Pat Buchanan questions ‘endless war’

Pat Buchanan, a former US Presidential candidate, is a leading voice of American Conservatism.  In excerpt from an article that appeared on his website on Tuesday, he is less than flattering about the Republican Party:

“How do you like the Journal’s war?”

So boasted the headline of William Randolph Hearst’s New York flagship that week in 1898 that the United States declared war on Spain.

While Hearst’s Journal, in a circulation battle with Joe Pulitzer’s World, was a warmongering sheet, it did not start the war.

Yet the headline comes to mind reading the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages seem to have concluded that on Nov. 4 America voted for new wars in the Middle East, and beyond.

On Nov. 15, its lead editorial declared that the great “question before President Obama and Europe is how to stop the Napoleon of the Kremlin.”

Putin is Napoleon? Has the Journal lost it?

Vladimir Putin is 62. By age 40, Napoleon’s empire encompassed nearly all of Europe. France had swallowed Belgium, Holland, parts of Germany and the Italian coast to Rome. The Emperor had alliances with Austria, Russia, Denmark, Sweden and a truncated Prussia. Virtually all the resources, industries and populations of Continental Europe were at the service of the French Empire.

Putin has reacquired Crimea, which belonged to Russia before the United States was a nation, and is about the size of Vermont.

Napoleon made it to Moscow. Does the Journal think Putin will make it to Paris, as Czar Alexander I did, or to Berlin, as Stalin did?

The Journal hails the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 18-0 vote to arm the Ukrainians, and urges Congress to do the same.

And what would be the result of U.S. heavy weapons arriving in Kiev?

Would Putin recoil in shock and awe and scurry out of Crimea?

Probably not, as the Journal itself concedes, “In 15 years running Russia, Mr. Putin has never stood down.”

And if Putin, seeing U.S. weapons arriving in Kiev, sent in the Russian army to annex Luhansk and Donetsk, took Mariupol on the Black Sea coast, established a land bridge to Crimea, and then offered to negotiate, what would Kiev do?

Even with U.S. weapons Ukraine cannot defeat Russia.

What would we do? Accept defeat? Send U.S. advisers or troops into Ukraine? Launch strikes on Russian forces? Blockade Crimea? Are we really prepared for war with Russia, over Donetsk?

Since Nov. 4, the Journal and its neocon allies have been cawing for U.S. troops to fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria, for U.S. air strikes on Assad’s regime, for bombing Iran, and for arming Ukraine to fight the Russians in a war that Kiev would surely lose.

Was this what America voted for on Nov. 4?

Is this what the Grand Old Party has on offer – endless war?

What if the media were moral?

mercer_ilanaby Ilana Mercer

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Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded “the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer

No sooner had the Senate voted, on Wednesday Oct. 16, to unconditionally reopen the spending spigot—seconded in short succession by Congress and the president—than an unabashed Dana Bash, chief congressional correspondent for CNN, cornered Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Her angle, like every other media mouthpiece in the country, was the futility of the fight Cruz had spearheaded:

“As you well know, you have a lot of fellow Republicans really downright angry at you because, here we are, almost three weeks later, the strategy that you started out on to defund Obamacare as part of funding the government. They never thought it was going to work because the votes aren’t there. And here we are, reopening the government after a lot of bruising political warfare internally, and you got nothing for it.”

More a leading suggestion than a journalistic question, Bash’s crude calculus—that outcomes, rather than principle, should dictate the political action pursued—was what Americans had been force-fed by her ilk over the past two weeks.

Throughout the so-called shutdown (unnoticed by hardworking Americans), Americans were exposed, day in and day out, to asphyxiating agitprop. The Taliban-like tea party caucus, they were told, was criminally negligent for refusing to allow the government to keep borrowing. Damned they were as “aging, white bigots” for daring to demand changes to a despised law, at the expense of the temporary furlough of 800,000 non-essential oink-sector workers, whose salaries are, on average, double that of the average wage in the country, and whose hefty healthcare and bankrupting retirement benefits the rest of the country can only dream of, but must pay for.

