Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.
Council News:
Debra Heine over at Nice Deb penned a superb article at PJ Media reporting on how the Obama Administration has sided with the Palestinians, working to try to stop US citizens from collecting judgments they won in court as victims of PLO terrorist attacks. It’s a must read.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6 PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning
Simple, no?
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
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Robert Conquest has died at age 98. He was a gigantic hero of truth and the voiceless.
On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest’s tremendous body of work — and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the “intelligentsia” — has been and will remain a guiding inspiration.
In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.
Some relevant passages from the book follow.
p. 94
British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46
How could that be? Without understanding the extent of Communist pen- etration into the decision-and-opinion-making echelons of the West—and, as important, into the decision-and-opinion-making minds of the West—the question is baffling, a mystery without clues, a historical brick wall. From our vantage point, blanks and all, it is almost impossible to comprehend how it could have been that our relatives and forebears, apparently sentient, apparently decent Americans, could have looked on in neutral silence as the Soviet state, year after year, starved and brutalized and enslaved millions of its own people to death—news of which did indeed spread throughout the West despite Soviet censorship and prevarication, although it remained outside consensus.47 Dalton Trumbo, as we’ve seen, took pride in the silence on the Hollywood front. He’s hailed as a martyr of idealism. Historians, as we’ve seen, looked the other way, strenuously, to protect their precious “basic symmetry.” They remain figures of respect and authority. How—and when—did these and other inversions of logic and morality, common sense and common decency, begin to take place?
pp. 100-101
On his real-life return to the USSR, [journalist] Eugene Lyons would see and eventually understand. He writes of finding the familiar old mind games, the sifting techniques, no longer effective on his return. “With every week after my return I came to feel more ashamed of my mealy-mouthed caution while at home,” he writes. “Deep under those excuses I had made for myself, I now was forced to admit, had been the subconscious desire to remain persona grata with the masters, retain my job. I was protecting my status as a ‘friendly’ correspondent. And at that I had just about crawled under the line.”60
There Lyons was to stay at least long enough to participate in a seminal event in Soviet crime and Western turpitude: what Robert Conquest would much later identify as the very first successful implementation of the “Big Lie”—the concerted assault on truth to form world opinion, in this original case, to deny the regime-engineered Famine in the Ukraine. It was a Faustian turning point.
Conquest writes:
On the face of it, this [deception] might appear to have been an impossible un- dertaking. A great number of true accounts reached Western Europe and America, some of them from impeccable Western eyewitnesses . . .
But Stalin had a profound understanding of the possibilities of what Hitler approvingly calls the Big Lie. He knew that even though the truth may be read- ily available, the deceiver need not give up. He saw that flat denial on the one hand, and the injection into the pool of information of a corpus of positive false- hood on the other, were sufficient to confuse the issue for the passively in- structed foreign audience, and to induce acceptance of the Stalinist version by those actively seeking to be deceived.
Flat denial plus a corpus of positive falsehood: Sounds like another black hole of antiknowledge, another corroding attack on the basis of the Enlightenment itself. Conquest describes this concerted effort to deceive the world about the truth of the state-engineered famine, Stalin’s brutal war on the peasantry, as “the first major instance of the exercise of this technique of influencing world opinion.”61
This instance, then, was a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the twentieth century, a moment in which history itself, always subject to lies and colorations, became susceptible to something truly new under the sun: totalitarianism; more specifically, the totalitarian in- novation of disinformation, later expanded, bureaucratized and, in effect, wea- ponized, by KGB-directed armies of dezinformatsiya agents.
