A Hillary Prescription For Losing In November: Pick Tim Kaine As Veep

Hillary and Hillary II: Let's hope they have good laughs now since they likely won't in November.

As Michael Moore's turn to comment came up on Bill Maher's Convention edition of Real Time last night, he provided what he himself called "the buzzkill". That is, predicting Donald Trump will win the general election - much to the boos and consternation of the lefties in the audience and on the panel (Joy Reid and Dan Savage).

Moore zeroed in on the "Brexit" in the US of A, comprising three  industrial states: Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania with their 64 electoral votes. Those 64  electoral votes were the difference between Mitt Romney becoming the 45th President in 2012 and just another loser to Obama. But this time around, as Moore explained, they could easily be grabbed by Trump - especially given all three feature Republican governors who can gin the voting rules in their favor, including via use of electronic voting machines which were a major factor in Bush winning Ohio in 2004.

Of course, the Real Time LA crowd, stoked on the triumphalism of most of the liberal press, couldn't handle it. They were in denial and averse to such awful forecasting.

Moore might be right or wrong. I personally don't believe it's a given Hillary Clinton  will lose, but that is only provided she plays her cards right and doesn't shoot herself in the foot. Right now, however, the buzz is that she will do that - by following her advisors lead and picking a Neoliberal Veep, namely Tim Kaine.

As David Swanson pointed out on smirkingchimp.com:

"Kaine was an anti-environmentalist pro-coal governor of Virginia, a supporter of the "right to work" (for less) law restricting union organizing in Virginia, and he is a supporter of corporate trade agreements including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and including fast-tracking the TPP. An extremely loyal Democrat, he nonetheless criticized Democrats in 2011 for proposing higher taxes on millionaires.

Kaine is the anti-Bernie Sanders on policy and on process. He takes his direction from those in power, not from the public. In a poll of over 250 Sanders delegates to the Democratic National Convention (by the Bernie Delegate Network), only 2.7% of them said they thought Kaine would be an acceptable vice presidential nominee."

Kaine's support of the TPP will be one of the biggest knocks against him. Trump will hammer him and Clinton relentlessly - based on his acceptance speech tonight -  citing the horrific job losses in industrial states in the wake of trade deals starting with  NAFTA (pushed by Bill Clinton) and ending with TPP (embraced in the past by Hillary). 

Meanwhile, with another Neolib on the ticket Bernie or Bust people will not be energized enough to change their minds and certainly not to subscribe to the lesser of two evils again. They will also take a Kaine pick as not only a slap in the face, but also showing Clinton doesn't really support Bernie  Sanders

 positions or the integration of some of them into the Dem platform.

As Janice expressed immense fear tonight after Trump's speech, I observed that Hillary still has the power to avert electoral disaster. That means picking a firm liberal as Veep (Elizabeth Warren would be best) and not mucking up the debates.

We don't know yet how she will fare in the debates but her Veep pick can either be the first  powerful round fired to take down Trump in November or the first nail in her electoral coffin.  The choice is ultimately hers, and being too cautious will not get it done.

Postscript  7/23:

As predicted Clinton made just about the worst pick imaginable, cynically betting Kaine will help her "sew up" the middle when she really needed to consolidate her left flank. Now I predict that at least 20 percent of Bernie Sanders' voters will not be energized enough to show up. I believe this will translate to Clinton losses in what Michael Moore called the "Brexit" states, and lead to a narrow Trump win.  The reason is that now, without those energized left voters, it will make the election a squeaker and close enough to steal via any number of ruses we're beheld before. (Including electronic voting machine manipulations.)

It is sad, and at one point in the middle of all the misplaced cheerleading on MSNBC's 'All In'  last night, Progressive magazine editor Ruth Conniff was explaining the magnitude of Clinton's disaster. She noted it being a "slap in the face" to Sanders' voters.  She added:

"It's just a sign that Hillary does not feel like she has to do anything for the progressive wing of the party,"

 Soon after she was  terminated by a call in from Neoliberal VA governor Terry McCauliffe.

Hillary had her chance to make a huge statement and help to bring it home for the Dems and become the first female President. Alas, unless she can unleash Jack Kennedy-esque lightning in the debates, she will end up like Hubert Horatio Humphrey did in 1968.  The truth hurts, but don't expect the cheerleading media and most Dems to buy it.

