Monday, Jul 9, 2012 12:39 PM EDT
Harold Ford Jr., sleazy corporatist and
nepotist, offers up a particularly grotesque defense of U.S. aggression
By Glenn Greenwald
Harold Ford Jr. (Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi)
(updated below)
Harold
Ford, Jr. is the walking, breathing embodiment of virtually everything
rotted and corrupt about the American political class. He entered
Congress at the age of 26 only by virtue of nepotistic benefits: while
in law school, he ran for the seat long held by his father of the same
name (he then promptly failed the test for admission to the Tennessee
bar). In Congress, he voted for
de-regulation of Wall Street
(which helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis); to authorize the
Iraq War (and then harshly criticized Democrats who opposed it and
refused to admit its error even as late as 2007); in favor of a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages (
The Advocate branded him “anti-gay”); and was one of the few Democrats to support the credit-card-industry-demanded
bankruptcy “reform” bill that made it harder for impoverished consumers to discharge consumer debt.
After
Tennessee voters drove him from Congress by rejecting his 2006 Senate
bid, Ford immediately cashed in on his servitude to Wall Street and
peddled his D.C. influence by
becoming Vice Chairman and Senior Policy Adviser of Merrill Lynch.
During Ford’s tenure,
“Merrill Lynch nearly collapsed, was bailed out by US taxpayers, and
went through a troubled merger with Bank of America,” yet he
nonetheless received
$2 million a year in guaranteed salary plus what were almost certainly
substantial annual bonuses. He left what had become Bank of America
Merrill to
become a Senior Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, at which time he
bought a $3 million co-op in Manhattan. Upon leaving Congress, Ford also cashed in by
becoming the last Chairman of the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (“last” because, typifying his career, the DLC
ceased to exist under his leadership). He cashed in further by
becoming a Fox News contributor, until he left for MSNBC.
Reflecting the interests he typically serves so eagerly, Ford recently
attacked
Democratic criticisms of Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital on the
ground that “private equity is a good thing in many, many instances.” So
that’s Harold Ford, Jr.: opportunistic, craven, sleazy nepotistic
corporatist who has made a career out of converting his unearned
political influence and loyalty to the banking industry into large wads
of cash.
This morning, Ford, as he often is, was on
Morning Joe (independently
significant is that fact that one of the most prolific NBC/MSNBC
political commentators — a Democrat — is also a senior Wall Street
executive). The show devoted a six-minute segment to
Esquire‘s Tom Junod, who — as I noted earlier today — has just published
a worthwhile and heartfelt article entitled
“The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” which examines in depth the
multiple ways the President has seized the power to kill; in one
section, Junod reports on the U.S. killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman
Awlaki in Yemen,
and
Esquire has
published that section separately under this headline: “
Obama’s Administration Killed a 16-Year-Old American and Didn’t Say Anything About It. This Is Justice?” In the
Morning Joe segment,
Junod repeatedly documented the numerous innocent Muslims — including
children — that are continuously killed by Obama’s attacks, such as the
16-year-old Denver-born son of the Islamic preacher, a mere two weeks
after his father was killed.
You just have to watch the reaction
of Ford, neocon Dan Senor, and Mike Barnacle to appreciate the soulless
rot that leads people so cavalierly to defend and dismiss the continuous
killing of innocent Muslims by the U.S. But it’s Ford’s smirking,
self-satisfied, effete ignorance — from a warmonger whose delicately
manicured hands have never been and will never be near any of the
carnage he reflexively defends — that is particularly nauseating. Like
most mindless defenders of U.S. violence, Ford just repeatedly utters
the word “Terrorist” over and over like a hypnotic mantra.
Even
after Junod describes the heinous death of the indisputably innocent
American teeanger, Ford just smirks and pronounces that it’s better to
Kill The Terrorists than to capture them. There’s nothing unique about
Harold Ford, Jr. — as I said, he’s just the personification of the
standard Beltway sicknesses, and the vacant “arguments” he makes to
justify drones (“THE TERRORISTS!”) are the typical ones offered up — but
there’s something about the way Harold Ford, Jr. speaks here, and who
he is, that really vividly conveys what motivates this mindset:
UPDATE: The commenter ThomasPaine
adeptly summarizes the
Morning Joe discussion this way:
So here’s the discussion in a nutshell:
Junod: Our government killed a 16 year old boy and it won’t even say why.
Ford: Yeah, killing terrorists is cheaper than capturing them.
Senor: No, we need to tortur– interrogate them first.
Junod: But we’re talking about a 16 year old boy who wasn’t a terrorist.
Ford: Like I said, kill them.
Senor: Hey, war is messy.
That’s depressingly
accurate. Meanwhile, several commenters have asked about the photograph
of Ford at the top of this column: it comes from an infamous incident
when Ford was running for the Senate in Tennessee in 2006 and
deliberately posed, wearing a camouflage hat, in front of a Confederate
flag, sparking serious (understandable) fury in a number of precincts.
Here
is a local Nashville columnist, A.C. Kleinheider, writing about this
event, under the headline “The political nihilism of Harold Ford Jr.,”
and here are two representative African-American commentators —
here and
here (Baratunde Thurston at JackandJill Politics) – discussing Ford’s conduct.
