He is also a flake, but I guess I'm glad he's there.
SHOWTIME
For a show trial is quite literally intended as an entertainment, a kind of political slapstick in which stereotypes knock each other over the head and go through their stylized paces. Clark is nothing if not a walking stereotype, ever since he joined up with the Workers World Party (WWP) cult that runs his "International Action Center" (IAC). Longtime readers of this column will remember my own experiences with this wacky bunch during the Kosovo war, when they tried to take over the antiwar opposition, and put on rallies where old Slobo was praised as the next best thing to Fidel Castro. Now there's a way to reach out to the naturally "isolationist" sentiments of the American people – tell them we have to get out of Kosovo in order to "defend the gains of the socialist revolution" in Yugoslavia!
INVASION OF THE POD PEOPLE
The WWP pod people, having taken over the body of an ex-US Attorney General, use Clark as a front to push their own zealous defense of virtually every tyrant on earth, from Saddam Hussein to the black "anti-imperialist" militias of Rwanda, to Slobodan Milosevic. Naturally, the War Party is going to have a field day with this, and the Del Ponte-Ramsey Clark Punch-&-Judy show will become a Morality Play for Our Times. Clark is positively spooky, and his "International Action Center," of which he is the titular leader, not only defends tyrants against US intervention – it glorifies them as heroic fighters for "socialism." But of course what else can you expect from a group that can trace its origins to a split in the old Socialist Workers Party, onetime followers of Leon Trotsky, over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary: the Workers Worlders, you see, were for it, and they walked out of the SWP and formed their own party over the Hungarian issue. Now, all these years later, one of their prize catches, formerly a high official in the cabinet of Lyndon Baines Johnson, is defending the record of the last Stalinist in Europe. Somehow, it seems all too fitting, the final nightmarish touch to this elaborate parody, The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic as co-authored by Carla Del Ponte, Ramsey Clark, and Franz Kafka.
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