Into the Cannibal's Pot

What Cruz had to say throughout the ordeal was not what Americans—who get most of their news from cable television and the news networks—got to hear.

Repeated ad nauseam by these noisy, Democratic sleeper cells were the results of polls that reflected a media-manufactured consensus: “Republicans continue to get more blame than the Obama administration for Washington’s fiscal policy stalemate.”

Is there any wonder that infantile America mirrors its squandering government with respect to debt carried? “Like father, like son” goes a saying about the similarities between the behavior of parent and progeny. Like their government, Americans are debt-addled (the “fore horse for oppression and despotism,” forewarned Founding Father Thomas Jefferson). The total household debt in the U.S. stands at $13 trillion; student loans at $3.04 trillion.

If the media were moral, they’d have told Americans these truths.

If the media were moral, they’d have told Americans that the perennial debt crises are manufactured crises.

That the U.S. government’s receipts are more than sufficient to cover its debt payments by a factor of approximately 10.

That the 14th Amendment (Section 4) of the U.S. Constitution prohibits a default on the country’s debt.

That if the country were to default on the debt, it would be because President Barack Obama deliberately and maliciously chose to flout the Constitution (it’s the law of the land, unlike Obamacare), and not service the debt, so as to win a political battle.

If the media were moral, they’d tell America that it’s do or die. That capping the debt ceiling is perhaps the only way to compel a government that owes $17 trillion and carries “$70 trillion in off-balance-sheet liabilities” to make do with the loot it collects.

That the stock-market’s “confidence,” pursuant to lifting the cap on the debt, amounts to faith in confidence men; that soaring stocks in a debt-fueled, stagnant economy is a consequence of the confetti of funny-money raining down from the nation’s pantheon: the Federal Reserve Bank.

That non-stop monetary stimulus is the road to ruin—it results in a rise in prices, stocks included. Homes too. And that an increase in the price of an item is not the same as an appreciation in its value.

That the natural laws of economics dictate that Obamacare will increase both public and private debt.

That members of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth.

And that’s the honest to goodness truth.

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Ann Coulter: Republican Party ‘deserves to die’ if it backs immigration reform

Ann Coulter

The GOP (Republican Party) deserves to die if it backs immigration reform, allowing more Latinos to become citizens, right wing pundit Ann Coulter says in a new column, If the GOP is stupid, it deserves to die.

The article is the latest in a series since President Barack Obama’s November reelection in which Coulter paints Hispanics as lazy, poor and government-dependent, concluding that they could never vote for conservatives and immigration reform would destroy both the Republican Party and the country as a whole.

“Democrats terrify Hispanics into thinking they’ll be lynched if they vote for Republicans, and then turn around and taunt Republicans for not winning a majority of the Hispanic vote,” Coulter wrote in the column, published Wednesday.

Coulter went on to claim that Latinos don’t favor a path to citizenship.

“Hispanic voters are a small portion of the electorate,” the column says. “They don’t want amnesty, and they’re hopeless Democrats. So Republicans have decided the path to victory is to flood the country with lots more of them!”

It’s unclear what Coulter bases this on, as she does not cite a source. A Fox News Latino poll published last year found that 85 percent of Hispanics support offering a path to citizenship for the undocumented. A poll released this week by Latino Decisions found that 81 percent of Hispanic voters want Congress to address the pathway to citizenship and border security simultaneously, while only 13 percent favor the border security-first approach advocated by conservatives like Coulter.

Coulter reinforced the views presented in her column during an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” Wednesday evening that ran under the banner “Legalizing Illegals.”

“This bill has nothing in terms of enforcement,” Coulter said. “If you’re serious about enforcement, just say ‘we’re enforcing E-Verify.’”

In fact, the comprehensive immigration reform proposal under debate in the Senate pours $6.5 billion into border security and mandates the expansion of E-Verify.

During a disagreement over whether Coulter was directly responding to a question about the path to citizenship, she and the host called one another “liberal.”

“You’re not answering my question,” Hannity said, as Coulter continued speaking. “You’re like a liberal.”

