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Traditional Catholic Faith => Politics and World Leaders => Topic started by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 19, 2016, 09:59:07 PM

Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 19, 2016, 09:59:07 PM
Trump and the Press-A Death Struggle

Patrick J Buchanan

Posted 9-19-2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-press-death-struggle-125720

Alerting the press that he would deal with the birther issue at the opening of his new hotel, the Donald, after treating them to an hour of tributes to himself from Medal of Honor recipients, delivered.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. … President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”

The press went orbital.

“Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent” howled the headline over the lead story in The New York Times.

Its editorial called Donald Trump a “reckless, cynical bully” spreading political poison in an “absurdist presidential campaign,” adding that Trump is the “ultimate mountebank” using a “Big Lie” that “made him the darling of the wing nuts and racists” and “nativist hallucinators.”

You get the drift.

While Trump’s depiction of the birther controversy was … inexact … there was truth in it. Obama’s campaign did charge the Clinton campaign with drawing press attention to that photo of Obama in traditional Somali garb. Apparently, Sid Blumenthal did push a McClatchy bureau chief to search for Obama’s birth records in Kenya.

Tim Kaine was wailing on Sunday about how “painful” Trump’s birtherism has been to African-Americans. And Democrats and the media are pledging not to let it go, but to exploit Trump’s attempt to “delegitimize” Obama’s presidency.

These are crocodile tears. Obama gave the game away Saturday night. At the Black Caucus’s annual gala, says The Washington Post, a “beaming” Obama “gleefully” had the attendees rolling in “laughter” over Trump’s concession. “With just 124 days to go,” mocked Obama, “we got that thing resolved.”

Many news organizations will go along with the game. For many appear to be all in on Clinton’s depiction of half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … haters.”

Yet one wonders. Do the major media understand that in their determination, bordering on desperation, to kill Trump, they are killing their credibility? And as they are losing credibility they are losing the country.

According to a new Gallup poll, distrust of the press has hit an all-time high. Half the nation’s Democrats still trust the media, but only one-in-three independents and one-in seven Republicans, 14 percent, believe the media are truthful, honest and fair.

When, early in his presidency, Obama jokingly referred to the White House Correspondents Association dinner as his political base, Americans now believe he was not exaggerating the case.

And the more the media vent their detestation of Trump, the more Trump’s supporters revel in their discomfort. “We love him most of all for the enemies he has made,” said backers of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Trump’s folks feel that way about the national press.

America’s media seem utterly lacking in introspection. Do they understand why so many people hate them so? Do they care? Are they so smugly self-righteous and self-regarding they cannot see?

Take the birther issue again. According to a January HuffPost/YouGov poll, an astonishing 53 percent of all Republicans, 30 percent of all independents, and even 10 percent of Democrats still believe Barack Obama was born outside the USA.

What does this say about the persuasiveness of the press?

Indeed, what does it say about the idea that universal suffrage is the best way to determine the leadership of a republic?

In 2016, America faces serious issues — a rising deficit and escalating debt, the explosion of entitlements, the resurgence of Russian power, Chinese military expansionism in the South and East China seas, North Korea’s development of nuclear missiles, and Afghanistan.

Now consider the issues that have transfixed the media this election season:

The birther issue, David Duke, the KKK, a Mexican-American judge, Black Lives Matter, white cops, the “Muslim ban,” the Battle Flag, the “alt-right,” the national anthem, Trump’s refusals to recant his blasphemies against the dogmas of political correctness, or to “apologize.”

What does the continual elevation of such issues, and the acrimony attendant to them, tell us?

America is bitterly and irreparably divided over race, ideology faith, history and culture, and Trump’s half of the nation rejects the modernist gospel that America’s diversity and multiculturalism are her greatest treasures.

To the contrary, Trump’s half wants secure borders, “extreme vetting” of immigrants, especially from the Mideast, and foreign and trade policies marked by an “Americanism” that seems to be an antonym for globalism.

They want America to be “great again,” and they believe she was once, and is not now.

No matter who wins in November, America is going to face a divide unseen in decades. If Donald Trump wins, he will confront a resident media more hateful than that which confronted Richard Nixon in 1968.

If Hillary Clinton wins, she will come to office distrusted and disbelieved by most of her countrymen, half of whom she has maligned either as “deplorables” or pitiful souls in need of empathy.

Not for half a century has the idea of “one nation under God, indivisible,” seemed so distant.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Neil Obstat on September 20, 2016, 01:24:06 AM
Quote

No matter who wins in November, America is going to face a divide unseen in decades. If Donald Trump wins, he will confront a resident media more hateful than that which confronted Richard Nixon in 1968.

If Hillary Clinton wins, she will come to office distrusted and disbelieved by most of her countrymen, half of whom she has maligned either as “deplorables” or pitiful souls in need of empathy.

Not for half a century has the idea of “one nation under God, indivisible,” seemed so distant.


If Perfidious Crooked Hillary wins, she will come to office giving us effectively Obama's third term.

Because PC Hillary is Obama in drag.

Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 22, 2016, 11:00:09 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-wins-debate-125730

How Trump Wins the Debate

9-22-2016

Patrick J. Buchanan

On one of my first trips to New Hampshire in 1991, to challenge President George H. W. Bush, I ran into Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

He was returning to the scene of his ’68 triumph, when he had inflicted the first crippling wound on Lyndon Johnson.

“Pat, you don’t have to win up here, you know,” he assured me. “All you have to do is beat the point spread.”

“Beat the point spread” is a good description of what Donald Trump has to do in Monday night’s debate.

With only a year in national politics, he does not have to show a mastery of foreign and domestic policy details. Rather, he has to do what John F. Kennedy did in 1960, and what Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

He has to meet and exceed expectations, which are not terribly high. He has to convince a plurality of voters, who seem prepared to vote for him, that he’s not a terrible risk, and that he will be a president of whom they can be proud.

He has to show the country a Trump that contradicts the caricature created by those who dominate our politics, culture and press.

The Trump on stage at Hofstra University will have 90 minutes to show that the malicious cartoon of Donald Trump is a libelous lie.

He can do it, for he did it at the Mexico City press conference with President Pena Nieto where he surprised his allies and stunned his adversaries.

Recall. Kennedy and Reagan, too, came into their debates with a crucial slice of the electorate undecided but ready to vote for them if each could relieve the voters’ anxieties about his being within reach of the button to launch a nuclear war.

Kennedy won the first debate, not because he offered more convincing arguments or more details on the issues, but because he appeared more lucid, likable and charismatic, more mature than folks had thought. And he seemed to point to a brighter, more challenging future for which the country was prepared after Ike.

After that first debate, Americans could see JFK sitting in the Oval Office.

Reagan won his debate with Carter because his sunny disposition and demeanor and his “There you go again!” airy dismissal of Carter’s nit-picking contradicted the malevolent media-created caricatures of the Gipper as a dangerous primitive or an amiable dunce.

Even George W. Bush, who, according to most judges, did not win a single debate against Al Gore or John Kerry, came off as a levelheaded fellow who was more relatable than the inventor of the internet or the windsurfer of Cape Cod.

The winner of presidential debates is not the one who compiles the most debating points. It is the one whom the audience decides they like, and can be comfortable taking a chance on.

Trump has the same imperative and same opportunity as JFK and Reagan. For the anticipated audience, of Super Bowl size, will be there to see him, not her. He is the challenger who fills up the sports arenas with the tens and scores of thousands, not Hillary Clinton.

If she were debating John Kasich or Jeb Bush, neither the viewing audience nor the title-fight excitement of Monday night would be there. Specifically, what does Trump need to do? He needs to show that he can be presidential. He needs to speak with confidence, but not cockiness, and to deal with Clinton’s attacks directly, but with dignity and not disrespect. And humor always helps.

Clinton has a more difficult assignment.

America knows she knows the issues. But two-thirds of the country does not believe her to be honest or trustworthy. As her small crowds show, she sets no one on fire. Blacks, Hispanics and millenials who invested high hopes in Barack Obama seem to have no great hopes for her. She has no bold agenda, no New Deal or New Frontier.

“Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?” wailed Hillary Clinton this week.

The answer is simple. America has seen enough of her and has no great desire to see any more; and she cannot change an impression hardened over 25 years — in 90 minutes.

But the country will accept her, if the only alternative is the Trump of the mainstream media’s portrayal. Hence, the strategy of the Democratic Party for the next seven weeks is obvious:

Trash Trump, take him down, make him intolerable, and we win.

No matter how she performs though, Donald Trump can win the debate, for he is the one over whom the question marks hang. But he is also the one who can dissipate and destroy them with a presidential performance.

In that sense, this debate and this election are Trump’s to win.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 27, 2016, 12:20:09 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/is-charlotte-our-future-125739

Is Charlotte Our Future

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted: Tuesday 9-27-16

Celebrating the racial diversity of the Charlotte protesters last week, William Barber II, chairman of the North Carolina NAACP, proudly proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.”

Well, if Barber is right, so, too, was John Adams, who warned us that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit ѕυιcιdє.”

Consider what the protesters, who, exults Barber, “show us a way forward to peace and justice,” accomplished.

In the first two nights of rioting, the mob injured a dozen cops, beat white people, smashed and looted stores, blocked traffic, shut down interstate highways, got one person shot and killed, and forced the call-up of state troopers and National Guard to rescue an embattled Charlotte police force.

This was mobocracy, a criminal takeover of Charlotte’s downtown by misfits hurling racist and obscene insults and epithets not only at the cops but also at bystanders and reporters sent to cover their antics.

We have seen Charlotte before. It was a rerun of Ferguson, Baltimore and Manhattan, after mobs in those cities concluded that innocent black men had been deliberately killed by “racist white cops.”

Yet, one week later, what do we know of the precipitating event in Charlotte?

Keith Scott, 43-year-old African-American father of seven, was shot and killed not by a white cop, but by a black cop who shouted to him, along with others, almost 10 times — “Drop the gun!”

An ex-con whose convictions included assault with a deadly weapon, Scott was wearing an ankle holster and carrying a handgun.

Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney, also black, after viewing video from a dash-cam and a body-cam of the officers involved, recommended against filing any charges.

The chief concedes that he cannot, from the video footage, see a gun in Scott’s hands at the time he was shot.

But how is the legitimate investigation of the death of Keith Scott advanced by a mob? And if mass civil disobedience is what “democracy looks like” in 2016, why are we surprised that other nations look less and less to American democracy as their model?

Moreover, if these repeated reversions of the enraged to street action become the new normal, what do they portend for the country?

Blanket cable news coverage of the Ferguson riots split us along racial lines. But what purpose did they serve? Even Eric Holder’s Justice Department concluded that officer Darren Wilson should not be charged in the shooting death of Michael Brown, who tried to grab his gun.

A year ago, Baltimore divided the nation.

Six Baltimore cops, three of them black, were charged in an alleged “rough ride” in a police van that killed 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

This year, a black judge acquitted three of the cops in three trials, and all charges against the rest were dropped.

No evidence was produced that the cops had intended to injure Gray.

In New York, the five cops who piled on Eric Garner to subdue him never intended to injure him, said a grand jury. Well over 300 pounds, Garner suffered from obesity, diabetes, asthma and hypertension, and died, not of a police chokehold, but a heart attack.

Yes, there have been incidents when cops made mistakes and cases where cops acted criminally. In Tulsa last week, after a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man who appeared to offer no threat, she was charged with first-degree manslaughter. Is not this, rather than marching mobs, the way to handle such incidents?

Inevitably, given the violent crime in our cities — 540 murders this year in Chicago and 3,000 shootings — white and black cops are going to be confronting white and black suspects. Inevitably, some of these collisions are going to result in police shootings and black deaths.

While most of those police decisions to shoot are going to be seen in retrospect as justified, some will not be unjustified, and some will be malicious.

The latter will be rare, but they are going to happen.

But in a nation of 320 million, if every collision between white cops and black men resulting in the death of a suspect is to be seen as legitimate grounds for mob action like Charlotte, we will never know racial peace.

Like moths to a flame, TV cameras are attracted to conflict, especially racial conflict. Networks and TV stations reward with airtime the most incendiary of racial charges. Thus, the news going out to homes and bars will continue to polarize us along racial lines.

And when the rage of one side and the disgust of the other dissipate, some new incident, between white cops and black men, will occur, and will be recorded, and rushed onto the air.

The street action in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlotte may be what “democracy looks like” to Barber’s NAACP. But to most Americans, it looks like a formula for endless racial conflict — and a touch of fascism in the night.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Viva Cristo Rey on September 27, 2016, 04:12:26 AM
A teenager who vanished from Myrtle Beach, S.C., in 2009 was repeatedly raped in a gang “stash house” for several days – then she was shot dead and fed to alligators when her disappearance generated too much media attention, the FBI said last week.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Viva Cristo Rey on September 27, 2016, 04:16:13 AM
"The FBI has rounded up 17 black gang members that were in connection with the murder of Jessica Chambers in Mississippi. She was a white 19 year old girl that had disappeared from a gas station while she was filling up her car with gas; her body was found burning just a few miles from the station. The thugs doused her with gasoline and then burned her alive.

Even though this happened more than a year ago, the mainstream media was covering it non-stop…oh, wait, just kidding. There was little to no coverage about this story. Now, especially because there are 17 black thugs that have been arrested, we really aren’t going to hear squat about it.

This is just another example of another White life that doesn’t matter to the media, and certainly not to the idiot residing in the White House.
"   Daily clash.
PANOLA COUNTY, Miss. — The FBI spent the morning rounding up suspected gang members.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Viva Cristo Rey on September 27, 2016, 04:22:05 AM
NJ TEEN ADMITS LURING, STRANGLING 12-YEAR-OLD AUTUMN PASQUALE

none
 
October 2, 2013 2:01:57 PM PDT
GEOFF MULVIHILL Associated Press
CAMDEN, N.J. - August 7, 2013 -- A teenager admitted Wednesday that he strangled a 12-year-old girl who disappeared last fall while out riding her bike, touching off a massive search that ended when her body was found in a recycling bin just blocks from her home.
Justin Robinson, 16, pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in the death of Autumn Pasquale after agreeing earlier in the day to have his case moved to adult court. Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk said that in the court hearing, the teen took sole responsibility for killing the girl, even though his older brother Is also facing a murder charge.

Faulk said the boy admitted luring the girl to his home to trade bike parts, but he declined to discuss a motive for the killing.

Faulk said the state was willing to accept a plea deal for charges less than murder because of the complicated circuмstances of the case.

He said that because of the boy's age at the time of the slaying and his "diminished capacity," it was not a sure thing that a judge would have agreed that the case should be tried in adult court. Further, Faulk said, that while there was forensic evidence that places Autumn's death in Robinson's house, there was not clear evidence - other than the boy's admission - that he was the one who choked the girl to death.

Under a plea agreement, Robinson faces a 17-year prison sentence with no chance of parole for more than 14 years when a judge metes out his punishment Sept. 12. Faulk said that if the case had remained in juvenile court, the maximum sentence would have been 20 years, but he would have a chance of parole in less than seven years.

His brother Dante was 17 at the time and also charged with murder in the case. His case is pending in juvenile court. Because of a court order, prosecutors and others involved in the case would not discuss those charges.

The public defender representing Justin Robinson did not return a call.

Jaime Kaight, an attorney for Autumn's mother, Jennifer Cornwell, said prosecutors did "the best they could" in a challenging case.

Doug Long, a lawyer for the slain girl's father, Anthony Pasquale, said it was hard for him to sit through the sentencing Wednesday. "Mr. Pasquale knows that no amount of years on a sentence is going to bring his daughter back," Long said. "The only justice would be to bring autumn back, but that will never happen."

Forty-eight hours after the girl went missing Oct. 20, her body was found in a recycling bin near the Robinsons' home in Clayton, a rural community 25 miles south of Philadelphia.

Authorities had credited a tip from the suspects' mother with helping them solve the case. They said she saw something in one of their Facebook posts that gave her cause to call police. The call led them to the body and her sons.

Initially, some of the victim's relatives complained about the search for the girl and the way Gloucester County prosecutors handled the case, which was eventually moved to the Camden County prosecutor's office.


Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Viva Cristo Rey on September 27, 2016, 04:38:08 AM
POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 21, 2016 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CHARLOTTE POLICE SHOOTING
SLAIN CHARLOTTE MAN HAD LENGTHY CRIMINAL RECORD
The friends and family of Keith Lamont Scott, the Charlotte man killed by police this week, portray him as a “family man” and “likable.” This may be true.

However, Scott also had a long police record that included gun violations. Buried deep in this Charlotte Observer story, we learn:

Scott was convicted in April 2004 of a misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon charge in Mecklenburg County. Other charges stemming from that date were dismissed: felony assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and misdemeanors assault on a child under 12, assault on a female and communicating threats.

In April 2015 in Gaston County Court, Scott was found guilty of driving while intoxicated.

In 1992, Scott was charged in Charleston County, S.C., with ?several different crimes on different dates, including carrying ?a concealed weapon? (not a gun), simple assault and contributing to ?the delinquency of a minor. ?He pleaded guilty to ?all charges.

Scott also was charged with aggravated assault in 1992? and assault with intent to kill in 1995. Both charges were reduced, but the disposition of the case?s? is unclear.

(Emphasis added)

And there is this:

According to Bexar County, Texas, records, Scott was sentenced in March 2005 to 15 months in a state jail for evading arrest. In July of that year, records show, he was sentenced to seven years in prison on a conviction of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman said Scott completed his sentence and was released from prison in 2011.

(Emphasis added)

None of this means, necessarily, that Scott had a gun when the police killed him or that the police reasonably felt threatened by him. But Scott’s record makes it all the more unfair to assume — as the Charlotte protesters do, explicitly or implicitly — that claims by the police that he was armed and potentially dangerous are untrue.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 30, 2016, 04:04:56 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-right-trade-predators-125775

Trump right on Trade Predators

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 9-29-2016

Is America still a serious nation?

Consider. While U.S. elites were denouncing Donald Trump as unfit to serve for having compared Miss Universe 1996 to “Miss Piggy” of “The Muppets,” the World Trade Organization was validating the principal plank of his platform.

America’s allies are cheating and robbing her blind on trade.

According to the WTO, Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the EU pumped $22 billion in illegal subsidies into Airbus to swindle Boeing out of the sale of 375 commercial jets.

Subsidies to the A320 caused lost sales of 271 Boeing 737s, writes journalist Alan Boyle. Subsidies for planes in the twin-aisle market cost the sale of 50 Boeing 767s, 777s and 787s. And subsidies to the A380 cost Boeing the sale of 54 747s. These represent crippling losses for Boeing, a crown Jєωel of U.S. manufacturing and a critical component of our national defense.

Earlier, writes Boyle, the WTO ruled that, “without the subsidies, Airbus would not have existed … and there would be no Airbus aircraft on the market.”

In “The Great Betrayal” in 1998, I noted that in its first 25 years the socialist cartel called Airbus Industrie “sold 770 planes to 102 airlines but did not make a penny of profit.”

Richard Evans of British Aerospace explained: “Airbus is going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they bleed and scream.” And another executive said, “If Airbus has to give away planes, we will do it.”

When Europe’s taxpayers objected to the $26 billion in subsidies Airbus had gotten by 1990, German aerospace coordinator Erich Riedl was dismissive, “We don’t care about criticism from small-minded pencil-pushers.”

This is the voice of economic nationalism. Where is ours?

After this latest WTO ruling validating Boeing’s claims against Airbus, the Financial Times is babbling of the need for “free and fair” trade, warning against a trade war.

But is “trade war” not a fair description of what our NATO allies have been doing to us by subsidizing the cartel that helped bring down Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas and now seeks to bring down Boeing?

Our companies built the planes that saved Europe in World War II and sheltered her in the Cold War. And Europe has been trying to kill those American companies.

Yet even as Europeans collude and cheat to capture America’s markets in passenger jets, Boeing itself, wrote Eamonn Fingleton in 2014, has been “consciously cooperating in its own demise.”

By Boeing’s own figures, writes Fingleton, in the building of its 787 Dreamliner, the world’s most advanced commercial jet, the “Japanese account for a stunning 35 percent of the 787’s overall manufacture, and that may be an underestimate.”

“Much of the rest of the plane is also made abroad … in Italy, Germany, South Korea, France, and the United Kingdom.”

The Dreamliner “flies on Mitsubishi wings. These are no ordinary wings: they constitute the first extensive use of carbon fiber in the wings of a full-size passenger plane. In the view of many experts, by outsourcing the wings Boeing has crossed a red line.”

Mitsubishi, recall, built the Zero, the premier fighter plane in the Pacific in the early years of World War II.

In a related matter, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit in July and August approached $60 billion each month, heading for a trade deficit in goods in 2016 of another $700 billion.

For an advanced economy like the United States, such deficits are milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from abroad.

In the U.S. trade picture, even in the darkest of times, the brightest of categories has been commercial aircraft.

But to watch how we allow NATO allies we defend and protect getting away with decades of colluding and cheating, and then to watch Boeing transfer technology and outsource critical manufacturing to rivals like Japan, one must conclude that not only is the industrial decline of the United States inevitable, but America’s elites do not care.

As for our corporate chieftains, they seem accepting of what is coming when they are gone, so long as the salary increases, stock prices and options, severance packages, and profits remain high.

By increasingly relying upon foreign nations for our national needs, and by outsourcing production, we are outsourcing America’s future.

After Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax visited Italy to wean Mussolini away from Hitler. The Italian dictator observed his guests closely and remarked to his foreign minister:

“These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.”

If the present regime is not replaced, something like that will be said of this generation of Americans.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 03, 2016, 08:09:38 PM
Aborting the Trump Revolution

Posted 10-3-2016

Patrick J. Buchanan

http://buchanan.org/blog/aborting-trump-revolution-125787


By Patrick J. Buchanan

In taking that $915 million loss in 1995, and carrying it forward to shelter future income, Donald Trump did nothing wrong. By both his family and his business, he did everything right.

In a famous 1947 dissent, Judge Learned Hand wrote:

“[T]here is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. … Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exaction's, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.”

This writer’s father spent his career as a tax accountant who studied tax codes and utilized every permissible deduction to keep his clients’ tax bills as low as legally possible.

That was his business, as it is the business of every accountant, including those who prepare the returns of the politicians and journalists piling on Trump as some sort of scofflaw tax cheat who has evaded his moral obligations to the state.

One needs a machete to cut through this hypocrisy.

Hillary Clinton benefited from a $700,000 loss on her 2015 income taxes. In the days of poverty in Arkansas, she took a $2 deduction for a contribution to charity of Bill’s old underpants.

Five weeks before Election Day, Trump’s taxes have displaced the former Miss Universe as the critical issue, as determined by the anti-Trump media.

Their motivation is not difficult to discern. Their goals are two. First, make Trump unacceptable as an agent of change. Second, keep the people distracted from their determination to rid America of the incompetent and corrupt ruling class that controls this capital city.

Consider but a few of the disasters that establishment does not want discussed or debated, or the American people thinking about, when they head for the polls in November.

There is the great betrayal of the American working class, the deindustrialization of the country, and the loss of economic independence it took America a century to achieve.

This disaster was produced by the trade deals enacted by Beltway politicians for the corporate contributors of their campaigns whose highest loyalty is to the bottom line of a balance sheet.

On behalf of these specials interests, U.S. politicians made the People’s Republic of China the greatest manufacturing power on earth and halted the traditional annual rise in wages of our working men and women.

Beijing is now using the wealth compiled to build up their air, naval and missile forces to push us out of Asia and back across the Pacific.

Then there is the illegal invasion of America and Europe by the impoverished masses of the south, who have never before been fully assimilated into any Western nation.

Unrivaled since the last days of the Roman Empire, this invasion has Americans pleading for a security wall on their border, propelled Britain’s exit from the EU, and could yet cause a breakup of Europe.

What is at stake here? Ultimately, Western civilization.

We have wars going with no end in sight in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. We have Beltway hawks howling for a “no-fly zone” and the shooting down of Syrian planes, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs warns this could mean war with Russia.

The War Party does not want Americans heading to the polls thinking of the thousands of dead and wounded and trillions of dollars lost in their misbegotten adventures in the Middle and Near East.

Trump is new to national politics. Yet, with all the mistakes he has made, and all the savagery of the media attacks upon him, he is still, remarkably, very much in the race for president of the United States.

That his crowds remain huge and his following loyal, and that he remains competitive, testifies to the depth of the detestation of our cultural, political and media elites out there in Middle America.

But what happens if Hillary Clinton’s media acolytes keep the country’s focus on trivial pursuits, and she prevails?

What happens to America, if the uprisings and rebellions in the two parties – Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the GOP, the Bernie Sanders revolt in the Democratic Party — are turned back, and we get in 2017 the same old people and same old policies we repudiated in 2015 and 2016?

What happens if the election, in which America demanded change in both parties, results in change in neither party?

One wonders: Do America’s reigning elites believe the Trump movement is but a passing phase? Do they believe that the rise of populist and nationalist parties across Europe is but a seasonal epidemic of the flu that will die out, after which we can all get back to building the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of Bush I and Barack Obama?

Will history look back upon 2016 as a system failure?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 07, 2016, 02:32:02 PM
ISIS, Not Russia, is the Enemy in Syria

Patrick J. Buchanan

10-6-2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/isis-not-russia-enemy-syria-125800

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Denouncing Russian air strikes on Aleppo as “barbaric,” Mike Pence declared in Tuesday’s debate:

“The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength. … The United States of America should be prepared to use military force, to strike military targets of Bashar Assad regime.”

John McCain went further:

“The U.S. … must issue an ultimatum to Mr. Assad — stop flying or lose your aircraft … If Russia continues its indiscriminate bombing, we should make clear that we will take steps to hold its aircraft at greater risk.”

Yet one gets the impression this is bluster and bluff.

Pence has walked his warnings back. And there are few echoes of McCain’s hawkishness. Even Hillary Clinton’s call for a “no-fly zone” has been muted.

The American people have no stomach for a new war in Syria.

Nor does it make sense to expand our enemies list in that bleeding and broken country — from ISIS and the al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front — to Syria’s armed forces, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

These last three have been battling to save Assad’s regime, because they see vital interests imperiled should it fall.

We have not plunged into Syria, because we have no vital interest at risk in Syria. We have lived with the Assads since Richard Nixon went to Damascus.

President Obama, who has four months left in office, is not going to intervene. And Congress, which has the sole power to declare war, has never authorized a war on Syria.

Obama would be committing an impeachable act if he started shooting down Russian or Syrian planes over Syrian territory. He might also be putting us on the escalator to World War III.

For Russia has moved its S-400 anti-aircraft system into Syria to its air base near Latakia, and its S-300 system to its naval base at Tartus.

As the rebels have no air force, that message is for us.

