Is Hillary’s Presidential Campaign The Biggest Victim Of The Brussels Attack ?

The carnage in Brussels, the capital of the European Union, will have a number of tactical and strategic fallouts. On the one hand, the scale of the human tragedy is high: innocent, normal people traveling across continents have been affected. I can only grieve for the high cost imposed on them, and pray for the dead and wounded.

There is much geo-political fallout, however. In the short term, it puts paid to the era of easy travel in the West; and probably dooms the Schengen common visa area for the European Union. In the long term, it seriously wounds the very idea of the EU, which has been held together with difficulty under currency duress, as it were with sealing wax and twine.

In the short term, it yet again demonstrates the strange loyalties of Leftists in India (and probably elsewhere); in the medium term, it may have fatally wounded Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president of the US.

The reactions of the Indian left were at once hilarious and predictable. As a twitter habitue, I am used to the loud and incessant pontifications of our Leftists there, including a prima donna, a husband-and-wife team, and various others, all of whom enlighten us with their wisdom on any and all matters. However, there was a thunderous silence, a virtual shut-down, from all of them for the last 24 hours (I write this on 23rd morning). Not a word about Brussels. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Cat got their tongue. Hilarious, it is.

I am reminded of the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze” where the detective mentions the “curious incident of the dog in the night time”. A crime was committed, but the dog didn’t bark: that speaks volumes, and that was the curious incident.

Not a complete embargo, though, I must say. Shekhar Gupta, one of the stalwarts of the MSM, did say something about nomenclature (and I thought it was pretty weak). I have two conjectures.

Conjecture 1: the MSM types are waiting for the memo to tell them how to outrage. As soon as that arrives, they will swing into coordinated action, shouting from the rooftops. Some of you may remember the immortal words captured on tape: “Oh god. Now what? What should I tell them? Tell me what I should tell them”, dated 22 March 2009.

Conjecture 2: MSM types have handlers both in the Christian camp and in the Muslim camp. Thus, if there is something that hurts either, they are trained to outrage immediately, especially if there is an (invented) attack on churches in India, or an (imagined) attack on Muslims in India. But there is no standard operating procedure if a Christian kills a Muslim, or vice versa. Thus the confusion, cognitive dissonance and the complete radio silence.

I am quite sure that today, 23 March, the MSM will recover their composure, and do the usual: blame Narendra Modi for Brussels, along with everything else. That is before moving on to the next invented atrocity literature on command.

But from a strategic perspective, the big loser is probably Hillary Clinton. Surveys show that white men are the most reluctant supporters of the Democratic front-runner. Given that Donald Trump has, at least for rhetorical purposes, made noises about Fortress America, and protecting US interests and lives abroad, he must have looked prophetic in the aftermath of Brussels.

Clinton, on the other hand, is compromised by association. Her mishandling of the Benghazi incident which led to gunmen assassinating the US Ambassador, has never been properly explained. It is, at the very least, a signal dereliction of duty as a symbol of the American State was attacked with impunity. In fact the entire Libya episode was poorly handled. There is also the emailgate scandal, where it is alleged that she may have allowed the leakage of sensitive information through negligence. Clinton’s relations with militant Middle Eastern groups and government are also opaque and worrisome.

There is a strong possibility that the Brussels attack has made ordinary middle class men give Trump a bump up in the polls. In fact, this may be the beginning of the end for Clinton. If so, remember, you heard it here first. This was my tweet-