Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Pravda sticks it to ‘trucker-type’ Clinton

washingtonpost.com

U.S.-Russian relations may have truly hit bottom. A vicious, over-the-top newspaper column Sunday blasted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying Russian and Chinese vetoes of an Arab League-backed peace plan for Syria were “despicable.”

The column in Pravda — formerly a commie house organ and now apparently in that same mode — was headlined “Despicable is Hillary Clinton.”

“She started four years ago as a charming Secretary of State, the smile on the snout to wipe out the snarl of her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.”

But now, it continued, “she appears on camera butch, a trucker-type probably complete with tattoos, insolent, inconsequential and incompetent. We now understand Bill.”

The screed slides, with increasing incoherence, downhill from there, rehashing her 2008 campaign embellishment of her landing in Bosnia “under fire,” and then smacking her for blowing a “very easy” shot at the presidency. “Did she pull it off? No she didn’t.”

Russia and China only “exercised their right to block NATO’s evil desire to make another Libya out of Syria,” the column says. That would be bad? At least the Libyan government, as opposed to Russian ally Syria, was not engaged in a full-scale bombardment of women and children, last time we checked.

But Clinton’s not the only one who’s “despicable.” We quickly get to the “Gulf Royals, unelected, but in power,” and not a word of protest from the administration even though the regimes “have carried out the most draconian measures against their citizens.” (As opposed to a full-scale bombardment of women and children, see above.)

The ravings pivot further to “Despicable is the United States of America and its policy of torture flights.” And Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Lynndie England and “arm[ing] terrorists overseas, as was the case in Libya and as is the case in Syria.” (Full-scale bombardment of women and children, see above.)

“Despicable, then, . . . is Hillary R. Clinton and the hellhole that she represents,” the column concludes, noting that Russia and China were not “involved” in any of those “human rights violations” mentioned.

Of course there was Hungary, Poland, Chechnya, Tibet, Tiananmen Square — but we digress.

Team Clinton was furious with the column, we hear. In truth, “despicable” was a most undiplomatic term. Probably better to say “reprehensible.”

What happened to the U.S.-Russia “reset” button? Oh, yeah, ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has it — but the Russians are barely acknowledging his presence.

The more things change

The Capitol, that grand and glorious building towering above the city, draws nearly 3 million visitors each year.

Few of them know that the iconic structure and the dome are the result of the steadfast efforts of one key senator back in the 1850s.

That was Sen. Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi Democrat and also secretary of war, who left town to head the Confederacy before the building, though well underway, was completed.

Our former colleague Guy Gugliotta, in his new book, “Freedom’s Cap,” gives us a fascinating tale of the struggles to design, fund and construct the new Capitol — at a time when the country was expanding and, at the same time, lurching toward war.

Most of us learn precious little in history class about that period: Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott , two exceptionally pathetic presidents — Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan — and not a whole lot more.

But Gugliotta weaves a narrative of the massive construction project and the politics surrounding it. We see how Davis and others foresaw that the still-new nation would become a great power — and deserving of a great building for its seat of government — amid signs that a civil war over slavery was increasingly inevitable.

Indeed, it seems that the notion of constructing the building was about the only thing Northern and Southern lawmakers could agree on.

Washington observers will be delighted to read that some things never change here. There was constant skirmishing over just about everything, starting with intense bureaucratic infighting between the Army and the Interior Department over control of the effort — the Army won — and including disputes over whether to use federal workers or to contract out.

The lawmakers bickered over the scope and design of the project and the yearly funding for it. Lobbyists fought over lucrative contracts while losers pushed for bogus investigations.

There were selective media leaks to undermine political enemies as well as outraged protests from the Know-Nothing party — a nativist, anti-Catholic group — that Italian and Irish immigrants were taking jobs from Americans.

Some things, of course, were slightly different. By December 1859 a large number of lawmakers were armed, Gugliotta writes, and a “near-riot began” when a pistol accidentally fell out of one lawmaker’s pocket.

“The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife,” one senator wrote, “are those who have two revolvers.”

Gugliotta dryly observes: “The age of accommodation was over.”

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