A New Yorker's Opinion: Clinton vs. Putin--Occupy Kremlin Yes, Occupy Wall Street No?

Oh, irony, your sweet breath sends chills down my spine! Now Hillary Clinton called the Russian Election rigged and is urging the Occupy Kremlin crowd to speak up...Say nyet, she urges foreign protestors, to corruption and cronyism that infects the Putin government and its one percenters. But silence, near as I can tell, to cracking down on ours.

The hubris is breathtaking. Did she support protests against just such corruption and cronyism in our government and our one percenters? Maybe I missed it, it was so subtle, I am sure, during the months of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Silence, too, if not outright support, from brave patriots to the left and to the right of us, over the heavy-handed, and in some cities, brutal crackdown on peaceful, albeit rowdy, dissent. And as for those pundits that supported the stifling of domestic dissent, I have complete confidence that they will not hesitate for a moment to boldly proclaim them patriotic abroad.

I wait with baited breath to hear the soaring rhetoric by our mission to the U.N., when, inevitably, Oligarch Putin cracks down heavily on any and all who might question the establishment in Russia. Will he ask for help from our police, I can only wonder, to make sure his tactics are up to date? The Oakland PD could show him a thing or two!

And what a coincidence that Putin is rattling his sabers, and we ours, of a missile buildup. Oh, we must get back to the cold war a.s.a.p., now that it looks like the crushing gridlock in Congress is going to lead to actual cuts in the evermore bloated defense budget. Money is doubtless pouring into the K-street lobbyist coffers from the military industrial complex right now to make sure that no such tragedy would threaten the otherwise almost certain recovery of this great country's economy.

And for Putin and his oligarchs, and our military-industrial-Wall-street-congressional complex and their oligarchs, what better way to take their respective publics' minds off the state of their own economies' and their own sinking shot at a decent life, than to aim all those missiles and guns at each other, the forever Orwellian faceless enemy? Soldiers, who, if you get close enough to look into each other's eyes, is someone pretty much like you--wearing the gaudy ribbons and the uniforms that disguise that shared humanity and make you think that they are the other side.

The real irony, of course, is the use of the others to divide us at home. That's right, all you contenders for president of these United State, I'm talking about the illegals issue, the domestic variant of all that is nationalist and righteous about squandering our wealth on places it will do us the least imaginable good.

First off, let's be fair, the illegals did not take our jobs, we can thank NAFTA and the trade deals that have followed. So thank you Bill Clinton, really! That set the stage for years of offshoring. That's what happened to those jobs.

But not to worry. I have every confidence that if we just let them all be illegal for a bit longer, they will all be going home soon. After all that's where the good new jobs seem to be. For example, things are getting better in China, so much so that a recent Atlantic Magazine article noted that Chinatowns seem to be emptying out, as many Chinese, educated here, go home, lured by the American Dream, which happens to be alive and well-back where they came from.