World Politics

Article: Democracy is the best revenge. By: Asif Ali Zardari.
Two years ago the world stopped for me and for my children. Pakistan was shaken to its core and all but came apart. Women everywhere lost one of their greatest symbols of equality. And Islam, our great religion, lost its modern face.

On Dec. 27, 2007, my wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. She was the bravest person I have ever known, and the second anniversary of her death is an appropriate occasion to reflect upon what she achieved for our country, and how her legacy must be preserved against those who would return Pakistan to darkness.

Twice elected prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir had an immense impact. She stood up and defeated the forces of military dictatorship. She freed all political prisoners. She ended press censorship. She legalized trade and student unions, built 46,000 primary and secondary schools and appointed the first female judges in our history. And she showed the women of Pakistan and the world that they must accept no limits on their ability and opportunity to learn, to grow and to lead in modern society.

The target of two assassination attempts by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, Benazir repeatedly warned a skeptical world of the impending danger from extremists and militants. In her last campaign—even on the very day of her death, by the hands of such extremists—she mobilized and rallied the people of Pakistan against the terrorist threat.

Benazir's murderers didn't kill her dreams. On the day we buried her, even as her supporters cried out for revenge, we reminded our party and country that, in her own words, "democracy is the greatest revenge." And then we led the Pakistan People's Party to victory in the elections.

Since then, fulfilling the electoral manifesto she wrote, the nation's economy, which had been left in shambles by the priorities of a decade of dictatorship, has been stabilized and revitalized. Food shortages have ended. Power shortages have diminished. We have adopted a national curriculum for the first time in history to challenge the spread of political madrassas. Constitutional reforms are being finalized which will rid Pakistan of the undemocratic provisions inserted by military dictators that expanded the power of the presidency at the expense of parliament.

Benazir Bhutto died confronting the forces of tyranny and terrorism, and Pakistan remains committed to the struggle that she led. We have reclaimed Swat and Malakand from the militants and rehabilitated the displaced persons back into their homes. We have taken the fight against militants to other areas, including South Waziristan in our Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and to our major cities, and we will win this war against them.

We will not let militants violently impose their political agenda on the people. Political ownership of the war against terrorism rests with the people of Pakistan for the first time. We are in the front trenches of this war while the community of nations stands with us.

Much has been accomplished, but it has not been easy for my nation, for my party or for my family. The forces in Pakistan that have resisted change, modernity and democracy for 30 years still attempt to derail progress.

Some of these forces who were allied with dictatorship in the past now hope that the judicial process can undo the will of a democratic electorate and destabilize the country. A litany of ancient charges of corruption—the modus operandi of past plots against every democratically elected government in Pakistan—now threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our government.

Those that will not stand with us against terrorism stand against us in the media. I have spent almost 12 years in prison on trumped up charges never proven, even by a court system manipulated by dictators and despots. But like Benazir, I refuse to be intimidated.

So let the legal process move forward. Those of us who have fought for democracy against dictatorship for decades do not fear justice; we embrace it.

My ministers, my party, leaders of other parties and thousands of civil servants across our nation will defend themselves in the courts if necessary. Democracy has come a long way in Pakistan, and the People's Party has always been at the vanguard of the fight. In 1979 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir's father and the elected prime minister of Pakistan was executed under a smokescreen that history now characterizes as a judicial murder. Two decades later Benazir was indicted on fabricated charges on the orders of her political enemies then in power. When tape recordings of these government officials ordering the courts to fabricate evidence and false witness against Benazir were made public, these trumped-up charges were dismissed.

Those of us who have been victims of dictatorship in the past believe in the rule of law and have faith in the judicial process. We believe, in the words of my wife, that "time, justice and the forces of history are on our side."

We have not come this far in our democratic struggle to fail. In this struggle, I am inspired by my father-in-law, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who said that he "would rather die at the hands of dictators than be killed by history."

Mr. Zardari is president of Pakistan.

• Todd and Sarah Palin met at a high school basketball game. When she first saw him, she whispered to herself, “Thank you, God.”
• MSN.com named Sarah Palin as one of the “Sexiest Women over 40.”
• Todd once told his high school friends that Palin did not know how to kiss
• While she was pregnant with daughter Willow, Palin dressed as a pregnant Jane Fonda for Halloween.
• In her book Going Rogue, Palin insists that she was manipulated into doing the famous Katie Couric interviews by Nicole Wallace, a communications aide for the campaign, and that Couric was just interested in catching Palin in a “gotcha” moment.
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• Palin is a member of Feminists For Life (FFL) an anti-abortion, pro-contraception organization.
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• Palin is a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
• Palin supports capital punishment.
• A legislative panel launched a $100,000 investigation into “Trooper-gate” to determine if Palin abused her power by trying to fire her former brother-in-law who was a state trooper.
• In Going Rouge, Palin talks about her two miscarriages, her Creationist beliefs, her wedding dinner at Wendy’s, and the letter she wrote her children about their brother Trig from the point of view of God.
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• The Anchorage Daily News has called Palin “the Joan of Arc of Alaska Politics.”
• Palin says her favorite author is C.S. Lewis.
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• In Going Rouge, Palin reveals that Todd told his locker room friends that Sarah didn’t know how to kiss.
• In August 2008, Palin tried to sue the U.S. Department of the Interior in an attempt to remove polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act because it would hinder Alaska’s gas industry and drilling development.
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• -When Palin was first selected to be McCain’s running mate, she thought the biggest secret would be that she once got a D in college.

