To the new Clinton time.

As the race towards 2016 will soon be upon us the Democrat still seem likely to pick Hillary Clinton and no other contender on the Republican side seems to match her for reputation. The Clintons have a record and we should take a look back critically if we are to correctly perceive the next Clinton administration. Here's an excerpt from The Golden Age Is In Us (1995) of a piece written by Alexander Cockburn and Andrew Kopkind.

It's difficult to convey the feel of the Clinton culture. Like the Kennedy culture thirty years ago, it is a stir-fry of blatant self-promotion, unexamined idealism, cynical sophistication, suspect intellectual certainty and an arrogant race and class snobbery that can be oppressive to those without the necessary credentials. It comes on as hip and liberal, but it panders to the right (Clinton's embrace of the death penalty) and abhors any person or movement to its left. It is suffused with a gestural sentimentality about racial harmony, but its commitment is to white privilege. Its adherents protested the Vietnam war, if they were old enough, but they hold no internationalist values and, like Clinton, are ever-willing to sacrifice principle to 'political viability within the system'.

In many ways, Bonnie Greer was right to suggest that there has already been a second Clinton administration under Barack Obama. He has proven to be adept at triangulation as he has presented the Affordable Care Act as a progressive step towards universal coverage. Actually it shares a lot in common with the GOP alternatives to the Clinton proposal of the 1990s. The Obama administration has been even more hawkish than its predecessor as its foreign policy takes the form of reverberations on the Bush doctrine. And Hillary Clinton has played a significant part in it as Secretary of Defense.


We can expect not merely more of the same, but much worse. No end to drone strikes, or the NSA surveillance state, let alone the national security state. The reoccupation of Iraq seems well under way with airstrikes against Syria to boot. Given that she is even more hawkish than Obama and wanted to attack Syria over a year ago. That would have likely put ISIS in an even stronger position than they are in today. What more should we expect from the Democratic Party?

The Bullet that Saved JFK.

To many, John F Kennedy was a hero. The pretensions of the Great Man are always a worthwhile target and the Kennedy cult is one such prime case. The legend of John F Kennedy is a tightly inflated balloon that has been wafting across the discourse since the young man defeated Nixon in 1960. Fifty years since the man was gunned down under circumstances of considerable fixation the time is more than ripe to take aim at that balloon and fire. Kennedy is not remembered for the details of his foreign policy, his efforts in the subversion of Latin American governments, his anti-Communist crusade against Cuba and his escalation of the Vietnam war. And yet there is a plethora of theories floating along with the personality cult.

The trouble with conspiracy theories in general is the tendency to apply Occam's Razor in reverse, slitting through all the simple answers to the end. The preference is always for building a vast and intricate theory. If there is a simple explanation, or a rational explanation, then it is to be rejected as a rule in favour of unfounded speculation of the wildest variety. It can lead anywhere after that point of no return. Like the conspiracy theorists who believe the attacks on the World Trade Centre were either achieved with a) US missiles or b) the attacks were a hologram. Once you've accepted such a proposition you're left with the problem of where all those people - in the planes, in the towers, in the Pentagon - have really gone. So why not suppose they were all gassed in Chicago? Or taken out to Nebraska to be shot on orders from Cheney? The degrees of nuttiness know no bounds.

We find the same with Lee Harvey Oswald. There are inconvenient facts, such as the fact that Oswald owned the guns involved in the events of November 22nd 1963 - not just the assassination, but the murder of a police officer as well - and the fact that the paraffin test at least demonstrated that he had fired a hand gun (though not the rifle, which doesn't discharge a residue). Why would an innocent man shoot a police officer as he ran out of a building? Of course, to answer such a question one first has to be open to a certain array of possibilities. If you have already decided that the captured shooter was a 'patsy' for a high-level conspiracy to ratchet up the war in Vietnam, then why bother? There are more important matters at hand. For instance, if the Mafia was involved (and this goes for the CIA too) then why would Oswald be left to try and hail a taxi to escape from the scene? Ignorance is sometimes all too invincible. Nevertheless, the assumptions behind these theories are always particularly revealing.

The first possibility to be written-off from the outset by the 9/11 'Truth' movement is that Arabs are perfectly capable of hatching such a complex plan and carrying it out. That has a lot in common with the tradition of European anti-Arab racism. Just as Western historians couldn't comprehend that the Arabs could have raced to the straits of Gibraltar from the Middle East and crossed over to the Iberian peninsula. The racist assumption that the Arabs are a race so primitive as to be incapable of a modicum of self-defence ran right into the mid 20th Century. It was a convenient myth for the European empires. It was with the emergence of General Nasser and the crisis of Suez that the Arabs were recognised as capable fighters. After that the new myth would soon be that the Arabs are bloodthirstily savages. The 9/11 'Truthers' simply revert to the early racial myth.

