Bye Bye Madame Secretary Albright

Just because you make "firsts" doesn't make you good.

Madeleine Albright, the first female US Secretary of State, died earlier today. 

And, yes, this is a takedown type obit. And, it's HUGELY deserved.

Albright, as CNN notes at the link, as Slick Willie Clinton's SoS, pushed for the expansion of NATO that pissed off then Russian president Boris Yeltsin just like it pisses off today's Russian president Vladimir Putin.

And, she probably knew it would do just that.

Meanwhile, per her Wiki page, she once called Putin a snake. Many right-knowing people on Twitter have espoused variants of "it takes one to know one."

And, as Huff Post notes, she also claimed that if half a million Iraqi kids were killed by sanctions, it was worth it.

Full quote, with exchange with Lesley Stahl, via Fair:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it? 

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it. —60 Minutes (5/12/96)

Fair notes that the mainstream media largely buried under the rug when she uttered it. 

Albright then showed exactly the type of bullshit the establishment can engage in. She claimed that Lesley Stahl had asked her a loaded question, and that Stahl was promoting Iraqi propaganda. At about the same time, when someone asked why are we arming Israel to bomb Palestinians, she accused them of supporting Hussein. There's video at that Twitter link, and yeah, really, she's pretty loathsome.

More on Albright, Palestinians and speeches? She spoke at Berkeley's commencement in 2000, at the same event where a Palestinian was recognized as a University Medalist. A Mondoweiss writer, who worked on student newspaper The Daily Californian, reminisces.

As for whether the death toll was real, Saddam Hussein propaganda, or somewhere in between? A. Doesn't matter. Even if totally untrue, she accepted as true for the sake of argument. B. At the time, on the show, she didn't claim it was untrue.

She also, per The Nation, was a loathsome promoter of American exceptionalism, specifically what Andrew Bacevich calls "Indispensible Nation Syndrome," with her as originator.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

No wonder Dear Leader gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dear Leader who bombed the shit out of Libya, with the best economy in Mediterranean Africa, and left it with slave markets a decade later. (And even Bernie Sanders' protest about that one was weak."

Don't forget, as Colin Powell didn't, that even pre-SoS, as Clinton's UN ambassador, she was a warhawk:

“My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we could not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective,” Powell wrote in his memoir, “My American Journey.” Albright, he wrote, “asked me, ‘What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’ I thought I would have an aneurysm.”

Yep.

And, for Kosovans talking about how she freed their country? It was at a price — literally. Wiki also notes that her investment company originally planned to bid on the privatization of Kosovo's telecom and postal company. (That's beyond the issue, that Wiki doesn't note, of the same Harvard types who advised Boris Yeltsin about privatization surely talking the same talk to Kosovans.)

Wiki's page also gives us a friendly reminder of other things, like her serving at the National Security Agency under Henry Kissinger's Democratic doppelgänger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, under whom she took graduate courses. She also led the effort to deny UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali a second term. That said, HIS Wiki page notes that his initial election was due to many countries withdrawing support from another African candidate under fears the US was trying to torpedo both.

To do her some fairness, she wasn't all wrong on Serbia, at least vis-a-vis Bosnia. But? Croatia had its own initially thuggish post-Yugoslav breakup leadership. And, Franjo Tudjman was "our" thug, with Croatia being eyed for NATO membership well in advance. And Milosevic was Russia's thug when Yeltsin raised some mild objections to the bombing and beyond. And, the bombing didn't work, any more than Russia's does today. Boutros-Ghali? Maybe he was sluggish on Rwanda, but I think it was posterior covering on her part, in part.