Hillary Clinton's Post Cold-War Fairy Tale
from Peter Beinart at the Atlantic:
(Tuesday night on The Daily Show) Near the end of the interview, Stewart asked a broad question that ended, “What is our foreign policy anymore?” Here’s the key chunk of Hillary’s reply.
What I found when I became secretary of state is that so many people in the world—especially young people—they had no memory of the United States liberating Europe and Asia, beating the Nazis, fighting the Cold War and winning, that was just ancient history. They didn’t know the sacrifices that we had made and the values that motivated us to do it. We have not been telling our story very well. We do have a great story. We are not perfect by any means, but we have a great story about human freedom, human rights, human opportunity, and let’s get back to telling it, to ourselves first and foremost, and believing it about ourselves and then taking that around the world. That’s what we should be standing for.
As a vision for America’s relations with the world, this isn’t just unconvincing. It’s downright disturbing. It’s true that young people overseas don’t remember the Cold War. But even if they did, they still wouldn’t be inspired by America’s “great story about promoting human freedom, human rights, human opportunity.” That’s because in the developing world—where most of humanity lives—barely anyone believes that American foreign policy during the Cold War actually promoted those things. What they mostly remember is that in anticommunism’s name, from Pakistan to Guatemala to Iran to Congo, America funded dictators and fueled civil wars.
Barack Obama has acknowledged as much. He begins the foreign policy chapter of The Audacity of Hope by discussing his boyhood home of Indonesia, a country that for much of the Cold War was ruled by a “harshly repressive” military regime under which “arrests and torture of dissidents were common, a free press nonexistent, elections a mere formality.” All this, Obama notes, “was done with the knowledge, if not outright approval, of the U.S. administrations.” Hillary Clinton, by contrast, in her interview with Stewart, painted the Cold War as a glorious freedom struggle through which America inspired the globe.
For Hillary, America’s current problem is that once the Cold War ended, we “withdrew from the information arena.” As a result, across the world, a new generation no longer remembers the great things we supposedly did in the past, and America has stopped telling them about the great things we are still doing today. Her answer: “get back to telling” the story of America’s greatness, not only to the rest of the world but “to ourselves first and foremost.”
Really? Is America’s biggest post-Cold War foreign policy problem really that we’ve failed to adequately remind others, and ourselves, how good we are?
read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/hillary-clintons-bizarre-critique-of-us-foreign-policy/374618/
= new reply since forum marked as read
from donating and volunteering to posting against the Republicans and Hillary fans. Even got all but booted from a board run by Hillary fan.
I followed every nuance, not only the racist things from the Clinton, but also the "racially tinged" stuff from Hillary operatives, like Ferrara and Cuomo. (Indeed, the 2008 primary was the first time that I heard the term "racially tinged" --ever so much softer than "racist."
As a result, I am very familiar with everything that you've mentioned. And others that you did not mention, like the photos circulated during the primary of a young Obama, trying on traditional Kenyan clothing, which not only underscored his African roots, but made the connection between him and his Muslim Kenyan grandfather.
But, Obama has been a lame duck for quite a while. So, his personal virtues and shortcomings are not terrible relevant for future voting purposes. And he and the Clintons made their peace--and maybe a deal--back in 2008. And, speaking only for myself, I am not the fan of Obama that I was in 2007-08 anyway. So, in all, the Obama Clinton wars are now of historical interest.
On the other hand, as I stated, everything about Hillary still is very relevant, including the racism in which her 2008 campaign indulged. I don't see that as a continuation of the Hillary Obama wars, though, just one more fact about Hillary that means I cannot support her.
Point taken. She'll has to be the last man standing for me to vote for her. 
over the last 100 years. it was part of the revolution of thinking that led to the fall of self denying totalitarian societies. Part and parcel of it. Add that the natural inclination of people wanted to be free and add people like Gandhi and Havel, you have people doing things for themselves. I remember when Beatle albums and jeans were incredibly powerful symbols of independence in places like russia but then I am old. 
I don't know about Clinton. She's not making points with me just about every time she opens her mouth these days.
Try to imagine, if you can, all the time, money and resources the US devoted to the Cold War. Now times that by about 100,000 (because you probably underestimated vastly). Now imagine a world in which that time, money and effort had been spent on worthier causes.
BTW, among the intended victims of the Cold War? The left, including the left in the US.
When the Russian peasants and the Russian military joined forces to overthrow the Tsars, that shell shocked the upper classes of the world so much that everything seemed worth throwing around to prevent similar uprisings in other countries.
On the bright side, that shell shock probably gave us the New Deal after the stock market crash of 1929.
who surrounded himself with a group of advisers he called "the Brain Trust."
According to Wikipedia:
The core of the first Roosevelt brain trust consisted of a group of Columbia law professors (Moley, Tugwell, and Berle). These men played a key role in shaping the policies of the First New Deal (1933). Although they never met together as a group, they each had Roosevelt's ear. Many newspaper editorials and editorial cartoons ridiculed them as impractical idealists.
Decades before FDR became president, there was a lot of socialist/communist/anarchist agitation in America. A lot of "impractical" ideas were fermenting about how wealth should be distributed, etc., that the first Red Scare helped to push on the sidelines of political discourse.
With the collapse of capitalism in '29, these ideas resurfaced, I believe, among intellectuals, only with FDR and the Brain Trust, they weren't interested in going "red" (despite what some of their critics alleged)--they saw these ideas as a way to salvage capitalism. As it says on the Wikipage for Raymond Moley (Brain Trust member who went on to bitterly criticize the New Deal):
Praising the new president's first moves in March 1933, he concluded that capitalism "was saved in eight days."
FDR knew, I believe, that to save American-style capitalism he would have to regain the support of a largely disillusioned and angry populace, some of whom were attracted to Communism while others looked to Fascism as a way to resolve the economic crisis.
I'm not a historian on this, btw, so I don't say this is definitive. I draw a lot of my understanding from Howard Zinn, economist Richard Wolff, and Naomi Klein (so you see which side of the fence I'm on 
). (Edited to add Bill Moyers as someone who has informed my view...he did an excellent documentary a while back about FDR in which Moyers concluded that FDR's policies saved capitalism).
...people grimace at what's about to come out of it.
<-- Amurika Ahhsome!
- Every time she opens her mouth Real Democrats© grimace at what's about to come out of it.
Better?
I recall the interview you mentioned and the subsequent allowance of safe passage from the studio w/o being chewed alive.
Jon knows who signs the checks.
As does Rachel, in the end.
Lenny and Mort presided at a time of smoky night clubs, with the occasional cleaned-up version of their schtick on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar or with Steve Allen with an audience exposure in the thousands.
Now, Stewart gets those numbers for his online repeats. The main difference being, the people watching today have been overexposed to the criminalities of the 1% class and no longer believe their political system can do anything to improve their lives.
Which is why only about 11% of the eligible voting population even bothers to vote.
Exactly!