pp. 104-108
More than three decades later, in 1968, when Robert Conquest came along with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the colossal horror of the Soviet regime, first regarding the Moscow show trials, and then, in 1985, with his testimonies, his figures, and his footnotes attesting to the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, there was no need to meet in a hotel room with a Soviet censor and work out a conspiracy of denial and drink to it with vodka. Nor was there consciousness of such a need. The legacy of denial had become so powerful in the interim as to have become imperceptible and stunningly effective. “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the moti- vation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children,” Conquest wrote, but class was incapable of learning.70
“People accepted his facts, but they didn’t accept his conclusions,” British writer Neal Ascherson said to the British newspaper The Guardian in 2003, perfectly crystallizing the intelligentsia’s permanent reaction to Conquest.71 This facts-sans-implications formulation is key. It sounds so reasonable. Come, come, dear boy; no one is rejecting your facts, just your conclusions. There may indeed be extreme “food shortages,” but widespread mortality is due to diseases associated with “malnutrition,” not famine. Facts, yes. Conclusions, no. However, such facts are conclusions because they are crimes. Soviet exterminationism is Soviet exterminationism (emphasis on Soviet), just as Nazi genocide is Nazi genocide (emphasis on Nazi). Reject the conclusion and the facts, the crimes, become meaningless. Indeed, such facts demand judgment, just as such crimes demand a verdict. As Conquest put it:
The historian, registering the facts beyond doubt, and in their context, cannot but also judge. Die Weltgeschischte ist das Weltgericht—World History is the World’s Court of Judgment: Schiller’s dictum may seem too grandiose today. Yet the establishment of the facts certainly includes the establishment of responsibility.72
The Left tried to drive a wedge between the facts as Conquest marshaled them and the conclusions as he drew them, making efforts to taint both due to his evident “dislike” of purges, terror, and death camps—or, as Eugene Lyons might have put it ironically, his middle-class liberal “hang-overs of prejudice” against dictatorship, mass slaughter, and the crushing of the human spirit. Conquest writes:
It was believed that a “Cold Warrior” became opposed to the Soviet system be- cause of some irrational predisposition . . . The idea seems to be that if one can show that opposition to the Soviet threat was in part based on dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions—that is, “emotions”—then the opposition cannot have been objective. But, of course, the Soviet system was indeed disliked, even detested, because of its record and intentions.73
What Conquest’s detractors dismissed as “emotions”—namely, “dislike of Soviet actualities and intentions” (including twenty million killed by Stalin)— was in fact a historian’s verdict of responsibility regarding such crimes. Visceral feelings aside, it is a judgment based on evidence, logic, and moral analysis. These are the same underpinnings of any rational investigation into Nazi “ac- tualities and intentions” and subsequent finding of their detestable nature. No one would pause over the following slight reworking of a Conquest line quoted above: “The main lesson seems to be that the Nazi ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children”— but insert “Communist ideology” into the sentence and boy, look out.
“No one could deal with this,” he writes of his Great Terror research, “or other themes I wrote of later, unless judgmental as well as inquisitive; and those who denied the negative characteristics of Soviet Communism were deficient in judgment and in curiosity—gaps in the teeth and blinkers on the eyes.”74
To be able to “deal with” the evil of Communist extermination history, then, as Conquest writes, is to be judgmental as well as inquisitive. This suggests a continuum between such fruits of curiosity and academic labor—the repugnant facts of Communist extermination history—and our judgment of them. The gap-toothed and blinkered ones, however, set out to interrupt this continuum, to sunder these facts from their conclusions, to explode the whole logical exercise that begins in facts and ends in conclusions into senseless fragments—to decontextualize it (and everything else while they’re at it). Yes, the Nazi system killed six million people (fact), and yes, the Nazi system was evil (conclusion); and yes, the Soviet system killed twenty million people (fact), but how dare that “cowboy” Ronald Reagan call the Soviet Union the “evil empire”?
Like postmodernism itself, this massive inconsistency on Nazism and Communism doesn’t make a shred of sense. If making sense were the goal, the phrase “evil empire” would have been a trite truism, a hoary cliché long before Ronald Reagan uttered the words, which, like the most potent incantation, drove tribes of intelligentsia the Western world over into fits of mass hysteria and rage—against evil Reagan, not the empire. If the words today no longer conjure the same teeth-gnashing indictment of Old West simplicity they once did, they still manage to strike a spark or two of faux outrage. Also, the quotation marks of irony have yet to fall away.
