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Just as when the Republicans stole the 2000 election (which was insufficiently thrown for reasons to explain another time) there were choruses of protestation about "SoreLoserman", so there are those who say now it's a matter of "tinfoil hats" and "whiny Democrats" etc etc. They are cheerleaders for the party lying. The notion that the system is a machine is something treated as outre BY THE MACHINE AND DRUMMED INTO PEOPLE FROM INFANCY. Just as people watch about 20,000 murders on TV before the age of 18, so they are similarly 'ideologicially toilet trained' not to seriously question the system, and I am talking about serious specific analysis, not horses*** (or what I call PHAWYSI -- Privileged Horses*** Any Way You Slice It) like stuff about the UN conspiring to take over the world or the Vincent Foster "murder". These ideas get lumped together, even by Chomsky, shamefully, with notions that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK or that the election in Florida was really won by Gore, or that we're really in Iraq (as most Iraqis realize) for geopolitical reasons of necolonialism -- that is that is really IS "the oil, stupid", but not in the simplistic sense set up as a straw man by such profound political observers as Dennis Miller & Co. Well, Chomsky might hedge on the latter two, but anything that probes deeper into the mechanisms of our system -- not as "conspiracy theory" but essentially looking at the mechanisms of what is, at the end of the day, a system of class power -- these things are simply outre. Outre but true. But if you know where your bread is buttered you simply pretend otherwise. Like a good "citizen".
OK about Clinton. The best starting point for understanding Clinton is the poli sci classic by Walter Karp "Indispensable Enemies". Karp, although he has a few (what I consider) major blooper theories in his book, sets out an excellent framework to understand the two party system in the US over the past century -- indeed his is the best, with all its myriad imperfections. He starts from the notion from Robert "they didn't think of it as a tin foil hat in those days" LaFollette, Progressive Wisconsin Senator who ran the strongest third party candidacy since Lincoln: "Machine politics is always bipartisan". He specifically focuses -- with excellent examples in this MUST READING book, such as JFK's education bill -- on how those elected to generate progressive reform, basically Democrats since WWII in the White House, have done the job of defeating and frustrating those very reforms. It's their JOB, just as the job of the media is to justify the lying, and the job of BOTH media and politicians is to insist that such arguments as this are "paranoid" "cynical" etc. And get people at the astroturf roots to believe it, including liberals. They actually do quite a good job, too. And they have oodles of supposed progressives to help do so, because when you control the means of communication, you can control who GETS to be famous aboveground and therefore respected as the 'progressive leaders' etc. at least to some degree.
Back to Clinton. He was pushed as the nominee NOT because he had ANY national grassroots following (I have been a political activist for years and knew only of his long boring speech at the 88 Convention) but because the Republicans couldn't even rig another election to get Bush in -- too unpopular -- so the powers that pee, who are basically anti-progressive, needed to get someone in that they liked, just like in '76, where Carter came out of seemingly the blue with trumpets of media attention and complex boogie woogie. These were figures who would not rock the boat even as much as the (acceptable for the Senate but not the White House) Kennedys. So Bill the Shill came in with an agenda of NAFTA, balancing the budget (a truly great achievement, the FIRST thing the Republicans busted in 2001 before the Jeffords defection), and eviscerating welfare etc. That WAS the Clinton agenda. But those weren't the things that helped Republicans POLITICALLY; they were just what the powers that pee wanted, policywise. (Monicagate -- which really you somewhat misconstrue -- was basically about ISSUE LAUNDERING and about public distraction and entertainment, like the whole business with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. My question is, if JFK was banging Marilyn Monroe, couldn't the PRESIDENT do better than THAT? What about Beyonce, or someone else with a little class BEFITTING THE OFFICE!) You must not confuse the policy issues, including issues laundering of ELITE-agenda items, the REAL promises that politicians make, the ones that count, with the political sabotage of reform and of reform politics although they sometimes overlap including considerably.
It is in the area of what Clinton did to (a) frustrate reform or simply not pursue issues effectively and (b) to bring about a Republican Congress, something no Republican president could EVER do without having a "Democrat" establish it for them. Bill the Shill did the latter in the 93-94 period, when I was reading from Karp on call in radio about his systematic frustration of a reform agenda, although I underestimated the extent of the agenda, not seeing the railroading of a Republican Congress, at the time. Indicative was the teeny example of Clinton and the fetal tissue research issue. It generated a demonstration in response of a mere 7-,000 anti-Choice yahoos. So the issue quickly DISAPPEARED. It wasn't what Clinton was looking for. Then there was gays in the military, an issue quickly put through without fuss in other countries, and which could have been easily adjusted along the lines suggested by the HEAD OF THE MARINES in a letter to the NY Times on the issue at the time. That issue really caught on, politically, as a vehicle for antiprogressivism, and became a media extravaganza. Two or three other examples from this period are indicative. The health care program was not only designed to fail politically, it was designed to bring down the Democratic Party as much as possible. Having lightning rod Hillary do it accentuated this purpose. Kerry's proposals in this area actually make POLITICAL and POLICY sense, and then what you need to add as a first step is a GENERAL resolution by Congress in support of single payer and other parameters of a health care bill, and then have a Commission appointed (as he did in setting up a blue-ribbon whitewash or bluewash commission, like the Warren Commission was, to palm of Persian Gulf War Syndrome as psychosomatic, even though it has been proven -- ever so slightly --contagious). The Commission could then draw up comprehensive health plans. But that wasn't the elite agenda; they prefer the Medicare scam that Bush pushed through -- a complete ripoff instead of real reform.
