By Jeffrey Robbins
I often find that one last objection of many conservatives who continue to vote Republican for President is often on the grounds of the potential harm that a Democrat would bring to pass on the Supreme Court. For those readers who have not yet read the first writings that appeared here regarding this possible myth that Republicans have been good for the Court, you may want to review two earlier posts,
here:
http://wiconstitutionalist.blogspot.com/2008/01/are-republicans-conservative-part-ii.html
and here:
http://wiconstitutionalist.blogspot.com/2008/01/are-republicans-conservative-part-iii.html
Since the time is quickly eroding until we take to the polls in November to decide who among the many candidates will receive our rightful vote for President (Baldwin, Barr, Obama, McCain, and Nader for example), it may be an important time to review the harm John McCain (and many of his fellow Repubicans) has possibly wrought on the Supreme Court.
In 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3. The only votes against her came from three conservative Republicans: Helms (R-NC), Nickles (R-NC) and Smith (R-NH). Senator Donald W. Riegle Jr., a Michigan Democrat, did not appear for the vote.
In 1994, Stephen Breyer was confirmed by a 87-9 vote. Burns (R-MT), Coats (R-IN), Coverdell (R-GA), Helms (R-NC), Lott (R-MS), Lugar (R-IN), Murkowski (R-AK), Nickles (R-OK), Smith (R-NH) were the votes against his confirmation. There were four non-voters, two from each party.
John McCain assumed his Senate seat on January 3, 1987.
As we can see, John McCain votes Left when a Democrat is picking the US Supreme Court nominees, as he did with Clinton picks Ginsberg and Breyer. His other votes have been for Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Souter, and Bork. So based on his actual votes (not his rhetoric) we have zero idea what principles guide him in voting for Justices as these Justices range from what most would consider the most liberal to moderate to conservative.
What happened when the Democrats filibustered one Bush nominee to the federal court of appeals after another in 2005? McCain's reaction? Annouce on Chris Matthews' Hardball program that he would vote with Teddy Kennedy, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and vote to let the, then, minority Democrats retain the judicial filibuster.
McCain tries to explain his tendency for voting with Ted Kennedy and the Left by saying, "If the Democrats win the White House, we need to retain our option to filibuster liberal nominees."
McCain was just wanting to preserve the judicial filibuster so that he could filibuster a Left Wing judicial nominee if a Democrat became president in the future, right?
If that's the case, why did McCain vote for Ruth Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer?
One also cannot offer the following excuse others have offered: "That was when we judged nominees on their qualifications only, not ideology." Votes for Ginsberg and Breyer, occuring in 1993 and 1994 happened after the Democrats sunk the Robert Bork nomination in 1987 and nearly sunk the Clarence Thomas nomination four years later, in 1991.
In fact, don't consider this necessarily an indictment of simply McCain. It could be an indictment of the vast majority of Republican Senators. It strikes me as odd that the two generally accepted most conservative nominees in Bork and Thomas had the closest confirmation votes, indicating the Democrats voted on ideology. Yet, the Republican Senators who claim rhetorically that they want strict constitutionalists fall short somehow when we look at the confirmation votes for seemingly very liberal Justices as the votes overwhelmingly and inexplicably pour in from Republicans. Perhaps, just perhaps, a review of the following will turn your head on this topic.
Breyer and Ginsberg, our two examples above, coasted through 87-9 and 96-3, respectively. Conversely, Thomas was confirmed with a vote of 52-48 and Bork's nomination failed 42-58.
The same pattern occurs with Attorney General nominees: 42 votes against John Ashcroft, 36 against Alberto Gonzales, and zero against Janet Reno. Why? (When you go back and read the two posts mentioned in the first paragraph of this post you will note that Ashcroft and Gonzales were not necessarily conservative or freedom-loving once in office.)
What if we look at the votes of the disappointing moderates to liberals nominated by Republicans? Souter was confirmed 90-9. O'Conner was confirmed 99-0. Stevens 98-0. If Republicans do not put up a wimper when liberal nominees such as Ginsberg are nominated. If Republicans themselves nominate and vote for a number of moderates (cloaked as "conservatives" for the nomination hearings - only to find out later...)...is it any wonder we have a myth brewing that Republican presidents have been great for the Court and freedom?
Perhaps when McCain said he was "disappointed" with the US Supreme Court (Alito, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy and Thomas were in the majority) decision that struck down McCain's anti-1st Amendment McCain-Feingold legislation he is giving us a much better clue than his rhetoric as to his thoughts on the Court and why he votes for the likes of Ginsburg. That is the very same Ruth Bader Ginsberg who was the former ACLU General Counsel on record endorsing reducing the age of sexual consent to age 12 as well as Co-ed prisons.
Do you not believe McCain is proud of his Supreme Court votes? He is certainly using them to 'woo' Hillary Clinton Democrats. See this link: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0608/McCain_mingles_with_Clinton_supporters.html
Of course as noted in other articles posted here, a vote for McCain is a vote for a liberal. Here below are just some of the problems a conservative should have in casting a vote for John McCain. There are other, better candidates. I would point to former Republican Congressman Bob Barr of the Libertarian Party and Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. Why continue voting for the evil of two lessers and betraying your priciples?
1) Tax cuts. In 2001 and 2003, McCain was one of 2 and then 3 Republicans, in the US Senate to vote with the Democrats against the Bush tax cuts. McCain is now I understand preaching that he did so because the tax cuts did not come along with appropriate spending cuts. That is simply disingenous. Why? Senator McCain not only voted against the Bush tax cuts, he joined leading liberal senators in offering and voting for amendments designed to undermine them. All in all, Senator McCain voted on the pro-tax side of 14 such amendments in 2001 and 2003. These included such odious measures as:
An amendment sponsored by Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-WV) to prohibit a reduction in the top tax rate until Congress enacted legislation to provide a prescription drug benefit.
An amendment sponsored by Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) against full repeal of the Death Tax. This vote is in keeping with Senator McCain's 2002 vote against repealing the Death Tax.
An amendment sponsored by Tom Daschle (D-SD) and co-sponsored by Senator McCain to limit tax reduction in the top tax bracket to one percentage point.
Well, okay, maybe his rhetoric (as it sometimes is) was conservative at least:
"I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief." quoting John McCain, Washington Times, 06/09/01
How different was McCain's excuse for voting against the 2001 Bush tax cuts from some (other) liberals?
Here's Ted Kennedy on the 2001 Bush tax cuts:
"Now, they are proposing more of the same, more tax breaks benefiting only the wealthiest among us." Sen. Ted Kennedy, Press release, 06/08/06
Democratic Representative Maxine Waters (CA): "I voted against the Republican tax cut plan, which is an irresponsible tax cut that will further undermine the nation's struggling economy at the expense of middle-class American families." The Los Angeles Sentinel, 05/29/03
(2) McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. They don't call John McCain "McAmnesty" for nothing.
(3) McCain-Kennedy-Edwards "Patients' Bill of Rights". There's a bill that would have enriched the Trial Lawyers and severely damaged the private health insurance market.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Oklahoma to feds: Don't tread on me
State House defends its sovereignty from D.C. intrusion
June 16, 2008
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Steamed over a perceived increase in federal usurping of states' rights, Oklahoma's House of Representatives told Washington, D.C., to back off.
Joint House Resolution 1089, passed by an overwhelming 92-3 margin, reasserts Oklahoma's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and, according to the resolution's own language, is "serving notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates."
The Tenth Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Traditionally, this language has meant that the federal government is limited in its scope and cannot usurp the sovereign powers of states. In recent decades, however, as the size and reach of the federal government has expanded, many have come to question whether Washington has stepped on states' rights and gotten too big for its breeches.
Charles Key, the Republican state representative who authored the resolution, told WND that he introduced it because he believes the federal government's overstepping of its bounds has put our constitutional form of government in danger.
"The more we stand by and watch the federal government get involved in areas where it has no legal authority, we kill the Constitution a little at a time," he said. "The last few decades, the Constitution has been hanging by a thread."
Specifically, Resolution 1089 says the following:
"The State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States."
The resolution resolves that Oklahoma will "serve as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers."
It also instructs that "a copy of this resolution be distributed to the president of the United States, the president of the United States Senate, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate of each state's legislature of the United States of America, and each member of the Oklahoma congressional delegation."
The resolution does not, as some have speculated, amount to secession, but it does send a warning signal to Washington: Oklahoma does not intend to be bullied by big brother government.
The Sooner State became a hotbed of federal vs. state authority clashes earlier this month when a federal judge blocked a portion of Oklahoma's tough immigration laws, ruling that plaintiffs would likely establish that the state mandates preempted federal immigration laws.
Oklahoma's immigration statute, known as the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2007, originated as House Bill 1804 (co-authored, incidentally, by Key). It has been characterized by USA Today as "arguably the nation's toughest state law targeting illegal immigration."
The statute prohibits illegal immigrants from receiving tax-supported services and makes it a state crime to transport or harbor illegal immigrants. It also mandates that businesses take measures to verify the work eligibility of employees and independent contractors.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and individual chambers of commerce in Oklahoma challenged the latter mandates, set to go into effect July 1, in court.
On June 4th, U.S. District Judge Robin J. Cauthron issued an injunction against enforcing the July 1 mandates.
"We've just had a federal judge say that our immigration law's employer provisions are unconstitutional, claiming it as federal government territory," said Key in response. "That goes right to the issue of (Resolution 1089). The federal government doesn't have the right to have sole domain over that issue or many of the issues it has spilled over into."
Though House Joint Resolution 1089 received great support in Oklahoma's House of Representatives, it has now hit a roadblock. In the state's Senate, where the seats are split, 24-24, between Republicans and Democrats, the resolution was sent to the Senate's rules committee, where it languished without action until the legislature adjourned.
According to Key, the Senate has worked out agreements on how to manage the political tie, including power given to the Democratic senators to not hear certain bills. Those senators, says Key, refuse to even hear Resolution 1089.
In the House, where Republicans enjoy a 57-44 majority, Resolution 1089 received a hearing and was supported overwhelmingly on both sides of the aisle.
"I was on the Democratic side of the floor," said Key, "and one member went off talking about how far we've gotten, how bad (federal overreaches of power) are getting – it's the kind of thing you hear in coffee shops."
Key said his bill "is making a difference" in the way legislators in Oklahoma are talking and thinking about state's rights. "I think it will make even more of a difference," he said, "when I bring it up again." He vows to put the pressure on Oklahoma's Senate to pass a resolution like 1089, and he plans to begin communicating the cause with legislators around the country, urging them to bring up the issue in their states.
Key passed a similar resolution in 1994, when he was serving a previous tenure in the legislature. But that attempt was only a House resolution. He authored 1089 as a joint resolution because, he said, he wanted to increase its exposure. "As people who believe in this constitutional form of government," he said, "we need to bring this issue to a national level and debate."
June 16, 2008
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Steamed over a perceived increase in federal usurping of states' rights, Oklahoma's House of Representatives told Washington, D.C., to back off.
Joint House Resolution 1089, passed by an overwhelming 92-3 margin, reasserts Oklahoma's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and, according to the resolution's own language, is "serving notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates."
The Tenth Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Traditionally, this language has meant that the federal government is limited in its scope and cannot usurp the sovereign powers of states. In recent decades, however, as the size and reach of the federal government has expanded, many have come to question whether Washington has stepped on states' rights and gotten too big for its breeches.
Charles Key, the Republican state representative who authored the resolution, told WND that he introduced it because he believes the federal government's overstepping of its bounds has put our constitutional form of government in danger.
"The more we stand by and watch the federal government get involved in areas where it has no legal authority, we kill the Constitution a little at a time," he said. "The last few decades, the Constitution has been hanging by a thread."
Specifically, Resolution 1089 says the following:
"The State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States."
The resolution resolves that Oklahoma will "serve as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers."
It also instructs that "a copy of this resolution be distributed to the president of the United States, the president of the United States Senate, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate of each state's legislature of the United States of America, and each member of the Oklahoma congressional delegation."
The resolution does not, as some have speculated, amount to secession, but it does send a warning signal to Washington: Oklahoma does not intend to be bullied by big brother government.
The Sooner State became a hotbed of federal vs. state authority clashes earlier this month when a federal judge blocked a portion of Oklahoma's tough immigration laws, ruling that plaintiffs would likely establish that the state mandates preempted federal immigration laws.
Oklahoma's immigration statute, known as the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2007, originated as House Bill 1804 (co-authored, incidentally, by Key). It has been characterized by USA Today as "arguably the nation's toughest state law targeting illegal immigration."
The statute prohibits illegal immigrants from receiving tax-supported services and makes it a state crime to transport or harbor illegal immigrants. It also mandates that businesses take measures to verify the work eligibility of employees and independent contractors.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and individual chambers of commerce in Oklahoma challenged the latter mandates, set to go into effect July 1, in court.
On June 4th, U.S. District Judge Robin J. Cauthron issued an injunction against enforcing the July 1 mandates.
"We've just had a federal judge say that our immigration law's employer provisions are unconstitutional, claiming it as federal government territory," said Key in response. "That goes right to the issue of (Resolution 1089). The federal government doesn't have the right to have sole domain over that issue or many of the issues it has spilled over into."
Though House Joint Resolution 1089 received great support in Oklahoma's House of Representatives, it has now hit a roadblock. In the state's Senate, where the seats are split, 24-24, between Republicans and Democrats, the resolution was sent to the Senate's rules committee, where it languished without action until the legislature adjourned.
According to Key, the Senate has worked out agreements on how to manage the political tie, including power given to the Democratic senators to not hear certain bills. Those senators, says Key, refuse to even hear Resolution 1089.
In the House, where Republicans enjoy a 57-44 majority, Resolution 1089 received a hearing and was supported overwhelmingly on both sides of the aisle.
"I was on the Democratic side of the floor," said Key, "and one member went off talking about how far we've gotten, how bad (federal overreaches of power) are getting – it's the kind of thing you hear in coffee shops."
Key said his bill "is making a difference" in the way legislators in Oklahoma are talking and thinking about state's rights. "I think it will make even more of a difference," he said, "when I bring it up again." He vows to put the pressure on Oklahoma's Senate to pass a resolution like 1089, and he plans to begin communicating the cause with legislators around the country, urging them to bring up the issue in their states.
Key passed a similar resolution in 1994, when he was serving a previous tenure in the legislature. But that attempt was only a House resolution. He authored 1089 as a joint resolution because, he said, he wanted to increase its exposure. "As people who believe in this constitutional form of government," he said, "we need to bring this issue to a national level and debate."
