Commentary Magazine
The British press is all aflutter with reports that Prime Minister Tony Blair promised to back President George W. Bush in Iraq a year before the Iraq War began. The then-classified letter that was attached to a Hillary Clinton email is much ado about nothing. In it, Secretary of State Colin Powell states, “On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary. He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will yield more regional success.”
That the British press ignores the conditional phrase “should military operations be necessary” reflects poorly on the British press.
What is interesting, however, is why Clinton would have such a document attached to the email. Once a politician, always a politician: It seems Clinton and her top aides were much more interested in trying to dig for dirt on the Bush administration to prove the cheap political rhetoric and conspiracy that Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Barack Obama engaged while American troops were in harm’s way and after Clinton and Biden at least had voted to put them there.
Even more interesting, however, is that the lack of leakage of any such findings to back the conspiracies embraced by Obama, Clinton, and Biden show just how false they were: The war was not pre-ordained. Rather, it is prudent to plan just as hard for war as it is for diplomacy. If anything, Bush put the kibosh on any real post-war planning for much too long due to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s fear that the “optics” of planning for occupation might undercut diplomacy and antagonize European states.
Many prominent Democrats also bought into the conspiracy that the Iranian government had actually offered a grand bargain in 2003 to resolve the nuclear issue, terrorism, and frozen relations with the United States. It was nonsense, and anyone having basic common sense and knowing the personalities of the Iranians involved or having witnessed the Iranian way of negotiation over the past several years would recognize.
If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney had, in a fit of arrogance and pique, rejected the Iranian overture, classified material would have shown that. The silence from Obama, Clinton, and others show how cheap the promotion of such conspiracies was.
Commentary Magazine
Up to now, the political media has devoted its focus to the human
wrecking ball that is Donald Trump. The near myopic fixation of the
press is understandable; they are in the eyeballs business, and Trump
got them 24 million pairs of them who tuned into the last Republican debate. But the race for the GOP nomination isn’t the only exciting
presidential primary.
The Democratic primary race that was once a sleepy
coronation with a predetermined outcome has suddenly become not only
competitive but also interesting and substantive. It is curious that the
many in media have declined to give the contentious contest due
notice.
Just to establish a baseline level of wonderment, it seemed likely
Hillary Clinton’s strongest challenger for the Democratic nomination
would be former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley as recently as March.
The former secretary of state was a juggernaut who enjoyed astronomical
levels of support from a committed base of Democratic voters. Those who
challenged her were seen as engaged in an endeavor that could most
charitably be described as quixotic. If you were inclined toward
sympathy, you might have characterized a challenge to Clinton’s
dominance as a kamikaze mission. And suicidal is exactly what socialist
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ frontal assault on the frontrunner
initially looked like.
Flash forward six months, and that assessment of a leftwing populist
candidate’s ability to exploit progressive frustration seems downright
naïve. Sanders has achieved the impossible in that at least one survey
of a critical early primary state, New Hampshire, now shows him leading
Clinton by a considerable margin. While Sanders’ surge is certainly due
in part to the candidate’s unique brand of far-left politics, his rise
is almost certainly also attributable to Clinton’s self-inflicted
wounds. Her candidacy has been hamstrung by the slow and constant drip
of scandalous revelations regarding her mishandling of classified
information on a secret and unauthorized email system while she served
as secretary of state.
Clinton has also been hurt by the implication
that her family foundation solicited high-dollar donations from foreign
patrons and governments with the implication that America’s chief
diplomat would happily provide quid pro quo. When asked about these
matters in the press, Clinton routinely fudges the truth, and her trust ratings in the polls have correspondingly plummeted.
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You may remember that NBC was going to do a mini-series featuring Hilary Clinton but backed down in the face of a groundswell of criticism. Another network however, Univision, has readily embraced the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
The Hispanic network just signed a deal with the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation to promote “Pequeños y Valiosos” (Young and Valuable) which helps young presumably Spanish speaking children learn English (?) Seems like a reasonable thing to support for sure.
But is it just a thinly disguised effort to get the Clinton name in front of Hispanic voters, which it basically seems to be.
The Miami Herald
“She would be a wonderful president,” Haim Saban, a major Clinton donor and backer, told the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth. “If it happens, we will of course pitch in with full might. Seeing her in the White House is a big dream of mine.”
Oh, yeah. Saban basically owns Univision, too. His Saban Capital Group bought Univision Communications Inc. in 2007 with other investors."
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Univision has become one of the most-watched networks on TV. Depending on the day or month, Univision has sometimes beaten out English-language ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox for young Hispanic viewers in prime-time.
