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.           

Donald Trump Might Actually be Good for America

Donald Trump Might Actually be Good for America.

Consider this part gedankenexperiment, part the mutant child; the anti-consensus.

The mainstream narrative line, defined for so long by denial of his rise and prophecies of his failure, has seen Donald Trump progress from laughable irrelevance, through curious sideshow bloviating like some half-cut post-modern William Blake, into the Great Red Dragon himself.

“And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars from heaven, and did cast them to the earth.”

Perhaps that should read The Great Red Donald, with the heads as states, the horns as endorsements, the crowns as delegates and the stars as his rivals for the Republican nomination.

He represents, we are told, the worst of humanity. He is a fascist or a proto-fascist or a crypto-fascist, the next Hitler; a racist, a tyrant, a fraud, a buffoon. He is an opportunist, a liar, a demagogue devoid of substance and decency. He is dangerous, he is divisive, he is a threat to our future and to the future of the world; he is bad.

And so on, and so on. Donald Trump has his own record of insults and assaults and it is impressive in its size and variety, though he does have a whole world with which to fight. But that arsenal is almost if not entirely matched by that of the forces arrayed against him and him alone.

At least, that is how we might frame the difference conventionally. But that lazy phraseology is a problem, and it is precisely the reason for his success and his immunity to attacks that would fell other men: It is not The Donald against the world, because The Donald is but the face and the voice and the toupee of a movement; one that he represents though he did not create it.

Much is made in election seasons of The Silent Majority. It is a phrase typically employed by those of whom the pollsterati have been painting unflattering portraits. “Yes, the polls put Party B comfortably in the lead, but I think, come the day of the election, you’ll find that the silent majority will come out to vote for us [Party A].”

It seldom happens, of course. The Silent Majority has become something like a myth, one born of the unhappy fact that voter turnout is invariably poor and of the complacency of those who don’t care to ask why; the comforting fairytale of electoral politics. We hear of it but never from it.

Well, The Silent Majority has found its voice in America, and it isn’t happy. It was never silent of its own volition, it was made to be so by a political system and a political and media establishment that became dead and deaf to it a long, long time ago.

Forgetting Blake and his dragons: The repetition of The Donald’s rhetoric is at least worthy of Eliot.

We will build a wall,
It’ll be a great wall,
It’ll be a great wall
And Mexico will pay for it.

It is nativist, if not completely racist, but his critics often try to have it both ways when they criticise him for being flexible and malleable and dishonest and then work on the assumption that his rhetoric is honest and criticise him for that, too.

A cursory look through his history in politics, as an activist and a lobbyist for causes as varied as universal healthcare and nuclear non-proliferation, betrays no innate racism and demonstrates a flexible commitment to fairly consistent principles. (His economic populism and calls for a return to isolationism have been constituents of his political gospel since his involvement in the Perot movement of ’92.)

His talk, then, is expedient; and that at least suggests that Trump is not as bad for America as someone, like Ted Cruz, who is a genuine zealot. He won’t really ban Muslims from entering the United States. He can’t. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits it. Nor does he really hate women; his position on women’s’ issues, especially on Planned Parenthood, has been consistently liberal. Lip-service might be paid to the obligatory Republican crusade against abortion, but Trump has historically aligned himself with pro-choice movements whilst his opponents have not.

He might play to the worst sentiments of the Republican base but his comments on Mexicans, the Chinese and the Japanese are designed to get a reaction; to inflame the base and put their (sometimes legitimate) concerns at the head of the agenda.

The first was a crude amalgam of concerns regarding mass illegal immigration and the very real heroine crisis that is plaguing many Southern and early-voting states (and whether you agree with his tone or credit him with substance, both are serious issues). And that, I contend, is more honest than the dog-whistle approach employed by his Republican rivals and the neo-Dixiecrats in the Clinton campaign.

The others form part of an appeal for economic isolationism and a reflect the real concerns of those to whom the liberalisation of trade with Europe and China has been, to use a word The Donald is fond of, “a disaster.” Given that his opposition to such liberalisation almost certainly includes the TTIP, which theoretically opens NHS contracts to US health insurance tenders and might even allow companies to sue national governments if their policies harm profits, that position would benefit us a great deal.