Monday, June 16, 2008
Agent: FBI Can't Protect United States From Terror
Note: The article below really understates the problems...read Triple Cross by Peter Lance. My notes from the book: Book is RE: Ali Mohamed, Ramzi Yousef, others. US knew of 9/11 plot by 1995 via Yousefs laptop captured by phillipines govt. PDB's prior to 9/11 also shows they knew (not exact day). some of perps (the 20 hijackers, and other planners) were in custody multiple times. All released. Mohamed's Commanding Officer at Ft Bragg re: Afghan trip. Release of AliM per hapless FBI agent in CA from Canadian prison. the CA agent was AliM handler and was embrioled in 6 year triple homicide w/ personal links? tie to OKC (terry Nichols-Phill.). tie to TWA 800. 1994 wet test on PAL434. NYC Fire dept accountant secured all blueprints for key NYC buildings including WTC, this was known prior to 9/11. fbi and govt lies to preserve Scarpa investigation and charges against many mafioso. at what point does it cross to criminal negligence or worse? the number of warnings by low and mid level agents numbered hundreds. "wall memo" created after many of these warnings as a convenient hindsight excuse. very key agents, etc. who stopped imp warnings from being heard at imp junctures were promoted with bonus and/or increased salary after 9/11 commission's stonewalling was success. over 1/2 of 9/11 commission from staff of govt agencies being investigated (wolf/hen house). data mine project(Able Danger) prior to 9/11 in 2000 ylds 2.5 TB of data including a link chart with nearly all known conspirators, yet no action even then. on 9/11 there were at least 3 mock war exercises ongoing that day. at least one involved fighters and another involved SATS. including long island planes scrambled instead of OH. Systemic problem to FBI/CIA or worse? admission in private by key FBI figure to author: we are good at criminal, but terrible in defending against terrorism, predictive analysis.
By JUSTIN ROOD and VIC WALTER
May 21, 2008
The FBI is unable to protect the United States from another major attack by al Qaeda or other Middle Eastern extremists, an FBI counterterrorism official says.
FBI whistle-blower Bassem Youssef, right, addresses the American Library Association meeting in Philadelphia on Jan. 12, 2008. Youssef, a decorated FBI supervisor who was born in Egypt and speaks fluent Arabic, said that jealousy, discrimination and flawed directives hinder the agency's attempts to fight terrorism.
One key problem: In the FBI section dedicated to tracking international terrorists like al Qaeda, close to four out of every 10 supervisory positions are vacant, according to prepared testimony from Bassem Youssef, unit chief for the bureau's Communications Analysis Unit.
As a result, the FBI has recruited managers who have "no experience in counterterrorism and who did not even want to work in these positions," Youssef alleges in material prepared in advance of a congressional hearing this afternoon.
An FBI spokesman Wednesday morning declined to answer questions about Youssef's prepared testimony, noting the bureau was preparing a statement to respond to issues expected to be raised at the hearing.
The bureau's well-publicized troubles hiring and promoting talented foreign language speakers has also crippled its counterterrorism efforts, Youssef warned. FBI managers "rely exclusively on translation services" to understand communications from Middle Eastern terrorist operations, and FBI personnel "continue to make major mistakes" because they lack expertise in Arabic, he said.
As one consequence of these shortcomings, the bureau has "irresponsibl[y]" misidentified threats, Youssef said, adding that he was prepared to testify on the topic.
As another, Youssef said, it has come to depend too heavily on technological solutions, including aggressive electronic surveillance, which has "the potential of undermining American civil liberties."
The bureau said in January it had 46 agents and 285 language analysts who speak at least conversational Arabic.
"We have enough language qualified personnel to do our job, but that doesn't mean we don't want more, and we are continuing our recruiting efforts in this area," spokesman Richard Kolko said then.
Youssef, the FBI's highest-ranking Arab-American agent, is suing the bureau for discrimination, claiming he was passed over for promotions despite his successes and awards, including infiltrating a radical Islamic group whose leader masterminded the 1993 World Trace Center bombing. The FBI has denied his allegations.
By JUSTIN ROOD and VIC WALTER
May 21, 2008
The FBI is unable to protect the United States from another major attack by al Qaeda or other Middle Eastern extremists, an FBI counterterrorism official says.
FBI whistle-blower Bassem Youssef, right, addresses the American Library Association meeting in Philadelphia on Jan. 12, 2008. Youssef, a decorated FBI supervisor who was born in Egypt and speaks fluent Arabic, said that jealousy, discrimination and flawed directives hinder the agency's attempts to fight terrorism.
One key problem: In the FBI section dedicated to tracking international terrorists like al Qaeda, close to four out of every 10 supervisory positions are vacant, according to prepared testimony from Bassem Youssef, unit chief for the bureau's Communications Analysis Unit.
As a result, the FBI has recruited managers who have "no experience in counterterrorism and who did not even want to work in these positions," Youssef alleges in material prepared in advance of a congressional hearing this afternoon.
An FBI spokesman Wednesday morning declined to answer questions about Youssef's prepared testimony, noting the bureau was preparing a statement to respond to issues expected to be raised at the hearing.
The bureau's well-publicized troubles hiring and promoting talented foreign language speakers has also crippled its counterterrorism efforts, Youssef warned. FBI managers "rely exclusively on translation services" to understand communications from Middle Eastern terrorist operations, and FBI personnel "continue to make major mistakes" because they lack expertise in Arabic, he said.
As one consequence of these shortcomings, the bureau has "irresponsibl[y]" misidentified threats, Youssef said, adding that he was prepared to testify on the topic.
As another, Youssef said, it has come to depend too heavily on technological solutions, including aggressive electronic surveillance, which has "the potential of undermining American civil liberties."
The bureau said in January it had 46 agents and 285 language analysts who speak at least conversational Arabic.
"We have enough language qualified personnel to do our job, but that doesn't mean we don't want more, and we are continuing our recruiting efforts in this area," spokesman Richard Kolko said then.
Youssef, the FBI's highest-ranking Arab-American agent, is suing the bureau for discrimination, claiming he was passed over for promotions despite his successes and awards, including infiltrating a radical Islamic group whose leader masterminded the 1993 World Trace Center bombing. The FBI has denied his allegations.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Are Americans pro-slavery?
June 11, 2008
© 2008 by Walter Williams
Let's do a thought experiment asking whether Americans are for or against slavery. You might say, "What are you talking about, Williams? We fought a war that cost over 600,000 lives to end slavery!" To get started, we might find a description that captures the essence of slavery. A good working description is: Slavery is a set of circumstances whereby one person is forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor.
The average American worker toils from Jan. 1 to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what's taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person.
You might ask, "Williams, aren't you a bit off base? Slavery means that you are owned by another person." Who owns a person is not nearly important as who has the rights to use that person. In other words, a plantation owner having the power to force a black to work for him would have been just as well off, and possibly better off, not owning him. Not owning him means not having to bear medical expenses and loss of wealth if the slave died. During World War II, Nazis didn't own Jews, but they had the power to force them to labor for them. Not owning Jews meant that working and starving them to death had little cost to the Nazis. The fact that American slaves were owned, with prices sometimes ranging from $800 to $1,300, meant that owners had a financial stake in the slave's well-being and they were not worked and starved to death.
You might argue that my analogy is irrelevant because unlike American slaves and Nazi concentration camp inmates, we can come and go as we please, live where we want, buy a car, clothes and other things with the money left over after the government gets four months' worth of our earnings. But, does that make much of a difference?
During slavery, visitors to the South often observed "a great many loose negroes about." Officials in Savannah, Mobile, Charleston and other cities complained about "nominal slaves," "virtually free negroes" and "quasi-free negroes" who were seemingly oblivious to any law or regulation. Frederick Douglass, a slave, explained this phenomenon when he was employed as a Baltimore ship's caulker: "I was to be allowed all my time; to make bargains for work; to find my own employment, and to collect my own wages; and in return for this liberty, I was … to pay him (Douglass' master) three dollars at the end of each week, and to board and clothe myself, and buy my own caulking tools."
There are some benefits to being a quasi-free person such as Frederick Douglass. There are two ways U.S. Congress might force me to serve the purposes of another American. They might force me spend a couple of hours each day actually working, without compensation, for another American. Or, they might forcibly take a portion of my earnings so that American can hire someone. I see myself as being better off with Congress doing the latter – taking a portion of my earnings and giving it away.
Some might be put off by my thought experiment and consider it an illegitimate use of the term "slavery." At what point should we consider ourselves a quasi-free American – when government takes two-thirds or three-quarters of our earnings?
© 2008 by Walter Williams
Let's do a thought experiment asking whether Americans are for or against slavery. You might say, "What are you talking about, Williams? We fought a war that cost over 600,000 lives to end slavery!" To get started, we might find a description that captures the essence of slavery. A good working description is: Slavery is a set of circumstances whereby one person is forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor.
The average American worker toils from Jan. 1 to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what's taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person.
You might ask, "Williams, aren't you a bit off base? Slavery means that you are owned by another person." Who owns a person is not nearly important as who has the rights to use that person. In other words, a plantation owner having the power to force a black to work for him would have been just as well off, and possibly better off, not owning him. Not owning him means not having to bear medical expenses and loss of wealth if the slave died. During World War II, Nazis didn't own Jews, but they had the power to force them to labor for them. Not owning Jews meant that working and starving them to death had little cost to the Nazis. The fact that American slaves were owned, with prices sometimes ranging from $800 to $1,300, meant that owners had a financial stake in the slave's well-being and they were not worked and starved to death.
You might argue that my analogy is irrelevant because unlike American slaves and Nazi concentration camp inmates, we can come and go as we please, live where we want, buy a car, clothes and other things with the money left over after the government gets four months' worth of our earnings. But, does that make much of a difference?
During slavery, visitors to the South often observed "a great many loose negroes about." Officials in Savannah, Mobile, Charleston and other cities complained about "nominal slaves," "virtually free negroes" and "quasi-free negroes" who were seemingly oblivious to any law or regulation. Frederick Douglass, a slave, explained this phenomenon when he was employed as a Baltimore ship's caulker: "I was to be allowed all my time; to make bargains for work; to find my own employment, and to collect my own wages; and in return for this liberty, I was … to pay him (Douglass' master) three dollars at the end of each week, and to board and clothe myself, and buy my own caulking tools."
There are some benefits to being a quasi-free person such as Frederick Douglass. There are two ways U.S. Congress might force me to serve the purposes of another American. They might force me spend a couple of hours each day actually working, without compensation, for another American. Or, they might forcibly take a portion of my earnings so that American can hire someone. I see myself as being better off with Congress doing the latter – taking a portion of my earnings and giving it away.
Some might be put off by my thought experiment and consider it an illegitimate use of the term "slavery." At what point should we consider ourselves a quasi-free American – when government takes two-thirds or three-quarters of our earnings?
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
Note: As posted here before, if anyone is under impression that the government, regardless of which major establishment candidate wins, is leaving Iraq, well, you will be wrong. McCain has since rescinded his "100 years" comment, but...,the Korean War was in what year again? The funding for the permanent bases has been voted on from both sides of the aisle per previous posts.
Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 5 June 2008
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.
The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.
America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.
The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.
The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.
Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.
The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.
Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.
The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.
The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.
The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.
Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 5 June 2008
A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.
The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.
America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military "surge" began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.
The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. "It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty," said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.
The US has repeatedly denied it wants permanent bases in Iraq but one Iraqi source said: "This is just a tactical subterfuge." Washington also wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and the right to pursue its "war on terror" in Iraq, giving it the authority to arrest anybody it wants and to launch military campaigns without consultation.
Mr Bush is determined to force the Iraqi government to sign the so-called "strategic alliance" without modifications, by the end of next month. But it is already being condemned by the Iranians and many Arabs as a continuing American attempt to dominate the region. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful and usually moderate Iranian leader, said yesterday that such a deal would create "a permanent occupation". He added: "The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves of the Americans."
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is believed to be personally opposed to the terms of the new pact but feels his coalition government cannot stay in power without US backing.
The deal also risks exacerbating the proxy war being fought between Iran and the United States over who should be more influential in Iraq.
Although Iraqi ministers have said they will reject any agreement limiting Iraqi sovereignty, political observers in Baghdad suspect they will sign in the end and simply want to establish their credentials as defenders of Iraqi independence by a show of defiance now. The one Iraqi with the authority to stop deal is the majority Shia spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In 2003, he forced the US to agree to a referendum on the new Iraqi constitution and the election of a parliament. But he is said to believe that loss of US support would drastically weaken the Iraqi Shia, who won a majority in parliament in elections in 2005.
The US is adamantly against the new security agreement being put to a referendum in Iraq, suspecting that it would be voted down. The influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to demonstrate every Friday against the impending agreement on the grounds that it compromises Iraqi independence.
The Iraqi government wants to delay the actual signing of the agreement but the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney has been trying to force it through. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, has spent weeks trying to secure the accord.
The signature of a security agreement, and a parallel deal providing a legal basis for keeping US troops in Iraq, is unlikely to be accepted by most Iraqis. But the Kurds, who make up a fifth of the population, will probably favour a continuing American presence, as will Sunni Arab political leaders who want US forces to dilute the power of the Shia. The Sunni Arab community, which has broadly supported a guerrilla war against US occupation, is likely to be split.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Republic v. Democracy
A Republic is representative government ruled by law (the Constitution). A democracy is direct government ruled by the majority (mob rule). A Republic recognizes the inalienable rights of individuals while democracies are only concerned with group wants or needs (the public good).
Lawmaking is a slow, deliberate process in our Constitutional Republic requiring approval from the three banches of government, the Supreme Court and individual jurors (jury-nullification). Lawmaking in our unlawful democracy occurs rapidly requiring approval from the whim of the majority as determined by polls and/or voter referendums.
Democracies always self-destruct when the non-productive majority realizes that it can vote itself handouts from the productive minority by electing the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury. To maintain their power, these candidates must adopt an ever-increasing tax and spend policy to satisfy the ever-increasing desires of the majority. As taxes increase, incentive to produce decreases, causing many of the once productive to drop out and join the non-productive. When there are no longer enough producers to fund the legitimate functions of government and the socialist programs, the democracy will collapse, always to be followed by a Dictatorship.
Even though nearly every politician, teacher, journalist and citizen believes that our Founders created a democracy, it is absolutely not true. The Founders knew full well the differences between a Republic and a Democracy and they repeatedly and emphatically said that they had founded a republic.
Article IV Section 4, of the Constitution "guarantees to every state in this union a Republican form of government".... Conversely, the word Democracy is not mentioned even once in the Constitution. Madison warned us of the dangers of democracies with these words,
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths...",
"We may define a republic to be ... a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans and claim for their government the honorable title of republic." James Madison, Federalist No. 10, (1787)
"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men." Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
John Witherspoon, signer - “Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”
Zephaniah Swift, author of America’s first legal text - “It may generally be remarked that the more a government resembles a pure democracy the more they abound with disorder and confusion.”
Benjamin Rush, signer - “ a simple democracy … is one of the greatest of evils.”
John Quincy Adams - “The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.”
Noah Webster - “In democracy … there are commonly tumults and disorders … Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”
James Madison - “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
John Adams - “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Fisher Ames, author of the House language for the First Amendment - “A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way. The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty !!
Gouverneur Morris, signer and penman of the Constitution - “We have seen the tumult of democracy terminate … as [it has] everywhere terminated, in despotism … Democracy! savage and wild. Thou who wouldst bring down the virtuous and wise to the level of folly and guilt.”