Russia is also moving its aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, into the Med. Vladimir Putin is doubling down in Syria.

Last weekend, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that U.S. attacks in Syria “will lead to terrible tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole.”

Translation: Attack Syria’s air force, and the war you Americans start could encompass the entire Middle East.

Last week, too, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, warned that creating a “no-fly zone” in Syria could mean war — with Russia. Dunford’s crisp retort to Sen. Roger Wicker:

“Right now, senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.”

And neither, thankfully, will Barack Obama.

So, where are we, and how did we get here?

Five years ago, Obama declared that Assad must step down. Ignoring him, Assad went all out to crush the rebels, both those we backed and the Islamist terrorists.

Obama then drew a “red line,” declaring that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would lead to U.S. strikes. But when Obama readied military action in 2013, Americans rose up and roared, “No!”

Reading the country right, Congress refused to authorize U.S. military action. Egg all over his face, Obama again backed down.

When Assad began losing the war, Putin stepped in to save his lone Arab ally, and swiftly reversed Assad’s fortunes.

Now, with 10,000 troops — Syrian, Iraqi Shiite militia, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Afghan mercenaries — poised to attack Aleppo, backed by Russian air power, Assad may be on the cusp of victory in the bloodiest and most decisive battle of the war.

Assad and his allies intend to end this war — by winning it.

For the U.S. to reverse his gains now, and effect his removal, would require the introduction of massive U.S. air power and U.S. troops, and congressional authorization for war in Syria.

The time has come to recognize and accept reality.

While the U.S. and its Turkish, Kurdish and Sunni allies, working with the Assad coalition of Russia, Hezbollah and the Iranians, can crush ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria, we cannot defeat the Assad coalition — not without risking a world war.

And Congress would never authorize such a war, nor would the American people sustain it.

As of today, there is no possibility that the rebels we back could defeat ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, let alone bring down Bashar Assad and run the Russians, Hezbollah, Iran and the Iraqi Shiite militias out of Syria.

Time to stop the killing, stop the carnage, stop the war and get the best terms for peace we can get. For continuing this war, when the prospects of victory are nil, raises its own question of morality.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 11, 2016, 08:20:22 PM
THE DONALD LIVES

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 10-11-2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-donald-lives-125811

Donald Trump turned in perhaps the most effective performance in the history of presidential debates on Sunday night.

As the day began, he had been denounced by his wife, Mike Pence, and his own staff for a tape of crude and lewd remarks in a decade-old “locker room” conversation on a bus with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood.”

Tasting blood, the media were in a feeding frenzy. Trump is dropping out! Pence is bolting the ticket! Republican elites are about to disown and abandon the Republican nominee!

Sometime this weekend, Trump made a decision: If he is going down to defeat, he will go out as Trump, not some sniveling penitent begging forgiveness from hypocrites who fear and loathe him.

His first move was to host a press availability, before the debate, where a small sampling of Bill Clinton’s alleged victims — Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick — made brief statements endorsing Trump and denouncing the misogyny of the Clinton's.

“Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me,” said Broaddrick, “and Hillary Clinton threatened me.”

The press had to cover it. Then the women marched into the auditorium at Washington University to watch Hillary Clinton defend her behavior toward them after their encounters with Bill.

As the moderators and Hillary Clinton scrambled to refocus on Trump’s comments of a decade ago, Trump brought it back to Bill’s criminal misconduct against women, his lying about it, and Hillary’s aiding and abetting of the First Predator.

It was like a tawdry courtroom drama in an X-rated movie, a new low in presidential debates. But what it revealed is that if Trump is going down, his enemies will carry away their own permanent scars.

As Caesar said of Cassius, “Such men are dangerous.”

Hillary Clinton has never been hammered as she was Sunday night, and it showed. Knocked off her game, she was no longer the prim and poised debater of Hofstra University.

There were other signs that, win or lose, Trump intends to finish the campaign as he began, as a populist-nationalist and unapologetic adversary of open borders, globalization and neo-imperialism.

When moderators Martha Raddatz and Anderson Cooper revealed their bias by asking Trump tougher questions and more follow-ups, and interrupting him more rudely and often, he called them out.

“It’s one on three!” said Trump. And it sure looked like it.

How could the moderators have ignored that other leak of last week, of Clinton's speech to Brazilian bankers where she confessed she “dreams” of a “hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.”

If the quote is accurate, and Clinton has not denied it, she was saying she dreams of a future when the United States ceases to exist as a separate, sovereign and independent nation.

She envisions not just a North American Union evolving out of NAFTA but a merger of all the nations of North, South and Central America, with all borders erased and people moving freely from one place to another within a hemispheric super-state.

If this quote is accurate, Clinton is working toward an end to the independence for which our Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution.

After all, Thomas Jefferson did not write some declaration of diversity in 1776, but a Declaration of Independence for a new, unique and separate people.

Clinton dreams of doing away with what American patriots cherish most.

When the issue of Syria arose, Clinton said she favors a “no-fly zone.” Unanswered, indeed unasked by the moderators, was whether she would order the shooting down of Syrian or Russian planes that violate the zone.

Yet, what she is suggesting are acts of war against Syria, and Russia if necessary, though Congress has never authorized a war on Syria, and Syria has not attacked us.

Trump did not hesitate to overrule the suggestion of Mike Pence that we follow Clinton’s formula. He believes ISIS is our enemy, and if Syria, Russia and Iran are attacking ISIS, we ought not to be fighting them.

As of sunrise Sunday, the media were writing Trump off as dead.

By Sunday night, they were as shocked and stunned as Hillary and Bill.

What did Trump accomplish in 18 hours?

He rattled Hillary Clinton, firmed up and rallied his base, halted the stampede of the cut-and-run Republicans, and exposed the hypocrisy of liberal and secular celebrants of the ’60s “sɛҳuąƖ revolution,” who have suddenly gotten religion where Trump is involved.

Trump exposed the fraudulence of the Clinton's’ clucking concern for sɛҳuąƖly abused women, brought Pence back into camp, turned the tables and changed the subject from the Trump tapes to the Trump triumph at Washington University.

Upshot: The Donald is alive.

While his path to 270 electoral votes still looks more than problematic, there is a month to go before the election, and anything can happen.

Indeed, it already has — many times.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 17, 2016, 08:38:57 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/system-rigged-betcha-125844

Is the System is Rigged? You Betcha

Patrick J Buchanan

Posted 10-17-2016

“Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged election,” said Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Saturday.

The stunned recoil in this city suggests this bunker buster went right down the chimney. As the French put it, “Il n’y a que la verite qui blesse.” It is only the truth that hurts.

In what sense is the system rigged?

Consider Big Media — the elite columnists and commentators, the dominant national press, and the national and cable networks, save FOX. Not in this writer’s lifetime has there been such blanket hatred and hostility of a presidential candidate of a major party.

“So what?” They reply. “We have a free press!”

But in this election, Big Media have burst out of the closet as an adjunct of the regime and the attack arm of the Clinton campaign, aiming to bring Trump down.

Half a century ago, Theodore White wrote of the power and bias of the “adversary press” that sought to bring down Richard Nixon.

“The power of the press in America,” wrote Teddy, “is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk about and think about — an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Newt Gingrich volunteered on Sunday that, “without the unending one-sided assault of the news media, Trump would be beating Hillary by 15 points.”

On this one, Newt is right.

With all due respect, as adversaries, Harry Reid and Nancy Peℓσѕι are not terribly formidable. Big Media is the power that sustains the forces of globalism against those of Americanism.

Is the system rigged? Ask yourself.

For half a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has systematically de-Christianized and paganized American society and declared abortion and ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ marriage constitutional rights.

Where did these unelected jurists get the right to impose their views and values upon us, and remake America in their own secularist image? Was that really the Court’s role in the Constitution?

How did we wind up with an all-powerful judicial tyranny in a nation the Founding Fathers created as a democratic republic?

There are more than 11 million illegal immigrants here, with millions more coming. Yet the government consistently refuses to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.

Why should those Americans whose ancestors created, fought, bled and died to preserve America not believe they and their children are being dispossessed of a country that was their patrimony — and without their consent?

When did the country vote to convert the America we grew up in into the Third World country our descendants will inherit in 2042?

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Congressional majority voted to end discrimination against black folks.

When did we vote to institute pervasive discrimination against white folks, especially white males, with affirmative action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even in blue states like California, affirmative action is routinely rejected in statewide ballots.

Yet it remains regime policy, embedded in the bureaucracy.

In 2015, in the Democratic primaries, the big enthusiastic crowds were all for 75-year-old Socialist senator Bernie Sanders.

We now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not only the superdelegates and the Obama White House but a collaborationist press and the DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any chance at the nomination.

The fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the system is rigged.

If there is an issue upon which Americans agree, it is that they want secure borders and an end to trade policies that have shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the wages, of working Americans.

Yet in a private speech that netted her $225,000 from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton confided that she dreams of a “common market, with open trade and open borders” from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.

That would mean the end of the USA as a unique, sovereign and independent nation. But the American press, whose survival depends upon the big ad dollars of transnational corporations, is more interested in old tapes of the Donald on The Howard Stern Show.

As present, it appears that in 2017, we may get a government headed by Hillary Clinton, and an opposition headed by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

Is that what the people were hoping for, working for, voting for in the primaries of 2016? Or is this what they were voting against?

Big money and the media power of the establishment elites and the transnationals may well prevail.

And if they do, Middle America — those who cling to their bibles, bigotries and guns in Barack Obama’s depiction, those “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary Clinton’s depiction — will have to accept the new regime.

But that does not mean they must love it, like it or respect it.

Because, in the last analysis, yes, Virginia, the system is rigged.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 20, 2016, 08:44:34 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/an-establishment-in-panic-3-125855

Establishment in Panic

Patrick J. Buchanan

10-20-2016

Pressed by moderator Chris Wallace as to whether he would accept defeat should Hillary Clinton win the election, Donald Trump replied, “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”

“That’s horrifying,” said Clinton, setting off a chain reaction on the post-debate panels with talking heads falling all over one another in purple-faced anger, outrage and disbelief.

“Disqualifying!” was the cry on Clinton cable.

“Trump Won’t Say If He Will Accept Election Results,” wailed The New York Times. “Trump Won’t Vow to Honor Results,” ran the banner in The Washington Post.

But what do these chattering classes and establishment bulletin boards think the Donald is going to do if he falls short of 270 electoral votes?

Lead a Coxey’s Army on Washington and burn it down as British General Robert Ross did in August 1814, while “Little Jemmy” Madison fled on horseback out the Brookeville Road?

What explains the hysteria of the establishment?

In a word, fear.

The establishment is horrified at the Donald’s defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.

It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.

Having fixed the future, the establishment finds half of the country looking upon it with the same sullen contempt that our Founding Fathers came to look upon the overlords Parliament sent to rule them.

Establishment panic is traceable to another fear: Its ideology, its political religion, is seen by growing millions as a golden calf, a 20th-century god that has failed.

Trump is “talking down our democracy,” said a shocked Clinton.

After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment installed “democracy” as the new deity, at whose altars we should all worship. And so our schools began to teach.

Half a millennia ago, missionaries and explorers set sail from Spain, England and France to bring Christianity to the New World.

Today, Clintons, Obamas and Bushes send soldiers and secularist tutors to “establish democracy” among the “lesser breeds without the Law.”

Unfortunately, the natives, once democratized, return to their roots and vote for Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, using democratic processes and procedures to re-establish their true God.

And Allah is no democrat.

By suggesting he might not accept the results of a “rigged election” Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots.

For none of the three — diversity, equality, democracy — is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the pledge, we are a republic.

When Ben Franklin, emerging from the Philadelphia convention, was asked by a woman what kind of government they had created, he answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Among many in the silent majority, Clintonian democracy is not an improvement upon the old republic; it is the corruption of it.

Consider: Six months ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bundler, announced that by executive action he would convert 200,000 convicted felons into eligible voters by November.

If that is democracy, many will say, to hell with it.

And if felons decide the electoral votes of Virginia, and Virginia decides who is our next U.S. president, are we obligated to honor that election?

In 1824, Gen. Andrew Jackson ran first in popular and electoral votes. But, short of a majority, the matter went to the House.

There, Speaker Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams delivered the presidency to Adams — and Adams made Clay secretary of state, putting him on the path to the presidency that had been taken by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Adams himself.

Were Jackson’s people wrong to regard as a “corrupt bargain” the deal that robbed the general of the presidency?

The establishment also recoiled in horror from Milwaukee Sheriff Dave Clarke’s declaration that it is now “torches and pitchforks time.”

Yet, some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in “Points of Rebellion”:

“We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.”

Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America that they love, elitist enthusiasm for “revolution” seems more constrained.

What goes around comes around.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 25, 2016, 12:05:48 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/dump-duterte-starters-125879

Dump Duterte for Starters

Patrick J Buchanan

10/24/2016

Alliances are transmission belts of war.

So our Founding Fathers taught and the 20th century proved.

When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany in 1914, America sat out, until our own ships were being sunk in 1917.

When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany, Sept. 3, 1939, we stayed out until Hitler declared war on us, Dec. 11, 1941.

As the other Western powers bled and bankrupted themselves, we emerged relatively unscathed as the world’s No. 1 power. The Brits and French lost their empires, and much else, and ceased to be great powers.

Stalin’s annexation of Central Europe and acquisition of an atom bomb, and Mao’s triumph in China in 1949, caused us to form alliances from Europe to Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia.

Yet, with the end of the Cold War, we did not dissolve a single alliance. NATO was expanded to embrace all the nations of the former Warsaw Pact and three former republics of the USSR.

This hubristic folly is at the heart of present tensions with Russia.

Now, Beltway hawks have begun to push the envelope to bring former Soviet republics Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, with some urging us to bring in the Cold War neutrals Sweden and Finland.

Given the resentment of the Russian people toward America, for exploiting their time of weakness after the breakup of the Soviet Union, to drive our alliance onto their front porch, such moves could trigger a conflict that could escalate to nuclear weapons.

Moscow has warned us pointedly and repeatedly about this.

Yet now that the election is almost over, neocons burrowed in their think tanks are emerging to talk up U.S. confrontations with Syria, Russia, Iran and China. Restraining America’s War Party may be the first order of business of the next president.

Fortunately, after the Libyan debacle, President Obama has lost any enthusiasm for new wars.

Indeed, he has a narrow window of opportunity to begin to bring our alliances into conformity with our interests — by serving notice that the United States is terminating its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with Manila.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is proving himself to be an unstable anti-American autocrat, who should not be entrusted with the power to drag us into war over some rocks or reefs in the South China Sea.

Earlier this year, we got an idea of what a commitment to go to war for a NATO ally might mean when President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, another mercurial autocrat, shot down a Russian plane that strayed over Turkish territory for 17 seconds.

Had Vladimir Putin retaliated in kind, Erdogan could have invoked Article 5 of NATO, requiring us come to Turkey’s defense against Russia.

Given how Erdogan has acted since this summer’s attempted coup, purging Turkish democratic institutions and imprisoning tens of thousands, do the benefits of our NATO alliance with Ankara still outweigh the risks?

Duterte harbors a lifelong grudge against America for our war of 1899-1902 to crush the Philippine independence movement, after Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. We liberated the Philippines, only to annex them.

A longtime mayor on Mindanao before being elected president, Duterte is reputedly the godfather of death squads that executed drug dealers and users. Now, the practice has apparently been introduced nationwide.

While campaigning, Duterte said he would Jet Ski 120 miles to Scarborough Shoal, which is occupied by China though it is in Manila’s territorial waters. Since then, he has flipped and become outspokenly pro-China.

Before attending a summit in Laos, Duterte called President Obama “the son of a whore.” He has insulted America and canceled joint military exercises. In Beijing he announced a “separation from the United States. … No more American influence. No more American [military] exercises. It’s time to say goodbye.”

“I would rather go to Russia and to China,” he added.

President Obama should email President Duterte: “Message received. Accept your decision. Good luck with the Russians and Chinese.”

Would termination of our Mutual Defense Treaty mean severing ties with the Filipino people? By no means.

What it would do, though, is this: restore America’s absolute freedom to act or not act militarily in the South China Sea, according to our interests, and not Duterte’s whims.

Whether we intervene on Manila’s behalf or not, the decision would be ours alone. Terminating the treaty would absolve us of any legal or moral obligation to fight for Scarborough Shoal, Mischief Reef or any of the other rocks in a South China Sea that are now in dispute between Beijing and half a dozen nations.

A U.S. decision to terminate the treaty would also send a wake-up call to every ally:

America’s Cold War commitments are not forever. Your security is not more important to us than it is to you. As Donald Trump has been saying, we are starting to put America first again.

On this, maybe even President Obama could find common ground.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 27, 2016, 10:15:39 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/a-presidency-from-hell-125889

A Presidency from Hell

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 10-27-2016

Should Donald Trump surge from behind to win, he would likely bring in with him both houses of Congress.

Much of his agenda — tax cuts, deregulation, border security, deportation of criminals here illegally, repeal of Obamacare, appointing justices like Scalia, unleashing the energy industry — could be readily enacted.

On new trade treaties with China and Mexico, Trump might need economic nationalists in Bernie Sanders’ party to stand with him, as free-trade Republicans stood by their K-Street contributors.

Still, compatible agendas and GOP self-interest could transcend personal animosities and make for a successful four years.

But consider what a Hillary Clinton presidency would be like.

She would enter office as the least-admired president in history, without a vision or a mandate. She would take office with two-thirds of the nation believing she is untruthful and untrustworthy.

Reports of poor health and lack of stamina may be exaggerated. Yet she moves like a woman her age. Unlike Ronald Reagan, her husband, Bill, and President Obama, she is not a natural political athlete and lacks the personal and rhetorical skills to move people to action.

She makes few mistakes as a debater, but she is often shrill — when she is not boring. Trump is right: Hillary Clinton is tough as a $2 steak. But save for those close to her, she appears not to be a terribly likable person.

Still, such attributes, or the lack of them, do not assure a failed presidency. James Polk, no charmer, was a one-term president, but a great one, victorious in the Mexican War, annexing California and the Southwest, negotiating a fair division of the Oregon territory with the British.

Yet the hostility Clinton would face the day she takes office would almost seem to ensure four years of pure hell.

The reason: her credibility, or rather her transparent lack of it.

Consider. Because the tapes revealed he did not tell the full truth about when he learned about Watergate, Richard Nixon was forced to resign.

In the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan faced potential impeachment charges, until ex-security adviser John Poindexter testified that Reagan told the truth when he said he had not known of the secret transfer of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Bill Clinton was impeached — for lying.

White House scandals, as Nixon said in Watergate, are almost always rooted in mendacity — not the misdeed, but the cover-up, the lies, the perjury, the obstruction of justice that follow.

And here Hillary Clinton seems to have an almost insoluble problem.

She has testified for hours to FBI agents investigating why and how her server was set up and whether secret information passed through it.

Forty times during her FBI interrogation, Clinton said she could not or did not recall. This writer has friends who went to prison for telling a grand jury, “I can’t recall.”

After studying her testimony and the contents of her emails, FBI Director James Comey virtually accused Clinton of lying.

Moreover, thousands of emails were erased from her server, even after she had reportedly been sent a subpoena from Congress to retain them.

During her first two years as secretary of state, half of her outside visitors were contributors to the Clinton Foundation.

Yet there was not a single quid pro quo, Clinton tells us.

Yesterday’s newspapers exploded with reports of how Bill Clinton aide Doug Band raised money for the Clinton Foundation, and then hit up the same corporate contributors to pay huge fees for Bill’s speeches.

What were the corporations buying if not influence? What were the foreign contributors buying, if not influence with an ex-president, and a secretary of state and possible future president?

Did none of the big donors receive any official favors?

“There’s a lot of smoke and there’s no fire,” says Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps, but there seems to be more smoke every day.

If once or twice in her hours of testimony to the FBI, grand jury or before Congress, Clinton were proven to have lied, her Justice Department would be obligated to name a special prosecutor, as was Nixon’s.

And, with the election over, the investigative reporters of the adversary press, Pulitzers beckoning, would be cut loose to go after her.

The Republican House is already gearing up for investigations that could last deep into Clinton’s first term.

There is a vast trove of public and sworn testimony from Hillary, about the server, the emails, the erasures, the Clinton Foundation. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, there are tens of thousands of emails to sift through, and perhaps tens of thousands more to come.

What are the odds that not one contains information that contradicts her sworn testimony? Cong. Jim Jordan contends that Clinton may already have perjured herself.

And as the full-court press would begin with her inauguration, Clinton would have to deal with the Syrians, Russians, Taliban, North Koreans and Xi Jinping in the South China Sea — and with Bill Clinton wandering around the White House with nothing to do.

This election is not over. But if Hillary Clinton wins, a truly hellish presidency could await her, and us.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 01, 2016, 03:01:36 PM
Hillary's Watergate?

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted: 10/31/2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/hillarys-watergate-125935

After posting Friday’s column, “A Presidency from Hell,” about the investigations a President Hillary Clinton would face, by afternoon it was clear I had understated the gravity of the situation.

Networks exploded with news that FBI Director James Comey had informed Congress he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email scandal, which he had said in July had been concluded.

“Bombshell” declared Carl Bernstein. The stock market tumbled. “October surprise!” came the cry.

The only explanation, it seemed, was that the FBI had uncovered new information that could lead to a possible indictment of the former secretary of state, who by then could be the president of the United States.

By Sunday, we knew the source of the eruption.

Huma Abedin, Clinton’s top aide, sent thousands of emails to the private laptop she shared with husband Anthony Weiner, a.k.a. Carlos Danger, who is under FBI investigation for allegedly sexting with a 15-year-old girl.

The Weiner-Abedin laptop contains 650,000 emails.

The FBI has not yet reviewed Abedin’s emails, and they could turn out to be duplicates of those the FBI has already seen, benign, or not relevant to the investigation of Clinton.

But it does appear that Abedin misled the FBI when she told them all communications devices containing State Department work product were turned over to State when she departed in 2013.

Clinton, understandably, was stunned and outraged by Comey’s letter. For it casts a cloud of suspicion over her candidacy by raising the possibility that the FBI director could reverse his decision of July, and recommend her prosecution.

By Monday, Oct. 31, new problems had arisen, some potentially crippling or possibly lethal to a Clinton presidency.

Reporters have unearthed a near-mutiny inside the FBI over the decision to shut down the investigation of the Clinton email scandal and Comey’s recommendation of no prosecution.

Andrew McCabe, No. 2 at the FBI, has come under anonymous fire from inside the bureau as one of those most reluctant to pursue aggressively any investigations of the Clintons.

McCabe’s wife, in a 2015 state senate race in Virginia, received $475,000 in PAC contributions from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and major fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

After the Senate race that McCabe’s wife lost, he was promoted from No. 3 at the FBI to No. 2, where he has far more influence over decisions to investigate and recommend prosecution.

Justice Department higher-ups under Attorney General Loretta Lynch apparently disagreed with Comey notifying Congress, and the nation, to new developments in the email scandal. Yet Comey had given his word to Congress that he would do so.

In the Southern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over the Weiner sexting investigation, FBI agents have reportedly been blocked from opening an investigation into charges of corruption in the Clinton Foundation.

This follows revelations that corporate chiefs and foreign rulers and regimes, hit up for contributions to the Clinton Foundation, were then urged by an ex-Clinton aide to provide six-figure speaking fees for Bill Clinton.

This follows reports the Clinton Foundation took contributions for victims of natural disasters, and awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to contributors to do the work.

Still unanswered is what Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch discussed during that 30-minute meeting on the Phoenix tarmac, prior to the FBI and Justice Department decision not to indict Hillary Clinton.

The stench of corruption is reaching Bhopal dimensions.

What appears about to happen seems inevitable and predictable.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, the email scandal, the pay-for-play scandal involving the Clinton Foundation, “Bill Clinton, Inc.,” the truthfulness of her testimony, and reports of Clinton-paid dirty tricksters engaging in brownshirt tactics at Trump rallies, are all going to be investigated more thoroughly by the FBI.

And if Clinton is president, there is no way her Justice Department can investigate the Clinton scandals, any more than this city in the early 1970s would entrust an investigation into Watergate to the Nixon Justice Department.

Clinton, understandably, was stunned and outraged by Comey’s letter. For it casts a cloud of suspicion over her candidacy by raising the possibility that the FBI director could reverse his decision of July, and recommend her prosecution.

By Monday, Oct. 31, new problems had arisen, some potentially crippling or possibly lethal to a Clinton presidency.

Reporters have unearthed a near-mutiny inside the FBI over the decision to shut down the investigation of the Clinton email scandal and Comey’s recommendation of no prosecution.

Andrew McCabe, No. 2 at the FBI, has come under anonymous fire from inside the bureau as one of those most reluctant to pursue aggressively any investigations of the Clintons.

McCabe’s wife, in a 2015 state senate race in Virginia, received $475,000 in PAC contributions from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and major fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

After the Senate race that McCabe’s wife lost, he was promoted from No. 3 at the FBI to No. 2, where he has far more influence over decisions to investigate and recommend prosecution.

Justice Department higher-ups under Attorney General Loretta Lynch apparently disagreed with Comey notifying Congress, and the nation, to new developments in the email scandal. Yet Comey had given his word to Congress that he would do so.

In the Southern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over the Weiner sexting investigation, FBI agents have reportedly been blocked from opening an investigation into charges of corruption in the Clinton Foundation.

This follows revelations that corporate chiefs and foreign rulers and regimes, hit up for contributions to the Clinton Foundation, were then urged by an ex-Clinton aide to provide six-figure speaking fees for Bill Clinton.

This follows reports the Clinton Foundation took contributions for victims of natural disasters, and awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to contributors to do the work.

Still unanswered is what Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch discussed during that 30-minute meeting on the Phoenix tarmac, prior to the FBI and Justice Department decision not to indict Hillary Clinton.

The stench of corruption is reaching Bhopal dimensions.

What appears about to happen seems inevitable and predictable.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, the email scandal, the pay-for-play scandal involving the Clinton Foundation, “Bill Clinton, Inc.,” the truthfulness of her testimony, and reports of Clinton-paid dirty tricksters engaging in brownshirt tactics at Trump rallies, are all going to be investigated more thoroughly by the FBI.

And if Clinton is president, there is no way her Justice Department can investigate the Clinton scandals, any more than this city in the early 1970s would entrust an investigation into Watergate to the Nixon Justice Department.

If Clinton wins this election, and Republicans hold onto one or both houses of Congress, investigations of the Clinton scandals will start soon after her inaugural and will go on for years. And the clamor for a special prosecutor, who will, as Archibald Cox did with Nixon, build a huge staff and spend years investigating, will become irresistible.

