Tag Archives ⇒ Hillary Clinton

New Yorker New Yorker New Yorker

November 9, 2016
· Martin Kelley

Web­sites are start­ing to talk about a Don­ald Trump pres­i­den­tial cab­i­net and the names high­light a curios­i­ty of this elec­tion: many of the prin­ci­ple insid­ers come from North­east Cor­ri­dor states that vot­ed for Hillary Clin­ton. Rudolph Giu­liani and Chris Christie, are, like the whole Trump fam­i­ly, metro New York­ers and as far as I know Newt Gin­grich lives in north­ern Virginia.

I’ve lived in Chris Christie’s New Jer­sey since he was elect­ed gov­er­nor and I find it real­ly hard to believe he’s sud­den­ly going to have a strong inter­est in the Mid­west­ern red states that gave Trump the win. You can point to VP-elect Mike Pence of Indi­ana, but as far as I can tell he was only brought on for strate­gic rea­sons and is not part of the Trump circle.

What real­ly can Trump do to bring back the good pay­ing jobs that dis­ap­peared decades ago? Our econ­o­my has been shift­ing regard­less of which par­ty occu­pies the Oval Office. There’s sops and pork to be doled out, but the nation­al econ­o­my has been cen­tral­iz­ing in the big coastal cities that our new polit­i­cal lead­ers call home (the same would have been true with a Clin­ton pres­i­den­cy). What if Trump’s elec­tion is the ulti­mate prank: red states sell­ing their vote to a New York devel­op­er who will most­ly con­tin­ue to devel­op the New York-to-DC corridor?

Hashtagging politics

February 19, 2016
· Martin Kelley

I’ve been most­ly sit­ting out the Hillary vs Bernie debates. I’m in a late vot­ing state and I have bet­ter things to do than get into Face­book flame wars. I have a nat­ur­al polit­i­cal bias toward Sanders, but I respect Hillary Clin­ton’s accom­plish­ments and would rather see a cen­trist than any of the increasingly-insane GOP candidates.

With that said, I’m notic­ing a num­ber of retweet­storms of anti-Sanders quips fill­ing my Twit­ter feed. I’m sure the infa­mous “Bernie Bros” exist, but most of the dis­mis­sive posts I see are from Hillary sup­port­ers. A lot of them seem to sim­ply be mad that he would run (and be run­ning so well). Oth­ers attack him for things said or done by sup­port­ers with no con­nec­tion to the Sanders campaign.

I don’t know if it’s my observ­er bias giv­en my pol­i­tics and/or the make­up of friends but my dis­tinct impres­sion is that my Bernie-supporting friends are excit­ed by Bernie and his ideas while my Hillary-supporting friends are mad at Bernie and his ideas and followers.

The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Non​vi​o​lence​.org

December 10, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Non​vi​o​lence​.org read­ers may not be aware that my per­son­al site has been the talk of the polit­i­cal inter­net for the last few days. Since post­ing an “account of get­ting a phone call from a CBS News pub­li­cist”, I’ve been linked to by a Who’s Who of blog­ging glit­er­at­ti: Won­kette, Instapun­dit, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy, Lit­tle Green Foot­balls, Rather­Biased, etc. For a short time yes­ter­day, the sto­ry was a part of the second-ranked arti­cle on Tech­no­rati’s Pol­i­tics Atten­tion index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a pro­gram on an issue that’s cen­tral to Nonviolence.org’s man­date: con­sci­en­tious resis­tance to mil­i­tary ser­vice. After look­ing over the mate­r­i­al, I thought the inter­views of resisters who have fled to Cana­da would be inter­est­ing to my read­ers and so wrote a short entry on it. Think­ing it all a lit­tle fun­ny that a pub­li­cist would care about Non​vi​o​lence​.org, I men­tioned the inci­dent in the “Sto­ries of Non​vi​o​lence​.org” sec­tion of my per­son­al site. One by one the lead­ing polit­i­cal sites of the blo­gos­phere have run the sto­ry as fur­ther proof of the vast left-wing main­stream media con­spir­a­cy. It’s rather fun­ny actually.

I have to won­der is who’s kid­ding who with all this feigned out­rage? For those miss­ing the irony gene: the Non​vi​o​lence​.org Pay­Pal account cur­rent­ly has a bal­ance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last dona­tion – $5.00 back on Novem­ber 20th. My cor­ner of the left wing con­spir­a­cy is fund­ed by the vast per­son­al wealth I accu­mu­late as a book­store clerk.

