Joel Bleifuss, the long time editor and publisher, apparently for life, of In These Times has a short piece up in which he whines about some journalists pointing out that in all of the hullabaloo over Hillary Clinton's period of Secretary of State, forgotten seems to be that there is no evidence she ever did anything improper and certainly nothing illegal. He names several, Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum and takes a swipe at Sidney Bluementhal accusing the others of wishing to join him, the former In These Times correspondent in Boston, in the halls of power. It's an especially stupid accusation, especially to make it against Kevin Drum, but it is a small hint to the method of this kind of lefty effort. I will quote a passage from Drum because it makes the real point that Bleifuss takes exception to:
So now we have some more emails related to Hillary Clinton, and what have we learned? The crown prince of Bahrain wanted to meet with the Secretary of State, and in addition to making a request through normal channels he also talked to someone at the Clinton Foundation, who then called Huma Abedin. The meeting took place, which is entirely unexceptional since meeting with people like this is the Secretary of State's job. There's no indication that the extra push by the Foundation had any particular effect.
Another time, someone at the Foundation called Abedin to see if she could expedite a visa. She said this made her nervous, and the Foundation guy backed off.
On another occasion, a lobbyist who had formerly been a Democratic staffer asked for a meeting with her client, a coal company executive. Abedin blew her off.
We might yet find a smoking gun in all these emails. But so far, the trend is clear: lots of people talked to Huma Abedin to try to set up meetings with Hillary Clinton. Generally speaking, Abedin treated them politely but told them to get lost. That's about it.
If some of these efforts had succeeded, that would hardly be noteworthy. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time. What's really noteworthy about the most recent email releases is that they demonstrate a surprisingly high level of integrity from Hillary Clinton's shop at Foggy Bottom. Huma Abedin was tasked with running interference on favor seekers, and she seems to have done exactly that. There's no evidence at all that being a donor to the Clinton Foundation helped anyone out.
The real point is that what Hillary Clinton's office was doing was the kind of thing that the Secretary of State and her office do all the time. While you might criticize someone at the Clinton Foundation for making an approach to Huma Abedin, there is no evidence that even that had any undue influence on the actions of Hillary Clinton or her office while she was Secretary of State. As Kevin Drum asks,
So tell me again what the issue is here?
To which Bleifuss apparently holds, he doesn't have to find an issue, using the ever vague and ever flexible and creative standard of "an appearance of a conflict of interest" and he, by virtue of his claim as a journalist, apparently doesn't even have to find an interest to be conflicted, he can just assert one exists.
The issue here is not whether we can find a smoking gun establishing a quid pro quo exchange. Smart operators (like Gulf State autocrats and their contacts in the State Department) don’t produce paper trails of receipts or memoranda confirming transactional corruption. For this reason, principled public officials avoid the mere “appearance of impropriety” lest they expose themselves to reasonable inferences of corruption. This is a tenet that any judge who has recused herself from a case understands—and with which any graduate of Yale Law School is familiar.
However, in order for there to be a quid pro quo, you have to establish that a quid and a quo, or even one of them, exists. You need that much before you can construct an interest to appear to be conflicted over. His straw grasping would seem to leave out a far more important reason for the Secretary of State to have contact with Gulf State autocrats.
What clear-eyed observer would not deny that the U.S. failure to strongly condemn Bahrain’s oppression of its Shia majority might somehow be related to the warm rapport between the Bahrainian monarchy and American elites—ties nurtured through many relationships, including, perhaps, through Crown Prince Salman’s contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative?
A clear-eyed observer would look at what happened under Hillary Clinton's leadership of the State Department and the encouragement of the Bahrain government to end the oppression of the Shia population. You can google her statement on the release of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report:
Our countries have many shared, strategic interests and a relationship that includes decades of working together to defend regional security. In this context, it is essential for Bahrainis themselves to resolve the issues identified in the report and move forward in a way that promotes reform, reconciliation, and stability.
We are deeply concerned about the abuses identified in the report, and urge the Government and all elements of Bahraini society to address them in a prompt and systematic manner. The Government of Bahrain has committed to establish a follow-on committee to implement the report’s recommendations, and we urge full and expeditious implementation of these recommendations.
It is noteworthy that the government of Bahrain commissioned the inquiry. What would Bleifuss suggest? That the American Secretary of State refuse to speak to the government? While, as opposed to the impotent fire breathing of lefty magazine scribblage, the diplomatic language sounds weak, that's the language they deal in. Something more in the I.T.T. style would be a diplomatic excuse to drop discussion of the issue. Also lost would seem to be the reality that an American Secretary of State has very limited influence to wield over a very rich government half-way across the world.
It’s an economy of power that is corrupt … and that corrupts. But systems can be changed. When In These Times was founded 40 years ago, we pledged to confront the “political taboo” of corporate capitalism.
And I'm sure it feels very satisfying to be Mr. Bleifuss when they make their confrontation, a confrontation that might be read, literally, by a few thousand, or more likely hundred people who don't exercise any influence. I doubt much happens when The Nation does that, or Mother Jones. That satisfaction is an entity in the politics of the imagination as opposed to the politics of things that actually happen and make things happen. Anyone who doesn't see that it is better to have Hillary Clinton as president as opposed to a man who believes we should have "just taken all the oil" in his own, even more extravagant and more dangerous play-time imaginings is living in a lefty La-la land. The purity lefties, the posing process lefties, the "more speech" lefties, Greens, principled non-voters, etc. all live there instead of in reality. This is the year I've realized, once and for all time that such people are a huge part of why the left lost power and why they have to be thrown aside if it is ever to gain power.
You wonder how that little matter of OIL got left out of his analysis.
As to that small clue I mentioned, it is part of this kind of lefty effort to use the success of someone of the left to exercise influence as a means of discrediting them, even using such a figure to make accusations against other lefties that they aspire to exercise influence and actually do something in reality instead of in the pages of a little read magazine. You have to wonder why lefties who want to actually do something in reality is something they figure earns scorn and distrust. It's as if they didn't understand that's the whole point of politics, not their ideological and lifestyle posing.
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