Realizing that this is the near-certain fate and future of any Hillary Clinton presidency, and would be disastrous for the country, Sunday night, Doug Schoen, who worked for President Clinton for six years, said he has changed his mind and will not be voting for Hillary.

Donald Trump says this is worse than Watergate. As of now, it is only potentially so.

But if Hillary Clinton, this distrusted and disbelieved woman, does take the oath of office on Jan. 20, there is a real possibility that, like Nixon, down the road a year or two, she could be forced from office.

Do we really want to go through this again?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 04, 2016, 12:12:36 AM
Hillary's High Crimes & Misdemeanors

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 11-3-16

http://buchanan.org/blog/hillarys-high-crimes-misdemeanors-125951

If Hillary Clinton is elected president on Tuesday, and if what Bret Baier is reporting from FBI sources on Fox News is true, America is headed for a constitutional crisis.

Indeed, it would seem imperative that FBI Director James Comey, even if it violates protocol and costs him his job, should state publicly whether what Baier’s FBI sources are telling him is false or true.

The people have a right to know — before Tuesday.

For, if true, Clinton could face charges in 2017 and impeachment and removal from office in 2018.

According to Baier, FBI agents have found new emails, believed to have originated on Clinton’s server, on the computer jointly used by close aide Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband, Anthony Weiner.

Abedin’s failure to turn this computer over to the State Department on leaving State appears to be a violation of U.S. law.

Moreover, the laptops of close Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, thought destroyed by the FBI, were apparently retained and are “being exploited” by the National Security division.

And here is the salient point. His FBI sources told Baier, “with 99 percent” certitude, that Clinton’s Chappaqua server “had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence services…”

If this is so, Hillary Clinton as security risk ranks right up there with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, though they acted out of treasonous ideology and she out of Clintonian hubris. What do these foreign intelligence agencies know about Clinton that the voters do not?

The second revelation from Baier is that the Clinton Foundation has been under active investigation by the white-collar crime division of the FBI for a year and is a “very high priority.”

Specifically, the FBI is looking into published allegations of “pay-to-play.” This is the charge that the Clinton State Department traded access, influence and policy decisions to foreign regimes and to big donors who gave hundreds of millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with 15 years of six-figure speaking fees for Bill and Hillary.

According to Baier’s sources, FBI agents are “actively and aggressively” pursuing this case, have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple persons, and are now being inundated in an “avalanche of new information” from WikiLeaks docuмents and new emails.

The FBI told Baier that they anticipate indictments.

Indeed, with the sums involved, and the intimate ties between high officials of Bill’s foundation, and Hillary and her close aides at State, it strains credulity to believe that deals were not discussed and cut.

Books have been written alleging and detailing them.

Also, not only Fox News but also The Wall Street Journal and other news sources are reporting on what appears a rebellion inside the FBI against strictures on their investigations imposed by higher ups in the Department of Justice of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Director Comey has come under fire from left and right — first for refusing to recommend the prosecution of Clinton, then for last week’s statement about the discovery of new and “pertinent” emails on the Abedin-Weiner computer — but retains a reputation for integrity.

And he knows better than any other high official the answer to a critical question that needs answering before Tuesday: Has Baier been fed exaggerated or false information by FBI agents hostile to Clinton?

Or has Baier been told the truth?

In the latter case, we are facing a constitutional crisis if Clinton is elected. And the American people surely have a right to know that before they go to the polls on Tuesday.

What is predictable ahead?

Attorney General Lynch, whether she stays or goes, will be hauled before Congress to explain whether she or top aides impeded the FBI investigations of the Clinton scandals. And witnesses from within her Justice department and FBI will also be called to testify.

Moreover, Senate Republicans would block confirmation of any new attorney general who did not first promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the email and pay-to-play scandals, and any pressure from Lynch’s Justice Department on the FBI.

Even Democrats would concede that a Department of Justice, staffed by Hillary Clinton appointees, could not credibly be entrusted with investigating alleged high crimes and misdemeanors by former Secretary of State Clinton and confidants like Abedin and Mills.

An independent counsel, a special prosecutor, appears inevitable.

And such individuals usually mark their success or failure by how many and how high are the indictments and convictions they rack up.

However, these processes proceed at a torpid pace.

First comes the setting up of the office and the hirings, then the investigations, then the grand jury appearances, then the indictments, then the prosecutions, then the horse-trading for the testimony of the accused and the convicted in return for immunity or leniency.

Steadily, it moves up the food chain. And when a head of state is involved, it is a process deeply debilitating to the nation.

We have gone through this before, twice.

Do we really want to go through it again?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 10, 2016, 03:52:07 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/hath-trump-wrought-125976

What Hath Trump Wrought

Patrick J. Buchanan

“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump.

Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.

Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover.

Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.

Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.

Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.

Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.

How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?

How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?

Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.

The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.

Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.

But it is the national establishment that has suffered most.

The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.

Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with.

He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are “rapists.” He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women “pigs.” He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in “fat-shaming” a Miss Universe, calling her “Miss Piggy,” and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the “Access Hollywood” tape with Billy Bush.

While such “gaffes” are normally fatal for candidates, Trump’s followers stood by him through them all.

Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump’s support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did?

Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country.

Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power.

Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in.

These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote.

They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future.

They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the sons of the “deplorables” to fight.

Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as “America First” and “Make America Great Again” by elites who think 55 million abortions since Roe is a milestone of moral progress.

And what do they have in common with a woman who thinks partial-birth abortion, which her predecessor in the Senate, Pat Moynihan, called “infanticide,” is among the cherished “reproductive rights” of women?

While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America’s future appears disunited and grim.

But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots,” to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should she win?

No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, “The work goes on, the cause endures.”

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 11, 2016, 08:08:07 AM
Memo to Trump: 'Action this Day!'

Patrick J. Buchanan

11-10-16

http://buchanan.org/blog/memo-trump-action-day-125997

“In victory, magnanimity!” said Winston Churchill.

Donald Trump should be magnanimous and gracious toward those whom he defeated this week, but his first duty is to keep faith with those who put their faith in him.

The protests, riots and violence that have attended his triumph in city after city should only serve to steel his resolve.

As for promptings that he “reach out” and “reassure” those upset by his victory, and trim or temper his agenda to pacify them, Trump should reject the poisoned chalice. This is the same old con.

Trump should take as models the Democrats FDR and LBJ.

Franklin Roosevelt, who had savaged Herbert Hoover as a big spender, launched his own New Deal in his first 100 days.

History now hails his initiative and resolve.

Lyndon Johnson exploited his landslide over Barry Goldwater in 1964 to erect his Great Society in 1965: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid. He compromised on nothing, and got it all.

Even those who turned on him for Vietnam still celebrate his domestic achievements.

President Nixon’s great regret was that he did not bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong in 1969 — instead of waiting until 1972 — and bring the Vietnam War to an earlier end and with fewer U.S. casualties.

Nixon’s decision not to inflame the social and political crisis of the ’60s by rolling back the Great Society bought him nothing. He was rewarded with media-backed mass demonstrations in 1969 to break his presidency and bring about an American defeat in Vietnam.

“Action this day!” was the scribbled command of Prime Minister Churchill on his notepads in World War II. This should be the motto of the first months of a Trump presidency.

For the historic opportunity he and the Republican Party have been given by his stunning and unanticipated victory of Nov. 8 will not last long. His adversaries and enemies in politics and press are only temporarily dazed and reeling.

This great opening should be exploited now.

Few anticipated Tuesday morning what we would have today: a decapitated Democratic Party, with the Obamas and Clintons gone or going, Joe Biden with them, no national leader rising, and only the power of obstruction, of which the nation has had enough.

The GOP, however, on Jan. 20, will control both Houses of Congress and the White House, with the real possibility of remaking the Supreme Court in the image of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan have indicated they are willing to work with President Trump.

There is nothing to prevent the new GOP from writing history.

In his first months, Trump could put a seal on American politics as indelible as that left by Ronald Reagan.

A partial agenda: First, he should ignore any importuning by President Obama to permit passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a lame-duck session — and let the trade deal sink by year’s end.

On Jan. 20, he should have vetted and ready to nominate to the high court a brilliant constitutionalist and strict constructionist.

He should act to end interference with the Dakota Access pipeline and call on Congress to re-enact legislation, vetoed by Obama, to finish the Keystone XL pipeline. Then he should repeal all Obama regulations that unnecessarily restrict the production of the oil, gas and clean coal necessary to make America energy independent again.

Folks in Pennsylvania, southeast Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia should be shown, by executive action, that Trump is a man of his word. And when the mines open again, he should be there.

He should order new actions to seal the Southern border, start the wall and begin visible deportations of felons who are in the country illegally.

With a new education secretary, he should announce White House intent to work for repeal of Common Core and announce the introduction of legislation to put federal resources behind the charter schools that have proven to be a godsend to inner-city black children.

He should propose an immediate tax cut for U.S. corporations, with $2 to $3 trillion in unrepatriated profits abroad, who will bring the money home and invest it in America, to the benefit of our economy and our Treasury.

He should take the president’s phone and pen and begin the rewriting or repeal of every Obama executive order that does not comport with the national interest or political philosophy of the GOP.

Trump should announce a date soon for repeal and replacement of Obamacare and introduction of his new tax-and-trade legislation to bring back manufacturing and create American jobs.

Donald Trump said in his campaign that that this is America’s last chance. If we lose this one, he said, we lose the country.

The president-elect should ignore his more cautious counselors, and act with the urgency of his declared beliefs.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 15, 2016, 09:53:00 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-doctrine-america-first-126011

A Trump Doctrine 'America First'

11-14-16

Patrick J. Buchanan

However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border.

Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor.

Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy rooted in the national interest, not in nostalgia. The neocons insist that every Cold War and post-Cold War commitment be maintained, in perpetuity.

On Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Trump said: “You know, we’ve been fighting this war for 15 years. … We’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion — we could have rebuilt our country twice. And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels … and our airports are … obsolete.”

Yet the War Party has not had enough of war, not nearly.

They want to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic. They want to send weapons to Kiev to fight Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.

They want to establish a no-fly zone and shoot down Syrian and Russian planes that violate it, acts of war Congress never authorized.

They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal, though all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.

Other hardliners want to face down Beijing over its claims to the reefs and rocks of the South China Sea, though our Manila ally is talking of tightening ties to China and kicking us out of Subic Bay.

In none of these places is there a U.S. vital interest so imperiled as to justify the kind of war the War Party would risk.

Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin’s empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

In 1949, suddenly, he had the atom bomb, and China, the most populous nation on earth, had fallen to the armies of Mao Zedong.

As our situation was new, Truman acted anew. He adopted a George Kennan policy of containment of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from being overrun.

At the end of the Cold War, however, with the Soviet Empire history and the Soviet Union having disintegrated, George H.W. Bush launched his nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr. His son, George W., invaded Iraq and preached a global crusade for democracy “to end tyranny in our world."

A policy born of hubris.

Result: the Mideast disaster Trump described to Lesley Stahl, and constant confrontations with Russia caused by pushing our NATO alliance right up to and inside what had been Putin’s country.

How did we expect Russian patriots to react?

The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.

What should Trump say?

“As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.

“For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic of the Soviet Union.

“While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.

“The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.

“No other nation’s internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.

“Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.

“In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq and Libya.”

Then Trump should move expeditiously to lay out and fix the broad outlines of his foreign policy, which entails rebuilding our military while beginning the cancellation of war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests. We cannot continue to bankrupt ourselves to fight other countries’ wars or pay other countries’ bills.

The ideal time for such a declaration, a Trump Doctrine, is when the president-elect presents his secretaries of state and defense.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 22, 2016, 08:39:38 PM
A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 11-22-2016

http://freedomsback.com/pat-buchanan/a-besieged-trump-presidency-ahead/

 
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence:
“(W)e are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values.”
In March, the casting call that went out for actors for roles in this musical celebration of “American values” read:
“Seeking NON-WHITE men and women.”
The arrogance, the assumed posture of moral superiority, the conceit of our cultural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday night, is what Americans regurgitated when they voted for Donald Trump.
Yet the conduct of the “Hamilton” cast puts us on notice. The left neither accepts its defeat nor the legitimacy of Trump’s triumph.
His presidency promises to be embattled from Day One.
Already, two anti-Trump demonstrations are being ginned up in D.C., the first on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, by ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. A second, scheduled for Jan. 21, is a pro-Hillary “Million Woman March.”
While the pope this weekend deplored a “virus of polarization,” even inside the church, on issues of nationality, race and religious beliefs, that, unfortunately, is America’s reality. In a new Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans perceived their country as “Greatly Divided on the Most Important Values,” with 7 in 8 Democrats concurring.
On the campuses, anti-Trump protests have not ceased and the “crying rooms” remain open. Since Nov. 8, mobs have blocked streets and highways across America in a way that, had the Tea Party people done it, would have brought calls for the 82nd Airborne.
In liberal Portland, rioters trashed downtown and battled cops.
Mayors Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Bill de Blasio of New York have declared their cities to be “sanctuary cities,” pledging noncooperation with U.S. authorities seeking to deport those who broke into our country and remain here illegally.
Says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, “I have asserted firmly that we are a sanctuary city.” According to The Washington Post, after the meeting where this declaration had been extracted from Bowser, an activist blurted, “We’re facing a fascist maniac.”
Such declarations of defiance of law have a venerable history in America. In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, in a “Southern Manifesto,” rejected the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ordering desegregation of the public schools.
Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett and Alabama Gov. George Wallace all resisted court orders to integrate. U.S. marshals and troops, ordered in by Ike and JFK, insured the court orders were carried out.
To see Rahm and de Blasio in effect invoking John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of interposition and nullification is a beautiful thing to behold.
Among the reasons the hysteria over the Trump election has not abated is that the media continue to stoke it, to seek out and quote the reactions they produce, and then to demand the president-elect give assurances to pacify what the Post says are “the millions of … blacks and Latinos, gαys and Lesbians, Muslims and Jєωs — fearful of what might become of their country.”
Sunday, The New York Times ran a long op-ed by Daniel Duane who said of his fellow Californians, “(N)early everyone I know would vote yes tomorrow if we could secede” from the United States.
The major op-ed in Monday’s Post, by editorial editor Fred Hiatt, was titled, “The Fight to Defend Democracy,” implying American democracy is imperiled by a Trump presidency.
The Post’s lead editorial, “An un-American Registry,” compares a suggestion of Trump aides to build a registry of Muslim immigrants to “nαzι Germany’s … singling out Jєωs” and FDR’s wartime internment of 110,000 Japanese, most of them U.S. citizens.
The Post did not mention that the Japanese internment was a project of the beatified FDR, pushed by that California fascist, Gov. Earl Warren, and upheld in the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision, written by Roosevelt appointee and loyal Klansman, Justice Hugo Black.
A time for truth. Despite the post-election, bring-us-together talk of unity, this country is hopelessly divided on cultural, moral and political issues, and increasingly along racial and ethnic lines.
Many Trump voters believe Hillary Clinton belongs in a minimum-security facility, while Hillary Clinton told her LGBT supporters half of Trump’s voters were racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots.
Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run.
The battle of 2016 is over.
The long war of the Trump presidency has only just begun.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 25, 2016, 08:22:20 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/obamas-world-utopian-myth-126048

Is Obama's World A Utopian Myth?

Patrick J. Buchanan

Speaking in Greece on his valedictory trip to Europe as president, Barack Obama struck a familiar theme: “(W)e are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude form of nationalism, or ethnic identity, or tribalism that is built around an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ …

“(T)he future of humanity and the future of the world is going to be defined by what we have in common, as opposed to those things that separate us and ultimately lead us into conflict.”

That the world’s great celebrant of “diversity” envisions an even more multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial America and Europe is not news. This dream has animated his presidency.

But in this day of Brexit and president-elect Donald Trump new questions arise. Is Obama’s vision a utopian myth? Have leaders like him and Angela Merkel lost touch with reality? Are not they the ones who belong to yesterday, not tomorrow?

“Crude nationalism,” as Obama said, did mark that “bloodiest” of centuries, the 20th. But nationalism has also proven to be among mankind’s most powerful, beneficial and enduring forces.

You cannot wish it away. To do that is to deny history, human nature and the transparent evidence of one’s own eyes.

A sense of nationhood — “I am not a Virginian, but an American,” said Patrick Henry — ignited our revolution.

Nationalism tore apart the “evil empire” of Ronald Reagan’s depiction, liberating Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians, and breaking apart the Soviet Union into 15 nations.

Was that so terrible for mankind?

Nationalism brought down the Berlin Wall and led to reunification of the German people after 45 years of separation and Cold War.

President George H.W. Bush may have railed against “suicidal nationalism” in Kiev in 1991. But Ukrainians ignored him and voted to secede. Now the Russified minorities of the southeast and the Crimea wish to secede from Ukraine and rejoin the Mother Country.

This is the way of the world.

Out of the carcass of Yugoslavia came Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo. As nationalism called into existence Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, it impelled South Ossetians and Abkhazians to secede from Georgia.

Was it not a sense of peoplehood, of nationhood, that drove the Jєωs to create Israel in 1948, which today insists that it be recognized as “a Jєωιѕн State”?

All over the world, regimes are marshaling the mighty force of ethnonationalism to strengthen and sustain themselves.

With economic troubles looming, Xi Jinping is stirring up Chinese nationalism by territorial disputes with neighbors — to hold together a people who have ceased to believe in the secularist faith of Marxism-Leninism.

With Communism dead, Vladimir Putin invokes the greatness and glory of the Russian past and seeks to revive the Orthodox faith.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invokes nationalism, Attaturk, the Ottoman Empire, and the Islamic faith of his people, against the Kurds, who dream of a new nation carved out of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

“So my vision … may not always win the day in the short run,” Obama said in Greece, “but I am confident it will win the day in the long run. Because societies which are able to unify ourselves around values and ideals and character and how we treat each other, and cooperation and innovation, ultimately are going to be more successful than societies that don’t.”

What is wrong with this statement?

It is a utilitarian argument that does not touch the heart. It sounds like a commune, a cooperative, a corporation, as much as it does a country. Moreover, not only most of the world, but even the American people seem to be moving the other way.

Indeed, what values and ideals do we Americans hold in common when Obama spoke in Germany of “darker forces” opposing his trade policies, and Hillary Clinton calls Trump supporters “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic … bigots.”

Did not the Democrats just run “an us and a them” campaign?

Less and less do we Americans seem to be one country and one people. More and more do we seem to be separating along religious, racial, cultural, political, ideological, social and economic lines.

If a more multicultural, multi-ethnic America produces greater unity and comity, why have American politics become so poisonous?

Trump’s victory is due in part to his stand for securing the U.S. border against foreigners walking in. Merkel is in trouble in Germany because she brought in almost a million Muslim refugees from Syria.

The nationalist parties that have arisen across Europe are propelled by hostility to more immigration from the Third World.

Outside the cosmopolitan elites of Europe and North America, where in the West is the enthusiasm Obama detects for a greater diversity of races, tribes, religions, cultures and beliefs?

“Who owns the future?” is ever the question.

In 2008, Obama talked of Middle Pennsylvanians as poor losers clinging to their bibles, bigotries and guns as they passed from the scene.

Yet, now, it’s looking like it may be Obama’s world headed for the proverbial ash heap of history.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 28, 2016, 10:00:00 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/america-first-trump-trade-policy-126074

An 'America First' Trump Trade Policy

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 11-26-16

Donald Trump’s election triumph is among the more astonishing in history.

Yet if he wishes to become the father of a new “America First” majority party, he must make good on his solemn promise:

To end the trade deficits that have bled our country of scores of thousands of factories, and to create millions of manufacturing jobs in the USA.

Fail here, and those slim majorities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin disappear.

The president-elect takes credit for jawboning William Clay Ford to keep his Lincoln plant in Louisville. He is now jawboning Carrier air conditioning to stay in Indiana and not move to Mexico.

Good for him. But these are baby steps toward ending the $800 billion trade deficits in goods America runs annually, or bringing back factories and creating millions of new manufacturing jobs in the USA.

The NAFTA Republicans tell us the plants and jobs are never coming back, that we live in a globalized world, that production will now be done where it can be done cheapest — in Mexico, China, Asia.

Yet, on Nov. 8, Americans rejected this defeatism rooted in the tracts of 19th-century British scribblers and the ideology of 20th-century globalists like Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

America responded to Trump’s call for a new nationalism rooted in the economic principles and patriotism of Hamilton and the men of Mount Rushmore: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

The president-elect has declared the TPP dead, and says he and his negotiators will walk away rather than accept another NAFTA.

Again, good, but again, not good enough, not nearly.

The New International Economic Order imposed upon us for decades has to be overthrown.

For the root cause of the trade deficits bleeding us lies in U.S. tax laws and trade policies that punish companies that stay in America and reward companies that move production overseas.

Executives move plants to Mexico, Asia and China for the same reason U.S. industrialists moved plants from the Frost Belt to the Sun Belt. Given the lower wages and lighter regulations, they can produce more cheaply there.

In dealing with advanced economies like Japan, Germany, and the EU, another critical factor is at work against us.

Since the Kennedy Round of trade negotiations, 50 years ago, international trade deals have reduced tariffs to insignificance.

But our trade rivals have replaced the tariffs with value-added taxes on imports from the USA. Even to belong to the EU, a country must have a VAT of at least 15 percent.

As Kevin Kearns of the U.S. Business and Industry Council writes, Europeans have replaced tariffs on U.S. goods with a VAT on U.S. goods, while rebating the VAT on Europe’s exports to us.

Some 160 countries impose VAT taxes. Along with currency manipulation, this is how European and Asian protectionists stick it to the Americans, whose armed forces have defended them for 60 years.

We lose at trade negotiations, even before we sit down at the table, because our adversaries declare their VAT nonnegotiable. And we accept it.

Trump has to persuade Congress to deal him and our trade negotiators our own high cards, without our having to go to the WTO and asking, “Mother, may I?”

Like this writer, Kearns argues for an 18 percent VAT on all goods and services entering the United States. All tax revenue raised by the VAT — hundreds of billions — should be used to reduce U.S. taxes, beginning by ending the income tax on small business and reducing to the lowest rate in the advanced world the U.S. corporate income tax.

The price of foreign-made goods in U.S. stores would rise, giving a competitive advantage to goods made in America. And with a border VAT of 18 percent, every U.S. corporate executive would have to consider the higher cost of leaving the United States to produce abroad.

Every foreign manufacturer, to maintain free access to the U.S. market of $17 trillion, greatest on earth, would have to consider shifting production — factories, technology, jobs — to the USA.

The incentive to produce abroad would diminish and disappear. The incentive to produce here would grow correspondingly.

Inversions — U.S. companies seeking lower tax rates by moving to places like Ireland — would end. Foreign companies and banks would be clamoring to get into the United States.

With a zero corporate tax, minority businesses would spring up. Existing businesses would have more cash to hire. America would shove China aside as the Enterprise Zone of the world.

Most important, by having Americans buy more from each other, and rely more on each other for the necessities of life, U.S. trade and tax policies would work to create a greater interdependence among us, rather than pull us apart as they do today.

Why not write new tax and trade laws that bring us together, recreating the one nation and people we once were — and can be again?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 29, 2016, 12:03:13 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/populist-nationalist-tide-rolls-126086

Populist-Nationalist Tide Rolls on

11-29-16

Patrick J. Buchanan

Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit.

In Sunday’s runoff to choose a candidate to face Marine Le Pen of the National Front in next spring’s presidential election, the center-right Republicans chose Francois Fillon in a landslide.

While Fillon sees Margaret Thatcher as a role model in fiscal policy, he is a socially conservative Catholic who supports family values, wants to confront Islamist extremism, control immigration, restore France’s historic identity and end sanctions on Russia.

“Russia poses no threat to the West,” says Fillon. But if not, the question arises, why NATO? Why are U.S. troops in Europe?

As Le Pen is favored to win the first round of the presidential election and Fillon the second in May, closer Paris-Putin ties seem certain. Europeans themselves are pulling Russia back into Europe, and separating from the Americans.

Next Sunday, Italy holds a referendum on constitutional reforms backed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. If the referendum, trailing in the polls, fails, says Renzi, he will resign.

Opposing Renzi is the secessionist Northern League, the Five Star Movement of former comedian Beppe Grillo, and the Forza Italia of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a pal of Putin’s.

“Up to eight of Italy’s troubled banks risk failure,” if Renzi’s government falls, says the Financial Times. One week from today, the front pages of the Western press could be splashing the newest crisis of the EU.

In Holland, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, on trial for hate speech for urging fewer Moroccan immigrants, is running first or close to it in polls for the national election next March.

Meanwhile, the door to the EU appears to be closing for Muslim Turkey, as the European Parliament voted to end accession talks with Ankara and its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In welcoming Muslim immigrants, Germany’s Angela Merkel no longer speaks for Europe, even as she is about to lose her greatest ally, Barack Obama.

Not only Europe but the whole world President-elect Trump is about to inherit seems in turmoil, with old regimes and parties losing their hold, and nationalist, populist and rightist forces rising.

Early this year, Brazil’s Senate voted to remove leftist President Dilma Rousseff. In September, her predecessor, popular ex-President Lula da Silva, was indicted in a corruption investigation. President Michel Temer, who, as vice president, succeeded Rousseff, is now under investigation for corruption. There is talk of impeaching him.

Venezuela, endowed with more oil than almost any country on earth, is now, thanks to the Castroism of Hugo Chavez and successor Nicolas Maduro, close to collapse and anarchy.

NATO’s Turkey and our Arab ally, Egypt, both ruled by repressive regimes, are less responsive to U.S. leadership.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, her approval rating in single digits, is facing impeachment and prosecution for corruption.

Meanwhile, North Korea, under Kim Jong Un, continues to test nuclear warheads and missiles that can hit all of South Korea and Japan and reach all U.S. bases in East Asia and the Western Pacific.

The U.S. is obligated by treaty to defend South Korea, where we still have 28,500 troops, and Japan, as well as the Philippines, where new populist President Rodrigo Duterte, cursing the West, is pivoting toward Beijing. Malaysia and Australia are also moving closer to China, as they become ever more dependent on the China trade.

Responding to our moving NATO troops into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Putin has begun a buildup of nuclear-capable offensive and defensive missiles in Kaliningrad, its enclave between Poland and Lithuania.

Should we get into a confrontation with the Russians in the Eastern Baltic, how many of our NATO allies, some now openly pro-Putin, would stand beside us?

The point: Not only is the Cold War over, the post-Cold War is over. We are living in a changed and changing world. Regimes are falling. Old parties are dying, new parties rising. Old allegiances are fraying, and old allies drifting away.

The forces of nationalism and populism have been unleashed all over the West and all over the world. There is no going back.

Yet U.S. policy seems set in concrete by war guarantees and treaty commitments dating back to the time of Truman and Stalin and Ike and John Foster Dulles.

