The Anti-Empire Report
Some things you need to know before the world ends
August 7, 2005
by William Blum
Che Clinton?
If Hillary Clinton is indeed eyeing the White House, we can expect a lot more of the kind of silliness of the intellect found in Edward Klein’s new book, “The Truth About Hillary“. Critics pan the book for its sleaziness. I pan it for its striking inability to distinguish among different points on the political spectrum.
Clinton, in Klein’s world, is a “leftist”, not the centrist she and her husband have plainly proven themselves to be. Klein sees her not as simply a liberal, but a “leftist”; in fact, not simply a leftist, but a “radical” leftist. Yes, that’s the word he uses. He’s speaking about a woman who supported the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, while her husband was in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. The Contras, in case you’ve forgotten, were the army employed by Ronald Reagan in his all-out war to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the Nicaraguan government. They went around burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing and strafing. These were the charming gentlemen Reagan liked to call “freedom fighters”.
Roger Morris, in his excellent study of the Clintons, “Partners in Power“, recounts Hillary Clinton aiding Contra fund-raising and her lobbying against people or programs hostile to the Contras or to the Reagan-CIA policies in general. “As late as 1987-88,” Morris writes, “amid some of the worst of the Iran-Contra revelations, colleagues heard her still opposing church groups and others devoted to social reform in Nicaragua and El Salvador.”{10}
Are Clinton’s views on Iraq or US imperialism in general any more progressive than this? If she is a radical leftist what would Edward Klein — who makes no mention at all of the Contras — call Noam Chomsky? What would he call Fidel Castro? Or Vladimir Lenin? This kind of ideological dumbness just permeates the American media and plays no small part in the voters losing their bearings.
Culled from the comment section of this florid and generous reaction to Bush’s ode to Intelligent Design, via James Wolcott, who in Capsule Review of Current TV (take one) describes the excruciatingly tedious experience to be had tuning into Gore’s channel. The “cool” hosts address their audience as if people are incapable of forming an opinion without coaching, or horrors, might possibly form the wrong one. Can’t have that. For every rightie that inherits a congenital hatred of knowledge there’s a liberal whose world vision has been erroneously shaped by elitist peddlers of designer intelligence.
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life . . .
Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob’s hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil.
H.L. Mencken
Homo Neanderthalensis
June 1925