The JFK cult has assumptions no less worthy of unpicking. Jack Kennedy was fortunate to die before the 1964 election. The bullet preserved the memory of a charming and glamorous Kennedy, a fallen angel and martyr for American liberalism. It is all too outlandish to believe that the Kennedy administration posed a serious threat to the intelligence sector, the military-industrial complex and the capitalist system in any way. Really the system should work, it's merely an aberration - if only Kennedy hadn't been shot by perpetrator X (take your pick: the Mafia, Castro, Johnson, the CIA, the anti-Castro Cubans, the rogue CIA and so on to infinite regress). It is a reassuring vision for someone who doesn't really believe social change is possible and doesn't really want to pursue it. It reaffirms passivity and so it should. These theories always seem to arise around events which threaten the pretensions of invincible and invulnerable power.

The fact that Kennedy was a Cold War liberal who saw withdrawal from Vietnam as only acceptable after victory - a victory he may have believed would come in 1965 - which puts him on the same wavelength as Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon. He thought it was fine to invade Cuba and snuff out its push towards independence. When the CIA botched the invasion, Kennedy was angry at the prospect of a tarnished record for his time in office. It was the failure of the mission, not the mission  itself, which was the problem. Kennedy took responsible publicly, and then fired Allan Dulles. This was when he made his famous remark expressing a willingness to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces". Of course, the Emperor would be furious when his minions fuck up what should have been a routine operation (or worse, as they were defeated in the case of the Bay of Pigs).

As for the rest of the record: Kennedy cut taxes for the wealthiest slice of American society, bringing down the New Deal rate of income tax from 90% to 70%; while pouring yet more cash into the war budget and had mostly empty gestures on civil rights. He was a strident anti-Communist who spent his spare moments sketching the uniforms of soldiers. The conservative writer Ira Stoll has reviewed the Kennedy Presidency in time for the 50th year since the Great Man was vanquished. The Stoll thesis is that the Kennedy legacy ought to belong to conservative hagiographers and not their liberal counterparts. It was the bullet that saved the Kennedy myth. If Kennedy had lived we would remember him as an ugly war criminal, the Vietnam war would have robbed him of his angelic innocence and Addison's disease would have done the rest.

Get Cheney!

Behold the unremitting and unrepentant Dick Cheney, who is about to publish his memoirs. The book is yet another attempt to festoon the Bush legacy with a little more than the long list of disasters, outright megalomania, disregard for human life and all assorted fuck-ups. This is the man who ran the White House for at least 5 years as the Vice President to George W Bush. The man who ordered torture with such ice-cold ease, only Henry Kissinger topped him in the monstrous tasks he delegated. Dick Cheney lives and breathes war, he's a ultra-nationalist driven by an obscene desire to defend the ceaseless expansion of the American empire. The reign of Cheney and Bush shocked the world in its blunt arrogance and shameless embodiment of everything wrong with the United States. No doubt Cheney would remind us that we all 'owe' our freedom to the Americans for fighting Fascism and Communism to the bitter end. The jingo is blind even when confronted with a wall of mirrors.

 It was the Bushites who rammed the USA Patriot act through Congress. The act gave the state the power to monitor phone-calls, emails, medical records, credit card bills, bank records and even library records. The NSA are currently building a national database the size of a city to house the data raked in. The preference for the NSA over the CIA goes back to the struggle within the Nixon administration between Kissingerian realists and what we might deem 'idealists'. The CIA adhere to a realist vision of foreign policy which is ruthlessly pragmatic in the defence of American interests. Where Henry Kissinger wanted detente with the Soviet Union the guys like Cheney wanted to continue the Cold War no matter what. Perpetual war for perpetual peace is the name of the game for Cheney and friends. The point for the interests that Cheney served is not victory over 'good' or 'evil', but the endless accumulation of capital secured through the military-industrial complex. Cheney and Rumsfeld are joined at the hip, the two of them are ruthless in their goals and managed to strip Henry Kissinger of his position in government back in the 70s.

Since 1949 the US has spent over $7.1 trillion on its military budget, today it accounts for 50% of military spending in the world and over roughly the same period of time the US has "intervened" in over 70 countries around the world. In the service of this war machine which also props up a large share of the American economy, Cheney was willing to go to extraordinary lengths. Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed for a way to recreate a new Cold War with China as the major 'enemy' to be defeated. Of course the military-industrial complex and the energy industry approved of this proposal, but it would have significantly lowered the American standard of living if it had been pursued and "Corporate America" was well aware of that. So the plan of a new Cold War was not followed through, Colin Powell was quick to nudge George Bush in that direction and see it would not materialise. Sadly the entire administration was complicit in the re-declaration of the "War on Terrorism" which has seen more than a million people slaughtered in Iraq for oil.

