The Clintons still don't do Ethics

From Tribune 14 March, 2008

Last week brought out the problems of ethics in politics – and journalism.
The phrase “journalistic ethics” is all too often an oxymoron. Nowhere was that more obvious than with Scotsman journalist Gerri Peev’s publication of comments by Samantha Power on Hillary Clinton. Power had, correctly, blurted out that the New York Senator was a ‘monster”, but asked for it to be put off the record.

Power, who consequently had to resign as foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, had written a deservedly prize-winning book on genocide. The world all too often says ‘never again’ about the subject: it should be said with much, more certainty by whichever political source or interviewee that Peev approaches in future.

Peev claims that since the whole interview was officially on the record, this allowed her to disregard Power’s request. It is a stretch. I see no sign that Peev told Power that she was disregarding that request, which I presume would have led to the immediate end of the interview. Has she ever treated any of Westminster’s many leaks in this way? I rather suspect not. Extending courtesy to interviewees and treating them fairly is a pragmatic principle as well as an ethical one. Who will ever speak freely to Peev again?

Power’s coyness was not dissimulation: the primary is designed to produce a Democratic candidacy to end the Republican hold on the White House after what most people would regard as the two most disastrous presidential terms in US history. In that battle, the candidates are under compunction to be collegial, but there is little doubt that the Clinton campaign is studying the Karl Rove play sheet, using its extensive contacts and influence to get the knife in on Obama, while making sure the fingerprints are not too visible.

Obama’s campaign suffers from ethical and practical scruples in returning the favour. Without the organizational support from the political apparatus that Clinton has, he cannot alienate his vital voter base by seeming to arm McCain in the event of her becoming the Democratic nominee.

Samantha Power’s book the "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." certainly does examine the Clinton family’s much vaunted “experience” and provides strong evidence that “here there be monsters”. Henry Kissinger once dismissively, but accurately said that “Ze problem with Bill Clinton is that he does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal!” But one forms the distinct impression that the softest part of his spouse is her teeth.

Looking at number of corporate donations going to Obama, and his pragmatic burning of sack-fulls of incense on the altar of the Israeli Lobby, it is difficult for me to be as starry-eyed as many of his supporters. However, my fears about him are just that: fears. In contrast, the Clinton campaign’s ruthless drive to power and the record of her and her spouse on every issue from the Middle East, to Iraq, to driving millions of welfare benefits, leaves little or no hope. She would be preferable to McCain, who has basked in the sympathy of previous victimization by the Bush-Rove machine – but is a dangerous conservative in his own right.

Since Ms Clinton has made such play of her “experience,” which after all was mostly being her husband’s spouse, she can hardly complain if we consider her in some measure culpable for his egregious failings. The couple was clearly a joint enterprise in the field of politics.

In Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda as thousands died, the Clinton administration’s sole concern was to avoid the domestic political embarrassment of risking any American casualties, regardless of actual massacres on the ground. It is no defence that he was embarrassed into this position by the Republicans who have since been so shamelessly profligate with GI dead. He shares the shame with them, and only contrasts his invertebracy with their cynicism.

We can presume Ms Clinton’s approval for her husband as governor of Arkansas during the Democratic primaries twelve years ago flying back to supervise the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, whose brain injuries would have disqualified him from trial, let alone execution in any civilized jurisdiction.

On a different note, we can presume her approval of the firing and subsequent social exclusion of old family friend Lani Guinier. Guinier, the first black woman law professor at Harvard was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Her work on proportional representation came under NeoCon attack, and the Clintons not only dropped her nomination, they cut off all relations with the old friend.


Hillary Clinton happily drew a salary for being on Wal-Mart’s board of directors without raising a peep about its viciously anti-union policies, its minimum wages and its denial of healthcare. Then she was a partner in one of the strongest anti-union law firms in the US, which probably qualified here for the directorship as much as being the President’s spouse.

No one can engage in political activity and come out with a halo. Even so, as Robin Cook said of foreign policy, there should at least be an ethical dimension. In the case of Clinton, and indeed Peev, that ethical dimension is as remotely theoretical as an eleventh dimensional superstring: not visible in our universe.

