Tag Archives: Republicans

The Republican War — Over War Policy, by Patrick Buchanan

Posted on November 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Rand Paul had his best debate moment Tuesday when he challenged Marco Rubio on his plans to increase defense spending by $1 trillion.

“You cannot be a conservative if you’re going to keep promoting new programs you’re not going to pay for,” said Paul.

Marco’s retort triggered the loudest cheers of the night:

“There are radical jihadists in the Middle East beheading people and crucifying Christians. The Chinese are taking over the South China Sea. … the world is a safer and better place when America is the strongest military power in the world.”

Having called for the U.S. Navy to confront Beijing in the South China Sea, and for establishing a no-fly zone over Syria that Russian pilots would enter at their peril, Rubio seems prepared for a confrontation with either or both of our great rival nuclear powers.

Dismissing Vladimir Putin as a “gangster,” Marco emerged as the toast of the neocons. Yet the leading GOP candidate seems closer to Rand.

Donald Trump would talk to Putin, welcomes Russian planes bombing ISIS in Syria, thinks our European allies should lead on Ukraine, and wants South Korea to do more to defend itself.

Uber-hawk Lindsey Graham did not even make the undercard debate. And though he and John McCain are the most bellicose voices in the party, they appear to be chiefs with no Indians.

Still, it is well that Republicans air their disagreements. For war and peace are what the presidency is about.

Historically, Republican presidents appear to line up on the side of Rand and Trump.

To continue reading: The Republican War—Over War Policy

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Former Congressman: I’m Quitting GOP, by Tom Tancredo

Posted on November 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

A former congressman realizes he’s part of the government uniparty and quits the Republican branch. From Tom Tancredo at breitbart.com:

In a panel discussion at the University of Colorado after the recent Republican debate, I was asked by a student why she should be a Republican. The question forced me to ask myself the same thing.

I gave the young woman the standard talking points–that Republicans believe in smaller government, individual rights, fiscal responsibility, and free enterprise. But as I drove home, her question–and my inability to respond with any level of real conviction–got me thinking: Does the Republican Party leadership fight for these values and principles today?

After much thought, I reluctantly concluded that the answer is “no.” The proudly socialist Democrats are full of passionate intensity, while the Republican leadership is full of pathetic excuses. After this week’s House GOP “budget deal,” which betrays nearly every promise made to grassroots conservatives since 2010, I have decided it is time to end my affiliation with the Republican Party.

This decision has been incubating over the past 17 years, years of watching the downward spiral of the Party of Lincoln and Reagan into the Party of Democrat Lite.

• As a Member of Congress for ten years (1998-2008), I was subjected to threats and pressures from the Congressional Leadership and President George W. Bush to support the creation of an expensive Medicare prescription drug program–even though creating a new government spending program financed by massive debt flies in the face of the Republican Party’s core principles.

• Our most powerful and influential “leaders” were shoving this down our throats in a crass political effort to use taxpayer money to buy the votes of senior citizens–particularly in the state of Florida in the next presidential election.

• I was incredulous about the fact that the most intense lobbying I had ever seen undertaken by our “leadership” was not an effort to limit government or the dollars it spends; it was to do just the opposite.

• That incident came just months after I was told by President Bush’s top political operative, Karl Rove, “never to darken the door of the White House again” because of my criticism of the administration’s dangerously lax immigration policies in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

When I first arrived in the U.S. House of Representatives, I naively believed that it was primarily the Democrats who were committed to open borders. But I quickly learned the entire Republican establishment also supported a policy of immigration non-enforcement.

I was repeatedly pulled into the office of the then-Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and threatened with dire consequences if I continued to speak out publicly for common-sense immigration policies and true border security – particularly if I was doing so in the districts of other Republican Members of Congress.

For most of those years after 2000, we had a Republican President and a Republican-controlled Congress, but the conservative agenda was largely ridiculed and abandoned.

To continue reading: Former Congressman: I’m Quitting GOP

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Posted in Government, Other Views, Philosophy, Politics

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The Little Dutch Boy, from The Burning Platform

Posted on October 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

See also “They Said That? 10/28/15,” SLL.

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A Lesson From Scott Walker’s Political Collapse: Playing Neocon Warrior Is No Path To Presidency, by Doug Bandow

Posted on September 22, 2015 | 1 comment

And then there were 15 (“Snow Black and the 17 Dwarfs,” SLL, 8/05/15). It’s hard to distinguish yourself from the pack when you and the pack are mouthing the neocon mantra. From Doug Bandow at forbes.com, critiquing both Scott Walker and neoconservative folly:

There may be no sadder political spectacle than a Republican governor running for president. He knows nothing about foreign policy. But he recognizes that Neocons dominate the GOP and expect the nominee to advocate perpetual war. So he plays faux warrior, insisting that he is more likely than his competitors to wreak death and destruction around the globe. Then his presidential campaign collapses.

So it was with Rick Perry. Now it is with Scott Walker, who yesterday abandoned his presidential bid.