• Hillary has been dogged by rumors that she was a lesbian based on her assertive manner, lack of interest in her appearance during adolescence, and her entourage of women staffers who called themselves “HERC and the girls” (playing on her initials, HRC).
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• Hillary was the first First Lady to hold a postgraduate degree (Yale Law, 1973) and to run for and be elected Senator (NY, 2000).
• Hillary was the first woman elected to the New York senate. She was also the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm.
• Shortly before she married Bill Clinton in 1975, Hillary tried to join the Marines, probably to make a political statement. The Marine recruiter rejected her on the grounds that she was “too old,” couldn’t see very well, and that she was a woman.
• Gennifer Flowers, who supposedly had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, said in 2007 that she was considering voting for Hillary for President, saying “I would love to see a woman president. I just didn’t think it would be her.”
• In 1997, Hillary won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for the audio of her book It Takes a Village.
• In the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton was making $35,000 as governor of Arkansas, Hillary was making $100,000 a year from her law firm salary and corporate board fees. A portion of her salary was from Lafarge, a U.S. cement maker which was later fined for pollutions violations at its Alabama plant.
• Hillary Clinton wrote to NASA as a child inquiring how to become an astronaut. NASA replied that girls could not be astronauts.
• Hugh Ellsworth Rodham (1911-1993), Hillary’s father, worked as a textile wholesaler and contributed to her initially conservative ideology. While Hillary said her childhood resembled the television series Father Knows Best, biographers have described her father as domineering and even verbally rough, which may have prepared her for the rough-and-tumble life of politics.
• Hillary’s fifth grade teacher, Mrs. King, was so fond of teaching Hillary, it was said that she followed her to the sixth grade so that she could have her in class for a second year.
• When she was a teenager, Hillary organized a baby-sitting group to look after the children of migrant Mexican workers in rural Illinois.
• Hillary would sometimes come to class in the ninth grade wearing her Girl Scout uniform. Perhaps not coincidentally, she would later promote school uniforms.
• As a young adult, Hillary was an active Republican and even campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement in America, Wellesley influences, and her view that the Richard Nixon campaign against Nelson Rockefeller included “veiled racism” prompted Hillary to leave the Republican party.
• Hillary attended Wellesley College and was elected Senior Class President in 1969. She initially struggled with academic confidence at Wellesley and wanted to drop out. Her mother, however, encouraged her to stay.
• Hillary and her Wellesley friends were self-confessed “wonks,” the kind of students who lingered in the dining hall for hours debating issues of the day.
• Hillary won the TV quiz show College Bowl several times and landed in Life Magazine in 1969 after making headlines as the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley. While some older alumnae thought her “mild rebuke” of an earlier speaker was rude, she received a standing ovation lasting seven minutes.
• As a senior at Wellesley, Hillary wrote her thesis on Chicago's radical community organizer Saul Alinsky under the direction of Professor Schechter. Her thesis was supposedly suppressed years later while she was at the White House.
• Hillary was accepted to both Yale and Harvard Law schools. A friend introduced her to one of the legendary Harvard law professors saying, “Professor so-and-so, this is Hillary Rodham. She’s trying to decide between us and our nearest competitor.” The professor replied, “First of all, we have no nearest competitor, and secondly, we don’t need any more women.” Hillary decided to go to Yale.
• After graduating from Wellesley, Hillary worked in Alaska, sliming fish in a fish processing plant. The plant fired her and then shut down after she complained about unhealthy conditions.
• Hillary was among only 27 women in a class of 235 at Yale Law.
• How Hillary met Bill Clinton at Yale: She got up from her desk, walked over to him, extended her hand, and said, “If you keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham.”
• After Bill’s mother spoke disparagingly of Hillary’s looks, he told his mother, “I have to have somebody to talk to. Don’t you understand that?” His extramarital activities, however, nearly ruptured his marriage several times.
• Hillary, who is a Methodist, and Bill, who is a Southern Baptist, were married in a Methodist ceremony in their living room on October 11, 1975.
• When asked what attracted Hillary to Bill, she replied, “He wasn’t afraid of me.”
• Many biographers and observers have voiced their suspicions that Hillary and Bill’s marriage is based on shared political ambition to revolutionize the Democratic Party and secure the presidency for Bill, rather than on love.
• In 1988 and 1991, The National Law Journal named Hillary one of the 100 most powerful lawyers in America.
• After graduating from Yale, she took the bar exam in Arkansas and Washington. She failed the D.C. bar but passed the one in Arkansas.d
• Hillary has been called “The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock.”
• Hillary served on the boards of TCBY and Wal-Mart.
• Hillary’s friendship as First Lady with former mentor Jean Houston ended after Bob Woodward revealed in a 1996 book that Houston helped Clinton hold imaginary conversations with her hero Eleanor Roosevelt. One of the conversations was taped and her critics called it “Wackygate.”
• Hillary and Al Gore reportedly never had a good relationship and vied over access to Bill. The rift deepened when Gore chose to distance himself from the Clintons in the 2000 presidential election.j
• When Hillary met mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary in 1995 in Nepal, she said to the press that her mother had named her after the famed climber. Sir Edmund Hillary became famous in 1953. Hillary Clinton, however, was born in 1947. In 2006, she said the story was a family myth.
• Hillary’s firm character led to The New Yorker cartoon of a woman shopping for a new jacket and saying, “Nothing too Hillary.”
• When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sent a check to Bill’s presidential campaign in 1992, he immediately said, “We can’t cash this.” Hillary replied,” Make a copy, and then cash it.”
• When Hillary first heard that Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, she attributed it to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” The phrase has since been used many times in popular culture. Rush Limbaugh, for example, refers to himself as Mr. Big of his fan base, “The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.” A number of entrepreneurs sell VRWC (Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy) merchandise.
• Hillary began calling herself “Hillary Clinton” or “Mrs. Bill Clinton” in order to appeal to more voters in Arkansas in the early 1980s.
• While talking with public radio interviewer Terry Gross in 2004, Bill essentially defined their marital dynamic as being similar to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who worked together in the White House but led separate lives after she learned about his affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford.
• In 1974, Hillary Clinton served as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff during Nixon’s impeachment proceedings.
• In 1977, Hillary landed a place at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. Founded in 1820, it was one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms west of the Mississippi River.
• When Bill Clinton was inaugurated as governor of Arkansas on January 10, 1979, Hillary wore a $20,000 necklace that contained the 4.25-carat Kahn diamond. The Kahn was mined at the Arkansas Crater of Diamonds State Park, the only state park that holds the only diamonds ever discovered in North America.
• When Hillary kissed Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, during a visit to the West Bank on November 11, 1999, the photo made front-page news and Hillary spent considerable time explaining the kiss was a social grace required of a first lady.
• In one of Hillary’s first trials before a jury, she represented a canning company that had been sued by someone who claimed they found the rear end of a rat in a can. Though she won the case, she became the butt of her husband’s jokes for years over what he called her “rat’s ass” case.
• When asked about her image in 1993, Hillary replied that she is a “Rorschach test.”
• The suicide of Vice Deputy White House Council Vince Foster, whose body was found in Fort Macy Park outside of Washington D.C. on July 20, 1993, sparked several conspiracy theories involving Hillary Clinton—particularly after several of her aides removed unidentified files from his office before the FBI could secure it.
• When Hillary Clinton encouraged White House chef Pierre Chambrin to resign in 1994, he was given $37,026 in exchange for his agreement not to discuss the Clintons or the circumstances of his dismissal. This severance bonus was unprecedented and was questioned by Congress.
• Though Hillary had appeared on Vogue in 1998, she apparently backed out at the last minute for a 2007 shoot, claiming she didn’t want to look too “feminine.“
• One biographer says that Hillary would have preferred a larger family but suffered from a medical condition that impaired her fertility.
• Some scholars speculate that President Obama has given voice to the rising possibility of women with his more feminine, inclusive approach to problem-solving. They suggest that Hillary, on the other hand, is still trying to emulate a male model which requires combat and demonizing enemies.

