<p>Towards Zero</p>
<p>The title comes from an Agatha Christie mystery novel. The clever plot has a well-known and respected figure committing a murder. But the insidiousness of his scheme is that it is not the actual murder victim who is the real target of this plan, it is his ex-wife, whom he wants to frame for the murder. So he leaves some obvious clues to point to her, then pretends to gallantly find the flaw in the clues, thus exonerating his ex-wife…until he seemingly admits something that he didn’t realize was important, thus making her the apparent culprit once again. And until the ever-brilliant and subtle Hercule Poirot figures it all out, it looks very much as if she will be arrested, tried and convicted of the murder.</p>
<p>Poirot senses that somehow things are too neatly arranged, that something more complex is going on. He and the police are being inexorably led to a certain outcome….towards zero….but it doesn’t feel right, it feels like something more sinister is being stage-managed from the wings. Poirot is ultimately more intelligent than the killer, and so justice triumphs. But Poirot of course was a fictional creation. In the real world, we can only wish we had someone as smart, as logical and as honorable as the Belgian detective. Because we are heading toward a seemingly inexorable outcome–the nomination of Barack Obama–that is every bit as wrong, as insidiously managed and as filled with misdirection as Christie’s clever mystery.</p>
<p>I will maintain that the real goal of this entire election campaign has been the removal from the political arena of Hillary Clinton, and to a lesser extent, Bill Clinton. The actual people in charge of the plot may never be known, or it may be that they are a loose and informal coalition of people whose interests happened to coincide. They include powerful Republicans, big-money people, radical Democrats, those who control the American media. Each of these groups has its own reasons for wanting to destroy the power of Hillary Clinton. But their end goal is the same, and Barack Obama was simply the useful tool to accomplish it.</p>
<p>Let’s go back to the beginning of this campaign. Obama, a mostly unknown political figure, had immense amounts of money to spend. This wasn’t coming from $25 donations from the grassroots, as the shadowy manipulators would have you believe. It was coming from big money sources. Exactly who will never be known. George Soros, certainly. Penny Pritzker and her consortium. Possible foreign sources tapped by either of the former or their associates. And it is almost certain that some of this money came from Republicans who thought that Obama was the best bet to eliminate Hillary Clinton. Obama could be sold to the Democratic Left, since as a Black man, he fit the wish-template of many of its members. And he could be marketed as someone new, someone who transcended “the battles of the ’90’s,’ not coincidentally those that the Republicans had lost.</p>
<p>The exact motivations for all of this are pretty easy to intuit, even if they are somewhat amorphous. Behavior, as Freud said, is overdetermined; there are more motivations for an action than are actually needed for someone to perform it. Republicans certainly hated Bill Clinton, and by extension, Hillary. Some of this comes from their sense that they epitomized the “excesses of the ’60’s” (how strange that Obama should have that phrase so readily available), with their anti-war demonstrations, long hair and the like. Most of it came from the reality that the Clintons beat them at every turn. BIll Clinton not only won two terms, but he left the White House with the Democratic brand restored, and with a very good chance that the Democrats were poised to win another two terms. The Clintons are anathema to the Republican power elite. They have beaten every other candidate the Democrats have put up since 1968, except for Jimmy Carter, who barely squeaked in because of the Watergate disgrace, and even so was useful to the the GOP as a whipping boy for the next two decades. The Republicans always feared that Hillary could beat their candidate this time, so they poured money into trying to knock her out. They figured they could beat anyone else, once they got rid of her.</p>
<p>And the big money boys and girls had even more reasons to want to stop Hillary. They feared the fact that she was the one truly Progressive Democrat in the race; the candidate of the working people, the one who was willing to attack the oil companies and the big pharmaceuticals. She was the person who vowed to bring national health care to this country. She would protect the American consumer, the American worker and the American dollar. The big money boys and girls don’t want that. They want wages low, oligopolies left alone to raise prices and profits, to put out flawed drugs, dangerous toys, environment-destroying automobiles. They are seeing capitalism begin to destroy the lifeblood of this country, but they are still getting incredibly wealthy, and there are other places to live. There is still money to be made, and they need a President who will let them make it. So they had to get rid of Hillary Clinton. Edwards blathered on about two Americas, but he was mostly show, and he couldn’t get elected. Hillary could and would. So they gave Obama immense sums of money to help him knock her out. They could live with Obama as President, as he will do what the corporations want him to do. Because of his race, the Left was easily seduced into thinking that he was some kind of New Progressive, when the truth was that all his economic advisors came from the ultra-conservative, free market-oriented Chicago School of Economics. So they were safe with him.</p>