Samuel Adams – “… it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds …”
Communist revolutionary Karl Marx understood this principle all too well. Which is why, in "The Communist Manifesto" this enemy of individual freedoms stated:
"[T]he first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of Democracy." For what purpose? To "abolish private property"; to "wrest, by degrees, capital from the bourgeoisie"; to "centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State."
Another proclaimed champion of Democracy was Communist Mao Tse-tung who proclaimed in 1939 [a decade before consolidating control on the Chinese mainland]:
"Taken as a whole, the Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party embraces the two stages, i.e., the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which are essentially different revolutionary processes, and the second process can be carried through only after the first has been completed. The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society."
Still another well-known champion of Democracy is Mikhail Gorbachev, who stated in his 1987 book Perestroika:
"[A]ccording to Lenin, Socialism and Democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites Socialism with Democracy [emphasis in the original] and revives the Leninist concept.... We want more Socialism and, therefore, more Democracy."
Our military training manuals used to contain the correct definitions of Democracy and Republic. The following comes from Training Manual No. 2000-25 published by the War Department, November 30, 1928.
DEMOCRACY:
A government of the masses.
Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of "direct" expression.
Results in mobocracy.
Attitude toward property is communistic--negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether is be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
Results in demogogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
REPUBLIC:
Authority is derived through the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them.
Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences.
A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass.
Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy.
Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress.
By 1952 the U.S. Army via the new War Department Field Manual 21-13, sub-section entitled "The Soldier's Guide" was singing the praises of Democracy instead of warning against it. This new manual incorrectly stated: "Because the United States is a Democracy, the majority of the people decide how our Government will be organized and run...."
follows is excerpt from article by Ron Paul
December 11, 2000
A Republic, Not a Democracy
by Rep. Ron Paul
Throughout the presidential election controversy, we have been bombarded with references to our sacred "democracy." Television and radio shows have been inundated with politicians worried about the "will of the people" being thwarted by the courts. Solemn warnings have been issued concerning the legitimacy of the presidency and the effects on our "democratic system" if the eventual winner did not receive the most popular votes. "I'm really in love with our democracy," one presidential candidate gushed to a reporter. Apparently, the United States at some point become a stealth democracy at the behest of news directors and politicians.
The problem, of course, is that our country is not a democracy. Our nation was founded as a constitutionally limited republic, as any grammar school child knew just a few decades ago (remember the Pledge of Allegiance: "and to the Republic for which it stands"...?). The Founding Fathers were concerned with liberty, not democracy. In fact, the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. On the contrary, Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution is quite clear: "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government (emphasis added). The emphasis on democracy in our modern political discourse has no historical or constitutional basis.
In fact, the Constitution is replete with undemocratic mechanisms. The electoral college is an obvious example. Small states are represented in national elections with greater electoral power than their populations would warrant in a purely democratic system. Similarly, sparsely populated Wyoming has the same number of senators as heavily populated New York. The result is not democratic, but the Founders knew that smaller states had to be protected against overreaching federal power. The Bill of Rights provides individuals with similar protections against the majority. The First Amendment, for example, is utterly undemocratic. It was designed to protect unpopular speech against democratic fervor. Would the same politicians so enamored with democracy be willing to give up freedom of speech if the majority chose to do so?
Our Founders instituted a republican system to protect individual rights and property rights from tyranny, regardless of whether the tyrant was a king, a monarchy, a congress, or an unelected mob. They believed that a representative government, restrained by the Bill of Rights and divided into three power sharing branches, would balance the competing interests of the population. They also knew that unbridled democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny suffered by the colonies under King George. In other words, the Founders had no illusions about democracy. Democracy represented unlimited rule by an omnipotent majority, while a constitutionally limited republic was seen as the best system to preserve liberty. Inalienable individual liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights would be threatened by the "excesses of democracy."
Lawmaking is a slow, deliberate process in our Constitutional Republic requiring approval from the three banches of government, the Supreme Court and individual jurors (jury-nullification). Lawmaking in our unlawful democracy occurs rapidly requiring approval from the whim of the majority as determined by polls and/or voter referendums.
Democracies always self-destruct when the non-productive majority realizes that it can vote itself handouts from the productive minority by electing the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury. To maintain their power, these candidates must adopt an ever-increasing tax and spend policy to satisfy the ever-increasing desires of the majority. As taxes increase, incentive to produce decreases, causing many of the once productive to drop out and join the non-productive. When there are no longer enough producers to fund the legitimate functions of government and the socialist programs, the democracy will collapse, always to be followed by a Dictatorship.
Even though nearly every politician, teacher, journalist and citizen believes that our Founders created a democracy, it is absolutely not true. The Founders knew full well the differences between a Republic and a Democracy and they repeatedly and emphatically said that they had founded a republic.
Article IV Section 4, of the Constitution "guarantees to every state in this union a Republican form of government".... Conversely, the word Democracy is not mentioned even once in the Constitution. Madison warned us of the dangers of democracies with these words,
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths...",
"We may define a republic to be ... a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans and claim for their government the honorable title of republic." James Madison, Federalist No. 10, (1787)
"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men." Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
John Witherspoon, signer - “Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”
Zephaniah Swift, author of America’s first legal text - “It may generally be remarked that the more a government resembles a pure democracy the more they abound with disorder and confusion.”
Benjamin Rush, signer - “ a simple democracy … is one of the greatest of evils.”
John Quincy Adams - “The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.”
Noah Webster - “In democracy … there are commonly tumults and disorders … Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”
James Madison - “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
John Adams - “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Fisher Ames, author of the House language for the First Amendment - “A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way. The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty !!
Gouverneur Morris, signer and penman of the Constitution - “We have seen the tumult of democracy terminate … as [it has] everywhere terminated, in despotism … Democracy! savage and wild. Thou who wouldst bring down the virtuous and wise to the level of folly and guilt.”
Samuel Adams – “… it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds …”
Communist revolutionary Karl Marx understood this principle all too well. Which is why, in "The Communist Manifesto" this enemy of individual freedoms stated:
"[T]he first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of Democracy." For what purpose? To "abolish private property"; to "wrest, by degrees, capital from the bourgeoisie"; to "centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State."
Another proclaimed champion of Democracy was Communist Mao Tse-tung who proclaimed in 1939 [a decade before consolidating control on the Chinese mainland]:
"Taken as a whole, the Chinese revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party embraces the two stages, i.e., the democratic and the socialist revolutions, which are essentially different revolutionary processes, and the second process can be carried through only after the first has been completed. The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society."
Still another well-known champion of Democracy is Mikhail Gorbachev, who stated in his 1987 book Perestroika:
"[A]ccording to Lenin, Socialism and Democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites Socialism with Democracy [emphasis in the original] and revives the Leninist concept.... We want more Socialism and, therefore, more Democracy."
Our military training manuals used to contain the correct definitions of Democracy and Republic. The following comes from Training Manual No. 2000-25 published by the War Department, November 30, 1928.
DEMOCRACY:
A government of the masses.
Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of "direct" expression.
Results in mobocracy.
Attitude toward property is communistic--negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether is be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
Results in demogogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
REPUBLIC:
Authority is derived through the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them.
Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences.
A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass.
Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy.
Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress.
By 1952 the U.S. Army via the new War Department Field Manual 21-13, sub-section entitled "The Soldier's Guide" was singing the praises of Democracy instead of warning against it. This new manual incorrectly stated: "Because the United States is a Democracy, the majority of the people decide how our Government will be organized and run...."
follows is excerpt from article by Ron Paul
December 11, 2000
A Republic, Not a Democracy
by Rep. Ron Paul
Throughout the presidential election controversy, we have been bombarded with references to our sacred "democracy." Television and radio shows have been inundated with politicians worried about the "will of the people" being thwarted by the courts. Solemn warnings have been issued concerning the legitimacy of the presidency and the effects on our "democratic system" if the eventual winner did not receive the most popular votes. "I'm really in love with our democracy," one presidential candidate gushed to a reporter. Apparently, the United States at some point become a stealth democracy at the behest of news directors and politicians.
The problem, of course, is that our country is not a democracy. Our nation was founded as a constitutionally limited republic, as any grammar school child knew just a few decades ago (remember the Pledge of Allegiance: "and to the Republic for which it stands"...?). The Founding Fathers were concerned with liberty, not democracy. In fact, the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. On the contrary, Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution is quite clear: "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government (emphasis added). The emphasis on democracy in our modern political discourse has no historical or constitutional basis.
In fact, the Constitution is replete with undemocratic mechanisms. The electoral college is an obvious example. Small states are represented in national elections with greater electoral power than their populations would warrant in a purely democratic system. Similarly, sparsely populated Wyoming has the same number of senators as heavily populated New York. The result is not democratic, but the Founders knew that smaller states had to be protected against overreaching federal power. The Bill of Rights provides individuals with similar protections against the majority. The First Amendment, for example, is utterly undemocratic. It was designed to protect unpopular speech against democratic fervor. Would the same politicians so enamored with democracy be willing to give up freedom of speech if the majority chose to do so?
Our Founders instituted a republican system to protect individual rights and property rights from tyranny, regardless of whether the tyrant was a king, a monarchy, a congress, or an unelected mob. They believed that a representative government, restrained by the Bill of Rights and divided into three power sharing branches, would balance the competing interests of the population. They also knew that unbridled democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny suffered by the colonies under King George. In other words, the Founders had no illusions about democracy. Democracy represented unlimited rule by an omnipotent majority, while a constitutionally limited republic was seen as the best system to preserve liberty. Inalienable individual liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights would be threatened by the "excesses of democracy."
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Memo Justified Warrantless Surveillance
Apr 2, 7:47 PM (ET)
By PAMELA HESS and LARA JAKES JORDAN
WASHINGTON (AP) - For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.
That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.
The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.
The 37-page memo is classified and has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."
Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program.
That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The October memo was written just days before Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, briefed four House and Senate leaders on the NSA's secret wiretapping program for the first time.
The government itself related the October memo to the TSP program when it included it on a list of documents that were responsive to the ACLU's request for records from the program. It refused to hand them over.
On Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the statement in the footnote does not reflect the current view of the department's Office of Legal Counsel.
"We disagree with the proposition that the Fourth Amendment has no application to domestic military operations," he said. "Whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires consideration of the particular context and circumstances of the search."
Roehrkasse would not say exactly when that legal opinion was overturned internally. But he pointed to a January 2006 white paper issued by the Justice Department a month after the TSP was revealed by The New York Times.
"The white paper does not suggest in any way that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military activities, and that is not the position of the Office of Legal Counsel," he said.
Suzanne Spaulding, a national security law expert and former assistant general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency, said she found the Fourth Amendment reference in the footnote troubling, but added: "To know (the Justice Department) no longer thinks this is a legitimate statement is reassuring."
"The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration's extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "The administration's lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties, and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law."
"Each time one of these memos comes out you have to come up with a more extreme way to characterize it," Jaffer said.
The ACLU is challenging in court the government's withholding of the October 2001 memo.
By PAMELA HESS and LARA JAKES JORDAN
WASHINGTON (AP) - For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.
That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.
The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.
The 37-page memo is classified and has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."
Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program.
That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The October memo was written just days before Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, briefed four House and Senate leaders on the NSA's secret wiretapping program for the first time.
The government itself related the October memo to the TSP program when it included it on a list of documents that were responsive to the ACLU's request for records from the program. It refused to hand them over.
On Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the statement in the footnote does not reflect the current view of the department's Office of Legal Counsel.
"We disagree with the proposition that the Fourth Amendment has no application to domestic military operations," he said. "Whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires consideration of the particular context and circumstances of the search."
Roehrkasse would not say exactly when that legal opinion was overturned internally. But he pointed to a January 2006 white paper issued by the Justice Department a month after the TSP was revealed by The New York Times.
"The white paper does not suggest in any way that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military activities, and that is not the position of the Office of Legal Counsel," he said.
Suzanne Spaulding, a national security law expert and former assistant general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency, said she found the Fourth Amendment reference in the footnote troubling, but added: "To know (the Justice Department) no longer thinks this is a legitimate statement is reassuring."
"The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration's extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "The administration's lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties, and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law."
"Each time one of these memos comes out you have to come up with a more extreme way to characterize it," Jaffer said.
The ACLU is challenging in court the government's withholding of the October 2001 memo.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
More FBI Privacy Violations Confirmed
LARA JAKES JORDAN (AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.
The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.
Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mueller raised the issue of the FBI's controversial use of so-called national security letters in reference to an upcoming report on the topic by the Justice Department's inspector general.
An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last year's audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many national security letters were requested by more than 4,600.
The new audit, which examines use of national security letters issued in 2006, "will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March," Mueller told senators. The privacy abuse "predates the reforms we now have in place," he said.
"We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people," Mueller said. He offered no additional details about the upcoming audit.
National security letters, as outlined in the USA Patriot Act, are administrative subpoenas used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers without a judge's approval.
Last year's audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, issued March 9, 2007, blamed agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct. Fine's latest report is expected to be released as early as next week.
Several Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with the upcoming 2006 findings have said privately the new audit will show national security letters were used incorrectly at a similar rate as during the previous three years.
The number of national security letters issued by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law in 2001, according to last year's report. Fine's annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration.
In 2005, for example, Fine's office found more than 1,000 violations within 19,000 FBI requests to obtain 47,000 records. Each letter issued may contain several requests.
In contrast to the strong concerns expressed by Congress and civil liberties groups after last year's inspector general's report was issued, Mueller's disclosure drew no criticism from senators during just over two hours of testimony Wednesday.
Speaking before the FBI chief, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., urged Mueller to be more vigilant in correcting what he called "widespread illegal and improper use of national security letters."
"Everybody wants to stop terrorists. But we also, though, as Americans, we believe in our privacy rights and we want those protected," Leahy said. "There has to be a better chain of command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just because they want to."
Following last year's audit, the Justice Department enacted guidelines that sternly reminded FBI agents to carefully follow the rules governing national security letters. The new rules caution agents to review all data before it is transferred into FBI databases to make sure that only the information specifically requested is used.
Fine's upcoming report also credits the FBI with putting the additional checks in place to make sure privacy rights aren't violated, according to a Justice official familiar with its findings.
Critics seized on Mueller's testimony as proof that a judge should sign off on the national security letters before they are issued.
"The credibility factor shows there needs to be outside oversight," said former FBI agent Michael German, now a national security adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union. He also cast doubt on the FBI's reforms.
"There were guidelines before, and there were laws before, and the FBI violated those laws," German said. "And the idea that new guidelines would make a difference, I think cuts against rationality."
---
WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.
The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.
Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mueller raised the issue of the FBI's controversial use of so-called national security letters in reference to an upcoming report on the topic by the Justice Department's inspector general.
An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last year's audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many national security letters were requested by more than 4,600.
The new audit, which examines use of national security letters issued in 2006, "will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March," Mueller told senators. The privacy abuse "predates the reforms we now have in place," he said.
"We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people," Mueller said. He offered no additional details about the upcoming audit.
