25524: Du Tuyau: (News) Bill Clinton's Affair with Voodoo (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: viandemoulue@aol.com

Dear all, this is fresh from the Toronto Free Press. The linking for your
review is this one:
http://www.torontofreepress.com/2005/cover062805.htm

> From weird to weirder, now prezidan Bill Clinton too is a wangatè. Read on
below, and enjoy the below.

Bill Clinton's affair with Voodoo
by Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Toronto-- When it comes to dabbling in the black arts, former U.S. President
Bill Clinton has much in common with deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Saddam reportedly wore a stone around his neck to ward off evil. When he was
ensconced in his Iraqi palaces, he summoned up the jinn (genies) to do his
bidding.
According to historian Joel A. Ruth, a Voodoo sorcerer, supplied to Clinton by
the exiled-by-coup John-Bertrand Aristide, once put a curse on incumbent
President George W. Bush, "by manipulating a doll made in the president's
image."
Neither Saddam's magic stone, a special talisman meant to keep the Grim Reaper
at bay, nor the Voodoo sorcerer's curse against George W. worked. Saddam
languishes in prison awaiting trial. Clinton, relegated to the public
speaker's tour, was last week paid a $300,000 fee to address a business
audience in Bogotá, Colombia.
The long road of destruction Aristide carved through poverty-stricken Haiti
was paved in part by one William Jefferson Clinton.
Clinton's friendship with Aristide, a former Catholic priest turned Voodoo
practitioner dates back to 1991 when Aristide, ousted in a coup, took up
residence in Washington, D.C. Joining the cocktail circuit and networking for
the political aid needed to help restore his power, he soon found his way
within the inner circle of the soon-to-be Democratic presidential hopeful Bill
Clinton.
As time would tell, Clinton paid more than a politician's lip service to the
practice of Voodoo.
According to the Haiti Observateur, "During a March 31, 1995 visit to Haiti
under Aristide's restored rule, Clinton took part in a Voodoo initiative
ceremony intended to keep him impervious to Republican attacks and to
guarantee his re-election." (FrontPageMag.com, Feb. 20,. 2004).
No Voodoo ceremony could ward off Monica Lewinsky and the rest, as they say,
is history.
His friendship with Clinton now cemented, Aristide later began shipping
Haitians to the U.S., many of them to Florida shores 600 miles away.
In 1998, Senator John F. Kerry followed in Clinton's footsteps and co-
sponsored a bill that resulted in amnesty for an estimated 125,000 Haitians
granted "temporary asylum" before 1996 because they were fleeing the chaos,
terror and poverty inflicted on them, largely by Aristide.
Aristide, whose last act for Haiti was to declare Voodoo an official religion,
fled the country on February 29, 2003 amid a rebellion and pressure from the
U.S. and France.
"Voodoo," Aristide professed in a speech to Congress attendees, "is one of the
great religions in the world alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism".
Since June 2004, a United Nations stabilization force has been in Haiti. The
presence of UN "blue helmets" notwithstanding, lack of security remains the
number one problem.
The interim government leading the country since Aristide's ignominious
departure has not improved the life of its citizens. Government commissions
are being disbanded as quickly as they are being created and would, were it
not for the tragedy, be the stuff of television sitcom comedy.
The children of Port-au-Prince continue to die of hunger. Marauding armed
guards still loyal to Aristide battle police and there are signs of UN
corruption.
A recent spate of violence in which at least 20 people were killed, is forcing
U.S. officials to consider deploying American troops to help maintain order
ahead of a general election slated for the last quarter of 2005.
While Aristide is living a life of a king's ransom in exile, most Haitians are
subsisting on less than a dollar a day.
Meanwhile, it will take more than black magic to clean the slate of Bill
Clinton in a country whose mantra is "Haiti is cursed".