In Mr. Luce latest essay, he almost comes to something like political realism by way of Joe Biden? But some questions arise: what and where is ‘Liberal America’ ? That America was purged, beginning with the alliance between the Mundt/McCarren/McCarthy/Nixon Zealots and their ‘Liberal’ fellow travelers in the ADA and their intellectual/moral leaders Schlesinger and Niebuhr. Much to polemical for Mr. Luce’s discerning, if not stringent political conformism.
But Mr. Luce quite rightly points to the fact that Clinton and the New Democratic Party apparatchiks are obsessed with the ‘Russian interference’ in the American election. The motive saving face, from both their incompetence and mendacity. The case for this ‘interference’ provided by the notorious liars Clapper and Monseigneur Brennan, and strategic leaks provided by elements in the spy agencies of the American National Security State. The Podesta e mails probably came from Seth Rich or his allies in the party. American self-serving myopia is always utterly predictable: the myth of American Innocence, blamelessness and Virtue with a capital v is the Party Line, from which no one is allowed to deviate
For those of us with memories longer than the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan, Mr. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, while Mr. Luce was still a toddler. Mr. Biden is the perfect political/civic conformist , he even chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in the confirmation hearings for Robert Bork, a man who sounded and looked like he stepped out of the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. An the hearings for Clarence Thomas.
If Mr. Biden is a potential candidate for the presidential nomination of 2020 the Party is in trouble. Shouldn’t it be Neo-Liberal Kamala Harris? Or should we look at this ?
In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin‘s bank OneWest despite “evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” according to a leaked memo from the Department of Justice.[92] In 2017, Harris said that her office’s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on following “the facts and the evidence…like any other case.”[93] In 2016, Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to Harris’ campaign,[94] making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin,[95] but as senator, Harris voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as treasury secretary.[95][96]
Or this:
In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors who had inserted a false confession into an interrogation transcript, committed perjury, and withheld evidence.[14] Federal appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski threw out the convictions, telling Harris’s lawyers, “Talk to the attorney general and make sure she understands the gravity of the situation.”[14]
In March 2015 a California superior courts judge ordered Harris to take over a criminal case after Orange County, California District Attorney Tony Rackauckas was revealed to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence.[14] Harris refused, appealing the order and defending Rackauckas.[14]
Harris appealed the dismissal of an indictment when it was discovered a Kern County, California prosecutor perjured in submitting a falsified confession as court evidence. Harris asserted that prosecutorial perjury was not sufficient to demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct. In the case,[97] Harris argued that only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment, and that perjury was not sufficient.[98]
The New Democrats need a scapegoat for the loss of 2016, which Mr. Luce gingerly describes, though we understand his reticence. As a pundit he must court the trust of sources. He approaches an almost candid assessment of the current Russia-phobia, yet he misses the American history dating from the Salem Witch Trials and the Red Scares of 1917-1920 and the Cold War period from 1947 till the fall of the Soviet Union in December 26, 1991. The search for heretics of all stripes is an American obsession.
Not to forget that Mrs. Clinton is, on foreign policy, a committed Neo-Conservative. Her motto: tougher that any man in the room! War with Russia is foundational to the Neo-Conservative coterie. Note both William Kristol’s and Jeffrey Goldberg’s enthusiastic support of Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election, that prove beyond doubt a shared and unslakable bellicosity.
Committed Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/1f8601f8-d9e3-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482
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