<p>The Left somehow thought that Hillary and even Bill were their enemies. They didn’t like “triangulation,” welfare reform, more police on the streets, the efforts made to mute the theretofore successful GOP lines of attack. They wanted ideological purity, and kept looking for the oddest people whom they delusionally thought would provide it: Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean. Obama is the latest version of left-wing wishful syndrome, accentuated in his case because he is Black. The Left always yearned for a Black candidate, to somehow expiate their own self-imposed racial guilt and sense of White moral inferiority. So they were easy dupes for the plot; and some of the wealthier members gave large sums of money to Obama. In turn, many of the disaffected young people were easy to convince that Obama represented something new and fresh, never before seen in American politics. Obama was the messiah, or akin to it; someone who transcends race, politics, ideology, partisanship. The people who were behind Obama’s campaign, which was really the campaign to get rid of Hillary Clinton, did not harbor such illusions, but they were useful as tools to bring large groups of young people into the fold. And of course the media, some of which are still angry at Hillary for having fired their friends in the White House Travel Office back in 1992; others of whom were jealous of Bill, or who resented Hillary not being the kind of buddy to the press that George Bush was, were eager to show their power and pile on. And in so doing, they were accomplishing the aims of their corporate bosses, who could not afford Hillary being elected. If the working media convinced themselves that Obama was something special, or that it would be refreshing to get rid of the Clintons, so much the better for the ultimate goal.</p>
<p>The rest of the plot has played out as it was drawn up. The Democratic Party elders were also happy to have a chance to defeat Hillary; for their own self-aggrandizement goals, and because they thought they could much better control Obama. And of course there were those in the Party who also felt morally enhanced by being able to say that they were supporting a Black person for President. So the nomination rules and procedures all favored Obama. Interestingly, once we got to March, when the media and the Party bigshots were all essentially saying that Obama had won, and that Hillary should leave the race, much of the Obama money seemed to disappear. His fundraising past March has substantially fallen off. It seems to be getting worse every month. Is that because Hillary has been eliminated, and now the corporate forces don’t care which of the two candidates gets elected? Is it because the Republicans who sent money, and who also made sure that enough of them crossed over in smaller states and caucuses, where they could make a a major delegate difference in favor of Obama, have seen their plans reach fruition, and now don’t have any more interest in helping Obama?</p>
<p>It may even be that some of the most powerful right-wing Republicans would just as soon have Obama win, so that they can get rid of semi-maverick McCain, and “purify” their own Party. They figure that Obama would only last a term, and that they could easily vilify him and the Democrats so as to once again make Republicans the majority Party for years. In 2012, they can come back with Jeb Bush, or Newt Gingrich, or another ideological true believer, who will continue the Bush policies, and further bankrupt the working class. Some Republicans are actually frightened of an Obama presidency, so will support McCain. Some of them are actually having recriminations for having helped Obama at the outset. But the real corporatists, the real Machiavellian forces, are now very near to accomplishing the end of their plans. It is a little more than a month until zero hour, when Hillary Clinton is to be denied the nomination of her Party, and to probably be relegated to never being able to become President. If Obama is elected, she cannot reasonably be the nominee until 2016, when she will be 68. Rest assured that Obama will do everything he can to marginalize her, and render her as politically impotent as possible. He will thus be accomplishing the work of those who plucked him out of obscurity and set him up to be the Clinton killer, to do that which all the Republican money and media could not do in so many years. They have waited a long time for this, and we are heading towards zero. The economy is falling apart, inflation is rising, wages are stagnant. The stock market is plummeting, banks are going under, the dollar is dropping every day. But the one person who could possibly fix this; save the dollar, help the desperate working class, limit the corporate stranglehold on this country, is about to be eliminated from the picture, as surely as one of Agatha Christie’s fictional murder victims.</p>