Won­ket­te’s pages adver­tise “spon­sor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties,” she’s a recent cov­er girl on New York Times Mag­a­zine, her hus­band is an edi­tor at New York mag­a­zine and in Octo­ber she cashed out her blog­ging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first nov­el (“It’s not Brid­get Jones does Wash­ing­ton, it’s Nick Horn­by does pol­i­tics”: good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for San­dra Day O’Con­nor), teach­es law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapun­dit’s Glenn Reynolds teach­es law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee, has served on White House advi­so­ry pan­els, and is a paid cor­re­spon­dent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the oth­ers, calls a two minute phone call “recruit­ing”?

I’m begin­ning to think the real inter­est comes from the fact that this top tier of blog­gers is total­ly in bed (lit­er­al­ly) with the MSM. Their income comes from their con­nec­tions with media and polit­i­cal pow­er. Their carefully-crafted fas­cade of snark­ish inde­pen­dence would crum­ble if their phone logs were made pub­lic. They’re not real­ly blog­ging in their paja­mas, folks.

By men­tion­ing the exis­tance of blog pub­li­cists, I’ve threat­ened to blow their cov­er. Pay no atten­tion to the men behind the cur­tains: my social gaffe was in pub­licly admit­ting that the main­stream media courts polit­i­cal blogs. Kudos to jour­nal­ist Derek Rose on admit­ting the practice:

But why should­n’t a news orga­ni­za­tion’s pub­lic­i­ty depart­ment court blog­gers? As a MSM mem­ber, I get emails from TV flacks all the time pro­mot­ing their scoops. From ABC, for exam­ple, I’ve received emails regard­ing a tape they got of the Belt­way sniper’s call to the Rockville police; Bar­bara Wal­ters’ Hillary Clin­ton inter­view; and their ‘Azzam the Amer­i­can’ video … as well as a Rush Lim­baugh drug laun­der­ing sto­ry that nev­er panned out. I even got atten­tion from pub­li­cists when I was work­ing for a news­pa­per that did­n’t have a 20th of the cir­cu­la­tion of Instapundit…

Rose aside, there’s incred­i­ble dis­tor­tion in the “report­ing,” a term I have to use very loose­ly. Won­kette says “Kel­ley claims that a CBS min­ion put the screws to him to post some­thing about a ’60 Min­utes’ pack­age on con­sci­en­tious objec­tors” yet all read­ers have to do is fol­low the link to see I nev­er said any­thing like that. Why do the cream of blog­gers feel like a posse of self-absorbed sev­enth graders? When I start­ed Non​vi​o​lence​.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new polit­i­cal world of the inter­net might be All the Pres­i­den­t’s Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it’s just Heathers. God help us.

Sodium-Free Friends

March 5, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Yet anoth­er group of Friends (does­n’t mat­ter which, it could be any) is plan­ning a pro­gram on “com­mu­ni­ty.” They quote a snip­pet of a 1653 epis­tle on George Fox – you know the one about “Mind that which is eter­nal…” Fine enough, but there’s so much more to the epis­tle that we would fear to quote, like:

We are redeemed by the only redeemer Christ Jesus, not with cor­rupt­ible things, nei­ther is our redemp­tion of man, nor by man, nor accord­ing to the will of man, but con­trary to man’s will. And so, our uni­ty and fel­low­ship with vain man are lost, and all his evil ways are now turned into enmi­ty; and all his pro­fes­sion is now found to be deceit, and in all his fairest pre­tences lod­geth cru­el­ty; and the bot­tom and ground of all his knowl­edge of God and Christ is found sandy, and can­not endure the tempest.

Inter­est­ing ideas, but not ones most lib­er­al Friends would like to tack­le. It’s a shame. I wish we would more more active­ly engage with our tra­di­tion and not just selec­tive­ly edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a sev­en­teen cen­tu­ry Thich Nhat Hanh. I think we can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly wres­tle with and chal­lenge our tra­di­tion with­out hav­ing to either capit­u­late to it or aban­don it.

After writ­ing the above, I went for a neigh­bor­hood walk with baby asleep in the back­pack. And I real­ized I had­n’t explained why it mat­ters to engage. I did­n’t quote the sen­tences about human will­full­ness to show that I’m more sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry than thee, or to prove I can use the “C” word.
No, I quote it because it’s a rockin’ quote. George Fox is map­ping out for us twenty-first cen­tu­ry Friends just how we might get out of the predica­ment of super­fi­cial “com­mu­ni­ty” we’ve got­ten our­selves into. Every­one from Wal­mart to Wal­green’s, from Hillary Clin­ton to Oprah, is try­ing to sell us on some dream of com­mu­ni­ty com­plete with a price tag from cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca. Buy our prod­ucts, our polit­i­cal par­ty, our lifestyle and we’ll give you the nar­cot­ic of con­sumer tar­get­ing. Wear the right right sneak­er or dri­ve the right car and you’re part of the in-crowd.