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/68239/does-hillary-get-it

And:

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/22/clinton-inflames-progressive-base-choice-tim-kaine-vice-president

Quote: By choosing a corporatist like Kaine, Hillary has 'pulled a Lieberman. God forbid if it puts Trump in the White House.

Jeff Cohen of RootAction.org

Convergence of Two Important Books Shows Kennedy Was Victim of the Deep State

Outside of the deep politics research community, there are few Americans who appreciate the import and magnitude of John F. Kennedy's assassination 52 years ago. It could all be as much a historical 'black hole' as the nature of the interiors of those celestial objects constitutes a physical hole for astrophysics.  Indeed, if one isn't part of the deep politics research constellation he or she will likely not be aware of what the 'deep state' means, far less what all the fuss is about over one dead president from over a half century ago. The person may even mistake the low political value of JFK himself (as a personality) for the high value of the assassination. (A danger author Michael Parenti first warned about).

The point is that the assassination was the primary event, not John F. Kennedy per se. It was the assassination that altered the arc of American history for the worst. It was the assassination  that had the high political value, since with Kennedy out of the way, many more nefarious initiatives could be undertaken, including assassinations and launching an 8-plus year undeclared war in Vietnam. Hence Parenti's articulation of the basis for assassination research ('The Dirty Truth'. p. 186), we:

"are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy."

 

  That  Kennedy crossed thresholds with the deep state that made him a target is something exposed in more than one book, including Peter Dale Scott's 'War Conspiracy' and more recently David Talbot's new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,”  which extends out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.

Before Talbot's book,  there was James Douglass' 'JFK and he Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters', which showed:


-  Gen. Curtis LeMay and others pushing JFK towards attacking Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis

-  JFK’s efforts and strategies to make peace with the Soviets, including 21 secret correspondences with Khrushchev

-   Kennedy’s secret efforts to establish normal relations with Cuba and the fury that this [it] caused within the CIA and amongst Cuban exiles

-  JFK’s determined efforts to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam and the forces within his administration that resisted and ultimately prevented this effort

-  Kennedy standing up to U.S. steel interests and the bitterness that this lead to among U.S. business leaders, including Henry Luce, publisher of Fortune

-  The overwhelming evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was on the CIA payroll and had an assortment of handlers

-  The CIA plot that painted Oswald as a communist sympathizer and lunatic with ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba

-  How power brokers convinced the official investigators (Warren Report) to pin the assassination on Oswald

-   The underreported plot to kill JFK in Chicago, stopped and bungled by the Secret Service one month before Kennedy was killed in November of ’63.

-  The latest forensic evidence that shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the published autopsy x-rays are composite fakes.

-  The stories of many witnesses who saw things differently than the official story, who were sometimes killed, died of mysterious causes, or had their stories changed or their lives threatened.

Interwoven with Talbot's book, the deep politics researcher sees clearly for the first time what drove those like Allen Dulles  - then CIA Chief and de facto head of the deep state -  to take Kennedy out. In short, JFK had gotten too big for his political-policy breeches and challenged Dulles' hegemony on too many fronts.

Smirkingchimp.com blogger David Swanson offers one of the best summary takes:

"Talbot's book is still one of the best I've seen on the Dulles brothers and one of the best I've seen on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Where it differs from Douglass' book, I think, is not so much in the evidence it relates or the conclusions it draws, but in providing an additional motivation for the crime.

JFK and the Unspeakable depicts Kennedy as getting in the way of the violence that Allen Dulles and gang wished to engage in abroad. He wouldn't fight Cuba or the Soviet Union or Vietnam or East Germany or independence movements in Africa. He wanted disarmament and peace. He was talking cooperatively with Khrushchev, as Eisenhower had tried prior to the U2-shootdown sabotage. The CIA was overthrowing governments in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Vietnam, and around the world. Kennedy was getting in the way.

The Devil's Chessboard depicts Kennedy, in addition, as himself being the sort of leader the CIA was in the habit of overthrowing in those foreign capitals. Kennedy had made enemies of bankers and industrialists. He was working to shrink oil profits by closing tax loopholes, including the "oil depletion allowance."

JFK was also determined to rein the CIA in after the Bay of Pigs, firing Dulles and his deputy Charles Cabell, and then setting up  a Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible to him, and soon mandating all overflights of Cuba be done by the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. He also defined a list of directives on what the CIA could and could not, do, and a 'Special Group' that had no less than 17 recommendations for the "reorganization and redirection of the CIA".

This Dulles could not abide.

Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. By late 1962 Kennedy was already seen as at least a commie sympathizer by virtue of his back channel rapprochement efforts with Fidel Castro- even dispatching medical aid to the Communist island nation (via emissary William Atwood)  to show good faith.

This alone would have enraged the CIA -led anti-Castro Cubans, not only the vets from the Bay of Pigs disaster (who still blamed Kennedy for not providing air support) but the  members of the Revolutionary Cuban Student Directorate or DRE, one of the largest anti-Castro groups in the United States.  In the spring of 1963 we know that the Chief of Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami (George Johannides,),  was “guiding and financing” the DRE.   This  included providing the DRE with up to $25,000 a month, so long as they submitted to CIA discipline.

The mere leak to the group that Kennedy was making nice with Fidel would have had any number of these right wing Cuban exiles volunteering to help make a CIA executive action a reality. (Look how little it took to provoke members of the same anti-Castro axis to take down a Cuban plane with 73 on board off Barbados coast  on Oct. 6, 1976)

Talbot further shows that Dulles  was a psychopath given how he is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Dulles and his fellow CIA Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy. Given the extent to which Kennedy was seen supportive of Castro (via rapprochement) or Nikita Khrushchev, e.g. signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August, 1963   - which also severely limited all anti-missile defense systems - they 'd have justified Kennedy's violent  removal.

In fact, by the time of Kennedy's rapprochement efforts, Dulles - who had surreptitiously set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile after his firing-  would have treated JFK as just another head of state to be earmarked for assassination like previous ones. Such was laid out in their earlier assassination manuals as far back as 1954 with the PBSUCCESS program, e.g.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

The immediate enabler and architect would have been William Harvey. The key clue was the letter ‘D’ – on the cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicated CIA Staff D, a SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): “In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle.”

Most researchers who've delved into this in much more depth than superficial 'buffs' come away with the conviction Oswald was set up as part of ZR/Rifle. However,  with the plot now turned against Kennedy. Oswald was likely used as the dupe or decoy so the actual perps (likely Cuban exiles, and trained assassins - from the Army's Ft. Benning Assassin school) could escape. And Harvey would have been the mastermind, following Dulles' order or in conjunction with them as part of an NSA coordinated operation.

Indeed, Talbot, in a recent interview on salon.com notes:

" I have an eye-witness that pinpoints one of these men, William Harvey, on a plane to Dallas, shortly before the assassination. He was spotted by his own deputy. And his deputy told his children years later that was convinced that William Harvey was involved in the assassination of Kennedy. This was the guy who was responsible for the assassination operation aimed at Fidel Castro. He was working with the mafia to kill Castro. He was a notorious figure in the CIA. So, for him to be flying to Dallas, shortly before the assassination, at least raises some serious questions."

But one of the most reprehensible facts Talbot details is the extent to which Dulles and cronies were very socially comfortable with many members of the Nazi elite, including bankers, security and intelligence people. To them, the whole question about war crimes and the horrors the Nazis had committed during the war were secondary to the more important geo-political questions [such as] who will rebuild Germany after the war and how to make sure the Soviet Union does not overrun Europe.

To them also, Kennedy -  by his willingness to stand up to the Nazi-nexus of spooks  -would have shown himself a prime and urgent target. That the deep state was protecting its associations with Nazi spies is well known by deep politics researchers.  Readers can also find more information on the Nazi- CIA ties here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

Excerpt:

In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.

Thus we see Hoover, head of the FBI, was protective of the Nazi links, and invoked "national security" to protect them.   One wonders what the immediate consequences might have been had Kennedy learned of them - the full extent  -  which wasn't revealed in files until decades later. Might not this have speeded up the need for action? The CIA, as Talbot notes,  is still withholding 15,000 key documents related to the Kennedy assassination including [documents related to] people in the Dulles assassination group. Talbot adds, in his salon.com interview:

"It is vital that we get those 15,000 documents that the CIA is still withholding in defiance of that (JFK Records Act)  law. There are a lot of clues in those [released] documents and I have used a lot of them."

Talbot also makes mention of the Nazi Wartime Disclosure Act.  It may well be, as we gradually uncover more of the deep state connections to the Kennedy assassination, we also see the extent to which the CIA's use and coddling of high profile Nazis played a direct role - perhaps even in the strategy and mechanics of taking Kennedy out.

We will see.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-burnett/54660/the-war-on-democracy-the-deep-state