The Wisconsin governor won some significant domestic political victories. In contrast, his foreign policy credentials were nonexistent. He tried to compensate by claiming to be tougher and meaner than any other Republican presidential candidate. That meant threatening to sacrifice the lives of folks who wear the uniform he never donned.

It obviously didn’t win him many votes. In the last poll he rated only an asterisk.

Walker spoke often on international issues, even delivering a formal address at the Citadel. He assumed that to prosper “we need a safe and stable world.” Which is simple nonsense. When has the earth been “safe and stable”? During the many European wars of the 18th century? The Napoleonic wars? The multiple conflicts during the rise of Germany? The Balkan wars and decline of the Ottoman Empire? World War I? The rise of the Bolsheviks? The Great Depression and triumph of fascism? World War II? The creation of the People’s Republic of China? Multiple conflicts during the Cold War? The messy break-up of the Soviet Union?

Naturally, Walker lauded Ronald Reagan, who governed when the world was neither safe nor stable but during which America prospered. Today Walker and other hawks take Reagan as their patron saint, yet Neocons denounced President Reagan as an appeaser for dealing with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and withdrawing from Lebanon’s civil war. Reagan deployed the military in only three limited actions, and never to engage in social engineering. Reagan was appalled by the possibility of war, which impelled him to advocate missile defense and negotiate with Moscow.

Walker contended that “America is not safer” than seven years ago. True, but mainly because of the dangerous military interventions he and other Republican candidates reflexively supported. Iraq remains the gift that keeps on giving. Only because of George W. Bush’s foolish invasion did the Islamic State develop, arising in opposition to the U.S. occupation and sectarian, Shia-dominated regime in Baghdad. The Bush administration failed to press reconciliation in Iraq and negotiate a status of forces agreement for a permanent U.S. garrison, for which GOP candidates perversely blame President Obama. Yet a continuing occupation would only have turned U.S. forces into targets of extremists on all sides.

To continue reading: A Lesson From Scott Walker’s Political Collapse

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100% risk of a 50% stock crash, by Paul B. Farrell

Posted on September 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Paul B. Farrell, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

“Who will get the Dreary Recovery Going?” taunts Mort Zuckerman in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The head of U.S. News & World Report warns America that a recession is coming: “They occur about every eight years and America is ill-prepared to weather the one on the horizon.” Ill-equipped.

Yes, the clock is ticking, every 8 years. 2000. 2008. Next 2016, even with a President Trump.

Another great newsman, Bill O’Neill, publisher of Investors Business Daily, author of perennial best-seller “How To Make Money in Stocks,” agrees: Markets have peaked and crashed roughly every four years for the last century, with bigger crashes, long recessions, every eight years. And still most investors will be ill-prepared.

Sounds like a double-teamed confirmation of Jeremy Grantham’s famous BusinessInsider prediction for 2016: “Around the presidential election or soon after, the market bubble will burst, as bubbles always do, and will revert to its trend value, around half of its peak or worse.”

Get it? A mega crash is coming, dropping half off its peak, down below Dow 5,000. Not just another 1,000-point correction like last month. But a heart-stopping collapse coinciding with the 2016 elections … then a long systemic recession … probably lasting till the 2020 presidential election, maybe longer … no matter who’s in the White House, Doanld Trump, Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton.

Yes, recessions hit every eight years. The last was just about 8 years ago, warned Zuckerman with these facts: “The period since the Great Recession ended in 2009 has seen the weakest U.S. recovery since World War II,” Our aging bull is actually warning us … recession dead ahead.

Why no “urgency from the White House,” no push to strengthen the U.S economy, avoid the coming recession? asks Zuckerman. Why? GOP candidates are worse, immature teenagers offering a “handful of Band-Aids.” Any leaders? Trump the egomaniac? God help us.

Next another disturbing Journal op-ed gets tossed into the mix: Dick Cheney is on the attack, sounding like fellow Republican Trump’s motto, “Make America Great Again.” Build a bigger Pentagon war machine, says the architect of the $5 trillion Iraq War fiasco. His latest rally cry: “Restoring American Exceptionalism.” Sorry folks, but the GOP’s relentless efforts to sabotage the White House the last six years (like 50 repetitive and futile House votes to repeal Obamacare) was the exact opposite, an “exceptional” failure of leadership.

The former vice president also quoted conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer: We’re at a “hinge point in history.” And former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges one-upped Cheney in Salon.com: The “world is at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen.” Like the 1848 European revolutions. Hedges even warns liberals, “climate change is the least” of the world’s problems, don’t even think that “voting for Hillary will make any difference.”

Tell Trump the ISIS War will increase taxes, add trillions of new debt

Yes, folks, the GOP neo-con hawks are back at it again, want new wars … liken Obama to Hitler … fueling Cheney’s latest bout of extreme hubris … arming another Bush effort to take over America a third time … Cheney claims America is weaker today than at the start of his costly ill-fated Iraq War. He should endorse Trump, they both want a new superpower military ready to start new wars, fight revolutionaries, add big debt, run up casualties.

