There is a man sitting at his desk. He is on the phone taking care of business. Underneath the desk, there is a young woman. She, too, is taking care of business. The man, Former President Bill Clinton, is handling state and personal business, a feat of what is called, today, “multitasking” and others claim men are less capable of accomplishing. The former president is managing to spread democracy, as they say, while pursuing the acquisition of his desires from the focused Monica Lewinsky.

The narrative, the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as she, as the First Lady, called it at the time, sex scandal and revelation of her husband’s sexual exploitations and his impeachment by the House, seems to have slipped the mind of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.

I am sure Hillary discovered that she misspoke when she shouted that bit of nonsense about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” An angry utterance about a phantom entity! Conspiracy? No - but the reality of power in the U.S., power corporations grant to the U.S. government, federal, state, and local institutions, the military, the entire economic system. Corporate power unites all the supposedly different political stripes. And she, Hillary, has a high position in this corporate world!

So this scoundrel Julian Assange’s website leaks over 250,000 “confidential” U.S. Embassy cables. In 2006, according to a report in The Christian Science Monitor, the U.S.’s development of a massive computer system to collect “huge amounts of data” from our “blogs and emails” is already operational in the search for “terrorist activity” and already “credited with helping to foil some plots.” And who has not followed the seemingly weekly news feature in which “terrorists” within strikingly similar “terrorists narratives” are explained, according to the U.S. government, as the successful execution of the Patriot Act in the war on Terrorism.

The U.S. government is contemplating the collection of DNA from non-violent and non-convicted offenders. And let us not forget the invasive use of TSA body scanners at the airports.

Our privacy is violated as a matter of law, of course, for our protection from ourselves, potential “terrorists”!

And, pardon me, Hillary, this shift from U.S. citizens to potential terrorist is not a “vast right-wing conspiracy”! Bill Clinton’s reckless use of his powers, personal and otherwise, to elevate the power of corporations to promote a fascist state through the funding of politicians who will do their bidding - now that is a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Julian Assange is dangerous? His condom broke? The Bill and Monica Show to marry the “vast right-wing” to the Democratic Party!

After the “sex scandal,” Bill and Hillary were born again - as a powerful and leading couple, advocating for the right of the corporations to grow unhindered by something as silly as deregulation. That is why we hear of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton frantically calling foreign leaders and embassy officials offering apologies for authorizing the State Department to find “dirt” on them - leverage - to maintain the U.S. brand of “diplomacy” in over some 700 military bases around the global. The U.S., the “victims” of terrorists everywhere, condemns the likes of a Julian Assange, further endangering our precarious right to declare anyone and everyone a “terrorist” anywhere in the world. What would the world think if they knew what we’re up to?

It is Hillary now, the once wronged woman, producing a reality show for today’s reality-show-generation, who, let us be honest, for the most part, do not follow the unfolding events within the U.S., let alone at the international level. In Europe’s old days, it used to be a spectacle with scalpel and guillotine. In the U.S., it was flames engulfing the pole in which a terrorist happened to be attached or a tree with a hanging figure. In modern times, television news took the place of the pole or tree. And Bill is not the featured culprit of this EVENT.

No, now, North American citizens are treated to a meal of sound-bites and fast-paced images at dinner time. Hillary Clinton condemns Julian Assange! Julian Assange charged with Rape! Julian Assange is an electronic terrorist!

For people paying the cable companies to have their big screen televisions operating for “fight parties,” Oprah’s show, or Dancing with the Stars, and, who do not read and certainly do not read news, and who are unwilling or unable to search for news at alternative media sites, for those who do not even know that there are alternative sites or who believe that “alternative” news is equal to “communist” or “inferior” or “less successful journalists (in other words, journalists-who-do-not-make-money) - Julian Assange and WikiLeak are, indeed, dangerous. Hillary says so! It matters little whether this EVENT, this reality show, serves, again, as a distraction from the real crimes committed on Wall Street or in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The average American is not going out of his or her way to read these cable leaks and see what the fuss is all about. And Hillary knows this.

I still encounter middle class, educated people who cannot hold a conversation with me about the war in Afghanistan, who feel they can do very little if anything about the Wall Street coup of the U.S., who recognize climate change but God knows what is best, but who believe the immigrant of color represents a conspiracy on the part of the U.S. government to submerge the average American worker, and Black Americans are still and have been and always will be responsible for their condition - not institutionalized policies (invisible to many) that have restricted the mobility of the majority of Blacks. Indigenous people are content with the reservations and gambling casinos, and, at least - we don’t have to be reminded of them! Our radars are set to detect Arabs and Muslims in our midst.

