Cheering Change, Booting Out Bush, and Beyond - a D.C. Diary

This article was originally published on SmirkingChimp.com on Tuesday, January 27, 2009:

I have never seen so many people so happy, so hopeful, so full of energy, and so united.

Being in D.C. for Inauguration Week was an experience like no other. I got to see Barack and Michelle Obama, and Joe and Jill Biden, close-up as they walked by my section of the parade route – incidentally, all of the above except Barack looked in my direction and I believe must have seen my “Arrest Bush & Cheney” sign. But the excitement was not about star-gazing. I live in L.A., I know how people are at premieres and such. That was not the vibe. In D.C., we were there to Witness, to use our senses (i.e. of the freezing cold) to make sure we weren’t dreaming when the loudspeakers joined those two words “President” and “Obama.” Above all, the excitement was the communal experience. We were thrilled to see how thrilled we all were, to meet people from all over the country, to be so crowded it took 40 minutes to exit a subway station. It was thrilling because it felt like democracy.

First of all, there was the considerable honor of being able to share this openly emotional moment with so many kazillions of proud and beaming African-Americans. To celebrate their victory in particular, and to realize how fully it signifies a universal victory, was profound. Moreover, there was the exuberance that we the people had pulled this off, in spite of many powerful forces and Fox News, fear-mongering, smear campaigns, voter suppression, electronic voting fraud, and history. There was also the enormous relief that after struggling for almost 8 years against a hostile, capricious, and monomaniacal government, finally someone was going to listen to different ideas, and actually make an attempt to pull us back from the precipice.

The joy was only heightened by the exhilarating feel of the defeat of madness, a.k.a. the Bush-Cheney regime. Not that I wasn’t worried that they were going to try to pull something. But that was part of our job, the 2-million-strong citizen brigade; to show them they were outnumbered and out-passioned. My taxi driver had deplored the expense of the Inauguration and asked why we couldn’t just watch it on TV. He overlooked the importance of an actual throng being on hand to ensure that much-ballyhooed “peaceful transfer of power.”

Inauguration pilgrims did not generally seem to agree with the party line that the outgoing president had suffered enough. Time columnist Nancy Gibbs described him as “unloved by more of his fellow citizens upon leaving office than any modern President including Nixon”, but it’s almost as if the reality of a 22% approval rating had not hit the media elite until they heard the crowd boo Bush from the Mall.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07ckQxmU9KM

Even the MSNBC commentators, who conservative ideologues are always trying to diss as too ideologically liberal, tried to scold the American Republic for caring more about the damage that has been done to their country than about Washington ceremonial etiquette. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4ByPZgU4_0

On Bush’s exit, MSNBC followed the usual corporate media line -- trying to ignore dissent and keeping up a superficial chatter -- while the crowds sang “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” to the departing helicopter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNdVj_jeWJI

Gibbs’ column claimed “Bush may not be popular, but there aren’t crowds calling for him to be hanged or accusing him of raiding Fort Knox”.

She needs to get out more.

A FEW EXAMPLES:

During Inauguration Week, activists from peace and social justice groups converged on D.C. to give Bush the boot and to express their hopes for real change under Obama. Those who are perpetually out of the loop tried to downplay them, or to pretend they would not be welcome amidst the festivities. This was not the case.

On Sat. Jan. 17th, a dozen members of the national groups World Cant Wait and also Veterans for Peace got the attention of visitors to the Newseum, the popular D.C. museum about the media: “When we got inside people did a huge banner drop from the 2nd floor that said prosecute war criminals Bush and Cheney,” a World Cant Wait write-up of the event later reported. “There were quite a bit of people inside and they were completely shocked. People outside and inside were very responsive for the demand to Obama to arrest Bush and Cheney. Then World Can't Wait hung out near 18th and Constitution with a banner that read, ‘From Gaza To Guantánamo: Stop The Endless Wars of Terror and Torture’. Tons of people were taking pictures with the banner. So many in fact that we had a hard time leaving because people kept wanting pictures.”