National security letters, as outlined in the USA Patriot Act, are administrative subpoenas used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers without a judge's approval.
Last year's audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, issued March 9, 2007, blamed agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct. Fine's latest report is expected to be released as early as next week.
Several Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with the upcoming 2006 findings have said privately the new audit will show national security letters were used incorrectly at a similar rate as during the previous three years.
The number of national security letters issued by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law in 2001, according to last year's report. Fine's annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration.
In 2005, for example, Fine's office found more than 1,000 violations within 19,000 FBI requests to obtain 47,000 records. Each letter issued may contain several requests.
In contrast to the strong concerns expressed by Congress and civil liberties groups after last year's inspector general's report was issued, Mueller's disclosure drew no criticism from senators during just over two hours of testimony Wednesday.
Speaking before the FBI chief, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., urged Mueller to be more vigilant in correcting what he called "widespread illegal and improper use of national security letters."
"Everybody wants to stop terrorists. But we also, though, as Americans, we believe in our privacy rights and we want those protected," Leahy said. "There has to be a better chain of command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just because they want to."
Following last year's audit, the Justice Department enacted guidelines that sternly reminded FBI agents to carefully follow the rules governing national security letters. The new rules caution agents to review all data before it is transferred into FBI databases to make sure that only the information specifically requested is used.
Fine's upcoming report also credits the FBI with putting the additional checks in place to make sure privacy rights aren't violated, according to a Justice official familiar with its findings.
Critics seized on Mueller's testimony as proof that a judge should sign off on the national security letters before they are issued.
"The credibility factor shows there needs to be outside oversight," said former FBI agent Michael German, now a national security adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union. He also cast doubt on the FBI's reforms.
"There were guidelines before, and there were laws before, and the FBI violated those laws," German said. "And the idea that new guidelines would make a difference, I think cuts against rationality."
---
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Report: Obama mentored by Communist Party figure
Posted: May 22, 2008
11:40 pm Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Barack Obama had extensive ties with extreme anti-American elements, including agents of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, in Hawaii and Chicago, according to two new reports released yesterday in Washington, D.C., by two experienced internal security investigators.
Investigative journalist Cliff Kincaid and Herbert Romerstein, a former investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, presented evidence Obama was mentored, while attending high school in Hawaii, by Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American poet and journalist who was also a CPUSA member.
The authors, in a separate report, document Obama's ties to radicals in Chicago who helped launch his career.
In a paper entitled "Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection," the authors document that in 1948, Davis decided to move from Chicago to Honolulu at the suggestion of what they describe as two "secret CPUSA members," actor Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen Union, or ILWU.
In Chicago, Davis had worked for the Chicago Star newspaper; in Honolulu, he was hired as a reporter for the Honolulu Record, both identified by Kincaid and Romerstein as "communist front newspapers."
In his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama discusses the influence a mentor identified in the book only as "Frank" had on his intellectual development.
Obama described Frank as a drinking companion of his grandfather, who had boasted of his association with African-American authors Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during the time Frank was a journalist in Chicago.
Romerstein, in addition to having served as investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, served in the same capacity with the House Committee on Internal Security and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation for the U.S. Information Agency. Romerstein is also co-author of the influential book "The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors," which included extensive documentation of the communist activities of Roosevelt administration staffer Alger Hiss.
Kincaid is the founder and president of America's Survival Inc., an independent watchdog group that monitors the U.N. and international terrorism. He is also editor of Accuracy in Media's AIM Report.
Are you a member of the Communist Party?
Kincaid and Romerstein quote Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who wrote a dissertation on the life of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis was a significant influence on Obama when the senator attended Punahou prep school in Hawaii from 1975 to 1979
A transcript of a 1956 hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee discovered by internal security affairs researcher and writer Max Friedman showed Davis took the Fifth Amendment when asked by the subcommittee if he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.
In the second report, "Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection," Kincaid and Romerstein present evidence supporting their contention the SDS organization from which the Weather Underground organization and radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn came, received financial contributions from the CPUSA, which in turn receive its funding from Moscow.
Obama's run for the Illinois state Senate was launched by a fundraiser organized at Ayers' and Dorhn's Chicago home by Alice Palmer. Palmer had named Obama to succeed her in the state Senate in 1995, when she decided to run for a U.S. congressional seat.
Nine years before Palmer picked Obama to be her successor, she was the only African-American journalist to travel to the Soviet Union to attend the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, according to an article Palmer wrote in the CPUSA newspaper, People's Daily World, June 19, 1986.
"There has been no explanation of why Ayers et al. played a role in launching Obama's political career," Kincaid wrote.
Kincaid and Romerstein present documentation that Tom Hayden, another major figure in the SDS, is today one of four principal initiators of the "Progressives for Obama" movement, which calls for ending the war in Iraq "as quickly as possible, not in five years."
According to Kincaid and Romerstein, U.S. Peace Council executive committee member Frank Chapman "blew the whistle on communist support for Obama's presidential bid and his real agenda" in a letter to the People's Weekly World after Obama's win in the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses.
"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.
Kincaid and Romerstein wrote, "The clear implication of Chapman's letter is that Obama himself, or some of his Marxist supporters, are acting like moles in the political process. The suggestion is that something is being hidden from the public."
11:40 pm Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Barack Obama had extensive ties with extreme anti-American elements, including agents of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, in Hawaii and Chicago, according to two new reports released yesterday in Washington, D.C., by two experienced internal security investigators.
Investigative journalist Cliff Kincaid and Herbert Romerstein, a former investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, presented evidence Obama was mentored, while attending high school in Hawaii, by Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American poet and journalist who was also a CPUSA member.
The authors, in a separate report, document Obama's ties to radicals in Chicago who helped launch his career.
In a paper entitled "Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection," the authors document that in 1948, Davis decided to move from Chicago to Honolulu at the suggestion of what they describe as two "secret CPUSA members," actor Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen Union, or ILWU.
In Chicago, Davis had worked for the Chicago Star newspaper; in Honolulu, he was hired as a reporter for the Honolulu Record, both identified by Kincaid and Romerstein as "communist front newspapers."
In his autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama discusses the influence a mentor identified in the book only as "Frank" had on his intellectual development.
Obama described Frank as a drinking companion of his grandfather, who had boasted of his association with African-American authors Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during the time Frank was a journalist in Chicago.
Romerstein, in addition to having served as investigator with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, served in the same capacity with the House Committee on Internal Security and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation for the U.S. Information Agency. Romerstein is also co-author of the influential book "The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors," which included extensive documentation of the communist activities of Roosevelt administration staffer Alger Hiss.
Kincaid is the founder and president of America's Survival Inc., an independent watchdog group that monitors the U.N. and international terrorism. He is also editor of Accuracy in Media's AIM Report.
Are you a member of the Communist Party?
Kincaid and Romerstein quote Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who wrote a dissertation on the life of Frank Marshall Davis, confirming Davis was a significant influence on Obama when the senator attended Punahou prep school in Hawaii from 1975 to 1979
A transcript of a 1956 hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee discovered by internal security affairs researcher and writer Max Friedman showed Davis took the Fifth Amendment when asked by the subcommittee if he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.
In the second report, "Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection," Kincaid and Romerstein present evidence supporting their contention the SDS organization from which the Weather Underground organization and radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn came, received financial contributions from the CPUSA, which in turn receive its funding from Moscow.
Obama's run for the Illinois state Senate was launched by a fundraiser organized at Ayers' and Dorhn's Chicago home by Alice Palmer. Palmer had named Obama to succeed her in the state Senate in 1995, when she decided to run for a U.S. congressional seat.
Nine years before Palmer picked Obama to be her successor, she was the only African-American journalist to travel to the Soviet Union to attend the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, according to an article Palmer wrote in the CPUSA newspaper, People's Daily World, June 19, 1986.
"There has been no explanation of why Ayers et al. played a role in launching Obama's political career," Kincaid wrote.
Kincaid and Romerstein present documentation that Tom Hayden, another major figure in the SDS, is today one of four principal initiators of the "Progressives for Obama" movement, which calls for ending the war in Iraq "as quickly as possible, not in five years."
According to Kincaid and Romerstein, U.S. Peace Council executive committee member Frank Chapman "blew the whistle on communist support for Obama's presidential bid and his real agenda" in a letter to the People's Weekly World after Obama's win in the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses.
"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle," Chapman wrote. "Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.
Kincaid and Romerstein wrote, "The clear implication of Chapman's letter is that Obama himself, or some of his Marxist supporters, are acting like moles in the political process. The suggestion is that something is being hidden from the public."
Sunday, May 25, 2008
US soldier refuses to serve in 'illegal Iraq war'
Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium
Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American US military recruiters love.
"I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school," the now 24-year-old told AFP.
"I was 'filet mignon' for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade," or around 16 years old, he added.
Chiroux joined the US army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.
He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.
On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.
"I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.
"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.
Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.
The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.
Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of "lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis."
He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.
Goldsmith said he had "self-medicated" for several months to treat the wounds of the war.
Another soldier told AFP he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia -- two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq -- before testifying.
Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.
A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades' testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.
Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.
Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking US officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of US contractors.
Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed US troops of using excessive force, firing off thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and hundreds of grenades in the face of a feeble four rounds of enemy fire.
Goldsmith accused US officials of censorship.
"Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or Myspace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission," Goldsmith told AFP after the hearing.
"You're almost always denied before you are allowed to send them home."
Officials take "hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president -- and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq," Goldsmith added.
Chiroux is one of thousands of US soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to figures issued last year by the US army.
But while many seek refuge in Canada, the young soldier vowed to stay in the United States to fight "whatever charges the army levels at me."
The US army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days.
Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.
"I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem," he told AFP.
Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American US military recruiters love.
"I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school," the now 24-year-old told AFP.
"I was 'filet mignon' for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade," or around 16 years old, he added.
Chiroux joined the US army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.
He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.
On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.
"I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.
"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.
Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.
The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.
Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of "lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis."
He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.
Goldsmith said he had "self-medicated" for several months to treat the wounds of the war.
Another soldier told AFP he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia -- two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq -- before testifying.
Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.
A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades' testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.
Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.
Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking US officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of US contractors.
Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed US troops of using excessive force, firing off thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and hundreds of grenades in the face of a feeble four rounds of enemy fire.
Goldsmith accused US officials of censorship.
"Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or Myspace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission," Goldsmith told AFP after the hearing.
"You're almost always denied before you are allowed to send them home."
Officials take "hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president -- and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq," Goldsmith added.
Chiroux is one of thousands of US soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to figures issued last year by the US army.
But while many seek refuge in Canada, the young soldier vowed to stay in the United States to fight "whatever charges the army levels at me."
The US army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days.
Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.
"I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem," he told AFP.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Friends of Terror in Peru
Excerpt: "In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros's Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament."
my note: Great example of how non profit orgs, others, including our own government fund ideas contrary to what the populace believes they fund. To begin exploring the subversion originally sought out by Cox Committee and the Reece Committee (1952-1955) please visit:
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=FinalWarn02-5#Committee
AND
http://www.garynorth.com/Reece%20Report%20(1957).pdf
Wall Street Journal
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
April 28, 2008; Page A17
Thursday's vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Movement," which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the Colombian rebel group FARC.
The Europeans' decision is maddening. But it is also instructive, in that it shows how terrorists can advance their cause with the help of nongovernmental organizations. Under such headings as "human-rights" advocacy, NGOs that share the ideology of the far left toil away daily in Peru, trying to legitimize their buddies who, behind the scenes, continue their "armed struggle." The kicker is that these NGOs are often funded by foreign governments and philanthropists.
Peruvian Congressman Rolando Sousa, who I interviewed in Lima 10 days ago, knows a lot about the problem. He headed a congressional subcommittee that looked into the activities of the Bolivarian Movement in Peru. Its findings are now before a special commission with subpoena power that is likely to uncover even more. But he's already learned enough to cause alarm.
Mr. Sousa says that Mr. Chávez's Bolivarian Movement sits on a three-legged stool. Two of the legs are legal, the third is not. The first leg is official Venezuelan "diplomacy." Discounted oil shipments have bought the allegiance of 19 countries in the region. Other ploys, such as the purchase of Argentine debt and aid for Ecuadorian energy projects, are likewise designed to create dependence and establish Venezuelan dominance.
The second leg of the stool is the effort to establish ideological control within unions and grassroots organizations. These organizations have created a series of nonprofit "associations," which, Mr. Sousa says, operate internally like political parties, with official titles like "secretary of foreign relations" and "secretary of doctrine."
The names of these NGO associations – like "Houses of Alba" (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) and "Houses of Friendship" – may sound innocuous. But, says Mr. Sousa, "What matters is their objective which, like a coin, has two sides. One side is open. The other is hidden."
George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Institute.
Openly, the associations administer eye clinics, literacy programs and health centers manned by Cuban doctors. Behind the scenes, the congressman warns, they work to indoctrinate the poorest Peruvians in the ideology of the extreme left.
The third, illegal leg of the stool is the most dangerous. Mr. Sousa cites two groups: the "Continental Bolivarian Coordinator" and the "Bolivarian Congress of the People." His committee found that both are recruiting and using the most extreme elements of the country – anarchists, terrorists and the radical left – to produce "the social conditions . . . the chaos" necessary to create the impression that democracy is not working.
Once this is accomplished, the grassroots organizations – nurtured by the NGOs – are standing by, ready to bring the extremists to power through the ballot box. The strategy was used in Bolivia to bring down the Sánchez de Lozada government in 2003 and bring Chávez puppet Evo Morales to power.
There is now ample evidence linking Mr. Chávez, the mastermind of the Bolivarian Movement, to terrorism, courtesy of the computers seized from the camp of dead Colombian guerrilla Raúl Reyes. At this time the connection, beyond ideology, between the Bolivarian NGOs and the Bolivarian terrorists remains blurry, notes Mr. Sousa. But the special congressional commission may bring the relationship into focus.
Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian "human-rights" group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security.
In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros's Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament.
No wonder the term NGO has become a dirty word in Peru. In an interview in Lima last week, Peruvian President Álan Garcia told me that "anticapitalism" NGOs funded by foreigners also play a major role in blocking development. "It's something that amazes me," he said.
Me too. Especially considering the fact that the victims of the poverty and violence that their agenda produces are Peru's most vulnerable.
my note: Great example of how non profit orgs, others, including our own government fund ideas contrary to what the populace believes they fund. To begin exploring the subversion originally sought out by Cox Committee and the Reece Committee (1952-1955) please visit:
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=FinalWarn02-5#Committee
AND
http://www.garynorth.com/Reece%20Report%20(1957).pdf
Wall Street Journal
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
April 28, 2008; Page A17
Thursday's vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Movement," which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the Colombian rebel group FARC.
The Europeans' decision is maddening. But it is also instructive, in that it shows how terrorists can advance their cause with the help of nongovernmental organizations. Under such headings as "human-rights" advocacy, NGOs that share the ideology of the far left toil away daily in Peru, trying to legitimize their buddies who, behind the scenes, continue their "armed struggle." The kicker is that these NGOs are often funded by foreign governments and philanthropists.
