Up here in Canada you could scarcely find a single person (other than our soon-to-be Prime Minister) who bought the US line on Iraq. France didn’t buy it. The UN didn’t but it. Tony Blair is being given the heads up on a report coming out so he can do damage control because he bought it (well, because he supported Bush, I have no reason to think he really bought it). Basically, people saying it’s hindsight are ignoring the fact that a third of Americans didn’t buy it, half of American who did buy it wanted more information before going to war (when polls had three choices instead of a simple yes/no) and that practically everyone else in the world saw through the ruse.
If Hilary Clinton was indeed fooled by the rhetoric, that does not speak well of her presidential credentials. I do not think she was really fooled. I think she is hawkish on war and felt empowered to vote yes by opinion polls.
Isn’t it so profoundly annoying when naive folks who apparently (actually!) believe in the system have the hide to characterise one’s well-earned and hard-boiled cynicism as some sort of inverse naivety, as if being aware that the system isn’t all it’s cracked up to be amounts to getting carried away with every nutjob with a conspiracy theory?
It’s not conspiracy theorising; it’s conspiracy spotting: anti-democratic secret treaties like TPP, scumbag mobs like ALEC writing legislation as corporate wish-lists that get rubber-stamped, and a legislature bought and run by fucking fatcats.
We’ve been living in a class war for four decades. It’s time to stop making like gently-boiled frogs, and fucking fight back.
This I will absolutely agree on, and it’s what concerns me most about her – not her “corporate links” or “shadow government connections”, but her hawkishness. She’s too keen on war.
I shadowed a shadow government guy in the shadows, as he shadily shadowed my shadow from the spooks. I thanked him by overshadowing his silhouette with a shadow of an outstretched hand. He made a bird signal and then a barking dog. My barking dog shadow snarled at his eagle. Then the lights came on and we walked into the shadows again.
Her hawkishness is totally a function of her shadow government and corporate links; ‘military-industrial complex’ isn’t just a cool-sounding phrase designed to seem clever and worldly.
Quotation marks can be used to quote directly or to paraphrase, though technically I should have been using single-quotes to indicate an indirect quote, though neither is really essential. Kimmo and others never spoke of a ‘shadow government’ (until I mentioned it, and now they are), but it’s an oft-cited element of the Deep State / evil-military-industrial-complex theory.
The notion that unelected, unaccountable individuals with vested interests have undue influence over the course of nations is as much a theory as the theory of gravitation.
How much historical evidence on the public record do you need before admitting we can totally use a new broom?
As someone who’s voted Green in the past, I’m happy to explore all options. Unfortunately, especially this cycle, I haven’t yet seen a viable third option. It’d be great if we had one. But you know as well as I do that third parties in American presidential races simply haven’t had a chance.
I would, however, object to calling them a “shadow government”. They are running things quite openly. How many veils do you have to pierce to find the Koch brothers?
Well, there’s the one being worn by a lot of people I know, who think rich people are heroes and the main problem today is Big Government. Good luck getting them to see those two things in the correct manner (that is, as not separate but rather, as joined at the hip).
