Orlando - It's Not Terrorism.

It's Much, Much Worse.

~~~

It took far too long for the stupid and fatuous term War on Terror to be expunged from the lexicon of foreign policy. The political history of the United States is littered with silly declarations of hopeless domestic conflicts – on drugs, on poverty, on want, on crime – but the War on Terror is so asinine, so self-contradictory, so evidently impossible to prosecute that it could only have been created in and maintained by W’s White House.

What is war if not a terrifying prospect? What does it do if not utilize means and methods that terrify the sane? Has there ever been an account, from a civilian trapped in a conflict zone, that has not spoken in stark and candid terms of the terror they felt?

How can a War on Terror then be prosecuted when it involves us in a mind-numbing tautology. War involves terror; a war on terror must necessarily involve a war on the means of warfare., and yet not once did the Bush White House order the bombarding of an enemy with white poppies.

Bush, it seems to me, was at best half right. What he presented as a declaration of a new war, on terms and against an ‘enemy’ of a nature that made a mockery of the claim, should have been presented as a response to a declaration of war on civil society. Terror was never an enemy to be opposed; it is a symptom of war.

We, who are too often disinterested observers, would do well to keep this fact in mind. We are told of the “desperate search for answers” in the aftermath of acts that are commonly, and wrongly, described as “senseless” and “meaningless.” In fact, attacks like that on the Pulse nightclub (made bitterly ironic because a pulse is what the victims have been cruelly deprived of) should serve as reminders: that, whilst it is obviously ridiculous to say “on terror,” we are still participants in a war that predates, and goes well beyond, our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alright, if we are not at war on terror then against what, or with whom, are we struggling?

The  employment of the term terrorist actually predates the Bush White House by three decades or more. It is not as self-evidently self-defeating a term as War on Terror, which probably goes some way toward explaining why it is still in employ whilst the War on Terror is not. But it, too, is rank with contradictions and ripe for specious misuse. A terrorist cannot be defined in isolation from the concept and definition of terrorism and terrorism has no universal or binding definition.

It is commonly parsed as “the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Yet this is quite obviously inadequate in a conversation which often involves a debate about the ‘backers’ and ‘financers’ and ‘enablers’ of terrorism. And it grants the holder far too much power whilst allowing for capricious and arbitrary application.

So it is that the Reagan White House could justify its interventions in Nicaragua on the spurious grounds that it was becoming a ‘terrorist state’ (thus admitting that terrorism can in fact be ‘authorised’) whilst at the same time making nice with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which actually do support, finance, back, endorse, enable and authorise acts of terrorism. Bush’s War on Terror cannot then be reparsed as a War on Terrorism because his related talk of a new axis of evil made no mention of the supposed allies who created and supported the Taliban and, more recently, Islamic State.

Furthermore, the definition requires that violence is used ‘in pursuit of political aims’. This, again, allows for advocates of political causes to be admitted as terrorists – whether they be Viet Cong, Sandinista, PKK, ETA (but not, curiously, - and here again the point about capricious and arbitrary standards – French colonialists, Bay of Pigs insurrectionists, contras, the Turkish government, the murderers of Salvador Allende, for all of whom the United States has found a use whilst denying that terrorism can be or has ever been ‘authorized’) – whilst precluding the application of the term to the very people we now most readily call terrorists, the invariably apocalyptic and messianic death cults of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State. These are groups which combine the ugly fatalism of the nihilist with the dangerous supremacist outlook of the fascist and the zeal of religious fanaticism. And one would have to be very generous indeed to allow that the desire to bring on the apocalypse could count as a ‘political aim’.

The injunction to ‘call things by their proper names’ has had an unusual progression through philosophy and politics, it being recommended to us by figures as diverse and removed from each other as Confucius, Orwell and Ted Cruz. Donald Trump claims prescience on this matter but it was Cruz who first and most often and most eloquently demanded that politicians describe their enemies without equivocation, only then to mischaracterise the nature of both the threat and its propagators.

“Radical Islamic terrorism” was and remains his classification of choice. One might, I suppose, give him the credit of trying; the response universally adopted by those on the liberal left-wing of politics has always been to resort to the lines “it has nothing to do with Islam,” “hate has no religion,” and words to that effect, a via negativa approach that does not attempt to provide an explanation or to give answers to those who so “desperately search” for them.

But Cruz fails the standard he claims to value so dearly. For one thing, terrorism is (as we’ve seen) a stupid and inadequate category that affects specificity but is in fact staggeringly vague. For another, it does not distinguish between different forms of Islamic, or Islamist, fundamentalism. Islamic State is born of Wahabbism which is itself a strand of Sunni Islam; should Hezbollah achieve its stated wish  - the destruction of the state of Israel – it would have achieved a goal of Shiite extremists. And for another, it encourages jumping to a conclusion without consideration for the facts. Remember how quickly people declared Anders Breivik’s slaughter in Norway an act of Islamist terrorism?