“No, nothing… you, you… on the contrary, you are like a liberal,” Coulter stammered back as Hannity sniggered.

She said if “amnesty” happens, “America is over” and “the only thing left for people like you and me to do, Sean, is to punish the people who destroyed America.” – Huffington Post

‘Whiter and more male’

Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said the Republican Party “got whiter and more male” while the Democratic caucus is “majority minority and female.”

“Take a good look when the House convenes after this next Congress is sworn in at what our side of the aisle looks like versus what the Republican side looks like. I mean they got whiter and more male, and we now have a majority minority and female Democratic caucus – first time in history,” Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said Wednesday at a discussion hosted by the Emily’s List, a group known for supporting pro-abortion female candidates.

She said when women run for office, “Democrats win.”

“We have to double down in 2014. We’ve got to make sure we recruit more women for office, because It’s not just a slogan that when women run, women win. They do, and when women run, Democrats win,” Wasserman-Schultz said.

The new Congress will consist of 20 women senators and 81 congresswomen – an accomplishment she credited to the efforts of the Emily’s List.

“There is no longer an all-male state legislature anywhere in the country,” she said, adding that “40 percent of the U.S. population now has at least one woman senator.” CNSNews.com

The D-bomb has dropped

by Ilana Mercer

In our democracy – for we are no longer a republic that upholds individual rights and limits central power – you vote not for the representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich – whom the left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being – you vote defensively. If you are The Poor, you vote extractively – you empower your guy to steal The Other Guy’s stuff and hand it over.

Elections are when the politically dominant majority gets to thump the politically weak minority.

The Moron Media, left and right, are sticking to their story. Barack Obama had “out-hustled” Mitt Romney. Obama ran a better “ground game.” He triumphed “in the trenches,” “neutralized” his rival. He had not stopped campaigning since 2008. The president’s mega-machine was unbeatable, even though his vision was lacking. (As I like to say, a visionary bureaucrat is a voracious one. The best leader is one who leads in limiting his leadership.)

Had Romney, say some of the analysts, been a better tactician, scrappier, less of a patrician – he’d have won.

The media so arguing have advocated for immigration policies that have helped, over the decades, to replace the American people with a new, vastly different people. Although whites broke for Romney in a big way – as a proportion of the voting public, the founding majority is teetering on minority status. It has shrunk to the point where it is becoming powerless against a coalition in opposition.

As an extension of their life’s work, the “news” people aforementioned have anointed a string of progressive commentators who are distinguished from the Democrats with whom they cavort in studios in one way only: They call themselves Republicans.

This lot’s line on the Republicans’ Nov. 6 defeat went as follows: Be nicer to the axis of Asians, blacks, browns (and brown-nosing bimbos) who handed the Democrats a handy victory.

In a word, neutralize the D-Bomb.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

For years, those of us who’ve warned about demographics have been dubbed racists. But the D- Bomb has dropped. Its debris is scattered across “the field” upon which Mitt Romney said he “left everything.”

Asians, blacks and Latinos united for Obama.

As always, women voted with their wombs, although married sisters were less wild for big daddy O. (Oh, how we suffer for the female suffrage! I once vowed to “give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”)

To the pox of the 19th Amendment – it granted women the vote – add the 26th Amendment. Smuggled into the Constitution by statute, it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, the vote grants youngsters a claim on the livelihood of those who do.

Overlapping voter categories notwithstanding, Obama thus curried favor with females – single ladies, in particular – the faithless, kids and minorities.

Put differently, those earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

People with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.

The rich are politically impoverished; the poor politically rich. The rich dominate the economy; the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.

What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life? In a democracy, the right to vote does just that.

As for demographics, they have become destiny. They were not necessarily so. Demographics have been the excuse central planners have advanced to persevere with immigration policies that destroy civil society and shore up the welfare state.

The now-waning West became great not because it outbred the rest of the world. The West was once great because of its human capital – innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas and the willingness to defend such a civilization, not because it was more populated than the rest of the world.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs better people.