America emerged from the Cold War, a quarter century ago, as the sole superpower. Yet, it seems clear that we are not today so dominant a nation as we were in 1989 and 1991.

We have great rivals and adversaries. We are deeper in debt. We are more divided. We’ve fought wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen that availed us nothing. What we had, we kicked away.

America is at a plastic moment in history.

And America needs nothing so much as reflective thought about a quarter century of failures — and fresh thinking about her future.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 02, 2016, 11:12:44 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/fake-news-war-party-lies-126096

Fake News and the War Party Lies

Patrick J. Buchanan

12-2-16

"I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government — by the planners of the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr,” FDR told the nation in his Navy Day radio address of Oct. 27, 1941.

“It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundary lines … bringing the whole continent under their domination,” said Roosevelt. “This map makes clear the nαzι design not only against South America but against the United States as well.”

Our leader had another terrifying secret docuмent, “made in Germany by Hitler’s government. …

“It is a plan to abolish all existing religions — Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Jєωιѕн alike. … In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an international nαzι Church…

“In the place of the Bible, the words of ‘Mein Kampf’ will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols — the swastika and the naked sword. … A god of blood and iron will take the place of the God of love and mercy.”

The source of these astounding secret nαzι plans?

They were forgeries by British agents in New York operating under William Stephenson, Churchill’s “Man Called Intrepid,” whose assignment was to do whatever necessary to bring the U.S. into Britain’s war.

FDR began his address by describing two German submarine attacks on U.S. destroyers Greer and Kearny, the later of which had been torpedoed with a loss of 11 American lives.

Said FDR: “We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot.”

The truth: Greer and Kearny had been tracking German subs for British planes dropping depth charges.

It was FDR who desperately wanted war with Germany, while, for all his crimes, Hitler desperately wanted to avoid war with the United States.

Said Cong. Clare Boothe Luce, FDR “lied us into war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.”

By late 1941, most Americans still wanted to stay out of the war. They believed “lying British propaganda” about Belgian babies being tossed around on German bayonets had sucked us into World War I, from which the British Empire had benefited mightily.

What brings these episodes to mind is the wave of indignation sweeping this capital over “fake news” allegedly created by Vladimir Putin’s old KGB comrades, and regurgitated by U.S. individuals, websites and magazines that are anti-interventionist and anti-war.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman says the “propaganda and disinformation threat” against America is real, and we must “counter and combat it.” Congress is working up a $160 million State Department program.

Now, Americans should be on guard against “fake news” and foreign meddling in U.S. elections.

Yet it is often our own allies, like the Brits, and our own leaders who mislead and lie us into unnecessary wars. And is not meddling in the internal affairs, including the elections, of regimes we do not like, pretty much the job description of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy?

History suggests it is our own War Party that bears watching.

Consider Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Who misled, deceived, and lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the “fake news” that sucked us into one of our country’s greatest strategic blunders?

Who lied for years about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which almost dragged us into a war, before all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies debunked that propaganda in 2007 and 2011?

Yet, there are those, here and abroad, who insist that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program. Their goal: war with Iran.

Were we told the whole truth about the August 1964 incident involving North Vietnamese gunboats and U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, which stampeded Congress into voting a near-unanimous resolution that led us into an eight-year war in Southeast Asia?

One can go back deeper into American history.

Cong. Abe Lincoln disbelieved in President Polk’s claim that the Mexican army had crossed the Rio Grande and “shed American blood upon American soil.” In his “spot” resolution, Lincoln demanded to know the exact spot where the atrocity had occurred that resulted in a U.S. army marching to Mexico City and relieving Mexico of half of her country.

Was Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt telling us the truth when he said of our blasted battleship in Havana harbor, “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards”?

No one ever proved that the Spanish caused the explosion.

Yet America got out of his war what T.R. wanted — Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, an empire of our own.

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

So said Winston Churchill, the grandmaster of fake news.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: countrychurch on December 07, 2016, 11:23:47 AM
Quote from: RomanCatholic1953
“painful” Trump’s birtherism has been to African-Americans. And Democrats and the media are pledging not to let it go, but to exploit Trump’s attempt to “delegitimize” Obama’s presidency.





I think that is one of the absolute DUMBEST things about the liberals, when they accuse someone of racism over such a non-racial issue. Are they just trying to distract us from the fact that.. HELLO! We have a right to know whether our president is ELIGIBLE to be president?

you know, those liberals, they really think most of us are a bunch of morons.

the ironic thing is that they are the ones who are operating without all oars in the water, which is why we see them sinking to the bottom

 :cheers:
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 07, 2016, 09:01:44 PM
Quote from: countrychurch
Quote from: RomanCatholic1953
“painful” Trump’s birtherism has been to African-Americans. And Democrats and the media are pledging not to let it go, but to exploit Trump’s attempt to “delegitimize” Obama’s presidency.





I think that is one of the absolute DUMBEST things about the liberals, when they accuse someone of racism over such a non-racial issue. Are they just trying to distract us from the fact that.. HELLO! We have a right to know whether our president is ELIGIBLE to be president?

you know, those liberals, they really think most of us are a bunch of morons.

the ironic thing is that they are the ones who are operating without all oars in the water, which is why we see them sinking to the bottom

 :cheers:


I never said that nor has Patrick Buchanan in his articles that I posted.
It has been established that the Father of Barack Obama is an
American by the name of Frank Marshal Davis. (You can look up
his Wikipedia on your computer).
You can also read his book "Dreams from my Father". That is available
to be read online and audio is available.
Their are photos of President Obama and Frank Marshal Davis and
they look very similar.l
This whole situation if Obama was US born or not could have been
solved right away with a valid certificate just like what we have to
present when getting a Passport.
The so called birtherism was first advanced by Hillary Clinton in her
first run for the White House against Barack Obama in 2008. And it
was picked up by others on the right without doing their research.
The mass media including Fox News are dominated by left wing
liberals and neo-cons.  They are the real fake News.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 08, 2016, 01:53:32 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-calling-xi-jinping-126107

Is Trump Calling Out Xi Jinping?

Patrick J Buchanan

12-6-16

Like a bolt of lightning, that call of congratulations from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to President-elect Donald Trump illuminated the Asian landscape.

We can see clearly now the profit and loss statement from more than three decades of accommodating and appeasing China, since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their historic journey in 1972.

What are the gains and losses?

Soon after Nixon announced the trip in July 1971, our World War II ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, was expelled from the UN, its permanent seat on the Security Council given to the People’s Republic of China’s Chairman Mao, a rival of Stalin’s in mass murder.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter recognized the regime in Beijing, cut ties to Taipei and terminated the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954. All over the world countries followed our lead, shut down Taiwan’s embassies, and expelled her diplomats. Our former allies have since been treated as global pariahs.

During the 1990s and into the new century, Republicans, acting on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, voted annually to grant Most Favored Nation trade status for China. They then voted to make it permanent and escort China into the WTO.

What did China get out of the new U.S. policy? Vast investment and $4 trillion in trade surpluses at America’s expense over 25 years.

From the backward country mired in the madness of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1972, China grew by double-digits yearly to become the foremost manufacturing nation on earth, and has used its immense earnings from trade to make itself a military power to rival the United States.

China now claims all the islands of the South China Sea, has begun converting reefs into military bases, targeted hundreds of missiles on Taiwan, claimed the Senkakus held by Japan, ordered U.S. warships out of the Taiwan Strait, brought down a U.S. EP-3 on Hainan island in 2001, and then demanded and got from Secretary of State Colin Powell an apology for violating Chinese airspace.

Beijing has manipulated her currency, demanded transfers of U.S. technology, and stolen much of what of U.S. did not cover.

For decades, China has declared a goal of driving the United States out beyond the second chain of islands off Asia, i.e., out of the Western Pacific and back to Guam, Hawaii and the West Coast.

During these same decades, some of us were asking insistently what we were getting in return.

Thus Trump’s phone call seemed the right signal to Beijing — while we recognize one China, we have millions of friends on Taiwan in whose future as a free people we retain an interest.

China bristled at Trump’s first communication between U.S. and Taiwanese leaders since 1979, with Beijing indicating that Trump’s failure to understand the Asian situation may explain the American’s gaffe.

Sunday, Vice President-elect Mike Pence assured us that nothing of significance should be read into the 15-minute phone call of congratulations.

Trump, however, was less polite and reassuring, giving Beijing the wet mitten across the face for its impertinence:

“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea?”

Trump then answered his own question, “I don’t think so.”

According to The Washington Post, the phone call from Taiwan to Trump was no chance happening. It had been planned for weeks. And people in Trump’s inner circle are looking to closer ties to Taiwan and a tougher policy toward Beijing.

This suggests that Trump was aware there might be a sharp retort from Beijing, and that his tweets dismissing Chinese protests and doubling down on the Taiwan issue were both considered and deliberate.

Well, the fat is in the fire now.

Across Asia, every capital is waiting to see how Xi Jinping responds, for a matter of face would seem to be involved.

On the trade front, China is deeply vulnerable. U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods would cause a sudden massive loss of income to factories in China and a stampede out of the country to elsewhere in Asia by companies now producing in the Middle Kingdom.

On the other hand, without China using its economic leverage over North Korea, it is unlikely any sanctions the U.S. and its allies can impose will persuade Kim Jong Un to halt his nuclear weapons program.

China can choke North Korea to death. But China can also step back and let Pyongyang become a nuclear weapons state, though that could mean Seoul and Tokyo following suit, which would be intolerable to Beijing.

Before we go down this road, President-elect Trump and his foreign policy team ought to think through just where it leads — and where it might end.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 12, 2016, 10:28:49 PM
Will Trump Defy McCain & Marco?

Patrick J. Buchanan

12-12-16

http://buchanan.org/blog/will-trump-defy-mccain-marco-126173

By Patrick J. Buchanan

When word leaked that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, a holder of the Order of Friendship award in Putin’s Russia, was Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, John McCain had this thoughtful response:

“Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully, and a murderer and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.”

Yet, Putin is something else, the leader of the largest nation on earth, a great power with enough nuclear weapons to wipe the United States off the face of the earth. And we have to deal with him.

McCain was echoed by the senior Democrat on foreign relations, Bob Menendez, who said naming Tillerson secretary of state would be “alarming and absurd … guaranteeing Russia has a willing accomplice in the (Trump) Cabinet guiding our nation’s foreign policy.”

Sen Marco Rubio chimed in: “Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a Secretary of State.”

If just three GOP senators vote no on Tillerson, and Democrats vote as a bloc against him, his nomination would go down. President Trump would sustain a major and humiliating defeat.

Who is Tillerson? A corporate titan, he has traveled the world, represented Exxon in 60 countries, is on a first-name basis with countless leaders, and is endorsed by Condi Rice and Robert Gates.

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation — “A man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money” — may be a bit of a stretch when it comes to OPEC and the global oil market.

Yet there is truth to it. Most businessmen are interested in doing deals, making money, and, if the terms are not met, walking away, not starting a war.

And here is the heart of the objection to Tillerson. He wants to end sanctions and partner with Putin’s Russia, as does Trump. But among many in the mainstream media, think tanks, websites, and on the Hill, this is craven appeasement. For such as these, the Cold War is never over.

The attacks on Tillerson coincide with new attacks on Russia, based on CIA sources, alleging that not only did Moscow hack into the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign, and leak what it found to hurt Hillary Clinton, but Russia was trying to help elect Trump, and succeeded.

Why would Moscow do this?

Monday’s editorial in The New York Times explains: “In Mr. Trump, the Russians had reason to see a malleable political novice, one who had surrounded himself with Kremlin lackeys.”

Backed by Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, McCain has announced an investigation. The goal, said the Times, is to determine “whether anyone within Trump’s inner circle coordinated with the Kremlin and whether Moscow spread fake news to hurt Mrs. Clinton.”

What is going on here? More than meets the eye.

The people who most indignantly condemned Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate as a scurrilous scheme to delegitimize his presidency, now seek to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

The Times editorial spoke of a “darkening cloud” already over the Trump presidency, and warned that a failure to investigate and discover the full truth of Russia’s hacking could only “feed suspicion among millions of Americans that … (t)he election was indeed rigged.”

Behind the effort to smear Tillerson and delegitimize Trump lies a larger motive. Trump has antagonists in both parties who alarmed at his triumph because it imperils the foreign policy agenda that is their raison d’etre, their reason for being.

These people do not want to lift sanctions on Moscow. They do not want an end to the confrontation with Russia. As is seen by their bringing in tiny Montenegro, they want to enlarge NATO to encompass Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

They have in mind the permanent U.S. encirclement of Russia.

They want to provide offensive weapons to Kiev to reignite the cινιℓ ωαr in the Donbass and enable Ukraine to move on Crimea. This would mean a war with Russia that Ukraine would lose and we and our NATO allies would be called upon to intervene in and fight.

Their goal is to bring down Putin and bring about “regime change” in Moscow.

In the campaign, Trump said he wanted to get along with Russia, to support all the forces inside Syria and Iraq fighting to wipe out ISIS and al-Qaida, and to stay out of any new Middle East wars — like the disaster in Iraq — that have cost us “six trillion dollars.”

This is what America voted for when it voted for Trump — to put America First and “make America great again.” But War Party agitators are already beating the drums for confrontation with Iran.

Early in his presidency, if not before, Trump is going to have to impose his foreign policy upon his own party and, indeed, upon his own government. Or his presidency will be broken, as was Lyndon Johnson’s.

A good place to begin is by accepting the McCain-Marco challenge and nominating Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. Let’s get it on.

Image edit and remix by Linda Muller at Buchanan.org – Original Photo by Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 4.0

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 20, 2016, 08:28:03 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/real-saboteurs-trump-foreign-policy-126270

The Real Saboteurs of a Trump Foreign Policy

12-19-2016

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The never-Trumpers are never going to surrender the myth that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump.

Their investment in the myth is just too huge.

For Clinton and her campaign, it is the only way to explain how they booted away a presidential election even Trump thought he had lost in November. To the mainstream media, this is the smoking gun in their Acela Corridor conspiracy to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sees Russian hacking as a way to put a cloud over the administration before it begins. But it is the uber-hawks hereabouts who are after the really big game.

They seek to demonize Putin as the saboteur of democracy — someone who corrupted an American presidential election to bring about victory for a “useful idiot” whom Clinton called Putin’s “puppet.”

If the War Party can convert this “fake story” into the real story of 2016, then they can scuttle any Trump effort to attain the rapprochement with Russia that Trump promised to try to achieve.

If they can stigmatize Trump as “Putin’s president” and Putin as America’s implacable enemy, then the Russophobes are back in business.

Nor is the War Party disguising its goal.

Over the weekend, Sen. John McCain called for a congressional select committee to investigate Russian hacking into the Clinton campaign. The purpose of the investigations, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, “is to put on President Trump’s desk crippling sanctions against Russia.”

“They need to pay a price,” Graham chortled on Twitter.

“Crippling sanctions” would abort any modus vivendi, any deal with Russia, before Trump could negotiate one. Trump would have to refuse to impose them — and face the firestorm to follow. The War Party is out to dynamite any detente with Russia before it begins.

Among the reasons Trump won is that he promised to end U.S. involvement in the costly, bloody and interminable wars in the Middle East the Bushites and President Barack Obama brought us — and the neocons relish — and to reach a new understanding with Russia and Putin.

But to some in Washington, beating up on Russia is a conditioned reflex dating to the Cold War. For others in the media and the front groups called think tanks, Russophobia is in their DNA.

Though Julian Assange says WikiLeaks did not get the emails from Russia, this has to be investigated. Did Russia hack the DNC’s email system and John Podesta’s email account? Did Putin direct that the emails be provided to WikiLeaks to disrupt democracy or defeat Clinton?

Clinton says Putin has had it in for her because he believes she was behind the anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow in 2011.

But if there is to be an investigation of clandestine interference in the politics and elections of foreign nations, let’s get it all out onto the table.

The CIA director and his deputies should be made to testify under oath, not only as to what they know about Russia’s role in the WikiLeaks email dumps but also about who inside the agency is behind the leaks to The Washington Post designed to put a cloud over the Trump presidency before it begins.

Agents and operatives of the CIA should be subjected to lie detector tests to learn who is leaking to the anti-Trump press.

Before any congressional investigation, President-elect Trump should call in his new director of the CIA, Rep. Mike Pompeo, and tell him to run down and remove, for criminal misconduct, any CIA agents or operatives leaking secrets to discredit his election.

Putin, after all, is not an American. The CIA saboteurs of the Trump presidency are. Will the media investigate the leakers? Not likely, for they are the beneficiaries of the leaks and co-conspirators of the leakers.

The top officials of the CIA and Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, should be called to testify under oath. Were they behind anti-Putin demonstrations during the Russian elections of 2011?

Did the CIA or NED have a role in the “color-coded” revolutions to dump over pro-Russian governments in Moscow’s “near abroad”?

If Russia did intrude in our election, was it payback for our intrusions to bring about regime change in its neighborhood?

What role did the CIA, the NED and John McCain play in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014? McCain was seen cheering on the crowds in Independence Square in Kiev.

Trump has promised a more hopeful foreign policy than that of the Republicans he denounced and is succeeding. No more wars where vital interests are not imperiled. No more U.S. troops arriving as first responders for freeloading allies.

The real saboteurs of his new foreign policy may not be inside the Ring Road in Moscow; rather, they may be inside the Beltway around D.C.

The real danger may be that a new Trump foreign policy could be hijacked or scuttled by anti-Trump Republicans, not only on Capitol Hill but inside the executive branch itself.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 22, 2016, 11:06:58 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/europes-future-merkel-le-pen-126291

Europe Future: Merkel or Le Pen?

Patrick J. Buchanan

12-22-16

The terrorist who hijacked a truck in Berlin and ran over and killed 12 people, maiming and wounding 48 more, in that massacre in the Christmas market, has done more damage than he could imagine.

If the perpetrator is the jihadist from Tunisia who had no right to be in Germany, and had been under surveillance, the bell could begin to toll not only for Angela Merkel but for the European Union.

That German lassitude, and the naivete behind it, allowed this outrage validates the grim verdict of geostrategist James Burnham in “ѕυιcιdє of the West“: “Liberalism is the ideology of Western ѕυιcιdє.”

Both the transnational elite and populist right sense the stakes involved here. As news of the barbarous atrocity spread across Europe, the reactions were instantaneous and predictable.

Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, leading candidate for the presidency in 2017, declaimed: “How many more people must die at the hands of Islamic extremists before our governments close our porous borders and stop taking in thousands of illegal immigrants?”

Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom front-runner for prime minister of Holland, echoed Le Pen: “They hate and kill us. And nobody protects us. Our leaders betray us. We need a political revolution.

“Islamic immigration/Is an invasion,” he went on, “An existential problem/That will replace our people/Erase our culture.”

“These are Merkel’s dead,” tweeted Marcus Pretzell of the far-right Alternative for Germany about the victims in the Christmas mart.

Nicholas Farage, who led the campaign for British secession from the EU, called the Christmas massacre “the Merkel legacy.”

Europe’s populist right is laying this act of Islamist savagery at the feet of Merkel for her having opened Germany in 2015 to a million migrants and refugees from Syria and the Middle East wars.

Before Berlin, she was already on the defensive after mobs of migrants went about molesting and raping German girls in Cologne last New Year’s Eve.

Even admirers who share her belief in a Europe of open borders, that welcomes immigrants and refugees from Third World wars and despotisms, sense the gravity of Merkel’s crisis.

“Germans should not let the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin undermine liberal values,” ran the headline on The Washington Post editorial Dec. 22. Alarmed, the Post went on:

“What Germany cannot and must not do is … succuмb to the siren song of the anti-foreigner right-wing, which has been gaining strength across Europe and moved immediately to exploit the attack ahead of the September 2017 national elections.”

The New York Times delivered its customary castigation of the European populist right but, in a note of near-desperation, if not of despair, implored Europe’s liberals not to lose faith.

“With each new attack, whether on a Christmas market or a mosque, the challenge to Europe to defend tolerance, inclusion, equality and reason grows more daunting. If Europe is to survive as a beacon of democratic hope in a world rent by violent divisions, it must not cede those values.”

But less and less does Europe appear to be listening.

Indeed, as Europe has been picking up its dead and wounded for over a decade, from terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels, the peoples of Europe seem less interested in hearing recitals of liberal values than in learning what their governments are going to do to keep the Islamist killers out and make them safe.

Salus populi suprema lex.

Liberals may admonish us that all races, creeds, cultures are equal, that anyone from any continent, country or civilization can come to the West and assimilate. That discrimination against one group of immigrants in favor of another — preferring, say, Lebanese Christians to Syrian Muslims — is illiberal and undemocratic.

But people don’t believe that. Europe and America have moved beyond the verities of 20th-century liberalism.

The cruel experiences of the recent past, and common sense, dictate that open borders are Eurail passes for Islamist terrorists, who are anxious to come and kill us in the West. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.

In our time, there has taken place, is taking place, an Islamic awakening. Of 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, hundreds of millions accept strict sharia law about how to deal with apostasy and infidels.

Scores of millions in the Middle East wish to drive the West out of their world. Thousands are willing to depart and come to Europe to terrorize our societies. They see themselves at war with us, as their ancestors were at war with the Christian world for 1,000 years.

Only liberal ideology calls for America and Europe to bring into their home countries endless numbers of migrants, without being overly concerned about who they are, whence they come or what they believe.

Right-wing and anti-immigrant parties are succeeding in Europe for a simple reason. Mainstream parties are failing in the first duty of government — to protect the safety and security of the people.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 30, 2016, 09:49:42 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/israel-first-america-first-126338

America First or Israel First

Patrick J Buchanan

12-29-2016

Donald Trump has a new best friend.

“President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel,” gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations.

Netanyahu accused Kerry of “colluding” in and “orchestrating” an anti-Israel, stab-in-the-back resolution in the Security Council, then lying about it. He offered to provide evidence of Kerry’s complicity and mendacity to President Trump.

Bibi then called in the U.S. ambassador and read him the riot act for 40 minutes. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer charged that not only did the U.S. not “stand up to and oppose the gang-up” at the U.N., “the United States was actually behind that gang-up.”

When Ben Rhodes of the National Security Council called the charges false, Dermer dismissed President Obama’s man as a “master of fiction.”

Query: Why is Dermer not on a plane back to Tel Aviv?

Some of us can recall how Eisenhower ordered David Ben-Gurion to get his army out of Sinai in 1957, or face sanctions.

Ben-Gurion did as told. Had he and his ambassador castigated Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as the Israelis dissed John Kerry, Ike would have called the U.S. ambassador home.

Indeed, Ike’s threat of sanctions against Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s government, which had also invaded Egypt, brought Eden down.

But then Dwight Eisenhower was not Barack Obama, and the America of 1956 was a more self-respecting nation.

Still, this week of rancorous exchanges between two nations that endlessly express their love for each other certainly clears the air.

While Kerry has been denounced for abstaining on the U.N. resolution calling Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem illegal and an impediment to peace, this has been U.S. policy for years.

And Kerry’s warning in his Wednesday speech that at the end of this road of continuous settlement-building lies an Israel that is either a non-Jєωιѕн or a non-democratic state is scarcely anti-Semitic.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history, has warned his countrymen, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jєωιѕн, or non-Democratic.”

“If the bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote” added Barak, “this will be an apartheid state.” Of John Kerry’s speech, Barak said, “Powerful, lucid … World & majority in Israel think the same.”

Defense Secretary-designate Gen. James Mattis warned in 2013 that Israeli settlements were leading to an “apartheid” state.

After Joe Biden visited Israel in 2010, to learn that Netanyahu just approved 1,600 new units in East Jerusalem, Gen. David Petraeus warned: “Arab anger on the Palestine question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnership with governments and people in the region.”

Yet facts and reality, however unpleasant, cannot be denied.

The two-state solution is almost surely dead. Netanyahu is not going to remove scores of thousands of Jєωιѕн settlers from Judea and Samaria to cede the land to a Palestinian state. After all, Bibi opposed Ariel Sharon’s removal of 8,000 Jєωιѕн settlers from Gaza.

How will all this impact the new Trump administration?

Having tweeted, “Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching,” and having named a militant Zionist as his ambassador, Trump is certain to tilt U.S. policy heavily toward Israel.

Politically, this will bring rewards in the U.S. Jєωιѕн community.

The Republican Party will become the “pro-Israel” party, while the Democrats can be portrayed as divided and conflicted, with a left wing that is pro-Palestine and sympathetic to sanctions on Israel.

And the problem for Trump in a full embrace of Bibi?

Britain and France, which voted for the resolution where the U.S. abstained, are going to go their separate way on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as is the world.

Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Arabs will be pressured by their peoples and by the militant states of the region like Iran, to distance themselves from the Americans or face internal troubles.

And once U.S. pressure ends and settlement building in the West Bank proceeds, Netanyahu, his hawkish Cabinet, the Israeli lobby, the neocons and the congressional Republicans will start beating the drums for Trump to terminate what he himself has called that “horrible Iran deal.”

Calls are already coming for the cancellation of the sale of 80 Boeing jets to Iran. Yet, any U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, or reimposition of sanctions on Iran, will further split us off from our European allies. Not only did Britain and France vote for the Security Council resolution, both are party, as is Germany, to the Iran deal.

Having America publicly reassert herself as Israel’s best friend, with “no daylight” between us, could have us ending up as Israel’s only friend — and Israel as our only friend in the Middle East.

Bibi’s Israel First policy must one day collide with America First.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 02, 2017, 10:15:14 PM
Can Trump and Putin Avert Cold War 2

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 1-2-2017

http://buchanan.org/blog/can-trump-putin-avert-cold-war-ii-126354

In retaliation for the hacking of John Podesta and the DNC, Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and ordered closure of their country houses on Long Island and Maryland’s Eastern shore.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that 35 U.S. diplomats would be expelled. But Vladimir Putin stepped in, declined to retaliate at all, and invited the U.S. diplomats in Moscow and their children to the Christmas and New Year’s party at the Kremlin.

“A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger,” reads Proverbs 15:1. “Great move,” tweeted President-elect Trump, “I always knew he was very smart!”

Among our Russophobes, one can almost hear the gnashing of teeth.

Clearly, Putin believes the Trump presidency offers Russia the prospect of a better relationship with the United States. He appears to want this, and most Americans seem to want the same. After all, Hillary Clinton, who accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet,” lost.

Is then a Cold War II between Russia and the U.S. avoidable?

That question raises several others.

Who is more responsible for both great powers having reached this level of animosity and acrimony, 25 years after Ronald Reagan walked arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev through Red Square? And what are the causes of the emerging Cold War II?

Comes the retort: Putin has put nuclear-capable missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave between Poland and Lithuania.

