Bern’ing Love
If nominated, Hillary being Bern’ed will hurt a lot.
Plus, the miraculous tale of how Mrs. Clinton came around to lovin’ Mr. Obama.
Note: any material you find underlined, below, correspond to links.
Published: Feb 12 2016
The Feb 11 2016 Democratic Party debate between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders revealed a lot. Pandering to a Democratic Party primary electorate that was largely supportive of President Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton took to latching onto Mr. Obama like he were a surgically-separated and long-lost Siamese twin who she’d suddenly found.
Lost to selective memory were the Clintons’ statement — alleged statement, yes, but consistent with their playbook — that, in the thick of the 2008 nomination contest between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, Bill Clinton told Ted Kennedy, who went on to endorse Obama, that:
“A few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been carrying our bags.”
Mrs. Clinton’s insistence, at nearly ever debate, that President-elect Barack Obama picked her to be Secretary of State for her foreign policy acumen, is also highly suspect to any shrewd observer. As far as we can gauge from 2008 candidate Obama’s repeated criticism of Mrs. Clinton’s vote to authorize Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld’s invasion of Iraq, Mr. Obama did not appear to have much going in the way of respect for Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy judgment.
The Clinton narrative is, per Wikipedia:
Within a week after the November 4 2008 presidential election, President-elect Obama and Clinton discussed over telephone the possibility of her serving as U.S. Secretary of State in his administration. Clinton later related, “He said I want you to be my secretary of state. And I said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t.’
Mrs. Clinton initially turned President-elect Obama down [we’re told] but [we’re also told] President-elect Obama persisted.
If one had to venture a guess — and predicated of course on Mr. Obama going on to win the presidency — Mrs. Clinton probably got offered the job to become the nation’s highest ranking diplomat, and senior-most Cabinet member, as a concession, an appeasement, for not putting up a prolonged and protracted fight for the nomination in 2008 after candidate Obama became the favorite to be the nominee.
If one had to venture a second guess — and, again, predicated of course on Mr. Obama going on to win the presidency — she may have even demanded she be made SecState. The U.S. Department of State is where the business of global “procurements” go to, to find (shall we say) conclusion and closure.
It’s been reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose human rights atrocities we significantly touch upon HERE, has directly and indirectly (through surrogates) contributed countless millions to the Clinton Foundation, that Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog, the Sunlight Foundation, is quoted calling “a slush fund for the Clintons.”
Just months before the Saudis were cleared by Hillary and her underlings at State to receive $29 billion in advanced military jets, in 2011, the Boeing Company, manufacturer of one of those tactical fighters, the F-15, donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
In four of the years Mrs. Clinton was heading up State, the Foundation secured in excess of one-half billion dollars in donations, much of which went towards paying for first-class travel, five-star accommodations, sumptuous meals, executive compensation, salaries and benefits, and a monstrous amount in unspecified expenses, classified as “other.”
The Secretary of State may have been earning only $186,600 a year through those years, but no doubt the Clinton Foundation was raking it in.
Bernie’s inner circles know all this, they’ve just been too kind to put it out, in the glare of a spotlight, to the masses.
Also, not a lot of Bernie’s supporters we’ve talked to think Hillary’s private email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York, was about “convenience.” They tend to think it had much more to do with Hillary’s State Department business finding the means to commingle with the Clinton Foundation’s business in lucrative ways.
Another case in point, sourced from the Raw Story and author Ana Kasparian:
It was recently revealed through Hillary’s emails that during her first year as Secretary of State she insisted that Laureate Education be included in the guest list for an education policy dinner hosted at the U.S. Department of State. “It’s a for-profit model that should be represented,” she wrote in the August 2009 email, and as a result, a senior vice president at Laureate was added to the guest list. Several months later, former President Bill Clinton became an honorary chancellor of Laureate International Universities, which turned out to be incredibly lucrative. He was paid a cool $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 for his role with the for-profit college.
At one point in the Feb 11 2016 debate, Hillary hit Bernie with what Bernie characterized as a punch below the belt, with Hillary saying that Sanders had criticized President Obama in antagonistic and even downright mean ways, leading Sanders to reply: “Secretary Clinton, that was a low blow.” And it was indeed a low blow, because, true to form — and conscience — Sanders was often critical of the President for not going far enough to advance the progressive agenda that Candidate Obama promised to unrelentingly advance. And there’s nothing wrong with criticism like that.
It was not the only “low blow” delivered that night, before, and after. We think they’ll all be remembered by those who’ve endeared themselves to Sanders in inseparable ways.
The news that Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton by a whopping 22 percentage points in New Hampshire’s primary and that they could still walk away with the same number of delegates for the Democratic National Convention, will convince a lot of Democratic voters — the young ones, especially — that the system is, as Sanders insists, “rigged”.
More poignantly, that Bernie practically tied Hillary in Iowa, losing only by a whisker, and won by a landslide in New Hampshire, and yet saw Mrs. Clinton amass a colossal 350-delegate lead after just one caucus and one primary in just two states, because of those insiders close to the Clintons known as superdelegates — that include Democratic Party lobbyists, by the way — would convince even a banana republic despot that American elections are indeed rigged.
That anyone in any democratic election can claim to be “super” or inherently superior to another, smells of a putrid combination of plutocracy, aristocracy, and kleptocracy — at least, that is, to someone who values democracy for its essence and not its connivance.
In light of all of the aforementioned, it remains to be seen if Sanders’ millions in adherents will monolithically flock to Hillary if she is the nominee in 2016, irrespective of how much burn ointment Bernie dutifully applies to Hillary’s Bern wounds.
We shall see.
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