The activists also handed out 2,000 premiere editions of a new tabloid newspaper, War Crimes Times, to Newseum attendees. (This is a separate venture from the similarly-named free paper War Times/El Tiempo de Guerra, a tabloid which began in Feb. 2002, is bilingual, is financed by Center for Third World Organizing, and after close to 3 years became an online journal, still continuing at:http://www.war-times.org. War Crimes Times is brand new, partly funded by Veterans for Peace, and specifically focuses on bringing U.S. war criminals to justice: http://warcrimestimes.blogspot.com/.)

The Inauguration edition of War Crimes Times featured articles and commentaries by Retired Col. Ann Wright (a longtime member of the military who resigned her post as a diplomat in protest over Bush’s war), Jesselyn Raddack (the Justice Department ethics lawyer when John Walker Lindh was interrogated), Center for Constitutional Rights head Michael Ratner, and various other legal experts laying out arguments for war crimes prosecutions of key members of the Bush Administration.

The next day, war crimes of the Bush Administration were also enumerated in a panel discussion in Georgetown with Ray McGovern (retired CIA officer who served under various presidents), David Swanson (founder of leading impeachment, now prosecution, advocacy site www.AfterDowningStreet.org), Col. Ann Wright, and Jesselyn Raddack. New strategies were developed and the struggle for accountability renewed.

SHOE-THROWING:

On Mon. Jan. 19th, Martin Luther King Day and the end of Bush’s term, a “Shoe Bush” protest began in Dupont Circle with some cathartic shoe-throwing at a giant inflated Bush doll with a Pinocchio nose.

The shoe-throwing was, of course, a condemnation of the former ‘commander-in-chief’ and also a tribute to Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw a pair of shoes at Bush’s head on Dec. 14th at a press conference in Baghdad. Though not the first Western anti-Bush activists to utilize shoe symbolism since that incident, the Jan. 19th ‘Shoe Bush’ protesters in D.C. wanted to bid farewell to Bush by borrowing from Muslim culture, where to show anyone the bottom of your shoe is to express your utter contempt for them.

(Although Bush had brushed off al-Zaidi’s act as that of someone trying to get attention, the BBC and the British paper The Guardian reported in Dec. that al-Zaidi’s family claimed his arm and ribs had been broken and he had suffered internal bleeding while in custody. The judge who saw al-Zaidi in court then also told the Associated Press that the accused appeared to have been beaten. The Swiss newspaper Tribune de Geneve has recently reported that al-Zaidi is seeking asylum in Switzerland because he fears for his safety in his Baghdad prison. Yet Bush expected us to buy that al-Zaidi would risk such negative consequences, and worse, just for “attention”.)

The Shoe Bush rally featured speakers like Debra Sweet of World Cant Wait, CODEPINK co-founder Gael Murphy, Col. Ann Wright, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVPtiyxtV4 ) and representatives of other peace and justice organizations such as Arrest Bush 2009, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, D.C. IndyMedia, and the International Socialist Organization.

World Cant Wait, which has trademarked orange as “the color of resistance” and who frequently appear in orange jumpsuits and black hoods to dramatically remind Americans of the torture done in their name, provided the 300 or so at the rally with a disturbing demonstration of waterboarding and a lesson about torture.

Some presenters mixed their serious political message with humor, including Hartbeat Ensemble, a theater group from Hartford, CT, which did a skit about Obama’s moral dilemma if people like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton try to dissuade him from ending the war in Iraq; Grandmothers for Peace, who sang a protest ballad demanding Bush’s prosecution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbm787kBRmU; and a cadre of CODEPINK women in flounced skirts, who showed off the can-can routine they were dancing that weekend outside various inaugural balls: “Yes We Can-Can End the War.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftVU1121uO0

The highlight of the event, however, was when 200 or so of the activists then marched, loudly, to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., prosecution banners and peace flags aloft, and when they arrived, clustered as close as they could get with the Inauguration structures up, and hurled their footwear at the White House gates. There was much rejoicing. Bystanders snapped pictures delightedly, a few audibly commenting on “how clever” the symbolic protest was, and the whole time the activists remained outside the White House (CODEPINK sang repeatedly), tourists stayed and watched. Many of those watching clamored, giddily, to get pictures with a big-headed Bush in prison costume and chains.