True, but who began this escalation?

George W. Bush was the one who trashed Richard Nixon’s ABM Treaty and Obama put anti-missile missiles in Poland. After invading Iraq, George W. Bush moved NATO into the Baltic States in violation of a commitment given to Gorbachev by his father to not move NATO into Eastern Europe if the Red Army withdrew.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, says John McCain.

Russia did, after Georgia invaded its breakaway province of South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers. Putin threw the Georgians out, occupied part of Georgia, and then withdrew.

Russia, it is said, has supported Syria’s Bashar Assad, bombed U.S.-backed rebels and participated in the Aleppo slaughter.

But who started this horrific cινιℓ ωαr in Syria?

Was it not our Gulf allies, Turkey, and ourselves by backing an insurgency against a regime that had been Russia’s ally for decades and hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean?

Did we not exercise the same right of assisting a beleaguered ally when we sent 500,000 troops to aid South Vietnam against a Viet Cong insurgency supported by Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow?

That’s what allies do.

The unanswered question: Why did we support the overthrow of Assad when the likely successor regime would have been Islamist and murderously hostile toward Syria’s Christians?

Russia, we are told, committed aggression against Ukraine by invading Crimea.

But Russia did not invade Crimea. To secure their Black Sea naval base, Russia executed a bloodless coup, but only after the U.S. backed the overthrow of the pro-Russian elected government in Kiev.

Crimea had belonged to Moscow from the time of Catherine the Great in the 18th century, and the Russia-Ukraine relationship dates back to before the Crusades. When did this become a vital interest of the USA?

As for Putin’s backing of secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, he is standing by kinfolk left behind when his country broke apart. Russians live in many of the 14 former Soviet republics that are now independent nations.

Has Putin no right to be concerned about his lost countrymen?

Unlike America’s elites, Putin is an ethnonationalist in a time when tribalism is shoving aside transnationalism as the force of the future.

Russia, it is said, is supporting right-wing and anti-EU parties. But has not our National Endowment for Democracy backed regime change in the Balkans as well as in former Soviet republics?

We appear to be denouncing Putin for what we did first.

Moreover, the populist, nationalist, anti-EU and secessionist parties in Europe have arisen on their own and are advancing through free elections.

Sovereignty, independence, a restoration of national identity, all appear to be more important to these parties than what they regard as an excessively supervised existence in the soft-dictatorship of the EU.

In the Cold War between Communism and capitalism, the single-party dictatorship and the free society, we prevailed.

But in the new struggle we are in, the ethnonational state seems ascendant over the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual “universal nation” whose avatar is Barack Obama.

Putin does not seek to destroy or conquer us or Europe. He wants Russia, and her interests, and her rights as a great power to be respected.

He is not mucking around in our front yard; we are in his.

The worst mistake President Trump could make would be to let the Russophobes grab the wheel and steer us into another Cold War that could be as costly as the first, and might not end as peacefully.

Reagan’s outstretched hand to Gorbachev worked. Trump has nothing to lose by extending his to Vladimir Putin, and much perhaps to win.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 06, 2017, 10:51:57 AM
Is Liberal Democracy an Endangered Species

Patrick J. Buchanan

1/5/2017

http://buchanan.org/blog/liberal-democracy-endangered-species-126366

“As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy,” writes William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, “it is illiberal democracy.”

Galston’s diagnosis is not wrong, and his alarm is not misplaced.

Yet why does America’s great export, liberal democracy, which appeared to be the future of the West if not of mankind at the Cold War’s end, now appear to be a church with a shrinking congregation?

Why is liberal democracy losing its appeal?

A front-page story about France’s presidential election, in the same day’s Journal, suggests an answer.

In the final round next May, the French election is likely to come down to a choice of Marine Le Pen or Francois Fillon.

Le Pen is the “let France be France” candidate of the National Front. Fillon is a traditionalist Catholic from northwest France, home to the martyred resistance of the Revolution — the legendary Vendee.

Fillon won practicing and nonpracticing Catholics alike by a landslide, and took 3 in 5 votes of those professing other faiths.

Le Pen wants France to secede from the EU and move closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The five million Arabs and Muslims currently in France, the prospective arrival of millions more, and recent Islamic terrorist atrocities have all propelled her candidacy.

Fillon succeeded in his primary by identifying himself as a man of Catholic beliefs and values and an opponent of same-sex marriage and abortion. He does not repudiate secularism, but believes that the France that was “the eldest daughter of the church” should also be heard.

Together, what do the Le Pen and Fillon candidacies tell us?

France and Europe may be moving inexorably away from a liberal democratic, de-Christianized and militantly secularist America. If we are the future, less and less do France and Europe appear to want that future.

While our elites welcome the Third World immigration that is changing the face of America, France and Europe are recoiling from and reacting against it. The French wish to remain who and what they are, a land predominantly of one language, one culture, one people.

America preaches that all religions are equal and should be treated equally. France does not seem to share that liberal belief. And just as the Middle East seems to want no more churches or Christians, France and Europe appear to want no more mosques or Muslims.

Where America’s elites may celebrate same-sex marriage and “reproductive rights,” more and more Europeans are identifying with the social values of Putin’s Russia. Pro-Putin parties are surging in Europe. Pro-America parties have been facing losses and defections.

“Because human beings are equal, any form of ethnocentrism that denies their equality must be rejected,” writes Galston.

That may well be what liberal democracy commands.

But the 24 nations that emerged from the disintegration of the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were all built on ethnonational foundations — Croatia and Serbia, Estonia and Latvia, Georgia and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova.

And was it not their unique ethnic identities that caused South Ossetia and Abkhazia to break free of Georgia?

Indeed, if what America has on offer is a liberal democracy of 325 million, which is multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual, which celebrates its “diversity,” then where in Europe can one find a great party preaching this as the future their country and continent should embrace?

European peoples are largely fleeing from the future America preaches and promises.

Europe’s nations are rising up against what liberal democracy has produced in the USA.

Galston contends correctly that, “few leaders and movements in the West dare to challenge the idea of democracy itself.”

True, so far. But worldwide, Caesarism appears on the march.

Russia, China, Turkey, Egypt and the Philippines exemplify the new popularity of the strongman state. Western liberals initially cheered the Arab Spring, but what it produced curbed their enthusiasm. Free elections in Palestine and Lebanon produced victories for Hamas and Hezbollah.

Though Galston chastises the Polish and Hungarian governments as illiberal democracies, they seem to remain popular at home.

What, then, does the future hold?

The present crisis of Europe has been produced by the migration of tens of millions of Third World peoples never before assimilated in any European nation, and by the pollution and poisoning of these nations’ traditional culture.

This has caused millions to recoil and declare: If this is what liberal democracy produces, then to hell with it.

And if Europe is moving away from what America has become and has on offer, what is there to cause Europeans to turn around and re-embrace liberal democracy? Why not try something else?

In Brexit, the English were voting against the diverse liberal democracy that their capital of Londonistan had become.

Donald Trump’s victory represented a rejection of Barack Obama’s America. And whether he succeeds, what is there to cause America to look back with nostalgia on the America Obama came to represent?

Our Founding Fathers believed that democracy represented the degeneration of a republic; they feared and loathed it, and felt that it was the precursor of dictatorship. They may have been right again.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 12, 2017, 09:20:13 PM
buchanan.org/blog/iran-nuclear-deal-alive-dead-126399

Iran Nuclear Deal-Alive or Dead

1-10-17

Patrick J. Buchanan

Though every Republican in Congress voted against the Iran nuclear deal, “Tearing it up … is not going to happen,” says Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Hopefully, the chairman speaks for the president-elect.

During the campaign, Donald Trump indicated as much, saying that, though the U.S. got jobbed in the negotiations — “We have a horrible contract, but we do have a contract” — he might not walk away.

To Trump, a deal’s a deal, even a bad one. And we did get taken.

In 2007 and 2011, all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies assured us, “with high confidence,” that Iran did not have an atomic bomb program.

Yet our folks forked over $50 billion for an Iranian show and tell to prove they were not doing what our 17 intelligence agencies told us, again and again, they were not doing.

Why did we disbelieve our own intelligence, and buy into the “Chicken Little” chatter about Iran being “only months away from a bomb”?

Corker also administered a cold shower to those who darkly warn of a secret Iranian program to produce a bomb: “In spite of all the flaws in the agreement, nothing bad is going to happen relative to nuclear development in Iran in the next few years. It’s just not.”

Under the deal, Iran has put two-thirds of the 19,000 centrifuges at Natanz in storage, ceased enriching uranium to 20 percent at Fordow, poured concrete into the core of its heavy water reactor at Arak, and shipped 97 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country. Cameras and United Nations inspectors are all over the place.

Even should Iran decide on a crash program to create enough fissile material for a single A-bomb test, this would take a year, and we would know about it.

But why would they? After all, there are sound reasons of state why Iran decided over a decade ago to forego nuclear weapons.

Discovery of a bomb program could bring the same U.S. shock and awe as was visited on Iraq for its nonexistent WMD. Discovery would risk a pre-emptive strike by an Israel with scores of nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia and Turkey would have a powerful inducement to build their own bombs.

Acquiring a nuclear weapon would almost surely make Iran, a Persian nation on the edge of a sea of Arabs, less secure.

If, however, in the absence of a violation of the treaty by Iran, we tore up the deal, we could find ourselves isolated. For Britain, France and Germany also signed, and they believe the agreement is a good one.

Do we really want to force these NATO allies to choose between the deal they agreed to and a break with the United States?

If the War Party is confident Iran is going to cheat, why not wait until they do. Then make our case with evidence, so our allies can go with us on principle, and not from pressure.

Also at issue is the deal signed by Boeing to sell Iran 80 jetliners. Airbus has contracted to sell Iran 100 planes, and begun delivery. List price for the two deals: $34.5 billion. Tens of thousands of U.S. jobs are at stake.

Is a Republican Congress prepared to blow up the Boeing deal and force the Europeans to cancel the Airbus deal?

Why? Some contend the planes can be used to transport the Iranian Republican Guard. But are the Iranians, who are looking to tourism, trade and investment to rescue their economy, so stupid as to spend $35 billion for troop transports they could buy from Vladimir Putin?

The Ayatollah’s regime may define itself by its hatred of the Great Satan. Still, in 2009, even our War Party was urging President Obama to publicly back the Green Movement uprising against the disputed victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In 2013, moderates voted Hassan Rouhani into the presidency, where he began secret negotiations with the USA.

New elections will be held this year. And while the death of ex-President Rafsanjani this weekend has removed the powerful patron of Rouhani and strengthened the hard-liners, Ayatollah Khamenei is suffering from cancer, and the nation’s future remains undetermined.

Iran’s young seek to engage with the West. But if they are spurned, by the cancellation of the Boeing deal and the reimposition of U.S. sanctions, they will be disillusioned and discredited, and the mullahs will own the future.

How would that serve U.S. interests?

We still have sanctions on Iran for its missile tests in violation of Security Council resolutions, for its human rights violations, and for its support of groups like Hezbollah. But we also have in common with Iran an enmity for the Sunni terrorists of al-Qaida and ISIS.

We are today fighting in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, as the War Party works to confront Beijing in the South China Sea, Russia in Ukraine and North Korea over its nuclear and missile tests.

Could we perhaps put the confrontation with Iran on hold?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 13, 2017, 08:54:51 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-enemies-see-opening-126410

Trump's Enemies See an Opening

Patrick J Buchanan

1-12-17

“Fake news!” roared Donald Trump, the work of “sick people.”

The president-elect was referring to a 35-page dossier of lurid details of his alleged sɛҳuąƖ misconduct in Russia, worked up by a former British spy. A two-page summary of the 35 pages had been added to Trump’s briefing by the CIA and FBI — and then leaked to CNN.

This is “something that nαzι Germany would have done,” Trump said. Here, basically, is the story.

During the primaries, anti-Trump Republicans hired the ex-spy to do “oppo research” on Trump, i.e., to dig up dirt.

The spy contacted the Russians. They told him that Trump, at a Moscow hotel in 2013, had been engaged in depraved behavior, that they had the films to blackmail him, and that Trump’s aides had been colluding with them.

When Trump won the nomination, Democrats got the dossier and began shopping it around to the mainstream media. Some sought to substantiate the allegations. None could. So none of them published the charges.

In December, a British diplomat gave the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who personally turned it over to James Comey of the FBI.

On Jan. 7, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and his colleagues at the NSA, CIA and FBI decided the new president needed to know about the dossier. They provided him with a two-page synopsis.

Once CNN learned Trump had been briefed, the cable news network reported on the unpublished dossier, without going into the lurid details.

BuzzFeed released all 35 pages. The story exploded.

Besides Trump’s understandable outrage, his Jan. 11 press conference produced related news.

U.S. intelligence agencies had for months contended that it was Russia who hacked the DNC emails and those of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. Putin’s objectives, they contend, were to damage both U.S. democracy and Hillary Clinton, whom Putin detests, and to aid Trump.

Trump had previously dismissed claims of Russian hacking as unproved conjecture, and also as being advanced to delegitimize his victory.

Wednesday, Trump conceded Russia did it: “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” adding, Vladimir Putin “should not be doing it.”

The stakes in all of this are becoming huge.

Clearly, Trump hopes to work out with Putin the kind of detente that President Nixon achieved with Leonid Brezhnev.

This should not be impossible. For, unlike the 1970s, there is no Soviet Empire stretching from Havana to Hanoi, no Warsaw Pact dominating Central Europe, no Communist ideology steering Moscow into constant Cold War conflict with the West.

Russia is a great power with great power interests. But she does not seek to restore a global empire or remake the world in her image. U.S.-Russian relations are thus ripe for change.

But any such hope is now suddenly impaired.

The howls of indignation from Democrats and the media — that Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat were due to Putin’s involvement in our election — have begun to limit Trump’s freedom of action in dealing with Russia. And they are beginning to strengthen the hand of the Russophobes and the Putin-is-Hitler crowd in both parties.

When Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson went before the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Marco Rubio demanded to know why he would not publicly declare Putin a “war criminal.”

The more toxic Putin-haters can make the Russian president, the more difficult for President Trump to deal with him, even if that is in the vital national interest of the United States.

The sort of investigation for which McCain has been clamoring, and the Beltway drums have now begun to beat, could make it almost impossible for President Trump to work with President Putin.

The Washington Post describes the engine it wishes to see built:

“The investigators of Russian meddling, whether a Congressional select committee or an independent commission, should have bipartisan balance, full subpoena authority, no time limit and a commitment to make public as much as possible of what they find.”

What the Post seeks is a Watergate Committee like the one that investigated the Nixon White House, or a commission like the ones that investigated 9/11 and the JFK assassination.

Trump “should recognize,” writes the Post, “that the credibility of his denials of any Russian connections is undermined by his refusal to release tax returns and business records.”

In short, when the investigation begins, Trump must produce the evidence to establish his innocence. Else, he is Putin’s man.

This city is salivating over another Watergate, another broken president. But President-elect Trump should be aware of what is at stake. As The Wall Street Journal writes:

“Mr. Trump’s vehement denials (of collusion with Moscow and corrupt behavior) also mean that if we learn in the future that Russia does have compromising details about him, his Presidency could be over.”

Yes, indeed, very big stakes.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 17, 2017, 07:56:56 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/reagan-trump-american-nationalists-126426

Reagan and Trump: American Nationalists

1-16-2017

Patrick J. Buchanan

Since World War II, the two men who have most terrified this city by winning the presidency are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

And they have much in common.

Both came out of the popular culture, Reagan out of Hollywood, Trump out of a successful reality TV show. Both possessed the gifts of showmen — extraordinarily valuable political assets in a television age that deals cruelly with the uncharismatic.

Both became instruments of insurgencies out to overthrow the establishment of the party whose nomination they were seeking.

Reagan emerged as the champion of the postwar conservatism that had captured the Republican Party with Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. His victory in 1980 came at the apogee of conservative power.

The populism that enabled Trump to crush 16 Republican rivals and put him over the top in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan had also arisen a decade and a half before — in the 1990s.

A decisive advantage Reagan and Trump both enjoyed is that in their decisive years, the establishments of both parties were seen as having failed the nation.

Reagan was victorious after Russia invaded Afghanistan; Americans were taken hostage in Tehran; and the U.S. had endured 21 percent interest rates, 13 percent inflation, 7 percent unemployment and zero growth.

When Trump won, Americans had gone through years of wage stagnation. Our industrial base had been hollowed out. And we seemed unable to win or end a half-dozen Middle East wars in which we had become ensnared.

What is the common denominator of both the Reagan landslide of 1980 and Trump’s victory?

Both candidates appealed to American nationalism.

In the late 1970s, Reagan took the lead in the campaign to save the Panama Canal. “We bought it. We paid for it. It’s ours. And we’re going to keep it,” thundered the Gipper.

While he lost the fight for the Canal when the GOP establishment in the Senate lined up behind Jimmy Carter, the battle established Reagan as a leader who put his country first.

Trump unapologetically seized upon the nationalist slogan that was most detested by our globalist elites, “America first!”

He would build a wall, secure the border, stop the invasion. He would trash the rotten trade treaties negotiated by transnational elites who had sold out our sovereignty and sent our jobs to China.

He would demand that freeloading allies in Europe, the Far East and the Persian Gulf pay their fair share of the cost of their defense.

In the rhetoric of Reagan and Trump there is a simplicity and a directness that is familiar to, and appeals to, the men and women out in Middle America, to whom both directed their campaigns.

In his first press conference in January of 1981, Reagan said of the Kremlin, “They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat. … We operate on a different set of standards.”

He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the modern world.”

The State Department was as wary of what Reagan might say or do then as they are of what Trump might tweet now.

But while there are similarities between these outsiders who captured their nominations and won the presidency by defying and then defeating the establishments of both political parties, the situations they confront are dissimilar.

Reagan took office in a time of Cold War clarity.

Though there was sharp disagreement over how tough the United States should be and what was needed for national defense, there was no real question as to who our adversaries were.

As had been true since the time of Harry Truman, the world struggle was between communism and freedom, the USSR and the West, the Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance.

There was a moral clarity then that no longer exists now.

Today, the Soviet Empire is gone, the Warsaw Pact is gone, the Soviet Union is gone, and the Communist movement is moribund.

NATO embraces three former republics of the USSR, and we confront Moscow in places like Crimea and the Donbass that no American of the Reagan era would have regarded as a national interest of the United States.

We no longer agree on who our greatest enemies are, or what the greatest threats are.

Is it Vladimir Putin’s Russia? Is it Iran? Is it China, which Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson says must be made to vacate the air, missile and naval bases it has built on rocks and reefs in a South China Sea that Beijing claims as its national territory?

Is it North Korea, now testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles?

Beyond issues of war and peace, there are issues at home — race, crime, policing, abortion, LGBT rights, immigration (legal and illegal) and countless others on which this multicultural, multiracial and multiethnic nation is split two, three, many ways.

The existential question of the Trump era might be framed thus: How long will this divided democracy endure as one nation and one people?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 20, 2017, 05:48:42 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/new-president-new-world-126437

New President, New World

Patrick J. Buchanan

1-20-2017

“Don’t Make Any Sudden Moves” is the advice offered to the new president by Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, which has not traditionally been known as a beer hall of populist beliefs.

Haass meant the president should bring his National Security Council together to anticipate the consequences before tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or shooting down a missile being tested by Kim Jong Un.

In arguing against rash action, Haass is correct.

Where the CFR and the establishment are wrong, and Donald Trump is right, however, is in recognizing the new world we have entered.

The old order is passing away. Treaties and alliances dating from the Cold War are ceasing to be relevant and cannot long be sustained.

Economic patriotism and ethnonationalism, personified by Trump, seem everywhere ascendant. Transnationalism is yielding to tribalism.

The greater danger for President Trump is that the movement he led will be abandoned, its hopes dashed, and the agenda that Trump rejected and routed will be reimposed by a Republican Establishment and its collaborators in politics and the press.

Again, it was Trump who read the nation right, which is why he is taking the oath today.

The existential threat to the West no longer comes from the East, from a Russian army crashing through Poland and Germany and driving for the Elbe and Fulda Gap.

The existential threat to the West comes, instead, from the South.

The billion-plus peoples of the Maghreb, Middle East and sub-Sahara, whose numbers are exploding, are moving inexorably toward the Med, coming to occupy the empty places left by an aging and dying Europe, all of whose native-born populations steadily shrink.

American’s bleeding border is what concerns Americans, not the borders of Estonia, South Korea, Kuwait or the South China Sea.

When Trump calls NATO “obsolete,” he is saying that the great threat to the West is not Putin’s recapture of a Crimea that belonged to Russia for 150 years. And if the price of peace is getting out of Russia’s face and Russia’s space, maybe we should pay it.

George Kennan himself, the architect of Cold War containment of Stalin’s Russia, admonished us not to move NATO to Russia’s border.

Of Brexit, the British decision to leave the EU, Trump said this week, “People, countries want their own identity and the U.K. wanted its own identity … so if you ask me, I believe others will leave.”

Is he not right? Is it so shocking to hear a transparent truth?

How could Europe’s elites not see the populist forces rising? The European peoples wished to regain their lost sovereignty and national identity, and they were willing to pay a price to achieve it.

Apparently, the Davos crowd cannot comprehend people who believe there are more important things than wealth.

Yet while President Trump should avoid rash actions, if he is to become a transformational president, he will spurn an establishment desperately seeking to hold onto the world that is passing away.

Article V of the NATO treaty may require us to treat a Russian move in the Baltic as an attack on the United States. But no sane president will start a war with a nuclear-armed Russia over Estonia.

No Cold War president would have dreamed of so rash an action.

Rather than risk such a war, Ike refused to send a rifle or bullet to the heroic Hungarian rebels in 1956. Painful, but Ike put America first, just as Trump pledged to do.

And given the strength of ethnonationalism in Europe, neither the eurozone nor the EU is likely to survive the decade. We should prepare for that day, not pretend that what is taking place across Europe, and indeed worldwide, is some passing fever of nationalism.

Notwithstanding Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson’s diktat, the United States is not going to force China to vacate the fortified reefs in a South China Sea she claims as her national territory.

Stick to that demand, and we best prepare for war.

As for the Taiwan card, it was played in 1972 by Richard Nixon as the price of his opening to China. Four decades ago, Jimmy Carter cut diplomatic ties to Taiwan and terminated our security pact.

For Xi Jinping to accept that Taiwan might be negotiable would mean an end of him and the overthrow of his Communist Party of China.

The Chinese will fight to prevent a permanent loss of Taiwan.

The imperative of the new era is that the great nuclear powers — China, Russia, the United States — not do to each other what Britain, France and Germany did to each other a century ago over a dead archduke.

President Trump should build the wall, secure the border, impose tariffs, cut taxes, free up the American economy, bring the factories home, create millions of jobs and keep us out of any new wars.

With rare exceptions, wars tend to be fatal to presidencies.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 24, 2017, 01:00:05 PM
Trump: America for Americans

Patrick J. Buchanan

1-24-2017

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-america-americans-126459

As the patriotic pageantry of Inauguration Day gave way to the demonstrations of defiance Saturday, our new America came into view. We are two nations now, two peoples.

Though bracing, President Trump’s inaugural address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of the president being sworn in.

Trump’s inaugural was Jacksonian.

He was speaking to and for the forgotten Americans whose hopes he embodies, pledging to be their champion against those who abandon them in pursuit of higher, grander, nobler causes. Declared Trump:

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed.”

Is this not true? American wages have stagnated as scores of thousands of factories were shut down or shipped abroad. Five of the six wealthiest counties in the U.S. today, measured by median household income, are the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Inaugurals should lift us up, wailed the media, this was “dark.”

And Trump did paint a grim picture — of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our … students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime and the gangs and the drugs…”

But is this not also a reality of America 2017?

Indeed, it carries echoes of FDR’s second inaugural: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. … The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Some of the recoil to Trump’s speech is surely traceable to an awareness by those covering and commenting upon it — that this was a searing indictment of them and their own ruling class.

With America’s political elite sitting behind him, Trump accused them of enriching “foreign industry,” not ours, of subsidizing other countries’ armies but neglecting our own, of defending other nation’s borders while leaving America’s borders unprotected.

Then, in the line that will give his address its name in history, he declared: “From this day forward it’s going to be only America First.”

Prediction: Trump’s “America First” inaugural will be recalled as the most controversial, but will be among the most remembered.

What did Trump mean by “America First”?

“Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

What does it mean for the world?

“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of other nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example. We will shine for everyone to follow.”

Denounced as isolationism, this is in an old and great tradition.

Ronald Reagan talked of America being a “shining city on a hill” for other nations to emulate.

John Quincy Adams declared:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled there will America’s hearts, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

When the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth came to America seeking aid for the revolution of 1848, Henry Clay told him:

“Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty, that … avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on the western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction among the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.”

The charge of “isolationist” was thrown in the face of Clay. But he prevailed, and America stayed out of Europe’s wars until 1917 when Woodrow Wilson, fatefully, plunged us in.

In 1936, FDR said, “We shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars. … We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. … I hate war.”

What Trump was saying in his inaugural is that we will offer our free and independent republic as an example to other nations, but it is not our providential mission to reshape the world in our own image.

“We will reinforce old alliances” that are in our interests, Trump declared. But we are approaching the end of an era where we fought other nations’ wars and paid other nations’ bills.

We will no longer bleed and bankrupt our country for the benefit of others. Henceforth, America will be of, by, and for Americans.

Is that not what the nation voted for?

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 27, 2017, 08:01:00 AM
What Trump's Wall Means to the World

1-26-17

Patrick J. Buchanan

http://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-wall-says-world-126472

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote poet Robert Frost in the opening line of “Mending Walls.”

And on the American left there is something like revulsion at the idea of the “beautiful wall” President Trump intends to build along the 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico.

The opposition’s arguments are usually rooted in economics or practicality. The wall is unnecessary. It will not stop people from coming illegally. It costs too much.

Yet something deeper is afoot here. The idea of a permanent barrier between our countries goes to the heart of the divide between our two Americas on the most fundamental of questions.

Who are we? What is a nation? What does America stand for?

Those desperate to see the wall built, illegal immigration halted, and those here illegally deported, see the country they grew up in as dying, disappearing, with something strange and foreign taking its place.

It is not only that illegal migrants take jobs from Americans, that they commit crimes, or that so many require subsidized food, welfare, housing, education and health care. It is that they are changing our country. They are changing who we are.

Two decades ago, the Old Right and the neocons engaged in a ferocious debate over what America was and is.

Were we from the beginning a new, unique, separate and identifiable people like the British, French and Germans?

Or was America a new kind of nation, an ideological nation, an invented nation, united by an acceptance of the ideas and ideals of Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln and Dr. King?