<p>But almost amazingly, it is still not too late. There is absolutely an opportunity for Hillary Clinton to be nominated for President by the Democrats. And if nominated, she will almost surely be elected. All that would have to happen is for the superdelegates to do their job, and vote for the person who not only has the better chance of winning, but who has the far better chance of saving the country. Do that many superdelegates actually think that Obama has a better idea of how to lead the nation than Hillary, aided by Bill? Do they really look forward to the chaos which will ensue if Obama comes in with his additional deficit ballooning stimulus packages, his doubling of the capital gains tax, his plans to divert billions in funds to improving third-world nations? Do they really want to see how he deals with the many foreign threats; how he manages to overcome his obvious intellectual laziness and self-indulgence to spend the 18-hour days which would be necessary to work on the country’s many problems? Weren’t the superdelegates inserted into the nominating process to make such crucial decisions? If the superdelegates simply gave their vote to the candidate who got more popular votes, Hillary would be nominated. If they simply voted for the person who won their state’s primary, she would easily win the nomination. The only purported rationale that they could give for casting votes for Obama would be that he won more pledged delegates. But that is only because of undemocratic and illegally run caucuses. And even if one willfully ignores that truth, the idea that superdelegates are there to rubberstamp the pledged delegate count is utterly inane. Why would they be there if all they were supposed to do was to reiterate the pledged delegate count? Why would there be 800 or so of them, supposed to cast their nomination ballot in secret, if their duty was simply to see who got more pledged delegates, and vote for that person? Is this just some ego-trip for 800 people, getting to act important, but with no free will to decide? That is hardly what was intended. It is clear that the superdelegates were specifically put into the process to act as a possible counterweight to the primaries and caucuses, to only be significant in a close race when one candidate could not accumulate enough pledged delegates to render the superdelegate votes meaningless. They are the ones who are supposed to make their presence and insight felt in just such a situation as this one. The people who keep trumpeting that they “must not overturn the will of the voters” (note, not the popular vote, just the caucus outcomes), are being propagandists for their own side, the anti-Hillary side. The superdelegates can and should fix this injustice, this incipient nightmare. And they have the time and the opportunity to do so–but that time is rapidly running out.</p>
<p>In a little more than a month, the final gavel will sound. The plot–developed over time, and carefully planned–was the figurative political murder of Hillary Clinton. That is what this entire campaign has really been about, despite the misdirection. In both Parties’ debates it seemed as if every single other candidate was running against Hillary, instead of for something, including the needs of the country. Does anyone ever remember such an outcry for a candidate–particularly one who had won so many primaries–to get out of the race? That was the cry after the first Iowa caucus, back in January; and it has never stopped, no matter how well she did, no matter how much competence and skill she has demonstrated. “Hillary must be destroyed,” the incessant call, coming from so many quarters; far too coincidental to be just individual reactions. “Why won’t she leave?,” as if there were some overwhelming need to have one less candidate in the race, a race which is by rule and history supposed to only end at the convention. Even now, unceasing efforts are being made to force Hillary to bargain herself out, in exchange for money, a chance to speak, political sanctuary. Why is there such a desperate need to absolutely guarantee that she cannot be President?</p>
<p>Hercule Poirot would figure all of this out; would realize that this is not really about Obama, and what he might become; not about whether or not McCain can be elected. It is about the villainous plot to pull down the final curtain on Hillary Clinton’s bid to ever become President of the United States. That is and has been the ultimate goal of this entire stage-managed election process. When and if the final gavel sounds in Denver, and if Obama is the nominee, the plot will have succeeded. After that, it won’t much matter to the plotters whether Obama is elected, or McCain. The intended victim all along has been Clinton. The final evil act in this plot has not yet been committed, but we are rapidly heading towards zero. </p>
<p>My final post on this topic.</p>