Bill Clinton has summoned “his own mini-General Assembly of presidents, prime ministers, kings and other pooh-bahs” to devise plans for “addressing poverty, global warming, religious conflict and better governance.”

The inaugural meeting of what the perjurer in chief modestly calls the Clinton Global Initiative has brought together 800 bigwigs who paid $15,000 each for a seat (which adds up to a neat $12 million in entrance fees alone).

Clinton also asked each attendee to “commit” to doing something to improve the world, by which he really means money.  They have obliged, and over 50 such pledges have been made so far, totaling more than $300 million, including an Africa investment fund and a plan to fight AIDS.  “What is happening here is the kind of intense dialogue between different people and cultures which should take place at the U.N. but can’t anymore because of highly ritualistic structures, protocol and conflict avoidance,” explained Richard C. Holbrooke, former U.N. ambassador under Clinton and John Kerry’s foreign-affairs advisor during his presidential campaign.

So far, so predictable: A failed President with no scruples and a flair for p.r. is fighting for his legacy and making a killing along the way.  The bad news is that the circus was attended by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  Her predecessor, Colin Powell, is reported to have cancelled an appearance at a conference on AIDS in Nigeria in April 2001 because Clinton decided to attend.  For reasons mysterious, the Bush administration has decided to relegitimize Clinton.

That the administration is making a mistake is evident from the record and character of Clinton himself, of course; but it is also evident from the list of Distinguished Panelists provided by the Initiative.  It includes South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, whose major contribution to the AIDS debate is his highly controversial assertion that such “traditional attitudes” of African men as violence against women and promiscuity do not play a significant role in spreading the disease—for which he has been attacked by, among others, his predecessor Nelson Mandela.  The position of South Africa’s doctors is clear: Unless the president changes his views on the matter, “he will not be in the position to lead the country’s campaign against the virus.”

Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo is there, too.  His experiences may be useful to the “better governance” panel, as he is the head of what is arguably one of the most corrupt states in the world—certainly so in terms of the estimated amount of money directly stolen from its coffers by leaders past and present: $420 billion, an amount that equals all Western aid to Africa over the past four decades.

Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko is on board, which is appropriate in view of his almost Clintonesque talent for not letting mere facts stand in the way of his creativity.  Yushchenko’s claim that the former Ukrainian authorities tried to poison him using dioxin came in very handy during his stage-managed presidential campaign last November, but it remains unproved more than a year later, because Yushchenko has reneged on his pledge to undergo tests in the Ukraine.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Ergodan is also there, presumably as a specialist on “religious conflict.”  Before re-inventing himself, this “post-Islamist” leader of his anything-but-post-Islamic country declared that “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”  His party resisted legislation aimed at reducing violence against women, and, last year, its deputies were persuaded only with difficulty to remove the imprisonment of adulterers from the statute books.

The role of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is also on board, will probably be to work in tandem with Obasanjo on “better governance.”  To that task, he can contribute his extensive experience in managing the Oil for Food Program in Iraq.

The grim list goes on: that prominent humanitarian Madeleine Albright, Al Gore (remember him?), Paul Wolfowitz, Rupert Murdoch, and, of course, George Soros.

Soros is probably the most deserving member of the Clinton Global Initiative.  He has contributed tens of millions to America Coming Together and MoveOn.org and to the “Center for American Progress,” run by “third way” Clintonites John Podesta (formerly of the Democratic Leadership Council), Morton Halperin, and Gene Sperling.

Soros wants to fight poverty in the Third World, having made a contribution to its spread.  His major contribution to the AIDS epidemic has been a successful kick-start—through a network of his “Open Society Foundations”—to (previously nonexistent) homosexual activism all over Eastern Europe.  The campaign for “LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Rights” is directed from Budapest, publishing lesbian and “gay” books in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia and opening “Gay” and Lesbian Centers in the Ukraine and Rumania.

Clinton’s and Soros’ brand of one-world transnationalism are one and the same.  Their radical mind-set dominates the Democratic Party, of course; but it is puzzling that their rabidly antitraditionalist and deeply anti-Western worldview and political agenda should be legitimized and even implicitly supported by the Bush administration.