Peruvian Congressman Rolando Sousa, who I interviewed in Lima 10 days ago, knows a lot about the problem. He headed a congressional subcommittee that looked into the activities of the Bolivarian Movement in Peru. Its findings are now before a special commission with subpoena power that is likely to uncover even more. But he's already learned enough to cause alarm.
Mr. Sousa says that Mr. Chávez's Bolivarian Movement sits on a three-legged stool. Two of the legs are legal, the third is not. The first leg is official Venezuelan "diplomacy." Discounted oil shipments have bought the allegiance of 19 countries in the region. Other ploys, such as the purchase of Argentine debt and aid for Ecuadorian energy projects, are likewise designed to create dependence and establish Venezuelan dominance.
The second leg of the stool is the effort to establish ideological control within unions and grassroots organizations. These organizations have created a series of nonprofit "associations," which, Mr. Sousa says, operate internally like political parties, with official titles like "secretary of foreign relations" and "secretary of doctrine."
The names of these NGO associations – like "Houses of Alba" (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) and "Houses of Friendship" – may sound innocuous. But, says Mr. Sousa, "What matters is their objective which, like a coin, has two sides. One side is open. The other is hidden."
George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Institute.
Openly, the associations administer eye clinics, literacy programs and health centers manned by Cuban doctors. Behind the scenes, the congressman warns, they work to indoctrinate the poorest Peruvians in the ideology of the extreme left.
The third, illegal leg of the stool is the most dangerous. Mr. Sousa cites two groups: the "Continental Bolivarian Coordinator" and the "Bolivarian Congress of the People." His committee found that both are recruiting and using the most extreme elements of the country – anarchists, terrorists and the radical left – to produce "the social conditions . . . the chaos" necessary to create the impression that democracy is not working.
Once this is accomplished, the grassroots organizations – nurtured by the NGOs – are standing by, ready to bring the extremists to power through the ballot box. The strategy was used in Bolivia to bring down the Sánchez de Lozada government in 2003 and bring Chávez puppet Evo Morales to power.
There is now ample evidence linking Mr. Chávez, the mastermind of the Bolivarian Movement, to terrorism, courtesy of the computers seized from the camp of dead Colombian guerrilla Raúl Reyes. At this time the connection, beyond ideology, between the Bolivarian NGOs and the Bolivarian terrorists remains blurry, notes Mr. Sousa. But the special congressional commission may bring the relationship into focus.
Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian "human-rights" group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security.
In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros's Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament.
No wonder the term NGO has become a dirty word in Peru. In an interview in Lima last week, Peruvian President Álan Garcia told me that "anticapitalism" NGOs funded by foreigners also play a major role in blocking development. "It's something that amazes me," he said.
Me too. Especially considering the fact that the victims of the poverty and violence that their agenda produces are Peru's most vulnerable.
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Russia-Al-Qaeda Axis
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, March 19, 2008
There are two factions of the Chechen Resistance: one of them more or less democratic and the other Islamist. Recently, Chechnya had a constitutional crisis: the Islamists persuaded the then acting President, Dokka Umarov, to announce that the Chechens were joining the global jihad against all the infidels, not only Russia. Umarov also proclaimed himself to be the Amir of the 'Caucasus Amirate', of which Chechnya would be only a part.
The last democratically elected Chechen parliament said it did not recognize this decision, which amounted to Umarov's resignation as the president of the Chechen Republic. So the parliament assumed supreme power and formed the government led by Ahmed Zakayev, who has always been known as the most pro-Western of Chechen politicians. He is one of the veteran leaders of the Chechen Resistance and he is now the Prime Minister in exile of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
Today, Frontpage Interview’s guest is Ahmed Zakayev.
FP: Ahmed Zakayev, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Zakayev: Thank you, always at your service.
FP: Is the Chechen Resistance nationalist or Islamist?
Zakayev: Neither. Even though Chechens are in absolute majority in Chechnya, the proponents of our independence include representatives of various nationalities and religions. The Chechen Resistance unites those who value freedom. For example, in different periods we were joined by Ukrainians and Russians, people from Caucasus and from Arab countries, etc. Our enemies do their best to present our fight as that of Chechens against Russians, or Muslims against Christians, but that is not the case. In Russia, as well as in other countries, we find understanding that Russia’s own way to freedom and democracy goes through the liberation of Chechnya. For rights of individuals are unthinkable in any multinational country where whole nations are denied their rights.
FP: What are the dangers that if Chechnya gains independence that it may become an Islamist beach-head, like the danger that an independent Kosovo poses now?
Zakayev: To begin with, the secession of Kosovo is a significant step towards stability in the Balkans and in Europe as a whole. I am sure that an independent Kosovo is also good for the Serbian people, because it helps them to recover from the dangerous virus of Chauvinism. One has to be insane to believe that Europe should have accepted national discrimination against Kosovo Albanians just because of their religion.
The idea of ‘Islamist beach-head’ certainly needs some clarification. I do not know, for example, what phrases like ‘Christian beach-head’ or ‘Judaic beach-head’ or ‘Buddhist beach-head’ might mean. I guess ‘Islamist beach-head’ is supposed to mean something bad. So I can say that recognition of Chechnya’s independence will have only positive consequences: more or less similar to what I’ve said about Kosovo’s independence.
FP: Well, I guess we would disagree on applying equivalency in terms of danger to an Islamist beach-head to a Christian, Judaic or Buddhist beach-head, but this debate will have to take place in another forum.
Tell us about the recent crisis in Chechnya.
Zakayev: As I have stated on numerous occasions, declaration of the Amirate (or ‘Emarate’, in the written version) by Dokka Umarov was an FSB provocation. To be more precise, the ‘Emarate’ is the critical stage in the development of a long-term provocation, started by the KGB against USSR’s Muslims as early as in 1988.
In that year, the ‘Party of Islamic Revival of USSR’ was founded. Its mission was simple enough: to split every Muslim nation by dividing it into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims.
In 2000 one of my colleagues and I described the ‘Vahhabism’ (Islamic radicalism) as the Kremlin’s vaccine against the movement for national independence. It is easy enough for the FSB to feed and manipulate that trend. Apart from the secret agents they have infiltrated in Chechnya, they also have ‘their people’ in Arab countries, who offer both money and advice to ‘Islamists’ – without advertising their friendship with Moscow, of course.
For all those years, the main mission of the ‘Islamic’ ideologists was to discredit and disorganise the Chechen Resistance. As for the declaration of the ‘Amirate’, it was an attempt of a formal, legal self-denunciation of Chechnya’s independence, independence established long ago in full accordance with the renewed Soviet legislation and the principles of international law.
To give our Parliament their due, they reacted by taking adequate constitutional measures. As a result, this well-calculated FSB provocation came to nothing but Dokka Umarov’s resignation from his position of Chechen Republic’s acting President.
FP: Tell us a bit more about how the FSB is operating in Arab countries and its people offering both money and advice to Islamists.
Zakayev: The FSB (KGB) is the most experienced terrorist organisation in the world, whose foundations were laid even before the Bolsheviks captured power in Russian Empire in 1917. For over a half of the 20th century, the KGB operated on every continent and effectively terrorised the whole world.
Having one sixth of the world’s dry land under its control, the FSB is in no shortage of resources. However, its most important instrument of influence is the constantly updated ‘Know How’ in every kind of terrorist activity, including kidnappings, explosions, hijacking planes, hostage-taking, use of poisons and nuclear materials for assassinations, etc. The most important ‘Know How’ is the FSB’s ability to form and develop extremist ideologies. Two examples of that are the Al Qaeda and the Wahhabism among Muslim nations in Russia.
Without going into much detail, let me remind your readers that notorious Aiman al Zawahiri spent half a year in Russia in 1997, just before he went to Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden. That fact was publicly admitted by the FSB Chief Gen. Patrushev, who claimed, however, that the FSB failed to establish al Zawahiri’s identity. In fact, he had been known to the KGB from the old times when Egyptian president Anvar Sadat was assassinated. My late friend Alexander Litvinenko directly named Al Zawahiri as an FSB secret agent. Personally, I have no doubt that Al Zawahiri is the one who really pulls the strings in Al Qaeda.
The seeds of Wahhabism in Russia were sown in 1989, when the Party of Islamic Revival was founded in Astrakhan. Ever since then, the activities of so-called Islamic extremists in Russia and some Muslim post-Soviet republics are guided by the Kremlin’s short-term considerations.
The FSB keeps and guards its loyal agents at the top of its every project, wherever it takes place.
FP: How is the war going these days?
Zakayev: Basically, it is a typical guerrilla war. The invaders often use aircraft and artillery. Our troops are ordered to refrain from large-scale military operations. This is because we are convinced that the time works for us.
FP: Does the government-in-exile control the resistance fighters inside Chechnya?
Zakayev: I would like to stress that it is only a part of the Chechen Government which is really in exile. There are ministers who stay in Chechnya or have returned to Chechnya, and they are responsible for controlling our troops inside the country. First of all, that function is performed by the General Staff Chief of the Armed Forces of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
FP: What do you think of the terrorist methods some Chechens used in the past?
Zakayev: As a Minister of ChRI Government and representative of our elected President Aslan Maskhadov, I always condemned any terrorist attacks, regardless of who organised them or who took responsibility for them. The provocative anti-Chechen nature of those attacks has always been obvious to me.
You know, in the summer of 1998 Russia passed a law on the struggle against terrorism (I do not remember its exact title now). Interestingly, at that time there were negotiations between Russia and Chechnya on various problems of cooperation between the two countries, including cooperation in law enforcement. Undoubtedly, those forces who initiated the new Russian legislation knew for sure there would be terrorist attacks soon.
FP: What do you think about the foreign jihadi groups such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah?
Zakayev: Al Qaeda is a global provocation, designed to clash the Islamic world with the Western world, thus weakening the both sides as much as possible. Those who capitalise on that are Russia, China and their allies in the totalitarian camp.
The task of Hamas and Hezbollah is to prevent peace between Palestinians and Israelis. That benefits Russia, Iran, and Arab dictators.
All the three organisations have nothing to do with the interests of the Muslim world. They are obedient puppets in the hands of others.
FP: Expand for us a bit on how Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist terror groups help Russia, Iran, and Arab dictators.
Zakayev: First of all, they raise tensions in an oil-rich region. The higher the tensions are, the higher the oil prices. Imagine for a moment what would happen to Russia, Iran or Arab countries if they suddenly lost their oil revenues. In a sense, the whole foreign policy of all these countries is targeted at selling oil for the highest possible price.
Secondly, Russia, Iran and a number of Arab countries have authoritarian regimes, whose internal opponents would be very much attracted to Western democracy at the time of stability. Therefore, fighting a war against the Western democracies is vital for those regimes’ survival. Using Al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah, they can fight the West in foreign lands and with foreign hands; so they don’t care about casualties.
Another thing which unites Russia and Iran is their objective interest to prevent stability among the Sunnis. In case of Iran, the reason for that is the hostility along the Shia-Sunni lines. As for Russia, it fears that a stable and united Sunni world would ask it to free the dozens of Sunni nations which are still kept by force under its colonial domination.
FP: What kind of danger would you say Russia poses to the West?
Zakayev: The conflict between Russia and the West is a conflict between authoritarianism and democracy. No peaceful coexistence is possible here. If you do not advance, you retreat. Today, Russia is on the offensive, and has advanced quite far, mostly because of some Western leaders’ short-sightedness. I am confident of the eventual victory for democracy, but to make it happen soon, the West has to start a decisive offensive. Unfortunately, the democratic camp today is less united than the authoritarian one led by Russia, China and Iran.
A delay of the West’s offensive means prolonged sufferings to millions of people, not only in the authoritarian countries, but also far beyond their borders, because the Neo-Bolsheviks have now armed themselves with the ‘international Islamic terrorism’. It is a kind of their big stick with remote control.
FP: How do you see the future independent Chechnya - should it be democratic or not? What should its foreign policy be?
Zakayev: I would say that independent Chechnya shall be a model democratic country. Its foreign policy shall be based on openness and preparedness for mutually beneficial cooperation with everyone.
FP: When and how might Chechnya finally win its independence?
Zakayev: Nobody can name an exact date when Russian invaders shall leave Chechnya. One thing I do not doubt is that every day brings us closer to the moment of liberation.
FP: What policy do you think the U.S. should pursue vis-à-vis Putin?
Zakayev: If it was for me to decide, the U.S. would pursue no policy towards Putin or Medvedev personally. That is to say, stop looking into their eyes. Unless Russia becomes democratic, it is going to keep undermining the West, be that under Putin or anyone else. We must remember that Gorbachev embraced openness and democracy not before he was driven into a corner. So, a sure way to make Russia democratic is to make life as hard as possible for its ruling regime.
FP: Ahmed Zakayev, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Zakayev: Thank you for your questions.
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, March 19, 2008
There are two factions of the Chechen Resistance: one of them more or less democratic and the other Islamist. Recently, Chechnya had a constitutional crisis: the Islamists persuaded the then acting President, Dokka Umarov, to announce that the Chechens were joining the global jihad against all the infidels, not only Russia. Umarov also proclaimed himself to be the Amir of the 'Caucasus Amirate', of which Chechnya would be only a part.
The last democratically elected Chechen parliament said it did not recognize this decision, which amounted to Umarov's resignation as the president of the Chechen Republic. So the parliament assumed supreme power and formed the government led by Ahmed Zakayev, who has always been known as the most pro-Western of Chechen politicians. He is one of the veteran leaders of the Chechen Resistance and he is now the Prime Minister in exile of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
Today, Frontpage Interview’s guest is Ahmed Zakayev.
FP: Ahmed Zakayev, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Zakayev: Thank you, always at your service.
FP: Is the Chechen Resistance nationalist or Islamist?
Zakayev: Neither. Even though Chechens are in absolute majority in Chechnya, the proponents of our independence include representatives of various nationalities and religions. The Chechen Resistance unites those who value freedom. For example, in different periods we were joined by Ukrainians and Russians, people from Caucasus and from Arab countries, etc. Our enemies do their best to present our fight as that of Chechens against Russians, or Muslims against Christians, but that is not the case. In Russia, as well as in other countries, we find understanding that Russia’s own way to freedom and democracy goes through the liberation of Chechnya. For rights of individuals are unthinkable in any multinational country where whole nations are denied their rights.
FP: What are the dangers that if Chechnya gains independence that it may become an Islamist beach-head, like the danger that an independent Kosovo poses now?
Zakayev: To begin with, the secession of Kosovo is a significant step towards stability in the Balkans and in Europe as a whole. I am sure that an independent Kosovo is also good for the Serbian people, because it helps them to recover from the dangerous virus of Chauvinism. One has to be insane to believe that Europe should have accepted national discrimination against Kosovo Albanians just because of their religion.