Making nice with constituencies that vote repeatedly and habitually for the candidate who promises them more stuff is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The only voters who could be swayed by the promise of the free market are the Democratic Party’s Asian supporters, since they enjoy higher incomes and stabler families than the party’s Hispanic and black devotees.

Ultimately, elections are about perception – the way in which the people perceive the political planks of the two parties.

The American people perceive the Democratic Party as the party of entitlements. They think of the Republican Party as the party of austerity.

History and reality tell us that both parties have grown government into the gigantic, intractable, wealth-gobbling Thing that it is. But in the age of reality TV, reason and reality are meaningless.

Perception is everything.

The idea of an American People is yet another misconception. The extravaganza that had one adorable, carrot-topped kid bawling “no more ‘Bronco Bamma’ and Mitt Romney, please” has ended. But if this advance auction of stolen goods – H. L. Mencken’s definition of an election – proved anything, it is that America is a mass of competing factions.

Some vie to keep more of their rightful property; others fight to get their paws on that very property.

And the tipping point has arrived. This, Nov. 6, 2012, has proven.

Ilana Mercer is a classical liberal (libertarian) writer and a fellow at the “Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.” She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” “The titular tease,” explains Ilana in the book, “is meant as a metaphor and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” Ilana’s website is IlanaMercer.com.. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com.

Romney, Santorum neck and neck in Michigan

Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum

Mitt Romney’s narrow but campaign-saving primary victory in Michigan lost some of its luster when the final outcome showed that his top rival, Rick Santorum, still won half of the state’s delegates, muddying the race ahead of 10 key state contests next Tuesday.

A win in Michigan was crucial for Romney, who was born there and whose father was governor of the state, to affirm his contention that he is his party’s best choice to defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in November.

He overcame the religious conservative Santorum by a slim margin – 41 percent to 38 percent – in the vote Tuesday by sticking to his core and mainstream Republican message of fixing the economy and reducing unemployment in a country still recovering from the worst recession in decades.

Romney is favored by much of the Republican establishment, and enjoys more campaign funds and a stronger organization than his primary rivals. But Santorum has electrified the party’s conservative base, which trusts his views on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, and considers Romney too moderate and inconsistent.

Santorum remains on solid ground heading into Super Tuesday, a day next week when 419 delegates are up for grabs in 10 states. The day could go a long way in determining who will win the state-by-state race for delegates that yields the party’s nomination at its national convention in August.

Santorum is leading the polls in Ohio, possibly the most important contest on Super Tuesday. It is a big industrial state with 8.1 percent unemployment, 63 convention delegates at stake and a long history as a battleground in general election campaigns. Santorum also is keeping an eye on two other big prizes among the 10 Super Tuesday states: Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Romney is all but assured of victories in at least two of next Tuesday’s states – Massachusetts, where he was governor and faces little or no competition in the primary, and Virginia, where neither former House speaker Newt Gingrich nor Santorum qualified for the ballot. Those two contests offer 84 delegates combined.

News that Santorum’s narrow loss in Michigan would yield him as many delegates as the winner – 15 each – enabled him to label the results a success on Romney’s home turf, putting some wind in his sails ahead of the big contests next week.

The other two candidates in the race, Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, did not campaign in Michigan and got no delegates.

“We had a much better night in Michigan than maybe was first reported. This was a really great race to go into, in a sense, the belly of the beast, the hometown of my chief rival here in the Republican primary,” Santorum said Wednesday during a campaign stop in Tennessee.

Romney was campaigning in Ohio, where he kept on the economy, promising “more jobs, less debt and smaller government” if he’s elected in November. Romney was headed next for North Dakota, which holds caucuses Tuesday.

Gingrich and Paul made little effort in either of Tuesday’s contests in Michigan or Arizona, focusing instead on Super Tuesday. Gingrich campaigned in Georgia, the state he represented in the House of Representatives for 20 years. Paul appears to be contesting Romney in Vermont, which carries 17 delegates.

In the Associated Press tally, Romney now has 167 delegates, including all of Arizona’s 29 delegates, which he won easily on Tuesday in the day’s second race. Santorum has 87, Gingrich has 32 and Paul has 19.

