Monday, March 14, 2016

Hillary and other signs of a world gone mad

Turkish war planes have yet again bombed northern Iraq -- though that's now what the press coverage tells you.  The press coverage tells you that they bombed PKK camps in northern Iraq.

Who was there?

What reporter was on the ground and verified that claim?

We've had over a decade now of the Turkish government lying that it bombed camps and Iraqi towns and villages being destroyed, Iraqis being wounded and killed.  At what point do reporters remember that their job is not to be a megaphone but a critical resource?

That thought never entered their tiny little minds.

AHLUL BAYT NEWS AGENCY insists that this was "confirmed" -- and this confirmation was "by the Turkish army."

No, dead, that's not a confirmation, that's a claim.


And in the midst of a presidential campaign in the United States, why can't any contender comment on this never ending back and forth that's decades old and talk about the need for mediation to resolve this issue?

The Turkish government oppresses the Kurdish minority.  The Turkish government broke the most recent cease fire with the PKK.  At what point do we say, "This has gone on decades, you've both lost the high ground, you need to resolve it and stop involving the world in your problems."?


That would be real leadership.

As opposed to the go-aheads to bomb or, worse, the supplying of weapons.

If David Israel's report for THE JEWISH PRESS is to be believed, we're seeing one example of what supplying weapons can lead to:


Military analyst J.E. Dyer on Sunday suggested the US government sold to Iraq the two missiles discovered on a passenger plane bound for Portland, Oregon.
On Saturday, bomb-sniffing dogs identified in two wooden coffins, shipped from Lebanon and bound for Portland, two guided, armor-piercing AGM-114 Hellfire missiles with explosive warheads. The missiles, designed to be fired from helicopters, were manufactured by Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrup Grumman, each weighs about 100 pounds and costs about $110,000.









Heading into another round of Tuesday primaries, Hillary Clinton hopes she can seize the nomination and stop Senator Bernie Sanders' momentum.  Hillary getting the presidency in November?  That would mean a term of war and more war, a term of destruction and chaos.  Honduras is currently suffering from her actions as Secretary of State:



AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Honduras. I want to go to Hillary Clinton in the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. In her memoir, Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton wrote about the days following the coup. She wrote, quote, "In the subsequent days I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa [in] Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections [could] be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot," unquote.
Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places in the world. In 2014, the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres spoke about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup. This is the woman who was assassinated last week in La Esperanza, Honduras. But she spoke about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup with the Argentine TV program Resumen Latinoamericano.
BERTA CÁCERES: [translated] We’re coming out of a coup that we can’t put behind us. We can’t reverse it. It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The same Hillary Clinton, in her book, Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling of North Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here, she, Clinton, recognized that they didn’t permit Mel Zelaya’s return to the presidency. There were going to be elections. And the international community—officials, the government, the grand majority—accepted this, even though we warned this was going to be very dangerous and that it would permit a barbarity, not only in Honduras but in the rest of the continent. And we’ve been witnesses to this.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres speaking in 2014. She was murdered last week in her home in La Esperanza in Honduras. Last year, she won the Goldman Environmental Prize. She’s a leading environmentalist in the world. Professor Grandin?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, and she criticizes Hillary Clinton’s book, Hard Choices, where Clinton was holding up her actions in Honduras as an example of a clear-eyed pragmatism. I mean, that book is effectively a confession. Every other country in the world or in Latin America was demanding the restitution of democracy and the return of Manuel Zelaya. It was Clinton who basically relegated that to a secondary concern and insisted on elections, which had the effect of legitimizing and routinizing the coup regime and creating the nightmare scenario that exists today.



With recent polling finding that a majority of Americans view Hillary Clinton unfavorably (a finding that's been documented in poll after poll since at least December).  It's not that Hillary wouldn't have any support if she got the nomination, it's just that it would be the support of the slimey and the unethical with a good portion of the unaware.  But Juan Williams (THE HILL) is predicting she could get some major star power endorsements:

For an already fractured Republican party, the sight of the GOP nominee taking shots at Clinton over a war started by the last Republican president will inevitably lead to a wild outcome: The Bush family will have to endorse Hillary Clinton.
They won’t have a choice. 
If the Bush dynasty backs Trump or even stands out of the fray, they will be effectively accepting his critique of the war as a catastrophic mistake for America.


How fitting.

POLITICO offers a lengthy essay entitled "What's Wrong With Hillary?" -- lengthy but not lengthy enough.

Or as Rosenne observes:



  • i'm listening to Hillary say Trump is full of hate-but- he didn't vote to invade Iraq, or cause th wholesale destruction of Libya, so, c'm







  •  Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Low Road" went up yesterday.


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