Hello Bad Rachel. Don’t ya know. Talking about a revolution. I’ll tell ya. Sounds like a whisper. POTUS has gotten me really into Tracy Chapman. But also. Maybe you want to turn on the television. What’s that look like? Arab Freedom. The Obama Doctrine. It took Barack two years to make good on the Bush freedom agenda. So I came out tonight basically to gloat to all the neocons. Obama’s policies have finally brought democracy to the Middle East. You guys had your speeches. We did it with smart power. I would predict the Nobel committee would give Barry the peace prize, but, oh yeah, he already has one of those. Can I ask a serious question Bad Rachel? Can old Joe get Obama’s second Nobel Peace Prize? It would be like giving Scottie Pippen one of Michael Jordan’s MVPs. We need to start that whisper campaign now: Joe Biden for the Peace Prize.
’Cause this whole Egypt policy is 100 percent pure, cold-filtered Biden. I told Barack Obama from the beginning. You have got to lock these Muslim leaders in. We gotta get them to stop telling their kids to grow up and kill us. As a Muslim, Barack, you have a golden opportunity here to tell them to stop all this Jihad. At that point, John Brennan reminded me that we are never to say Jihad in this administration. But I was already there. Yes. I get it. Smart power. That’s why we did our first international interview with Al Jazeera. By the way, I can’t turn off al Jazeera English. I want my AJE.
OK. I know, I know. What was Joe Biden doing, going out on Jim Lehrer, saying Mubarak is no dictator? But Joe Biden knows world leaders. I’m a stand up guy. I’m not going to go around and say Hosni Mubarak is a dictator like that. Joe wouldn’t do that to a friend. But just to make it perfectly clear: This administration supports a transition process through the offices of President Mubarak to achieve a sustainable outcomes-based foreign policy objective for Egypt. We have been saying it since day one of this crisis. It’s as clear as crystal.
One of the reasons I am checking in is because I am worried about some of you conservatives. There is no reason why you can’t look at the Muslim Brothers as literally our Muslim Brothers. They are the most credible democratic voice on the street. We have nothing to fear from them. The Muslim Brotherhood has renounced violence. Now I get where you’re going to go with this. What about Hamas? Doesn’t the Muslim Brotherhood support Hamas? The truth is we really don’t know. The intelligence community is pretty divided on this. I think we have a golden opportunity to reach out to the moderate Muslim Brothers and start the long work towards healing the rift between our two nations. Hosni Mubarak has told me many times that he wants the same thing. He just can’t say that in public—’cause of the Arab street and all. But you will see. Power has a funny way of moderating Islamists. Look at Obama.
I mean I can’t tell you how great it is to be vice president at such a historic moment. I have for years been telling world leaders it’s time for Islamic revolution in the Middle East, except for Iraq which needed Saddam Hussein to keep a lid on that three-way civil war. You can’t really know this. But when you get a foreign policy really right, like we did with Egypt, it really does make you feel good. So this is the big leagues. I belong here. Joe Biden, Islamic Revolutionary, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Winner.
Watching Barack Obama’s foreign policy flopping like a Minnesota perch on a White Bear Lake dock this week (as every other week since January 20, 2009) and enduring yet another dose of his wife’s hortative obsession with the size of the collective American bootay—to say nothing of the occasionally slipping-out utterances, when their true natures get the better of them, of the racism-tinged resentment they harbor for many of us, their fellow citizens—I shake my head in wonder for the zillionth time: How did this arrogant overrated swaggerer out of nowhere and his angry bigoted wife wind up running the country? And will the two of them excite as much fond nostalgia, when they’re exiled back to their Hyde Park digs and their black-liberation-theology church, as the Clintons and the Kennedys have done?
There’s still a certain pleasure—maybe it’s a touch unseemly, but whatever—in the memory of Ma and Pa Clinton struggling to hold things together during the dark hours of his impeachment. The astounding rapacity, the infantile self-indulgence, the voracious appetite for things lowdown and dirty that had cruised with him like balanus balanoides from Hope to Little Rock to the White House and allowed him to permit himself to sully the presidency and then lie about it, baldly, made Mr. Clinton a figure of contempt: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. . . . These allegations are false.” No, wait, I mean, “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Uh huh. His wife—in her incarnation as Arkansas’s first lady and then America’s—with her smug piety and frosty acquisitiveness, was as alienating as her husband was weak: Cattle futures? Sharp banking practices? “Shoulda, coulda, woulda.” Mr. Clinton’s Oval Office romp? “This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Exactly.
