US ELECTIONS UPDATE

I haven’t had a chance to blog this week. It’s time for the weekend now but let me cast a critical eye back over the previous four days of US presidential politics. As you’ll all have noticed by now, Senator Hillary Clinton remains in the Democratic race after winning the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. She and her acolytes have been spinning her victory against Senator Barack Obama as ‘against all odds’ and as a victory for the ‘underdog’ and the mainstream media seems to be buying her crap. This blog, however, has no qualms about reminding the army of Beltway pundits and pontificators that opinion polls actually had Hillary in a 20-point lead over Obama only ten days before the primary – a lead she had built up since January. So it was Obama who was actually the underdog in this particular race and it was Obama who deserves credit, and plaudits, for halving Hillary’s initial lead on Tuesday to just 10 per cent (and that too after his rather unfortunate and offensive gaffe about "bitter" working-class people "clinging to guns or religion" in Pennsylvania.)

Now, as regular readers of this blog may have guessed by now, I am an Obama supporter. He is the best of a bad bunch. The other two remaining members of the ‘bad bunch’ – Senators McCain and Clinton – are pro-war hawks who say ludicrous things. Consider the evidence of this week alone:

Hillary Clinton

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” breakfast-news show, Clinton warned Tehran on Tuesday that if she were president, the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran.

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Not only is this a nonsensical statement – does she really want to be known as the ‘Genocide Candidate’? – but it is also deeply hypocritical. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has long been castigated and condemned for his alleged desire to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. Why should the US president now harbour an equally bizarre and immoral desire to wipe Iran off the map?

But, most troubling of all, is the fact that such a hawkish question was even asked in the first place. Can you imagine a politician in any other country in the world being asked such a question by a journalist on a breakfast show or answering in such a nakedly populist and hawkish manner? And on what grounds does a journalist even ask a presidential candidate about a hypothetical Iranian ‘nuclear’ threat to Israel when American’s own intelligence agencies have publicly and categorically confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons nor even a nuclear weapons programme (as I have blogged about here)? The mainstream media is pathetic, ignorant and biased – which is one of the many reasons behind me setting up this blog.

John McCain

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, April 20, McCain called one-time (and distant) Obama friend William Ayers “an unrepentant terrorist” (trying to smear Obama in a ‘guilt by association’ accusation). What was McCain’s evidence? McCain said that Ayers “was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people…” So McCain is saying that someone who engages in bombings which could have killed or did kill innocent people is a terrorist.

Now consider what McCain did. McCain flew a bomber, an A-4E Skyhawk, over North Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually dropped his bombs before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Vietcong. But certainly he was engaged in actions that, if he had succeeded, could have killed innocent people – and was part of a war effort which did kill millions of innocent people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Which makes McCain, in his own words, a terrorist.

By the way, while the US press continues to devote acres of print to the presidential primaries, it ignores the rather shocking case of the FBI arresting retired US military engineer Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel (!) Imagine that! America’s best buddy in the world, it’s closest ally, the biggest recipient of US aid, continues to spy on it even now, more than twenty years on from the infamous Jonathan Pollard case. There’ll be more on the spying case here on the Radical Opinions blog next week. Stay tuned!