Michael Carmichael
Global Research
February 9, 2008
“Clinton will be the Democrat, and I don’t know who the Republican will be, but the election will be about the war on terror and the Republican will win.”
Karl Rove, Fox News, December 2007
Many astute Republicans believe that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the salvation of their party. On Super Tuesday, it is time that the American people take a serious look at why the opposition party favors the nomination of the former First Lady.
For months, the leading Republican strategists and tacticians have been salivating at the thought of running their presidential campaign against Senator Clinton. The senior Republican political consultants: Karl Rove and Dick Morris have predicted that Senator Clinton will be the Democratic candidate who will be defeated by the Republican nominee this November. Their theory of the self-destructive candidacy of Senator Clinton has been the idée fixe of Republican strategy since she formally became a candidate for the presidency.
Overt Republican operations to ensure Senator Clinton’s victory have ranged from destructive email campaigns against her opponents to massive direct financial support to her campaign from corporate lobbyists loyal to the neoconservative and corporate ideals of the Republican Party.
Serious question marks have been raised over the role of heavyweight Republican contributors, Alan Quasha and Hassan Nemazee, who have been described as “Hillary’s mystery money men.” These two valuable political assets have records of financial backing for both George W. Bush and former Senator Jesse Helms. In a suspicious transaction, Quasha acquired Harken Oil from George W. Bush providing the future president with a financial windfall that launched him into his career as an owner of a team in minor league baseball. Bush bought the Texas Rangers and financed his campaign for governor with the capital provided by Quasha, who is now backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency.
With his longstanding relationship with George W. Bush, there is little wonder why Quasha is referred to as “Hillary’s mystery man.” But, Quasha’s ties to Hillary are not as simple as that, because his family is linked to both: the former dictator of the Phillipines, Ferdinand Marcos, and the international intelligence community – a linkage that brought him into the charmed circle of George Bush, Sr. over two decades ago. Hillary’s other “mystery man,” Hassan Nemazee is the employer of the long-serving Clinton apparatchik: Terry McAuliffe, a former head of the Democratic National Committee.
According to Bill Maher and a growing number of people, covert Republican operations included the rigging of the New Hampshire primary via secret manipulation of the Diebold voting machines to produce the startling “upset” only a few weeks ago – in order to enhance Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the Democratic nominee. Maher had the courage to voice the suspicion that is on millions of lips - that the Republicans want to manipulate the outcome of the Democratic nomination to rig it for Clinton, whom they deem to be an easy mark.
Underscoring Maher’s opinion that is becoming more popular as the campaign develops, Peter Wehner provided a column for the Washington Post titled: “Why Republicans Like Obama.” Wehner writes,
“A number of prominent Republicans I know, who would wage a pitched battle against Hillary Clinton, like Obama and would find it hard to generate much enthusiasm in opposing him.”
The important point in Wehner’s thesis echoes the opinions of Karl Rove and Dick Morris: Clinton would be easy prey, while Obama would be extremely difficult to defeat because of his message of change – and his formidable political and rhetorical gifts.
For some Democratic Party members, it is troubling that Mark Penn is Senator Clinton’s top political advisor. Some Democratic strategists find it bizarre that Penn was brought into the Clinton’s political operations by Dick Morris, the strident Republican political consultant who is known to loathe the Clintons. This was not always the case. Morris has a long and complicated history with the Clintons. Morris began serving them in the 1980s, but fell out of favor one icy evening in 1990 when an argument between Morris and both Clintons degenerated into fisticuffs – with the towering ex-footballer, Bill Clinton, soundly beating the nerdish Morris to a pulp. After suffering his humiliating beating by Bill Clinton, in the wee hours Morris rang the senior consultant in the Clinton campaign sobbing, “He beat me up!” This priceless gem of Clintoniana is recorded for posterity in Ray Strother’s autobiography, Falling Up.
After 1990, the Clintons replaced their consultants with a new team led by James Carville who had been a factotum for Strother in the early 1980s. While the Carville team led the Clintons to victory, success was short-lived. The Republicans struck back with the extremist Contract with America of Newt Gingrich to obtain a majority in Congress in 1994, and the Clintons had another house-cleaning.
In the mid-1990s, Clinton sacked Carville and company and re-hired Dick Morris who would mastermind the devastating 1996 campaign before his involvement in a prostitution scandal that led to his ignominious downfall. Prior to Morris’ dalliances with the prostitute, he engineered the insertion of the pollster Mark Penn into the Clintons’ circle of political experts.
