By nation of origin of our people, by 2050, America will be a Third World country. Our great cities will all look like Los Angeles today. Los Angeles and the cities of the Southwest will look like Juarez and Tijuana...
He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.
But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.
What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.
Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.
U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?
Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.
That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality — namely, that Russia’s control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.
If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.
Not only did Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.
Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.
The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the “near abroad” when the Soviet Union broke apart.
Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.
This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.
Scheunemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.
Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp.
The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.
Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?
Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … a free people ought to be constantly awake,” Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.
The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.
Truman refused to use force to break Stalin’s Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter’s response to Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did — nothing.
These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?
As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?
For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.
If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?
The swift and decisive action of Putin’s army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.
What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin’s trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?
Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.
The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.
The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.
Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation’s primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.
A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.
Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?
As for Saakashvili, he’s probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.
Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.
Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.
Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain, and America’s lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli.
Mikheil did not reckon on the rage or resolve of the Bear.
American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight — Russia finished it. People who start wars don’t get to decide how and when they end.
Russia’s response was “disproportionate” and “brutal,” wailed Bush.
True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more “disproportionate”?
Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?
Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?
When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, we celebrated. When Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo broke from Serbia, we rejoiced. Why, then, the indignation when two provinces, whose peoples are ethnically separate from Georgians and who fought for their independence, should succeed in breaking away?
Are secessions and the dissolution of nations laudable only when they advance the agenda of the neocons, many of who viscerally detest Russia?
That Putin took the occasion of Saakashvili’s provocative and stupid stunt to administer an extra dose of punishment is undeniable. But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia’s nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany.
When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed its bases in Cuba, dissolved the evil empire, let the Soviet Union break up into 15 states, and sought friendship and alliance with the United States, what did we do?
American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags to loot the Russian nation. Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we moved our military alliance into Eastern Europe, then onto Russia’s doorstep. Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former republics of the Soviet Union are now NATO members.
Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin’s birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia?
The United States unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty because our technology was superior, then planned to site anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against Iranian missiles, though Iran has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs. A Russian counter-offer to have us together put an anti-missile system in Azerbaijan was rejected out of hand.
We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey to cut Russia out. Then we helped dump over regimes friendly to Moscow with democratic “revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, and tried to repeat it in Belarus.
Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them.
Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan, where Europe had opted out of the Cold War after Moscow installed those SS-20 missiles east of the Elbe. And Europe had abandoned NATO, told us to go home and become subservient to Moscow.
How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?
For a decade, some of us have warned about the folly of getting into Russia’s space and getting into Russia’s face. The chickens of democratic imperialism have now come home to roost — in Tbilisi.
In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown.
But if Barack had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously.
For not only is Barack the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A+ report card from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He supports the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, where the baby’s skull is stabbed with scissors in the birth canal and the brains are sucked out to end its life swiftly and ease passage of the corpse into the pan.
Partial-birth abortion, said the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, “comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary.”
Yet, when Congress was voting to ban this terrible form of death for a mature fetus, Michelle Obama was signing fundraising letters pledging that, if elected, Barack would be “tireless” in keeping legal this “legitimate medical procedure.”
And Barack did not let the militants down. When the Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on this barbaric procedure, Barack denounced the court for denying “equal rights for women.”
As David Freddoso reports in his new best-seller, “The Case Against Barack Obama,” the Illinois senator goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the “culture of death.”
Thrice in the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion. Thrice, Obama voted to let doctors and nurses allow these tiny human beings die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.
How can a man who purports to be a Christian justify this?
If, as its advocates contend, abortion has to remain legal to protect the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother, how is a mother’s life or health in the least threatened by a baby no longer inside her — but lying on a table or in a pan fighting for life and breath?
How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death? Yet, that is what Obama voted for, thrice, in the Illinois Senate.
When a bill almost identical to the one Barack fought in Illinois, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, came to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2001, the vote was 98 to 0 in favor. Barbara Boxer, the most pro-abortion member of the Senate before Barack came, spoke out on its behalf:
“Of course, we believe everyone should deserve the protection of this bill. … Who could be more vulnerable than a newborn baby? So, of course, we agree with that. … We join with an ‘aye’ vote on this. I hope it will, in fact, be unanimous.”
Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade. But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, which is what letting a tiny baby die of neglect or killing it outright amounts to, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended to outlaw infanticide?
Is the right to an abortion so sacrosanct to Obama that killing by neglect or snuffing out of the life of tiny babies outside the womb must be protected if necessary to preserve that right?
Obama is an abortion absolutist. “I could find no instance in his entire career,” writes Freddoso, “in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion.”
In 2007, Barack pledged that, in his first act as president, he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion.
What we once called God’s Country would become the nation on earth most zealously committed to an unrestricted right of abortion from conception to birth.
