For many Americans — both Republican and Democrat — the drama of 2016 consisted of deciding not so much who to vote for, but rather who to vote against, and how. There were basically two ways to handle the “how.” You could abstain or vote for the candidate of the other party you would never have chosen to vote for in any other election, just to make sure.

By abstaining, you could have the satisfaction of knowing that at least the one who ended up losing was someone you didn’t want to win. You could even vote for a third-party candidate just to prove that you cared enough to vote, offering yourself the satisfaction that comes from knowing that you didn’t assist the one you most disliked, even if its candidate ended up winning. It was a unique quandary in the history of US elections.

The good side of it was that both candidates were so off-putting that if you did end up voting for one of them, you at least had the satisfaction of knowing that you did your democratic duty by voting against the other.

Hillary Clinton lost the election because more Democrats found themselves in that situation than Republicans. Thanks to the latest stance Clinton has taken, some Democrats who chose not to vote for her in 2016, however much they may now regret what they’ve seen of Trump presidency, will now have the satisfaction of knowing that their successful effort to prevent her from winning wasn’t in vain.

Trump turned out to be a joke — a sick joke. The Donald has tried to play at being a politician and has failed miserably. Hillary is not a joke. She is so thoroughly a humorless political animal that she long ago stopped being a rational human being. Now we know that she is mad, psychotic, bonkers, paranoid, off her rocker — choose your favorite epithet. At least she has now had the decency to make that point clear to everyone.

Interviewed by David Plouffe, Clinton commented on the current presidential primary race, with an unsubtle allusion to Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii: “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Russians:

An imaginary foreign populace whose culture focuses on a single unique objective: discrediting both the Democratic Party and the military-financial complex that supports it, and, more specifically, preventing anyone named Hillary Clinton from being elected.

Contextual Note

As all good Democrats and liberal TV commentators know, or at least believe, in 2016, for the first time in America’s history, the Russians successfully compromised the purity of the nation’s pristine democracy. An entire nation, whose territory spreads across the length of the Eurasian continent, has colluded to deviously engineer the election of Donald Trump. It was even a form of lèse-majesté, since it barred the pre-planned accession and coronation of Hillary Clinton as the 45th chief executive of the US government and commander-in-chief of the most overwhelmingly powerful military force in human history.

For the past three years, good Democrats have tried to believe this is true, even if the Mueller report was unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the winner of the election was in on the collusion. They also believe that, as a constant of history, it will be even truer in 2020. And now Hillary has opened up to tell us exactly what the Russians are up to. They’ve secretly drafted and programmed Tulsi Gabbard, a woman who didn’t need to be drafted into the US military because she volunteered and did two tours of service in combat zones during the never-ending wars that then-Senator Hillary Clinton clamorously voted to support.

Hillary is the first to reveal that the Russians not only hack DNC emails, but they “groom” Manchurian candidates to defeat anyone who deigns to represent the Democratic establishment. But instead of revealing what she “thinks” is the treasonous role of Tulsi Gabbard in the presidential primary campaign, Clinton unveils what many have often suspected, without being able to point to more than circumstantial evidence: that Clinton is not so much an asset but a full-fledged member of the oligarchic military-financial-industrial complex.

Gabbard responded with insulting words, calling Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” Unlike Clinton, Gabbard cites easily verifiable evidence that includes Clinton’s unbending support of George W. Bush’s wars and her disastrous and cynical — even sadistic — initiative, as secretary of state, to invade Libya.

Gabbard has also seized the occasion to tell her own well documented story as a Democratic Party insider pushed to the outside in 2016 for insubordination (supporting Bernie Sanders). The history of the Clinton family’s transformation of the Democratic Party into a lobbying arm for the military-industrial economy and the intelligence community has been on display throughout the last four presidencies for all to see.

In the 2016 election, none of this was evident enough for traditional Democratic Party voters to appreciate the danger Clinton represents. Her current bout of public paranoia, consistent with the entire Russiagate fiasco designed principally to provide an excuse for her loss to an unqualified opponent, clarifies not only what Clinton represents but also the deepest operating principles of the Democratic Party and the media complex it has created and relied on for support. As Gabbard explains: “From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.” In August, the Daily Devil’s Dictionary commented on this obvious campaign spearheaded in the media by the New York Times.

The ultimate irony of Clinton’s apparently ingrained taste for conspiracy theories will not please her. Despite all the very real damage done by the media’s concerted assault against Gabbard, this incident has given an unexpected boost to the congresswoman’s campaign.

Historical note

Although the US and Germany fought in the two World Wars as absolute enemies, historians have noticed some significant patterns of convergence in the evolution of both nations’ political, financial and industrial structures. Just as US law, political practice and scientific experimentation in eugenic inspired the racist laws of Nazi Germany, the model of military, industrial and to some extent social organization of Hitler’s Germany became a source of inspiration for the development of the US military-industrial complex after the war.

In the 1960s, awareness of the impact of the military-industrial complex emerged as the outgoing president and former general, Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, in a solemn speech identified it as a fundamental and growing threat to US political culture. Some attribute President John Kennedy’s assassination to the fear that he may have opposed its growing power.

Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam split the party in two, and may have been the motive behind a second Kennedy assassination, when Robert Kennedy was killed after securing the votes for the Democratic nomination in 1968. The internal rift over the policy in Vietnam momentarily pushed the Democratic Party in the direction of preferring peace to war and aggravating its suspicions of the intelligence community that played a guiding role in military-industrial complex.

After two Republicans presidents — Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. — a new Democratic president from Arkansas worked to redefine the party’s policies and electoral strategy. The New Democrats saw themselves as a solid pillar of the financial, military and industrial, and even penal, establishment. Bill Clinton defined a Third Way that effectively reduced dissonance by imposing a centrist credo hardly distinguishable from traditional Republican policy. 

The traditional thinkers and active politicians of the Democratic left — the heirs of Roosevelt’s New Deal — found themselves outside looking in. They briefly placed their hopes for regaining a voice in the party in a candidate who challenged Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries and promised hope and change. Once elected, Barack Obama opted for continuity rather than change and selected Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state. In everyone’s mind, that put her next in line and even a shoe-in for the presidential succession. Somehow, she managed the feat of losing to Donald Trump and then promptly blaming it on the Russians.

Tulsi Gabbard claims that we can now see Hillary Clinton for who she is and has always been — a military-industrial-complex insider. Another political personality, the former democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, deposed by a coup Clinton allowed to happen, gave his own description of her and her decision-making in a 2015 interview:

“She is a very capable woman, intelligent, but she is very weak in the face of pressures from groups that hold power in the United States, the most extremist right-wing sectors of the US government, known as the hawks of Washington. She bowed to those pressures and that led US policy to Honduras to be ambiguous and mistaken. On the one hand, they condemned the coup, but on the other hand they were negotiating with the leaders of the coup.”

For Zelaya, on the one hand, she’s a liberal Democrat and, on the other hand, she’s an “asset” not just of the military-industrial complex, but of the neocon hawks who define its strategy. 

In one final irony, we have just learned that the current president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, compromised in a major scandal of drug trafficking for which his brother was found guilty in a US court on Friday. Hernandez represents the heritage of the hugely corrupt regime resulting from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision-making in 2009. 

[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.