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Over the past few months, as the Democratic presidential race has heated up, we have received a number of complaints about critical stories we have written about Barack Obama and, especially, Hillary Clinton.
A common theme in the complaints is that we should lighten up on the Democratic frontrunners and concentrate more on John McCain and the Republicans. Some readers have accused us of sounding like the MSM in our reporting on Sen. Clinton in particular.
John Yoo, the author of the infamous Aug. 1, 2002, "torture memo" that formed the legal basis for so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques against high-level terrorist detainees, used a statute governing health benefits when he provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture, according to a former Justice Department official.
Yoo's legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury "such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" than the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture.
Hillary Clinton, who has built her case for the presidency on her superior “ready on Day One” management skills, burned through almost $130 million of campaign money, had to kick in $5 million from her own murky family funds, and is now pressing her chief financial backers to find creative ways to raise more money.
Some of those financial schemes appear to skirt the law – as some backers consider putting money into “independent” entities that can spend unlimited sums but aren’t supposed to coordinate with the campaign – while other ideas are more traditional, like appealing to wealthy donors involved with the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby.
By forcing repeat combat assignments to Iraq and Afghanistan – and by winking at torture and indiscriminate killings – George W. Bush is degrading the reputation of the U.S. military, turning enlisted soldiers and intelligence officers into murderers and sadists.
For instance, on Feb. 10 at Camp Liberty in Iraq, Army Ranger Sgt. Evan Vela was sentenced by a U.S. military court to 10 years in prison for executing an unarmed Iraqi detainee who – along with his son – had stumbled into a U.S. sniper position last year.
One painful irony of the Obama-Clinton showdown is that it could end up with middle-aged women – who are determined to elect the first female president – stomping on the dreams of their own children, who have shaken off years of political apathy to rally behind Barack Obama.
What makes this dilemma particularly poignant is that many of these Hillary Clinton supporters themselves experienced the stomping on their dreams four decades ago in the pivotal election of 1968.
To fully understand the present manifestation of the Bush family and its excesses, one must consider its history over several generations, a difficult and painful undertaking since it reveals so much about the self-destructive apathy of the American people.
James Madison wrote passionately in the Federalist Papers that in order for a democracy to function and not descend into a tyranny of the wealthy and the well-connected, the citizenry must stay well informed. In Madison’s view, a democratic society was wholly dependent on an informed citizenry.