Before any devout Catholic, Evangelical Christian or Orthodox Jew votes for Obama, he or she might spend 15 minutes in Chapter 10 of Freddoso’s “Case Against Barack.” For if, as Catholics believe, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, and participation in an abortion entails automatic excommunication, how can a good Catholic support a candidate who will appoint justices to make Roe v. Wade eternal and eliminate all restrictions on a practice Catholics legislators have fought for three decades to curtail?
And which Catholic priests and prelates will it be who give invocations at Obama rallies, even as Mother Church fights to save the lives of unborn children whom Obama believes have no right to life and no rights at all?
In his 1937 “Great Contemporaries,” Winston Churchill wrote, “Whatever else may be thought about (Hitler’s) exploits, they are among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.”
Churchill was referring not only to Hitler’s political triumphs — the return of the Saar and reoccupation of the Rhineland — but his economic achievements. By his fourth year in power, Hitler had pulled Germany out of the Depression, cut unemployment from 6 million to 1 million, grown the GNP 37 percent and increased auto production from 45,000 vehicles a year to 250,000. City and provincial deficits had vanished.
In material terms, Nazi Germany was a startling success.
And not only Churchill and Lloyd George but others in Europe and America were marveling at the exploits of the Third Reich, its fascist ally Italy and Joseph Stalin’s rapidly industrializing Soviet state. “I have seen the future, and it works,” Lincoln Steffins had burbled. Many Western men, seeing the democracies mired in Depression and moral malaise, were also seeing the future in Berlin, Moscow, Rome.
In Germany, Hitler was winning plebiscites with more than 90 percent of the vote in what outside observers said were free elections.
What calls to mind the popularity of the Third Reich and the awe it inspired abroad — even after the bloody Roehm purge and the Nazi murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934, and the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws — is a poll buried in The New York Times.
In a survey of 24 countries by Pew Research Center, the nation that emerged as far and away first on earth in the satisfaction of its people was China. No other nation even came close.
“Eighty-six percent of Chinese people surveyed said they were content with the country’s direction, up from 48 percent in 2002. … And 82 percent of Chinese were satisfied with their national economy, up from 52 percent,” said the Times.
Yet, China has a regime that punishes dissent, severely restricts freedom, persecutes Christians and all faiths that call for worship of a God higher than the state, brutally represses Tibetans and Uighurs, swamps their native lands with Han Chinese to bury their cultures and threatens Taiwan.
China is also a country where Maoist ideology has been replaced by a racial chauvinism and raw nationalism reminiscent of Italy and Germany in the 1930s. Yet, again, over 80 percent of all Chinese are content or even happy with the direction of the country. Two-thirds say the government is doing a good job in dealing with the issues of greatest concern to them.
And what nation is it whose people rank as third most satisfied?
Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Moscow is today more nationalistic, less democratic and more confrontational toward the West than it has been since before the fall of communism. Power is being consolidated, former Soviet republics are hearing dictatorial growls from Moscow and a chill reminiscent of the Cold War is in the air.
Yet, wrote the Times, “Russians were the third most satisfied people with their country’s direction, at 54 percent, despite Western concerns about authoritarian trends.”
Of the largest nations on earth, the two that today most satisfy the desires of their peoples are the most authoritarian.
High among the reasons, of course, are the annual 10 percent to 12 percent growth China has experienced over the last decade, and the wealth pouring into Russia for the oil and natural gas in which that immense country abounds. Still, is this not disturbing? In China and Russia, the greatest of world powers after the United States, people seem to value freedom of speech, religion or the press far less than they do a rising prosperity and national pride and power. And they seem to have little moral concern about crushing national minorities.
Contrast, if you will, the contentment of Chinese and Russians with the dissatisfaction of Americans, only 23 percent of whom told the Pew poll they approved of the nation’s direction. Only one in five Americans said they were satisfied with the U.S. economy.
Other polls have found 82 percent of Americans saying the country is headed in the wrong direction, only 28 percent approving of President Bush’s performance and only half that saying they approve of the Congress. In Britain, France and Germany, only three in 10 expressed satisfaction with the direction of the nation.
Liberal democracy is in a bear market. Is it a systemic crisis, as well?
In his 1992 “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama wrote of the ultimate world triumph of democratic capitalism. All other systems had fallen, or would fall by the wayside. The future belonged to us.
Democratic capitalism, it would appear, now has a great new rival — autocratic capitalism. In Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, nations are beginning to imitate the autocrats of China and Russia, even as some in the 1930s sought to ape fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The game is not over yet. We are going into extra innings.
John McCain is running as a war hero. There are just a few problems with that. He’s despised by fellow Vets, especially fellow POWs, not only for cooperating with the enemy, but also for blocking every effort to make sure all American POWs were returned after the war. Interestingly enough, the other veteran who obstructed truth on the matter was John Kerry who ran against Bush in 2004.
Barack Obama just had the worst week since his beloved pastor, Jeremiah Wright, decided to expatiate on black liberation theology at the National Press Club.