Trump’s expediency is designed to play off the very system he rails against. Though he makes much of his personal wealth, his disposable income is too little to allow for a conventional campaign to rival the Super-PACs of his rivals. He might even be correct, then, when he claims to be beholden to no Big Money interests and that, too, is good for a political process which has otherwise been bought by the Koch brothers and by the likes of Right to Rise and Hillary Clinton’s innumerable Big Money backers.

It is a question raised both by Trump and by Sanders, and the question is a just and pertinent one: How can you honestly claim to be against the same interests that finance your campaign?

So it is that Trump energises his supporters with promises of an independent campaign, and his more colourful language has earned him air time that money quite literally cannot buy. There are limits to how much money can be spent to buy air time, even within the United States’ campaign finance system. Trump gets his for free, thus freeing him from the corruption endemic within that system and that, too, is a good thing.

 And Trump, like Sanders, is speaking for the forgotten; for The Silent Majority; for those left behind in the States’ transition from democracy to plutocracy; for Eliot’s Hollow Men.

“This is the dead land,
This is cactus land;
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

 More specifically, he represents the frustrations of those who believe that their representatives have sacrificed democracy for plutocratic cronyism, and that is inseparable from his image: a plutocratic crony who is sacrificing the other way.

It is something the Clinton team will do well to consider if (and it is still an if) she is able to schmooze and triangulate her way past Sanders for the Democratic nomination: Donald Trump’s campaign is gorging on the support of first-time voters in much the same way (though not quite to the same extent) as Sanders’ campaign. And, should the rigged nominations system confer upon Clinton the coronation she has long expected, and in so-doing opt for the candidate of both the conventional and the dark establishment, the Democrats may well face a support deficit and a de-energised support base in the general election.

But involving more people in the democratic process: That’s another good thing.

And who are those people? In the days when I found myself more enchanted by a snappy line than by the assumptions underlying it – and those days aren’t completely behind me – I lauded Lindsey Graham’s quip on the problem the GOP has with its electorate: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

I have always considered this to be true, but I now consider it to be a necessary and not a sufficient truism. Jeb Bush, for example, was absolutely right when he realised that it was and is not only “angry white guys” who are most naturally inclined to vote Republican. Many of the immigrants vilified for years by the GOP share many of the party’s convictions on social policy. For all we might disagree with those convictions, I was sorry to see Bush abandon his principles by reneging upon past positions in a pathetic attempt to meet Trump on annexed ground.

But why are Angry White Guys so angry? Surely they do not want to be. And I would bundle them into the same category as first-time Trump voters: These are people who have been energised by the consistent failure, on the party of the GOP, to account for their concerns.

Trump, for all his ills, is giving a voice to the disenfranchised. Should he win the nomination (which is likely but not a certainty given that a contested convention is possible; mass-suicides have happened before, after all) then, regardless of the outcome of the general election, the GOP will have nominated a candidate who represents The Silent Majority for the first time in recent history.

And, regardless of the outcome of the general election, The Silent Majority will finally have been re-engaged with a political process that has hitherto sought to exclude them from the debate. They will have representation. And, if you subscribe to the view, as I do, that political extremism is often a result of disenfranchisement (and, by extension, that the worst tendencies of the electorate are the fault not of the electorate but of the politicians who ignore them) then you will be open to the possibility that, just perhaps, Donald Trump will fundamentally realign the focus of the GOP elite away from the business interests of those who fund it and toward the concerns of those who made and make it.

No democracy can thrive or excel or even survive when only one party holds the power. I speak as someone with no ideological love for the GOP, and as someone who thinks that the Democrats are right wing, and as someone who thinks that the primary and caucus systems have many flaws that need to be addressed in order for the United States to be the democracy it claims to be, but I do firmly believe that (if we must settle for a two-party system) a strong GOP is absolutely vital if the United States is to achieve all that it is capable of achieving.

To that end, and for the sake of the voters, and for the sake of democracy, and for the sake of the United States; for the sake of accountability, and for the sake of reform, and for the sake of the separation of democracy and corporate interests (Jefferson had his wall, after all); for the sake of a challenge to Clintonian corruption, and for the sake of an end to one-party, one-ideology rule; and for the sake of theatre, and for the sake of entertainment, and for the sake of the American people:

Donald Trump might, just might, be good for America.

To Play the Queen: The Case Against Hillary Clinton - Part 2.

To Play the Queen.

The case against Hillary Clinton - Part 2.

