assassination

Yesterday I wrote the following about Hillary Rodham Clinton :

Shameless.

Despicable.

Unfit to be President of the United States.

My words hit the front pages of both Daily Kos and The Moderate Voice. By evening Keith Olbermann had the following to say about Hillary Clinton's latest "gaffe" :

The most important part of the transcript is after the jump :

Shameless.

Despicable.

Unfit to be President Of The United States.

As it appears reported in the New York Post

Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out

To this blogger, Hillary Clinton has waged a campaign on bringing out the inner white supremacist out of many Americans who are frothing at the mouth over the prospect of having to vote for a black man. Of course, many other pundits and bloggers gave her the benefit of the doubt. Then her infamous, "white Americans" comment happened.

This after a long string of gaffes, innuendos and outright racist attacks that too many people in media decided to let pass and still give her the benefit of the doubt since many were coming from her own surrogates and even her husband.

Then Ketucky and West Virginia happened :

Are you telling me it is not in her mind that she has enough racists supporting her enough to go out and kill Obama for her?

Are you telling me this is not a shamelessly opportunistic moment of wishful thinking?

It is despicable and not only does it not have any place in this campaign. It has no place near the White House.

Hillary Clinton has demonstrated she is unfit to be President of the United States.

In my occasional visits to Daily Kos, I notice that one of the things that will get a comment troll rated faster than anything is advocacy of assassinating George Bush. Given the rhetoric many on the left have towards Bush, citing the huge numbers of deaths he is responsible for, citing his advocacy of torture and his dismantling of Constitutional rights, why NOT discuss assassination as a solution? If someone is that much of a threat to world stability and to American Democracy, shouldn't assassination be considered as a political tool?

Let me be clear: I do not advocate assassination. Advocacy of said action is not the purpose of this diary. Rather I am questioning the taboo that has been placed on the topic. Now let me go into why...

Assassination has always been a political tool, for better or worse. In ancient Rome, although the rights of citizens were gradually eroded by the rising strength of the military and the supreme dictator (what they called the Augustus and we call Emperor), one consistent check and balance to the power of that dictator was the fear of assassination. If the situation got too bad, either soldiers or Senators or both would resort to assassination. Some if the worst Emperors (Gaius Caligula, Nero, Elegabalus...) were removed though assassination. Some of the best Emperors rose to power in the wake of assassinations or imperial suicides under the threat of assassination (Vespasian, and the so-called "5 Good Emperors").

I am not really a conspiracy theorist. I really think most of the time people are too lazy and gossip too much to carry out a really complicated conspiracy. I am pretty inclined to believe the easiest, least convoluted explanations of things. Still, sometimes there are things that should make us suspicious.

BBC's Newsnight is running a Shane O'Sullivan broadcast that claims to show the presence of known CIA agents at the scene of the RFK assassination in Los Angeles at a time when the CIA had no domestic jurisdiction. The story, adding some circumstantial evidence, claims this shows a CIA link to the assassination. I am not so quick to jump to that conclusion. But it does raise an eyebrow:

The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O'Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles...

Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its Secret War on Castro.

David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends:

"I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."

Bush's idea of staying the course is insane on almost all levels. Stay the course on a stagnant economy? Why? Stay the course on global warming? Stupid and a missed economic opportunity! Stay the course on al-Qaeda? Bush STILL doesn't seem to care about catching bin Laden, the man who actually attacked America. Stay the course on Iraq? The course in Iraq is a spiral of violence that is beyond Civil War. Civil War implies two organized sides. Iraq is descending into the chaos of Afghanistan and Somalia, the exact kind of chaos that ENCOURAGES al-Qaeda and destablilizes the entire region.

The latest sign that he Iraq quagmire is an out of control mess that Bush has fumbled about every way he can is the fact that Iraqi academics are being killed at an enormous rate and those who survive are fleeing the nation as fast as they can.

From Salon.com:

Gunmen killed the Shiite dean of Baghdad University's school of administration and economics along with his wife and son on Thursday, four days after the murder of a prominent Sunni academic.

Jassim al-Asadi was driving with his family in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Azamiyah when unidentified assailants pulled alongside and opened fire, police Lt. Ahmed Ibrahim said.

The shooting follows the killing on Monday of geologist Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professor's Union and a senior member of the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, which is believed to have links to the anti-Shiite insurgency raging against U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies.