Manuel Roig-Franzia at the Washington Post described the perils facing Samantha Power: dictators, third world warlords, terrorist. None of them inspired in her the slightest fear. There was only one thing on earth that gave her pause. Hillary.
Power’s ascent was interrupted when she resigned as a senior foreign policy adviser on Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign after calling his opponent, Hillary Clinton, “a monster” during an interview with the Scotsman newspaper. Power, who thought her comment was off the record, was referring to Clinton’s campaign tactics. …
If Power had not said that single word — “monster” — she might have started in a much more public role in the first Obama administration. Instead, she was tucked away for four years on the National Security Council staff. She learned the rites of silence.
Silence is golden. Especially in the rarefied air of polite society. Polite society — now there’s a phrase.
Recently the British press has been rocked by a series of revelations that beloved Leftist leaders were actually pedophiles whose crimes were covered up, time and again by instructions from on high. The secret lives of the famous were shrouded in decorous silence: those of ‘pop stars, a bishop and top politicians’ was how one publication put it.
The shocking scale of the Establishment cover-up of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s sickening sex abuse of boys is revealed today.
For four decades, the depraved 29st [stone=14 pounds] politician was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight.
Police received at least 144 complaints by victims of the predatory paedophile yet the authorities blocked any prosecution – allowing Smith brazenly to continue his abuse.
The Liberal Party even put his name forward for a knighthood in 1988 in spite of the rumours of his sordid activities swirling around Westminster.
Jabba the Hutt
To the press Cyril Smith was a “working class hero”. But by night he allegdly frequented a place called the Elm Guest house, patronized by among others, Anthony Blunt. In that place people could “be themselves”. It was non-denomational sort of place, with grandees from every walk of life, except apparently the femine. “It had a reputation. Somebody told me that their daughter had come home and saw a lot of naked men in the front room as she walked past.”
It was the nightmare on Elm Street before the movie came out. Filled with high minded individuals who had turned orphanages — some of whom they were the patrons — into their own private henhouses and threw the human detritus onto the street when they passed a certain age, where they would, if they knew the form, commit suicide and leave the grandees to a younger generation, they were really the ultimate clubs of power. They were places where you could show who you were, surrounded by people too afraid to speak out. A place where Silence was Golden.
It would be a mistake to think that corruption is confined to any one level of society or style of depravity. If perversion is an attraction peculiar to some quarters, money is apparently attractive to all. Recently the city manager of Bell, California was sentenced to nearly 12 years in jail for basically looting the treasury together with other officials.
On Thursday, Spaccia’s attorney tried to bring Robert Rizzo, Bell’s former city manager, to court to show that Rizzo made the rules and Spaccia followed them. …
An audit of the State Controller’s Office found Bell had illegally raised property taxes and business licensing fees to keep the money flowing. At one point, homeowners in Bell where the annual median household income is about $36,000 a year, were paying higher property taxes than those in Beverly Hills.
By the time they were fired in 2010, Rizzo and Spaccia, were collecting salaries higher than that of the president of the United States.
And who can forget King City, California? It’s not every day that 1/3 of the entire police force is arrested in a fell swoop for being crooks. But maybe it ought to happen more often. The King City cops basically stole cars from civilians and sold them for profit.
Perhaps one of Europe’s most intriguing villains is Belgian child molester and killer Marc Dutroux. This monsters abused and starved little girls. Yet he claimed that he was just small fry. “Throughout the trial, Dutroux continued to insist that he was part of a Europe-wide pedophile ring with accomplices among police officers, businessmen, doctors, and even high-level Belgian politicians.” His claims, are of course too outrageous to ever possibly be true, right? Right?
Recently even the BBC was forced to ask: are top British politicians “monsters”? Were big time left wing icons like Harriet Harman and her husband — as well as the whole progressive human rights establishment — bound to protect pedophiles as part of a political deal?
[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_richardfernandez” mediaid=”35991″]
Harman’s answer in the video was ‘My job was to protect human rights. How could I have known that the Pedophile Information Exchange represented pedophiles’?
It is in some ways a whole lot easier to fight extremist gangs in dusty, far away African places. These mean, low-down, murderous critters whose life on earth is arguably a waste of oxygen are also in their way powerless villains, whose main sin is having no lobbyist in Washington to represent them. If they had it would already be politically incorrect to despise them. But one wonders whether low-rent thugs people like Kony are the truly dangerous men of this world when compared to those who hover, above reproach, in our most glittering circles, in the center of our most respected human rights organizations?
The progressive agenda fundamentally rests on the notion that ordinary men need brilliant people to tell them what to do. It depends on the idea that left to themselves the great unwashed would merely swill beer, drive pickup trucks and believe in superstitious nonsense like good and evil, right and wrong, God and the devil. And how much better it might be if we instead listened to the enlightenment of the Great and the Good.
And the Great talk a good line. They tell us that landmines, not those who plant them, are the real dangers. They say that guns, not broken people, are responsible for crime. They promise that if we abolish nuclear weapons and elect people who make the oceans fall we can fundamentally transform America. They warn of every danger except of man himself; how in form like an angel and how when fallen like a devil.
Madison thought differently. He understood that men were the danger. That the management of human power, not its expansion via “positive rights” was the key to liberty. “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.”
But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.
Madison might have preferred the first 500 names in the phonebook to the Great and the Good. He might have preferred to be governed by people we were not afraid to call “monsters” if they were — and many of them would be — but they would be monsters within reach. But before so great a personage as Hillary, what is there left to say except: huzzah!
Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.
The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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