1.27.1999

Got War?

Heading into the home stretch of Clintontime, all the media gush about the Clinton Legacy conveniently left out the assaults on the Constitution, military adventurism in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Act, not to mention a little perjury. Oh, wait, yeah, that's right, we had that big ol' Impeachment trial coming up; and if your name happened to be Bill Clinton, then there was only one thing to do: War Scare Time again, boys and girls! This time, as I recall, it was Serbia and its head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, who were Enemy Of The Month owing to accusations of "mass murder" or somesuch against Milosevic, in which it was eventually discovered that the "mass" part came to about the total annual murder rate for DC in a good year. So, President Elvis' Secretary of Snake...uh, Snake, the venerable old Reaganoid Madeleine Albright, was engaged in a round of diplomacy with Mr. Milosevic right about this time -- if, by "diplomacy", you mean "sign this absurdly one-sided, crippling list of our demands*, or else we'll crater your asses flat". Nothing, if not Mafia Diplomacy...only difference was, the actual Mafia would've let him slide with broken fingers.

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Meanwhile, with the "Impeachment Tide Surging" -- as USA Today put it -- it was time once again for President Bubba to get all Presidential, meaning, of course, to fan up another war scare someplace against a country with no air force and damn near nothing to shoot back with and then fly the most technically sophisticated, most expensive and deadliest air force on the planet over them and stomp the fertilizer out of them for about a month and a half while going on TV with some grim-assed speech about how you had to do it. Also, if you've really got your ducks together, you find some fresh-faced young flack from Human Rights Watch to go on the Today Show the week the bombing starts and deliver the most spectacularly convoluted, steaming, quivering mass of triagulation ever seen in any mass media to date in an attempt to show that it really is OK that Clinton's air force is bombing civilians because they're defending human rights against Milosevic.

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