During the time I have spent writing this, the second part of the précis of a case against Hillary Clinton, an American friend and occasional correspondent - and a potential Clinton voter - posed me three questions, which can be fairly summarised as follows:

1) Is it not both unfair and irrelevant to focus so much of my argument on Clinton's personal life?

2) Is it not the case that her tenure as Secretary of State has given her the experience necessary to manage the office of President?

3) Would it not be good for the United States to elect its first female president and, more broadly, is she not likely to be better than anyone (Bachman, Bush, Cain, Christie, Paul, Ryan, etc.) running as a Republican?

The sentiment of these questions is more important than the content because it mirrors that expressed by the supporters and defenders of Bill Clinton throughout his tenure as president, and because we are likely to see similar arguments proffered by the votaries of Hillary Clinton. They, like their forebears in the nineties, will almost certainly claim (with hurt in their eyes and pain in their voices) that those who hold and express views like my own are demonizing their preferred candidate who, let's not forget, "has done so much for us!"

My first response went something like this: If you can look at the charges put by myself and others and still hold the view that they are vulgar personal attacks, and that they bear no relevance to Ms Clinton's political career and aspirations, then that is very much your problem, and you will likely be rewarded with exactly what you deserve.

That said, and in case my answer be deemed to evasive or dismissive, I intend to incorporate more detailed answers to these questions within the next – and final – part of this series. If by its conclusion the reader feels that any of the above have been left unanswered, then either I have failed in my task, or you have failed in yours.

So, without any further meandering:

6) The Brothers Rodham.

"If my sister doesn’t end up with the nomination, I gotta take a look at who I’m gonna vote for.”

So said Tony Rodham to a reporter from the LA Times, who found him stewing over a pint at a bar opposite the Washington hotel which was playing host to the Democratic rules committee.

To the uninitiated, this might seem a trivial anecdote; an expression of brotherly bias, and nothing more. To those on the Clinton staff, a Rodham brother mouthing off to a journalist is seen as a minor crisis.

Never mind that his preferred candidate, should Hillary not get the Democratic nomination, was John McCain or Bob Barr (both Republicans, and the ease with which a Clinton or a Rodham can make the transition from Democrat to Republican is a theme which runs throughout both houses); the Rodham brothers are bad news.

If one looks through newspaper archives or on the internet, one is struck by how many gaffes and scandals and sinister dealings that Tony and Hugh Rodham are associated with. That their plans and designs almost always end in failure is testament to their incompetence, for which the United States owes a debt of gratitude to nature, which has been so unkind to them.

One of the most amusing and well known episodes came when the brothers put their collective brain to the task of creating and orchestrating what we are obliged to call a 'get rich quick' scheme. This involved the peculiar and, at first glance, innocuous enterprise of growing hazelnuts in the former Soviet state of Georgia, and exporting them to the West.

In a feat befitting of a comic relief duet, this banal venture caused a major diplomatic scandal.

The brothers had, more by accident than design, embroiled themselves in the complex world of post-Soviet politics. The Clinton administration had gone to considerable efforts to support the then-president of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze, who was accommodating of US interests in the region.

The Rodham brothers, apparently ignorant of this delicate state of affairs, bypassed the government of Georgia and went instead to the president's great rival, the pro-Russian Aslan Abashidze (a man who more closely resembles an egg than a lion). Abashidze took the opportunity to flaunt what he claimed was the personal support of Bill Clinton, which unsettled Shevardnadze, and this in turn compromised relations between the US and Georgia.

Tony Rodham seems to have acted as the puppet of a disreputable Georgian gentleman named Vasili Patarkalishvili. This is the man responsible for the conception of the hazelnut plan, as well as the founder of a bank which opened just long enough to take hundreds of thousands of dollars before closing (with the money still somewhere inside), and who attempted to use Tony's influence to arrange a meeting between Bill Clinton and the then-mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov, with the aim of winning Luzhkov's support for another shady scheme involving smart debit cards. Luzhkov, incidentally, was rumoured to have links to mobsters, and allegedly had an American businessman murdered.

Hugh, meanwhile, has been accused of using his influence to negotiate a lucrative tobacco settlement, and both have been accused of acting as covert lobbyists for various interest groups, taking a significant amount of money in the process.

7) The Issue of Race.

No, I'm not talking about the 'race card' supposedly played by Obama on Bill Clinton. He can claim otherwise, but the former president (who later attempted to deny saying what, thanks to the internet, we can still clearly hear him saying) betrayed another less-than-clean aspect of his character.