The Old Right contended that America existed even before the Revolution, and that this new nation, this new people, wrote its own birth certificate, the Constitution. Before Washington, Madison and Hamilton ever went to Philadelphia, America existed.

What forced the premature birth of the nation — was the Revolution.

We did not become a new nation because we embraced Jefferson’s notion about all men being “created equal.” We became a new people from our familial break with the Mother Country, described in the declaration as a severing of ties with our “brethren” across the sea who no longer deserved our loyalty or love.

The United States came into being in 1789. The Constitution created the government, the state. But the country already existed.

When the Irish came in the mid-19th century to escape the famine and the Germans to escape Bismarck’s Prussia, and the Italians, Jєωs, Poles, Greeks, Slovaks came to Ellis Island, they were foreigners who became citizens, and then, after a time, Americans.

Not until decades after the Great Migration of 1890-1920, with the common trials of the Depression, World War II and Cold War, were we truly forged again into one united nation and people.

By 1960, almost all of us shared the same heroes and holidays, spoke the same language and cherished the same culture.

What those with memories of that America see happening today is the disintegration of our nation of yesterday. The savagery of our politics, exemplified in the last election, testifies to how Americans are coming to detest one another as much as the Valley Forge generation came to detest the British from whom they broke free.

In 1960, we were a Western Christian country. Ninety percent of our people traced their roots to Europe. Ninety percent bore some connection to the Christian faith. To the tens of millions for whom Trump appeals, what the wall represents is our last chance to preserve that nation and people.

To many on the cosmopolitan left, ethnic or national identity is not only not worth fighting for, it is not even worth preserving. It is a form of atavistic tribalism or racism.

The Trump wall then touches on the great struggle of our age.

Given that 80 percent of all people of color vote Democratic, neither the Trump movement nor the Republican Party can survive the Third Worldization of the United States now written in the cards.

Moreover, with the disintegration of the nation we are seeing, and with talk of the breakup of states like Texas and secession of states like California, how do we survive as one nation and people?

Old Europe never knew mass immigration until the 20th century.

Now, across Europe, center-left and center-right parties are facing massive defections because they are perceived as incapable of coping with the existential threat of the age — the overrunning of the continent from Africa and the Middle East.

President Trump’s wall is a statement to the world: This is our country. We decide who comes here. And we will defend our borders.

The crisis of our time is not that some Americans are saying this, but that so many are too paralyzed to say it, or do not care, or embrace what is happening to their country.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 31, 2017, 05:59:41 PM
The First Firestorm

1-30-2017

Patrick J Buchanan

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-first-firestorm-126483

That hysterical reaction to the travel ban announced Friday is a portent of what is to come if President Donald Trump carries out the mandate given to him by those who elected him.

The travel ban bars refugees for 120 days. From Syria, refugees are banned indefinitely. And a 90-day ban has been imposed on travel here from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

Was that weekend-long primal scream really justified?

As of Monday, no one was being detained at a U.S. airport.

Yet the shrieking had not stopped. All five stories on page one of Monday’s Washington Post were about the abomination. The New York Times’ editorial, “Trashing American Ideals and Security,” called it bigoted, cowardly, xenophobic, Islamophobic, un-American, unrighteous.

This ban, went the weekend wail, is the “Muslim ban” of the Trump campaign. But how so, when not one of the six largest Muslim countries — Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey — was on the list? Missing also were three-dozen other Muslim countries.

Of the seven countries facing a 90-day ban, three are U.S.-designated state sponsors of terror, and the other four are war zones. Clearly, this is about homeland security, not religious discrimination.

The criterion for being included in the travel ban appears to be that these places are the more likely breeding grounds for terrorists.

Yet there are lessons for the Trump White House in the media-stoked panic and outrage at the end of his first week in office.

First, Steve Bannon’s observation that the media are “the opposition party,” is obviously on target. While Sen. Chuck Schumer was crying on camera that the ban was “un-American,” the media were into the more serious business of stampeding and driving the protesters.

A second lesson is one every White House learns. Before a major decision is announced, if possible, get everyone’s input and everyone on board to provide what Pat Moynihan called the “second and third echelons of advocacy.” Those left out tend to leak.

A third lesson Trump should learn is that the establishment he routed and the city he humiliated are out to break him as they broke LBJ on Vietnam, Nixon on Watergate, and almost broke Reagan on the Iran-Contra affair.

While the establishment may no longer be capable of inspiring and leading the nation, so detested is it, it has not lost its appetite or its ability to break and bring down presidents.

And Trump is vulnerable, not only because he is an envied outsider who seized the highest prize politics has on offer, but because his agenda would cancel out that of the elites.

They believe in open borders, free trade, globalization. Trump believes in securing the Southern border, bringing U.S. industry home, economic nationalism, “America First.”

They want endless immigration from the Third World to remake America into the polyglot “universal nation” of Ben Wattenberg’s utopian vision. Trump’s followers want back the America they knew.

Our foreign policy elites see democratization as a vocation and an autocratic Russia as an implacable enemy. Trump instead sees Moscow as a potential ally against real enemies like al-Qaida and ISIS.

There is another reason for the reflexive howl at Trump’s travel ban. The establishment views it, probably correctly, as the first move toward a new immigration policy, built on pre-1965 foundations, and rooted in a preference for Western-Christian immigrants first.

When the Times rages that “American ideals” or “traditional American values” are under attack by Trump, what they really mean is that their ideology and agenda are threatened by Trump.

We are headed for a series of collisions and crises, and what has happened in Europe will likely happen here. As the Third World invasion and growing Islamization of the Old Continent — which the EU has proven unable to stop — has discredited centrist parties and continuously fed a populist-nationalist uprising there, so may it here also.

And Trump not only appears to have no desire to yield to his enemies in politics and the media, he has no choice, as he is now the personification of a surging Middle American counterrevolution.

Undeniably, there are great numbers of Americans who agree with the libels the Times showered on Trump and, by extension, his backers whom Hillary Clinton designated “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … deplorables.”

But by whatever slurs they are called, Middle Americans seem prepared to fight. And history shows that such people do not calmly accept the loss of what is most precious to them — the country they grew up in, the country they love.

They have turned to Trump to lead them. Why should he not, having been raised up by them, and knowing in his own heart what the establishment and the media think of him and would do to him?

Ten days in, and already it is “Game On!”

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: klasG4e on January 31, 2017, 06:44:13 PM
Imagine if Pat ever did a slam dunk in telling the truth about 9-11: who planned it, who executed it, and who covered it up.  Even the courageous Congressman JamesTraficant never seemed to be able to bring himself to telling us flat out who it was who was really behind 9-11. Ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was perhaps the only member of Congress who ever nailed it and nailed it publicly on 9-11.  

9-11 has been the direct/indirect cause of the death and maiming of millions of innocent people and the loss of trillions of dollars.  And yet the lie of 9-11 goes on and on and on.  
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 04, 2017, 09:41:40 AM
The Coming Clash with Iran

2-2-2017

http://buchanan.org/blog/coming-clash-iran-126494

By Patrick J. Buchanan

When Gen. Michael Flynn marched into the White House Briefing Room to declare that “we are officially putting Iran on notice,” he drew a red line for President Trump. In tweeting the threat, Trump agreed.

His credibility is now on the line.

And what triggered this virtual ultimatum?

Iran-backed Houthi rebels, said Flynn, attacked a Saudi warship and Tehran tested a missile, undermining “security, prosperity, and stability throughout the Middle East,” placing “American lives at risk.”

But how so?

The Saudis have been bombing the Houthi rebels and ravaging their country, Yemen, for two years. Are the Saudis entitled to immunity from retaliation in wars that they start?

Where is the evidence Iran had a role in the Red Sea attack on the Saudi ship? And why would President Trump make this war his war?

As for the Iranian missile test, a 2015 U.N. resolution “called upon” Iran not to test nuclear-capable missiles. It did not forbid Iran from testing conventional missiles, which Tehran insists this was.

Is the United States making new demands on Iran not written into the nuclear treaty or international law — to provoke a confrontation?

Did Flynn coordinate with our allies about this warning of possible military action against Iran? Is NATO obligated to join any action we might take?

Or are we going to carry out any retaliation alone, as our NATO allies observe, while the Israelis, Gulf Arabs, Saudis and the Beltway War Party, which wishes to be rid of Trump, cheer him on?

Bibi Netanyahu hailed Flynn’s statement, calling Iran’s missile test a flagrant violation of the U.N. resolution and declaring, “Iranian aggression must not go unanswered.” By whom, besides us?

The Saudi king spoke with Trump Sunday. Did he persuade the president to get America more engaged against Iran?

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker is among those delighted with the White House warning:

“No longer will Iran be given a pass for its repeated ballistic missile violations, continued support of terrorism, human rights abuses and other hostile activities that threaten international peace and security.”

The problem with making a threat public — Iran is “on notice” — is that it makes it almost impossible for Iran, or Trump, to back away.

Tehran seems almost obliged to defy it, especially the demand that it cease testing conventional missiles for its own defense.

This U.S. threat will surely strengthen those Iranians opposed to the nuclear deal and who wish to see its architects, President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, thrown out in this year’s elections.

If Rex Tillerson is not to become a wartime secretary of state like Colin Powell or Dean Rusk, he is going to have to speak to the Iranians, not with defiant declarations, but in a diplomatic dialogue.

Tillerson, of course, is on record as saying the Chinese should be blocked from visiting the half-dozen fortified islets they have built on rocks and reefs in the South China Sea.

A prediction: The Chinese will not be departing from their islands, and the Iranians will defy the U.S. threat against testing their missiles.

Wednesday’s White House statement makes a collision with Iran almost unavoidable, and a war with Iran quite possible.

Why did Trump and Flynn feel the need to do this now?

There is an awful lot already on the foreign policy plate of the new president after only two weeks, as pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine are firing artillery again, and North Korea’s nuclear missile threat, which, unlike Iran’s, is real, has yet to be addressed.

High among the reasons that many supported Trump was his understanding that George W. Bush blundered horribly in launching an unprovoked and unnecessary war on Iraq.

Along with the 15-year war in Afghanistan and our wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen, our 21st-century U.S. Mideast wars have cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of dead. And they have produced a harvest of hatred of America that was exploited by al-Qaida and ISIS to recruit jihadists to murder and massacre Westerners.

Osama’s bin Laden’s greatest achievement was not to bring down the twin towers and kill 3,000 Americans, but to goad America into plunging headlong into the Middle East, a reckless and ruinous adventure that ended her post-Cold War global primacy.

Unlike the other candidates, Trump seemed to recognize this.

It was thought he would disengage us from these wars, not rattle a saber at an Iran that is three times the size of Iraq and has as its primary weapons supplier and partner Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

When Barack Obama drew his red line against Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr, and Assad appeared to cross it, Obama discovered that his countrymen wanted no part of the war that his military action might bring on.

President Obama backed down — in humiliation.

Neither the Ayatollah Khamenei nor Trump appears to be in a mood to back away, especially now that the president has made the threat public.

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I disagree with Patrick Buchanan opinion that Osama Bin Laden,
Arabs, and Muslims are responsible for the events of 9-11-2001.
Any fair study of the events of 9-11 will prove that we attacked
ourselves to justify an unjust wars and a unjust police state at
home.  All supported by deliberate lies and falsehoods.

Bashar Assad had nothing to do with the gassing of his own people.
The gassing was done by the rebels supported by the U.S., NATO,
and Turkey. The gas originated from the U.S.

This rush to war against Iran is just for Israel. Any large scale war
would sink our economy.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: klasG4e on February 04, 2017, 12:35:08 PM
RomanCatholic1953
Quote

I disagree with Patrick Buchanan opinion that Osama Bin Laden,
Arabs, and Muslims are responsible for the events of 9-11-2001.

How is it that someone so intelligent, experienced, and astute as Pat could actually believe such nonsense?  Surely, he must have had various individuals over the years confront him on 9-11.  How could he persist in such a belief?  Blackmail?  Threats against his life and or that of his loved ones?  Same same for Ron Paul and many other prominent people.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Matto on February 04, 2017, 12:51:33 PM
Quote from: klasG4e
Imagine if Pat ever did a slam dunk in telling the truth about 9-11: who planned it, who executed it, and who covered it up.  Even the courageous Congressman JamesTraficant never seemed to be able to bring himself to telling us flat out who it was who was really behind 9-11. Ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was perhaps the only member of Congress who ever nailed it and nailed it publicly on 9-11.

According to wikipedia, less than half of the people polled believe in the official story of 9-11. Of those who do not believe it, the largest number of them say they did not know who did it, followed by those who think the US government did it, and then there are those who think Israel did it and those who think someone else did it.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: klasG4e on February 04, 2017, 02:34:49 PM
Matto
Quote
According to wikipedia, less than half of the people polled believe in the official story of 9-11. Of those who do not believe it, the largest number of them say they did not know who did it, followed by those who think the US government did it, and then there are those who think Israel did it and those who think someone else did it.

Good thing we always have Jєωpedia uh....I mean wikipedia to rely on.  In any event,  hopefully a good majority of people on CathInfo realize it was an inside/outside job -- Zionist (gentile and Jєω) money/power grubbing neo-cons in the U.S. working in unison with the hard core Zionist power elite (via Mossad and 3rd party contractors) in Israel.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 07, 2017, 10:36:02 AM
Moral Supremacy of Mr. Putin

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016?

Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.

Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.

During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally Bashar Assad alone.

With this diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a “thug” or a “murderer.”

Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.

O’Reilly pressed, “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

To which Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

While his reply was clumsy, Trump’s intent was commendable.

If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a “killer.”

Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a “thug” and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between America and Russia is outrageous.

Apparently referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, “When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?”

Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.

When President Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the “Butcher of Budapest” for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?

Did President Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about Mao Zedong — that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?

While Nixon was in Peking, Mao was conducting his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in millions of deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s crimes went unmentioned in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a “long march” together.

John McCain calls Putin a KGB thug, “a murderer, and a killer.”

Yet, Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest who engineered the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels with Russian tanks, became head of the KGB. And when he rose to general secretary of the Communist Party, Ronald Reagan wanted to talk to him, as he had wanted to talk to every Soviet leader.

Why? Because Reagan believed the truly moral thing he could do was negotiate to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

He finally met Gorbachev in 1985, when the USSR was occupying Afghanistan and slaughtering Afghan patriots.

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of “American exceptionalism” is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.

Undeniably, we were on God’s side in World War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?

Was it not at least morally problematic what we did to Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of women and children were blasted and burned to death?

How many innocent Iraqis have perished in the 13 years of war we began, based on falsified or fake evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction?

In Russia, there have been murders of journalists and dissidents. Yes, and President Rodrigo Duterte, our Philippine ally, has apparently condoned the deaths of thousands of drug dealers and users since last summer.

The Philippine Catholic Church calls it “a reign of terror.”

Should we sever our treaty ties to the Duterte regime?

Have there been any extrajudicial killings in the Egypt of our ally Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since he overthrew the elected government?

Has our Turkish ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, killed no innocents in his sweeping repression since last summer’s attempted coup?

Some of us remember a Cold War in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet dealt summarily with our common enemies in Chile, and when the Savak of our ally the Shah of Iran was not a 501(c)(3) organization.

Sen. Rubio notwithstanding, the CIA has not been a complete stranger to “wet” operations or “terminating with extreme prejudice.”

Was it not LBJ who said of the Kennedys, who had arranged multiple assassination attempts of Fidel Castro, that they had been “operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”?

If Trump’s talking to Putin can help end the bƖσσdshɛd in Ukraine or Syria, it would appear to be at least as ethical an act as pulpiteering about our moral superiority on the Sunday talk shows.

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Trump is correct that we did our share of killing. Executing false wars
in the middle east against Iraq under false pretenses.  Drone killings
mostly innocent people such as wedding parties. Supporting and
supplying weapons to ISIS.
Even Obama bragged about killing people.  A former Secretary
of State Albright said that causing the deaths of innocent Iraqi
Children was worth it  through the sanctions that prevented food
and medical supplies from getting to them.
Just because you did not read this on the mainstream media
does not mean it did not happen.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: klasG4e on February 07, 2017, 10:50:42 AM
Spot on Pat!.  Excellent column!  O'Reilley is nothing more than a paid thug.
Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 10, 2017, 11:46:56 AM
Trump Must Break Judicial Power

2-9-2017

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Disheartening and demoralizing,” wailed Judge Neil Gorsuch of President Trump’s comments about the judges seeking to overturn his 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from the Greater Middle East war zones.

What a wimp. Did our future justice break down crying like Sen. Chuck Schumer? Sorry, this is not Antonin Scalia. And just what horrible thing had our president said?

A “so-called judge” blocked the travel ban, said Trump. And the arguments in court, where 9th Circuit appellate judges were hearing the government’s appeal, were “disgraceful.” “A bad student in high school would have understood the arguments better.”

Did the president disparage a couple of judges? Yep.

Yet compare his remarks to the tweeted screeds of Elizabeth Warren after her Senate colleague, Jeff Sessions, was confirmed as attorney general.

Sessions, said Warren, represents “radical hatred.” And if he makes “the tiniest attempt to bring his racism, sexism & bigotry” into the Department of Justice, “all of us” will pile on.

Now this is hate speech. And it validates Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to use Senate rules to shut her down.

These episodes reveal much about America 2017.

They reflect, first, the poisoned character of our politics. The language of Warren — that Sessions is stepped in “racism, sexism & bigotry” echoes the ugliest slander of the Hillary Clinton campaign, where she used similar words to describe Trump’s “deplorables.”

Such language, reflecting as it does the beliefs of one-half of America about the other, rules out any rapprochement in America’s social or political life. This is pre-cινιℓ ωαr language.

For how do you sit down and work alongside people you believe to be crypto-nαzιs, Klansmen and fascists? Apparently, you don’t. Rather, you vilify them, riot against them, deny them the right to speak or to be heard.

And such conduct is becoming common on campuses today.

As for Trump’s disparagement of the judges, only someone ignorant of history can view that as frightening.

Thomas Jefferson not only refused to enforce the Alien & ѕєdιтισn Acts of President John Adams, his party impeached Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase who had presided over one of the trials.

Jackson defied Chief Justice John Marshall’s prohibition against moving the Cherokees out of Georgia to west of the Mississippi, where, according to the Harvard resume of Sen. Warren, one of them bundled fruitfully with one of her ancestors, making her part Cherokee.

When Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus violated the Constitution, Lincoln considered sending U.S. troops to arrest the chief justice.

FDR proposed adding six justices to emasculate a Supreme Court of the “nine old men” he reviled for having declared some New Deal schemes unconstitutional.

President Eisenhower called his Supreme Court choices Earl Warren and William Brennan two of the “worst mistakes” he made as president. History bears Ike out. And here we come to the heart of the matter.

Whether the rollout of the president’s temporary travel ban was ill-prepared or not, and whether one agrees or not about which nations or people should be subjected to extreme vetting, the president’s authority in the matter of protecting the borders and keeping out those he sees as potentially dangerous is universally conceded.

That a district judge would overrule the president of the United States on a matter of border security in wartime is absurd.

When politicians don black robes and seize powers they do not have, they should be called out for what they are — usurpers and petty tyrants. And if there is a cause upon which the populist right should unite, it is that elected representatives and executives make the laws and rule the nation. Not judges, and not justices.

Indeed, one of the mightiest forces that has birthed the new populism that imperils the establishment is that unelected justices like Warren and Brennan, and their progeny on the bench, have remade our country without the consent of the governed — and with never having been smacked down by Congress or the president.

Consider. Secularist justices de-Christianized our country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to achieve racial balance in public schools. They turned over centuries of tradition and hundreds of state, local and federal laws to discover that the rights to an abortion and same-sex marriage were there in Madison’s Constitution all along. We just couldn’t see them.

Trump has warned the judges that if they block his travel ban, and this results in preventable acts of terror on American soil, they will be held accountable. As rightly they should.

Meanwhile, Trump’s White House should use the arrogant and incompetent conduct of these federal judges to make the case not only for creating a new Supreme Court, but for Congress to start using Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution — to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and to reclaim its stolen powers.

A clipping of the court’s wings is long overdue.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: klasG4e on February 10, 2017, 12:33:04 PM
Federal judges are almost never disciplined and they serve for life.  A good formula to promote real arrogance!  Aside, from that many of them -- and I mean MANY of them -- are freemasons and they have a hugely inordinate number of the Tribe within their ranks.:A good formula for a highly corrupt federal judiciary!
 
























Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 17, 2017, 08:35:46 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/deep-state-targets-trump-126550

The Deep State Targets Trump

2/16/17

By Patrick J. Buchanan

When Gen. Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser, Bill Kristol purred his satisfaction, “If it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

To Kristol, the permanent regime, not the elected president and his government, is the real defender and rightful repository of our liberties.

Yet it was this regime, the deep state, that carried out what Eli Lake of Bloomberg calls “The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn.”

And what were Flynn’s offenses?

In December, when Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador. He apparently counseled the envoy not to overreact, saying a new team would be in place in a few weeks and would review U.S.-Russian relations.

“That’s neither illegal nor improper,” writes Lake.

Vladimir Putin swiftly declared that there would be no reciprocal expulsions and U.S. diplomats and their families would be welcome at the Kremlin’s Christmas and New Year’s parties.

Diplomatic crisis averted. “Great move … (by V. Putin),” tweeted Trump, “I always knew he was very smart.”

But apparently, this did not sit well with the deep state.

For when Vice President Pence told a TV show that Flynn told him that sanctions did not come up in conversation with the Russian ambassador, a transcript of Flynn’s call was produced from recordings by intelligence agencies, and its contents leaked to The Washington Post.

After seeing the transcript, the White House concluded that Flynn had misled Pence, mutual trust was gone, and Flynn must go.

Like a good soldier, Flynn took the bullet.

The real crime here, however, is not that the incoming national security adviser spoke with a Russian diplomat seeking guidance on the future president’s thinking. The real crime is the criminal conspiracy inside the deep state to transcribe the private conversation of a U.S. citizen and leak it to press collaborators to destroy a political career.

“This is what police states do,” writes Lake.

But the deep state is after larger game than General Flynn. It is out to bring down President Trump and abort any move to effect the sort of rapprochement with Russia that Ronald Reagan achieved.

For the deep state is deeply committed to Cold War II.

Hence, suddenly, we read reports of a Russian spy ship off the Connecticut, Delaware and Virginia coasts, of Russian jets buzzing a U.S. warship in the Black Sea, and Russian violations of Reagan’s INF treaty outlawing intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Purpose: Stampede the White House into abandoning any idea of a detente with Russia. And it appears to be working. At a White House briefing Tuesday, Sean Spicer said, “President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to … return Crimea.”

Is the White House serious?

Putin could no more survive returning Crimea to Ukraine than Bibi Netanyahu could survive giving East Jerusalem back to Jordan.

How does the deep state go about its work? We have seen a classic example with Flynn. The intelligence and investigative arms of the regime dig up dirt, and then move it to their Fourth Estate collaborators, who enjoy First Amendment immunity to get it out.

For violating their oaths and breaking the law, bureaucratic saboteurs are hailed as “whistleblowers” while the journalists who receive the fruits of their felonies put in for Pulitzers.

Now if Russians hacked into the DNC and John Podesta’s computer during the campaign, and, more seriously, if Trump aides colluded in any such scheme, it should be investigated.

But we should not stop there. Those in the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies who were complicit in a conspiracy to leak the contents of Flynn’s private conversations in order to bring down the national security adviser should be exposed and prosecuted.

An independent counsel should be appointed by the attorney general and a grand jury impaneled to investigate what Trump himself rightly calls “criminal” misconduct in the security agencies.

As for interfering in elections, how clean are our hands?

Our own CIA has a storied history of interfering in elections. In the late ’40s, we shoveled cash into France and Italy after World War II to defeat the Communists who had been part of the wartime resistance to the nαzιs and Fascists.

And we succeeded. But we continued these practices after the Cold War ended. In this century, our National Endowment for Democracy, which dates to the Reagan era, has backed “color revolutions” and “regime change” in nations across what Russia regards as her “near abroad.”

NED’s continued existence appears a contradiction of Trump’s inaugural declaration: “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”

The president and GOP should get out front here. Let Congress investigate Russia meddling in our election. And let a special prosecutor run down, root out, expose and indict those in the investigative and intel agencies who used their custody of America’s secrets, in collusion with press collaborators, to take down Trump appointees who are on their enemies lists.

Then put NED down.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 21, 2017, 02:23:50 PM
Is a Trump-Putin Detente Dead?

2-20-17

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-putin-detente-dead-126561

By Patrick J Buchanan

Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that he read the nation and the world better than his rivals.

He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethnonationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit.

While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them.

While our corporatists burn incense at the shrine of the global economy, Trump went to visit the working-class casualties. And those forgotten Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, responded.

And while Bush II and President Obama plunged us into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Trump saw that his countrymen wanted to be rid of the endless wars, and start putting America first.

He offered a new foreign policy. Mitt Romney notwithstanding, said Trump, Putin’s Russia is not “our number one geopolitical foe.”

Moreover, that 67-year-old NATO alliance that commits us to go to war to defend two dozen nations, not one of whom contributes the same share of GDP as do we to national defense, is “obsolete.”

Many of these folks are freeloaders, said Trump. He hopes to work with Russia against our real enemies, al-Qaida and ISIS.

This was the agenda Americans voted for. But what raises doubt about whether Trump can follow through on his commitments is the size and virulence of the anti-Trump forces in this city.

Consider his plan to pursue a rapprochement with Russia such as Ike, JFK at American University, Nixon and Reagan all pursued in a Cold War with a far more menacing Soviet Empire.

America’s elites still praise FDR for partnering with one of the great mass murderers of human history, Stalin, to defeat Hitler. They still applaud Nixon for going to China to achieve a rapprochement with the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, Mao Zedong.

Yet Trump is not to be allowed to achieve a partnership with Putin, whose great crime was a bloodless retrieval of a Crimea that had belonged to Russia since the 18th century.

The anti-Putin paranoia here is astonishing.

That he is a killer, a KGB thug, a murderer, is part of the daily rant of John McCain. At the Munich Security Conference this last weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham promised, “2017 is going to be a year of kicking Russia in the ass in Congress.” How’s that for statesmanship.

But how does a president negotiate a modus vivendi with a rival great power when the leaders of his own party are sabotaging him and his efforts?

As for the mainstream media, they appear bent upon the ruin of Trump, and the stick with which they mean to beat him to death is this narrative:

Trump is the Siberian Candidate, the creature of Putin and the Kremlin. His ties to the Russians are old and deep. It was to help Trump that Russia hacked the DNC and the computer of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, and saw to it WikiLeaks got the emails out to the American people during the campaign. Trump’s people secretly collaborated with Russian agents.