Several other issues besides gays in the military and the health care fiasco were put in the programmed to fail agenda of the first two years of the Bill the Shill Administration. These included his NONpursuit in any serious way of popular major environmental issues like alternative energy, that could have passed in Congress and had popular support. That's how you build a progressive base for reform, as FDR did in the early thirties. You always start with the things that you CAN accomplish, and then use those accomplishments to build a larger agenda of reform, but that was the OPPOSITE of what Bill the Shill was always about. There were numerous other key issues (issues MUCH more important to gays than either gays in the military or gay marriage, both issues that could well be compromised yet somehow get pushed IN THE SYSTEM NOT FROM THE GRASSROOTS AS A GRASSROOTS PRIORITY as wedge issues. Laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or allowing basic civil union rights of visitation and inheritance and such that even W Bush says he supports, or a much more vigorous AIDS program (what I was suggesting a bill to push, and let the Republicans filibuster it, at the time, along with other POPULAR REFORMS). Walter Karp does an excellent job in analyzing this kind of dynamic -- this is all straight out of his playbook.
Two other issues were indicative in the Bill the Shill agenda. One was the issue of a lands policy, specifically at the point of MAXIMUM resistance and quickly weakened by Bruce Babbitt. It looked good on paper and was praised by the usual chorus of NY Times types, but was gasoline to the fires of the sagebrush movement while being of only secondary ecological importance, and was quickly backed away from. On the other hand, the Clinton Administration backed away from a popular environmental promise about a site in Ohio, and at no time really proposed ANY major ecological advances and slighted the issue, now an area where W Bush is moving backwards in massive and alarming ways. But NONE of the liberals like Bobby Kennedy Jr really publicly called the Clinton Administration on the environment front -- they should have been having hearings on the ozone layer and global warming instead of gays in the military -- AND DEMOCRATS WERE IN CONTROL OF BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS SO HAD NO EXCUSE.
Another interesting episode concerned the tax bill of '93. Republicans still wail about it, but it really is what set the foundations for the balanced budget and the prosperity of the 90s. Somehow it was constructed so that it passed by a single vote in the House, and thus EVERY Democrat in the House could be blamed for the tax increase. In unnecessarily included two key provisions -- one ending a tax break on businesses in Puerto Rico, and another taxing Social Security recipients with incomes of UNDER 40K (including my mother) both maximum political cost at minimum economic benefit. Was this mere accident? The budget was balanced on the backs of the Democrats, and they spent the next 6 years failing to take credit for it, and still do.
Then there was the Khallid Abdul Maurice Templesman Muhammad affaire. In response to a minor speech by a previously unheard of aide to Farrakhan, there was a full year (94) of fuss in the Bourbon-obedient press, without someone like myself having any access to the debate. Such is the nature of so-called freedom in the US -- a mere laundromat system for the issue of attainder, a core Constitutional concept. It is all one side and no opportunity for the other -- that's the name of the game, the nature of the 'sportsmanship'. The web could be used to really raise these issues, but as you can see with the cravenness of many of the leading bloggers (like spinsanity) on the election fraud issue that the mainstream press is sweeping under the rug -- it would need to be based OUTSIDE the US with authentic progressives who are forceful AND not accountable to the US machine of media justifying the lying. When the Congress unanimously passed a resolution supposedly condemning antisemitism -- the New York Times in a moment of a glimmer of integrity, in an editorial referred to it critically, as a "resolution condemning Farrakhan", in an editorial. But nothing was mounted in serious response to the underground agenda. That's because that sort of thing, along with throwing elections to a Republican Congress and W Bush is what this system is all about -- that and condemning anyone who points it out as 'in a tin foil hat'. It isn't as if there are fair elections or competition that is lost. Or a few cut corners that are then properly brought forward and then well yes Virginia a little laundered. It is nothing but a one-sided railroading system and the second estate (authentic Christianity now, not the hot-squat yahoos of rightwing so-called "Christianity") are only interested in preserving themselves in this context and (sometimes) throw a few crumbs of mitigation in those directions that could cover themselves or benefit themselves politically. And the system is getting worse, with the presidential elections -- other than Bill the Shill, with his special Congressional agenda -- of 88, 00 and 04 all being thrown.
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