Did they remind us of the Kennedys? Yes, though probably not in quite the way they’d hoped and expected to do so. The private bargains of the two couples were not our business, but the violation of the office of the presidency most certainly was. Both men needed wives sharp-tongued and virtuous, but liked their squeezes soft and raunchy. Mr. Clinton was hard at it with Miss Lewinsky in 1995 and 1996, but he’d already been outmanned by his declared idol, JFK: Marilyn Monroe vs. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky? Any questions? And could a U. S. president—never mind his wife’s Frenchified elegant cultivation and the Camelot-as-imagined-by-Broadway-lyricists occupied by his retinue—get any cruder or more sordid than sharing a mistress with Chicago mob bosses? Had he been exposed then, would JFK have lied to Americans about it? We can’t know, owing to Lee Harvey Oswald and the corrupt Kennedy-worshipping of the White House press corps, Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger, and the rest of his obsequious retainers. But it’s fair to surmise he would have done as much to salvage his presidency as his Papa had done to get it for him. And really, was there ever a president’s father more vulgar or avaricious—or more prepared to flout convention and the law to get his son elected president—than Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.? Or complicit biographers more eager to beatify their subject? Or, for that matter, a pair of brothers more shamelessly willing to profit from proximity, pre- and especially post-mortem, to their sibling? Only in Shakespeare—or Dickens.
There was no trace of Shakespeare, or Boston ward-heeling, or bootlegging, or vote-stealing, or Las Vegas crime-syndicating in the Clinton orbit, but Dickensian crudity there was in ample supply. That, if it occasionally seemed at odds with Bill’s rockin’-rollin’ technocraticism and Hillary’s holier-than-thou sexual-revolution priggishness—and their joint 1960s-born sense of entitlement—shimmered in the sub-tropical oleaginous Little Rock air, permeating their skins for nearly two decades before they arrived in Washington and unpacked the first generation of draft-dodging baby-boomers onto the White House lawn to grow there like Topsy.
What Mr. Clinton did have that Mr. Kennedy hadn’t was time to unfold himself in full as a liberal-world-orderist; but no matter—he was as disappointing on this score, even occasionally to himself, as JFK had showed promise he would be during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Khrushchev spanking, to name an obvious few. Mrs. Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda’s husband sat on his hands as the Rwandan genocide took place (“I blew it”), watched the (first) al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the U.S.S. Cole, without responding, tried desperately to curry favor with the blood-stained Yasser Arafat, hosting the terrorist at the White House thirteen times—more often than any other foreign . . . leader, if “leader” be the word for what that creature was—in a hopeless attempt to secure the chimerical Middle East Peace. And all the while engaging in, then lying about, then defending his “not appropriate” relationship with Miss Lewinsky, and who knows how many others.
Which brings me back to crassness Obamaesque: It isn’t about sex, or the definition of sexual relations, or the meaning of the word “is”; and it isn’t about French-accented elegance-covered venality, even if venality there surely has been in their lives, or about French chefs in the White House kitchen—though in part it does involve the kitchen garden sowed, so they say, by Mrs. Obama’s own personal two hands, with the help of a bunch of elementary school students (some of the same children, maybe, who’ve been deprived by her husband and his co-teachers-union-religionists in Congress—whose own children attend private schools—of access to the vouchers and grants for the private-school educations their parents are so desperate to get for them?), and used as a trowel to shovel good nutrition down our throats.
It’s the hagiolatry, including Mr. Obama’s own two contributions to the published literature, elaborating his stratospheric brilliance, it’s the brazen vanity of the man: “I have a gift,” “Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there,” and, best of all, given two years’ worth of foreign-policy disasters, “foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain”; it’s the ugly (and duplicitous) disloyalty to old friends when they’ve stood in the way of the main chance: “I never heard [Reverend Wright] say some of the things that have people upset.” No, I mean, “Our relations with Trinity [United Church of Christ] have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own views.” Or “We've got a governor in Rod Blagojevich who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.” That is, “I believe the best resolution would be for the Governor to resign his office and allow a lawful and appropriate process of succession to take place”; and it’s the shameless whining about the great good fortune of being president of the United States: “You know, the typical president, I think, has two or three big problems. We’ve got seven or eight big problems,” that are so vulgar.
