Hillary has a hot time at Cafe Havana in Cartagena
** Such a toughie with the Castros, but not so much with the Honduran boyz, but whatever everybody shake it
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=499540&version=1&template_id=43&parent_id=19
abc news photo:
http://abcnews.go.com/meta/search/imageDetail?format=plain&source=http%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2Fimages%2FPolitics%2Fgty_hillary_clinton_columbia_jt_120415
Clinton dances after midnight at Cafe Havana
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday went dancing after midnight at Cafe Havana, a Cartagena bar known for its Cuban music, after a day of diplomacy at the Summit of the Americas.
Accompanied by security agents, Clinton had a drink at the salsa bar and then danced with a posse of her female aides, relaxing after a day at the side of US President Barack Obama at the roughly 30-nation summit, which excluded Cuba.
“She looked like she was having a great time,” said a person who saw Clinton at the bar and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pictures of the outing, which began late because Clinton was at an official dinner until past midnight, emerged on the Internet, including one that showed her dancing beneath a sign that read “Havana.”
A US State Department official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed Clinton went dancing at the bar. Asked if she had fun, the official replied: “A lot.”
The bar is about as close as Clinton is likely to come to Cuba, which remains under a US trade embargo more than 50 years after Fidel Castro seized power on the Caribbean island and ushered in an era of communist rule.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The thousands of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists and others slaughtered by the U.S.-funded and "trained" Colombian military and the FIVE MILLION peasants brutally displaced from their farm lands by state terror, in Colombia, are of no moment to Secretary Clinton. It's fun time for the rich and the corporate in Cartagena!
It's very difficult for me to dis someone for having a good time. But I really have to. Why isn't she visiting the mass graves? Why isn't she receiving delegations of the survivors of the death squads, for instance, those suing Drummond Coal (of Alabama)? (Instead she sends a letter to the judge warning him against requiring the testimony of Alvaro Uribe, former president and 'mafia boss' of Colombia under the Bush Junta, for "national security" reasons? What might those be?) Why isn't she visiting the slums where FIVE MILLION peasant farmers, brutally displaced from their lands, now live in urban squalor--a slave labor pool for our corporate masters and Colombian fascists? Why isn't she investigating the U.S. embassy involvement in Uribe's vast, illegal domestic spying scandal and other U.S. crimes, including war crimes? (What was that State Department "fine" of Blackwater all about, for "unauthorized training of foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan"?) What about the Pentagon/USAID "pacification" program that resulted in a massacre in La Macarena, Colombia?
So many horrors. So many well-grounded suspicions. So many unanswered questions. So many SECRETS!
And she drinks beer and dances to make it all go away. Sorry, it sickens me.
I have never liked her plastic smile. And there is actually a part of me that responds positively to seeing a genuine smile on her face, as she celebrates--but what she is celebrating--her ultimate triumph--is a bloodsoaked mountain of bodies and vast, VAST injustice, as Colombia was prepped for transglobal corporate looting and subjugation. And, in fact, the murders continue--as they do also in Honduras.
To me, it is tragic what has become of this potentially great leader, who, in her youth, opposed unjust war. Imagine what she could have been and could have done, to save our own democracy as well as reforming U.S. foreign policy which has been so violent and so utterly hypocritical for such a long time.
Now she's just a tool of the some of the worst evildoers in history.
I want to attribute some good motives to her but I'm probably just projecting. I don't think she planned the Honduran coup. I think it was sprung on her by Bushwhack operatives. And I think, also, that she may be responsible (or partly responsible) for Santos making peace with Chavez and Venezuela. The prior president of Colombia, 'mafia boss' Alvaro Uribe, was a terrible warmonger, in league with the Bush Junta warmongers. That was certainly a change of policy, with Obama/Clinton. But her response to Honduras was to rig an election to legitimize the coup. And her response to the horrors there and in Colombia is to IGNORE THEM. Further, the economic consequences of "free trade for the rich" for both of these countries has already been written, over the past two decades, in Argentina, in Bolivia, in Venezuela, in Guatemala, in Mexico, in Jamaica, in Haiti and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Ruin! The looting and destruction of societies and economies, falling most heavily on workers and the poor. This doesn't concern her either, because the rich and the corporate will prosper. She is their servant and she celebrates their victory over the poor and over democracy itself.
Whether she planned the Honduran coup or not, and whether she is blind to the history of U.S. "free trade for the rich" or not (not to mention the history of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs"
, she is the instrument of these policies. Whether she has, or had, good intentions, or not, she is inflicting these policies on millions of helpless victims.
That I and others had better hopes for her leadership--back a decade and more (before she voted for the Iraq War and before she hired a lobbyist for Colombia to run her presidential campaign)--brings the word "tragedy" to my mind. The classical definition of tragedy is that the potentially great hero of the story is undone by a "tragic flaw." Maybe I'm projecting that Clinton was a potentially great leader. Maybe her "tragic flaw"--the ambition to be a world "player" and to hobnob with the greediest bastards who ever walked the earth--was inherent, in her, from the beginning. Maybe--likely--she was no hero at all, and never had potential to be a good and wise leader. That judgement lay in the future--it will take time and historical perspective.
Right now, I'm sickened by this spectacle. I cannot disassociate it from the graves that she is dancing upon.
