Hillary Clinton rattles a mean saber

In my opinion he goes too far in his speech, but, I have always thought she was too biased in favor of Israel, one of the reason I had a hard getting on board in the beginning. (Pretty sure Obama got an award because he said he was willing to negotiate with our enemies, which he ended up doing with Iran.)

I liked what Bernie had to say regarding the middle east, he more or less said what most other presidents have been saying and doing for years in their presidency, but it was notable because for one he didn't attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and two it was in such a contrast to the other candidates.

Straight Talk From Bernie Sanders on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

if you look at Hillary Clinton’s record, not in the 1980s, but far more recently, in the last five to six years, she has embraced and expressed extreme levels of support for some of the world’s most brutal and horrific dictators. She called President Mubarak of Egypt a close personal friend of her family and expressed all kinds of support for him at the time that the government, of which she was a part, was arming and funding him. She did the same with the Saudis. The Clinton Foundation has raised money from some of the worst and most oppressive dictatorships in the Persian Gulf, including the Saudis and the Qataris and the Emirates and the Bahrainis. Hillary Clinton, essentially, her record has been one of embracing and supporting, in all kinds of ways, the world’s worst tyrants.

The other aspect that I would add is that, you know, not just those Persian Gulf regimes, but one of the things that Hillary Clinton has done, with very little notice, has been to make a central part of her campaign embracing not just the right-wing Israeli government, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu herself—himself. She’s written op-eds in Jewish journals and in The Forward talking about the need to get even closer to Israel, if you can imagine that. And then the speech she just gave to AIPAC was about the most disgustingly militaristic, hawkish, pro-Israel speech, I think, that you could ever possibly hear, without the slightest even pretense of concern for people in Palestine or in Libya, where she supported a war that has caused great instability, or in Iraq, where she supported a war that has imposed huge amounts of suffering. And so it’s very easy to talk about Donald Trump being close to dictators or being dangerous, but there has been a huge amount of Hillary Clinton’s record that has spawned immense amounts of tyranny and violence in the world, that Democrats and progressives are steadfastly ignoring.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip of Hillary Clinton addressing AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

HILLARY CLINTON: Many of the young people here today are on the front lines of the battle to oppose the alarming boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS. ... We must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Hillary Clinton addressing AIPAC. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: What she’s doing there is affirming one of the most vile slanders that currently exists. There is a campaign in the United States and in Israel to literally outlaw any advocacy of a boycott movement against Israel, similar to the boycott and divestment and sanctions campaign that brought down Israel and the United States’s closest ally, which was the apartheid regime in South Africa. Now you can certainly raise objections to the tactic of boycotting Israel, and lots of people have, but to render it illegal depends upon this grotesque equating of an advocacy of a boycott of Israel with anti-Semitism and then saying that because anti-Semitism should be banned from universities or from private institutions, that it should be literally outlawed, to ban advocating the boycott of Israel, as well. And people in Europe are actually being arrested for advocating a boycott of Israel. Students in American universities are being sanctioned and punished for doing so.

And what Hillary Clinton did was go before AIPAC and pander, as grotesquely as she typically does, by affirming this line that if you "malign," quote-unquote, the government of Israel and support a boycott of it, in opposition to their decades-long occupation of the Palestinians, it means essentially that you’re guilty of maligning the Jewish people. She is conflating the government of Israel with Jews, which, ironically enough, is itself a long-standing anti-Semitic trope. But it’s just part of her moving to the right in order to position herself for the general election by affirming some of the United States government’s worst and most violent policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Democratic candidate Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the only one to skip the AIPAC conference earlier this week. He did address the issue on the campaign trail, though, from Utah, calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: It is absurd for elements within the Netanyahu government to suggest that building more settlements in the West Bank is the appropriate response to the most recent violence. It is also not acceptable that the Netanyahu government decided to withhold hundreds of millions of shekels in tax revenue from the Palestinians, which it is supposed to collect on their behalf.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Bernie Sanders in Utah. Glenn Greenwald, I believe he did offer to address AIPAC by video stream or Skype, as did Romney in 2012, but we heard he was told no.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, a couple months ago, Donald Trump, on an MSNBC program, said, when asked about Israel and Palestine, that he thought the U.S. should be neutral in order to be a more effective arbiter, which until 20 years ago was a standard mainstream U.S. position, but now has become very shocking. Same with what Bernie Sanders just said. To hear a prominent American politician stand up and actually criticize Israel in such stark and blunt terms, calling them occupiers, essentially, and criticizing how they’re treating the Palestinians, is almost shocking to the ear. Hillary Clinton would never do it, nor would leading Republican politicians. And yet it’s really a very mild way to talk about Israel. And it shows just how far to the right the discourse has shifted in the United States when it comes to Israel, and how much a part of that rightward shift is Hillary Clinton, when you think about how almost shocking it is to hear pretty mild criticisms of Israel coming from Sanders or mild proclamations of neutrality coming from Trump.

Sheesh! What is it with the Far Left that always makes them hate democracy and love terrorists?



In other words, Hillary took a reasonable position in support of the good guys.

I don't like her attacks on the Second Amendment, but there is certainly nothing wrong with her foreign policy.

Good. Our universities need to be cleansed of the anti-Semitic filth that currently infest them.



So long as the Palestinians refuse to make peace, it is entirely reasonable for Israel to cut off their funding and to build on the land as they see fit.

President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left before he vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.

If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.

Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln.

The greatest fear every future president will continue to have in the post 9/11 period, at least for the next 25 years or more, is being held accountable -- politically or otherwise -- for not "keeping Americans safe" from terrorists.

'My primary job is to keep our country safe' is a line repeated in various iterations often by this president. It has translated into the extrajudicial killing of American citizens via drone for the crime of posting inflammatory YouTube videos, the crafting of so-called heroes like Chris Kyle who shoot down women and children with Oswald-ish precision via long-range sniper rifle, and by responding to theocratic guerilla warriors in five separate countries -- not counting whatever we're doing in Syria -- with an Israeli-like hamhandedness that only breeds more of the same.

America's former top diplomat under this president -- the person whose mission is to avoid war and bombings and such -- has already promised to unilaterally strike Iran if she is elected president. She wanted to "big-stick" China, and that was too much for Obama.

(Former SecDef Robert) Gates laid out the case for diverting the (aircraft carrier) George Washington to the Yellow Sea: that the United States should not look as if it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier. The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff, who, even 18 months into her tenure, still marveled at her pugnacity.

Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already underway; changing its course was not a decision to make on the fly.

“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said — unwittingly one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.

When I read people writing about Hillary's strength in foreign policy, I wince. (That's a cringing liberal admission for my friend J. R. Behrman.) 'Foreign policy' these days -- if you're not including global trade pacts that hollow out the middle-class -- means more war: more drone killings, more long-range jets bombing more places, more special forces boots on the ground infiltrating, patrolling, shooting and dying. A more technological and precise imperialism beyond longbows, or blankets laced with smallpox, or mustard gas, or P-51 Mustangs and B-29 Superfortresses, or even Fat Men and Little Boys, but psychopathic imperialism nonetheless.

His managing continuous war over the course of his time in office has occasionally replaced the failure to use his political capital to get universal single-payer done, in terms of my greatest objection with this administration -- and the next one -- but at the moment it's the perpetuity of this most exceptional American legacy I dread the most.
Posted by PDiddie at Sunday, May 15, 2016

Obama, winner of the Pulitzer for doing nothing, has bombed more countries than George W. Bush.

Hillary wants to be "more muscular" than Obama.

http://www.poynter.org/2014/fact-checking-the-war-comparisons-between-obama-and-bush/272471/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?_r=0

mark