Believing Putin robbed Hillary Clinton of the presidency, Democrats are bent on revenge — on Putin and Trump.

And the epidemic of Russophobia makes it almost impossible to pursue normal relations. Indeed, in reaction to the constant attacks on them as poodles of Putin, the White House seems to be toughening up toward Russia.

Thus we see U.S. troops headed for Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, NATO troops being sent into the Baltic States, and new tough rhetoric from the White House about Russia having to restore Crimea to Ukraine. We read of Russian spy ships off the coast, Russian planes buzzing U.S. warships in the Black Sea, Russians deploying missiles outlawed by the arms control agreement of 1987.

An Ohio-class U.S. sub just test-fired four Trident missiles, which carry thermonuclear warheads, off the Pacific coast.

Any hope of cutting a deal for a truce in east Ukraine, a lifting of sanctions, and bringing Russia back into Europe seems to be fading.

Where Russians saw hope with Trump’s election, they are now apparently yielding to disillusionment and despair.

The question arises: If not toward better relations with Russia, where are we going with this bellicosity?

Russia is not going to give up Crimea. Not only would Putin not do it, the Russian people would abandon him if he did.

What then is the end goal of this bristling Beltway hostility to Putin and Russia, and the U.S.-NATO buildup in the Baltic and Black Sea regions? Is a Cold War II with Russia now an accepted and acceptable reality?

Where are the voices among Trump’s advisers who will tell him to hold firm against the Russophobic tide and work out a deal with the Russian president?

For a second cold war with Russia, its back up against a wall, may not end quite so happily as the first.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 28, 2017, 08:35:33 AM
http://buchanan.org/blog/lavrov-vs-mccain-russia-enemy-126589

Lavrov vs. McCain: Is Russia an Enemy?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The founding fathers of the Munich Security Conference, said John McCain, would be “be alarmed by the turning away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism.”

McCain was followed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who called for a “post-West world order.” Russia has “immense potential” for that said Lavrov, “we’re open for that inasmuch as the U.S. is open.”

Now McCain is not wrong. Nationalism is an idea whose time has come again. Those “old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism” do seem everywhere ascendant. But that is a reality we must recognize and deal with. Deploring it will not make it go away.

But what are these “universal values” McCain is talking about?

Democracy? The free elections in India gave power to Hindu nationalists. In Palestine, Hamas. In Lebanon, Hezbollah. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, then overthrown in a military coup welcomed by the world’s oldest and greatest democracy. Have we forgotten it was a democratically elected government we helped to overthrow in Kiev?

Democracy is a bus you get off when it reaches your stop, says Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, autocrat of Ankara, a NATO ally.

Is freedom of religion a “universal value”?

Preach or proselytize for Christianity in much of the Islamic world and you are a candidate for martyrdom. Practice freedom of speech in Xi Jinping’s China and you can wind up in a cell.

As for the Western belief in the equality of all voluntary sɛҳuąƖ relations, in some African and Muslim countries, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs are beheaded and adulterers stoned to death.

In Nuristan Province in U.S.-liberated Afghanistan this month, an armed mob of 300 besieged a jail, shot three cops and dragged out an 18-year-old woman who had eloped with her lover to escape an arranged marriage. Beaten by relatives, the girl was shot by an older brother with a hunting rifle and by a younger brother with his AK-47.

Afghan family values.

Her lover was turned over to the husband. An “honor killing,” and, like ѕυιcιdє bombings, not uncommon in a world where many see such actions as commendable in the sight of Allah.

McCain calls himself an “unapologetic believer in the West” who refuses “to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries.”

Lavrov seemed to be saying this:

Reality requires us here in Munich to recognize that, in the new struggle for the world, Russia and the U.S. are natural allies not natural enemies. Though we may quarrel over Crimea and the Donbass, we are in the same boat. Either we sail together, or sink together.

Does the foreign minister not have a point?

Unlike the Cold War, Moscow does not command a world empire. Though a nuclear superpower still, she is a nation whose GDP is that of Spain and whose population of fewer than 150 million is shrinking. And Russia threatens no U.S. vital interest.

Where America is besieged by millions of illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico, Russia faces to her south 1.3 billion Chinese looking hungrily at resource-rich Siberia and Russia’s Far East.

The China that is pushing America and its allies out of the East and South China Seas is also building a new Silk Road through former Russian and Soviet provinces in Central Asia. With an estimated 16 million Muslims, Russia is threatened by the same terrorists, and is far closer to the Middle East, the source of Sunni terror.

Is Putin’s Russia an enemy, as McCain seems to believe?

Before we can answer that question, we need to know what the new world struggle is about, who the antagonists are, and what the threats are to us.

If we believe the struggle is for “global democracy” and “human rights,” then that may put Putin on the other side. But how then can we be allies of President el-Sissi of Egypt and Erdogan of Turkey, and the kings, emirs and sultans of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman?

But if the new world struggle is about defending ourselves and our civilization, Russia would appear to be not only a natural ally, but a more critical and powerful one than that crowd in Kiev.

In August 1914, Europe plunged into a 50-month bloodbath over an αssαssιnαtҽd archduke. In 1939, Britain and France declared war to keep Poland from having to give up a Prussian port, Danzig, taken from Germany under the duress of a starvation blockade in 1919 and in clear violation of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Danzigers’ right of self-determination. In the two wars, 50 million to 100 million died.

Today, the United States is confronting Russia, a huge and natural ally, over a peninsula that had belonged to her since the 18th century and is 5,000 miles from the United States.

“We have immense potential that has yet to be tapped into,” volunteered Lavrov. But to deal, we must have “mutual respect.”

Hopefully, President Trump will sound out the Russians, and tune out the Beltway hawks.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 03, 2017, 10:15:55 AM
It’s Trump’s Party, Now
Thursday - March 2, 2017 at 8:54 pm

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life.

And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display.

Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer economic nationalism.

“We’ve lost more than one-fourth of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved,” thundered Trump, “and we’ve lost 60,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.”

Yet a Republican party that embraced NAFTA and voted MFN for China every time it came up gave Trump standing ovations.

“(W)e have inherited a series of tragic foreign policy disasters,” said Trump, “America has spent approximately six trillion dollars in the Middle East — all the while our infrastructure at home is crumbling.”

And from Congressional Republicans who backed every Bush-Obama war — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen — not a peep of protest, as their foreign policy legacy was being consigned to the dumpster.

Watching Republicans rise again and again to hail Trump called to mind the Frankish King Clovis who, believing his wife’s Christian God had interceded to give him victory over the Alemanni, saw his army converted by the battalions and baptized by the platoons.

One had thought the free-trade beliefs of Republicans were more deeply rooted than this.

“We have withdrawn the United States from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Trump exulted, having just tossed into the trash that mammoth trade deal beloved of Bush Republicans.

GOP champions of the TPP, if there are any left, sat mute.

Trump cited the first Republican president, Lincoln, as having got it right when he warned, “abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government (will) produce want and ruin among our people.”

Celebrating protectionism, hailing “America First!” in a virtual State of the Union address — it doesn’t get any better than this.

To open-borders Republicans who backed amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, Trump had this message, “We will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border.”

And the cheering did not stop.

The president invoked Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, the greatest public works project of the 20th century, as a model.

Yet Ike was opposed by the Taft wing of his party and Ike’s republicanism gave birth to the modern conservative movement.

Yet, in leading Republicans away from globalism to economic nationalism, Trump is not writing a new gospel. He is leading a lost party away from a modernist heresy — back to the Old-Time Religion.

In restating his commitment to the issues that separated him from the other Republicans and won him Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, however, Trump reaffirmed aspects of conservatism dear to his audience.

He committed himself to regulatory reform, freeing up the private sector, rolling back the administrative state. The Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines are on the way to completion. And Trump is all behind school choice.

While the speech was unifying and aspirational, the president set goals and laid down markers by which his presidency will be judged.

And none will be easy of attainment.

“Dying industries will come roaring back to life. … Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways … Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and, ultimately, stop. … Our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety and opportunity.”

As some of these domestic crises are rooted in the character, or lack of it, of people, they have proven, since Great Society days, to be beyond the capacity of government to solve.

Ronald Reagan was not wrong when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”

And while the president’s speech astonished critics as much as it reassured friends, it leaves large questions unanswered.

How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program — and not explode the deficit and national debt?

Now that we are ensnared in wars all over the Middle East, how do we extricate ourselves and come home without our enemies filling the vacuum?

How does the GOP repeal and replace Obamacare without cutting the benefits upon which millions of Americans have come to rely?

How do you eliminate an $800 billion merchandise trade deficit without tariffs that raise the price of cheap imports from abroad — on which Trump’s working-class voters have come to depend?

The Republican establishment today bends the knee to Caesar.

But how long before K Street lobbyists for transnational cartels persuade the GOP elite, with campaign contributions, to slow-walk the president’s America First agenda?

Tuesday’s speech established Trump as the man in charge.

But how loyal to him and his program will be the “deep state,” which dominates this city that gave Trump only 4 percent of its votes and, paranoically, believes him to be an agent of Vladimir Putin?

The Trump-Beltway wars have only just begun.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 07, 2017, 04:12:41 PM
The Beltway Conspiracy to Break Trump

3-6-17

http://buchanan.org/blog/beltway-conspiracy-break-trump-126646

By Patrick J. Buchanan

At Mar-a-Lago this weekend President Donald Trump was filled “with fury” says The Washington Post, “mad — steaming, raging, mad.”

Early Saturday the fuming president exploded with this tweet: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

The president has reason to be enraged. For what is afoot is a loose but broad conspiracy to break and bring him down, abort his populist agenda, and overturn the results of the 2016 election.

At its heart is the “deep state” — agents of the intel community, their media collaborators, and their amen corner in a Democratic party whose control of our permanent government is all but total.

At the heart of the case against Trump is what appears to be a Big Lie.

It is that Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s email account, then colluded with Trump’s friends or associates to systematically sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Therefore, Trump stole the election and is an illegitimate president. In this city, Trump is looked upon as a border-jumper, an illegal alien.

Yet let us consider the constituent components of the charge.

For months, we have heard that U.S. intel agencies agree that the Russians hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign, and gave the fruits of their cybertheft to WikiLeaks, because Putin wanted Trump to win.

For months, this storyline has been investigated by the FBI and the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress.

Yet where is the body of evidence that the Russians did this?

More critically, where is the evidence Trump’s people played an active role in the operation? Why is it taking the FBI the better part of a year to come up with a single indictment in this Trump-Putin plot?

Is this all smoke and mirrors?

In late February, The New York Times reported that Trump officials had been in regular touch with Russian intelligence officers.

The smoking gun had been found!

Yet, almost immediately after that report, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told Fox News “the top levels of the intelligence community” had assured him that the allegations of campaign contacts with Russia were “not only grossly overstated, but also wrong.”

If what Reince says is true, the real crime here is U.S. security officials enlisting their Fourth Estate collaborators, who enjoy First Amendment privileges against having to testify under oath or being prosecuted, to undermine the elected commander in chief.

Now we expect Russia to seek to steal our secrets as we steal theirs. After all, our NSA wiretapped Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Our National Endowment for Democracy pushes “color revolutions” to bring about regime change in the near abroad of Putin’s Russian Federation.

Our NGOs are being restricted, shut down, expelled from Russia, China, Israel and Egypt, because they have been caught interfering in the internal affairs of those countries.

There is talk that Putin use the pilfered emails as payback for Clinton’s urging demonstrators to take to the streets of Moscow to protest a narrow victory by his United Russia party in 2011.

As for the alleged wiretapping of Trump Tower, President Obama has denied ordering any such thing and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assures us nothing of the sort was ever done.

Yet, there are other reports that intelligence officials got a warrant to surveil Trump campaign officials or the Trump Tower, and, though failing to succeed in the FISA court that authorizes such surveillance in June, they did succeed in October.

If true, this is a far more explosive matter than whether a Trump aide may have told the Russians, “You’re doing a great job!” when WikiLeaks blew DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz out of her job for tilting the playing field against Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

What needs to be done now?

The White House should tell the Justice Department to tell the FBI to expedite its investigation and file a report on what was done by the Russians. And if any Trump campaign official criminally colluded with the Russians, send the recommendation to indict to Justice.

The acting attorney general should instruct Director James Comey to run down, remove and recommend for prosecution any FBI or intel agent who has leaked the fruits of their investigation, or fake news, to the media. If Comey cannot find the source of the leaks, or lies, coming out of this investigation, a housecleaning may be needed at the bureau.

While President Obama may not have ordered any surveillance of Trump or his advisors, the real question is whether he or Attorney General Loretta Lynch were aware of or approved of any surveillance of Trump and his staff during the campaign.

Russian hacking of the DNC is a problem, not a scandal. The scandal is this: Who inside the government of the United States is trying to discredit, damage or destroy the President of the United States?

For these are the real subversives.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 10, 2017, 10:13:43 AM
Is a Korean Missile Crisis Ahead?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

To back up Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis’ warning last month, that the U.S. “remains steadfast in its commitment” to its allies, President Donald Trump is sending B-1 and B-52 bombers to Korea.

Some 300,000 South Korean and 15,000 U.S. troops have begun their annual Foal Eagle joint war exercises that run through April.

“The two sides are like two accelerating trains coming toward each other with neither side willing to give way,” says Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, “Are (they) really ready for a head-on collision?”

So it would seem.

It is Kim Jong Un, 33-year-old grandson of that Stalinist state’s founding father, who launched the first Korean War, who brought on this confrontation.

In February, Kim’s half-brother was αssαssιnαtҽd in Malaysia in a VX nerve agent attack and five of Kim’s security officials were executed with anti-aircraft guns. Monday, Kim launched four missiles toward U.S. bases, with three landing in the Sea of Japan.

U.S. response: Begin immediate deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile shield in Korea.

This set off alarms in China. For while THAAD cannot shoot down Scuds on the DMZ, its radar can detect missile launches inside China, thereby, says Beijing, imperiling her deterrent.

For accepting THAAD, China has imposed sanctions on Seoul, and promised the U.S. a commensurate strategic response.

Minister Wang’s proposal for resolving the crisis: The U.S. and Seoul cancel the exercises and North Korea suspends the nuclear and missile tests.

How did we reach this crisis point?

In his 2002 “axis of evil” address, George W. Bush declared, “The United States … will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

He then launched a war on Iraq, which had no such weapons. But North Korea, hearing Bush’s threat, built and tested five atom bombs and scores of missiles, a few of intercontinental range.

Pyongyang has tested new presidents before.

In April 1969, North Korea shot down a U.S. EC-121 over the Sea of Japan, killing its entire crew. President Nixon, a war in Vietnam on his hands, let it pass, which he regretted ever after.

But this crisis raises larger questions about U.S. foreign policy.

Why, a quarter of a century after the Cold War, do we still have 28,000 troops in Korea? Not only does South Korea have twice the population of the North, but an economy 40 times as large, and access to U.S. weapons far superior to any in the North.

Why should Americans on the DMZ be among the first to die in a second Korean War? Should the North attack the South, could we not honor our treaty obligations with air and naval power offshore?

Gen. James Mattis’ warning last month was unambiguous:

“Any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated and any use of nuclear weapons would be met with a response that would be effective and overwhelming.”

JFK’s phrase in the Cuban crisis, “full retaliatory response,” comes to mind.

Hence the next move is up to Kim.

New tests by North Korea of missiles or atom bombs for an ICBM could bring U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities and missile sites, igniting an attack on the South.

For China, this crisis, whether it leads to war, a U.S. buildup in the South, or a U.S. withdrawal from Korea, is problematic.

Beijing cannot sit by and let her North Korean ally be bombed, nor can it allow U.S. and South Korean forces to defeat the North, bring down the regime, and unite the peninsula, with U.S. and South Korean soldiers sitting on the Yalu, as they did in 1950 before Mao ordered his Chinese army into Korea.

However, should U.S. forces withdraw from the South, Seoul might build her own nuclear arsenal, followed by Japan. For Tokyo could not live with two Koreas possessing nukes, while she had none.

This could leave China contained by nuclear neighbors: to the north, Russia, to the south, India, to the east, South Korea and Japan. And America offshore.

What this crisis reveals is that China has as great an interest in restraining North Korea as do we.

While the United States cannot back down, it is difficult to reconcile a second Korean war with our America first policy. Which is why some of us have argued for decades that the United States should moves its forces out of South Korea and off the Asian continent.

Events in Asia — Chinese claims to reefs and rocks in the South and East China Seas and North Korea’s menacing her neighbors — are pushing us toward a version of the Nixon Doctrine declared in Guam in 1969 that is consistent with America first:

While we will provide the arms for friends and allies to fight in their own defense in any future wars, henceforth, they will provide the troops.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 14, 2017, 10:42:19 AM
Is Turkey Lost to the West?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Not long ago, a democratizing Turkey, with the second-largest army in NATO, appeared on track to join the European Union.

That’s not likely now, or perhaps ever.

Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Angela Merkel’s Germany to Hitler’s, said the Netherlands was full of “nαzι remnants” and “fascists,” and suggested the Dutch ambassador go home.

What precipitated Erdogan’s outbursts?

City officials in Germany refused to let him campaign in Turkish immigrant communities on behalf of an April 16 referendum proposal to augment his powers.

When the Netherlands denied Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu landing rights, he exploded, saying: “The Netherlands … are reminiscent of the Europe of World War II. The same racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism.”

When Turkey’s family and social policies minister, Betul Sayan Kaya, drove from Germany to Rotterdam to campaign, Dutch police blocked her from entering the Turkish consulate and escorted her back to Germany.

Liberal Europeans see Erdogan’s referendum as a power grab by an unpredictable and volatile ruler who has fired 100,000 civil servants and jailed 40,000 Turks after last summer’s attempted coup, and is converting his country into a dictatorship.


This crisis was tailor-made for Geert Wilders, the anti-EU, anti-Muslim Dutch nationalist who is on the ballot in Wednesday’s Dutch general election.

Claiming credit for the tough stance of conservative Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Wilders tweeted: “I am telling all Turks in the Netherlands that agree with Erdogan: GO to Turkey and NEVER come back!”

“Wilders is a racist, fascist nαzι,” replied Cavusoglu.

Wilders had been fading from his front-runner position, but this episode may have brought him back. While no major Dutch party would join a government led by Wilders, if he runs first in the election March 15, the shock to Europe would be tremendous.

Rutte, however, who dominated the media through the weekend confrontation with the Turks, could be the beneficiary, as a resurgent nationalism pulls all parties toward the right.

All Europe now seems to be piling on the Turks. Danes, Swedes and Swiss are taking Europe’s side against Erdogan.

comments….

Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist National Front in France, called on the socialist regime to deny Turkish leaders permission to campaign in Turkish communities. She was echoed by conservative party candidate Francois Fillon, whose once-bright hopes for the presidency all but collapsed after it was learned his wife and children had held do-nothing jobs on the government payroll.

On April 23 comes the first round of the French elections. And one outcome appears predictable. Neither of the major parties — the socialists of President Francois Hollande or the Republicans of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy — may make it into the May 7 finals.

Le Pen, the anti-EU populist who would lift sanctions on Putin’s Russia, is running even with 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, a socialist running as the independent leader of a new movement.

Should Le Pen run first in April, the shock to Europe would be far greater than when her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made the finals in 2002.

At the end of 2017, neither Wilders nor Le Pen is likely to be in power, but the forces driving their candidacies are growing stronger.

Foremost among these is the gnawing ethnonational fear across Europe that the migration from the South — Maghreb, the Middle East and the sub-Sahara — is unstoppable and will eventually swamp the countries, cultures and civilization of Europe and the West.

The ugly and brutal diplomatic confrontation with Turkey may make things worse, as the Turks, after generous payments from Germany, have kept Syrian cινιℓ ωαr refugees from crossing its borders into Europe. Should Ankara open the gates, a new immigration crisis could engulf Europe this spring and summer.

Other ethnonational crises are brewing in a familiar place, the Balkans, among the successor states born of the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia.

In Bosnia, secessionists seek to pull the Serb Republic away from Sarajevo toward Belgrade. The Albanian minority in Macedonia is denouncing political discrimination. The Serbs left behind after Kosovo broke loose in 1999, thanks to 78 days of U.S. bombing of Serbia, have never been reconciled to their fate.

Montenegro has charged Russia with backing an attempted coup late last year to prevent the tiny nation from joining NATO.

The Financial Times sees Vladimir Putin’s hand in what is going on in the Western Balkans, where World War I was ignited with the June 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo.

The upshot of all this:

Turkey, a powerful and reliable ally of the U.S. through the Cold War, appears to be coming unmoored from Europe and the West, and is becoming increasingly sectarian, autocratic and nationalistic.

While anti-immigrant and anti-EU parties across Europe may not take power anywhere in 2017, theirs is now a permanent and growing presence, leeching away support from centrist parties left and right.

With Russia’s deepening ties to populist and nationalist parties across Europe, from Paris to Istanbul, Vlad is back in the game.

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Title: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 17, 2017, 07:38:36 AM
Is McCain Hijacking Trump’s Foreign Policy?
Thursday - March 16, 2017 at 10:33 pm

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“The senator from Kentucky,” said John McCain, speaking of his colleague Rand Paul, “is working for Vladimir Putin … and I do not say that lightly.”

What did Sen. Paul do to deserve being called a hireling of Vladimir Putin?

He declined to support McCain’s call for a unanimous Senate vote to bring Montenegro into NATO as the 29th member of a Cold War alliance President Trump has called “obsolete.”

Bordered by Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania, tiny Montenegro has a population roughly that of D.C., and sits on the western coast of the most volatile peninsula in Europe.

What strategic benefit would accrue from having Montenegro as an ally that would justify the risk of our having to go to war should some neighbor breach Montenegro’s borders?

Historically, the Balkans have been an incubator of war. In the 19th century, Otto van Bismarck predicted that when the Great War came, it would come out of “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.” And so it did when the Austrian archduke was αssαssιnαtҽd in Sarajevo June 28, 1914 by Serbian ethnonationalist Gavrilo Princip.

Aflame with ethnic, civil and sectarian war in the 1990s, the western Balkans are again in political turmoil. Milo Djukanovic, the longtime Montenegrin prime minister who resigned on election day in October, claims that he was targeted for assassination by Russia to prevent Montenegro’s accession to NATO.

Russia denies it. But on the Senate floor, McCain raged at Rand Paul: “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin … trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject of an attempted coup.”

But if Montenegro, awash in corruption and crime, is on the verge of an uprising or coup, why would the U.S. issue a war guarantee that could vault us into a confrontation with Russia — without a full Senate debate?

The vote that needs explaining here is not Rand Paul’s.

It is the votes of those senators who are handing out U.S.-NATO war guarantees to countries most Americans could not find on a map.

Is no one besides Sen. Paul asking the relevant questions here?

What vital U.S. interest is imperiled in who comes to power in Podgorica, Montenegro? Why cannot Europe handle this problem in its own back yard?

Has President Trump given McCain, who wanted President Bush to intervene in a Russia-Georgia war — over South Ossetia! — carte blanche to hand out war guarantees to unstable Balkan states?

Did Trump approve the expansion of NATO into all the successor states born of the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia?

Or is McCain hijacking U.S. foreign policy on NATO and Russia?

President Trump should tell the Senate: No more admissions to NATO, no more U.S. war guarantees, unless I have recommended or approved them. Foreign policy is made in the White House, not on the Senate floor.

Indeed, what happened to the foreign policy America voted for — rapprochement with Russia, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and having rich allies share more of the cost of their own defense?

It is U.S., not NATO defense spending that is rising to more than $50 billion this year. And today we learn the Pentagon has drawn up plans for the insertion of 1,000 more U.S. troops into Syria. While the ISIS caliphate seems doomed, this six-year Syrian war is far from over.

An al-Qaida subsidiary, the Nusra Front, has become the most formidable rebel fighting group. Syria’s army, with the backing of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militias from across the Middle East, has carved out most of the territory it needs.

The Turkish army is now in Syria, beside its rebel allies. Their main enemy: Syria’s Kurds, who are America’s allies.

From our longest war, Afghanistan, comes word from U.S. Gen. John Nicholson that we and our Afghan allies are in a “stalemate” with the Taliban, and he will need a “few thousand” more U.S. troops — to augment the 8,500 President Obama left behind when he left office.

Some 5,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq, helping to liberate Mosul from ISIS. In Kabul, Baghdad and Damascus, terrorist bombings are a weekly, if not a daily, occurrence.

Then there is the U.S. troop buildup in Poland and the Baltic, the U.S. deployment of a missile defense to South Korea after multiple missile tests in the North, and Russia and China talking of upgrading their nuclear arsenals to counter U.S. missile defenses in Poland, Romania and South Korea.

In and around the waters of the Persian Gulf, United States warships are harassed by Iranian patrol boats, as Tehran test-fires anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to send the Americans a message: Attack us and it will not be a cakewalk war.

