Friends Don't Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Friends Don’t Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Not in a healthy relationship, anyway.

Time and memory are precious commodities in politics, made so by the fact that they are in short supply. But I invite you back to 2013 and the occasion of the G20 summit in St Petersburg.

Britain had been branded “just a small island” by Vladmir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “No one pays any attention to them.”

David Cameron saw this as the perfect time to emulate the best, most foppish and lecherous Prime Minister Britain never had. This was his Hugh Grant moment. Britain, he said, was great. Sorry, is great. We beat fascism and slavery with Dick Francis and One Direction.

Absent from his sterling riposte (aside from any retort to the comments also reportedly made by Mr. Peskov about Russia owning Kensington and Chelsea) was a very important qualification.

The qualification is an inconsistency (I do not say paradox); one that never seems to be caught in the open but is detectable by its scent and the vague sense that something is happening just out of eye-line and ear-shot. It is a dog doggedly dogging in the dark; that unsettling thing that you seldom see as you stroll through the woods but that you are quite sure exists.  

And it is unique to the Better Together tribute act. The Brexit campaign has an alternative which is at least rhetorically cogent: Britain is great and therefore capable; it is great enough to, so-to-speak, stand alone. Moreover its greatness is served best by standing alone; it is only being held down by the burdens of a failing foreign power.

Cameron’s omission of this inconsistency is also one of Remain’s biggest flaws. It seems, at best superficially and at worst seriously, incongruous to speak of the boldness, patriotism, bravery and greatness of Britain if your argument tacitly acknowledges that we are reliant upon others for our status.

I make no secret of my own partisanship. Though I could hardly be accused of patriotism, I do not think that Britain is necessarily reliant upon Europe for its status.

But David Cameron undoubtedly is. George Osborne is, too. (Not for nothing does one cultivate a cosy relationship with Christine Lagarde.) The belated concession to those clamouring for a referendum forced them to gamble on that most important of currencies in politics: legacy.

So, whilst Mr. Peskov elicited such a quaint but firm response, Barack Obama was met not only with what we are obliged to call the red carpet treatment but also the personal and absolutely slavish devotion and indebtedness of the leader of a supposedly proud nation.

We should not kid ourselves on this: Barack Obama, speaking in the nauseatingly ‘candid’ tones of a dear ‘friend’, has left us with no room to doubt the depths of esteem in which he holds the junior partner in the special relationship; a real and valuable relationship disgraced by the monarchical attitude of the President and by a Prime Minister with an expression befitting only a sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome.

The conclusion we should draw from Obama’s speech is that Britain serves American interests by acting as its 51^st state lobbying within the borders of Europe; both a prostitute and a pimp. Out of Europe, Britain ceases to perform that useful function and is then, as Mr. Peskov stated, “just a small island.” No one will pay any attention to us, not least the United States, who will happily push us to “the back of the queue.”

A friendly reminder, apparently. Well, as the old saying goes: with friends like these, who needs enemies?

We are fortunate that the political scene in the United States suggests Mr. Obama was speaking not for any future administration and barely even for his own. Even Anne Applebaum, normally as astute as a tactical nuclear weapon, has noticed the almost perfectly bipartisan move away from exactly the type of trade deal (TPP and TTIP) that Obama has chosen to weaponize.

Whether Trump or Cruz, Clinton or Sanders, the next president is not likely to accelerate any free trade deal of the type for which he is an increasingly lonely advocate. And I know for a fact that I speak for many, on both sides of the Atlantic and of the supposed political divide, when I say that I would not be sorry to see daddy confiscate those particular toys. Let us continue to be the largest single foreign investor into the United States and still register a trade surplus without signing away the future of the NHS in a bid to appease any desire for ‘harmonization’.

But seldom is it that monarchs are concerned with reality, and Barack Obama is the most monarchical President of my living memory. He seems to have given no consideration whatever to the necessary trade-offs required by our continued membership of the European Union; democracy, accountability and sovereignty were not factored into his speech.

Then again, this is a President more at home in the company of our own queen than he would ever be in the House of Commons. His rhetoric is smooth and polished, his presentation superb, but this is a man whose tenure in high office only flourished after the Democrats lost both the House and the Senate. This is a man whose astonishing hubris (he claimed of his own election that it marked the moment the oceans ceased to rise) was only ever constrained by democracy and fit only to be enacted by decree. The leader of the free world has always preferred to act by executive order, often imposing policies less extreme than those he presented to his political opponents in the certain knowledge that they would be rejected. His lasting democratic achievement is the making of democracy redundant: rendering Republican speaker John Boehner’s position all but untenable and creating the very divide he has since used to justify his royal prerogative.

And this is a President whose promised “Change We Need” and “Change We Can Believe In” has been so remarkable by its absence that huge swathes of voters are now, apparently without self-critique, flocking to the candidate, Hillary Clinton, he once (and rightly) portrayed as the antithesis of that change. Millions more are so fed up with business as usual that they are helping to create the biggest protest movement since the Dixicrats walked out of the Democrats’ convention in ’48.