Other events on the afternoon of Bush’s last day in office included a “die-in” by a coalition of activists lying on the ground as a visual reminder of those killed by Bush’s wars; an anti-war and anti-torture street theater “freeze” in busy Union Station; and an Inauguration Eve ceremony outside the White House by spiritual believers (and in some cases, just humorists) who came with sage to purge wicked spirits from the building.

BUSH SPOTS ‘ARREST BUSH’ SIGNS:

On Jan. 20th, Inauguration Day, some peace groups held vigils before the main event, while a coalition of activists with “Arrest Bush” signs joined the crowds waiting on the parade route on Pennsylvania Ave. One reveler asked to borrow my own homemade “Arrest Bush” sign to make a music video with some of the exuberant dancers on the street. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FVNJHTyE7w. I ended up leaving the sign with another parade spectator who wanted it.

Numerous other Inaugural celebrants asked to take a picture of me with my 2nd sign (which read “Arrest Bush & Cheney” on one side, and “No-One is Above the Law” on the other). The same phenomenon was reported by a group of “Arrest Bush” activists who’d been walking through D.C. on Jan. 18th, according to an email by David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org: the activists “were absolutely dumfounded by what they had just experienced. They'd spent the day at the train station in D.C. and on the streets of D.C. as excited Obama celebrators poured in by the tens of thousands, and they'd been unable to walk a dozen steps without people stopping them to have their photo taken with an "Arrest Bush" sign.”

And on that most unusual Inauguration Day, I swear to God, the ex-president who throughout his presidency, has been protected by ludicrously-named ‘free speech zones’ keeping protesters away from him at public appearances, finally saw a bunch of those “Arrest Bush” signs by the FBI Building.

After breakfast at the White House with the Obamas, Bush’s motorcade drove up Pennsylvania Ave. to the Capitol. His head turned toward and lingered on an unmissable sea of “Arrest Bush” placards.

NEXT...

Meanwhile, CODEPINK ladies in their favorite hue moved through the bustling crowds handing out pink ribbons – the kind you tie around your finger so you won’t forget something – to remind us to remind Obama to remember his promises.

Their flyer lists 7 Obama promises to keep track of: ending the war in Iraq, rejecting the Military Commissions Act, holding unconditional talks with Iran, abiding by Senate-approved international treaties, working to eliminate nuclear weapons, and of course stopping torture and shutting down Guantánamo. Obama did indeed show good faith on his first full day, Jan. 21st, by issuing executive orders to begin the closing of Guantánamo and the end of U.S. use of torture; his Admin. has declared they will use “direct diplomacy” with Iran; and yesterday Obama signalled a foreign policy shift when in his first formal interview he told Al-Arabiya Network that "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy." Groups that pressured for these changes are of course urging us to write him our thank yous for these first steps and our encouragements to continue this vein.

Still, the unwillingness of CODEPINK and other progressives to just leave it all up to Obama shows that demands for Bush Admin. prosecutions are not personal or partisan. (CODEPINK, for one, is explicitly non-partisan in their registered status.) CODEPINK, Progressive Democrats of America (which used the pre-inaugural weekend for a panel-filled, national organizing conference), and their confrères just want us to stay awake, to make sure we achieve the change we seek. And consistent with that aim, they demand prosecutions to prevent the recent presidency’s crimes from happening again.

“This is not a fantasy, boys and girls,” David Swanson told AfterDowningStreet members. “The New York Times' Scott Shane and Attorney General Mukasey agree with me that prosecution is now going to be hard to avoid. When even Nancy Pelosi has figured out where we're going, you know the winds of change are blowing strong.”

AfterDowningStreet and its allies have a petition requesting Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder “appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes”. They have 20,000 signatures so far and will deliver the petition after Holder’s confirmation process. Add your name here. You may also want to take steps to make sure Holder gets into the job first, by signing a People for the American Way petition against Republican attempts to block Holder’s confirmation.