The idea of ‘Islamist beach-head’ certainly needs some clarification. I do not know, for example, what phrases like ‘Christian beach-head’ or ‘Judaic beach-head’ or ‘Buddhist beach-head’ might mean. I guess ‘Islamist beach-head’ is supposed to mean something bad. So I can say that recognition of Chechnya’s independence will have only positive consequences: more or less similar to what I’ve said about Kosovo’s independence.
FP: Well, I guess we would disagree on applying equivalency in terms of danger to an Islamist beach-head to a Christian, Judaic or Buddhist beach-head, but this debate will have to take place in another forum.
Tell us about the recent crisis in Chechnya.
Zakayev: As I have stated on numerous occasions, declaration of the Amirate (or ‘Emarate’, in the written version) by Dokka Umarov was an FSB provocation. To be more precise, the ‘Emarate’ is the critical stage in the development of a long-term provocation, started by the KGB against USSR’s Muslims as early as in 1988.
In that year, the ‘Party of Islamic Revival of USSR’ was founded. Its mission was simple enough: to split every Muslim nation by dividing it into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims.
In 2000 one of my colleagues and I described the ‘Vahhabism’ (Islamic radicalism) as the Kremlin’s vaccine against the movement for national independence. It is easy enough for the FSB to feed and manipulate that trend. Apart from the secret agents they have infiltrated in Chechnya, they also have ‘their people’ in Arab countries, who offer both money and advice to ‘Islamists’ – without advertising their friendship with Moscow, of course.
For all those years, the main mission of the ‘Islamic’ ideologists was to discredit and disorganise the Chechen Resistance. As for the declaration of the ‘Amirate’, it was an attempt of a formal, legal self-denunciation of Chechnya’s independence, independence established long ago in full accordance with the renewed Soviet legislation and the principles of international law.
To give our Parliament their due, they reacted by taking adequate constitutional measures. As a result, this well-calculated FSB provocation came to nothing but Dokka Umarov’s resignation from his position of Chechen Republic’s acting President.
FP: Tell us a bit more about how the FSB is operating in Arab countries and its people offering both money and advice to Islamists.
Zakayev: The FSB (KGB) is the most experienced terrorist organisation in the world, whose foundations were laid even before the Bolsheviks captured power in Russian Empire in 1917. For over a half of the 20th century, the KGB operated on every continent and effectively terrorised the whole world.
Having one sixth of the world’s dry land under its control, the FSB is in no shortage of resources. However, its most important instrument of influence is the constantly updated ‘Know How’ in every kind of terrorist activity, including kidnappings, explosions, hijacking planes, hostage-taking, use of poisons and nuclear materials for assassinations, etc. The most important ‘Know How’ is the FSB’s ability to form and develop extremist ideologies. Two examples of that are the Al Qaeda and the Wahhabism among Muslim nations in Russia.
Without going into much detail, let me remind your readers that notorious Aiman al Zawahiri spent half a year in Russia in 1997, just before he went to Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden. That fact was publicly admitted by the FSB Chief Gen. Patrushev, who claimed, however, that the FSB failed to establish al Zawahiri’s identity. In fact, he had been known to the KGB from the old times when Egyptian president Anvar Sadat was assassinated. My late friend Alexander Litvinenko directly named Al Zawahiri as an FSB secret agent. Personally, I have no doubt that Al Zawahiri is the one who really pulls the strings in Al Qaeda.
The seeds of Wahhabism in Russia were sown in 1989, when the Party of Islamic Revival was founded in Astrakhan. Ever since then, the activities of so-called Islamic extremists in Russia and some Muslim post-Soviet republics are guided by the Kremlin’s short-term considerations.
The FSB keeps and guards its loyal agents at the top of its every project, wherever it takes place.
FP: How is the war going these days?
Zakayev: Basically, it is a typical guerrilla war. The invaders often use aircraft and artillery. Our troops are ordered to refrain from large-scale military operations. This is because we are convinced that the time works for us.
FP: Does the government-in-exile control the resistance fighters inside Chechnya?
Zakayev: I would like to stress that it is only a part of the Chechen Government which is really in exile. There are ministers who stay in Chechnya or have returned to Chechnya, and they are responsible for controlling our troops inside the country. First of all, that function is performed by the General Staff Chief of the Armed Forces of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
FP: What do you think of the terrorist methods some Chechens used in the past?
Zakayev: As a Minister of ChRI Government and representative of our elected President Aslan Maskhadov, I always condemned any terrorist attacks, regardless of who organised them or who took responsibility for them. The provocative anti-Chechen nature of those attacks has always been obvious to me.
You know, in the summer of 1998 Russia passed a law on the struggle against terrorism (I do not remember its exact title now). Interestingly, at that time there were negotiations between Russia and Chechnya on various problems of cooperation between the two countries, including cooperation in law enforcement. Undoubtedly, those forces who initiated the new Russian legislation knew for sure there would be terrorist attacks soon.
FP: What do you think about the foreign jihadi groups such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah?
Zakayev: Al Qaeda is a global provocation, designed to clash the Islamic world with the Western world, thus weakening the both sides as much as possible. Those who capitalise on that are Russia, China and their allies in the totalitarian camp.
The task of Hamas and Hezbollah is to prevent peace between Palestinians and Israelis. That benefits Russia, Iran, and Arab dictators.
All the three organisations have nothing to do with the interests of the Muslim world. They are obedient puppets in the hands of others.
FP: Expand for us a bit on how Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist terror groups help Russia, Iran, and Arab dictators.
Zakayev: First of all, they raise tensions in an oil-rich region. The higher the tensions are, the higher the oil prices. Imagine for a moment what would happen to Russia, Iran or Arab countries if they suddenly lost their oil revenues. In a sense, the whole foreign policy of all these countries is targeted at selling oil for the highest possible price.
Secondly, Russia, Iran and a number of Arab countries have authoritarian regimes, whose internal opponents would be very much attracted to Western democracy at the time of stability. Therefore, fighting a war against the Western democracies is vital for those regimes’ survival. Using Al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah, they can fight the West in foreign lands and with foreign hands; so they don’t care about casualties.
Another thing which unites Russia and Iran is their objective interest to prevent stability among the Sunnis. In case of Iran, the reason for that is the hostility along the Shia-Sunni lines. As for Russia, it fears that a stable and united Sunni world would ask it to free the dozens of Sunni nations which are still kept by force under its colonial domination.
FP: What kind of danger would you say Russia poses to the West?
Zakayev: The conflict between Russia and the West is a conflict between authoritarianism and democracy. No peaceful coexistence is possible here. If you do not advance, you retreat. Today, Russia is on the offensive, and has advanced quite far, mostly because of some Western leaders’ short-sightedness. I am confident of the eventual victory for democracy, but to make it happen soon, the West has to start a decisive offensive. Unfortunately, the democratic camp today is less united than the authoritarian one led by Russia, China and Iran.
A delay of the West’s offensive means prolonged sufferings to millions of people, not only in the authoritarian countries, but also far beyond their borders, because the Neo-Bolsheviks have now armed themselves with the ‘international Islamic terrorism’. It is a kind of their big stick with remote control.
FP: How do you see the future independent Chechnya - should it be democratic or not? What should its foreign policy be?
Zakayev: I would say that independent Chechnya shall be a model democratic country. Its foreign policy shall be based on openness and preparedness for mutually beneficial cooperation with everyone.
FP: When and how might Chechnya finally win its independence?
Zakayev: Nobody can name an exact date when Russian invaders shall leave Chechnya. One thing I do not doubt is that every day brings us closer to the moment of liberation.
FP: What policy do you think the U.S. should pursue vis-à-vis Putin?
Zakayev: If it was for me to decide, the U.S. would pursue no policy towards Putin or Medvedev personally. That is to say, stop looking into their eyes. Unless Russia becomes democratic, it is going to keep undermining the West, be that under Putin or anyone else. We must remember that Gorbachev embraced openness and democracy not before he was driven into a corner. So, a sure way to make Russia democratic is to make life as hard as possible for its ruling regime.
FP: Ahmed Zakayev, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Zakayev: Thank you for your questions.
Karen Kwiatkowski: The Soldier Who Spoke Out
NOTE: Read this keeping in mind that through September 2007, when Ron Paul was still engaged in the race, he led all candidates for most donations from military, second was Obama, followed by McCain. Why? Then remind yourself adjusted for total share of votes how remarkable it is that Ron Paul led in this constituency. Why?
Max Follmer
The Huffington Post
March 18 2008
As the war in Iraq completes its fifth year this week, The Huffington Post is featuring interviews with and essays by those journalists, elected officials, policymakers and former military officials who spoke out early and boldly against what they saw as an inevitable disaster. They join our Iraq Honor Roll.
Karen Kwiatkowski spent two decades as a career military officer in the United States Air Force before being assigned in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA). Her new assignment was to work on policy papers for the Secretary of Defense and other top brass at the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, she was assigned to a newly-formed bureau inside the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans, which was created to help the Pentagon deal with issues in Iraq.
As Huffington Post Senior Editor Marc Cooper wrote in a profile of Kwiatkowski for LA Weekly:
Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.
Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America's most decorated veteran.
Kwiatkowski retired from the military in 2003, just as the U.S. was invading Iraq. She spoke with Huffington Post about what going on at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war, and her reflections on the fifth anniversary of the invasion. A selection of her thoughts are below:
On her arrival at her new assignment and what she found was going on at NESA and the Office of Special Plans:
The biggest shock I had in May 2002 was finding that the war plan for invasion of Iraq was in its second draft - it was ready to go. We were ready to invade Iraq in the Spring of 2002. What had not happened, was the public case for this had not been made yet. So what I got to watch was the public case for war being made, and in part being made by people who worked in the Pentagon - mainly political appointees. You know military people like me, we are not creating agendas. And if military people were [going to be] creating agendas, you know, they would be conservative - small "c" conservative. But what we had were these political appointees creating an agenda to go along with the direction that Centcom had already received from Rumsfeld, and Cheney I guess, but primarily Rumsfeld. And that direction was "we're going into Iraq." I man, I was surprised that we were so ready to go when there was no intelligence justification for it, and no public case for war had been made at all. But that, of course, was beginning to happen. But that public case for war was made after the actual decision to go to war, I think. The decisions were made a long time in advance, but on what basis these decisions were made we're not 100 percent sure.
On the mood inside the Pentagon among career military officers:
There was a good sense of betrayal and also anger. And not just in me, but in a lot of the folks that I worked with - the colonels and a lot of the folks I worked with. The civilian leadership, with no justification, with no intelligence rational,e and with no real planning was pushing forward with this war and they were going to do it on the cheap, and they were going to invade, and they were going to make up reasons why. We were angry. We were feeling like we were being manipulated. This was a time of anger and frustration and it was across the board, across the military. I don't think there were too many senior military people who didn't feel like their advice was not being taken. And the guys in the Defense Intelligence Agency felt that their assessments were being rejected. And the only folks who weren't being rejected - and there were some in those agencies and there were some military guys, you know, the Petraeus kind of guy, even though Petraeus wasn't a factor then - but these highly politicized guys who will say whatever the political leaders want regardless of the facts. Those guys were the only ones, and that frustrated the military guys. We've always had contempt for those guys who will truth and their own integrity to go along with the chance for getting in good with the boss. It was amazing how many military people were not on board at all with what these civilians were doing. And yet we take our orders, we do what we're told or we quit.
On her decision to start publishing anonymous columns:
We had gotten instructions that anything we wrote in policy papers that mentioned weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, or Iraq would not be written by us through consultation with intelligence, which is how we used to do it. We would just call [the Office of] Special Plans, and Special Plans would give us the talking points. And we would use those. Now as we were doing that, and I was doing that in September of 2002, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were giving speeches and they were echoing these classified talking points that were getting from the Office of Special Plans. And we knew they weren't true! So it is one thing to be lied to by an agency, "oh this is how you do it," but then apparently the President is either being lied to - or is the source of this false information - or the Vice President is being lied to - or is the source of this false information.
So you know, there was this huge sense of betrayal, and of something not being right. But it was the President's and Vice President's speeches in September and early October 2002 that brought me to write. Now, I was frustrated before then and wrote some of these dark humor essays that were later published anonymously.
As I am seeing this I am talking to intelligence people and they are shaking their heads. There was a lot of frustration. But I really didn't intend to push them out there until I realized this was larger than stupid mismanagement at the Pentagon, and it was bigger than that. Now this war plan had been finalized for months before and the President still hadn't made his case, and to the extent that he was making his case his was making it on false information.
On how people dealt with their frustrations at work:
What people did was they left their jobs. If they were close enough to retire, they did. A lot of folks, if the had a three-year tour, they called back their services and said "get me out of here." I worked with two guys who got different positions.
I retired and wrote, anonymously, of course, because I didn't want to go to Leavenworth. That was pretty disloyal of me. I mean, heck, they shut down the military blogs. They got people so they couldn't put stuff on YouTube. There's a lot of stuff that you probably see as being honest that the military historically and today sees as being disloyal. So that would certainly have fallen into that category.
On her reaction to what has happened over the past five years:
Kind of resignation in many ways. It seems very superficial, you know, the public trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein. I mean, why kill him so quick? Because he is part of the story they didn't want told. You know, these false assurances of this we were doing and that we were doing.
And this fantasy that the surge has improved things. The partitioning of Iraq - you have to wonder if that happened by design. Because certainly that's counter to everything that Saddam Hussein as a national socialist was working for. You know, he was turning people into Iraqis. And I think that's what we wanted to get rid of. You know, we didn't want a strong modern Arab nation sitting on top of the 3rd largest oil reserves in the world. You know, that's not justification for war; that's not constitutional.
Everything that has rolled out since that invasion has continued along the same politicized cover story in Iraq. And you know, where are the reporters in Iraq? They're in the Green Zone. If they're out of the Green Zone, they're dead. They're dead people. There's no news. It's all artificial. Unless of course, for the 4,000 dead soldiers and the 100,000 people with PTSD.
Interview conducted, edited and condensed by Max Follmer.
Max Follmer
The Huffington Post
March 18 2008
As the war in Iraq completes its fifth year this week, The Huffington Post is featuring interviews with and essays by those journalists, elected officials, policymakers and former military officials who spoke out early and boldly against what they saw as an inevitable disaster. They join our Iraq Honor Roll.
Karen Kwiatkowski spent two decades as a career military officer in the United States Air Force before being assigned in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA). Her new assignment was to work on policy papers for the Secretary of Defense and other top brass at the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, she was assigned to a newly-formed bureau inside the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans, which was created to help the Pentagon deal with issues in Iraq.
As Huffington Post Senior Editor Marc Cooper wrote in a profile of Kwiatkowski for LA Weekly:
Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.
Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America's most decorated veteran.