There is no easy, immediate, catch-all definition which answers our burning questions. Life, like the perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity, is not so forgiving. It is not blowback; the LGBT community so pointlessly massacred in Orlando have no more invaded another country than had the children at Sandy Hook Elementary, killed not by any Islamist terrorist but by a mentally deranged American citizen. It cannot be justified by citing the alleged crimes committed in the name of foreign policy, nor can it always be said that the perpetrator is gripped by a fervour that is explicitly religious.

Where any of these things can be proved to be true, we should then call them by their proper names. The shooter in Orlando did apparently offer a pre-emptive declaration of affiliation with Islamic State. But what if he hadn’t? What if he had been motivated by Shiite fervour? Would it still have been ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ had this man, with a ‘Muslim name’, instead been a devotee of some crazed, millenialist sect?

No, ‘terrorism’, whether Islamic or anything else, simply will not do. There can be no guarantee of motive, no pre-emptive classification. There can be no certainty, and that is a terrible thing. Nihilism, the pointless taking of life, the wanton destruction in and of this world by those to whom life has no value except as preparation for the unknowable and non-existent beyond; this is what we are faced with. Not a clash of civilizations but a war between civilization and its enemies ; enemies who view all of us, gay or straight, man or woman, adult or child, black or white, civilian or military, as combatants to be targeted.

It has no political aim, it has no realisable dream, it has no goal to be justified. It’s not terrorism; it’s much, much worse.

'Why I'm Joining ISIS'

 There is, at first glance, very little to distinguish Salusbury Road from any other just-off-central London backstreet. Mile after mile of terraced housing, broken only by the occasional shabby chemist, shabby off-licence, or shabby estate agents’ equally shabby offices. But appearances can, from time to time, prove deceptive. Inside one of these unremarkable flats sits a very remarkable man, and I, with curiosity overpowering my apprehension, have been sent to meet him.

Baruch Mendelsohn is surprisingly easy to find. In fact, he’s a well-known figure in these parts, especially amongst the community of drug addicts and homeless people that make up society’s shadow in the Brent Council area. One man, a cheerful old sod with a fondness for Sour Diesel and a beard that wouldn’t look out of place in Middle Earth, sings in praise of Baruch.

“He’s a top lad, Barry,” says the vagrant. He can’t remember his own name, but he’s enamoured by ‘Barry’, who gives him food and money, and occasionally steps out to share a joint on the porch of the old, run-down police station.

This story is repeated, in one form or another, and with varying degrees of erudition and eloquence, up and down the road. By the well-spoken woman with the well-fed dog who begs outside the tube station, by the singing Rasta-man, and by the odd couple who can be found wandering drunkenly, hitting each other with half-full cans of Special Brew and, on this occasion, kicking an unopened pack of sausages up the street. “Top lad,” “Great guy,” “Love him to bits.”

 The Sleeping Man is perhaps the only exception. Huddled in an alcove next to the bookshop, he shouts and swears when I mention Baruch. But then, as I soon discover, The Sleeping Man does little else. He shouts and swears at dogs, at children, at women; at anyone who crosses his eye line. The Sleeping Man does not discriminate.

All very well and good, but how do I square this with the profile I’ve got?

This profile, written and sent to me by Mr. Mendelsohn himself, paints a very different picture. Indeed, I’ve been told that I am to address him not as Baruch Mendelsohn but as Baadir Mohamad, he having “Renounced [his] Jewish faith and [his] kafir ways, turned [his] back on decadence and sin, accepted the truth of the al-Quran,” and so on. B.M. is apparently unaware that one does not need to write ‘the’ before ‘al-Quran’; it translates as ‘the the Quran’. A quibble, but possibly quite revealing.

The mental portrait I’m trying to create is shattered as I’m accosted outside Starbucks and whirled around to face who I assume – who I hope – must be Baadir.

“Mr. Mercer!”

I’d been expecting to be confronted by a cliché; by a Choudary clone or Hamza doppelganger, all wild eyes and austere robes and liberated facial hair. But Baadir Mohamad isn’t any of that. Or rather, he’s not quite any of that. I seem to have caught him in the very early stages of his metamorphosis. An almost indiscernible hint of mania in the otherwise friendly blue eyes, something not-quite-unpleasant in the crooked-toothed, tarnished-silver smile; traces of some artificial colourant in his thinning hair.

“Mr Mohamad, I presume.”

“Please, call me Baadir.”

These introductory niceties having been concluded, Baadir takes me, bizarrely, by the hand, and leads me to a door not ten yards away from the ‘coffee’ shop (I use the term in its broadest possible sense). Two flights of stairs later, and I’m in the unremarkable flat with the very remarkable man.

We’re sitting in his kitchen, which doubles up as a living room. There’s a copy of the Quran next to a bottle of fabric softener on top of the washing machine, and the surface next to that is covered with a sea of unwashed plates. The place reeks of marijuana and cigarette smoke, and I’m hit with a strange and sudden realisation. Sitting here, on this disgusting sofa, it occurs to me that this is how it must feel to be a discarded fag butt.

My first question, the one I’ve been most looking forward to asking, concerns his Jewishness. What does he think of it? Do Jews really control the world?