Both Morris and Penn have curious histories of advising foreign politicians most of whom lean to the right. According to astute observers, Penn is closely aligned with heavyweight Republican operatives linked to Karl Rove. Penn’s client list contains prominent right-wingers including Joseph Lieberman, and he is only one of the major polling figures behind the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. Now the head of the controversial corporate public relations giant, Burston Marsteller, Mark Penn is fabulously wealthy with a lengthy client list of major right-wing corporations including Rupert Murdoch’s News International and Bill Gates’ Microsoft. For many Democrats, Penn’s right-wing and archconservative client list seems odd for the chief political advisor to a major contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
While Hillary enjoys the support of Republican contributors and right-leaning Democratic operatives, the Republicans have their own Hillary agenda. At the same time that they have been maneuvering on behalf of Senator Clinton to help ensure her supremacy in the primaries, Republican strategists have been laying the foundation to swiftboat her political momentum shortly after she accepts the Democratic nomination in Denver this August. A bewildering network of websites have been erected to dissect, dismember and detonate Hillary Clinton’s candidacy before it really takes off – with peak operations scheduled to launch before, during and after the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August. One of these online sources provides verbatim quotes attributed to the Senator that are disturbingly anti-semitic.
Senator Clinton really has two intractable and virtually insurmountable political problems: her image and that of her husband, the former president: William Jefferson Clinton.
The Clinton Era remains a controversial and puzzling epoch in American history, one that is, at times, described in glowing terms as a progressive presidency and at others as the final breakdown of America’s commitment to the New Deal and the social democratic ideology that preserved capitalism while other nations were abandoning it. Pride of place in the Clinton museum of progressive ambiguities is occupied jointly by:
• the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) a trade pact that was hailed as a landmark in free trade but is now regarded as little more than a gift to major corporations that out-sourced millions of American jobs to cheaper foreign labor most of whom work for slave wages and
• the dissolution of Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of American social security since the 1930s.
Let us not forget Bill Clinton’s greatest achievement in foreign policy: frequent military interventions and the flagrant abuse of the military as an instrument of policy while laying the foundation for neoconservativism and the troubling vision of the so-called Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Most voters can still remember another Clinton contribution to his own historical legacy – the abuse of the military for public relations in the putrescent ‘wag the dog’ bombing of Baghdad that came in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky revelations in 1998 and led to the production of the Hollywood movie with Dustin Hofmann and Robert De Niro.
Other Republican attempts to destroy Senator Clinton’s political viability have taken a darker and decidedly more sinister complexion: the compilation of Clinton death lists. While the validity of these lists has been discounted by Snopes, a lingering miasma of doubt swirls around many of the less publicized aspects of the Clinton era. Some of these death lists are so detailed that they could only emanate from informed sources in Arkansas law enforcement – a relatively inexhaustible reservoir for damaging tittle-tattle about the Clinton couple. Due to his lengthy service to the Clintons when they were in Little Rock, some of these highly informed security personnel are personally known by Dick Morris and other political operatives inimical to the Clintons.
While the time bombs planted within Hillary Clinton’s candidacy outlined above are troubling, the definitive analysis of her vulnerability is found in a memo that is now enjoying broad circulation to Republican and right-leaning Americans via the internet. Attributed to her arch-nemesis, Dick Morris, the memo is titled simply: “Democrats are coming.”
In Morris’s inimitable style, the author reveals his glee at the very thought that Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic nominee. The ‘Morris’ memo surfaced on the internet shortly after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected resurgence in the mysterious New Hampshire primary that a growing number of people believe to have been rigged in her favor via covert political operatives who attacked the Diebold optical scanners – because they wanted to blunt the surging upward trend of Senator Barack Obama - whom they see as the most dangerous threat to neoconservativism.
Presented as a deconstruction of Bill Clinton’s now well-worn five minute commercial that is little more than a hagiography of his wife, ‘Morris’ reveals what the major Republican strategists refer to as the “soft white underbelly” of Hillary Clinton’s claims on the presidency.
In his forensic dissection of Bill Clinton’s message in favor of Hillary, ‘Morris’ argues that Hillary Clinton:
- Helped Black Panthers who had been indicted for the torture and murder of a federal agent when she was in law school;
- Flunked the DC Bar Exam and only found employment in Arkansas through Bill’s political connections;
- Served on the board of Walmart;
- Took political appointments that enhance her resumé;
- Took credit for major accomplishments that she does not deserve;
- Is totally devoid of any meaningful experience whatsoever in international affairs and diplomacy;
- Has no important legislation to her credit after eight years in the Senate,
In this explosive memo, ‘Morris’ makes other points designed to discredit Clinton with those Democrats who support the concept of a “war on terror.” (See Appendix below)
Senator Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities present an extremely attractive target for Republican strategists. Enticed by the very thought of her presidential candidacy, Republican operatives will stop at nothing to ensure her nomination and the devastation of her primary opponents. On Super Tuesday, 2008 - only one opponent to Hillary Clinton remains: Senator Barack Obama.
The cover story on a recent edition of Newsmax, a Republican Party magazine that frequently features the writings of Dick Morris, is adorned with a large and flattering photograph of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton while the headline proclaims: “She can save our party.” She probably can.
SOURCES
The Foulmouthed & Lying Clintons (anti-semitic comments)
A partial list of deaths of persons connected to President Clinton
