Career Day: Aid Worker, or Mass Murderer?  One Will Make You Rich

     I'm not a journalist.  I went to school for different purposes; I read literature and studied world religions, played music and made a strong effort to understand music theory.  I didn't study politics in an academic setting.  In 1984, during the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale contest, I began thinking on my own about politics.  My parents, Democrats, never spoke kindly of Republicans.  My father hated Richard Nixon.  I heard him say, "I voted against that bastard five times."  I look back at my own presidential voting choices: Mondale, Dukakis, didn't vote in 1992, Nader, Nader, Kerry, Obama, Obama.  Democrat, Democrat, abstention, Green, Green, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, and in 2016 I'll vote Green for Jill Stein.  Three Green votes, five Democratic, one abstention, making a mix reflecting my variable mind since I was twenty years old.
     My lack of journalistic practice helps explain how I approach research and the presentation in writing of details.  I combine a fiction writer's use of prose with a use of source materials not bound to a reporter's conventions.  I read an article about some aspect of the Global War on Terror, for instance, and find that elements of the information soak into my mind; later, I may recall something from that article and just write it down in a post without citing its origin.  I don't pretend to be a journalist, but rather an essayist combining a variety of techniques to convey my point of view.  Cable news networks are partly characterized by their "experts," their "pundits," their think tank spokespersons, all of whom have points of view, none of whom possess absolute authority, but rather use their time before the cameras arguing for the agendas of their masters: corporations, the superrich, the government, the defense industry.
     How I differ from any cable news pundit or corporate shill is a matter of degree.  I don't offer my viewpoints for the sake of getting people in the Middle East killed, for example, as Dick Cheney and scores of politicians, Democrat and Republican, did in 2002 and 2003 in the propaganda effort to overcome Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein, possessor of imaginary weapons of mass destruction.  Hillary Clinton, a Senator then, believed, or so she recently told Chris Matthews of MSNBC, that Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program, in spite of United Nations evidence to the contrary that Iraq's nuclear weapons research program had been dissolved by international weapons inspectors in 1991 after Operation Desert Storm.  Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense in 1991, would have known about Hussein's lack of nuclear weapons capability, just as Senator Clinton in 2002 and 2003, along with a majority of U.S. politicians who voted to destroy Iraqi society and its people, could have and should have known that the Hussein-has-WMD story was a fiction.  Further thought should've led Clinton and her pro-war colleagues to wonder about why Cheney and Bush were manipulating them into committing an act of war against a nation posing no threat to the United States; the kind of thing an aggressive and dangerous power does for the sake of long term strategies benefiting, in this case, oil corporations, which have Americans in a tight crotch grip, given our habit of self-transportation using gasoline, a substance linked to the Bush-Cheney administration in their past dealings with oil speculation and development projects; in other words, their area of interest.
     All these things I learned from reading books and articles that Hillary Clinton could have read.  I assume that I, as a layman, am not as well-informed on national and world issues as Mrs. Clinton.  If I can figure this shit out, I assume she also knows about it; that her response to Chris Matthews about Hussein's "nuclear capability," supposedly believed in by her and a Legislative majority in 2002 and 2003, is a lie covering the darker reality that Senator Clinton, wife of the man who relentlessly bombed Iraq during his presidency and enforced a sanctions regime which killed through neglect about a half a million children, wanted Iraq's leadership changed so that Cheney's vision of Iraq as a U.S. gas station could be enacted.  She looked at the evidence, like other politicians did, saw, since she's smart, that it was bullshit but adequate enough to look convincing for the time being, and gave her support in a Senatorial vote to Bush and Cheney's desire to acquire black gold by rendering Iraqi human flesh immobile and bloody.  The news networks cooperated, as they always do, being corporate-owned, concentrating on such pointless spectacles as the bringing down of a Saddam Hussein statue (with the aid of an American tank) on April 9, 2003, showing cheers of Iraqi men, most of whom are probably now dead or displaced, or fighting against the United States.
     Hillary Clinton, then, has demonstrated her bloodthirstiness.  One of her campaign bright points is that she "cares about children."  Sure, American children, some of them, anyway.  I haven't heard much about her plan, if any, to help the poisoned children of Flint, Michigan, who are the victims of a still sitting Republican governor not currently pacing in a prison cell.
     Nor has she mentioned, in any of her three presidential debates against Trump, the plight of Yemen and its people, currently and for the last year and a half, victimized by the United States in its support of Saudi Arabia's war against Houthis.  I've never heard her say anything about President Obama's drone strikes in Yemen that have killed numerous civilians, including children, those representatives of humanity that Mrs. Clinton claims to care about.  Many of those strikes occurred during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, making her, obviously, privy to their bloody facts.
     Her opponent, Donald Trump, continues to reveal himself as an incompetent boob.  One difference between the two candidates is never talked about on cable news: Trump, unlike Clinton, has never made a governmental policy decision affecting the lives, and causing the deaths, of millions of people.  Hillary Clinton's stain on humanity is real, but that just means, in some sad respects, she's an American politician playing games with foreigners' lives, an old habit of those who want to control the world.  Trump, too, wants control of an unsavory sort.  He has affected news media and the manipulation of images, has further poisoned an already diseased body, making the American political process an absurdity.  This devolution of political discourse, of ideas, will continue into the near future, making the 2020 election cycle even worse and more degenerate than that of 2016, meaning that the character of a human being wanting to be president is on the same level as that of a violent criminal.

                                                                            Vic Neptune