Coming off his royal progress through the Near and Middle East, Berlin, Paris and London, Barack had surged to a nine-point lead in the Gallup tracking poll. By Friday, he was back to a dead heat with a 72-year-old opponent with none of his natural skills, in a year when grocers are pulling Republican brands off the shelves.
For all its gracelessness, the McCain campaign, given openings by Barack, stepped in and put Muhammad Ali on the canvas.
The first opening was the clumsiness with which Barack dealt with a planned visit to wounded U.S. troops in Landshul, Germany.
While the first half of his foreign trip, to Afghanistan and Iraq, was official, the European tour was campaign related. Yet, it was on this leg that a visit to wounded U.S. soldiers had been scheduled. As campaigning in a military hospital is prohibited, the visit was canceled.
But, instead of going ahead and visiting the troops alone, without aides, press or cameras, Barack bailed out and flew on to Paris.
This left the McCain folks an opening to paint Obama as a cold-hearted opportunist avid to visit a military hospital only if he could bring in press and cameras to record his compassion.
Enraged Obama aides savagely accused McCain of running a dishonorable campaign. This reflex reaction, and the ugly brawl that ensued, made some Americans think less of Obama, but many more forget what a success his foreign trip had been.
Came then the Paris-Britney ad. This opens with shots of the wayward blondes, then of Barack, presuming to equate the three as vacuous, insubstantial and aimless. Purpose: Disparage Barack’s rock-star popularity and turn it into something laughable.
While the ad seemed both defensive and non-credible, too much of a stretch to be believed — even Republicans derided it as “childish” — it apparently acted as something of a matador’s cape snapped in front of an already tormented Obama.
Stung, Barack retorted: “What they’re going to try is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills you know. He’s risky.”
Barack was accusing the McCain campaign of implying he is risky because he is black.
This was the opening Rick Davis of McCain’s campaign needed to deliver a vicious uppercut to Obama’s jaw, charging him with “playing the race card … from the bottom of the deck.” Added Davis, this was “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.” McCain, sadly, agreed.
With that, both benches cleared.
Saturday, Bob Herbert of The New York Times charged McCain and the Republican Party with producing ads that are “slimy … foul, poisonous … designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.”
Sunday, Gene Robinson of The Washington Post accused McCain of “running a desperate, ugly campaign.”
The Britney-Paris ad calling Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world” was an attempt to “turn Obama’s popularity into a flaw.”
Now, undeniably, McCain’s ad was designed to minimize and mock Obama’s popularity as a modern form of Beatlemania.
But what is wrong with that?
On the weekend, the McCain folks released another ad. Called “The One,” it features Barack’s grandiose pronouncements about who he is, what he means to mankind and the marvelous miracles that await our messiah’s arrival — and twins him with Moses (Charlton Heston) parting the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments.”
The effectiveness of the ad is that people laugh with it, and so doing, laugh at the perceived pretentiousness of Barack Obama.
In a week, Barack, an object of media homage on his trip abroad, has become an object of mockery in much of Middle America. Though his media allies may howl racism, most Americans tend more and more to dismiss this. That card has been played so often it’s dog-eared.
And Barack’s raising the race issue anew seems suicidal. When one is winning the black vote 94 to 1, does it make sense to keep pushing into the face of the 87 percent of Americans who are Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian that the next president will definitely not be one of you?
When JFK’s polls showed him sweeping 80 percent of Catholics, he did not whistle-stop through the Bible Belt, billing himself as our “first Roman Catholic president.” He sent Lyndon and Lady Bird on a Dixie special to talk about JFK’s war record and rake Richard Nixon.
Thus did he become our first Catholic president. If Barack wishes to be our first black president, he will tell his friends to stop bellowing and braying every day about it.
Hearing the cable talk-show host solemnly pose the question, I could not suppress a belly laugh.
For the anchor was fearful that some white folks might reject Obama because he is African-American — even as a Rasmussen poll was reporting that Barack is beating McCain among black voters 94 to 1.
What, other than race, explains how Barack rolled up 90-10 margins among black voters while running against Hillary Clinton, wife of the man novelist Toni Morrison dubbed “our first black president”?
Indeed, so one-sided was the primary coverage in favor of Barack as the first African-American with a real chance to be president, even “Saturday Night Live” took to mocking the mainstream media.
As for black radio, on “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” “Michael Baisden Show” and “The Steve Harvey Morning Show,” which together may reach 20 million folks, there is “little pretense of balance,” writes Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times. “More often than not the Obama campaign is discussed as the home team.”
Black Entertainment Television plans to carry Barack’s speech to the Democratic convention live, but has no plans to carry McCain’s. Barack’s speech “is an historic occasion,” says BET Chairman Debra L. Lee, “so that demands some special treatment from us.”
As the mainstream media have moved left and talk radio right, and cable is breaking down along political and ideological lines, there is something else afoot now — the racial Balkanization of the newsroom.