But these com­mu­ni­ties built on the sand just dis­solve in the tide and leave us more strand­ed than when we started.
We poor humans are look­ing for ways to tran­scend the crap­pi­ness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world. Quak­erism has some­thing to say about that (more than ways to recy­cle plas­tic or stage a protest faux-blockade). We’re toss­ing out the future when we throw away the past, just to live in our TVs. George’s epis­tle men­tions this too:

Let not hard words trou­ble you, nor fair speech­es win you; but dwell in the pow­er of truth, in the mighty God, and have salt in your­selves to savour all words, and to stand against all the wiles of the dev­il, in the mighty pow­er of God.

(Quotes from Epis­tle 24, reprint­ed here.)

No More Coincidences: Big Bill’s Zipper Strikes Again

December 16, 1998
· Martin Kelley

Back in Feb­ru­ary, I con­clud­ed my “Stop the Zip­per War Before it Starts” with the following:

Noth­ing’s real­ly changed now except U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests. Hus­sein is still a tyrant. He’s still stock­pil­ing chem­i­cal weapons. Why are U.S. polit­i­cal inter­ests dif­fer­ent now? Why does Bill Clin­ton want U.S. media atten­tion focused on Iraq? Look no fur­ther than Big Bil­l’s zip­per. Stop the next war before it starts. Abol­ish every­one’s weapons of mass destruc­tion and let’s get a Pres­i­dent who does­n’t need a war to clear his name.

I put this at the bot­tom of the piece because then the idea that Clin­ton might have done this was still way out there.

Since then most every major turn­ing point in the Pres­i­den­t’s scan­dals has been echoed by mil­i­tary maneuverings.

On August 17th Clin­ton gave a tele­vised address which was wide­ly crit­i­cized as being “too lit­tle, too late” and non-repentant enough. Pub­lic opin­ion turned sharply against him. Three days lat­er Big Bill sent 100 cruise mis­siles into Afghanistan and Sudan in order to assas­si­nate Osama bin Laden, the pre­vi­ous­ly unknown arch­en­e­my of the Unit­ed States.

And now, on the after­noon before the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives was sched­uled to begin pro­ceed­ings on his Impeach­ment, Clin­ton has ordered an attack on Iraq. Con­gress will of course delay the vote. Rumors are that this new bomb­ing cam­paign might last more than a few days, and come Jan­u­ary’s new Con­gres­sion­al term there will be five less Republicans.

Each time these coin­ci­dences hap­pen, a few pun­dits that mut­ter about “Wag the Dog” sce­nar­ios before assur­ing the audi­ence that Clin­ton would nev­er do that. Every­one talks about coin­ci­dence and then moves on.

But coin­ci­dence has been Clin­ton’s friend through­out his scan­dals. Remem­ber the long-lost White­wa­ter doc­u­ments that mys­te­ri­ous­ly appeared on Hillary Clin­ton’s coffee-table when inves­ti­ga­tors were threat­en­ing to issue here a sub­poe­na? Remem­ber the job offers that Clin­ton cronies arranged for key wit­ness­es just before they either recant­ed their sto­ries or lied under oath? All of Clin­ton’s scan­dals have been of the “who cares” variety-shady land deal­ings twen­ty years ago in Arkansas, his hav­ing sex with an intern in the Oval Office. They dis­played a lack of judg­ment and char­ac­ter, but were not Impeach­able. But his scan­dals have grown and tak­en a life of their own as Clin­ton and his wife have been vis­it­ed by an ever-growing amount of coincidences.

Enough is enough. How much more are we to believe? As I write this the mis­siles are scream­ing over Bagh­dad and Iraqis are dying hor­ri­ble deaths. This is real. This is not some polit­i­cal game. It is time for Amer­i­cans to stop deny­ing that these coin­ci­dences are real­ly coincidental.

It is time to demand Clin­ton’s resignation.

And if he refus­es, then it is time to sub­poe­na White House records on the last year of mil­i­tary actions. If they show that Clin­ton has mur­dered in his des­per­ate attempt to save his Pres­i­den­cy, then it is time not only to impeach him but to put him into jail.