Apparently, Pimpin' is Easy

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein)

DCLeaks revealed one thing yesterday that you may not have known about Colin Powell: He's a regular guy.

     Sure, maybe the former Secretary of State and four star general might not want to sit down and have a beer with you. But in his gossipy perceptions about the powerful elite with whom he'd once rubbed shoulders, he really brings himself down to earth like the rest of us.

     How else does one explain his verbal brickbats in a series of emails to Bigly donor Jeffrey Leeds, who himself told Powell that "Nobody likes (Hillary)", said the 42nd president was "still dicking bimbos"? Or that Hillary Clinton was "greedy, not transformational"? Or that Donald Trump was "a national disgrace?" To a latter day reader, it's better than reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, the British 17th century naval official who in his diary had written scandalous but delightful pastiches on King Charles II and other luminaries in the second half of 17th century London.

     But the man who'd also said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for President, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris,” may sound typical of a man who'd served in what can charitably be called a "transformative" Republican administration. True, he also takes some pot shots at the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump and called the Cheneys "idiots.". But what the media ate up, understandably, were his scathing criticisms of his second successor. In fact, the vitriol of his remarks about the former Secretary of State seem to get more caustic in emails written as recently as a few weeks ago about the email/server controversy that continually dogs Clinton like bouts of pneumonia/dehydration/influenza.

     The takeaway one inevitably is given is that the Clintons hate certain powerful men who happen to be black, they're horrible, greedy human beings and Bill is still lecherous. Between the DCLeaks hack and the simultaneous Wikileaks hack, the two large disclosures paint a portrait of a power couple not unlike the Underwoods in House of Cards, two scheming, manipulative, power-starved sociopaths, revealed as only a DC insider like Powell can articulate.

     And between the Guccifer 2.0-affliated group and Julian Assange, we see an unflattering tableau of a sick, embittered old woman who blames one black man for her failures (even though Secretary Powell was careful to delineate the differences between his email set up and Clinton's) and another simply for defeating her fair and square in a highly-contested election.

     And Colin Powell is not very happy with what he sees on either side of the political landscape.

“Dumb. She should have done a ‘Full Monty’ at the beginning.”

     The media's insistence in focusing on his remarks on Clinton are understandable and has little if anything to do with the fact they're on opposite sides of the aisle. Clinton is, after all, Powell's second successor at Foggy Bottom and Clinton did make the tremendously bad error in judgment of blaming Powell and his so-called bad advice that she'd solicited at a Hamptons shindig for the 1% back in 2009. Whether or not he wanted to, despite his prohibitions to Clinton at that dinner, he is involved. Why shouldn't he get his money's worth?

     Don't get me wrong- I have little sympathy much less empathy for Colin Powell. Colin Powell is a very ethically-challenged man who will have to live out the rest of his days knowing that, armed with nothing but cartoons and a tiny vial of fake anthrax, he lied to the UN Security Council in February 2003. In doing so, he fibbed us into a ruinous war that killed over a million people and let his reputation as a no-nonsense, pragmatic trustworthy public official get squandered by a pack of neocon war criminals.

     But that doesn't mean Secretary Powell is still incapable of telling the truth about the elite in his circle and generation. What Mr. Powell said about the Clintons was nothing new. He merely crystallized and confirmed what we'd already suspected about the Clintons but couldn't quite bring ourselves to take on blind faith.

     His correspondence with his friend and business partner Jeffrey Leeds pulls back the rest of the curtain, as do the latest Wikileaks disclosures: The Democratic Party, starting with the Clintons, is filled to the rafters with greedy, shiftless, sociopathic, lecherous rage monsters who would trample their grandmother's bones in their never-ending scramble for power. And to that end, the Democrats, led by latter dayTammany Hall sachems Bill and Hillary Clinton, are no better than the Republicans.

     We can debate until the cows come home about the cyberethics of hacking into Secretary Powell's Gmail account. But that isn't the issue. The real issue is that our most reliable source of truth is coming from hackers in the shadows, the people we've been dreading and fearing since the internet was opened to the public in the early 90's. The issue is that if the mainstream media did their job, we wouldn't need people like the Guccifers, Julian Assange or Wikileaks.

     Being once at the top tier of power of a presidential administration, Secretary Powell is certainly entitled to indulge in gossip, as are we all. Except in this case, with our own government more hostile than ever to transparency, despite its public declarations to the contrary, gossip is what has to inform us until our elected officials and the media that are supposed to be keeping their feet to the fire, come clean with us.

     Instead, these spoon feedings to the stenographic MSM is what passes for scoops and actual news.