Molly Ivins - Not Hillary, Not Bush Lite

Before Molly Ivins lost her battle to cancer she left fellow Texans with something that is worth revisiting today.


Published on Friday, January 20, 2006 by the Columbus Free Press (Ohio)
I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President
by Molly Ivins

I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges. The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.


If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy -- rough, tough Bobby Kennedy -- didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry. What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF? I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?

Here's a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, "There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008." This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a string of bad news from the Middle East ... into calling for premature retreat from Iraq," versus those pragmatic folk like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.
Oh come on, people -- get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war -- from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily. You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.


Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this -- that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up. Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town. Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news." Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.
Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In?
© 2006 Columbus Free Press


Truth is stranger than fiction in America, where reality is a parallel universe to the propagandized tyranny imposed on the public.

i.e.
Business Plot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The Business Plot, the Plot Against FDR, or the White House Putsch, was a political conspiracy involving several wealthy businessmen to overthrow the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Details of the matter came to light when retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified before a Congressional committee that a group of men had attempted to recruit him to serve as the leader of a plot and to assume and wield power once the coup was successful. Butler testified before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in 1934.[1] In his testimony, Butler claimed that a group of several men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a military coup. One of the alleged plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported Butler's allegations on the existence of the plot,[2] but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.
Major General Butler claimed that the American Liberty League was the primary means of funding the plot. The main backers were the Du Pont family, as well as leaders of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. A BBC documentary about the plot alleges that Prescott Bush, father and grandfather to the 41st and 43rd US Presidents respectively, was also connected.[3]
Contents[hide]
1 Background
2 Timeline of events
3 McCormack-Dickstein Committee
3.1 Members of Committee
4 Partial corroboration of Butler's story
5 John Spivak
6 Historical treatment
7 Final resolution
8 References
9 External links
10 Further reading
10.1 Books with chapters devoted to the Business Plot
10.2 Related Subjects
...

Under the Clinton presidency NAFTA was negotiated and we have all seen the result of that trade agreement. To imply that Canadians and Mexicans were the ones who did not want labor laws in NAFTA is ridiculous. Canada has lost manufacturing jobs overseas as has Mexico, the labor of all three countries treated commodities, no humanity involved here.
The "war on drugs" (anyone selling drugs in competition to the CIA drug cartel) and the "war on poverty (actually a war on the poor)" became inseparable and more than a million black men are now incarcerated for terms of over ten years for an ounce of pot. In turn their labor is contracted back (cheap) to firms like AT&T. While American coffers are bilked dry, companies are paid to move offshore where they pay no taxes at all to support the troops fighting for their private oil profits. It is quite a slave trade they have going and the foundation was laid during the Clinton years.
Certainly Clinton was immeasurably better than Bush, but he let a far too much go that is
fundamentally harmful to America, had the decision been made the other way in the first place.

I mean, even I get it that if you allow corporations to hire someone for a dollar a day in another country, they are going to take their business out of the country and go elsewhere - now. So why couldn't the Clintons and congress see that? Further why didn't Clinton go the public and tell them that congress was passing laws that actually funded corporations to move offshore?

So "friends" and "folks" ....how about a president on DAY ONE who has no record of dealing with the corporate coup destroying America while otherwise intelligent people sit silent.
How about someone NOT in bed with the lobbyists, and the oil companies, and even better if it is someone who can enforce the law and not have it only apply to anyone not a Republican or a Bush.

Molly has passed on now, but her courage is still here with us in everything she wrote.
She loved us immeasurably and gawd she knew how to love. She kicked the bullies in the shins,
called Bush "Shrub" and saw through the patronizing, propaganda of the puerile paid off corporate coup press core.

I certainly hope and pray that Obama can get past Diebold (electronic voting) owned Ohio, Texas and Penn. primaries, and since over 400,000 voted early in Texas (to get into manual vote counting) Obama may have a chance.

In the meantime let's keep pouring the light onto Diebold and the fact they gave the New Hampshire to Hillary (see Black Box Voting stats). Ohio and Texas, under the Shrub have proven to be two of the most corrupt states in the union. ENOUGH....I do not want to hear the name Bush OR Clinton in the presidency for the next 100 years...and then their PAST should be reported to the world not buried as corrupt corporate news has done.