Kwiatkowski retired from the military in 2003, just as the U.S. was invading Iraq. She spoke with Huffington Post about what going on at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war, and her reflections on the fifth anniversary of the invasion. A selection of her thoughts are below:
On her arrival at her new assignment and what she found was going on at NESA and the Office of Special Plans:
The biggest shock I had in May 2002 was finding that the war plan for invasion of Iraq was in its second draft - it was ready to go. We were ready to invade Iraq in the Spring of 2002. What had not happened, was the public case for this had not been made yet. So what I got to watch was the public case for war being made, and in part being made by people who worked in the Pentagon - mainly political appointees. You know military people like me, we are not creating agendas. And if military people were [going to be] creating agendas, you know, they would be conservative - small "c" conservative. But what we had were these political appointees creating an agenda to go along with the direction that Centcom had already received from Rumsfeld, and Cheney I guess, but primarily Rumsfeld. And that direction was "we're going into Iraq." I man, I was surprised that we were so ready to go when there was no intelligence justification for it, and no public case for war had been made at all. But that, of course, was beginning to happen. But that public case for war was made after the actual decision to go to war, I think. The decisions were made a long time in advance, but on what basis these decisions were made we're not 100 percent sure.
On the mood inside the Pentagon among career military officers:
There was a good sense of betrayal and also anger. And not just in me, but in a lot of the folks that I worked with - the colonels and a lot of the folks I worked with. The civilian leadership, with no justification, with no intelligence rational,e and with no real planning was pushing forward with this war and they were going to do it on the cheap, and they were going to invade, and they were going to make up reasons why. We were angry. We were feeling like we were being manipulated. This was a time of anger and frustration and it was across the board, across the military. I don't think there were too many senior military people who didn't feel like their advice was not being taken. And the guys in the Defense Intelligence Agency felt that their assessments were being rejected. And the only folks who weren't being rejected - and there were some in those agencies and there were some military guys, you know, the Petraeus kind of guy, even though Petraeus wasn't a factor then - but these highly politicized guys who will say whatever the political leaders want regardless of the facts. Those guys were the only ones, and that frustrated the military guys. We've always had contempt for those guys who will truth and their own integrity to go along with the chance for getting in good with the boss. It was amazing how many military people were not on board at all with what these civilians were doing. And yet we take our orders, we do what we're told or we quit.
On her decision to start publishing anonymous columns:
We had gotten instructions that anything we wrote in policy papers that mentioned weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, or Iraq would not be written by us through consultation with intelligence, which is how we used to do it. We would just call [the Office of] Special Plans, and Special Plans would give us the talking points. And we would use those. Now as we were doing that, and I was doing that in September of 2002, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were giving speeches and they were echoing these classified talking points that were getting from the Office of Special Plans. And we knew they weren't true! So it is one thing to be lied to by an agency, "oh this is how you do it," but then apparently the President is either being lied to - or is the source of this false information - or the Vice President is being lied to - or is the source of this false information.
So you know, there was this huge sense of betrayal, and of something not being right. But it was the President's and Vice President's speeches in September and early October 2002 that brought me to write. Now, I was frustrated before then and wrote some of these dark humor essays that were later published anonymously.
As I am seeing this I am talking to intelligence people and they are shaking their heads. There was a lot of frustration. But I really didn't intend to push them out there until I realized this was larger than stupid mismanagement at the Pentagon, and it was bigger than that. Now this war plan had been finalized for months before and the President still hadn't made his case, and to the extent that he was making his case his was making it on false information.
On how people dealt with their frustrations at work:
What people did was they left their jobs. If they were close enough to retire, they did. A lot of folks, if the had a three-year tour, they called back their services and said "get me out of here." I worked with two guys who got different positions.
I retired and wrote, anonymously, of course, because I didn't want to go to Leavenworth. That was pretty disloyal of me. I mean, heck, they shut down the military blogs. They got people so they couldn't put stuff on YouTube. There's a lot of stuff that you probably see as being honest that the military historically and today sees as being disloyal. So that would certainly have fallen into that category.
On her reaction to what has happened over the past five years:
Kind of resignation in many ways. It seems very superficial, you know, the public trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein. I mean, why kill him so quick? Because he is part of the story they didn't want told. You know, these false assurances of this we were doing and that we were doing.
And this fantasy that the surge has improved things. The partitioning of Iraq - you have to wonder if that happened by design. Because certainly that's counter to everything that Saddam Hussein as a national socialist was working for. You know, he was turning people into Iraqis. And I think that's what we wanted to get rid of. You know, we didn't want a strong modern Arab nation sitting on top of the 3rd largest oil reserves in the world. You know, that's not justification for war; that's not constitutional.
Everything that has rolled out since that invasion has continued along the same politicized cover story in Iraq. And you know, where are the reporters in Iraq? They're in the Green Zone. If they're out of the Green Zone, they're dead. They're dead people. There's no news. It's all artificial. Unless of course, for the 4,000 dead soldiers and the 100,000 people with PTSD.
Interview conducted, edited and condensed by Max Follmer.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
McCain: 'CONTRACT WITH CONSERVATIVES' OR, A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL?
By Mary Starrett
February 22, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
The battered and bruised “conservatives” have begun yet another abusive relationship. So used to being smacked around, they simply cannot see their way clear to pack their bags and leave the party or the candidates who’ve been mistreating them. McCain’s history should be enough proof the man can’t be trusted, yet it appears, like those who repeatedly find themselves in sick relationships, these voters simply cannot get enough of that which they do not want. The “conservatives” are supporting a candidate who has, to the letter, shown he does not stand for anything said “conservatives” say they must have in a candidate.
Case in point is an analysis by Bobby Eberle, President of GOPUSA- a “company dedicated to promoting grassroots conservative philosophy.” Eberle focuses on what’s called “The Contract With Conservatives” This “contract” outlines the presumably non-negotiable points conservatives say they must have in a party and a presidential candidate. This “list” also shows they are the very same principles and issues John McCain has never, ever adhered to in his entire political career.
It’s difficult to imagine that intelligent people would ignore such glaring departures from their stated “principles.”
The Contract with Conservatives actually may better be termed “McCain’s Not Conservative- Let Us Count the Ways:”
The Contract outlines issues such as:
Immigration Reform
Secure America's borders
Enforce employment laws
No amnesty
On a scale from 1-10 McCain scores a -0 on this one.
The good senator from one of the states most devastated by the effects of the illegal invasion not only VOTED for amnesty, but he teamed up with Sen. Ted Kennedy to come up with an amnesty bill!
Once again, Contract with Conservatives? No, Deal with the Devil.
Tax Reform
Make President Bush’s tax cuts permanent
That one’s especially laughable since McCain voted against the tax cuts twice- once in 2001 and once in 2003.
Contract with Conservatives? Nope, same deal with Satan himself.
The Contract has clear imperatives for:
Judges
Vigorously nominate and support the confirmation of judges who follow the law, not those who legislate from the bench
Wage a real fight against left-wing attempts to block judicial nominees
Again, McCain scores a -0 on this one. He undercut the Republican’s efforts to stop the Democrats from filibustering nominees instead of voting them in or out.
How about the Contract specifications on:
Life
Respect the rights of the unborn and promote laws which will protect innocent human life
Support the overturning of Roe v. Wade
Block any efforts to fund or promote embryonic stem cell research
John McCain has shown his disdain for the pro-lifers (not to mention the unborn) with his support of federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Add to this his Super Tuesday endorsement by The Republicans for Choice Political Action Committee (LifeSiteNews.com). They decided that McCain was the “best candidate to make the Republican Party pro-choice” following Rudy Giuliani's withdrawal from the race.
Last, and certainly not by any means least, McCain scores in the super-negative numbers on this one:
Free Speech
Repeal the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act
Embrace First Amendment rights
The McCain-Feingold bill, under the guise of “campaign finance reform” did more to trample free speech in this country than any other piece of legislation. Now “conservatives” say this chilling First Amendment-destroying legislation must be repealed in one breath and with the next endorse for president the man who came up with it !
Deal with the Devil, to be sure, made by utterly insane people who wonder why our Republic has foundered.
John McCain finds all these demands rather irritating. It has been well documented that when John McCain is irritated he doesn’t hold back, turning the air blue with language usually reserved for the barracks or the bar room. His invectives can’t be printed here. The day after his Super Tuesday wins, McCain told his conservative critics to “just calm down.”
Those of us who have left the God-forsaken Old Party and work to advance true conservative political ideals know the two “Big Box” parties are so much alike we will not see any of the “change” we hear so much about by sticking by them. Millions of us have left the batterers behind, but we’ll continue to suffer the effects of the decisions made by those who have chosen to stay in their sick relationships. A look at the 2006 elections and the turnout in the Republican primaries, however, does show that some have seen the light.
Newt Gingrich even noticed it when he said:" [On Super Tuesday], there were 14.6 million Democrats who thought the presidential nomination was worth voting for, and there were 8.3 million Republicans on Super Tuesday," Gingrich said. "That is a warning of a catastrophic election."
GOPUSA’s Bobby Eberle has been battered so long he actually believes:
“ The Republican Party is best equipped to deliver… leadership. The time has come when conservative voters can no longer be taken for granted. For our time, effort, money, and votes, we need a pledge. We need a pledge from our presidential nominee to uphold the core Republican values that built this party, and which have taken a backseat to politics in recent years.
Bobby, conservative voters will continue to be taken for granted because they continue to believe the GOP will listen this time…..
All it takes, I suppose is the statement “and this time I mean it!”- a little whining and a “Contract.”
This “contract” is by no means the only evidence that otherwise bright, well-educated people can be by some accounts quite insane. Take the pronouncements of the Family Research Council (frc.org) president Tony Perkins who said he had a few ‘suggestions” for John McCain: “convince people that he is a strong conservative." If he hopes to reassure social conservatives and shore up the base… first, Senator McCain should announce that he now supports President Bush's policy on denying funds for experiments involving human embryos. The bottom line is that values voters are a stubborn lot….” (www.frcaction.org)
Stubborn? Apparently. If so-called “values voters” had been honest with themselves, they’d have realized their “values” had been systematically jettisoned in favor of the big government statists who now control both political parties. Those bruised and battered voters in both parties would do well to read the platform of the Constitution Party.
Those who batter ask: “Where are you going to go if you leave me?”
Those who’ve been battered now have an answer.
© 2008 Mary Starrett - All Rights Reserved
February 22, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
The battered and bruised “conservatives” have begun yet another abusive relationship. So used to being smacked around, they simply cannot see their way clear to pack their bags and leave the party or the candidates who’ve been mistreating them. McCain’s history should be enough proof the man can’t be trusted, yet it appears, like those who repeatedly find themselves in sick relationships, these voters simply cannot get enough of that which they do not want. The “conservatives” are supporting a candidate who has, to the letter, shown he does not stand for anything said “conservatives” say they must have in a candidate.
Case in point is an analysis by Bobby Eberle, President of GOPUSA- a “company dedicated to promoting grassroots conservative philosophy.” Eberle focuses on what’s called “The Contract With Conservatives” This “contract” outlines the presumably non-negotiable points conservatives say they must have in a party and a presidential candidate. This “list” also shows they are the very same principles and issues John McCain has never, ever adhered to in his entire political career.
It’s difficult to imagine that intelligent people would ignore such glaring departures from their stated “principles.”
The Contract with Conservatives actually may better be termed “McCain’s Not Conservative- Let Us Count the Ways:”
The Contract outlines issues such as:
Immigration Reform
Secure America's borders
Enforce employment laws
No amnesty
On a scale from 1-10 McCain scores a -0 on this one.
The good senator from one of the states most devastated by the effects of the illegal invasion not only VOTED for amnesty, but he teamed up with Sen. Ted Kennedy to come up with an amnesty bill!
Once again, Contract with Conservatives? No, Deal with the Devil.
Tax Reform
Make President Bush’s tax cuts permanent
That one’s especially laughable since McCain voted against the tax cuts twice- once in 2001 and once in 2003.
Contract with Conservatives? Nope, same deal with Satan himself.
The Contract has clear imperatives for:
Judges
Vigorously nominate and support the confirmation of judges who follow the law, not those who legislate from the bench
Wage a real fight against left-wing attempts to block judicial nominees
Again, McCain scores a -0 on this one. He undercut the Republican’s efforts to stop the Democrats from filibustering nominees instead of voting them in or out.
How about the Contract specifications on:
Life
Respect the rights of the unborn and promote laws which will protect innocent human life
Support the overturning of Roe v. Wade
Block any efforts to fund or promote embryonic stem cell research
John McCain has shown his disdain for the pro-lifers (not to mention the unborn) with his support of federally funded embryonic stem cell research. Add to this his Super Tuesday endorsement by The Republicans for Choice Political Action Committee (LifeSiteNews.com). They decided that McCain was the “best candidate to make the Republican Party pro-choice” following Rudy Giuliani's withdrawal from the race.
Last, and certainly not by any means least, McCain scores in the super-negative numbers on this one:
Free Speech
Repeal the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act
Embrace First Amendment rights
The McCain-Feingold bill, under the guise of “campaign finance reform” did more to trample free speech in this country than any other piece of legislation. Now “conservatives” say this chilling First Amendment-destroying legislation must be repealed in one breath and with the next endorse for president the man who came up with it !
Deal with the Devil, to be sure, made by utterly insane people who wonder why our Republic has foundered.
John McCain finds all these demands rather irritating. It has been well documented that when John McCain is irritated he doesn’t hold back, turning the air blue with language usually reserved for the barracks or the bar room. His invectives can’t be printed here. The day after his Super Tuesday wins, McCain told his conservative critics to “just calm down.”
Those of us who have left the God-forsaken Old Party and work to advance true conservative political ideals know the two “Big Box” parties are so much alike we will not see any of the “change” we hear so much about by sticking by them. Millions of us have left the batterers behind, but we’ll continue to suffer the effects of the decisions made by those who have chosen to stay in their sick relationships. A look at the 2006 elections and the turnout in the Republican primaries, however, does show that some have seen the light.
Newt Gingrich even noticed it when he said:" [On Super Tuesday], there were 14.6 million Democrats who thought the presidential nomination was worth voting for, and there were 8.3 million Republicans on Super Tuesday," Gingrich said. "That is a warning of a catastrophic election."
GOPUSA’s Bobby Eberle has been battered so long he actually believes:
“ The Republican Party is best equipped to deliver… leadership. The time has come when conservative voters can no longer be taken for granted. For our time, effort, money, and votes, we need a pledge. We need a pledge from our presidential nominee to uphold the core Republican values that built this party, and which have taken a backseat to politics in recent years.
Bobby, conservative voters will continue to be taken for granted because they continue to believe the GOP will listen this time…..
All it takes, I suppose is the statement “and this time I mean it!”- a little whining and a “Contract.”
This “contract” is by no means the only evidence that otherwise bright, well-educated people can be by some accounts quite insane. Take the pronouncements of the Family Research Council (frc.org) president Tony Perkins who said he had a few ‘suggestions” for John McCain: “convince people that he is a strong conservative." If he hopes to reassure social conservatives and shore up the base… first, Senator McCain should announce that he now supports President Bush's policy on denying funds for experiments involving human embryos. The bottom line is that values voters are a stubborn lot….” (www.frcaction.org)
Stubborn? Apparently. If so-called “values voters” had been honest with themselves, they’d have realized their “values” had been systematically jettisoned in favor of the big government statists who now control both political parties. Those bruised and battered voters in both parties would do well to read the platform of the Constitution Party.
