Clinton & Bush - Iran-Contra, CIA & Drugs

Nobody was a bigger fan of Bill Clinton than I up to a short while ago. I ignored everything that suggested he was  a crook. It took my interest in Iran-Contra and Bush/CIA drug trafficking to go back and review the information I had previously blocked out because it challenged my world view that Bill Clinton was a fucking amazing dude.

Somebody pointed out that Bill Clinton was the first President since WII to bomb white people. I have mixed feelings about this. But more importantly Mike Ruppert informs us that there were many Mena style Iran Contra drug running airports all around the country. The CIA is the largest and most effective organised crime unit on the planet.

The Clintons, Bush & CIA Drug Smuggling

One of the reasons I have no time for the fake left right divide cheerleaders is they're too busy waving the team colours to do the grown up homework and figure out that at an elite level they're all in it together in business and crime. The Clintons were savvy enough to get into bed with the CIA and Bush senior to smuggle drugs using an Arkansas airport called Mena while on the road to the presidency. They were also smart enough not to get involved with the money but to use the favours they granted (and the killings they covered up) to gain political influence. That's how it works folks. Waving a flag for your team or getting into a spitting contest with the other side is for infants. Don't take my word for it. Do the work and make your own conclusion. But the work isn't a quick skim. It's the books, the interviews, the FOIA documents and the thinking it through.

Don't expect the corporate media to spend time on reality. There's no money in it, and if you think that through, that's a good idea in the long run otherwise we'd do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

The Comeback Kid

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the street fighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? - ZIZEK - 23 July 2009

Some of you (all two of you on a good day) by now know that my political antenna are twitching in small spastic gestures, myopically groping their way to the disconnected future, uncovering micrograms of evidence that we're living in dramatically changing times.

Looking back on my own political wakening I genuinely gulp now how little and how shallow it really was, yet how vociferously it was argued. We argued rowdy politics over calming joints in the early 90's before heading out to the student parties. Ending for me by falling in love with an East German girl only to find employment working for the US army bases in Germany. It is here I started to fully grasp the empirical might the United States.

I really lucked out later on with a political mentor who had read more than anyone I knew and threw more valuable books my way in a few short years than I've read in a decade since. I pickled myself in rum and politics on tropical beaches interspersed with Asian tiger adland bouts and occasional Euro runs.

What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that growing up politically in the Clinton years that criss crossed and spanned, living and working in the two continents of Europe and Asia is a pespective that only now do I grasp was the solid foundation for moulding my undying love for the idea of ideas. The politics of politics. The meaning of what I mean.

I've slumped countless ideological times since those Hacyonic days of living in the Clinton era to learn of how much damage the financial market liberalisation is the responsibility of the former president. How say the market liberalisation of Haitian rice farmers to choose just one small devastating example, was destroyed by the subsidies of the American rice farmers, is personally down to Bill Clinton. An example I now know extends back into deeper  'merkan history.

Yet does one ever really forget all the merits of a past love affair? Not me. I see what it is that I adored. The only regrets I have now, emerging into middle age is the the frequent bouts of bad taste I've sailed with. Taste is both something we acquire and if we're honest with the definition of taste, are occasionally forced to dispense with as we evolve.

I worry about America. The putrid silence on the part of Capitalist Baconistas. The self evident insanity of the main stream right wing. The endlessly disappointing performance of the wishy washy left and those who hailed hope and change only to strand aspirational ships on sharp rocks of granite despair.

Then I see you again. The Polymath. The Comeback Kid, who with blow-job bravado takes on the Whitehouse press corp in a manner we haven't seen since the late nineties. And I want to believe you're going to make it. To silence the reptiles in the C Suite who control the Oval. I want to believe. I want.

I watch as the self evident principles of neo-sharing mysteriously take place at the highest level of office on the planet. I want to believe again in you America. Eight years of happiness and prosperity for me were pummelled with brutal annihilation into a hazy amnesia.

Please watch this. It's not just about the man, even though it's not just what you say it's how you say it. This is about the nature of ideas. Ideas that live and breath, that change and evolve, adapt and mutate to withstand the most colossal compression of evolutionary terminating forces we're facing. 

This is our karma. This is our responsibility. We're all in it together.

Countdown

I"m not so bothered with George Bush as some. I feel a wave of mild embarrassment each time I see him pretending that what is happening isn't happening. I'm embarrassed for his poor grasp of geography, his shunning of history and lately a reversal on GOP economic theory by advocating 'trickle up economics' with the stimulus package. Now they say it's because poor people are more likely to go spend the cash, and the cynicism this reveals for trickle down economics is only now manifest. Have they been fattening their wallets all this time? Selling cheap loans to people who will spend the next decade paying them off?. Keynesian economics is now evidently being practiced by POTUS and the mantra of free market economics as the unfailing driver of good, is a boil waiting to be lanced.

This doesn't mean I'm not horrified by the grotesque spectacle of Bill Clinton pulling tricks I never thought I'd see in order to gain reentry into the Whitehouse and of course his desperate wife Hillary who looks way past her time and a little ugly like Giuliani with his never ending repetition of what he did for N.Y. But don't let that colour your impression of my politics because my favourite candidate so far has been Ron Paul of the Republican party for his ruthless pursuit of presenting the unpalatable truth to the U.S.

It is however increasingly looking like Barack Obama's time and I see potential in him to lead the country forward in a way that the United States both deserves and desperately needs. It's time to rid the U.S. of that unholy alliance of the fundamentalists and neoconservatives because its just obscene listening to those pro lifers support the war in Iraq.

Via Rebecca Mackinnon