I went back to the original Reagan speech recently, realizing I’d never heard or read any more of it than that signature phrase. Reagan was addressing evangelical Christians at a time when the so-called nuclear freeze, which we now know to have been a colossal Soviet influence operation,75 was under debate in Congress and Reagan was proposing to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe. Two weeks later, he would announce his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which, even as it became the obsession that would drive the final Soviet dicta- tors to exhaust the Communist system in their futile efforts to compete, was endlessly caricatured in Western media as a “cowboy’s” comic-book ray gun of choice straight from Star Wars—no doubt a Soviet-encouraged moniker.
The speech is surprisingly mild. I was surprised to learn that by the time Reagan gets around to mentioning the “evil empire,” he was not inveighing against the USSR directly but rather against the creed of moral equivalence, at the time the very definition of intellectual chic. It’s hard to convey the intensity of the drumbeat for moral equivalence in those days. It was background noise and op-ed commentary, the premise of debate (“Resolved: There is no moral difference between the world policies of the United States and the Soviet Union,” Oxford Union debate, February 23, 1984) and the endings of movies (Three Days of the Condor [1975], Apocalypse Now [1979], Reds [1981]). The era Reagan was trying to end was one of entrenched belief in “ambiguities” between capitalism and Communism, between liberty and tyranny. It was too much for one man to do, even Ronald Reagan.
“We’re all the same, you know, that’s the joke,” East German agent Fiedler remarks to British agent Leamas in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, le Carré’s stunningly successful 1963 novel that instituted the le Carré brand. This joke was an old story by the 1980s, the conventional wisdom, the Establishment point of view. It still is. By 2008, le Carré was confiding to The Sunday Times of London, over fragrant, amber-colored glasses of Calvados, as the waves crashed at the foot of the cliffs below the author’s Cornwall home, that he had himself been tempted to defect to the Soviet Union.76
“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest” [ellipses in original].
The rest about the twenty million killed? Heavens, no. The Times explains:
This is maybe less surprising than at first it seemed: we are in true le Carré territory, nuanced and complex, where the spying is sometimes an end in itself and where there is rarely an easy, Manichaean split between the good guys and the bad guys. Defecting was a temptation the writer resisted, to our good fortune [em- phasis added].
To each our own. What is remarkable here is less the “news” about le Carré than the ease with which the reporter absorbs this point of moral cretinhood, conveying the author’s view as a beguilingly piquant eccentricity even as it skirts the charnel houses the man found himself fascinated and not repelled by. Such enthusiasm would not have greeted a thriller writer who expressed a temptation to “jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest” about, say, the Third Reich.
If an unhealthy attraction to the Soviet Union was still respectable as re- cently as 2008, imagine how outrageous the phrase “evil empire” sounded twenty-five years earlier. This is what Reagan actually said:
In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunder- standing and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.77
Reagan’s exhortation to face “the facts of history” was a broad challenge, his reference to “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire” an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. The cataclysmic histories of Ukraine, Finland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Korea, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Angola, and on and on were not the shining raiment becoming an empire of peace. Reagan was challenging us to acknowledge the implications of this fact, to fight the paralysis of “moral equivalence,” and see not two bullies in a playground, as the East-West struggle was repetitiously framed, but one aggressor seeking to impose a totalitarian system over as much of the world as possible. Good and Evil. Reagan may have had to struggle to explain this to the West, but the Soviets, as Robert Conquest reminds us, looking back from the vantage point of 2005, were never unclear, morally or otherwise, about their intentions:
The Soviet Union, right up to the eve of its collapse, was committed to the con- cept of an unappeasable conflict with the Western world and to the doctrine that this could only be resolved by what Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko de- scribed, as officially as one can imagine (in his 1975 book The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union) as world revolution: “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union subordinates all its theoretical and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.”78
As Conquest added, “one could hardly be franker.”