A Jan. 26th PFAW alert featured a call by Barbra Steisand to defend Holder in the face of Republican attacks. She feels Republicans want to throw their weight around; she did not mention that they might be against him because he says he values the rule of law. In other words, they could see getting rid of him as self-protection.

David Swanson finds the roots of the movement to hold the Bushies accountable in Obama’s inspiring oratory. “That's the dangerous thing about telling people that anything is possible,” quips Swanson. “They'll end up insisting on what they really want. And they want lots of new laws, but they very dearly want us to start enforcing the old ones too.”

PROP 2: Like the Obama Campaign, But Smaller

This article was originally published on Calitics.com on Friday, December 12, 2008:

Barack Obama's campaign, as many commentators have often stated, has been brilliantly run. There's another campaign which, in a different way and by a different yardstick, has done a superb job: the Yes on Prop 2 campaign in California. This proposition, under the rubric "Prevention of Farm Cruelty to Animals Act" initially but now officially titled "Standards for Confining Farm Animals", seeks to codify minimum humane standards for farm animals. These standards are absolutely basic: "that they be allowed, for the majority of every day, to fully extend their limbs or wings, lie down, stand up and turn around," the measure reads.

Anyone who has ever taken pets on an airplane will know that airlines have strict regulations about the size of their carriers. We accept that pets should not travel - even for a few hours - if they do not have enough room to be comfortable. Yet what was perhaps not well-known before Prop 2 was that in factory farms in this country, millions of pigs, cows, veal calves, and chickens are confined to spaces which do not give them room to even stretch their limbs, and they are kept that way for their entire lives.

HSUS, the Humane Society of the United States -- which the No on Prop 2 side refers to, ominously, as a "well-funded, Washington, DC-based special interest group" -- has been urging California legislators to institute humane farming standards for 20 years. ('Humaneness' being the "special interest", I guess, which nefarious animal lovers' $20 and $30 donations have funded.) On several occasions, California state legislators have even stood up for livestock's lying down and rolling over, but the bills that would require factory farms to make that much room have been killed in committee. Big Agribusiness has of course, been considered the culprit behind the bills' demise.

Yet in spite of the formidable foe, the ad hoc Californians for Humane Farms got this initiative on the ballot through months of hard work by volunteer signature-gatherers. If the No on 2 side doesn't  believe it was volunteer, I'll send them the old emails I received requesting I attend planning sessions, take petitioning shifts, follow careful directions on ensuring the validity of signatures, make deadlines, etc. (I expressed interest and never took the time to help out - so PLEASE vote Yes on  2. I'll feel really guilty if it fails!)

Since making the ballot, the energetic Yes on 2 activists have gone for it, if you will, whole hog. Knowing the fight that Big Agribusiness would put up, Yes on 2 volunteers have secured endorsements from 700 veterinarians in the state, 90 veterinary clinics and hospitals, 150 veterinary students, and the California Veterinary Medical Association; and also from 70 doctors who treat human animals. The Center for Food Safety, the Consumer Federation of America, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on board. The simple decency and the common sense of the proposition moved celebrities...

...to do testimonies for Prop 2 - even the cynic Bill Maher endorsed it - and Ellen and Oprah spread the word about the ballot initiative on their shows. Supporters have pounded the pavement and very sagely reached out to a wide swath of Californians, garnering even more endorsements from 400 California business, over 100 religious leaders, and just as many small farmers and organizations for farmers and farm workers' rights like Family Farm Defenders, National Black Farmers Association, United Farm Workers, and the Cesar Chavez Foundation. And, what I think is a really wonderful coup: the California Democratic Party. Animal welfare concerns weren't always part of the Democratic Party platform. But now Prop 2 materials are at Obama campaign offices, and a slew of City Councils, Mayors, Assembly Members, State Senators, U.S. Representatives, and both Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein back the measure. Various newspapers have been impressed by Prop 2's arguments as well.

I think this is incredible. Campaign manager Jennifer Fearing, who says she witnessed the cruel conditions of factory farming first-hand...

