March 03, 2014
THE SELLING OF HILLARY CLINTON
Documents released by the Clinton Library in Little Rock revealed that political strategists in the 1990s sought to help humanize the shrieking wolverine known as Hillary Clinton, to “soften her image” and make her “seem less extreme.” She was offered “a few style pointers” and told not to “be defensive and don’t raise your voice.” Part of the strategy was for her to meet with editors of women’s magazines and “turn the editors into Clinton surrogates.” Advisor Sidney Blumenthal recommended that she meet with prominent “opinion makers” to “help inoculate or diffuse any negatives that may arise in the mainstream press.”
If Clinton runs in 2016, she will be 69 years old. Suggestions that she will be too old for the presidency are being deemed “sexist,” since there have been male candidates who ran while older. Never mind that age was also mentioned as a factor in the campaigns of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and John McCain.
Just as any criticism of Obama has been deflected as “racist,” get ready to witness any negative murmurs about Clinton being summarily dismissed as “sexist.” Anyone who raises the possibility that she is a serial spousal abuser will likely be smeared as a “misogynist.” Not to worry about her age, though”she may already be too sick to run in 2016.
BIG BROTHER’S TROLLS AND PEEPHOLES
As part of his gradual release of leaks provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, journalist Glenn Greenwald has revealed a document by England’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group titled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.” According to Greenwald, the document urges two tactics:
(1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet [sic] in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable….Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in “false flag operations” to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.
The Guardian has published a piece about the British surveillance agency GCHQ‘s program “Optic Nerve,” which “collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.” A large quotient of the seized images involved “undesirable nudity,” which seems a bit judgmental on the intelligence officials’ part, because Lord knows they aren’t all Adonises themselves.
AMERICAN FLAG DECLARED UNAMERICAN
In a legal decision issued on Thursday, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the actions of a California high school that forbade the wearing of American-flag apparel on Cinco de Mayo, deeming the threat of violence from outraged Mexican students more substantial than gringos’ rights to wear the flag. Eugene Volokh of the Washington Post condemned the decision as “a classic “heckler’s veto” “ thugs threatening to attack the speaker, and government officials suppressing the speech to prevent such violence.”
A crucial passage from the legal ruling:
A group of Mexican students had been walking around with the Mexican flag, and in response to the white students” flag-raising, one Mexican student shouted “f*** them white boys, f*** them white boys.” When Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez told the student to stop using profane language, the student said, “But Rodriguez, they are racist. They are being racist. F*** them white boys. Let’s f*** them up.”
Once again: “They are being racist. Fuck them white boys.” The howling hypocrisy in that statement is not only ignored, it is now legally endorsed and protected. Welcome to the new America.