Barack Obama is popular. And, if popularity is a measure of success, then he is successful. His words and his warnings will probably resonate in the halls of the debate over Europe. But he will leave office with his legacy that of a commander by diktat; one whose actions demonstrate an absolute failure to work within the confines of democracy and to whom the notion of accountability and due process is seemingly alien. Little wonder, then, that he has many friends in the pro-EU establishment.

But, stripped (as he is soon to be) of the regalia of his esteemed office, his arguments for our continued membership are less convincing than those of even the least competent junior minister. That he used the privilege of his power to threaten the people of the United Kingdom is a repugnant abuse of his position, evidence of the vacuity of his cause, and an abuse of the friendship he affects to laud.           

A House of Lies: The Case Against Hillary Clinton - Part One

Were the relationship between press and politics in the United States as adversarial as it is claimed  to be, and were the American population as savvy and intelligent and incredulous as the dignity of that great country demands, or treated, by the talking heads on news networks, as though they had some dignity of their own, we would not now be forced to endure the facile and almost uniformly subservient 'debate' surrounding the prospect of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016.

This discussion, as presented, would have us consider nothing more than the two possible outcomes: Either Ms Clinton will run, or she will not. But, as with the equally misleading hand-wringing about whether she would or would not accept the position of Secretary of State, it entirely misses the most salient point: Should Clinton be allowed to run in the first place? Or, to put it another way: Why is it that Clinton is seen not only as a viable candidate by the DNC (not to mention large swathes of voters on both sides of the supposed political divide), but as a front runner?

 If the world were as it should be, her prospective candidacy would have been ruled out by her involvement in the numerous, shameful affairs which should have led to disbarring and eventual impeachment of her disgraceful husband. Or, failing that, with the conclusion of his worthless second term. That she is being considered as a candidate, and treated in some circles as the next in line to the White House, is a damning indictment of America's increasingly dynastic political system, and of those who fail to hold it to account.

More lenient critics might accuse her only of adopting the same 'blank slate' strategy which was used to great effect by the independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992, briefly at the expense of Ms Clinton's husband. (Ross Perot's decline began when people belatedly began filling in that slate on his behalf, resulting in a dirtied picture of a nasty man with a paranoid fear of black people and the CIA.) I would go further, and suggest that there is already enough colour on Hillary's canvas to rule her out of the race.

The four most recent disgraces take the form of an embarrassingly incompetent fabrication concerning her role in Bosnia during the last years of the Clinton administration, and of the flagrant and apparently shameless deployment of the 'race card' against Barack Obama in her 2008 campaign, and of her ludicrous claim that her family was "broke" after leaving the White House (the falsity of which should be obvious even if one does not care to delve into the murky world of the Clintons' financiers), and finally, of her 'stance' on foreign policy and foreign intervention - one might describe this as being the stance of a bipolar hawk - which has, during the last few weeks, resulted in overtures to her 'good friend' Henry Kissinger; a man whose singular accomplishment has been to avoid indictment as a war criminal whilst maintaining his image as a respected foreign policy guru.

These are all current issues, and they are relatively well known (though they have been treated uncritically by most whose opinions could matter). Her claims about coming under fire in Bosnia, presumably alongside the moral boosting entertainment troupe that accompanied her, are especially amusing. These will be covered in more detail later in part two. But first, I intend to revisit some of the unpleasant truths that her unwise supporters, both Democrat and Republican, have regarded with wilful blindness for over two decades.

To draw up a list of 52 cards to complete this deck of lies would be to take liberties with the patience of both the editor and the reader. (Though any deep investigation of the Clintons would almost certainly turn up far more than 52 unsavoury and unflattering facts.) And so, I will do my best to limit my charges to a list of ten points; enough, if you like, for a quick game of 10 card rummy.

1) As a 27 year old attorney, Hillary Clinton defended a man accused of raping a child; a man she allegedly knew to be guilty.

This story was revived during the 2008 presidential campaigns and flaunted by the most extreme right wing media outlets for all the wrong reasons. The facts of the case are damning enough without the hysterical and false addendums made by her political enemies. She was, of course, obliged to either do her job as a defence attorney or to stand aside on principle. Principle is not something which comes easily to Ms Clinton, and so, she undertook to do her job, and to provide the best legal defence that she could. And, in her qualified opinion, the best legal defence amounted to an entirely unfounded attack on the victim.

From a write-up of this case published in The Atlantic in 2008:

"I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing," wrote Rodham, without referring to the source of that allegation. "I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body."

"Dale Gibson, the investigator, doesn't recall seeing evidence that the girl had fabricated previous attacks."