Consider. On Sunday, 6,800 folks showed in Chicago for the 2008 quadrennial convention of UNITY: Journalists of Color. McCain declined an invitation. Bush had been booed at UNITY 2004, while John Kerry got a standing ovation. Featured speaker: Barack. Major concern of the journalists running the show: that their colleagues would lift the roof off the McCormick Place convention center when Barack arrived.
Said Luis Villareal, a producer of NBC’s “Dateline,” “I don’t think it’s such a bad thing if for 15 minutes you take off your reporter hat and respond to (Obama) as a human being at an event where you’re surrounded by people of color and you’re here for a united cause.”
And exactly what “cause” might the 10,000 members of UNITY be united behind? The hiring and advancement of journalists of color in all major news organizations in America.
For, as its emblem depicts, UNITY comprises four alliances: the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association and the National Association of Black Journalists.
“A New Journalism for a Changing World” is UNITY’s motto. And the title of its July 22 press release reveals what the “new journalism” is all about. “Aim of New UNITY Initiative Is More Diversity in Top Media Management.”
“With more than 50 percent of the population projected to be people of color in less than a generation,” says UNITY President Karen Lincoln Michel, “the nation’s news organizations continue to generate dismal diversity numbers year after year. … ‘Ten by 2010′ is a significant step in the right direction.”
What is Ten by 2010?
UNITY is demanding that 10 major U.S. news organizations, by mid-2010, elevate to a senior management position in the newsroom at least one journalist of color and provide “customized training to help prepare them.”
The journalist may be Asian, African-American, Native American or Hispanic, which rules out journalists of Irish, English, Polish, Italian, German or Jewish ancestry, since they are white.
Is this what we have come to 50 years after the triumph of the civil rights movement? Flat-out demands, by American journalists, for the hiring and promotion of colleagues based on race and color?
Is there any evidence major news organizations in this country have engaged in systematic discrimination to keep out men or women of color this last half century? The reverse seems true. They have bent over backward to advance minority journalists.
And if journalists have been hired and promoted based on ability and merit, why in the 21st century should these criteria be thrown out as the standards for advancement — in favor of race and color?
Isn’t this what they did in the days of Jim Crow — hire and promote based on race? What UNITY is calling for is a return to the old rules but with new beneficiaries — blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans — and new victims, all of whom will be white.
On Sunday, McCain came out in favor of an Arizona civil rights initiative that would outlaw any state discrimination either for or against folks, based on race, gender or national origin. Barack said he was “disappointed” with McCain and told UNITY he favors affirmative action “when properly structured.”
The Arizona referendum banning preferential treatment based on race is also on the ballot in the swing state of Colorado. It won in California in 1996, in Washington in 2000 and in Michigan in the great Democratic sweep of 2006. It has never lost, and may just win McCain Colorado, and with it the nation.
“We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in,” says Barack Obama of the U.S. war in Iraq. Wise counsel.
But is Barack taking his own advice? For he pledges to shift two U.S. combat brigades, 10,000 troops, out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, raising American forces in that country from 33,000 to 43,000.
Why does Barack think a surge of 10,000 troops will succeed in winning a war in which we have failed to prevail after seven years of fighting? How many more troops is he prepared to commit? Is the Obama commitment open-ended?
For, without any visible strategy for victory, Barack is recommending the same course LBJ took after the death of JFK. Johnson bombed North Vietnam in 1964, landed Marines in 1965 and built U.S. forces from 16,000 advisers on Nov. 22, 1963, to 525,000 troops in January of 1969.
Gradual escalation, which is exactly what Barack is recommending.
LBJ never thought through to the end game: how to break Hanoi, withdraw and leave a South peaceful, prosperous and pro-American.
Has Barack thought his way through to how this war ends in victory and we withdraw all U.S. ground troops from Afghanistan? For this writer cannot see anywhere on the horizon any such ending.
If the old rule applies — the guerrilla wins if he does not lose — the United States, about to enter its eighth year of combat, is losing. And, using the old 10-to-one ratio of regular troops needed to defeat guerrillas, if the Taliban can recruit 1,000 new fighters, they can see Obama’s two-brigade bet, and raise him. Just as Uncle Ho raised LBJ again and again.
What does President Obama do then? Send in 10,000 more?
The Soviet Union, whose 115,000-man army in Afghanistan reached more than twice the size of U.S.-NATO forces, even with the Obama surge, went home defeated in 1988. The Soviet Empire did not survive that humiliation.
Obama — and John McCain, who has endorsed the build-up — should, before committing any more combat brigades, explain how and when this war ends in an American victory. For as of today, the Afghan war resembles Vietnam far more than Iraq ever did.
