Governor Dannel Malloy, Democratic Party Bigwigs in
Connecticut and the members of the state’s all-Democratic US Congressional
Delegation are, at long last, in for Hillary Clinton as their Party’s
presidential nominee. For weeks, the Democratic crowd had been indifferently plunging
their big toes in the nomination pool. Now, in unison, all have jumped in,
satisfied that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fire breathing
progressive, has earnestly decided to withdraw behind the nomination curtain.
Fresh from having indicated he would not veto a progressive
state budget that effectively violates every important promise he made on the
gubernatorial campaign stump – no tax increases, no red ink budgets, no
untoward budget gimmickry, and the like – Mr. Malloy now has found time to issue
a generic endorsement of Hillary Benghazi.
Said Mr. Malloy, “I’ve been an admirer of hers for many
years… want to see her elected president…
think she is the best candidate the Democrats can run… one of the most
experienced candidates any party has run… best prepared candidate” and so on,
a cut-and paste endorsement made from
scraps of bumper-sticker rhetoric issued by DC Central.
Ralph Nader’s non-endorsement of Mrs. Clinton was far more
heartfelt. Said Mr. Nader, the fly in the progressive ointment:
“She almost singlehandedly did the
Libyan war. The Defense Department was against it, [Secretary Robert] Gates,
and she persuaded the White House that it was an easy topple without knowing
that in a tribal society with nothing to replace it you would have a civil war,
sectarian killings spilling into Africa, weapons everywhere, Mali, central
Africa and she’s being accused of Benghazi – the big thing is the huge amount
of geography that has been destabilized because of the Libyan overthrow.”
More than a
discouraging word there; however, the Nader message will not be unfamiliar to
populist progressives.
Mr. Malloy was asked by a reporter why he had not chosen to
endorse former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland. Mr. O’Malley would serve to fill the gap left
by progressive heart-throb Warren, a Wall Street and anti-war scourge. To be
sure, Mr. O’Malley is not a woman, but he is young and more reliably
progressive than Mrs. Clinton. In addition, he is not overburdened with the
usual Clinton baggage: He did not fiddle while the consulate in Benghazi
burned, and he is not married to serial molester Bill Clinton. If Mr. Clinton
were a Catholic priest, he long since would have been denounced from every
secular political pulpit in the land by enraged neo-feminists who shiver with
indignation at even the mildest micro-aggressions.
Mr. Nader – the man who would rather be right than
president – is right in this instance. Benghazi really is Mrs. Clinton’s Iraq.
Salon magazine, the progressive canary in the Democrat
populist mineshaft, seems more than willing to shove Mr. Nader – and, along
with him, Bill Curry, progressive populist and Hillary scold – off the
gangplank into the waters of the Lethe.
The leftist rollout of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has rendered pointless
the campaigns of those, like Ms. Warren, who seem to be more progressive than
Mrs. Clinton, according to Salon contributor Heather Digby Parton, author of “Hillary shocker: Who needs Elizabeth Warren? Clinton unleashes inner liberal, media freaks out” .
Readers of Salon should shelve the last half-dozen columns critical of the
Clintons written for the E-Zine by Mr. Curry, Connecticut’s own canary in the
populist-progressive mineshaft.
Progressives will
recall their assault on President George Bush II. Their beef was that although the
duffer had prosecuted a seemingly successful war against Kurd killer Saddam
Hussein, once Mr. Hussein had been removed a gap was opened in the north of
Iraq that was quickly filled by ISIS terrorists, the dragon teeth sown by Mr.
Bush’s bumbling foreign policy. That analysis surgically removes from the foreign policy equation subsequent actions by Mr. Obama that have destabilized the entire Middle East, but let that go.
In what important respects does the Obama-Clinton Libyan
operation differ from Mr. Bush’s Iraq misadventure? Republican cynics ight say
that no American ambassadors was subject to the indignity of murder in Mr.
Bush’s failed attempt to establish democracy in Iraq. In most respects, the
narrative in both cases is eerily similar: A dreaded tyrant is overthrown and
replaced with a more tolerable but incompetent boob; the boob does booby things
and soon incurs the enmity of his theological opponents who, being Islamic
terrorists, a designation fiercely resisted by the wall-eyed boobs in
Washington, begin to sack towns, burning Christian churches and beheading
infidels along the way.
At some point in her presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton
will be forced to justify a gun-running operation that resulted in the death of
an ambassador and consulate personnel, the presence of ISIS in Syria and
northern Iraq, the alienation of
affections of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the part she played in permitting Russian
President Vladimir Putin to corner the plutonium market following his seizure
of a large chunk of Ukraine, the money-grubbing role she played in shuttling
foreign cash into the Clinton Foundation when she was Secretary of State and,
not last or least, there is the case of the hacked private server she kept
under Secret Service guard in her mansion in Chappaqua.
The Clintons have a past that includes offenses far more
severe than the acquisition of speeding tickets, and as William Faulkner once
said: The past is not over; it is not even past.
In endorsing the scandal scarred Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Malloy
and the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, Democrats all,
implicitly assent to what she has done and failed to do, said and failed to say,
during her long career as the wife of the Governor of Arkansas, First
Lady during the administration of President Bill Clinton, U.S. Senator from New
York and United States Secretary of State. The experience Mr. Malloy so admires
will be sifted and measured in the upcoming Presidential campaign by people
whose nose for news may be sharper than his own.
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