The information revealed in the cables requires prior knowledge of world events and the players. Most Americans rely on Fox News, if they follow the news at all. The revelations are merely the big players “dissing” on each other. Why didn’t Bristol Palin win?

Governmental entities and their back-room dealings are too distant a thought in the everyday lives of many, other than those who have declared themselves anti-big government - as if the U.S. government were anything other than selected legislators funded by Wall Street. U.S. diplomacy means bullying other nations to do the bidding of the U.S.; it means voting or not voting for the reduction of fossil fuels according to the wishes of the U.S.; it means sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to wage a war for oil and Western control of the region; it means sanctioning or limiting diplomacy and trade to nations headed by democratically-elected presidents, labeled “dictators” and “terrorists,” by the U.S.; to establish a global police state in which the limitations of civil liberties in the U.S. extends to other nations as well; and it means to join the U.S. in the persecution of truth by accepting the U.S.’s response to anyone who threatens to expose the deception behind the U.S.’s wars against “terrorists.”

Consequently, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton - leading the campaign to kill the dissemination of files from WikiLeaks, is the voice of the “norm,” speaking with approval from the average American citizen!

If the U.S. government believes Assange is endangering the lives of Americans, then what are we to make of its attempt to silence its own citizens in order to more easily manipulate them? If we are not careful, we will miss the indifference and silence of the American public even as Hillary Clinton and the U.S. State Department attempt to produce this reality show for the corporate news’ audience. These are the fellow citizens, the cable news viewers, for whom the manipulating hand of the U.S. government (in the service of corporations) is still an obscured entity that functions like any repressive regime it claims to oppose.

This is what makes the developments surrounding the efforts of the U.S. to stifle WikiLeaks so chilling. The distraction, the reality show, is still less significant than the Oprah show!

And the U.S. government’s pursuit of extra-legal procedures to go after Assange - well, it all sounds like a reasonable thing to do when the government is tracking down a terrorist.

Just ask Hillary!

And President Obama, the fearless leader of the corporate capitalists, where is he? Obama is in the back room, performing his soft shoe gig for the budding fascists, the so-called “right wingers.”

On Tuesday, December 7, the same day that the corporate media flooded the airways with Hillary’s reality show, Obama lost a battle in court. A judge dismissed a lawsuit “aimed at preventing the United States from targeting anti-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki for death,” according to Nedra Pickler, Associated Press, Boston.com). Al Awlaki’s father, represented by the ACLU, brought the lawsuit “against President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta.”

But U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George Bush appointee, “questioned whether the president or his advisers can order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without ‘any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization.’” Bates, continued: “the serious issues regarding the merits of the alleged authorization of the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen overseas must await another day or another nonjudicial forum.” The Obama administration agreed with the ruling, but did Obama and his administration understand the question: Do you have the authority, Mr. President, to detain U.S. citizens and charge them with acts of terrorism?

Hillary whips up a terrorist-hunt show while the president of the United States works to drop the word “show” from the pogrom. She has recruited U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to serve as co-producer, and it was not hard to sell the content of the pogrom to a House Negro who was selected by the House Negro who, in turn, was selected by corporate capitalists! In Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPoint commentary, titled, “Julian Assange: Wanted by the Empire, Dead or Alive,” he cites Holder’s response to the question of how to prosecute Assange, “a non-U.S, citizen,”: “Let me be clear. This is not saber-rattling” (December 3-5, 2010). Holder vowed “to swiftly close the gaps in current US legislation…”

In other words, Cockburn writes, the espionage statute is being rewritten to target Assange, and in short order, if not already, President Obama – who as a candidate pledged ‘transparency’ in government - will sign an order okaying the seizing of Assange and his transport into the US jurisdiction. Render first, fight the habeas corpus lawsuits later.

Somewhere the ancestors are recalling the witch hunt for Africans in Africa. They recall the massive kidnapping and chaining, caves and the ships, if they survived. And they are shaking their heads - not again! But again it begins only in modern, high-tech police state, and it was not limited to “right wingers” then and it is not limited to “right wingers” now.

And somewhere there is a conductor, with hands raised and rising, as the first notes of Samuel Barber’s Adagio begins are played - for the death of the U.S.A.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.