—
And he is gone from us now. A permanent loss. R.I.P.
President Barack Obama’s disastrous deal with Iran paves the way for this totalitarian regime to attain nuclear weapons, ones which Iran’s dictators could then aim squarely at the United States, Israel, and our allies. But the complicit media repeatedly join the administration in championing the deal, which both falsely claim is the only viable alternative to war.
In order to stifle opposition to this narrative, the mainstream media have mostly offered the public misleading information and punditry. After an estimated 12,000 people gathered in New York City’s Times Square on July 22 to fight the Iran deal, the media did what they do best in the face of inconvenient truths—marginalize the opposition, or ignore the facts.
“Speakers, including Republican politicians, called on Congress to throw it out, whipping up the crowd that included supporters of right-wing Jewish and evangelical Christian groups,” reported AFP about the Times Square rally. Similarly, the widely distributed Associated Press article reported that “The event…consisted mainly of pro-Israel supporters, though organizers said it represents Americans of all faiths and political convictions.”
In other words, move along, nothing to see here but a bunch of right-wing crazies who want war with Iran. There’s no popular protest against the Iran deal, we are told, and opposition to the deal is not actually bipartisan. Yet notable Democrats who spoke at the rally included liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
David Brog, Executive Director, Christians United for Israel
Monica Crowley, Political Commentator
U.S. Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Steven Emerson, Founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Frank Gaffney, Founder of the Center for Security Policy
Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post
Kasim Hafeez, Christians United for Israel’s Outreach Coordinator
Pete Hoekstra, Former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee
Richard Kemp, Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan
Tony LoBianco, Actor and Activist
Herbert I. London, President London Center for Policy Research
Clare M. Lopez, Center for Security Policy
U.S. Navy Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
Kevin McCullough, Radio Host from WMCA and 970 The Answer
Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan District Attorney from 1975 to 2009
George Pataki, former Governor of New York
General Paul Vallely, Chairman of Stand Up America
Col. USA (Ret.) Allen West, former Congressman
Genevieve Wood, The Heritage Foundation
Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report
The New York Times’ decision to report on a minimum wage protest with far fewer attendees, and to splash that article onto the front page, reflects the cursory, feigned ignorance adopted by many in the media about this protest. The thousands of attendees apparently weren’t “enough people to catch the attention of The New York Times, who feature a $15 an hour minimum wage protest of a couple of dozen people on the front page, but not thousands rallying against the Iran deal,” notes Rick Moran for The American Thinker.
That pro-minimum wage hike article by the Times was titled, “Push to Lift Minimum Wage Is Now Serious Business,” and featured on page A1 of the July 24 issue. Instead of covering the Iran protest, and doing some genuine reporting on what was happening on their own doorstep, the Times instead featured the widely cited Associated Press article.
Clearly, the media aren’t going to tell the public the truth about the Iran deal—which is actually between the P5+1 nations and Iran—or why people oppose this debacle.
The many speakers at the rally provided compelling insights into why this is such a bad deal, and the video of this three-hour-plus rally can be viewed online. Speaker after speaker explained why this deal with Iran is inherently flawed and should be rejected.
One consistent theme throughout this powerful and emotional rally was urging people to contact their congressmen and women to try to get them to vote against the deal when it comes time for Congress to vote. Congress has 60 days to consider their vote, and that period began on July 20th.
The main focus of the event was on Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Schumer hasn’t committed either way, and is in a difficult position. He hopes and plans to succeed Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as the Senate Minority Leader (and eventually Majority Leader), and wants to be loyal to President Obama, and the party. But this conflicts with his longstanding support for Israel, which strongly opposes this deal.