Consider. Taliban attacks are up 40 percent this year. U.S. casualties in May and June exceeded those in Iraq. Gen. Petraeus says al-Qaida is moving assets from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Karzai’s writ still does not extend beyond the capital. He is mocked as the “Mayor of Kabul.” Security in the capital is deteriorating.
For the sixth straight year, the poppy crop, primary source of the world’s heroin, has set a new record. The Taliban eradicated the crop when in power, but are now collaborating with farmers to extort cash to keep fighting.
Most critically, Pakistan has become for the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida the same sanctuary that North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia provided for the Viet Cong and NVA, with this critical difference: We cannot bomb or invade Pakistan.
The new Islamabad regime is exhibiting no enthusiasm for fighting the Taliban who dominate the border regions and North-West Frontier province and have sympathizers in Pakistan’s military and intelligences agencies.
Air strikes, to which we have begun to resort, have resulted in wedding parties and families wiped out in their homes on both sides of the border. President Musharraf has even threatened to retaliate against U.S. forces if more of his people become victims.
Anti-Americanism, pandemic in Pakistan, is rising.
As for Afghanistan, how do we win a war in a nation of 27 million, the size of Texas, with only 50,000 U.S.-NATO troops? How long will it take us to train, equip and arm an Afghan army that is both loyal to the regime and an effective fighting force against its Pashtun brothers?
How, ever, can victory be achieved, if the enemy can retire every winter to Pakistan to rest, rearm and prepare new attacks?
If the Pakistani army will not clean out the border regions, how can we accomplish it with pinprick strikes by Special Forces, or Predators and F-16s, which invariably cause civilian casualties?
Afghanistan, in and of itself, is of no strategic importance, if it is not a base camp for al-Qaida. Loss of Pakistan to Islamism, however, a nation of 170 million Muslims with atomic bombs, would be a calamity for the Near East and United States.
Under the (Colin) Powell Doctrine for fighting wars, questions must be asked and answered affirmatively before committing U.S. troops:
Is a vital U.S. interest imperiled here? Do we have a defined and attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully weighed? Is there an exit strategy? Is the war supported by a united nation?
How many of these questions did Obama ask himself before pledging 10,000 more U.S combat troops to what will surely become, should he win, “Obama’s war” even as Iraq has become “Bush’s war”?
As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Lee’s retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur’s retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947 — and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued.
France’s departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds of thousands of faithful Algerians to the FALN disgraceful. Few American can forget the humiliation of Saigon ‘75, or the boat people, or the Cambodian holocaust.
Strategic retreats that turn into routs are often the result of what Lord Salisbury called “the commonest error in politics … sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”
From 1989 to 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the U.S.S.R., America had an opportunity to lay down its global burden and become again what Jeane Kirkpatrick called “a normal country in a normal time.”
We let the opportunity pass by, opting instead to use our wealth and power to convert the world to democratic capitalism. And we have reaped the reward of all the other empires that went before: A sinking currency, relative decline, universal enmity, a series of what Rudyard Kipling called “the savage wars of peace.”
Yet, opportunity has come anew for America to shed its imperial burden and become again the republic of our fathers.
The chairman of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Party has just been hosted for six days by Beijing. Commercial flights have begun between Taipei and the mainland. Is not the time ripe for America to declare our job done, that the relationship between China and Taiwan is no longer a vital interest of the United States?
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government wants a status of forces agreement with a timetable for full withdrawal of U.S. troops. Is it not time to say yes, to declare that full withdrawal is our goal as well, that the United States seeks no permanent bases in Iraq?
On July 4, Reuters, in a story headlined “Poland Rejects U.S. Missile Offer,” reported from Warsaw: “Poland spurned as insufficient on Friday a U.S. offer to boost its air defenses in return for basing anti-missile interceptors on its soil. …
“‘We have not reached a satisfactory result on the issue of increasing the level of Polish security,’ Prime Minister Donald Tusk told a news conference after studying the latest U.S. proposal.”
Tusk is demanding that America “provide billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors,” said Reuters.
Reflect if you will on what is going on here.
By bringing Poland into NATO, we agreed to defend her against the world’s largest nation, Russia, with thousands of nuclear weapons. Now the Polish regime is refusing us permission to site 10 anti-missile missiles on Polish soil, unless we pay Poland billions for the privilege.
Has Uncle Sam gone senile?
No. Tusk has Sam figured out. The old boy is so desperate to continue in his Cold War role as world’s Defender of Democracy he will even pay the Europeans — to defend Europe.
Why not tell Tusk that if he wants an air defense system, he can buy it; that we Americans are no longer willing to pay Poland for the privilege of defending Poland; that the anti-missile missile deal is off. And use cancellation of the missile shield to repair relations with a far larger and more important power, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Consider, too, the opening South Korea is giving us to end our 60-year commitment to defend her against the North. For weeks, Seoul hosted anti-American protests against a trade deal that allows U.S. beef into South Korea. Koreans say they fear mad-cow disease.