It was in 2007 that Dick Cheney urged President Bush to bomb Syria as he learned the country could possess a nuclear reactor. It was other advisers who thwarted this plot, as in the other cases. Note the hold Cheney had over the Oval Office was weakened considerably as Donald Rumsfeld and a lot of the neoconservatives were booted out in 2006. The second Bush term was comparatively moderate as a result. The President is only as good and wise as the advisers who surround him. For years Cheney managed to spoon-feed Bush information which he "cherry-picked" without the consultation of the CIA and gathered directly from raw data. This brings us back to Cheney's pernicious relationship with the CIA. The supply-side economics prescription which Cheney has backed for decades in government posts, as well as in Congress and as a capitalist, led to financial crisis and the current stagnancy the global economy has experienced. It was the process of deregulation that Cheney accelerated which led to the BP disaster.

Now it turns out Dick Cheney kept a preemptive signed resignation letter in a locked safe for all the years he served in the Bush administration. Only the President and a single member of Cheney's personal staff knew of the letter's existence. He claimed the letter might have been necessary due to his history of health problems, which is a reference to the heart which runs on pure radical evil to the extent that it almost destroys itself on a regular basis. I find it more likely that Cheney was fully aware of the depravity in which he indulged in as a fitting expression of who he is and what he believes. The resignation letter was drawn-up early on because he expected an enormous backlash against the administration. Sadly the widespread opposition and outrage over his government did not suffice for him to step down at any point. The ongoing freedom of this wretched creature is itself a vindication for Anacharsis, who saw laws as cobwebs capable of keeping the weak entangled but flimsy when confronted with the strong. When he finally does die of an enormous heart attack all we can say is that it would've been better had he never lived at all, but it would be better if we just take a silent and steamy piss on his grave.

Douglas Murray is Wrong.

Douglas Murray, the first self-proclaimed British neoconservative, appeared on Question Time last night and argued that it is "reasonable" to execute Osama bin Laden, because the man was a monster who killed thousands all over the world and would have killed even more had he been left alive. After wrangling with Paddy Ashdown and others Murray found support from a survivor of 7/7, who claimed that only Douglas Murray represents the victims of 9/11 and 7/7. It ought to be noted that the reason al-Qaeda committed the attacks on 9/11 was to lure the US into an over-reaction, which could then be construed as a war with Islam and be used to unite the Jihadist movement and the Muslim masses against the West. The neoconservatives jumped to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, in doing so they succeeded in uniting a divided Jihadist movement against America. These wars in the Middle East were exactly what Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted the West to do.

It is sad that the neoconservatives, who have acted in just the way al-Qaeda wanted, can still be held up as the defenders of the victim. People like Douglas Murray are willing to destroy the Free World out of hatred for the Muslim Other, whilst al-Qaeda want to destroy the world out of love for another world - a Caliphate. The consistent message of the neocons is that we must infringe upon our values to defend them. To save lives we must kill. In the violent defence of freedom and democracy we are at risk of losing those very things, this is the major lesson of the "War on Terror". The threat of terrorism increased as a result of the wars supported by neocons like Murray. Without Iraq and Afghanistan there wouldn't have been a 7/7. The neoconservatives are the defenders of attempts by the state to increase it's own power in order to be able to easily crush mass-movements whenever the effect of economic policies is social collapse and disorder.

The fact that the man was a preacher of hate and mass-murder is supposed to mean that the rights and freedoms of liberal society can be suspended in that case. Of course, we soon find ourselves in a state of exception in which the rights and freedoms of anyone can be stalled over a perceived threat. The point made by Paddy Ashdown is that the rights and freedoms of citizens as a whole will be undermined. If it were not for the USA Patriot act there would not be a NSA national database being constructed in Utah. The base will be bigger than Washington DC and will cost tax-payers $2 billion. The database will store information derived from "signals intelligence" - credit card details, emails, phone calls, internet searches and text messages - from which the NSA will decide who is and who is not a "terrorist". Apparently the world will be a better place if the NSA knows what you've been Googling and it's all justified by the death of a wanted terrorist in Pakistan.

In Ancient Rome if you were convicted of a certain crime all of your rights were revoked, as you become homo sacer, so anyone can legitimately kill you and take your property. The life of a homo sacer can be taken by anyone, but not sacrificed in ritual, as the person has been banned as an 'outlaw' and such a person is expunged from society where all civil rights and civil religious functions are in suspension. The homo sacer is both excluded from law and included at the same time. The mirror image is the sovereign, who is included in that he can be impeached and face trial (in theory) but excluded in that his privilege and power allows him to the rig the chances of him ever coming to trial. Osama bin Laden can be killed with the sanction of a state, George Bush can sit at home and praise the decision without fear that he might face trial for Iraq. This week it was Osama bin Laden, but assassination is not an aberration as we know just by looking at Fred Hampton who was murdered by the state and this is the reason that we should oppose assassination as defended by neocons.