...has created a grassroots effort that has caught fire and, like Obama's, attests to what passion and conviction can inspire and achieve.

As for the No on Prop 2 side, well, they did come up with a lovely name for their coalition -  "Californians for SAFE Food." They boast that they have small farmers on their side, too, but when Green reporter Cameron Scott checked, those claims turned out to be deceptive.

Meanwhile, coalition members who are definitely in good standing include: Alliance of Western Milk Producers, Broiler & Egg Association, California Cattlemen's Association, California Dairy Campaign, California Egg Marketing Association, California Pork Producers Association, National Pork Producers Council, Texas Egg Council, Western United Dairymen and other purely-good-samaritan folk. One of their gambits is to claim that suddenly your food will be less safe if, for instance, hens are not confined in wire-floor battery cages stacked on top of each other so that the ones on top defecate all over the ones below. Mmmm. Yumm. Let's watch that on the Food Network.

Actually, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production reports that restriction of natural motion in farm animals creates a great deal of stress. (I'd like to see the No on Prop 2 people prove this isn't so by confining themselves to a space with no elbow room or head space. Let's say for a month or two.) Of course, when animals experience that much stress, they tend to chew, bite, scratch, scrape - develop festering wounds, in short, and inflict them on their cell-block mates. Their overcrowding also spreads diseases quickly. On the other hand, the Pew Commission finds, when the animals are reared with humane standards and have at least minimal living space, they are safer for the food chain.

It isn't just liberal bastions like California who care about this issue. In the last six years, four states have banned gestation crates for pregnant sows: Oregon and Colorado via their legislatures, and Florida and Arizona via ballot initiatives. These states did not try to address as many species at one time as California's Proposition 2 does, but that's why Prop 2 is historic in an election year of firsts. Still, Prop 2 isn't out to turn factory farming on its head, it just asks that specific species of animals be given a modicum of space; and it gives these companies 7 years to comply.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, an author who explores animal emotions, writes in his book The Pig Who Sang to the Moon:

• that for "farm animals subjected to factory farming...it is impossible to perform any meaningful natural behavior." Yet "domesticated animals who live on our farms are very little removed from their wild ancestors and therefore have all the emotions that belong to those wild animals who live under conditions of freedom. This means that confinement is going to be all the more painful for farm animals, conflicting as it does with emotions that evolved under far different conditions."

Prop 2 simply offers a recognition that animals in factory farms are living beings. Yes, please!

BROADCAST FAILURE: the ABC Debate

This article was originally published on OpEdNews.com on Saturday, April 19, 2008:

For once, the abysmal quality of the mainstream media has been noticed by the mainstream media itself. April 16th’s Democratic debate met with such public outcry – an open letter to ABC signed by 41 journalists and media analysts, thousands of furious emails on ABC.com, 200,000 signatures on MoveOn’s petition - that The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today.com, NPR online, and even ABC World News actually covered the firestorm. This may be some kind of wake-up call, at least to ABC. They had certainly been oblivious to their responsibility to the public before this furor. Not even the shouts and groans from the live audience at the debate (captured in a videoclip on Huffington Post) had clued them in by the next morning: George Stephanopoulos cheerily recapped the debate on Good Morning America as if his pointless questions had been very informative, and on The View, Barbara Walters praised Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson’s “strong questions” and suggested that not a lot of people had heard such questions before. (Both shows are on ABC.)

In typical Hillary Clinton campaign fashion, both the campaign’s first statements and her own public ones after the debate ignored the true nature of the complaints about ABC. On Friday she tried to paint the moderators’ questions, so widely perceived as sensationalistic and trivial, as simply “hard questions”, and warned: “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." This after the first 45 minutes of the debate were conducted in such a way that the moderators peppered Barack Obama with Fox News-style questions using lowest-common-denominator, inflammatory terms like “the flag”, “loves America” and “patriotic” – and then considered they were being ‘fair’ because they gave Clinton equal time to ‘respond’…to the charges against Obama! Stephanopoulos even seemed to want to make up for the fact that the Democratic Party had rebuffed FOX’s 2007 offer to host a debate (a rebuff based on FOX’s smear campaign against Obama). He asked a question on Ayers that, though uncredited, was literally straight from the mouth of FOX’s Sean Hannity, who had fed it to him on air the day before. (http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/17/steph-hannity-audio/).

