Wesley Clark's Jewish connections: Part IV

Part IV: Calling General Backtrack!

There's also something else Clintonesque about Clark, and that is propensity for playing fast and loose with the truth: He vacillates, equivocates and prevaricates, when a simple statement of fact is all that's required. He can make what appears to be an unequivocal statement, only to reverse himself abruptly. And this isn't something that can be attributed to ignorance, for, having finished first in his class at West Point and with a Master's degree in economics from Oxford, this isn't a man who's exactly intellectually challenged. What follow are only a few examples of his duplicitous use of the English language.

In 1999 while commander of NATO forces fighting in Kosovo, Clark told a news serve that the deaths of as many as 70 ethnic Albanians had come at the hands of the Serbs, yet the next day NATO officials offered a retraction, saying that an American pilot had mistakenly taken the victims for a military convoy. (See "Kosovo" in Time magazine's "Notebook" for 4/26/99) So, why did Clark feel compelled to circulate what turned out to be a false rumor, instead of merely saying he didn't know? Could it be to cover the nature of his bombings, which included the targeting of residential and other non-military areas? (More on this in the next section.)

Just weeks before formally announcing his candidacy, this exchange occurred on CNN's Crossfire program:

Q: Would you sign the partial-birth abortion bill, which is about to be passed by Congress?
CLARK: I don't know whether I'd sign that bill or not. I'm not into that detail on partial-birth abortion. In general, I'm pro-life--excuse me, I'm pro-abortion rights. (from On the Issues: Wesley Clark on Abortion)

How could anyone the least bit knowledgeable about the subject of abortion—as is any reasonably literate American, whcih obviously includes Clark—not know the difference between pro-life and pro-abortion? The answer is that he couldn't, unless, of co

urse, it was a matter of him being unclear as to what seemed at the time to be the expedient thing to say, the stand most likely to position him favorably with the voters. Or could it be he was trying to subliminally put in the back of the minds of viewers who might not have been paying full attention that they heard "somewhere" that he was pro-life? Then again, to chose a slightly (but only slightly) less manipulative, but more likely motive, perhaps it shows that Clark, who admits to having voted twice for Reagan and "probably" (?) voted for Nixon, once may actually have been pro-life and, so, is still in the process of reinventing himself into a liberal Democrat. (Clark waffles on war How can someone not remember who he voted for, unless he's suffering from some mental impairment, which certainly isn't the case with Clark? Of course, his adopting of a radically new stand on pre-natal life is nothing new; several other Democrats, including Clinton and current presidential candidate, Rep. Richard Gephardt, have gone through the same politically expedient position change concerning abortion.)

Quite peculiar in his answer is the part about how he is "not into that detail on partial-birth abortion." Can anyone with his level of education really be so ignorant on a basic issue? By the time a man is ready to declare his candidacy for the highest office in the land, he certainly should be able to clearly articulate his position on partial birth abortion. But in the case of Wesley Clark, taken in the context of his answer, the sense is that he wasn't ready to commit (as in, "¼I'm pro-life--excuse me, I'm pro-abortion rights"), rather than that he didn't comprehend the concept.

Moving on to other issues, soon after Clark declared himself a candidate, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post began his one of his "Media Notes" column this way:

It ended on a plane from Arkansas to Florida on Thursday, when four reporters chatted him up and the retired general backed off his opposition to the war in Iraq. A day later, however, Clark flipped on his position yet again, saying that he would have opposed the war.¼ (Four-Star Disappointment? It remains to be seen if the honeymoon is really over, as Kurtz suggests. The controlled news media, living up to its name, is totally a bought creature that does what it's commanded to do: If they are ordered to puff up a candidate, they puff him up; if they are ordered to dump a candidate, they dump him. There is virtually no truly independent press in this country any more, and there hasn't been for decades. So, Clark will remain the "golden boy" for as long or short as the powers-that-be want and, based on the overwhelmingly positive spin his candidacy as thus received, there is no reason to believe to believe they'll be pulling the plug on him any time soon)

While Kurtz mentions a anti-war—pro-war—anti-war flip-flop, there's actually one more flip to the flip-flop, because Clark initially supported Iraqi the war and supported it in a big way. Despite what he's saying now, Clark supported in principle the use of force against Saddam Hussein's regime. Commenting on his current backtracking on whether he supported the congressional resolution authorizing force in Iraq, Scott Lehigh of the Boston Globe writes:

Add to that confusion an AP story from last October that indirectly quotes Clark saying he supported the resolution. Plus an April 10 column in The Times of London, after Baghdad had fallen, in which Clark wrote: "President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt." (Clark versus Clark)

Lehigh goes on to write that what Clark really objected to was President Bush's "go it alone" approach, as opposed to multilateralism pushed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. (Much of the "anti-war" rhetoric amounts to false opposition, such as Clark's. What is happening is a variation of the Marxist dialectic—thesis + antithesis = synthesis—masterfully carried out. Here the thesis ["rightwing" backs U.S. invasion] and antithesis ["leftwing" backs U.N. involvement] are really two contrived "opposites" which are moving everything towards the synthesis [namely, the desired goal of total world government]. The Iraq invasion moves towards that goal by convincing the nations to accept the concept of an international authority with the power to meddle in the countries' internal affairs—in this case, the disarmament of Saddam. Please observe that the U.N. gave its blessing to the use of force against Iraq when Bush addressed that body in the Fall of 2002 and that now Bush and the U.N. are working together to fashion a new government there that will do their bidding. The successful invasion is a successful step in getting the nations to accept the coercive power of U.N.-authorized strikes, strikes, though, that may one day be directed toward them. What makes this operation particularly insidious is the manner in which conservative Americans have been conned into supporting something that in the long run strikes at our nation's sovereignty and our personal liberties, all in the name of patriotism and national defense.)

Matthew Continetti of the Daily Standard, reveals two other examples of Wesley Clark's Clinton-like concept of reality:

When will Wesley Clark stop telling tall tales? In the current issue of Newsweek, Howard Fineman reports Clark told Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and University of Denver president Mark Holtzman that "I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove (photo, left) had returned my phone calls."

Unfortunately for Clark, the White House has logged every incoming phone call since the beginning of the Bush administration in January 2001. At the request of The Daily Standard, White House staffers went through the logs to check whether Clark had ever called White House political adviser Karl Rove. The general hadn't. What's more, Rove says he doesn't remember ever talking to Clark, either. (Clark never called Karl)

Clark also alleges he received a call from the White House on the afternoon of 9/11 in which he was urged to publicaly link Saddam's name to the attacks. "While it turns out Clark did receive a call 'on either Sept. 12 or Sept. 13,' writes Continetti, "the call wasn't from the White House. It was from Israeli-Canadian Middle East expert Thomas Hecht, who told the Toronto Star that he called to invite Clark to give a speech in Canada." (Please click on the "Last June" link in Continetti's column to see Clark's three different versions of what supposedly happened.)

As bothersome as all of this deception is, there are other Clark-Clinton tie-ins far more deeply disturbing¼Waco and Kosovo.

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