The Foreign Affairs of Hillary Clinton

In the nit-picking over Mark Penn's departure as Sen. Clinton's campaign manager, the biggest question of all has gone unasked by the mainstream media.

Whether he lobbies for the Columbian trade deal while she opposes it, or whether it was his flawed campaign strategy or conflicts with other staff that lead to his resignation, nobody has yet considered the underlying issue involved.

It is this:  SINCE WHEN are American presidential campaigns managed by paid agents of Foreign Governments? Have we entered some Twilight Zone so completely unlike all of our previous political history that this doesnt even get ASKED?

Could you imagine the uproar if John Kerry, or Bob Dole, or Jimmy Carter, or even Bill Clinton himself had allowed their campaigns to be run by Registered Agents of a Foreign Power?  We'd have taken to the streets in protest.  They can buy our banks, our ports, and our factories, but shall we let them buy our leaders as well?

Its just mind boggling in its implications.  Sleazy deals for Kazakh Uranium notwithstanding, the Colombian trade pact is a secondary issue. A free-trade agreement with Columbia, which removes far more of their tarriffs on our goods than the reverse, is probably a good thing.  Had Penn brought some coherence to Sen. Clinton's trade policy, all the better.  But the impending treaty just isnt the issue.

Columbia's notoriously corrupt government, awash in ill-gotten Cocaine-cartel drug money, is hardly the place we would choose to outsource our political leadership.  If we're going to - openly and without a whimper - allow our politicians to be in the care of Foreign Agents, at least let them be from someplace cleaner and more benign; Australia or Iceland, for example.

Its astonishing that the Mark Penn flap has been all about Sen. Clinton's duplicity on trade policy, or the back channel comments of an Obama advisor to the Canadians on NAFTA, with no investigative expose as to just how many Foreign Agents are involved in which presidential campaigns.

Sen. McCain's March 20th fundraiser in London - England - hosted by Baron Rothschild, which, according to the most recent campaign finance reports has apparently been his most successful yet, raises equally troubling questions.  15 Million of them, apparently.  These also remain unanswered.

Foreign governments and alien philosophies no longer need to resort to war, terror, propaganda, or espionage to affect American interests and policies.  All they need do is throw some money around, among well-connected lobbying firms on K Street, and they can infiltrate the highest levels of our political machinery.  They can apparently do it admittedly, and in full public view.  They can file the proper disclosure forms, and, so long as their paperwork is in proper order, and they dont make stupid faux-pas where the media are concerned (i.e. lobbying against your candidate's stated positions), nobody in the Fourth Estate will even raise an eyebrow.

I suspect that we're about to get the kind of government we deserve. Again. Unfortunately...

P.S. This just in:  Clinton's Colombian connection is even closer than Mark Penn's.  At least $800,000 of their recently reported fortune came from the shadowy Colombian -based Gold Service International...