The message from many of the speakers was that this is a moment of truth for Schumer. It won’t be good enough, they said, to wait until enough Democrats are lined up to assure that President Obama’s anticipated veto won’t be overridden, and then be able to make a safe vote against the deal. This crowd expects Schumer to lead the fight against the Iran nuclear agreement, which may be the only way for Congress to be able to defeat it. Even then, with the United Nations having already voted to lift its sanctions on Iran, based on certain conditions, it may not matter anyway. But it would definitely send a message.
There were too many great speeches to document here. I attended the event to be there in person, and to support my fellow members of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB). Below are the speeches of the six CCB members who spoke there, providing the story that the media refuse to tell.
“The reality is this arrangement, this deal with Iran is the worst negotiation the United States has conducted in history. … This agreement will actually free known terrorists who have killed Americans, Israelis, Europeans, Westerners and Muslims. An agreement that doesn’t give anything to the United States except the fact that it levels the playing field for Iran to dominate the Middle East, equate itself as a superpower, and ultimately become a power that has the ability to destroy all of its neighbors in the Middle East.”
“We stand united in believing that this is a bad agreement for America and the rest of the world, and we stand united knowing that America is strong. And in our history when we see evil we will confront it, contain it, and we will defeat it. … We have never, and we will never, accommodate it.”
“We know what’s in a good agreement, and people and this president say, ‘But it’s all we could get.’ It’s a sign of weakness.”
“This is the simple message that we should be sending to Iran. When Iran stands up and they chant, ‘Death to America!’ all we need to say is, ‘You first!’ … Well let me tell you something, the United States of America is about victors. The United States of America is about champions. The United States of America does not surrender to a bunch of black-robed crazed clerics that want to see us destroyed.”
“This traitorous group traded our national honor. … They humiliated this great nation before our friends, our allies, and most importantly our enemies. This surrender document must be thoroughly rejected by Congress, and then Congress must exercise its authority to start impeaching executive officials, starting with Secretary Kerry and following [with] President Obama for his illegal and unconstitutional acts.
“There’s only one sure way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon capability and that’s with a military strike—and you can take that to the bank.”
“And, oh by the way, we just learned there are two new side deals to this deal with Iran, and those deals have to do with a place called Parchin, where Iran was testing explosives for its nuclear warheads, says the IAEA. And the other one [is] about the ‘possible’ military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. These two side deals—not going to be made public, not going to be shared with Congress, not going to be shared with the American people or anybody else.”
“The last thing that Iran gets to keep, they’re keeping four American citizens hostages. … Until these hostages are set free we should not be having one word of negotiations with this Iranian regime.”
“I am tired of the deception, I am tired of the lies that come out of the White House and our government. …Let’s stick together, stand up, and kill this deal!”
* Satire, but you won’t believe what Hillary is doing on tax policy. It is virtually identical to Bill’s 1992 platform, when he made sweeping promises to enact a big middle class tax cut then denied it after being elected. This is surely Hillary’s plan too. After all it worked once, and those stupid Americans won’t remember…
Imagining a Clinton presidency in its earliest stages
What might the election of America’s first female president look like? But not just any first female president — the election of President Hillary Clinton?
Here, with a little imagination and a little kicking back, is the inside track on what Hillary Clinton’s highest policy priorities might be during her first 100 days in the Oval Office, should that come to pass.
Domestic Policy Make college affordable: In launching a new consumer-friendly college loan program, Hillary takes her inspiration from former Fannie Mae CEO Frank Raines, who promised the agency would underwrite $3 trillion in subprime mortgages to help the “little guy.” After all, homeownership is a civil right. The ensuing mortgage meltdown was just bad timing. But it was Bush’s fault anyway. Well, a college education is a civil right too!
In explaining her rationale for the program, Hillary describes her touching personal brush with poverty and her enduring identification with the lower classes. “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. It was not easy.”
Hillary’s new program guarantees that no American (including the Clintons) will ever have to suffer the deprivation she and her family were forced to endure in order to send Chelsea to Stanford University.
