Did you ever think you’d see the day when a U.S. Secretary of State would be pleading with a communist regime to continue lending money to the U.S. government? Well, that’s what Hillary Clinton has been doing this week in China. She’s been making the case to the Chinese communists that they would be smart to continue financing the U.S. government’s out-of-control spending. Clinton obsequiously said to her commie hosts, “I certainly do think that the Chinese government and central bank are making a smart decision by continuing to invest in Treasury bonds. It’s a safe investment. The United States has a well-deserved financial reputation.”
Human rights groups are agog that their liberal icon would remain silent about the Chinese regime’s longtime brutal infringement of human rights. Hey, what do they expect? Is it ever considered smart for someone deeply in debt to go and start insulting his lender?
I can’t help recalling when another liberal icon, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, was sacrificing tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers for nothing in Southeast Asia. Oh, back then U.S. officials didn’t say it was for nothing. They said that all those deaths were about “freedom.” Isn’t it always about “freedom”? Aren’t Iraq and Afghanistan about “freedom”? Isn’t the “war on terrorism” about “freedom”?
Back then, the bugaboo to justify ever-increasing federal expenditures wasn’t terrorism, it was communism, including Chinese communism. Keeping the American people on permanent scare status, U.S. officials portrayed the communists as one big monolithic block, one that was even scarier than “the terrorists.” The block consisted of communists everywhere — China, North Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Chile, the State Department, Hollywood, and the army. Why, Americans were even looking under their beds for communists! And they were all part of that big monolithic block that was going to conquer the United States. If U.S. soldiers weren’t fighting to defend “freedom” in Vietnam, we were told, the dominoes would begin falling to the communists, with the final domino being the United States.
Of course, it was all a lie, just like the intentionally false claim that Johnson and the Pentagon made about the North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. After the U.S. lost the war, the dominoes did not fall, the Soviet Union ultimately fell of its own dead weight, and the United States is still standing. In fact, after the Vietnam War, a war even broke out between China and Vietnam. So much for that scary monolithic block. Today, the U.S. government has even established trade relationships with Vietnam, even though it still maintains the cruel and harsh embargo against the Cuban people.
Of course, another reason that Hillary was being so nice and submissive to her communist hosts was that she must have felt right at home in China. After all, China is a socialist paradise. Just think how exhilarated she must have been being in a country where there is national healthcare, free public schooling, mandatory national service, welfare, public housing, and, best of all, a well-behaving, conformist, and obedient citizenry. Why, isn’t all that socialism enough to warm any liberal’s heart?
My hunch is that despite their pleas to their Chinese loan officers, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in for a rude awakening. Ultimately, the Chinese communist regime is going to operate in its own self- interest, not because it wants to help U.S. officials pay for their socialistic stimulus plans, bailouts, payoffs, pork, and welfare.
As most everyone knows, the U.S. government is spending money like it was going out style. There are obviously no limits to the borrowing and the printing of money being used to pay for the massively growing expenditures of the welfare-warfare state. If the Chinese decide that the U.S. debt instruments they are holding are likely to plummet in value as a result of U.S. monetary debasement, they might well decide to rush for the exits and dump their entire holdings of U.S. Treasury instruments in international markets. If that were to happen, the consequences would not pretty. That’s undoubtedly why Obama and Clinton are being so nice to their communist loan officers.