To continue reading: 100% risk of a 50% stock crash

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The Foreign Policy of the GOP, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on August 12, 2015 | 1 comment

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:

They’ve learned nothing because they remember nothing

If the “first tier” Republican presidential debate revealed anything, it is the huge empty space that is at the heart of the conservative mind, circa 2015. No wonder a vacuous nonentity like Donald Trump is leading in all the polls: his gargantuan ego has invaded that vast emptiness and expanded like a giant hot air balloon. As to how soon that gaseous zeppelin will pop – well, it’s anybody’s guess. All we know is that if and when it does another big nothing will take its place.

Speaking of a big nothing, the performance of Sen. Rand Paul, once the great hope of anti-interventionists and libertarians, was even worse than this writer expected. The first mention of foreign policy was the following question posed by Fox News anchor Brett Baier to the junior Senator from Kentucky:

“BAIER: Senator Paul, you recently blamed the rise of ISIS on Republican hawks. You later said that that statement, you could have said it better. But, the statement went on, and you said, quote, ‘Everything they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong for the last 20 years.’

“Why are you so quick to blame your own party?

“PAUL: First of all, only ISIS is responsible for the terrorism. Only ISIS is responsible for the depravity. But, we do have to examine, how are we going to defeat ISIS?

“I’ve got a proposal. I’m the leading voice in America for not arming the allies of ISIS. I’ve been fighting amidst a lot of opposition from both Hillary Clinton, as well as some Republicans who wanted to send arms to the allies of ISIS. ISIS rides around in a billion dollars worth of U.S. Humvees. It’s a disgrace. We’ve got to stop – we shouldn’t fund our enemies, for goodness sakes. So, we didn’t create ISIS – ISIS created themselves, but we will stop them, and one of the ways we stop them is by not funding them, and not arming them.”

Pauls’s answer was not merely inadequate, and shot through with an undertone of abject cowardice – it was confusing as well. To begin with, as Baier phrased his question, Paul’s original critique was directed at “Republican hawks,” i.e. the neoconservatives, a group of Republican ideologues the Senator used to criticize quite freely and regularly. Yet Paul let Baier get away with equating this group with every single Republican on earth: instead of challenging the premise of the question, Paul did what he’s been doing for months now, at great cost to his campaign – he backtracked.

Missing a great opportunity to point out that the neocons – his enemies – have indeed been spectacularly wrong about everything for the last 20 years, Paul instead went into a vague peroration about how we’re supposedly sending arms to allies of ISIS without specifying who those allies are. Are they the Turks? The Saudis? The Qataris? All three of these countries have been implicated in funding or otherwise assisting Syria’s jihadis, including ISIS. What I presume Paul meant is that the United States has been funding the Syrian rebels, who have gone over to ISIS and Al Qaeda in large numbers. Yet he didn’t deign to say that – which left millions of television viewers scratching their heads in puzzlement.

To continue reading: The Foreign Policy of the GOP

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Are key Republican leaders in D.C. being blackmailed? by Wayne Allyn Root

Posted on July 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

SLL thinks the things that happen in Washington out in the open are organized crime. Who knows what happens sub rosa? Wayne Allyn Root at personalliberty.com raises an interesting possibility, one that has probably crossed the minds of many readers and should not be dismissed:

Hi. I’m Wayne Allyn Root for Personal Liberty. I have the most important question of a lifetime for all of you. Are key Republican leaders in D.C. from the Senate, House and Supreme Court being blackmailed?

Tell me you haven’t thought the exact same thing. Something is very wrong. Something smells rotten in D.C. — rotten like a dead fish left at the front door of a congressman’s office by the Obama crime family, rotten like a photo of a Supreme Court justice with his robe down at his ankles.

Because what’s happening just isn’t normal. Please tell me how it’s possible that President Obama and his socialist cabal suffered the most massive and historic defeat in modern political history only nine months ago and, since then, they’ve gotten everything they’ve ever wanted handed to them on a silver platter. Does that make sense to you?

How’s it possible that the GOP — the party that won in a massive, historic landslide — gained nothing and won nothing? Not one victory. Zero. Zilch. Or in a language Democrats understand, “Nada.”

Not only did Obama’s party lose badly, it lost everywhere from top to bottom. Senate, House, state legislatures, mayors, governors — you name it. They lost the governorships of deep-blue Maryland and Massachusetts. They were destroyed.

And it was all about Obama. He wasn’t defeated; he was repudiated. Democratic Senate candidates refused his help. Democrats would not stand next to him on the same stage. Democrats treated Obama like a New Jersey toxic-waste dump. Democrats treated Obama like a rotten fish.

Since then, conservatives have lost everything. Name something we won or achieved after that smashing victory? Name one thing. Name anything. I dare you. I double dare you.

And you don’t think someone has photos of GOP leaders in bed with little boys?

Far-fetched? Really? Think two words: Dennis Hastert.

Somehow, the government knew he was taking his own money out of his own bank account. I didn’t even know that was a crime warranting an interview by the FBI. But this government knew. That’s because they know everything.

To continue reading: Are key Republican leaders being blackmailed?

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