“They control the media, certainly,” is his reply. He reaches for a pile of papers on the kitchen table and picks one out, seemingly at random. “This,” he says, “is something I was writing for my blog before it was taken down. This should explain it.”

And it does, after a fashion. I can’t repeat much of what I read; it would be impossible to print. It’s called ‘Letter from The Fat Controller’, the title taken from B.M.’s bizarre theory; that the Fat Controller of Thomas the Tank Engine is a metaphorical depiction of our Jewish overlords.

Does he really think Islamic State will accept him? He doesn’t look particularly Jewish, but he doesn’t look much like a Salafist, either. Wahhabi doctrine forbids you from shaving, and Baadir clearly has, and recently. His appearance is somewhat transigent; as though he dresses with one inept eye on fashion whilst the other looks toward the future he claims he desires.

“They will, when I get there. I can’t look the part now; I’m too easily noticed, and they’re watching me.”

This is undoubtedly true. When I ask him how he plans to get to Syria, he explains that he’s already tried, and been prevented. He also tried to move to Birmingham, believing that there might be some truth to the Fox News claim that the city is all but ready to declare itself an Islamic state, but was prevented again. He’s set his sights on a move to Tower Hamlets, from where he intends to plot his escape. Either he’s being coy, or he really has no idea how he’s going to go about it.

When I ask him about his family his expression becomes dark. Born and raised somewhere near Luton, he left home when he was fourteen, arrived in London when he was nineteen, and claims to have never been back. Having been born and raised somewhere near Luton myself, I can attest to the fact that the closer you are to it, the more it f*cks you up.

“My mother,” he says, “is a decadent western whore.”

“How so?”

“She can’t cook. She doesn’t cook. She doesn’t tend the house. She goes out to work and leaves the place to fester. She’s not married; wears makeup and no veil. She made me a bastard. She made me the way I am, or rather, the way I was.”

“Do you still speak to her?”

“Every Tuesday.”

Curious. “You said she made you the way you were. What were you?”

He pauses. “You know the story of Lut?”

I do. Lut, or Lot, is amongst a handful of figures from scripture who have survived plagiarism twice, appearing first in the Torah, then in the Bible and finally in the Quran. His story is contains that of Sodom and Gomorrah.  “Ah,” I say, “so you are-“

“I was,” he interrupts, “but I am cured.”

“But you blame your mother?”

He shrugs, non-committally. “One way or another it’s her fault. And I won’t stop until the black flag of jihad flies above her house. Maybe it’s her nature. Maybe it’s because she had me vaccinated. You know about vaccines? You know the Jews in the CIA invented them for their war on Muslims? They sterilise us, they infect us, they make us mentally ill.”

“Are you mentally ill?”

“Again, I was cured.” The source of these ‘cures’ is to be found in the Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza’s alma mater. Baadir’s conversion owes itself, at least in part, to the toxic blend of Saudi Wahhabism, oil wealth, and Prince Charles, that royal speaker to vegetables. “Allah is the cure,” Baadir continues.

When I ask him about his other diagnosis he waves me away, claiming he can’t remember. Schizophrenia or MPD; one of those. So, as he begins to roll a joint, I ask him… why. Why Islamic State? Conversion is one thing, terrorism is surely quite another.

“You mean you can’t see it?!” he exclaims, gesticulating toward the window. “Look at it. It’s filthy. It’s corrupt. The women are all prostitutes, the men are all beggars and sinners. The scriptures are clear; we do this, and we win. We have to win. There is no way we won’t win. The people who accept that might be saved, but the rest can burn.”

“And you’d be prepared to behead people?”

“Sure, why not.” He shrugs again. “I’ve seen the videos. I could do it. And it’s not as though I’d be beheading real Muslims.”

Alas, our time together is almost over. We both have places to be. Baadir is heading out to the Two Brewers in Clapham, which means I have to change my plans and head elsewhere. The Two Brewers describes itself as being ‘gay friendly’, and it’s full of friendly gays. It serves as a useful staging ground for trips into other worlds. Perhaps Baruch isn’t as dead as Baadir likes to pretend. Perhaps Baruch is still in him, somewhere. Perhaps someone else will be, later.

-----

“One for the road?”

He’s offering me a joint. I hate the stuff, but how often does one get the chance to take a spliff from a wannabe jihadi?

“Sure,” I say.

I’m still wondering, as I make my way back up Salusbury Road, what it is that separates us. We are the same age, we have similar backgrounds, we share many interests. And yet, he fantasizes about joining Islamic State, about beheading infidels and blowing up history, whilst I do not. Quite the opposite. Let the infidels keep their heads, I say, and history has a lot going for it.

The nameless old sod from earlier is sitting on the porch of the old, run-down police station. He eyes me up, meaningfully, as I stride toward him, and beckons with his gnarled old claw. Well, why not?

“Alright, Barry?” he asks, as I squat down beside him.

“Barry?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Never mind, old sod. Got a light?”

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.