No Remorse For Hillary
24
April, 2018
I
am hopeful that the commendable discovery process involved in US
litigation will bring to light further details of the genesis of
Christopher Steele’s ludicrous
dossier on
Trump/Russia, and may even give some clues as to whether Sergei
Skripal and/or his handler Pablo Miller were involved in its
contents.
The
decision by the Democratic National Committee to sue the Russian
Government, Wikileaks, Julian Assange personally and the Trump
campaign is an act of colossal hubris. It is certain to reveal still
more details of the deliberate fixing of the primary race against
Bernie Sanders, over which five DNC members, including the Chair,
were forced to resign. It will also lead to the defendants being able
to forensically examine the DNC servers to prove they were not hacked
– something which astonishingly the FBI refused
to do,
being instead content to take the word of the DNC’s own private
cyber security firm, Crowdstrike. Unless those servers have been
wiped completely (as Hillary
did to
her private email server) I know that is not going to go well for the
DNC.
I
cannot better Glenn
Greenwald’s article on
why it is a terrible idea to sue Wikileaks for publishing leaked
documents – it sets a precedent which could be used to constrain
media from ever publishing anything given them by whistleblowers. It
is an astonishingly illiberal thing to undertake. Nor is it
politically wise. The media has done its very best to ignore as far
as possible the actual content of the leaks of DNC material, and
rather to concentrate on the wild accusations of how they were
obtained. But the fundamental crookedness revealed in the emails is
bound to get some sort of airing, not least as the basis of a public
interest defence.
I
have often been asked if I regret my association with Wikileaks,
given they are held responsible for the election of Donald Trump. My
answer is that I feel no remorse at all.
Hillary
Clinton lost because she was an appalling candidate. A
multi-millionaire, neo-con warmonger with the warmth and empathy of a
three week dead haddock and an eye for the interests of Wall Street,
who regarded ordinary voters as “deplorables” (a term she used
not just once, but
frequently at
fund-raisers with the mega-wealthy). Hillary Clinton conspired with
the machine that was supposed to be neutrally running the primaries,
to fix the primaries against Bernie Sanders. The opinion polls
regularly showed that Sanders would beat Trump, and that the only
Democratic candidate who Trump could beat was Clinton. Egomania and a
massive sense of entitlement nevertheless led her not just to persist
to get the candidacy, but persist to rig the candidacy. She then
proceeded to ignore major urban working class battleground states in
her campaign against Trump and focus on more glamorous places. In
short, Hillary was corrupt rubbish. Full stop, and not remotely
Wikileaks’ fault.
Wikileaks
did not go out to get the evidence against Hillary. They were given
it. Should they have withheld the knowledge of the rigging of the
field against Bernie Sanders from the American people, to let Clinton
benefit from the corruption? For me that is a no-brainer. It would
have been a gross moral dereliction to have done so. It is also the
case that Wikileaks can only publish what they are given. Had they
been given dirt on Trump, they would have published. But they were
not given any leaks on Trump.
I
should put in an aside here which might surprise you. I like Anthony
Weiner. I have never met him, but I watched the amazing 2016 fly on
the wall documentary Weiner and he came across as a
person of genuine goodwill, passion and commitment, undermined by
what is very obviously a pathological illness. I realise that was not
the general reaction, but it was mine.
But
– and now I am going to really annoy people – I have to say that
from an international perspective, rather than an American domestic
perspective, I am also not in the slightest convinced that Trump has
been worse for the World than Clinton would have been. Trump has not,
to date, initiated any new military intervention or substantially
increased any military conflict during his Presidency. In fact his
current actions more closely match his words about non-intervention
during his election campaign, than do his current words. Despite
hawkish posturing, he has not substantially increased American
military intervention in Syria.
My
reading of the reported chemical weapon attack on Douma is this.
Whether it was a false flag chemical attack, a pro-Assad chemical
attack, or no chemical attack at all I do not know for sure. But
whichever it is, it was used to attempt to get Trump to commit to a
major escalation of American involvement in the war in Syria. So far,
he has not done that. The American-led missile attack was illegal,
but fortunately comparatively restrained, certainly in no way
matching Trump’s rhetoric. All the evidence is, and there is a
great deal of evidence from Libya and Afghanistan, that Clinton would
have been far more aggressive.
That
leaves the dichotomy between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions.
Certainly there is every sign of a sharp tilt to the neo-cons, His
apparent preference in his press conference with Macron today for an
extended presence of France, the former colonial power, and US troops
in Syria is deeply troubling. His sacking of the sensible Tillerson
from the State Department, and his appointment of the odious John
Bolton as National Security Adviser all appear to be terrible signs.
But still, nothing has actually happened. There is a reading that
Trump is placating the neo-cons with position and rhetoric while his
actions – in Syria and in what a hating political class fails to
acknowledge has all the makings of a diplomatic coup in North Korea –
go in a very different direction.
It
is beyond doubt that Hillary, who cannot open her mouth without
denouncing Russia for causing her own entirely self-inflicted failure
– would be taking the new Cold War to even worse extremes than it
has already reached, to the delight of the military-industrial
complex and her Wall Street friends. It is open to debate, but I
would contend that it is very probable that President Hillary would
have launched a major attack on Syria by now, just like she presided
over as Secretary of State in Libya.
So
my answer is this. Firstly, Clinton caused her own downfall by
arrogance, and by failing to grasp the alienation of ordinary people
from neo-liberal policies that impoverished them while the rich grew
massively richer. Secondly, I strongly suspect that if Hillary were
President, more people would be dead now in the Middle East.
So
no, I have no regrets at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.