There’s a strong debate going on right now amongst Democrats and progressive people in general: what to do if your favorite candidate doesn’t get the nomination.
Putting aside the rancor it seems to boil down to this:
Hillary supporters, mostly first generation feminists, would be enraged if she was not the nominee because they want to see a woman President before they croak.
Obama supports, mostly kidsters, want to see someone who isn’t 30 years their senior andwho talks like a motivational guru be President so they can believe they have a future.
Nader supporters could give a shit.
I’m an oddity of sorts. I’m a middle age guy who supports Obama, with serious reservations, because:
1. I believe he can beat Generalissimo McCain and Hillary can’t with her baggage
2. Even though the charisma is probably a calculated put on it would be nice to have the world regard our President as something other than an idiotic cowboy dry drunk.
3. Looking at the last half-century, we could do far worse than Obama all things considered.
4. He’s not Hillary Clinton.
Number four is the subject of this post.
In this article, Marc Cooper, derided as a ‘Clinton hater’ by some of the posters under the story, makes the case that the Obama campaign should not have fired the highly regarded Samantha Power for telling the truth.
And what was the truth?
Power was rightfully awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book A Problem From Hell which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered.
It was not calculated indifference. There is no oil in Rwanda. And the people there, unlike the Balkans, are black. It wasn’t calculated indifference, it was a calculated ignoring.
Former Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the UN forces in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, tells us a similar story in his own memoir. General Dallaire recounts how, at the height of the Rwandan holocaust, he got a phone call from a Clinton administration staffer who wanted to know how many Rwandans had already died, how many were refugees and how many were internally displaced. Writes Dallaire: “He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier.”
Now THAT’S calculating!
How much did it take for the Bush administration to risk one American life in Iraq?
112 billion barrels of oil.
More from Cooper:
Samantha Power has actually lived the sort of life that Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff has, for public consumption, invented for its candidate. Though not quite 40 years old, Power has spent no time on any Wal-Mart boards but has rather dedicated her entire adult life rather tirelessly to championing humanitarian causes. She has spoken up when others were silent. She took great personal risks during the Balkan wars to witness and record and denounce the carnage (She reported that Bill Clinton intervened against the Serbs only when he felt he was losing personal credibility as a result of his inaction. “I’m getting creamed,” Power quoted the then-President saying as he fretted over global consternation over his own hesitation to act).
We gave Power the Pulitzer for exposing the, well, monstrous indifference of the Clinton administration as it stared unblinkingly and immobile into the face of massive horror. But we give her a kick in the backside and throw her out the door when she has the temerity to publicly restate all that in one impolite word. Monstrous, indeed.
“We f***** up in Ohio,” she admitted. “In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win.
“She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything,” Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: “Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.
“You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”
Yes indeed.
Time and space does not permit a thoroughgoing list of the excesses and obscenities of the Clinton years and the personalities that made them possible. The Clinton economy, which most people point to as justification, was built on a speculative bubble that could not have lasted and did not last. Suffice it to say that if Clinton does manage to wrestle the nomination away from Obama by any means necessary, I would be hard pressed to vote for her in the general election.
And I say that with all knowledge of what a McCain presidency would entail.
But the difference, at that point, would be, I believe, between war and fascism on the fast track and on the not-so-fast track.
And in the end is that really any choice at all?
And perhaps, if that is exactly what happens, was that the point all along?
2 responses so far ↓
K // March 8, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Yes, there was a choice: Ron Paul.
I have read his writings for years and his stance has not changed on anything. He has opposed this disgusting war in Iraq (where a large portion of the blame for our crumbling economy rests, wars are expensive) and ever increasing federal budgets and power from the first word I read by him.
He is, truly, the only choice if you love your freedom.
To those inevitable people who will say, “I’m not throwing my vote away on some guy with no chance to win!” I respond: But you will happily throw your vote away on someone who you know is lying to you and who will make things worse? How stupid are you?
Maybe Obama is not the criminal that normally rises to the top of the two political parties, but I don’t know…
kegbot1 // March 8, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I agree on Ron Paul. I tend to think his lack of success despite his fund raising ability points to the futility of trying to work within the two party structure. The libertarian conservatism of Ron Paul seems to have packed up and left the GOP along with Pat Buchanan’s enlightened non-interventionism. And I always wondered about the ‘throw my vote away’ excuse. How is any vote wasted? Do we have such a winners mentality in this country that it really matters that we can tell our great grandchildren that we voted for all the winners over the years? People can’t win if you don’t vote for them. Having said that, I can understand the fatalism that creeps into voters due to our system. If we had a viable multi-party parliamentary system such as Canada, I think more views would be heard from a broader political spectrum than the current system allows. On the other side of Paul was Ron Gravel and a similar fate awaited him.
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