What the Wikileaks Reveal
The USA regime will soon recover from the embarrassments created by the massive release of diplomatic documents onto the Internet. There will be investigations and prosecutions. There will be ironic attempts by Madame Clinton and her colleagues to pretend that personal attacks on heads of state and foreign diplomats are de rigueur in the business of foreign affairs, but what few commentators have bothered to point out is the childish style of the papers. Mme. Clinton wants to probe the anxieties and possible drug use of the Argentine President; Putin and Medved are compared with Batman and Robin. The rhetoric and tone range from bitchy to puerile to paranoid. And these are the people that rule the world.
No, to anticipate the obvious question, it was not ever thus. We have thousands upon thousands of pages of state papers and private letters from leading politicians over the past two thousand years, and while Cicero may make jokes about Pompey or members of Lincoln's cabinet sneer at the vulgarity and ignorance of their chief, the language of diplomats has been veiled and guarded even when caustic--especially when caustic. A famous diplomat of the 17th century said a diplomat was someone sent to lie abroad for his country. What Sir Henry Wotton did not say--because it was obvious--that the lying had to be managed with dignity and grace. Remember the odious Harold Macmillan's response to Kruschev's shoe-rapping outburst at the United Nations? He dryly asked for a translation. Reserve, tact, self-restraint--the virtues of a good card player--were required of diplomats and statesmen. Now we have churls and braggarts like Clinton, Rice, Albright, and that unspeakable pair, Richard Holbrooke and John Bolton, spoiled children who go around the world stirring up resentment against their government and its people.
American journalists are still whining about poor Richard Nixon. Nixon made many mistakes, not the least of which was to promote Henry Kissinger to a position that was so far beyond his competence as to defy the Peter Principle, but for the most part,, when he was not pretending to be a regular guy, Nixon knew how to conduct himself on the world's stage. Our current crop of statesmen are perfect for Saturday Night Live.
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About Nixon being able to conduct himself while the Clintons can not - wasn't Nixon a bit of a middle class or even working class background person? Compared to upperclass men like the Clintons, he did seem to be more sophisticated and elegant, even though he probably would not have been able to afford finishing school experts as easily as them.
" Compared to upperclass men like the Clintons,.."
Bill Clinton was the posterboy for white trash. His wife may be upper middle class, but Slick Willy is trash no matter how nice the suit he wears is.
Mr. Maxwell is right. Clinton was classic trailer trash--which makes James Carville's famous remark on one of his women hilarious: "It shows what you can get by trolling hundred dollar bills through a trailer park." Yes, you get Bill Clinton. His wife is not at all upper middle class but strictly middle middle. Her father did well, but neither he nor her mother were bourgeois. I did not cite Nixon as an example of a good or polished statesman but as someone who is vilified for being the worst. By the way, neither Bill nor Hillary have anything that could be remotely described as good manners. Poor Bill is like his white trash predecessor Lincoln: every dirty thought that sleazes through the back alleys of his mind must be uttered, while Hillary is the classic Middle American shrew so beautifully described, time after time, by English visitors to the US. They found the men pleasant enough but the women intolerably aggressive, rude, and busybodying. Nixon's father, although he ran a little store, was basically decent blue-collar.
Mr. Sanjay should not feel bad about making this mistake, since trashy people like the Clintons and Kennedys are always held up by the press as some sort of aristocracy. I have unintentionally shocked friends in Europe by inadvertently revealing the truth.
Dr. Fleming, have any of the postbellum presidents been what one may consider upper class in status and manners? I suppose the Roosevelts were upper class by some definitions. But seemingly not resembling gentlemen like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson from the earliest days of what was once the republic. (Most of whom were or were influenced by southern and/or European culture.)
What the "Wikileaks" reveal is that most modern Humans scarcely qualify as intelligent life.
"And these are the people that rule the world." Not for long after the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas and, soon, the Palins or the Romneys or the Huckabees or the Pawlentys.
I don't think there will be any prosecutions. When were Democrats ever prosecuted successfully for anything.
Clinton actually grew up in an upper middle class neighbourhood in Hot Springs. It was not a town of white trash but a town of Chicago gangsters.
@ comment 3:
Well said. And my own personal opinion on progressives is that they are opposed to all things traditional and structured. Why, I hear now the progressives are turning against the Western tradition of daily bathing. Seems it's a wasteful bourgeois practice.
"...the progressives are turning against the Western tradition of daily bathing.
It's been there and done that for them, Jonathan. In the late 60s, my mother was a clerk in a Sears department store. Once, she was overpowered by a ghastly smell. Turning around to see where it was coming from, the source was some hippies who wanted to buy saucepans.
Billy Blythe was born to a small storekeeper's daughter who had married a traveling salesman. His stepfather was a cardealer in Hot Springs, but according to the President he was an alcoholic who beat his wife. While it is a little cruel to call him trailer trash on the basis of his antecedents, he lived the part. Ma Clinton, of course, got connected with the mob but that did little to improve her morals or manners.
It was not a town of white trash but a town of Chicago gangsters.
Yes, but the gangsters catered to the same economic base that Mr. Clinton glorified and helped create as our President ---- Consumer based!!. The old brothels and hot spring houses in those days had standards and horse racing was still considered the Sport of Kings -- The shrimp on race days was always flown in fresh from Louisiana.
It wasn't Churchill Downs of course, but it wasn't as bad as it later became after Mr. Clinton was made Governor and he and his wife occupied the Governors Mansion. And although the Arkansas Supreme Court did eventually disbar him and pull his license to practice law, the Yankees in New York welcomed the family with open arms.
It is my opinion that Western Civilization is being quietly preserved in the homes of countless Christian homeschoolers across the land everyday.
Because, after all, Western Civilization is nothing apart from Christianity. Therefore, it seems best it would now be saved by Christians quietly struggling against the Dark Ages coming now.
And I say this now, as my 17 year old scholar toils away at the kitchen table. He's studying Eusibus I believe.
Dr Wilson and Robert are both right. Of course, the native middle and upper classes kept up a normal Southern lifestyle for their day and age back when gambling was there, and mostly didn't mix with the mob, though the rampant corruption might have had it's influence on them. That life is no more now, but it's demise had little to do with the end of gambling.
There are still some good things about the city, but it's become a parody of what it was even just twenty years ago, much less the still recognisably Southern, but declining, community it was back in the seventies. It's an alien world now.
Robert, you are right on another point: It all changed during the Clinton 'governorship', throughout the state.
I think the Wiki Leaks capers also reveal something else: weakness. The government may not have been able to foresee or prevent the first big leak, but why not, with all it's PATRIOT act powers, and the ability to work with foreign enforcement agencies, just shut Wiki Leaks down and crack down on the offenders at that point? There is the appearance of incompetence here, and muddleheadedness.
Why does someone feel free to openly and boldly defy the authorities so blatantly and enormously, as has been done in this case? I'm beginning to think that people no longer fear the government, much less consider the moral questions of revealing such information. If that's the case, then Belshazzar had better look at the writing on the wall. Moral authority is completely gone.
#14 Wiki Leaks,
The Economist presented the New Media Award, to Wikileaks a few years back for ,"Having faced down an attempt by an investment bank to have it shut down, wikileaks continues to be an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists."
I wonder what went wrong? I guess the nuts must have blown the wrong whistle on the wrong investigative journalists?