The New York Times has a piece on people who encouraged Chris Christie to run for president before the last election:
Sixty people, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and prominent business executives, sat facing a small table with a phone on it. The phone allowed David Koch, the industrialist and conservative billionaire, and John J. Mack, the former chairman of Morgan Stanley, to call in and encourage his candidacy.
After Mr. Langone announced that the group would raise as much money as Mr. Christie would need, Mr. Kissinger picked up his cane and made his way to the front of the room. (In a previous conversation, Mr. Christie recounts, Mr. Kissinger had told him that he hadn’t “seen a politician connect with someone in a long time” the way Mr. Christie did with people.)
“Your country needs you,” Mr. Kissinger declared, and the room erupted in applause. (Mr. Kissinger declined the author’s request for an interview.)
As Dan Robinson notes (and he also gets the hat tip):
Henry Kissinger intoning,"Your country needs you" should be all the reason needed to run from Christie. http://t.co/kSmI0AbKrF
— Daniel Robinson (@daguro) July 24, 2013
Yes, quite. I know Kissinger is thought of more as village elder these days than as the terrible person he is. It’s also probably a reminder, as if any were necessary, for those of us who are frustrated by the slow pace of change in foreign policy in the Obama administration. If people like Kissinger think there are real differences between him and Obama, then whatever Kissinger wants will be less likely to bomb Cambodia, or whatever the 2013 equivalent of that is.
In his book “A Time for Trumpets, by Charles B. MacDonald, he doesn’t have much complementary to say about Kissenger. A German-speaker, Kissenger was an intelligence officer. But he spent most of the battle in a small house with his German mistress. No one knew where he was, and living with the enemy isn’t exactly a wise thing for an intelligence officer.
Henry Kissinger is a mass murderer, by every measure. His massive deliberate bombing in Cambodia and Laos being only one example, being primarily directed at civilian populations echoes that of Frederick Lindemann’s ideas of “dehousing the enemy” that became American and British military policy during WW2. In spite of the fact that the Germans were considered evil because they themselves deliberately targeted civilians in their bombing campaigns in Belgrade, Stalingrad and Bucharest (among many, many others).
Kissinger was the “go to” thinker for the CIA-supported coup in Chile that saw Salvadore Allende, a democratically elected President overthrown by a cabal of Military officers and that nation being put under martial law for the next 20+ years. He was also one of the primary consultants on the CIA/Cocaine and weapons smuggling ring in El Salvadore, Honduras and Guatemala during the early 1980s, in which nearly half a million civilians were deliberately butchered with the approval and support of the US Government. Oliver North confessed to relatively minor aspects of that operation in order to deflect attention away from the the half-billion dollar Cocaine smuggling operations being conducted by the CIA in Central America.
We’re still fighting the vestiges of that policy. The men the United States Government put in place to manage those operations are now sitting pretty in their gigantic mansions in Mexico, Costa Rica and Columbia. Their lower level operatives are cutting the heads off of civilians with chainsaws, and dumping them in old mine shafts.
I could show you the vids, but I doubt anyone here would want to see that shit.
# 2: Yep, Kissenger doesn’t have any moral qualms. Among many other things, he advised Nixon to extend the Vietnam War by four years, reaching a truce in 1972 which was basically along the same terms offered by the N. Vietnamese in 1968. In recommending the 1972 terms, he and Nixon both agreed that the S. Vietnames government would fall within a few years, but calculated that as long as it fell after the 1976 elections, it would be blamed on the Democrats. But he didn’t expect his resignation at the time, and was off by a year in his time-line (the S. Vietnames government fell in the spring of 1975).
Our church’s Justice & Peace Committee is planning on participating in an upcoming demonstration outside the Bangor Trident base. In preparation for that, they’re planning to have a screening this weekend of “Nuclear Tipping Point”, a film (supposedly) about the need for nuclear disarmament, prominently featuring Kissinger along with Robert McNamara and George Schultz. I’m going to have to be there–I’m the designate “AV guy” for the event. In the planned discussion after the flick I fully intend to ask what seems to be an obvious question: Since these guys had a lot to do with getting us into this mess, why in the world should be listen to anything they have to say now?
Just out of curiosity, how do sixty people fit around a table?
@5 – how the hell is Chris Christe going to fit at the Oval Office desk?
Q;
A: Hoyer lift.
@6
Fat jokes are easy. So is beating Christie nationally.
Montage of Christie speechifying about cutting costs and leaner Government.
Ad one, Footage of the Governor stepping out of the state helicopter, into the limo and driven 100yatds to the kid’s softball game. “Chris Christie, won’t fight for the needs of America, too lazy to walk two blocks. Needs the government to pay for the Car.”
Ad two…same opening, cut between Christie boarding the limo and Willard talking about 48%. “Chris Christie, still fighting for the privilege of being wealthy.”
ad three, same opening. Cut to footage of.Christie, Obama and Sandy damage. “Governor Christie, says he needs smaller government but when his state is in trouble, deep down knows he needs the federal government. If you can’t trust Chris in his ‘core principles’ can you trust him at all?”
Throw in some gay marriage bashing quotes (will the the anti demographic grow or shrink by 2016) and the electoral map looks just like 2012.
“Chris Christie, loves government to spend on him personally, nothing for the middle class. Wrong on transpiration. Wrong on every issue. The democratic national committee is responsible for the contents of this ad.”
The fact Kissinger was given a Nobel Prize provides fodder to wingers who — in their zeal to discredit Nobel Prize recipients like Martin Luther King Jr., Al Gore, Paul Krugman, and Barack Obama — assert that a Nobel Prize isn’t much of a credential. They have, to a certain limited extent, something of a point; on rare occasions you can’t help wondering what the Nobel committee was thinking, or whether they were drunk when they made the selection. Kissinger’s Nobel Prize is one of those.
Big train crash in Spain with dozens reported dead.
Christie is going to look a lot thinner by the next election.
But I’ll give him credit – he’s not been the idealouge that most of the other Republicans have been. Sure, his motives might be mixed – he comes from a largely Democratic state – but at least he was willing to give Pres. Obama credit for the federal response to Hurricane Sandy.
But that just makes him vulnerable to a primary challenge. We may not have to run against him at all.
11)He will survive reelection, but it will be a tough primary fight in 2016. I wished working with the other party was not a liability.
How much did we have to pay Rep. King (R-Idiot) to say that if you’re a Latino your kid is running drugs? We need more Republicans like him.