In a long look at the General, the NY Times discovers that he is a crony capitalist and a profiteer in the erosion of our civil liberties.
All the more reason to support him! If the nation actually elects this moderate Republican who is running as a Democrat, he will triangulate against the Nancy Pelosi Democrats in a manner that would make Bill Clinton proud. The result will either be to kill the Democratic Party, or cure it - it will either follow him to the center, or split (in a raucous 2008 nomination struggle).
After these new revelations, the General's campaign should be blessedly free of the screaming about Dick Cheney and Halliburton that we might otherwise expect from a Democrat. Gen. Clark's defenders may argue that the General was only a small time crony capitalist, while Cheney was "big-time". However, Oscar Wilde famously addressed this in a related context - we know what the General is.
Similarly, howling about John Ashcroft and the abuses of the Patriot Act should be stifled - complaining seems a bit silly when the General has earned over half a million dollars lobbying for a firm that began providing database info to the Federal Government after 9/11.
The NY Times also alludes to the probability that the General has alienated many of his former colleagues. But we knew that.
Evil Excerpts Follow:
Gen. Clark as crony capitalist:
Those who have worked with General Clark, whether at Stephens or a half-dozen other companies, said his main value was as a Washington door-opener, helping them land government contracts and advising them what products the Pentagon might want.
Gen. Clark, civil libertarian:
He was also becoming increasingly involved with Acxiom, which was founded in Little Rock as a Democratic mailing-list company and which is now one of the nation's largest database processors.
After the 2001 terror attacks, Acxiom, which had never before had a federal contract, discovered its computers had personal data on 11 of the 19 hijackers and sought the government's attention.
General Clark telephoned federal officials for Acxiom on a pro bono basis. By December he had joined the Acxiom board.
"Wes started making phone calls to people in the upper reaches of government," said Jerry Jones, Acxiom's legal counsel, "and then they started calling us."
Many of the resulting contracts are classified. One that is not is Capps II, an airline passenger screening system that some privacy advocates have criticized.
The general also helped arrange or attended meetings with high-level officials like Norman Y. Mineta, the transportation secretary; Tommy G. Thompson, the human services secretary; Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary; and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Gen. Clark, team player:
The path between the Pentagon and major defense contractors (whose board seats pay as much as $200,000 a year) is well trod — Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, now retired, sits on the Boeing board, while another retired general, John Ralston, is on the Lockheed Martin board. Other wartime generals, like Colin L. Powell, H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Tommy R. Franks, have turned their fame into million-dollar book deals.
But General Clark was perhaps not in a position to cash in as readily, in part because as allied commander during the Kosovo war he was not as well known as the men who ran the first war in Iraq. Moreover, his potential as a lobbyist in the eyes of the defense industry could have been undercut by his publicized run-ins with the Pentagon — although those close to General Clark said he was drawn more to working with small entrepreneurial companies.
In any case the general clearly surmounted obstacles to a richer life, and one important method he relied on was political connections.
..."Wesley Clark must be one of the few four-star generals not associated with a Fortune 500 company," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Northern Virginia nonprofit.
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