Those who batter ask: “Where are you going to go if you leave me?”
Those who’ve been battered now have an answer.
© 2008 Mary Starrett - All Rights Reserved
Saturday, March 01, 2008
McCain's appeal before CPAC rings hollow
originally under title of "Mitt's gone, Bill's back"
by Ilana Mercer
February 08, 2008
It doesn't take much to sunder a debate about the Republican Party's inconsequential core. The Rush Limbaugh-led insurrection against John McCain gave the fleeting impression that the movement was on the cusp of such a reckoning. No longer.
In close succession, Romney resigned, and McCain wowed the Conservative Political Action Conference. Behind the scenes, Bill Kristol practiced his curtain calls. Kristol is the uncrowned comeback kid – the attractive, affable neoconservative mastermind has backed McCain's campaign for some time now. Philosophically, Kristol is the king of consistency. Neoconservative all the way. Like McCain. Just as it appeared the neocons were slowly being inched out, they're back.
It's proving well nigh impossible to Kill Bill.
Kristol has been doing the rounds in the media, anointing McCain as the "leader of the conservative movement" – his words. Peggy Noonan, another court courtesan, has been quaking and quivering about McCain on the networks. (Will she pen an ode for McCain's nether reaches as she did for Bush's in "He's Got Two of 'Em"?) It all sounds terribly familiar.
I'll grant McCain this: His speech before the CPAC was a vast improvement on the pathological, unremitting lies of Bush and his spokesmen. "Yes, there were WMD in Iraq; yes, Saddam planned 9/11; yes, he shopped for yellow cake in Niger; yes, democracy is on the march in Iraq; yes, the economy at home is humming; yes, Iranian speedboats attacked U.S. warships" – Bush babble, I believe, is less a consequence of congenital stupidity than it is of the confusion caused by incessant, habitual lying.
McCain came clean. But he chose the objects of his confession carefully, lingering on his opposition to the small-potatoes of agricultural subsidies, rather than on his proposal, as part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, to legalize 20 million deadwood illegal immigrants. "God's children," in his words. Be mindful that McCain is not done with amnesty. Following the victory in South Carolina, McCain denied, to Sean Hannity's face, that he had been wrong in his support for amnesty. Now he promises to "address other aspects of the problem," after "securing our borders first." What does that mean? You be the judge.
McCain spoke about beating government back, having just the other day blessed the latest deficit spending, that obscene stimulus package. Moreover, opposing tax cuts once over a long political career could be put down to the ravages of age and an unsupple mind. But, by National Review's count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 times, often on the grounds that such cuts benefit those who pay the lion's share of the tax burden. McCain's sense of justice matches his understanding of the economy.
McCain's newfound fealty to the free market is suspect. Profits are the street signs of the free market – without profits there'd be no products. But in the course of disparaging Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector – politics, remember, is a form of sheltered employment – McCain badmouthed the thing that makes the free market go around: "I didn't manage for profit, I led for patriotism."
So said the beneficiary of life-long sheltered employment, who couldn't "manage for profit" if he tried. Indeed, his CPAC mention of Edmund Burke notwithstanding, McCain is not very bright. He finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy. He also lost five jets. IQ ace Steve Sailer has suggested that if you're looking for competence in the White House, McCain may not be your man: "To lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness."
"Reaching across the aisle to get things done" – now that's staple McCain Speak; it has been throughout his campaign. It's also a euphemism for relinquishing principles in favor of political expediency. The political animal known as McCain has too often moved in packs dominated by Democrats and other left-liberals. As part of the duo McCain-Feingold, he instated "a federal speech code, enforced with jail terms of up to five years," as Jonathan Rauch noted. As a member of the "Gang of 14," and against constitutionalism, McCain and his homie, Sen. Lindsay Graham, colluded with Democrats in an attempt to sabotage Bush's conservative judicial nominees. Had McCain's minders in the media dug for dirt as diligently as they did on Ron Paul, they'd discover that he voted for hard-core lefties Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court. In 2004, McCain considered running on the John Kerry ticket.
Enough said.
A man for all seasons (not), McCain has opposed exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The McCain-Lieberman bill expresses his enthusiasm for the Malthusian environmental monomania – McCain shares the gaseous Al Gore's belief that there is an inherent discord between our system of production and the environment. McCain's contempt for development and consumer freedom "will cost the average U.S. household at least $600 per year by 2010, rising to at least $1,000 per year by 2020," as well as 39,000 jobs in 2010, and at least 190,000 jobs by 2020, in the Heartland Institute's estimation.
The McCain-Lieberman collaboration gave neocon David Brooks and crunchy con Andrew Sullivan goose bumps. Both "fantasized" of launching a McCain-Lieberman Party. With war and global warming on the brain, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a neoconservative by any other name, is firmly behind McCain's candidacy.
From the pollution he has left along his political path McCain can run but cannot hide. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo. McCain, once again, jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and "more boots on the ground." More recently, it's been "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran," and the promise of a 100 year war in Iraq, bound to break that bank he now vows to make solvent. Under the loving gaze of the media, McCain's jingoism is ever evolving.
Fred Barnes, a neoconservative, has dismissed anti-McCain conservatives as "talk-radio mafia." Another McCainiac, Michael Medved, has framed McCain's apparent opposition to the "Fairness Doctrine" as a sign of his man's pure conservatism. A wicked, illiberal effort to control speech and property, the "Fairness Doctrine" is a litmus test not necessarily for a conservative, but for any decent individual, on the left or right. Like Bill Kristol's dad, Medved's ideological trajectory has taken him from the left to the neoconservative left. Unlike the clever Kristol, Medved's shabby argument reveals a less impressive intellectual arc.
Neocon Kristol, over on the op-ed pages of his new editorial home, the New York Times (an appointment that speaks to how cozy the left-neocon cabal truly is), has, excitedly, been admonishing mutinous conservatives, while reciting gory poetry in honor of McCain. Limbaugh he has maligned as suffering from "McCain Derangement Syndrome." (Kristol, however, correctly calls conservatives on their enthusiastic support for the equally problematic candidacy of "Benito" Giuliani.)
Cut to 2000, with Kristol and Brooks making mischief together – or magic, depending on whose side you're on. The two collaborated on a piece, "The Politics of Creative Destruction," in which they argued that McCain would revive, rather than repress, the State. I concur with Stephen Bainbridge when he contends that:
If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness "conservatism" of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-"conservatism" of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home. ... Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism.
Back in 2000, McCain's two neocon loyalists lauded him for his unshakable belief in great government, and for resurrecting the promise of "national-greatness conservatism." Given the neocons' "creative destruction" in the interim, the two have been a little less vocal about their aching desires. Their strategic silence makes it easier for McCain to lay claim to the Reagan mantle. He has no business so doing. Contra McCain, Reagan believed the state ought to get out of the way.
Indeed, most illuminating in the McCain CPAC speech was his vow to be "an advocate for the rights of man everywhere in the world." "We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold," Bainbridge observes, "but in a sense those are tactical issues." Agreed: The philosophical significance of McCain lies in his violence-for-values verbiage; in how he deceptively frames the bloodletting in Iraq and elsewhere around the world as the heroic upholding of individual rights. Thanks to the malign McCain, it looked as though the neoconservative whey was finally separating from the conservative curd. What was to remain was not the best concoction, but it promised to be a far cry from the previous accursed ideological amalgam.
I had hoped that, in the dust-up between conservatives and neocon-dominated establishment Republicans, McCain would serve as the curdling bacteria. I was wrong.
by Ilana Mercer
February 08, 2008
It doesn't take much to sunder a debate about the Republican Party's inconsequential core. The Rush Limbaugh-led insurrection against John McCain gave the fleeting impression that the movement was on the cusp of such a reckoning. No longer.
In close succession, Romney resigned, and McCain wowed the Conservative Political Action Conference. Behind the scenes, Bill Kristol practiced his curtain calls. Kristol is the uncrowned comeback kid – the attractive, affable neoconservative mastermind has backed McCain's campaign for some time now. Philosophically, Kristol is the king of consistency. Neoconservative all the way. Like McCain. Just as it appeared the neocons were slowly being inched out, they're back.
It's proving well nigh impossible to Kill Bill.
Kristol has been doing the rounds in the media, anointing McCain as the "leader of the conservative movement" – his words. Peggy Noonan, another court courtesan, has been quaking and quivering about McCain on the networks. (Will she pen an ode for McCain's nether reaches as she did for Bush's in "He's Got Two of 'Em"?) It all sounds terribly familiar.
I'll grant McCain this: His speech before the CPAC was a vast improvement on the pathological, unremitting lies of Bush and his spokesmen. "Yes, there were WMD in Iraq; yes, Saddam planned 9/11; yes, he shopped for yellow cake in Niger; yes, democracy is on the march in Iraq; yes, the economy at home is humming; yes, Iranian speedboats attacked U.S. warships" – Bush babble, I believe, is less a consequence of congenital stupidity than it is of the confusion caused by incessant, habitual lying.
McCain came clean. But he chose the objects of his confession carefully, lingering on his opposition to the small-potatoes of agricultural subsidies, rather than on his proposal, as part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, to legalize 20 million deadwood illegal immigrants. "God's children," in his words. Be mindful that McCain is not done with amnesty. Following the victory in South Carolina, McCain denied, to Sean Hannity's face, that he had been wrong in his support for amnesty. Now he promises to "address other aspects of the problem," after "securing our borders first." What does that mean? You be the judge.
McCain spoke about beating government back, having just the other day blessed the latest deficit spending, that obscene stimulus package. Moreover, opposing tax cuts once over a long political career could be put down to the ravages of age and an unsupple mind. But, by National Review's count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 times, often on the grounds that such cuts benefit those who pay the lion's share of the tax burden. McCain's sense of justice matches his understanding of the economy.
McCain's newfound fealty to the free market is suspect. Profits are the street signs of the free market – without profits there'd be no products. But in the course of disparaging Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector – politics, remember, is a form of sheltered employment – McCain badmouthed the thing that makes the free market go around: "I didn't manage for profit, I led for patriotism."
So said the beneficiary of life-long sheltered employment, who couldn't "manage for profit" if he tried. Indeed, his CPAC mention of Edmund Burke notwithstanding, McCain is not very bright. He finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy. He also lost five jets. IQ ace Steve Sailer has suggested that if you're looking for competence in the White House, McCain may not be your man: "To lose one plane over Vietnam may be regarded as a heroic tragedy; to lose five planes here and there looks like carelessness."
"Reaching across the aisle to get things done" – now that's staple McCain Speak; it has been throughout his campaign. It's also a euphemism for relinquishing principles in favor of political expediency. The political animal known as McCain has too often moved in packs dominated by Democrats and other left-liberals. As part of the duo McCain-Feingold, he instated "a federal speech code, enforced with jail terms of up to five years," as Jonathan Rauch noted. As a member of the "Gang of 14," and against constitutionalism, McCain and his homie, Sen. Lindsay Graham, colluded with Democrats in an attempt to sabotage Bush's conservative judicial nominees. Had McCain's minders in the media dug for dirt as diligently as they did on Ron Paul, they'd discover that he voted for hard-core lefties Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court. In 2004, McCain considered running on the John Kerry ticket.
Enough said.
A man for all seasons (not), McCain has opposed exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The McCain-Lieberman bill expresses his enthusiasm for the Malthusian environmental monomania – McCain shares the gaseous Al Gore's belief that there is an inherent discord between our system of production and the environment. McCain's contempt for development and consumer freedom "will cost the average U.S. household at least $600 per year by 2010, rising to at least $1,000 per year by 2020," as well as 39,000 jobs in 2010, and at least 190,000 jobs by 2020, in the Heartland Institute's estimation.
The McCain-Lieberman collaboration gave neocon David Brooks and crunchy con Andrew Sullivan goose bumps. Both "fantasized" of launching a McCain-Lieberman Party. With war and global warming on the brain, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a neoconservative by any other name, is firmly behind McCain's candidacy.
From the pollution he has left along his political path McCain can run but cannot hide. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo. McCain, once again, jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and "more boots on the ground." More recently, it's been "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran," and the promise of a 100 year war in Iraq, bound to break that bank he now vows to make solvent. Under the loving gaze of the media, McCain's jingoism is ever evolving.
Fred Barnes, a neoconservative, has dismissed anti-McCain conservatives as "talk-radio mafia." Another McCainiac, Michael Medved, has framed McCain's apparent opposition to the "Fairness Doctrine" as a sign of his man's pure conservatism. A wicked, illiberal effort to control speech and property, the "Fairness Doctrine" is a litmus test not necessarily for a conservative, but for any decent individual, on the left or right. Like Bill Kristol's dad, Medved's ideological trajectory has taken him from the left to the neoconservative left. Unlike the clever Kristol, Medved's shabby argument reveals a less impressive intellectual arc.
Neocon Kristol, over on the op-ed pages of his new editorial home, the New York Times (an appointment that speaks to how cozy the left-neocon cabal truly is), has, excitedly, been admonishing mutinous conservatives, while reciting gory poetry in honor of McCain. Limbaugh he has maligned as suffering from "McCain Derangement Syndrome." (Kristol, however, correctly calls conservatives on their enthusiastic support for the equally problematic candidacy of "Benito" Giuliani.)
Cut to 2000, with Kristol and Brooks making mischief together – or magic, depending on whose side you're on. The two collaborated on a piece, "The Politics of Creative Destruction," in which they argued that McCain would revive, rather than repress, the State. I concur with Stephen Bainbridge when he contends that:
If the Bush era has taught us nothing else, it is that we must be skeptical of interventionist foreign policies whether grounded in the national greatness "conservatism" of a Teddy Roosevelt or the neo-"conservatism" of a Bill Kristol. It produced a foreign policy quagmire that eviscerated any opportunity to advance the conservative agenda at home. ... Importantly when it comes to McCain, his interventionism is fundamentally contrary to the traditions of mainstream conservatism.
Back in 2000, McCain's two neocon loyalists lauded him for his unshakable belief in great government, and for resurrecting the promise of "national-greatness conservatism." Given the neocons' "creative destruction" in the interim, the two have been a little less vocal about their aching desires. Their strategic silence makes it easier for McCain to lay claim to the Reagan mantle. He has no business so doing. Contra McCain, Reagan believed the state ought to get out of the way.
Indeed, most illuminating in the McCain CPAC speech was his vow to be "an advocate for the rights of man everywhere in the world." "We can complain about various McCain positions, like McCain-Feingold," Bainbridge observes, "but in a sense those are tactical issues." Agreed: The philosophical significance of McCain lies in his violence-for-values verbiage; in how he deceptively frames the bloodletting in Iraq and elsewhere around the world as the heroic upholding of individual rights. Thanks to the malign McCain, it looked as though the neoconservative whey was finally separating from the conservative curd. What was to remain was not the best concoction, but it promised to be a far cry from the previous accursed ideological amalgam.
I had hoped that, in the dust-up between conservatives and neocon-dominated establishment Republicans, McCain would serve as the curdling bacteria. I was wrong.
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