Tag: clinton

Five

Five years ago today, Lemkin began. Five posts after that, a pretty decent one about our collecive and idiotic relationship with the media was emitted. The one thousandth post was far less full of self regard than this one. Keep walking.
After fifteen hundred or so stellar posts to clip and save, we’ve traveled from Creed to Kubrick and back again. Frankly, I’m a fan of Sherroditus. Don’t know why, exactly, but will try to write more like that one in the coming five.
Also in store for loyal Lemkinites: the thrilling, youth-oriented reboot of four things, Ozmodiar, a floating green alien that only I can see, and wedding after wedding after wedding… Thanks for occasionally reading and commenting. That is all.

Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.

Hillary Clinton, in a statement that both praises Al Jazeera as a fine and uniquely informative news source and calls out the utterly defunct American MSM. Compare and contrast with W. Bush’s plan to blow up Al Jazeera headquarters.
Naturally, it is the Obama administration that is “dangerous to American values.”
Source: blogs.abcnews.com

Why Does John McCain Want To Kill Soldiers?

Why does Susan Collins hate the military so much that she wants them to starve to death while those brave men and women are out there fighting and dying in harms way? How dare she endanger funding for even a second over procedural concerns.

These and other simple frames are things you will never hear from the mouth of The Democrat. They, after all, have the facts on their side. Why, this amendment doesn’t actually even end DADT at all, it simply creates a mechanism by which [blah de blah de blah blah blah]. Why, those little devils actually used the same mechanism to pass DADT when [blah de blah de blah blah].

Repeat after Lemkin: The Facts Do Not Matter.

John McCain hates soldiers. Period. There is no other possible explanation.
When asked to apologize, up the ante (not only does John McCain hate soldiers, I’m fairly sure he is committing an act of treason by blocking this legislation).

It’s this ceaseless inability to identify whatever policy the Democrat prefers and fight for it, whatever may come, that really poisons the electorate. As The Big Dog himself once said:

When people are insecure, they’d rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who’s weak and right

“Weak and right” so perfectly sums the modern Democrat that it really should have made the exciting new website redesign and bumper-sticker that we’re all so pumped up by.
And nothing, nothing depicts the modern Tea Klan GOP’s limbic politics more perfectly than “strong and wrong.”

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

–and–

I refused to use the word [socialist] because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton—the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House judiciary committee in the 1990s]—at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, “The most violated commandment in Washington, DC"—everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President—"is, ‘Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’” I thought, “He’s right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington.” For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I’m conservative. We disagree…But I don’t need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

We know, we know—it’s hard to believe that the path to impeachment could have been paved at a 1993 dinner party. […] But Establishment Washington—aka, The Village—has operated by very strange rules over the course of the past several decades. And now, years later, along comes Quinn—and she points to that very same dinner.

Bob Somerby, discussing this. Truly beyond belief; not-coincidentally also the rotting core of our dangerously dysfunctional system and the essence of the environment that makes the GOP noise machine possible.

Excessive

Bob Somerby reacts to this tidbit from the WaPo:

It is possible to sympathize with Clinton. Today, when the mainstream media seems so weakened, we forget how powerful—and arrogant—the New York Times and The Washington Post, along with the networks and news magazines, seemed to be in the early and mid-1990s. They were part of a giant scandal machine that dominated official Washington in the first few years after the Cold War. The endless string of special prosecutors and the media’s obsession with Whitewater seem excessive in retrospect.

with this:

It didn’t seem excessive to Thomas when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton helped murder Vince Foster.

It didn’t seem excessive to Thomas when Jerry Falwell spent years peddling the Clinton murder tapes—remaining an honored guest on Meet the Press, and on cable “news” programs.

It didn’t seem excessive to Thomas when Dan Burton was shooting up pumpkins in his back yard, showing how Foster may have died.

It didn’t seem excessive (or strange) to Thomas when the original special prosecutor got canned by a panel of right-wing judges—and was replaced by a well-known conservative functionary.

It didn’t seem excessive to Thomas when Fools for Scandal published the documents the New York Times had disappeared in the course of inventing the Whitewater “scandal.”

It didn’t seem excessive when a first lady was called a “congenital liar” by a bungling major columnist. It didn’t seem excessive when the Village called her every name in the book as they pretended that she had lied about the Cubs and the Yankees. It didn’t seem excessive when the Post published that disgraceful piece by Andrew Sullivan, two days before the 1996 election. (Headline: “Clinton: Not a Flicker Of Moral Life.”) It hadn’t seemed excessive when that same baboon had published that crap by Betsy McCaughey, in 1994—a piece whose fraudulence became quite clear in rather short order.