The girl was just 12 years old at the time, and one is left to wonder at the cynicism shown by the young Clinton. If, in your best judgement, the defence of the accused will be best served by seeking to assassinate the character of the child he has allegedly raped, you deserve any derogatory label subsequently applied to you.

That this episode was apparently lost to history until 2008 hints at a number of unpleasant truths about American justice and its relationship with politics, and also speaks to the political nous and knack for manoeuvring possessed by both Hillary Clinton and her husband.

2) The commencement of a decade of 'support'.

Those who tend to focus a little too much on Bill Clinton's sex life have proffered the thesis that his long term affair with Gennifer Flowers did more than anything else to propel him toward the White House. This seems to me to be a little too simplistic, as his 'expert' handling of the scandal was part of a much wider methodology. But it cannot be denied that, as governor and later as president, Bill Clinton succeeded in turning allegations of sexual misconduct to his advantage until long after he admitted that he had, in fact, had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. 

Whether he was supervising the execution of a lobotomized black man in Arkansas (described by Christopher Hitchens as "...the first of many times that Clinton would deliberately opt for death as a means of distraction from sex,") or taking the executive decision to bomb a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, he has an impressive record of keeping a smug and apparently handsome face above very troubled waters.

And yet, this might not have been possible had it not been for the public support of his wife, and her more covert involvement in smear campaigns against people - Flowers, Lewinsky, Willey, and Broaddrick (who made the much more serious charge of rape against the President) - who should, if their allegations are true, as we have many reasons to believe that they are,  quite properly be known and referred to as Clinton's victims.

Hillary Clinton's bizarre claim, made in 1999, that her husband's sex addiction stemmed from abuse at the hands of his own mother, is only one of the ways (albeit the one which displays doublethink in all its glory) in which she contributed to restoring and sustaining an image of family integrity which remains to this day. 

(I will not dirty this article with the pointless and, as far as I am aware, unfounded insinuations, made by some of the more disreputable of the Clintons' critics, that Hillary's reputation as being good on 'women's issues' stems more from her personal/sexual than it does her professional life.)

Her work on behalf of the President's image had the added bonus of giving her leverage over her husband, which undoubtedly contributed to...

3) She pressured Bill Clinton to delay taking action to halt the campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out in Bosnia.

To quote a passage from Sally Bedell Smith's book For Love of Politics:

"Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people."

This shameless regard for her own political image, and the disgraceful number of casualties of which it is a direct cause, gained the American public exactly nothing in return. The Clinton healthcare plan failed to limit the parasitic effects of big business on the HMO, and served only to introduce the worst elements of the bureaucracy with which many Americans associate the public health provisions of 'socialist' countries.

4) She lied about her own name.

During a tour of Asia in 1995, she was fortunate enough to meet Sir Edmund Hillary. In a minor and yet revealingly dishonest episode, she claimed that her mother had in fact named her after this great adventurer and philanthropist. Ms Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund's most famous mountaineering expedition (the one which first caught the eyes of the world) did not take place until 1953, requiring us to believe that Hillary Clinton was not given a name until she was 6 years old.

5) With the help of her husband, she tried to make us forget her support for the Iraq war.

For the record, I should state that I have never been opposed to the argument for intervention. It should have been carried out in 1991. This is not a debate on the merits of those arguments, or of the (often shambolic and criminally incompetent) handling of the occupation that followed. I am solely concerned - as anyone who views foreign policy and national security as being important issues should be - with Hillary Clinton's record on the issue.

This disturbingly successful attempt to alter history was carried out with a view to gaining a little more support in the Iowa caucuses.

She had initially taken the position that a conflict with Saddam Hussein was inevitable. By extension, we are supposed to assume that she viewed continuing coexistence with Saddam and his regime to be impossible, and that he represented a grave threat to the security of the United States and its allies. If this had been her view, she would have been perfectly correct. But her willingness to compromise on what should have been a deeply held conviction (compromise might be putting it too politely) suggests that, much to the surprise of no one who has followed her career, the hawk has never flown from its nest for anything other than a few easy-won votes.

(Incidentally, the hawk/dove dichotomy is both stupid and inaccurate. Compared to doves, hawks have superior vision and intelligence).

I fear I have trespassed too long on your good graces, dear reader. To conclude part one:

I find it astounding that many democrats and self-described liberals in the United States are gleefully awaiting the anointing of a woman who sits to the right of many Republicans.

Those who have criticized Obama's foreign policy as being too 'hawk-like' should, if they are consistent, be apoplectic with rage at the prospect of a commander in chief who believes Kissinger has made moral and worthwhile contributions to US policy. This is a man who should have scribbled his latest empty text from a prison cell.

Clinton apparently earned her place in the senate by performing admirably in the arduous task of covering for her lecherous, conniving, lying husband. Anyone who criticizes the United States for adopting a principal that is morally equivalent to the hereditary succession it had once railed against will be further vindicated if she succeeds to the office of president.

I mean, really. It would be akin to electing Francis Urquhart's wife.