The Co-Optor in Chief
John J. Miller at The Corner links to a really interesting article by Ari Berman in the current issue of The Nation on the doings of the Democracy Alliance —a large group of super-wealthy liberal and Leftist donors (like George Soros and Rob Reiner) who are trying to influence American politics.
As Berman reports (emphases mine):
At an October 2005 meeting at the Château Élan Winery & Resort in Atlanta, Alliance partners agreed to give $28 million to nine groups. A few were smaller, edgier, more progressive organizations, like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog that made headlines by drafting an ethics complaint against Representative Tom DeLay. But the bulk of the money went to familiar names on the DC circuit, like the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank run by Podesta, and Media Matters for America, which monitors right-wing media and media bias, headed by former conservative journalist David Brock.
The small number of groups chosen, some of whom were already well funded, and the secrecy of the process infuriated organizations excluded from the club. No one knew exactly why the nine groups had been picked. Funding progressive infrastructure was all well and good, but no one bothered defining precisely what “progressive” meant. The partners themselves, with their business backgrounds, focused on the process by which groups were funded, not what they would do with the money. “There was an almost complete lack of actual substance,” one adviser to a major donor said of the Atlanta meeting. The groups were selected to mirror the right but were far less anti-establishment than their conservative counterparts.
I don’t know what that last sentence means, but I know what this means. At the Alliance’s next meeting here in Austin last May:
A surprise guest at the meeting was Bill Clinton, whose agenda seemed to be protecting his wife. But things didn’t work out quite as planned. When Guy Saperstein, a retired lawyer from Oakland, asked Clinton if Democrats who supported the war should apologize, the former President “went fucking ballistic,” according to Saperstein. Forget Hillary, Clinton said angrily during a ten-minute rant; if I was in Congress I would’ve voted for the war. “It was an extraordinary display of anger and imperiousness,” Saperstein says.
The willingness to challenge Clinton at least temporarily reassured progressive Democrats that partners in the Alliance had a spine and wouldn’t be a front group for “Hillary ‘08.” But Clinton’s response was a not-so-subtle warning to partners to avoid divisive issues, like the war, that might harm his wife in the next presidential election. Hillary herself has had a number of one-on-one sit-downs with members of the board, as has Howard Dean.
Looks to me like the Clintons are still running things among the Democrats and the so-called “progressive” movement. They’re going to use their popularity among the money-men, Big Media, and the party’s base to completely screw the anti-war liberals and the Far Left.
Watch it happen, baby. Clinton’s third term is riding on Hillary’s back: don’t waste your time trying to derail this monster.
Just throw on your prettiest blue dress and get on your knees.