These events made perfect sense at the time! To Thomas, they only seem excessive in retrospect! By the way, did it seem excessive when the Post and the Times invented all that sh*t about Candidate Gore, then pimped it for twenty straight months?

Did that seem “excessive” in real time?

Wowie. My reaction seems tame in comparison. Read the whole thing.

Get Your Ass to Mars

Chris Matthews, apparently a longtime resident of Olympus Mons, talks to Clinton biographer Taylor Branch about the Fools for Scandal that are the Villagers:

Branch: Well, first of all, [Bill Clinton] was frustrated that his presidency was off course and besieged by tabloid scandals for six years of which the Lewinsky one was the only one that proved any substance. He forfeited the attempt to rise above the cynicism of the tabloid era by validating that cynicism with Monica Lewinsky. And his only explanation was that he felt sorry for himself, yet he was trying so hard to to be a good president and all anybody wanted to talk about was filegate, travelgate and whether or not he had killed Vince Foster.

Matthews: Did he think that people … well let’s get to some of the more extreme charges against him. Did he think that anybody thought that, anybody real, I mean we talk about the nut jobs all the time. But does anybody really think that Bill Clinton put a hit on his friend Vince Foster?

Branch: No, but it stayed in the news for six years.

Matthews: What news?

Branch: …. that’s astonishing. It was all over the place.

Matthews: What newspapers carried that?

Branch: Well first of all..

Matthews: The Clinton Chronicles, you know and Fox

Branch: Ken Starr could make stories about it all the time. It was an official investigation of the Whitewater special counsel.

This has been something of a recurrent theme with the establishment press in DC. They created Whitewater. They hounded Clinton for years. They invented stories about Gore out of whole cloth (these tales remarkably always managing to buttress preferred GOP talking points), and continue to repeat them to this day as though they are fact. But, when confronted directly about their complicity…they go into Sergeant Schultz mode: “I know nothing! I see nothing!” and act like it’s a brand new fucking discovery that the MSM was directly responsible for the lead-up to the Clinton impeachment, just like they were directly responsible for the run-up to the Iraq war. But they are fundamentally incapable of admitting or even perceiving this. Again with the Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Which, perhaps should be moderately revised to:

It is difficult to get a complicit media agent to understand something when they became millionaires by not understanding it.

You’d think there wouldn’t be anything more remarkable in the Branch interview than the Vince Foster stuff excerpted above. But there is:

Matthews: Why would he think that the liberal establishment, reflected in newspeople’s opinions were anti-Clinton?

Branch: That’s what drove him nuts. But more specifically, the New York Times and the Washington Post drove the Whitewater scandals and he always looked up to them and he though they were sucked into some tabloid netherworld that was detracting from his agenda for the country.

And continues to detract from any substantive agenda to this day. But, setting that aside for the moment, it’s utterly breathtaking to see Matthews here, pretending as though the six year war on Clinton, the subsequent war on Gore, the role the MSM played in the “election” of George W. Bush over Gore, the parroting of Bush lies as truth, and the bitter, still-unwinding outcome of those lies and all the rest: just never happened. Well, maybe, but only on FoxNEWS or something. This man was himself complicit in these events. Here’s Matthews on W. Bush:

MATTHEWS: What’s the importance of the president’s amazing display of leadership tonight?

[…]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically […], the president deserves everything he’s doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That […] if you’re going to run against him, you’d better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[…]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

And on and on and on.

Here’s Matthews on the “Clinton ordered Vince Foster’s murder” theories, chatting with Gennifer Flowers, no less, having a conversation he now denies ever happened in the MSM:

Ms. FLOWERS: I don’t know for–I didn’t hear Bill get on the phone and call and place the order to have this man killed, no.

MATTHEWS: Well, that’s not–you sort of need evidence like that to accuse even this guy, your–a guy you don’t like, perhaps, of murder, don’t you?

Ms. FLOWERS: Well, I–well, I think if it looks like a chicken and walks like a chicken, perhaps it’s a chicken. I mean, come on.

MATTHEWS: Well, perhaps, perhaps.

Now, of course, none of this ever happened. Not in the mainstream media, of course. Only those fringe lunatics ever talked about this stuff. Un-fucking-believable.