It will take 1,144 delegates to win the Republican nomination for president.

The next vote happens Saturday, when Washington state holds its caucuses.

Newt Gingrich calls Mitt Romney ‘timid’

Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich

Republican Newt Gingrich vowed on Sunday to press ahead with his struggling presidential bid after a big loss in Nevada, saying he will focus on drawing a contrast with “timid” rival Mitt Romney.

Romney, the Republican front-runner, easily thumped Gingrich in Nevada on Saturday for his second consecutive win and third in the first five contests in the state-by-state battle to pick a challenger to face Democratic President Barack Obama in the November election.

The victory gave Romney growing momentum as the race turns to the next round contests on Tuesday – in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri – and Maine’s weeklong caucuses that conclude next Saturday.

It also raised questions about Gingrich’s future, but the former House of Representatives speaker appeared on two national morning talk shows to repeat his vow to stay in the race despite big losses in Nevada and last week in Florida.

Gingrich, a former Georgia congressman, hopes his campaign can last until 10 “Super Tuesday” contests on March 6 and several later contests in March, when votes will be taken in southern states where he expects to do well.

“My goal over the next few weeks is to draw a very sharp distinction between Romney’s positions, which are very – the Wall Street Journal described them as timid – and in terms of tax policies, being like Obama,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I hope by the time we get to Super Tuesday that I will have made the case that a genuine conservative is a dramatically better choice to defeat Barack Obama,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Gingrich said he hoped to pull close to even with Romney in delegates for the nomination after the Texas primary in early April.

First he will have to survive February. New polls on Sunday showed Gingrich could face a challenge from Rick Santorum, who has been vying with Gingrich to be the conservative alternative to the more moderate Romney.

A Public Policy Polling survey showed Romney with a comfortable 14-point lead in Colorado over Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, with Gingrich in third. In Minnesota, Santorum had a slight 2-point edge on Romney with Gingrich in third.

In Missouri, which is a non-binding primary that does not award delegates, Gingrich is not even on the ballot.

‘BIG DAY FOR SANTORUM’

“Tuesday has the potential to be a big day for Rick Santorum,” the Public Policy Polling memo said.

Santorum said he believed he would pick up steam in the race as it moves beyond the first five contests and broadened to states where Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has not spent as much time organizing and campaigning.

“I think we’re going to show improvement. This race is a long, long way from being over,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We believe that if you look at the national polls, our numbers are moving up.”

The Romney campaign went on the attack against Santorum on Sunday, issuing a statement to reporters renewing criticism of his record in the Senate backing spending bills and local spending projects known as earmarks.

“Rick Santorum is part of the big-spending Washington establishment that ran up the national debt by trillions and stuck our grandchildren with the bill,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said.

Santorum finished a distant fourth in Nevada, behind Romney, Gingrich and U.S. Representative Ron Paul, whose third-place showing was a disappointment after spending time and building a campaign organization in the state.

Paul said on ABC’s “This Week” he was not sure where he might score a victory in the race. Santorum and Gingrich have each won one state, Iowa and South Carolina respectively, while Romney has won New Hampshire, Florida and Nevada.

“It’s hard to say exactly when, but we have three or four caucus states that we believe our numbers are doing pretty good, so we have to just wait and see and continue to do exactly what we’re doing,” Paul said.

Romney took command of the Republican race with his victory in Nevada, where he won a broad cross-section of Republican voters including conservatives, moderates and Tea Party movement supporters.

But while vote totals were not complete on Sunday afternoon, Romney’s 48 percent showing was slightly short of the 51 percent he received when he won Nevada during his failed 2008 presidential campaign.

Gingrich and Santorum said Romney had failed to seal the deal with Republican voters and there was still room for another candidate to confront him.

“The challenge is to say, do you really want to go into a fall election with a moderate candidate?” Gingrich said. “The difference between timidly trying to manage at the margins a system that has to be profoundly changed and boldly taking it on, is a very, very big difference.”

Gingrich and Romney both took the day off the campaign trail on Sunday, when many Americans were more focused on the Super Bowl football championship than on politics.