Yet, when a new deal was cut to limit imports to U.S. beef from cattle less than 30 months old, that too was rejected by the protesters. Behind the demonstrations lies a sediment of anti-Americanism.
In 2002, a Pew Research Center survey of 42 nations found 44 percent of South Koreans, second highest number of any country, holding an unfavorable view of the United States. A Korean survey put the figure at 53 percent, with 80 percent of youth holding a negative view. By 39 percent to 35 percent, South Koreans saw the United States as a greater threat than North Korea.
Can someone explain why we keep 30,000 troops on the DMZ of a nation whose people do not even like us?
The raison d’etre for NATO was the Red Army on the Elbe. It disappeared two decades ago. The Chinese army left North Korea 50 years ago. Yet NATO endures and the U.S. Army stands on the DMZ. Why?
Because, if all U.S. troops were brought home from Europe and Korea, 10,000 rice bowls would be broken. They are the rice bowls of politicians, diplomats, generals, journalists and think tanks who would all have to find another line of work.
And that is why the Empire will endure until disaster befalls it, as it did all the others.
Watch this video! Then see more info here [plus loads of videos and news!] and below on the Ron Paul R3volution Rally in Minneapolis during the GOP convention!
On NBC’s McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan and guests talk about Obama, Jesse Jackson and McCain. At the end of the clip Pat is asked to makes a prediction:
“The Republican Convention is going to have an exciting side convention. I think Ron Paul’s crowd is coming out. They could have 6,000 to 10,000 there for the Campaign for Liberty; a big rally Tuesday of the Republican Convention. I don’t think Ron Paul is going to endorse the Republican candidate.”
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT - July 11, 2008:
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Issue Two — I’m Sorry, So Sorry.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: (From videotape.) In this thing I have said in a hot-mike statement that’s contributed as a distraction, I offer an apology for that, because I don’t want harm nor hurt to come to this campaign. It represents too much of the dreams of so many who paid such great prices.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Reverend Jesse Jackson delivered this apology after this unfortunate remark about Barack Obama was caught on a live camera and microphone.
REV. JACKSON: (From videotape.) Barack has been talking down to black people. I want to cut his — (deleted) — off. Barack, he’s has been talking down to black people.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Question — Does this contretemps help or hurt Obama? Michelle Bernard.
MS. BE
RNARD: Oh, I think this is — I said earlier this week, Jesse Jackson is the gift that just keeps giving for Barack Obama. I think this is absolutely nothing but good news for Barack Obama.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Why? Why? MS. BERNARD: Because he is the presumptive Democratic nominee. If he wins the election, his challenge will be not only to represent African-Americans, but he will be representing the entire nation. He represents a completely different generational shift from what we saw coming out of our 1960s civil rights black leadership in the sense that he has no fear about going out in public and talking about the importance of personal responsibility, not only for the nation as a whole, but for the black community. And that is completely different than Jesse Jackson.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Okay, let’s nail this thing down. And here’s a sample of what Jackson apparently sees as Obama’s disparaging the black community.
SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESUMPTIVE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: (From videotape.
) If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are also missing. Too many fathers are MIA. Too many fathers are AWOL — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They’ve abandoned their responsibilities. They’re acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our family have suffered because of it. You and I know this is true everywhere, but nowhere is it more true than in the African-American community.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Question — Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an “Oreo” — a black on the outside, a white on the inside — that an “Oreo” should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle, which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for? Peter Beinart.
MR. BEINART: Who knows what Jesse Jackson is thinking? But that’s a completely unfair depiction of Barack Obama. The genius of Barack Obama is that he moves seamlessly between the African-American world and the white world in a way that even Bill Clinton couldn’t possibly match.
And the tragedy of this experience is that you know who’s spoken very eloquently for many, many years about personal responsibility in the black community? Jesse Jackson. He of all people should recognize, in fact, that what Barack Obama is saying is not contrary to the message of the civil rights movement. It is in keeping with that message.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Let’s nail it down a little bit more for the sake of Jackson. The question is this. Jackson’s point of contention is this. This is the exit question. The point of contention is that instead of Obama solely lecturing African-Americans on parental duty, particularly fathers, he should also give equal attention to the large and, many believe, prejudicial incarceration rate for blacks, their lack of economic opportunities and other public policy issues that limit choices for black males. Why doesn’t Obama hit that as hard as he hits individual parental responsibility? That’s what Jackson is complaining about.
MR. BEINART: Barack Obama doesn’t talk about jobs and health care? He talks about it all the time. If you want him to talk about the fact that there are too many people in prison, then you’re asking him to do something that will lose him the election. That is politically — no serious political strategist –
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Oh, oh. So he’s — (inaudible).
MR. BEINART: He’s a man trying to win the presidency, John.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: He’s exactly what Jeremiah Wright says he is. He will do whatever is necessary to win.
MR. BEINART: He’s a practical politician.
