I have a similar feeling I guess. What’s especially annoying to me is that he’s basically making the head-nodding arguments that were made to justify similar acts on behalf of not only Latin American thugs that we supported, but also what realist conservatives said about Saddam when he was our good buddy. When Rumsfeld, for instance, laughingly shook his hand before he fell out of favor, he had already committed many acts of genocide and brutual crimes in his rise to power. What’s he doing there shaking hands and cutting deals with a mass murderer if these are now suddenly unspeakable crimes that no one could ever countenance or excuse? Obviously, times and political calculus have changed, but no one seems to be acknowledging that in order to condemn Saddam. Suddenly him and his ilk are like these mythical beasts that emerged into the 21st century without any past history with us.
The difference between my, and I hope, your outrage at razing villiages is that we’re opposed to that sort of thing in general, always. Clarkes a pretty evil sonofabitch for defending Saddam BEFORE he was ever a client. But the argument he’s making is something I would hope would inspire a little more soul-searching about an American past that most Americans refuse to own up to or apologize for.
He was the attorney fuckin’ general, for chrissake! You can’t get deeper into the belly of the beast than that. What are you saying, he was some kind of one man commie sleeper? Not even STALIN is a stalinist anymore…
That was almost 40 years ago, and even then it doesn’t guarantee much of anything. Even if he was a Stalinist at this point, much of his work would have involved enforcing the progressive policies of the Johnson administration. I don’t know how much that would have bothered him. As far as the Communism goes, Clark is apparently one of the founders of A.N.S.W.E.R.
By the way, alaric, are you a lawyer? The thread title made me wonder.
B: Do I have to plead as charged, or can we negotiate a lesser included offense?
If I do plead as charged, what sentence is in contemplation?Is this state or federal court, cause if a federal judge is gonna pick the jury, I might as well just plead myself out right now…
Uh, what? Where did I imply that I thought Johnson was a Communist? Because he appointed a guy who later seems to have become a Communist? Because I said a left-winger or Communist might have approved of Johnson’s take on racial or social relations? I think you’ve missed my point.
I was indulging in a little “reductio”–but really, trust me. My godfather was (according to HUAC) the #3 communist in the country while alive. He would have been rendered helpless from laughter to hear Clark OR Johnson described as left-wingers.(Now HE, was, in fact, a stalinist. Which caused me some agita, being as I’m a trotskyite…)
Furthermore, to “become” a communist (let alone a stalinist)at Clark’s advanced age, a particularly lonely enterprise (unless you count the North Koreans)
Unfortunately, you’re continuing to slightly misread what I say. I said a left-winger might have approved of some of Johnson’s social policies, which is quite different from “Johnson was a left-winger.” I’m pretty sure some leftiest DID approve of the Great Society, including Head Start, the “war on poverty,” Medicare and Medicaid. The left certainly likes those things now!
I don’t think anybody said he became a Communist last week.
A Are there any cute girls listening?? No? ) yes, I am.
B:I’m trying to say this:(pace, Lloyd Bentsen…) I’ve known leftists; leftists have been friends of mine, and Ramsey Clark is no leftist.
C:Well, was he then a communist when he was AG, because I swear before Jesus he would be the only communist Attorney General in history?
By advanced age, I meant it’s a pretty heartbreaking endeavor at this point in time, given the ground that has been lost since the days when Lenin and 325 hard men took hold of the largest contiguous land mass in the world…
That’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it, but as I said, he did co-found International A.N.S.W.E.R… I think that’d at least be good evidence he’s a leftist.
I’m not going to play guessing games about what Ramsey Clark believed and when. I don’t know him and I’m not his biographer.
I disagree that Clark is a Stalinist, but other than that I pretty much concur with everything else in the above quote. Clark’s history in the last twenty years has shown that he’s not really interested in justice in the abstract, he just wants to use the court system as a podium to take shots at the United States from. This, among other things, often puts him in conflict with the better interests of the clients he is supposedly representing. The man really is a scumbag.
Besides, if Clark is good for defending Saddam, doesn’t that mean that the opposing lawyers are bad for prosecuting him? If every case has a lawyer who is a champion for truth and justice doesn’t that mean that in every case there is also a lawyer who is opposing truth and justice? Or is it just the process itself that is good, with no regard for the actual content of the cases before it? That makes the court system seem like a hollow mockery of justice. And if it is just the process, shouldn’t you admire Clark just as much if he volunteered to join the team prosecuting Saddam?
As a general proposition, I loathe and detest prosecutors–they are venal extortionists who advance their careers by coercing guilty pleas from the innnocent and by suborning and purchasing perjured testimony when unable to bludgeon acquiescence out of a particularly hard headed defendant.
I once fucked a prosecutor and I felt so dirty it became the topic of three successive therapy sessions.
It IS due process that is at stake–but the state does not need due process–it has all the advantages that a monopoly on the use of force bestows.
Somebody once pointed out that a prosecutor has the option of only taking those cases where he genuinely believes that his side is right; if he doesn’t think somebody is guilty of a crime, then he can choose not to prosecute. So a prosecutor can go through his entire career secure in the belief that he has always pursued justice.
But once somebody has been accused of a crime they always get a defense lawyer. So honest defense lawyers have to admit to themselves that they are sometimes defending people who are actually guilty and are therefore working to thwart justice.
So from that viewpoint, prosecution lawyers are more ethical than defense lawyers.
This “scumbag” supervised the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
He refused to authorize an FBI wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr.
He defended anti-war activist Father Philip Berrigan and American Indian political prisoner Leonard Peltier.
Clark is founder and chairperson of the International Action Center, the largest antiwar movement in the United States.
He is opposed to the glorification of violence. He is opposed to the extreme materialism that ignores the suffering and starvation of children. (I doubt that that has anything to do with “Stalinism,” but it has plenty to do with what we used to call virtue.)
Those who judge his motives harshly don’t know very much about his life and what he has stood for or the judicial background that he came from.
He has also vigorously defended the regimes of Slobodan Milosevic, the aforementioned Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong-Il.
He went to Tehran and participated in a “conference” designed to amass evidence of American crimes in that country. He did that in 1980, while fifty-two of our citizens were still being held hostage in our embassy there, and threatened daily with death.
You are cherrypicking instances in Clark’s life to present him as especially virtuous, and completely ignoring many very vile things he has done.
(Besides, the International Action Center is not as virtuous an organization as you might think.)
Are there any cute girls listening?? No? ) yes, I am.