The Clintons have never been shy of deploying race as a tactic. Bill Clinton did it in 1992, making overtures to minorities and then veering sharply away to reassure the rednecks. The 1994 “white hands” TV advert, authored by that most capable of Clinton stooges Dick Morris, deliberately played on a particularly nasty kind of race-based animosity; exploiting the plight of the white working classes and directing their ire at the job-stealing minorities. He launched something like an attack on Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition via the proxy of Sister Souljah in 1992, whilst the execution of Ricky Ray Rector served a double purpose: it made him look tough at a time when his credibility was threatened by the Gennifer Flowers affair, and it appealed to the more stupid and sadistic of his voters in the most visceral way possible. "Look, I'm not too pro-black; here I am supervising the execution of a black man.”

Bill Clinton's record on this is perhaps worse than that of his wife, but we must remember that he was officially a part of her campaign team. We must also remember that the odds of Bill joining the White House as an advisor to his wife are exceedingly good. (We live in a world in which the opinions of someone like Barbra Streisand – one of the few women besides Hillary to have been close to the president who hasn’t later attempted to sue him, or join the law suits of others – are taken seriously.) The ‘whites only’ golf club might have been forgotten by the voters, but we have no reason to abandon our doubts about his character in this regard.

Hillary Clinton adopted a slightly more nuanced approach, making the occasional reference, but rarely doing anything more explicit than implying or insinuating that Obama was and is too black to be a president.

Take this, for example: "Sen. Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," she told the paper, citing as evidence a recent Associated Press story on voting trends in Indiana and North Carolina. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on."

And Bill eventually began towing the less conspicuous line, saying this in North Carolina: "I think it'd be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics." That said, his unprompted comparison between Obama's victory and those of Jesse Jackson in the 80s does not really deserve to be called a 'veiled reference"

.

8) Under Fire in Bosnia?

Despite her appeals for clemency and understanding (because the campaign trail is long and tiring, whilst the office of president is, presumably, a breeze by comparison), Ms Clinton did not simply 'misspeak' when she fabricated a record for herself in Bosnia.

Here is one version of her claim, from a speech at George Washington University in 2008:

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

If you are going to lie in an attempt to boost your credentials, it is probably best to choose something that is hard to prove or disprove. It is certainly not a good idea to lie about a trip on which you were accompanied by an entire camera crew from the broadcaster CBS, the singer Sheryl Crowe, and the comedian Sinbad.

The CBS footage has been uploaded to Youtube and juxtaposed with the comments made by Ms Clinton as seen above. It makes for an amusing watch but, for those readers who do not have instant access to the internet, here is a brief description of what actually occurred, written by Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post's 'The Fact Checker' blog:

"As a reporter who visited Bosnia soon after the December 1995 Dayton Peace agreement, I can attest that the physical risks were minimal during this period, particularly at a heavily fortified U.S. Air Force base, such as Tuzla. Contrary to the claims of Hillary Clinton and former Army secretary Togo West, Bosnia was not "too dangerous" a place for President Clinton to visit in early 1996. In fact, the first Clinton to visit the Tuzla Air Force base was not Hillary, but Bill, on January 13, 1996.

Had Hillary Clinton's plane come "under sniper fire" in March 1996, we would certainly have heard about it long before now. Numerous reporters, including the Washington Post's John Pomfret, covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady. "As a former AP wire service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," said Pomfret.

According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony... shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss."

Well, her head was down. But, flippancy aside, I draw the reader's attention to what I wrote in the first part of this case. (It's called A House of Lies and it can be found in the previous issue of the Lion, or on my blog.) Hillary Clinton is at least partly responsible for the Clinton administration (temporarily) reneging on its promise to end the campaign of rape, murder and genocide carried out against the Bosnians under the auspices of Ratko Mladic and Slobodan Milosevic. That Clinton had the gall to repeatedly lie about her role in Bosnia, and to try and claim the country, its people, and the atrocities committed against them as political capital to further her own cause is, to put it politely, egregious in the extreme.

9) Dodgy Donors & Farcical Financiers.

Well, where does one begin to tackle this subject?

“The story behind story is that America is in an era of sharply rising inequality, with a few at the top doing fabulously well but most Americans on a downward economic escalator.