Tax Policy Wealthiest pay their fair share: Hillary’s tax policy is simple — the rich make too much money. It is not fair! As senator, she heroically opposed the Bush tax cuts, saying, “Many of you are well enough off that the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” She brings this refreshing attitude to her new job. Her new plan promises to “Reform our tax code so that the wealthiest pay their fair share.” After all, the top 20 percent of income earners pay a mere 84 percent of all income taxes. Clearly, not enough.
Middle class tax cut: Yes, you read that right. Hillary proposes a big middle-class tax cut just like hubby Bill did in his 1992 campaign. But don’t worry. Remember what Bill did after his election? Raised everyone’s taxes! Hillary plans to do the exact same thing. Bait and switch. Tee, hee, hee. Like our good friend Jonathan Gruber says, those stupid Americans will believe anything.
Economic Policy Raise middle-class incomes: Hillary says “it’s time to raise incomes for hard-working Americans.” She plans to do this by 1) increasing the minimum wage (because $15 an hour just isn’t enough); 2) expanding overtime (whether companies need it or not); 3) encouraging companies to profit share with employees — about time; 4) strengthening Obamacare; and 5) increasing workers’ pay and benefits, plus a lot more paid leave.
Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before? While it may seem that all these things cost companies money, Hillary has an answer to that too: Expand employment opportunities.
Foreign Policy
As we all know, foreign policy is one of Hillary’s strong points given her time as President Obama’s secretary of state. Her tenure was marked by numerous foreign policy challenges, all of which she met with characteristic Clinton class and determination. Benghazi, as we all know, was Bush’s fault. And for those who question her handling of the affair, she asks in her characteristically presidential tone, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
When queried about her vast knowledge of Islam and Islamic terrorism, Hillary credits, surprisingly, her daughter, Chelsea. “I have to admit that a good deal of what my husband and I have learned [about Islam] has come from my daughter. [As] some of you who are our friends know, she took a course last year in Islamic history.” Think of it. A woman with such a breadth of foreign policy experience credits her daughter! She took a course. That makes Hillary a true expert.
Energy Policy Power the economy of tomorrow: This brilliant program expresses the aspirations of millions of Americans in reducing our carbon footprint. In announcing her plan she says, “You know, we can’t keep talking about our dependence on foreign oil and the need to deal with global warming and the challenge that it poses to our climate and to God’s creation and just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”
Hillary’s plan is to put 500 million solar panels on roofs across America — for free — and increase green energy to 33 percent of the total by 2027. Of course, to see it through will require a third Hillary term, but who could oppose that?
While American energy producers will suffer after years of raping the planet, China and Taiwan, which produce 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaic cells, will prosper immeasurably, redistributing income to those parts of the world that really deserve it. So this environmentally friendly measure will be a boon for international trade.
But not all U.S. companies will suffer. Perish the thought. Hillary will made sure tax dollars flow in the right direction and boost the American economy at the same time. Companies to benefit include First Solar, whose investors include major Obama campaign bundlers, billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, green thumber Al Gore, Ted Turner, Goldman Sachs.
First Solar’s CEO is Michael Ahearn, a former fundraiser for both Obama and Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. Another one, NRG Energy, got a $1.2 billion Department of Energy loan guarantee from the Obama administration, whose bundler, Arvia Few, was married to then NRG executive vice president Jason Few. What a coincidence, no? NRG will now be able to afford even more green energy jobs.
Finally, it looks like Elon Musk, president of SolarCity, Tesla Motors, and a major Clinton Library donor, will be able to snag even more tax money to fund his government-subsidized electric sports car.
In this scenario, we now have a president willing to tackle America’s greatest national security threat, global warming, while boosting the world economy at the same time. It is not for nothing that Hillary Clinton has been called “the smartest woman in the world.”
Hillary 2024! Because, after all, the first woman president deserves at least three terms.
James Simpson is an economist, former White House budget analyst, businessman and investigative journalist.