Add to this the remnant of the racism that punctuated his wife’s senior thesis at Princeton (“Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second”) and rises to the surface in both of them from time to time, like pond scum after a storm—“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change”—and you have a pair as comically and tragically Dickensian as ever the Kennedys and Clintons were. Alas that all their comedic drama must also be imprinted on our memories, and some of it even in our history books.
Sandmonkey, Egypt’s leading blogger, reports from Cairo (warning: you may find when you open the link an announcement that the account has been suspended. The Mubarak regime seems to have shut him down, again):
You watched on TV as "Pro-Mubarak Protesters" – thugs who were paid money by NDP members by admission of High NDP officials- started attacking the peaceful unarmed protesters in Tahrir square. They attacked them with sticks, threw stones at them, brought in men riding horses and camels- in what must be the most surreal scene ever shown on TV- and carrying whips to beat up the protesters. And then the Bullets started getting fired and Molotov cocktails started getting thrown at the Anti-Mubarak Protesters as the Army standing idly by, allowing it all to happen and not doing anything about it. Dozens were killed, hundreds injured, and there was no help sent by ambulances. The Police never showed up to stop those attacking because the ones who were captured by the Anti-mubarak people had police ID's on them. They were the police and they were there to shoot and kill people and even tried to set the Egyptian Museum on Fire. The Aim was clear: Use the clashes as pretext to ban such demonstrations under pretexts of concern for public safety and order, and to prevent disunity amongst the people of Egypt. But their plans ultimately failed, by those resilient brave souls who wouldn't give up the ground they freed of Egypt, no matter how many live bullets or firebombs were hurled at them. They know, like we all do, that this regime no longer cares to put on a moderate mask. That they have shown their true nature. That Mubarak will never step down, and that he would rather burn Egypt to the ground than even contemplate that possibility.
Now, just in case this isn't clear: This protest is not one made or sustained by the Muslim Brotherhood, it's one that had people from all social classes and religious background in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood only showed up on Tuesday, and even then they were not the majority of people there by a long shot. We tolerated them there since we won't say no to fellow Egyptians who wanted to stand with us, but neither the Muslims Brotherhood not any of the Opposition leaders have the ability to turn out one tenth of the numbers of Protesters that were in Tahrir on Tuesday. This is a revolution without leaders. Three Million individuals choosing hope instead of fear and braving death on hourly basis to keep their dream of freedom alive. Imagine that.
The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay "because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people". This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can't. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can't allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful. If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them the battle for the soul of Egypt isn't over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak's gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes.
Foreign-policy hard-liners have been exhorted by some conservatives—ye shall know them by their liberal-snogging at tomorrow night’s State of the Union address—to shun triumphalism and celebrate with calm dignity (make mine a dirty gimlet, Jeeves, extra dry—and CHOP-CHOP,MAN!) the Bushian miasma that apparently has settled like an oil mist over Orange Beach upon the flowy gentle change-waters of Obamunism: Our armed forces are still in Afghanistan and Iraq; the smartest president in the room and his punctilious little secretary of state have backed off the Israelis; Guantanamo remains open; military tribunals for the hardest-core prisoners in our War on Terror will proceed.
All true—for now—and though it’s somewhat difficult to practice quiet self-command while rankers-and-filers of the whinging and embittered left blow their noses so appealingly honkingly and piercingly on their own tatty sleeves, restraint there must be, for there’s still a long slog ahead until, to paraphrase Peter O’Toole, an election rids us of this nettlesome president.
While we wait, Mr. Obama’s efforts to force engagement down the throats of our enemies continue apace. If the livers of these various imprisoners and slaughterers of freedom-seeking human beings are producing bile rather than foie gras as a result, well, we have “different political systems” at “different stages of development”. Decades of U.S. policy are nibbled away or jettisoned altogether to reestablish relations with the penal colony that goes by the name of the Republic of Cuba, and yet Fidel doesn’t phone or even write—he arrests a State Department contractor who’s down there doing humanitarian work and throws him into one of Cuba’s notorious prisons, where he languishes still, more than a month later. The president of Communist China munches on lobster and ribeye in the realpeoples’ house, and smiles benignly as his pianist countryman Lang Lang subjects the U.S. president—and through him the American people—to a sneering act of anti-Americanism.
And then there’s the Iranian answer to our velvet-glove throwdown: On the eve of the latest round of nuclear negotiations, the State Department mouthpiece announces that “we are committed to holding Iran accountable to its international obligations, and will continue to do so until Iran takes tangible steps to resolve international concerns with its nuclear program.” Scary—if you’re Finland, maybe, but probably not even the Finns take us very seriously any more.