That’s why Diane Sawyer asked Hillary about the huge speaking fees, and why the Guardian asked whether she could be credible on the issue of inequality.

And it’s why Hillary’s answers – that the couple needed money when they left the White House, and have paid their taxes and worked hard for it — seemed oddly beside the point. 

The questions had nothing to do with whether the former first couple deserved the money. They were really about whether all that income from big corporations and Wall Street put them on the side of the privileged and powerful, rather than on the side of ordinary Americans.”

Robert Reich, once a friend of the Clintons and Secretary of Labor in their administration, was probably correct in his analysis. The fuss following Hillary Clinton’s absurd claim – that the family was ‘broke’ after leaving the White House – was largely due to the fact that, for a great many Americans, the term ‘broke’ entails an inability to pay rent and feed the family.

As noted by Philip Bump in The Washington Post: “In 2000, the couple had no more than $2 million in assets, but perhaps as much as $10 million in debt... But if the couple was broke as they walked out of the White House, it took very little time to recover financially. In 2001, Bill made $13 million in speaking fees, and Hillary brought in nearly $2.5 million, presumably from her advance for "Living History." By 2004, the debt was erased.”

The article, which can be found here, notes that a significant portion of the $10 million in debt can be attributed to legal fees.

As is his fashion, Mr Reich does not care to look beyond the biggest of big pictures. The ‘tempest’, as he puts it, might not have been “about how they earned their money,”  but perhaps it should have been. Perhaps it would have been, too, had people like Mr Reich deigned to tell us exactly what caused those legal fees to soar, and how the Clinton’s have so often chosen to pay their debts.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Ms Clinton will almost certainly run in 2016, and much of her campaign infrastructure will be funded by Super PACs created by a group of people – former and current advisers, business associates, and the like – that we might loosely call ‘friends of the family’. This was made possible when, in 2010, the Supreme Court voted to ease restrictions on spending by ‘outside political organisations’.

This has not stopped her indulging in what her friends on Wall Street call ‘progressive populism’. In April this year, she criticised SCOTUS for “removing a limit on the total number of candidates one can donate to in one election season;” a move likely to mean that more private money enters the realm of electoral politics.

But I hope that the reader is not so easily fooled. There’s a reason Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan occupy first, second and fourth place on a list of Ms Clinton’s donors. There’s a reason these companies will pay $200,000 for such insights as “Leadership is a team sport,” “You can’t win if you don’t show up,” and “A whisper can be louder than a shout.” And there’s a reason that, in July of this year, a front-page article in the New York Times opened with the following: “As its relationship with Democrats hits a historic low, Wall Street sees a solution on the horizon: Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

This is Hillary’s Triangulation. It doesn’t really deserve to be called a variant of the Clintonian model, because it differs from the strategy of the Nineties in no meaningful respect. It is, after all, a family business, and Hillary herself employed it in a move that would see healthcare consolidated in the hands of a select few insurance companies.

I turn to Christopher Hitchens who, in No One Left To Lie To, summarises this episode of Triangulation more effectively than I can. He quotes a speech made by Ms Clinton in 1993 which closes as follows: “What you don’t get told [in adverts attacking the proposals for healthcare reform] is that it is paid for by insurance companies. It is time for you and for every American to stand up and say to the insurance industry: “Enough is enough, we want our health-care system back!”

He then goes on to make the following observation: “It is fortunate for the Clintons that this populist appeal was unsuccessful. Had the masses risen up against the insurance companies, they would have discovered that the four largest of them— Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, and Cigna— had helped finance and design the “managed-competition” scheme which the Clintons and their Jackson Hole Group had put forward in the first place.”

“The ‘triangulation’”, he says, “went like this. Harry and Louise sob-story ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), a group made up of the smaller insurance providers. The major five insurance corporations spent even more money to support “managed competition” and to buy up HMOs as the likeliest investment for the future. The Clintons demagogically campaigned against the “insurance industry,” while backing— and with the backing of— those large fish that were preparing to swallow the minnows.”

(Back to the present: This perhaps goes some way toward explaining Ms Clinton’s reaction to the SCOTUS decision mentioned earlier. She claimed, in the same speech, that: "With the rate the Supreme Court is going, there will only be three or four people in the whole country that have to finance our entire political system by the time they are done." We’ll ignore, at least for the moment, the fact that Ms Clinton is describing the status quo and not the future. Her problem with the SCOTUS decision is that it leaves those three or four people free to donate to candidates who aren’t her. In 93 she could monopolise the support of Aetna, Prudential and Cigna, and until recently she could monopolise the support of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Though it has by no means destroyed it, SCOTUS has ensured that she will have to work a little harder to maintain this monopoly.)