Abraham Lincoln was married to Marry Todd and was a father of four children but three of sons died before even turning 20 and in the present times there are no living heirs of Lincoln. Lincoln's hat was more than fashion or protection, the 6 Feet 4 inches tall Lincoln used it to store money. He wore custom footwear and was more spiritual than religious. His sons were a death magnet and attracted major accidents. Lincoln was a skilled wrestler and could use axe even more skillfully. Days before he actually died, Lincoln had a dream about his death. When he was shot he was seeing the play "Our American Cousin". His bodyguard left the position few minutes before his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, arrived. When escaping from the stage John Booth broke his ankle by landing awkwardly on the foot. He raised himself up and yelled, "Sic semper tyrannis!" Meaning in Latin "Thus always to tyrants" (which is Virginia State motto).

The First President to be born in a hospital, a student of Nuclear physics and a speed reader who can read almost 2000 words a minute, Jimmy Carter once panned for Gold too. At the age of five he was punished by his father for stealing from the collection plate at a church, a penny. The draft resisters that belong to the Vietnam War were also pardoned by him. Before he entered the world of politics, Jimmy Carter used to ride motorcycles. Jimmy Carter is said to be the first President whose mother was sent on a diplomatic mission. After his father's death, he ran very successfully his family's peanut farm. Jimmy Carter received 2002 Nobel Peace Prize in the Oslo, Norway. Jimmy Carter said about Iraq war: "I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false."