But the mullahs laugh outright at our empty threats. One lovely meal “of chicken saltimbocca with smoked tomato squash, steamed seabass, ravioli, baldo pilaf, grilled vegetables and deserts” down—after all, even tieless Persian thugs like a nice piece of fish before they eat us for lunch—and it’s back to Natanz with them. Was it Benjamin Franklin, or Albert Einstein, or Mae West, or who knows, Aeschylus, possibly, who said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?
Not actually feeling all that much triumphalism here in Hawkville at the moment. It’s more like keenness: How long, oh Lord, how long, before we are restored to sanity, and can join talons with the other Accipitriformes and say “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last” of these anti-American Obamic fetters?
Or old broads, come to that. Yet few and far between have been the past and present American high-hats resistant to the siren song of songs (Pythagorean mean, and mean indeed), “Middle East Peace.” Its music and lyrics enter the bloodstream, play on loop continuous through the heart, then pump, pump, pump, down, down, down, and up again, collecting artery-squeezing lipid potentates along the way to Byzantium (Two! Two! Two states in one!), to settle bits of loamy plaque in the government brain, then back by loop through heart again, and so on and so forth. And now the song, not to say the brain itself, has morphed: A pathetic hymn, and Byzantium just as out-of-reach as everithasbeen.
Hillary “Human Rights” Clinton started off her week—or the first public moments of it—sounding almost Condoleezza Ricean, exhorting the Arab world to stand firm against Iran by embracing the sanctions which, in her apparently dimming view, have been effective in impeding the progress of the Persian bomb; and urging the rag-tag lot of tyrants and dictators that comprises the Arab “leadership” to join the battle for Middle East peace by resuscitating the Arab Peace Initiative.
If one is hard put to believe that it’s our toothless sanctions—which the mullahs to date and with good reason have found risible—rather than sabotage that have interfered with the Iranian nuclear plot; or to make out which Arab Peace Initiative Mrs. Clinton meant to invoke—the one devised in 2002 by the then “crown prince” now “king” of Saudi Arabia to deflect attention from the Saudis’ own bloodied hand in the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and their contribution to the intifada that was at that moment raging against the Jewish State? The one as “re-launched” in 2007 in preparation for the massive waste of time and manpower that culminated in the Annapolis Conference on Middle East Peace? The one sweetening the dreams of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, as he conspired with Hitler in Berlin in 1941 to annihilate the Jews of Palestine?—that is not the worst of it.
Worse was the appalling declaration that came at the end of her peroration:
Clinton called for greater openness, tolerance and development in the region to blunt extremism, especially among Arab youth, that can breed terrorism. . . . She stressed that such problems are universal and, noting the recent shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, said extremism exists in the United States and must be combatted. . . . “Look, we have extremists in my country,” Clinton said. “A wonderful, incredibly brave, young woman congressmember, Congresswoman Giffords, was just shot by an extremist in our country. We have the same kinds of problems. So rather than standing off from each other, we should work to try to prevent the extremists anywhere from being able to commit violence.”
And worst of all is that it wasn’t just a wild flinging slip of the Clintonian tongue—Mrs. Cautious Goody-Two-Shoes doesn’t have all that many of those, although “congressmember” is pretty good—this was an intentional assertion about the incontrovertibly insane Jared Loughner, which she repeated yesterday afternoon:
“Based on what I know, this is a criminal defendant who was in some ways motivated by his own political views, who had a particular animus toward the congresswoman,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN. “And I think when you cross the line from expressing opinions that are of conflicting differences in our political environment into taking action that’s violent action, that’s a hallmark of extremism, whether it comes from the right, the left, from Al Qaeda, from anarchists, whoever it is. That is a form of extremism.” . . . Clinton added, “So, yes, I think that when you’re a criminal who is in some way pursuing criminal activity connected to—however bizarre and poorly thought through—your political views, that’s a form of extremism.”
This isn’t the first time the nostalgie de la Wellesley-radical boue that lingers like a hangover over the otherwise utterly conventional liberal thinking of our current secretary of state has brought ignominy upon U.S. foreign policy—even her boss, whose own past love affair with leftist anti-Americanism and moral equivalency still periodically flares up from the embers, performedadmirably enough on the mass murder—and I dare say it won’t be the last.
But oh how the longing for some relief from them all intensifies daily. The moment they’re off to roam the halls and grace the conference tables of the U.S. Institute of Peace can’t come soon enough . . .