The same author published an essay in The Nation in 2000, in which he makes mention of donations to Ms Clinton from the Pakistani government, made via the law firm of another family friend.

“Remember when every liberal knew how to sneer at George W. Bush, not only for forgetting the name of Pakistan’s new dictator but for saying that he seemed like a good guy? Well , General Musharraf’s regime has now hired, at a retainer of $ 22,500 per month, the DC law firm of Patton Boggs, for which Lanny Davis, one of the First Family’s chief apologists, toils.

Perhaps for reasons having to do with the separation of powers, Patton Boggs also collects $ 10,000 monthly from Pak-Pac, the Pakistani lobby in America, for Davis’s services in its behalf. Suddenly, no more Dem jokes about ignorance of Pakistan. Last December, after Clinton announced that Pakistan would not be on his itinerary when he visited the subcontinent, his former White House “special counsel” arranged a fundraiser in Washington at which lawyers from Patton Boggs made contributions to the First Lady’s Senate campaign that now total $ 25,500. So, not very indirectly, Pakistani military money was washed into her coffers from the very start. Then, in February, another Pak-Pac event, in New York, was brought forward so as to occur before the arrangements for the President’s passage to India had been finalized. Having been told that the First Lady did not grace any event for less than $ 50,000 upfront, the Pakistanis came up with the dough and were handsomely rewarded for their trouble by the presence of Lanny Davis and by a statement from Mrs. Clinton that she hoped her spouse would stop off in Pakistan after all. And a few days later, he announced that, after much cogitation, he would favor General Musharraf with a drop-by.”

Moving both forwards and backwards through time in a manner only marginally more ridiculous than an entry from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008 was haunted by a ghost from 1996, when Norman Hsu, a Clinton campaign “bundler” (and who, along with the likes of Elton John and Steven Spielberg, rose to the title of “Hillraiser”), was revealed to be a fugitive from justice. He had failed to appear for sentencing after being convicted of fraud in 1992 and, after a report in The Wall Street Journal alleged that he had ‘mishandled’ a considerable amount of bundled campaign finance contributions, he disappeared again.

The Clinton team can, if you’ll forgive the bad play on words, be said to have “bungled” its response to the Hsu scandal. It supported him, then it distanced itself, then it supported him, then it distanced itself again. It announced it would return the donations, then it would return some of the donations, then it would return only the donations relating to the 2008 campaign and not those made for Ms Clinton’s re-election campaign in 2006, for which Mr. Hsu also served as a “bundler.”

Fair enough, one might possibly forgive this oversight. It was a busy campaign, and Ms. Clinton had an inexplicably large number of donors. It wasn’t quite at the level of the 1996 campaign finance scandal, in which somewhere in the region of 50 donors with links to the Chinese military-industrial complex fled the country rather than appear before the senate, a good deal more pleaded the 5^th amendment, and the likes of Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and Maria Hsia were eventually compelled to give us a glimpse of a huge and murky network of illegitimate donors to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. (That this scandal concluded without a conclusion is testament in part to the work of Janet Reno.) However, when you consider that the 2008 campaign hadn’t even considered performing background checks on its largest donors, one has cause for suspicion. And when you add contributions from Abdul Rehmann Jinnah, William Danielczyk, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (believed to be a front for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which the United States lists as a terrorist organisation) and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the poorest households in New York’s Chinatown (the LA Times report features imaginary people, Chinese crime syndicates, exploitation of migrants and many more unpleasant realities), the whole episode takes on a distinctly sinister tone.

It has dawned on me that I will close this lengthy section having not even touched on Whitewater or the cattle-future trades. (The latter was just one of the occasions on which Ms Clinton used her daughter as a shield. In this case, she hadn’t even been born!)

10) Unanswered Questions.

I turn to Robert Scheer of The Nation to sum this up. On the NSA:

"Did Secretary of State Clinton know that such massive spying on the American people was going on and, if not, why isn’t she grateful that Snowden helped to enlighten her? With her scurrilous attacks on Snowden, Hillary Clinton is either a fool or a liar."

And, alas, I am out of space.

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.