Fail Caesar

Another variant on my Blair/Nixon comparison,
this one from Tribune 18 May 2007

Ian Williams

As Mark Anthony said about another military adventurist who came unstuck:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interréd with their bones!

Anxious for their seats and for the patronage of the incoming Prime Minister, there may be few who care to take an objective poke around the political cadaver of Tony Blair to see what achievements may be secreted there.

In many ways, his going, with the director of public prosecution looming over his shoulder, has shades of Richard Milhous Nixon's impeachment-impelled exit from the White House.

In fact, Blair suffers from the comparison. In terms of actual achievement, despite the murky circumstances under which he was forced to leave, Nixon was the most liberal and progressive president since FDR.

A poke around his bones reveals that Federal spending on welfare and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well desegregation measures all reached a peak during his presidency. He stopped the war in Vietnam, recognised China, fostered détente with Russia, engineered arms control treaties, and ended the US's chemical and biological warfare programs. He ended conscription and was the last president to consider a comprehensive national health service. He passed the Clean Air Act, and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency.

In comparison, Watergate was almost a peccadillo, which allowed both conservatives and liberals, outraged at how he had co-opted the Democratic agenda, to unite against him.

Now back to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, leaving with the purchasable peerages and the disastrous war clouding his reputation.

When Labour was elected Britain’s international standing was high. Robin Cook, Claire Short, Michael Meacher and others, were able to articulate a foreign policy that did indeed have an ethical dimension and certainly won a position of respect in organizations like the UN.

To put the eccentric New Labour “patriotism” campaign in perspective, Blair has left Britain’s international reputation at its lowest since Thatcher tried to cover for Apartheid. He has been told to butt out of the Middle East because of his criminal support for Bush, not only in Iraq, but also for opposing a ceasefire in Lebanon as Israel sowed its cities with cluster bombs. There was more distance between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan than between Blair and Bush, possibly the most unpopular president in the world.

Domestically, how can we reconcile the early New Labour guff about empowering citizens with the ID cards, the ASBOs, the attacks on civil liberties under the guise of anti-terrorism, the overflowing and privatized prisons, the lie detectors for benefit claimants, that intrude upon the life of British citizens?

But let us poke in the ossified remains of the Blair years. One senior minister complained during the first term that the government was actually doing a lot of good, but that they were not allowed to advertise it, and there is a lot of truth in that.

From the perspective of an exile from the Thatcher era, I suspect that those who stayed behind do not always appreciate how much better things in Britain really are now than when Labour first took over.

On my freeze-frame annual visits to Britain, the increasing prosperity has been clearly visible. Northern Ireland power-sharing and the abolition of most of the hereditary peers may still represent unfinished business – but they are further forward than any previous government has managed. The minimum wage, twice the US level, is a major achievement, along with parental leave and similar provisions. The expanding economy, and reduced unemployment and the increased resources for education and healthcare are big steps forward towards a more just society.

But too often it has been two steps forward and one step backward. The university top-up fees in England, the complex and expensive PFA partnerships retract some of those gains. And how many of these achievements were Blair’s rather than of the residual oldish Labourites in the cabinet?

It took twenty years for Nixon’s good to be disinterred, and even now the exhumation is a work in progress. One suspects it will take far less time for Tony Blair’s rehabilitation. He will probably be on the board of directors of Murdoch's News Corporation, which will assure him of an adulatory and amnesiac media across the English-speaking world.

But while we should not underplay the achievements of this Labour government, we should not forget that Blair’s cabal consciously tried to destroy the Labour Party as a mass organization with an active membership and to mutate it into mere PO box for large donations for re-election.

The Peerages for Sale wheeze was a political project that was almost certainly based on an idea by Bill Clinton. Just as Clinton stole the Democratic Party from what he called "Special Interest Groups" like working people, minorities and women, and handed it over to Wall Street, its purpose was to free the prime minister from any remaining accountability to the residual socialism of the unions and the Labour Party. Gordon Brown has always been much more aware of the party as an institution – one of his first jobs is make sure that it is not interred with Blair.