MS. BERNARD: He has been saying this forever.
MS. CLIFT: This is a generational shift. Jesse Jackson Jr. put out a statement basically saying, “Dad, time to leave the stage.” There is a disconnect in terms of style and tactics from the older civil rights generation to the generation that Obama is from and that he’s trying to attract.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Does Jackson have a legitimate point?
MR. BUCHANAN: No, he doesn’t.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Why?
MR. BUCHANAN: I’ll tell you why, John. Here’s why. What Barack Obama is saying is a message that needs to be heard. It’s the Bill Cosby message. It is “Look, this is our responsibility. These are our families. The white society is not responsible for our kids dropping out of schools or using drugs or going on welfare. We are.” What Jesse Jackson says is, “The white community is responsible, and they’ve got to solve our problems.”
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Isn’t this the oddity of the century where a Barack Obama is a conservative and Jesse Jackson is a liberal?
MR. BUCHANAN: Well, Jesse Jackson used to talk this way.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Isn’t that an oddity?
MS. BERNARD: It is an oddity, but I want to go back to the point you made about whether or not Barack Obama is an “Oreo,” because if Barack Obama is an “Oreo,” then every member of this generation of African-Americans is an “Oreo,” because we stand on the shoulders of the people who fought for our rights. And all of us say that you cannot blame “the man” or white racism for everything that ails the black community.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: But what about changing public policy where it needs to be changed?
MR. BUCHANAN: Well, public policy isn’t the problem. MS. CLIFT: As a former –
MS. BERNARD: If I could finish my point, when Jesse Jackson came out and said when he gave his, quote-unquote, “apology” the next day was, “Barack Obama should be demanding more government programs for African-Americans.” And that’s wrong.
MS. CLIFT: And Jack White, a former Time Magazine writer, says that it’s disorienting for the black community when “the man” might be the guy in the Oval Office. And so everybody’s making some adjustments here. But Barack Obama is handling his role beautifully, and that is to relate to America as a broad population.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Issue Three — McCain in the Gaffe Grinder.
Another gaffe this week, this time from one of Senator John McCain’s senior advisers, Phil Gramm, who played down the economic woes facing Americans.
FORMER SENATOR PHIL GRAMM (R-TX): (From videotape.) You’ve heard of a mental depression. This is a mental recession. We’ve never had more natural advantages than we have today. We’ve sort of become a nation of whiners.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: McCain quickly drew a red line separating himself from Gramm.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ, presumptive Republican presidential nominee): (From videotape.) Phil Gramm does not speak for me. I speak for me.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Did McCain have to be so definitive because of the following remarks made five months ago?
SEN. MCCAIN: (From videotape.) There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm. So I’m honored that you are here, Phil.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: McCain was then asked whether there was a place for Gramm in the McCain administration.
SEN. MCCAIN: (From videotape.) I think Senator Gramm would be in serious consideration for ambassador to Belarus.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Clever on McCain’s part, but Obama may have been cleverer.
SEN. OBAMA: (From videotape.) America already has one Dr. Phil. (Laughter.) We don’t need another one when it comes to the economy. We need somebody to actually solve the economy. It’s not just a figment of your imagination. DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Question — McCain once said that he didn’t know much about economics. Is the combination of that admission, compounded with the Gramm fiasco, plus Obama’s witty and sarcastic exploitation of it, altogether a mortal blow to John McCain’s candidacy? Peter Beinart.
MR. BEINART: That’s a little bit too strong, but I don’t think that much too strong. I mean, I think this is devastating.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Economy is the number one issue facing America.
MR. BEINART: John McCain cannot win the presidency unless he wins the economy. This reminds me of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” comment. When you start blaming the American people for the fact that the American people are struggling –
MS. CLIFT: Right.
MR. BEINART: First of all, it shows the McCain campaign cannot get its act together. It’s been terribly managed from the beginning. They’ve got surrogates going all over the place.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: What should McCain do now with regard to this economic problem that he has?
MR. BUCHANAN: Hey, John –
MR. BEINART: Something he’s not capable of doing, which is speaking compellingly himself about the economy. (Laughter.)
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: He’s got to get rid of his current staff, economic staff, and get some new people in there who can give him the look, at least –
MR. BEINART: The big problem is himself.
MR. BUCHANAN: I’ll tell you why this is deadly, John. This is deadly because McCain, to win, has got to have Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, two of those three. Those people can’t stand NAFTA. And he was up there trying to court them at the same time Gramm says, “It’s a figment of your imagination and it’s a mental recession you’ve got.” I don’t see how McCain can do it. The way he could do it is get rid of –
MS. CLIFT: This is deadly.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Before you go completely bananas about the negatives of McCain on this issue, bear in mind that June was his best fund-raising month. He got $22 million. Did you know that?
MR. BEINART: Barack Obama got that in an hour. MS. CLIFT: Yeah, and that was Barack Obama’s worst month.
