W.J. Astore
Hillary Clinton will soon be announcing her candidacy for the presidency. She has learned from 2008, or so reports say, and will be reaching out to voters in “intimate” settings like pseudo-town halls, rather than the mass rallies of her previous candidacy, which were supposed to anoint her as the “inevitable” Democratic candidate in 2008.
Yes, Hillary is searching for the common touch, the touch that came so naturally (in more ways than one) to her husband Bill. It’s an act, of course, for there’s no candidate more calculating and controlling and imperious than Hillary. This is not necessarily a bad thing in a leader; nice gals finish last, especially in the man’s world of U.S. presidential politics. Hillary knows it’s not enough for women to “lean-in”; you have to be willing to get down and dirty to beat the old boys at their own game.
No, the main problem is not Hillary’s imperiousness. It’s her shilling for major corporate donations, and her willingness to accept major “donations” from foreign governments (via the Clinton Foundation) while claiming that her hands remain untied and unsullied.
An interesting graphic from LittleSis illustrates the point, which explains that: “Of the 425 large corporate donors to the Clinton Foundation, the Wall Street Journal found 60 of those donors lobbied the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s tenure.”
http://littlesis.org/maps/534-hrc-complex-corporate-ties/raw?embed=true&zoom=0.617
As Peter Van Buren notes, the Clintons have already broken their promises of transparency with respect to donors and their donations. It’s say one thing and do another: business as usual for the Clintons.
When she was in high school, Hillary was an enthusiastic supporter of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, whose campaign slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” was appositely funny. Yes — far right, people said. Hillary’s slogan for 2016 should be, “In my heart, I know I’m right,” so vote for me, peasants. Never mind where and how Bill and I got our money, and to whom we owe favors.
Shilling for money is a large part of the American “democratic” process, and Bill and Hillary are masters at it. This shouldn’t necessarily disqualify Hillary. But the broken promises, the dubious ethics, the constant evasiveness: well, those qualities are far more worrying. And deeply compromising.
Bracing Views 
THE fundamental problem with Hillary is she offers absolutely nothing new in addressing the world’s graver-by-the-day problems. Now the GOP, oh boy, they are FULL of ideas. Unfortunately they are not really new either (Ayn Rand was the ultimate Libertarian, I dare say) and many are simply INSANE!!! Next year’s campaign circus is going to be non-stop looney-tunes, no doubt about it! It would be absolutely hilarious–beyond satire!–if it wasn’t so damned TRAGIC.
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The fundamental problem with Hillary Clinton is that she is a dedicated shaver, OH! I made a mistake. She is a dedicated regime changer and enemy of democratic regimes wherever she sees them. The first military coup in Latin America in twenty years took place under her watch as Secretary of State and with her approval. Her ‘whipping boy’ Lanny Davis officiated in advising the Honduran thugs who overthrew the democratically elected President Zelaga and he smoothed the way for the complicit Obama administration to swiftly approve recognition.
Honduras now is the murder capital of Latin America. She is a danger to our country and it’s standing in the world. The overthrow of the Honduran government set all of Latin America in an anti American mode and totally isolated the US at the 2012 Summit of the Americas. This resulted directly in Obama being forced, before attending this 2015 Summit to open the door to Cuba and to embarrassingly reverse his designation of Venezuela as a “terrorist ” state to avoid being isolated at the Summit now being held in Panama. She is definitely not the “lesser of evils” she is it incarnate.
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“During the intervals between elections the political existence of the citizenry is relegated to a shadow citizenship of virtual participation. Instead of participating in power, the virtual citizen is invited to have ‘opinions’: measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them.” — Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
So, with nine months before the first primary votes and yet another ten months before the actual national elections, America and the world face yet another lurid, mindlessly corrupt, and ultimately meaningless rendition of::
The Circus that Wouldn’t Leave Town
From time to time, the circus once arrived,
Quadrennial in its appointed rounds.
Yet somehow it has artfully contrived
To never leave — bombarding us with sounds
And sights so lurid and insistent that
Whatever tripe The Candidate expounds
Begins to clog the arteries with fat,
Inducing aneurisms in the soul
Through endless touting of a puerile spat.
Consultants endlessly conduct a poll
Which tells us what they wish for us to hear:
That folks like us will play our scripted role.
Commercial ads have made that crystal clear.
If only fright were all we had to fear
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2012
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Yes. “Participatory” democracy should not mean expressing meaningless opinions in canned polls. Small wonder than so many Americans can’t be bothered to vote. It’s not just laziness or apathy: it’s disillusionment and disaffection, but with no desire (as yet) to rally to change the system. Mainly because change will be resisted, and violently.
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What the next (almost) two dreary, disillusioning years have in store for us — again, from Sheldon Wolin’s masterful treatise Democracy, Incorporated:
“The Republican Party is not, as advertised, conservative but radically oligarchical. Programmatically it exists to advance corporate economical and political interests, and to protect and promote inequalities of opportunity and wealth.” (page 187)
“While the Republican Party is ever vigilant about the care and feeding of its zealots, the Democratic Party is equally concerned to discourage its democrats.
The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf. And this despite the fact that these elements are recognized as the loyal base of the party. By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves as an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.” (page 206)
As I like to say, “Buy a Republican and/or Rent a Democrat.” The “corporate allies of the Republicans” will get whatever they want, either way, and those who voted for the “Democrat” will get their usual — and intended — dose of disappointment.
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Grimly true.
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