But in truth it might have set some kind of precedent if ABC had actually askedgenuinely ‘hard questions’. In ABC’s Democratic debate of Aug. 2007, Stephanopoulos, after repeatedly by-passing lower-ranking candidates, made sure all candidates on stage (8 of them then) answered a pressing question sent in from Utah: “Do they believe that, through the power of prayer, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Minnesota bridge collapse could have been prevented or lessened?” Unsurprisingly, they all replied something about the importance to them of spiritual values. And having taken up so much time with that vital question, there was no time to ask a question about how to verifiably lessen or prevent disasters like Katrina by actually fighting global warming!

Nothing has changed in Stephanopoulos’ world since then, although an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Northern Ireland has broken off in our own. There were still no questions about global warming on April 16th. Not even a question on how the candidates might heed the Pentagon study (from 2004) on the vast climate change threat. Not even when the candidates were pressed on Pentagon leaders’ authority re. national security.

The networks are in lock-step in their silence, though: the League of Conservation Voters monitors the questions the top 5 political reporters have asked presidential candidates in debates and interviews since Jan. 2007, and out of over 3,200 questions, Stephanopoulos, Tim Russert (NBC), Bob Schieffer (CBS), Wolf Blitzer (CNN), and Chris Wallace (FOX) have asked only a total of 8 questions between them mentioning climate change (http://whataretheywaitingfor.com/facts.html).

Instead of the silly questions “do you think he can win?” and ‘can she win?’, which it was easy to predict the answers to, a question with actual substance could have been: “what integrity do the coming elections have when Diebold and other voting machines used in much of the country can be hacked into to change the national counts?” (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/144431/us_presidential_election_can_be_hacked.html)

And on the subject so belabored Wednesday, ‘fighting the Republicans’, could they not have moved the candidates away from the rhetorical to the practical with: “Considering the fact John Kerry told author Mark Crispin Miller he thinks the 2004 election was stolen, and many, many others contend the 2000 election was stolen, would you fight for a recount if you lose? If the public elects you, will you make sure their wish is honored?”

How about a question on holding the Bush Administration accountable for its 935 lies on Iraq, and its current lies on Iran? Instead, Stephanopoulos told his own lie, that Iran was continuing its “nuclear program” (by which he meant weaponry, not civilian power, though the National Intelligence Estimate says he’s wrong). Then he grafted this to another false assumption, that Iran has ever expressed any desire to attack Israel.

Likewise, Gibson used false conservative talking points about the effectiveness of capital gains tax cuts to badger Clinton and Obama on taxes, while neglecting other questions on the economy such as: unemployment, the deficit, the privatization of natural resources, the specter of a depression, and how about that gap between the rich and poor?

And why no mention of recent revelations that Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft, and even Powell sat in on meetings to plan torture? Gibson had, after all, introduced the debate with: “Much has happened in [the last] six weeks, and there is much to discuss”. But apparently he was just referring to things like Obama’s “bitter” remarks.

Yet despite their intense concentration on such supposed scandals, neither moderator asked Clinton how she could claim both that Obama’s remarks on people clinging to religion trivialize faith, and that she’s outraged by Obama’s loyalty to and respect for his church. I guess that might have been a ‘hard question’ for ABC and the media itself.

The media was the message on April 16th, and it was loud enough for many people hitherto unaware to hear the distress call.

The Gender Card

Originally published on OpEdNews on April 18, 2008.         

Earlier this year, Clinton supporters like Geraldine Ferraro, Gloria Steinem, Saturday Night Live alumnae, contributors to a Newsweek special issue, and some email petitions decried a sexist bias against Hillary in the media. Ferraro went on Fox several weeks after she supposedly left the campaign and used the occasion of Randi Rhodes’ comedy routine to again defend her own statement that had gotten her into hot water; she defended herself by accusing the Obama campaign of “playing the race card”. But in the process of lamenting the inequity between the way the two campaigns are received she herself was playing the gender card.

