Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Is Hillary Running for Vice President?: Orlando Patterson - Black man on the phone

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network

Bill Clinton and his Decepticons are now actually running plaintiff wife Hillary for Vice President on an Obama ticket. They can feel it is up for them and Obama will eventually take it. So the chant this week of Unstoppable is to pitch them – Hillary and Obama - as an undeniable unit; bringing them together and bringing Hillary (and Bill, don’t cha know) on a new last chance strategy; a graded 12 year ride – Hillary as VP in ’08, and President in ’12 and ‘16.

It is, of course, absurd that Hillary, running second, would actually call on Obama for VP as she has been saying she would recently. The Clintons have been claiming all these weeks before that Obama is inadequate and suggesting through nuance, as Harvard’s Orlando Patterson says on the op-ed pages of the NYTs this morning, that he is inadequate because he is black. These mnemonic devises amplify and fix in the press as they are inherently propaganda stratigies and are devised and intended to. Clinton here gives the impression that she would without a doubt now select Obama for VP just as she is failing, so that when the tide changes – and it already has – they will still have survivable options: under these radically new, undesirable and unanticipated circumstances Obama should certainly take her as VP as she certainly would undoubtedly have taken him. As a last resort they – Bill, Penn, the Carville Cartel - will send Hillary aboard as VP. As a propaganda strategy it is less slick, less subtle than what usually comes out of Madison Avenue, say, during Super Bowl. It is more akin to what came out of the Soviet Union during the 1950s.

The Clintons are now holding on with their fingernails. Their shills have descended to a quite course application of propaganda; coercing, intimating and intimidating. There are now three parties: The Republicans, the Democrats and the Clintons. Client 9 will again cast the Clintons in shadow and what Spitzer does will reflect on the Democrats as a whole and our country as a whole. And it will contrast with the Clintons in the White House and where they brought us in that ignominious time when Bill was unapologetically tapping the undergraduates. Client 9 further unravels the Clinton Party as its generational apologists who have again and again supported Clinton as Avatar and made the Democratic Party defenders of the indefensible (did somebody say Marc Rich?) are fast coming out of denial.

But this is the Elvis curse. Elvis refuses to leave the building and is an embarrassment to himself and to all of us late in his life. I expect to see Bill in the god suit next; fat, sweating like a pig and drugged, crooning sadly to dead enders in a Las Vegas casino.

Professor Patterson’s perceptive and thoughtful op-ed in today’s NYTs, Red Phone in Black and White, makes the point that Clinton insinuates in the 3 am TV ad, which shows a little white girl frightened in the night, that the girl is afraid because a black man would be answering the phone. He writes:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s "Birth of a Nation," the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

It is interesting that in the comment section of that article several people referred to a "Bogie Man" which, where I grew up in Rhode Island in the 50s, meant a black man. Another commentator suggested that Bill Clinton suggesting someone coming "in the night" to take the election from Hillary was a draw on racist attitudes in a racially polarized state.

Good points. There was indeed something sick and twisted in the clip – an insidious threat; Red Threat or Yellow Peril or H. Rap Brown threatening to burn down the neighborhood: We built it and we're gonna burn it down. Honkies and all.

But for some reason I started thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a classic propaganda film from the 1930s. It was suggested by the tightness of the close up and the coarseness of the heavy-handed telling and the overt propaganda in these early silent films.

Clinton & Co. have adopted language and strategy reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda: Deceive forcefully and the faithful will reinforce. Her claim last week that her time as First Lady gave her experience in foreign policy was in itself enough to gag a horse, but making such an absurd statement with a bunch of Admirals and army guys at her side was reminiscent of the old Politburo propaganda forums which always had puffy-chested Generals standing by with long faces and long rows of medals to accompany Khrushchev's ridiculous pronouncements.

All I could think about was Mrs. Khrushchev. It sounded ridiculous to anyone not in the cult.

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