USA

The Presidency of Hilary Clinton: A Cautionary Tale

/ Anthony Matijas / Leave a comment

The looming election of Hillary Clinton as the first woman president of the United States will be the opening of the final act in a revenge tale spanning multiple decades that saw her patiently biding her time before she could assume the office and take on the executive powers established by George W. Bush, and accelerated by Barack Obama, whereby the president could assassinate anyone in the world with no checks, balances, or oversight; even if they are US citizens, even if they are innocent of all crimes.

The one person worried most about this unprecedented rise of authoritarianism in America has not been some jihadist fomenting unrest in Syria, Iraq, or Yemen; not some lone wolf terrorist enthusiast ready to write his own jihad fan fiction in blood on the streets of a Western metropolis. No, it has been Monica Lewinsky watching the skies with growing unease over the past eight years, wondering at what altitude one could spot a predator drone, or whether or not she would be able to hear the hellfire missile when it came for her, even for a second; affording her enough time to reflect upon the days when she slept with the most powerful man in the world, never considering that his wife would one day become the most powerful person on the planet.

Watching the inauguration from an apartment she will henceforth not leave for months, Lewinsky will already have given up. In the early days of the Obama presidency, with Clinton as his Secretary of State, she still had hopes she could get off the grid. Live in the mountains, the desert, somewhere remote, sparsely populated, and beautiful; pay her rent by selling hand-knit doodads on Etsy via some alias, and remain anonymous. She knows better than that now. There is no grid, only a net, and the NSA has long ago caught her and her online personae within it, not to mention her semi-famous face and a back-story bordering on the legendary which still gets her recognized on a daily basis for certain deeds she never wanted once to define her as a person.

Lewinsky will survive the first years of a second Clinton’s presidency, owing not the least to the patience of her tormentor, who has waited so long that she could wait a few more years. Yet this patience, so conducive to cold-blooded revenge, will ultimately be Lewinsky’s salvation; as a newly aligned Supreme Court, tilted to the left by a Democrat administration’s appointed liberal judges, will stun the legal community and civil libertarians by ruling that the presidency of Hilary Clinton must, by law, pass the Bechdel Test. The dissenting opinion, a three word missive that will read, “Bitches be crazy,” will be universally acknowledged as the most succinct summation of the court’s views over the last 226 years, though now somewhat dated. The concurring opinions accompanying the majority view will go on to state that some cum stains are just incidental to the physical act of love, that the Other Woman is not the one who is cheating on his wife, and that the president cannot assassinate a US citizen unless they have done something truly ghastly such as having been born in the wrong country or having unpopular political opinions.

Historic agreement between US and China promises to not make history

/ Anthony Matijas / Leave a comment
REUTERS/Jacquelyn Martin/Pool

REUTERS/Jacquelyn Martin/Pool

In what has been described as “a unique, cooperative effort between China and the United States,” by American Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States and China have agreed to work together on climate change.  The historic agreement, which was announced in a joint statement issued at the end of Kerry’s tour of China, promises that the two nations will “collaborate through enhanced policy dialogue, including the sharing of information regarding their respective post-2020 plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions.”

What makes these noncommittal and inspiring words so significant, is that China and the United States are not only the two dirtiest carbon-spewing nations in the world, they also habitually portray the other as the chief obstacle to international action on global warming.  China has long argued that it is the legacy of western industrialization that is most responsible for climate change, and it should be able to continue to burn as much fossil fuel as it can to become as rich as it desires because the US and others did so already.  In the meantime, it should be up to the rest of the world to cut down on their carbon emissions, preferably by purchasing solar panels and windmills made in China.

The Americans, for their part, have chosen to ignore the fact that allowing developing nations more leeway to pollute while crafting an international agreement on reducing those same pollutants actually succeeded in lowering CFC emissions with the Montreal Protocol of 1987.  They insist that China must be subject to the same limitations on greenhouse gases as the US, if they are to agree to anything.  The logic being, apparently, that global warming is too serious an issue for the world to wait for China to catch up, but not too serious an issue that it can’t wait for two rival nations with incompatible economic systems and ideologies to come to an agreement.

Of course, things will be different now that China and the US have opened a dialogue.  With a little bit of luck, their agreement to start talking about maybe eventually doing something about this global warming thing will lead to a further agreement to definitely start doing something soon probably.

One day, after a future Republican administration, motivated by the fact that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by aborition-addict hippy chicks and socialist jihadi atheists, scraps every environmental policy, every empty gesture, token agreement, and half-measure made under Obama; and after the Chinese government, fully aware of the extent to which the West is simultaneously terrified of its success and nervous that its economy will falter, decides to abandon any agreement which it finds inconvenient just because it can; after some, but perhaps not all, of the worst predictions of climate scientists have befallen us; we can look back at this day as an unforgettable, historic moment when nothing really happened.