Hillary grovels, Barack salutes

Although Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are on the same team with Hillary the subordinate getting the distasteful chores, the instincts of the two on display this past week are a good reminder why we made the right choice in last year’s primary season.

Hillary outdid her usual bland cynicism by celebrating the legitimacy of the Afghan presidential ‘election’ and praising the ‘concessions’ made by Israel on the settlements issue. Give me a sip of water, I’m laughing so hard the tears are running down my face.

The ‘concessions’ from Netan-Yahoo’s crew consist of a generous decision not to openly replace the U.S. government with itself and instead settle for wagging Obama’s tail publicly for all to see. After openly defying Obama’s demand that illegal settlement activity on the West Bank be halted to get negotiations kick-started, they smugly waited for the inevitable collapse in Washington. Hillary duly obeyed; the only question is whether she felt chagrined at her own humiliation.

She was even more pathetic wanly accepting the daylight theft through massive ballot-box-stuffing of the presidential election by the head of the Afghan narco-state, Hamid Karzai. Unable to force Karzai to run a real election, Clinton signaled the U.S. acceptance of his fraudulent ‘victory’ by calling the opposition candidate’s withdrawal ‘a personal choice which may or may not be made’.

‘I don’t think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election’, she added disingenuously, a nicely rounded and complete falsehood meaning that even though the election is completely illegitimate, the U.S. has been outmaneuvered and will have to go along with it.

I can only wonder what that family in Missouri must be feeling as they read this news and realize that their enlisted loved one must expose him or herself to injury and death in defense of a corrupt warlord who thumbs his nose at the nation whose troops protect him and his opiates.

That’s where Obama’s gesture comes in. After nearly a decade of anti-terrorist crusaders pretending that making war in distant lands comes at no cost, Obama reminded the armchair militarists egging him on to escalate in Afghanistan that these decisions entail sacrifice—of other people’s children.

The two wars brought to us by Bush and Cheney were great money-making opportunities for them and their friends, and as Cheney cracked later when asked about the losses, no one can complain because ‘they’re all volunteers’. That was the attitude from the great patriots of the teabagger party, and it’s mind-numbing to think that they continue to get away with it while those who express concern about the troops are tagged as weak.

I suffer from chronic naiveté, but I cannot understand why this is not the moment to tell Karzai and his heroin-trafficking buddies that the U.S. has had enough and will be handing over the business of their defense to them. After all, these guys have shown how determined they are to be in charge—why not take them up on it?