American and world capitalism, let alone the Commander-in-Chief of the American empire.

Furthermore, Bernie Sanders does not want to play either of those roles. He entered the race, as his advisors acknowledged to the New York Times, “to spread his political message about a rigged America rather than do whatever it took to win the nomination,“ and he has repeatedly pledged to support whomever the Democrats nominate.

Whatever unexpected and undeniable success his campaign has had, it’s a “political revolution” that will be limited to exerting pressure on the Democratic Party and its eventual nominee. One can complain that it’s been blocked by electoral hijinks or by the anti-democratic superdelegates, but those sores have been festering for a long time in the party Bernie chose to run in. At this point, if Hillary comes to the convention with one more pledged delegate and more popular votes than Bernie—which she will—she will win fair and democratically square—and any attempt by him to use superdelegates against her would contradict his own erstwhile complaints about them. At any rate, those supredelegates were put in place expressly to prevent anyone like him from becoming the nominee, and are not going to be persuaded, even by wonderful arguments based on electoral logic, to forsake their duty. Which of these folks is going to switch to Bernie because polls show he’d do better against Trump in the general?

Bernie Wriggles On The Obama Hook

In previous posts (here, here, and here) I’ve expressed skepticism about whether Bernie Sanders will really go through to the end with the knockdown fight against the Democratic Party machine that will be required to win the nomination.

My skepticism is based on the contradiction between, on the one hand, Bernie’s call for a political revolution against the “rigged” social economy of the 1%, and, on the other, his explicit commitment to running in the Democratic Party, keeping it united, and supporting whatever candidate the party chooses, including Hillary Clinton.

The Democratic Party as an institution, and Hillary as a political persona, are primary obstacles to any such political and social revolution.  It is the programmatic ideology promoted and practiced by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and honed by the Obama administration, that has defined the Party as a strategic partner of the ruling class for at least twenty-five years. It’s hard to make a revolution from within a principal political institution of the counter-revolution. And I think it’s beyond Bernie’s ability (and perhaps his intent) to transform that institution into its political opposite.

This contradiction within the Sanders campaign, and within Bernie’s political persona, is, of course, a reflection of the contradiction within the Democratic Party between its popular class base and its elite institutional interests. For leftist Sanders supporters who accept this analysis of the Democratic Party, the implicit argument must be that he’s indeed mounting a coup to revolutionize the Party. But there’s a flip side to that argument: If he’s not mounting a coup, he’s not really running a campaign. For skeptical leftists, it is obvious that Bernie systematically avoids and elides this contradiction in order to protect the fictional and precarious unity of the Democratic Party against what he sees as the greatest evil of the Republicans. That strategy of protecting, via avoidance and elision, the precarious and pernicious unity of the party makes Bernie Sanders at one with Hillary Clinton, as a Democrat.

If FDR’s grand historical project was to save capitalism from itself, I fear that Bernie’s more modest mission is to save the Democratic Party from itself.

What Does Bernie Want? - Part 2

I’m prompted by some of the reactions to my Bernie Sanders piece the other day, to make some further comments. Many people seem to think I was being unkind and unfair to a man who has had a long and honorable career “wisely and effectively” promoting progressive causes. It was not only unkind of me to suggest that Bernie had “entered this race planning to lose,” it was horribly “cynical” (a word that appeared in a number of comments).

First of all, I want to say that this is not about personally dissing Bernie Sanders. I agree that Bernie Sanders has often been a wise progressive on many issues, consistently head and shoulders above almost all of his colleagues. It is also true that Bernie Sanders is not all that radical. It's not a very progressive cohort, after all. His limitations from a left, socialist, or anti-imperialist perspective are well-known. (You can find them analyzed in the sources in note 1 of yesterday’s post.)

Bernie is an FDR-New Deal-type American liberal, with all the limitations that entails. He's a moderate welfare-state social democrat, who calls himself a socialist in a way that can resonate within the strange paradigm of American politics. It’s another peculiar effect of the American political paradigm that Bernie Sanders ever appeared to be super radical. It’s particularly disturbing, as we should all notice, that his brand of FDR social politics is now seen as marginal, exceptional, and out of touch with reality within the Democratic Party.

It’s also the case that, though Sanders has been an effective, if limited, progressive on a local and congressional level, he’s never been, or tried to be, a nationally transformative figure, and never evinced serious Presidential aspirations.

Bernie has also had a particular, cozy, relation to the Democratic Party. Though he's always identified himself and run as an independent socialist, he has maintained close, reciprocally-supportive relationships with the Democratic Party. He participates in the Democratic Senatorial caucus, and the party defers to him in Vermont, never fully supporting a Democratic opponent for his Senate seat. Bernie may not formally be a Democrat, but he's an Adjunct Democrat as least as much as he's an Independent Socialist.

What Does Bernie Want?

The assumption was that Bernie Sanders would have no chance of becoming the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. It was understood that he would get a few months to highlight the issues of austerity and inequality before quickly succumbing to Hillary Clinton's highly experienced and well-financed political machine in the early primaries—probably right after the votes were counted in New Hampshire, if not Iowa.  He would then exit gracefully, assuring his supporters, with Hillary at his side nodding in agreement, that the important problems facing the “middle class” had been forcefully and irreversibly placed on the Democratic Party's presidential agenda, that it was going to be wonderful for America to have its first woman president, and that the most important thing to do now was to make sure the goddamn Republicans don't win.

I'm still betting we are going to hear that speech. But the path to it is becoming considerably more complicated, and the stage may not look the same. It’s interesting to consider how the dynamic of the Sanders campaign within the Democratic Party is unfolding.

Preliminary note: I am not going to focus on the deep problems with Bernie’s politics, which are important, but not crucial for this essay. For the purposes or this discussion, I’m going to treat the Sanders campaign as a vehicle that has attracted and mobilized many good progressives for substantively good reasons. My point here is to think about where this campaign is likely going. To clarify where I stand, I’ll put some remarks on two of the substantive political issues that should not be ignored into the first endnote.¹

Let’s first consider Hillary’s assets and advantages.

We must begin with the superdelegates. The superdelegate system, through which 20% of the convention delegates are appointed essentially ex officio, with no vote of the party’s constituency, was created after the McGovern defeat precisely to prevent anyone remotely leftist from winning the Democratic nomination. This system gives the un-Democratic Party’s establishment great confidence that it can squelch the kind of uprising of its popular base that is now roiling the more democratic Republican Party. Those superdelegates, and the Party establishment to which they belong, are, of course, overwhelmingly Hillary supporters. That means she starts out with a 20% lead.

Mali Jihadis: The Spawn of Hillary's (And America's) War On Libya

Harouna Traore/Associated Press

Another horrific jihadi attack today, this time on a Radisson Blu hotel in Mali. 27 killed. Here’s an excerpt from the New YorkTimes coverage:

Mali has been crippled by instability since January, 2012, when rebels and Al Qaeda-linked militants — armed with the remnants of late Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s arsenal — began advancing through the country’s vast desert in the north and capturing towns.

In other words, the jihadi gangs in Mali are a direct result of American/French/NATO regime change in Libya, executed by the Obama administration, spearheaded by "We came, we saw, he died" Hillary Clinton.

In 2010, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa (UN Human Development Index). Ghaddafi's Libya employed many Malians. It was an anchor of stability in North Africa. The US/France/NATO put an end to that, under entirely phony pretexts, against fundamental international law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification. The executioners and beneficiaries of that US/France/NATO strategy where the jihadis who shoved a stick up Ghaddafi's ass and are now rampaging throughout Mali.

Ha, Ha. Maybe she can get a gig at the Comedy Club in the Radisson.