MR. BEINART: He got that in an hour.
MS. CLIFT: This is deadly for McCain because this is an election that’s going to turn on the economy. And he has been good friends with Phil Gramm for 25 years, and what Gramm said is a window into the thinking of a lot of Republicans, mind you.
MR. BUCHANAN: I’m afraid it is.
MS. CLIFT: And I’m not sure that McCain is that much out of touch, but he sure looks it.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: McCain has minueted from the left to the center and over to the right.
MS. BERNARD: Yes.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: You know the whole list of items in that category, right?
MS. BERNARD: Yes.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think that Obama is fading a little because of that?
MS. BERNARD: (Laughs.) No.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you see any signs of that at all?
MS. BERNARD: Obama fading? No, I absolutely –
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Because McCain continues to hurt himself –
MS. BERNARD: Yeah. Look –
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: — or because Obama has –
MS. BERNARD: It’s Christmas in July for Barack Obama this week, particularly between Jesse Jackson and Phil Gramm’s statements. It’s like talk about death for surrogate for John McCain. I mean, he has a compelling story to tell, but when it comes to the economy and also making the American public feel that Republicans understand your pain, the message has been completely lost. They need to get rid of the surrogates and teach John McCain how to speak in a compelling manner.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back with predictions.
(Announcements.)
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Predictions. Pat.
MR. BUCHANAN: The Republican Convention is going to have an exciting side convention. I think Ron Paul’s crowd is coming out. They could have 6,000 to 10,000 there of a Campaign for Liberty; a big rally Tuesday of the Republican Convention. I don’t think Ron Paul is going to endorse the Republican candidate.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Eleanor.
MS. CLIFT: With Ted Kennedy in his last term in the Senate, the new populist liberal lion in the Senate will be Virginia Senator James Webb.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Michelle.
MS. BERNARD: I think that we will continue to see the House Democrats bring legislation forward and that people who previously supported Barack Obama — namely, Hillary Clinton — will continue to take opposite votes of what Senator Obama does.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Peter.
MR. BEINART: The person who’s getting more and more public talk in terms of Barack Obama’s vice presidential nominee is Al Gore.
DR. MCLAUGHLIN: Interesting. The Russian-Georgian inflamed and potential flash-point standoff on the region of Abkhazia on the Black Sea will be settled by the two nations, with Georgia pertaining sovereignty but Abkhazia itself almost totally autonomous.
First, from August 31 to September 2 in Minneapolis, we will host a handful of events that will shake the political establishment. Everything will culminate on Tuesday with the official launch of the Campaign for Liberty at the Rally for the Republic.
The Campaign for Liberty will be the largest organization for peace, freedom, the Constitution, and sound money in American history. It will launch in grand fashion with lots of special guests and - if the early television and print inquiries we’ve received are any indication - plenty of media attention.
I would like to personally invite you and your family to join me and thousands of others in Minneapolis for these events and send a message to the Republican Party.
Tickets will go on sale for the Rally for the Republic this Friday, July 25 @ 10AM CST. We want this to be an unforgettable day, so we are holding a ticket bomb all day Friday in the tradition of our famous money bombs. How many seats can we sell on the first day?
In patriotic fashion all tickets will cost $17.76, so you can afford to bring the whole family.
This leads me to the second big announcement. After measuring the excitement and enthusiasm, we decided that the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota was just too small to hold you. Therefore, we are making a significant upgrade. The Rally for the Republic will now take place at the Target Center, the largest arena in Minneapolis!
This promises to be the most spirited and provocative political event of the year! We held some very large rallies during the presidential campaign, but I have never attempted anything of this scale before. Its success rests entirely in your hands.
Later this week I will announce two internationally renowned musicians as headliners for the Rally for the Republic. We’ll also be joined by rock star Aimee Allen, NBC’s Tucker Carlson, Barry Goldwater Jr., Gov. Gary Johnson, conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, former Reagan deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, presidential historian Doug Wead, MTV’s Adam Curry, musician Mark Scibilia, and Frank Sinatra impersonator Rick Ellis. Other special guests will be announced soon.
My staff has been working overtime to provide you with three full days of entertainment. Please visit the schedule page of the website and read all about upcoming events. We also have a lodging page to help you find accommodations in Minneapolis.
Together we are taking back our government and restoring the republic. Please join me in Minneapolis to kickoff the Campaign for Liberty and support our Revolution. Can I count on you to be there?
In Liberty,
P.S. I know that you have done so much already, but with both major party nominees threatening to lead us into bankruptcy at home and more wars abroad, the success of the Rally for the Republic and the launch of the Campaign for Liberty is crucial. Please do what you can to be in Minneapolis August 31 - September 2 and send a loud and clear message of freedom, peace, and prosperity.
![Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War](http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/img/pjb-bk-hitler.jpg "Churchill_Hitler_the_Unnecessary_War\")