It’s true that after Hillary got teary in New Hampshire the ludicrous question of her emotionality saturated the media. But what that news cycle showed was that she is savvier about the media than some feminists fear. She did win that primary.

Clinton’s sniper fire gaffe is not something she can blame the media for; unless rising from its usual lethargy and actually researching something a politician said is an example of bias. But it does show that she thought it was sound media strategy to align herself with an image of war. It also underlines how the junior senator from New York wants liberals to see her as against the Iraq war while she tries to be militaristic for the right-wing.

As we all know, Clinton voted in 2002 for the war on Iraq while Obama went on public record opposing it. She has tried very hard to claim Obama’s stand against the war doesn’t count. It may have surprised her that the war became so unpopular that this difference between them actually seemed to mean something, especially to the young. She has repeatedly undermined Obama’s early anti-war position by unsmilingly joking that it’s her “lifetime of experience” and McCain’s “lifetime of experience” versus Obama’s “speech he made in 2002.”

In so doing, she undermines the stand any of us who opposed the war took in 2002 – or 2003, or since – whether it was a speech, a protest sign, a letter to Congress, or more. She has never explained why she couldn’t tell that the Bush Administration was lying even though millions of us worldwide could. She has not explained why she, supposedly so tough and so savvy in D.C. ways, saw nothing fishy in any of the administration’s 935 false statements about Iraq in the two years after 9/11. Perhaps we ordinary citizens, armed with internet access to public information, had greater resources than she did and knew things she couldn’t: that Bush made claims about an IAEA report on Iraq that were publicly contradicted by the IAEA the next day; that intelligence officials expressed disagreement on various of the Administration’s allegations before the war; that former UN inspector and ex-marine Scott Ritter was sure he and his team had thoroughly and permanently destroyed Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons after the Gulf War.

Even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and accept her argument that Bush tricked Congress into thinking they were just supporting a resolution to give him power to force U.N. inspections—and he did try that ruse—the truth is she also voted against the Oct. 2002 Levin Amendment, which contained a clause for “a new resolution of the United Nations Security Council” before a move to disarm Iraq. That would have kept Congress in charge of authorizing war. But it seems this ‘tested’, ‘ready’ candidate who says she’s the best to stand up to Republicans didn’t care to stand up during that test. (Her presidential campaign statement on this vote blames "the language of the Levin Amendment” as if it “would have made it the law of the land that the President could not act without Security Council approval.” Yet the amendment clearly stated the opposite by reiterating the U.S.’ right to self-defense. As does international law anyway.)

She has spent years trying to distance herself from her vote to authorize military force, but without going as far as Obama has in condemning the war. In Dec. 2006 she told ABC News “if we knew then what we know now there wouldn’t have been a vote”—implying that it was all a mistake, and perhaps that Bush would never have sought the authorization if he’d known there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Yet she made this excuse over a year and a half after “the Downing Street memos” were published in The Sunday Times (U.K.) on May 1, 2005. It’s very unlikely that Hillary was still unaware so long after their publication that memos of secret meetings between the Brits and the White House, several months before Congress’ vote on Iraq, revealed that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” to invade. She certainly should have understood the significance of the July 23, 2002 memo which briefed the Prime Minister on the U.S. plan: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” And she should have grasped that the lines in the memo which read “But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran” were clear evidence that Bush already ‘knew then what we know now’.

She tried to stress once again, in the April 16th debate in Philadelphia, that she thinks she can fight the Republicans better than Obama can. Oh, when will she start? The DNC’s own website catalogues numerous allegations of improper relations between McCain and a variety of lobbyists – potentially powerful financial and political scandals – but does Clinton care? She praised McCain again at the debate on ABC, calling him ‘formidable’; while critiquing Obama’s associations with Rev. Wright and William Ayers under the cover that this is what “the Republicans will be raising.” When will she raise Democratic objections against them instead of Republican objections against a Democrat?