With the death of Communism, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Bushite nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr, America needs a new grand strategy, built upon the solid foundation of America First.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 21, 2017, 05:16:26 PM
http://buchanan.org/blog/will-russiagate-backfire-left-126700 (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-russiagate-backfire-left-126700)

Will Russiagate backfire on the Left

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 26, 2017, 12:32:23 AM
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An Obama Plot to Sabotage Trump?
Thursday - March 23, 2017 at 10:49 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Devin Nunes just set the cat down among the pigeons.
Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had more than just a small point.
The U.S. intelligence community, says Nunes, during surveillance of legitimate targets, picked up the names of Trump transition officials during surveillance of targets, “unmasked” their identity, and spread their names around, virtually assuring they would be leaked.
If true, this has the look and smell of a conspiracy to sabotage the Trump presidency, before it began.
Comey readily confirmed there was no evidence to back up the Trump tweet. But when it came to electronic surveillance of Trump and his campaign, Comey, somehow, could not comment on that.
Which raises the question: What is the real scandal here?
Is it that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks? We have heard that since June.
Is it that Trump officials may have colluded with the Russians?
But former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA Director Mike Morrell have both said they saw no evidence of this.
This March, Sen. Chris Coons walked back his stunning declaration about transcripts showing a Russia-Trump collusion, confessing, “I have no hard evidence of collusion.”
But if Clapper and Morrell saw no Russia-Trump collusion, what were they looking at during all those months to make them so conclude?
Was it “FBI transcripts,” as Sen. Coons blurted out?
If so, who intercepted and transcribed the conversations? If it was intel agencies engaged in surveillance, who authorized that? How extensive was it? Against whom? Is it still going on?
And if today, after eight months, the intel agencies cannot tell us whether or not any member of the Trump team colluded with the Russians, what does that say of their competence?
The real scandal, which the media regard as a diversion from the primary target, Trump, is that a Deep State conspiracy to bring down his presidency seems to have been put in place by Obamaites, and perhaps approved by Obama himself.
Consider. On Jan. 12, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote,
“According to a senior U.S. government official, (Gen. Michael) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials … What did Flynn say?”
Now, on Dec. 29, Flynn, national security adviser-designate, was not only doing his job calling the ambassador, he was a private citizen.
Why was he unmasked by U.S. intelligence?
Who is this “senior official” who dropped the dime on him? Could this official have known how many times Flynn spoke to Kislyak, yet not known what was said on the calls?
That is hard to believe. This looks like a contract hit by an anti-Trump agent in the intel community, using Ignatius to do the wet work.
Flynn was taken down. Did Comey turn his FBI loose to ferret out the felon who had unmasked Flynn and done him in? If not, why not?
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger points anew to a story in The New York Times of March 1 that began:
“In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Trump and Russians — across the government.”
“This is what they did,” wrote Henninger, quoting the Times:
“At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies.”
For what benign purpose would U.S. intelligence agents spread secrets damaging to their own president — to foreign regimes? Is this not disloyalty? Is this not ѕєdιтισn?
On Jan. 12, writes Henninger, the Times “reported that Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed rules that let the National Security Agency disseminate ‘raw signals intelligence information’ to 16 other intelligence agencies.”
Astounding. The Obamaites seeded the U.S. and allied intel communities with IEDs to be detonated on Trump’s arrival. This is the scandal, not Trump telling Vlad to go find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails.
We need to know who colluded with the Russians, if anyone did. But more critically, we need to unearth the deep state conspiracy to sabotage a presidency.
So far, the Russia-connection investigation has proven a dry hole. But an investigation into who in the FBI, CIA or NSA is unmasking U.S. citizens and criminally leaking information to a Trump-hating press to destroy a president they are sworn to serve could prove to be a gusher.
As for the reports of Lynch-White House involvement in this unfolding plot to damage and destroy Trump the real question is: What did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 26, 2017, 12:44:42 AM
Will Russiagate Backfire on the Left?
Monday - March 20, 2017 at 10:05 pm

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   Patrick J. Buchanan
The big losers of the Russian hacking scandal may yet be those who invested all their capital in a script that turned out to based on a fairy tale.
In Monday’s Intelligence Committee hearings, James Comey did confirm that his FBI has found nothing to support President Trump’s tweet that President Obama ordered him wiretapped. Not unexpected, but undeniably an embarrassment for the tweeter-in-chief.
Yet longer-term damage may have been done to the left. For Monday’s hearing showed that its rendering of the campaign of 2016 may be a product of fiction and a fevered imagination.
After eight months investigating the hacking and leaking of the emails of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta and the DNC, there is apparently no evidence yet of Trump collusion with Russia.
Former Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper has said that, as of his departure day, Jan. 20, he had seen no evidence of a Russia-Trump collusion.
Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell also made that clear this month: “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. … There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.” Morell was a surrogate for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But while the FBI is still searching for a Trump connection, real crimes have been unearthed — committed by anti-Trump bureaucrats colluding with mainstream media — to damage Trump’s presidency.
There is hard evidence of collusion between the intel community and The New York Times and The Washington Post, both beneficiaries of illegal leaks — felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
While the howls have been endless that Trump accused Obama of a “felony,” the one provable felony here was the leak of a transcript of an intercepted conversation between Gen. Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador.
That leak ended Flynn’s career as national security adviser. And Director Comey would neither confirm nor deny that President Obama was aware of the existence of the Flynn transcript.
So where do we stand after yesterday’s hearing and eight-month FBI investigation? The Russians did hack Podesta’s email account and the DNC, and while the FBI has found no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians, it is still looking.
However, the known unknowns seem more significant.
How could DNI Director Clapper and CIA Director Morell say that no connection had been established between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, without there having been an investigation? And how could such an investigation be conclusive in exonerating Trump’s associates — without some use of electronic surveillance?
Did the FBI fly to Moscow and question Putin’s cyberwarfare team?
More questions arise. If, in its investigation of the Russian hacking and a Trump connection, the FBI did receive the fruits of some electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign, were Attorney General Loretta Lynch, White House aides or President Obama made aware of any such surveillance? Did any give a go-ahead to surveil the Trump associates? Comey would neither confirm nor deny that they did.
So, if Obama were aware of an investigation into the Trump campaign, using intel sources and methods, Trump would not be entirely wrong in his claims, and Obama would have some ‘splainin’ to do.
Is the FBI investigating the intelligence sources who committed felonies by illegally disclosing information about the Trump campaign?
Comey would not commit to investigate these leaks, though this could involve criminal misconduct within his own FBI.
Again, the only known crimes committed by Americans during and after the campaign are the leaks of security secrets by agents of the intel community, colluding with the Fourth Estate, which uses the First Amendment to provide cover for criminal sources, whom they hail as “whistleblowers.”
Indeed, if there was no surveillance of Trump of any kind, where did all these stories come from, which their reporters attributed to “intelligence sources”?
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from any role in the Russian hacking scandal. But the Justice Department should demand that the FBI put the highest priority on investigating the deep state and its journalistic collaborators in the sabotage of the Trump presidency.
If Comey refuses to do it, appoint a special counsel.
In the last analysis, as Glenn Greenwald, no Trumpite, writes for The Intercept, the real loser may well be the Democratic Party.
If the investigation of Russiagate turns up no link between Trump and the pilfered emails, Democrats will have egg all over their faces. And the Democratic base will have to face a painful truth.
Vladimir Putin did not steal this election. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lost it. Donald Trump won it fair and square. He is not an “illegitimate” president. There will be no impeachment. They were deceived and misled by their own leaders and media. They bought into a Big Lie.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 27, 2017, 09:46:12 PM
The Ryancare Route — Winning by Losing?
Monday - March 27, 2017 at 7:43 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Did the Freedom Caucus just pull the Republican Party back off the ledge, before it jumped to its death? A case can be made for that.
Before the American Health Care Act, aka “Ryancare,” was pulled off the House floor Friday, it enjoyed the support — of 17 percent of Americans. Had it passed, it faced an Antietam in the GOP Senate, and probable defeat.
Had it survived there, to be signed by President Trump, it would have meant 14 million Americans losing their health insurance in 2018.
First among the losers would have been white working-class folks who delivered the Rust Belt states to President Trump.
“Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan,” said JFK.
So, who are the losers here?
First and foremost, Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republicans who, having voted 50 times over seven years to repeal Obamacare, we learned, had no consensus plan ready to replace it.
Moreover, they put a bill on the floor many had not read, and for which they did not have the votes.
More than a defeat, this was a humiliation. For the foreseeable future, a Republican Congress and president will coexist with a health care regime that both loathe but cannot together repeal and replace.

Moreover, this defeat suggests that, given the ideological divide in the GOP, and the unanimous opposition of congressional Democrats, the most impressive GOP majorities since the 1920s may be impotent to enact any major complicated or complex legislation.
Friday’s failure appears to be another milestone in the decline and fall of Congress, which the Constitution, in Article I, fairly anoints as our first branch of government.
Through the last century, Congress has steadily surrendered its powers, with feeble resistance, to presidents, the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, the regulatory agencies, even the bureaucracy.

The long retreat goes on.
Another truth was reconfirmed Friday. Once an entitlement program has been created with millions of beneficiaries, it becomes almost impossible to repeal. As Ronald Reagan said, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
Nor did President Trump escape unscathed.
Among the reasons he was elected was the popular belief, which carried him through scrapes that would have sunk other candidates, that, whatever his faults or failings, he was a doer, a man of action — “He gets things done!”
To have failed on his first big presidential project has thus been an occasion of merriment for the boo-birds in the Beltway bleachers.
Yet, still, Trump’s Saturday tweet — “Obamacare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan … Do not worry!” — may prove prophetic.
Now that “Trumpcare” or “Ryancare” is gone, the nation must live with Obamacare. A Democratic program from birth, it is visibly failing. And Democrats now own it again, as not one Democrat was there to help reform it. In the off-year election of 2018, they may be begging for Republican help in reforming the health care system.
After what he sees as a wonderful win, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer now intends to block a Senate vote on Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, and thus force Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to muster 60 votes to halt a Democratic filibuster.

Should Schumer persist, Senate Republicans will exercise the “nuclear option,” i.e., change the rules to allow debate to be cut off with 51 votes, and then elevate Gorsuch with their own slim majority.
Why would Schumer squander his political capital by denying a quality candidate like Judge Gorsuch a vote? Does he also think that a collapsing Obamacare — even its backers believe is in need of corrective surgery — will be an asset for his imperiled colleagues in 2018? The last time Democrats headed down that Radical Road and nominated George McGovern, they lost 49 states.
While the Republicans have sustained a defeat, this is not the end of the world. And there was an implied warning in the president’s Sunday tweet:
“Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare.”
What Trump is explaining here is that, if Republican majorities in the House and Senate cannot or will not unite with his White House behind solutions on health care, taxes, infrastructure, border security, he will seek out moderate Democrats to get the work done.
This humiliation of Obamacare reform may prove a watershed for the Trump presidency. What he is saying is simple and direct:

I am a Republican president who wants to work with Republicans. But if they cannot or will not work with me, I will find another partner with whom to form coalitions to write the laws and enact the reforms America needs, because, in the last analysis, while party unity is desirable, the agenda I was elected to enact is critical.
The health care defeat yet may prove to be another example of winning by losing.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 30, 2017, 08:38:00 PM
Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?
Thursday - March 30, 2017 at 8:35 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“If we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.
“On the world stage, who could vie with him?”
So asks Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard in a remarkable essay in Hillsdale College’s March issue of its magazine, Imprimis (https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/think-vladimir-putin/).
What elevates Putin above all other 21st-century leaders?
“When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that.
“In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Ataturk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he resurrected a national-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.”
Putin’s approval rating, after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin’s appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump’s?
Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.
What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr established at the Cold War’s end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.
And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.
The U.S. establishment loathes Putin because, they say, he is an aggressor, a tyrant, a “killer.” He invaded and occupies Ukraine. His old KGB comrades αssαssιnαtҽ journalists, defectors and dissidents.
Yet while politics under both czars and commissars has often been a blood sport in Russia, what has Putin done to his domestic enemies to rival what our Arab ally Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has done to the Muslim Brotherhood he overthrew in a military coup in Egypt?
What has Putin done to rival what our NATO ally President Erdogan has done in Turkey, jailing 40,000 people since last July’s coup — or our Philippine ally Rodrigo Duterte, who has presided over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of drug dealers?
Does anyone think President Xi Jinping would have handled mass demonstrations against his regime in Tiananmen Square more gingerly than did President Putin this last week in Moscow?
Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West, when standing up for Russia’s interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.
He not only remains popular in his own country, but has admirers in nations whose political establishments are implacably hostile to him.
In December, one poll found 37 percent of all Republicans had a favorable view of the Russian leader, but only 17 percent were positive on President Barack Obama.
There is another reason Putin is viewed favorably. Millions of ethnonationalists who wish to see their nations secede from the EU see him as an ally. While Putin has openly welcomed many of these movements, America’s elite do not take even a neutral stance.
Putin has read the new century better than his rivals. While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.
The new dividing lines are between social conservatism and self-indulgent secularism, between tribalism and transnationalism, between the nation-state and the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.
On the new dividing lines, Putin is on the side of the insurgents. Those who envision de Gaulle’s Europe of Nations replacing the vision of One Europe, toward which the EU is heading, see Putin as an ally.
So the old question arises: Who owns the future?
In the new struggles of the new century, it is not impossible that Russia — as was America in the Cold War — may be on the winning side. Secessionist parties across Europe already look to Moscow rather than across the Atlantic.
“Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism,” writes Caldwell. “That turns out to be the big battle of our times. As our last election shows, that’s true even here.”

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 04, 2017, 02:29:52 PM
Why Is Kim Jong Un Our Problem?
Monday - April 3, 2017 at 11:32 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”
So President Donald Trump warns, amid reports North Korea, in its zeal to build an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit our West Coast, may test another atom bomb.
China shares a border with North Korea. We do not.
Why then is this our problem to “solve”? And why is North Korea building a rocket that can cross the Pacific and strike Seattle or Los Angeles?
Is Kim Jong Un mad?
No. He is targeting us because we have 28,500 troops on his border. If U.S. air, naval, missile and ground forces were not in and around Korea, and if we were not treaty-bound to fight alongside South Korea, there would be no reason for Kim to build rockets to threaten a distant superpower that could reduce his hermit kingdom to ashes.
While immensely beneficial to Seoul, is this U.S. guarantee to fight Korean War II, 64 years after the first wise? Russia, China and Japan retain the freedom to decide whether and how to react, should war break out. Why do we not?
Would it not be better for us if we, too, retained full freedom of action to decide how to respond, should the North attack?
During the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, despite John McCain’s channeling Patrick Henry — “We are all Georgians now!” — George W. Bush decided to take a pass on war. When a mob in Kiev overthrew the pro-Russian government, Vladimir Putin secured his Sebastopol naval base by annexing Crimea.
Had Georgia and Ukraine been in NATO, we would have been, in both cases, eyeball to eyeball with a nuclear-armed Russia.
Which brings us to the point:
The United States is in rising danger of being dragged into wars in half a dozen places, because we have committed ourselves to fight for scores of nations with little or no link to vital U.S. interests.
While our first president said in his Farewell Address that we might “trust to temporary alliances” in extraordinary emergencies, he added, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
Alliances, Washington believed, were transmission belts of war. Yet no nation in history has handed out so many war guarantees to so many “allies” on so many continents, as has the United States.
To honor commitments to the Baltic States, we have moved U.S. troops to the Russian border. To prevent China from annexing disputed rocks and reefs in the South and East China Seas, our Navy is prepared to go to war — to back the territorial claims of Tokyo and Manila.
Yet, our richest allies all spend less on defense than we, and all run trade surpluses at America’s expense.
Consider Germany. Last year, Berlin ran a $270 billion trade surplus and spent 1.2 percent of GDP on defense. The United States ran a $700 billion merchandise trade deficit and spent 3.6 percent of GDP on defense.
Angela Merkel puts Germany first. Let the Americans finance our defense, face down the Russians, and fight faraway wars, she is saying; Germany will capture the world’s markets, and America’s as well.
Japan and South Korea are of like mind. Neither spends nearly as much of GDP on defense as the USA. Yet, we defend both, and both run endless trade surpluses at our expense.
President Trump may hector and threaten our allies that we will not forever put up with this. But we will, because America’s elites live for the great game of global empire.
What would a true “America First” foreign policy look like?
It would restore to the United States the freedom it enjoyed for the 150 years before NATO, to decide when, where and whether we go to war. U.S. allies would be put on notice that, while we are not walking away from the world, we are dissolving all treaty commitments that require us to go to war as soon as the shooting starts.
This would concentrate the minds of our allies wonderfully. We could cease badgering them about paying more for their defense. They could decide for themselves — and live with their decisions.
In the Carter era, we dissolved our defense pact with Taiwan. Taiwan has survived and done wonderfully well. If Germany, Japan and South Korea are no longer assured we will go to war on their behalf, all three would take a long hard look at their defenses. The result would likely be a strengthening of those defenses.
But if we do not begin to rescind these war guarantees we have handed out since the 1940s, the odds are high that one of them will one day drag us into a great war, after which, if we survive, all these alliances will be dissolved in disillusionment.
What John Foster Dulles called for, over half a century ago, an “agonizing reappraisal” of America’s alliances, is long, long overdue.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 06, 2017, 10:42:44 PM
Nixon, LBJ & the First Shots in the Judges’ War
Thursday - April 6, 2017 at 8:14 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Democrats’ drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court — a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson.
By June 1968, Nixon, having swept his primaries, was cruising to the nomination and probable victory in November.
The establishment was aghast.
Warren’s bitterness toward Nixon dated to their California days. Sen. Nixon had worked behind the scenes for Ike’s nomination in 1952, though Gov. Warren was California’s favorite son. Warren had been crushed and humiliated — but Nixon was rewarded with the vice presidency.
Now, 16 years later, the chief justice was ready to step down, but desperately did not want his nemesis Nixon choosing his successor.
So, Warren and LBJ colluded in a plot. Warren announced his resignation from the court contingent on Senate confirmation of his successor. LBJ then named Warren’s ally and his own longtime crony, Fortas, to succeed Warren.
The fix was in. Nixon was boxed, and adopted a posture of benign neutrality on Fortas’ elevation, having been warned by future Secretary of State Bill Rogers that he would be accused of anti-Semitism if he blocked the first Jєωιѕн chief justice.
With Nixon’s knowledge, some of us on his staff ignored his neutrality posture and urged Senate conservatives to block Fortas.
Foremost among these was Strom Thurmond, who needed little prodding, and who was provided with “Flaming Creatures,” a graphic film of transvestite sex which Fortas, alone among the nine justices, had deemed acceptable for public viewing.
Senators were invited to a closed room for a screening. Some walked out wobbly. And as I told friend Sim Fentress of Time, the “Fortas Film Festival” was going to do in our new chief justice.
And so it did. Fortas was rejected in early October. In May 1969, President Nixon named Judge Warren Burger to succeed Earl Warren.
By that May also, Attorney General John Mitchell had learned that Fortas was on a $20,000-a-year secret retainer from swindler Louis Wolfson. Mitchell went to see Warren to suggest that his friend Abe resign, rather than be impeached. Fortas got the message.
Now, with a second vacancy, Nixon, to honor his promise to select a Southerner, chose Harvard Law grad and Chief Judge of the 4th Circuit Clement Haynsworth, the youngest chief judge in the nation.
Joe Rauh, counsel for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, instantly branded Haynsworth a “hard-core segregationist” and liberal Democrats painted him as a grifter steeped in petty corruption, whose court decisions were steered by his stock portfolio.
This was all trash talk. Haynsworth had released black militant H. Rap Brown from jail, without requiring him to post bail, and ruled that lawyers for black defendants had a right to discover whether jurors belonged to any organizations known for bias against blacks.
No matter. Haynsworth was depicted as a corrupt and racist judge and liberal Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans united to vote him down. But while painful to the judge, his vilification by the left had split the nation along a new fault line.
Nixon’s defiant response: He sent another Southern judge up to the Senate, G. Harrold Carswell. Less distinguished than Haynsworth, Carswell got the same treatment. In a statement he had me write, Nixon tore into the Senate for an “act of regional discrimination” against the South.
While losing Beltway battles, we were winning the bigger war.
Nixon then, fatefully, sent up a third nominee, Judge Harry Blackmun of Minnesota, who was approved 94-0.
Suddenly, in 1971, there were two more openings, as Justices Hugo Black, FDR man and former Klansman, and John Harlan resigned.
Nixon called to tell me he was sending up the first woman, a state judge from California, along with an Arkansas bond lawyer.
The heart sank. But Divine Providence intervened.
The American Bar Association voted 11-1 that Mildred Lillie was “not-qualified” and Herschel Friday got a split decision — six “not-qualified” votes and six “barely qualified.”
Panic ensued. Nixon swiftly pivoted to Lewis Powell, ex-head of the ABA, and William Rehnquist, a brilliant young conservative and legal scholar, whom Reagan would elevate to chief justice when Burger retired.
Three days after Nixon’s second inaugural, in Roe v. Wade, written by Blackmun, the court declared the right to an abortion had been hidden in the Constitution, though it had been a crime in every state when Earl Warren was appointed by Ike.
All doubt was now removed. The Supreme Court was using its right to declare what the law says and what the Constitution means — to reshape America in the image of Earl Warren and his judicial clones.
Realization that these were now the stakes, and power the issue, is the reason why Reagan nominee Robert Bork was savaged, and Bush I nominee Clarence Thomas was brutalized.
Behind the hostility to the mild-mannered and decent Neil Gorsuch lies the same malevolence that lynched Clement Haynsworth.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 10, 2017, 10:23:24 PM


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10April 2017
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Is Trump Enlisting in the War Party?
Monday - April 10, 2017 at 9:46 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
By firing off five dozen Tomahawk missiles at a military airfield, our “America First” president may have plunged us into another Middle East war that his countrymen do not want to fight.
Thus far Bashar Assad seems unintimidated. Brushing off the strikes, he has defiantly gone back to bombing the rebels 
from the same Shayrat air base that the U.S. missiles hit.
Trump “will not stop here,” warned U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday. “If he needs to do more, he will.”
If Trump fails to back up Haley’s threat, the hawks now cheering him on will begin deriding him as “Donald Obama.”
But if he throbs to the war drums of John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and orders Syria’s air force destroyed, we could be at war not only with ISIS and al-Qaida, but with Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
A Syrian war would consume Trump’s presidency.
Are we ready for that? How would we win such a war without raising a large army and sending it back into the Middle East?
Another problem: Trump’s missile attack was unconstitutional. Assad had not attacked or threatened us, and Congress, which alone has the power to authorize war on Syria, has never done so.
Indeed, Congress denied President Obama that specific authority in 2013.
What was Trump thinking? Here was his strategic rational:
“When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies — with a chemical gas … that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. … And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me … my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”
Two days later, Trump was still emoting: “Beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”
Now, that gas attack was an atrocity, a war crime, and pictures of its tiny victims are heart-rending. But 400,000 people have died in Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr, among them thousands of children and infants.
Have they been killed by Assad’s forces? Surely, but also by U.S., Russian, Israeli and Turkish planes and drones — and by Kurds, Iranians, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, U.S.-backed rebels and Shiite militia.
Assad is battling insurgents and jihadists who would slaughter his Alawite brethren and the Christians in Syria just as those Copts were massacred in Egypt on Palm Sunday. Why is Assad more responsible for all the deaths in Syria than those fighting to overthrow and kill him?

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Are we certain Assad personally ordered a gas attack on civilians?
For it makes no sense. Why would Assad, who is winning the war and had been told America was no longer demanding his removal, order a nerve gas attack on children, certain to ignite America’s rage, for no military gain?
Like the gas attack in 2013, this has the marks of a fαℓѕє fℓαg operation to stampede America into Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr.
And as in most wars, the first shots fired receive the loudest cheers. But if the president has thrown in with the neocons and War Party, and we are plunging back into the Mideast maelstrom, Trump should know that many of those who helped to nominate and elect him — to keep us out of unnecessary wars — may not be standing by him.
We have no vital national interest in Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr. It is those doing the fighting who have causes they deem worth dying for.
For ISIS, it is the dream of a caliphate. For al-Qaida, it is about driving the Crusaders out of the Dar al Islam. For the Turks, it is, as always, about the Kurds.
For Assad, this war is about his survival and that of his regime. For Putin, it is about Russia remaining a great power and not losing its last naval base in the Med. For Iran, this is about preserving a land bridge to its Shiite ally Hezbollah. For Hezbollah it is about not being cut off from the Shiite world and isolated in Lebanon.
Because all have vital interests in Syria, all have invested more blood in this conflict than have we. And they are not going to give up their gains or goals in Syria and yield to the Americans without a fight.
And if we go to war in Syria, what would we be fighting for?
A nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr? Democracy? Separation of mosque and state? Diversity? Free speech for Muslim heretics? LGBT rights?
In 2013, a great national coalition came together to compel Congress to deny Barack Obama authority to take us to war in Syria.
We are back at that barricade. An after-Easter battle is shaping up in Congress on the same issue: Is the president authorized to take us into war against Assad and his allies inside Syria?
If, after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, we do not want America in yet another Mideast war, the time to stop it is before the War Party has us already in it. That time is now.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 13, 2017, 11:19:09 PM
Will Christianity Perish in Its Birthplace?
Thursday - April 13, 2017 at 11:10 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” Those are among Jesus’ last words on the Cross that first Good Friday.
It was a cry of agony, but not despair. The dying Christ, to rise again in three days, was repeating the first words of the 22nd Psalm.
And today, in lands where Christ lived and taught and beyond where the Christian faith was born and nourished, the words echo. For it is in the birthplace of Christianity that Christians face the greatest of persecutions and martyrdoms since the time of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.
President Donald Trump, outraged by pictures of infants and children who had perished in the nerve gas attack in Syria, ordered missile strikes on the air base from which the war crime came.
Two days later, Palm Sunday, 44 Coptic Christians celebrating Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem were martyred in terrorist attacks in Egypt. The first bombing was at St. George’s Church in Tanta, the second at St. Mark’s in Alexandria, where the Coptic Pope Tawadros II was at Mass.
The pope was unhurt, but 100 Christians were injured in the attacks. At St. George’s, one witness described the scene after the bomb exploded near the altar: “I saw pieces of body parts. … There was so much blood everywhere. Some people had half of their bodies missing.”
The Islamic State group claims credit for the murders, and the pictures of dead children from those churches were surely as horrific as the pictures the president saw after the gas attack.
Copts are among the earliest Christians, dating to the first century A.D., when St. Mark, one of the Twelve Apostles, established the first church outside the Holy Land and became bishop of Alexandria.
The Copts make up 10 percent of Egypt’s population. They have been especially targeted for terrorist attacks since the 2013 overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, who had been elected president after the ouster of longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak.
In the subsequent struggle between Egypt’s Islamists, whose base is in Sinai, and the Cairo regime of Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who was welcomed to the White House in March, the Copts are seen as soft-target allies of Gen. el-Sissi’s and hated for their faith.
Whatever they did for democracy, the U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the vaunted Arab Spring have proved to be pure hell for Arab Christians.
In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Christians were left alone if they did not interfere in politics. Indeed, they prospered as doctors, lawyers, journalists, academics, engineers, businessmen. A Christian, Tariq Aziz, was Saddam’s foreign minister who negotiated with Secretary of State James Baker to try to prevent what became the Gulf War.
Before 2003, there were still 800,000 Christians in Iraq. But after a decade of church bombings and murders of priests, their numbers have plummeted. When the Islamic State seized a third of Iraq, Christians under the group’s rule had to convert to Islam and pay a tax or face beheading.
On Dec. 26, St. Stephen’s Day, which honors the first martyr, Pope Francis hailed the Iraqi Christians lately liberated from Islamic State rule, noting, “They are our martyrs of today, and there are so many we can say that they are more numerous than in the first centuries.”
In 2016, an estimated 90,000 more Christians worldwide died for their faith.
Under Syria’s dictator Hafez al-Assad and son Bashar, Christians have been 10 percent of the population and protected by the regime. They thus have sided with Assad against the terrorists of the Islamic State and al-Qaida, whose victory would mean their expulsion or death.
Of the 10 nations deemed by Christianity Today to be the most hateful and hostile toward Christianity, eight are majority-Muslim nations, with the Middle East being the site of the worst of today’s persecutions.
Afghanistan, which we “liberated” in 2001, is listed as the third-most hostile nation toward Christians. The punishment for baptism there is death. A decade ago, a Christian convert had to flee his country to avoid beheading.
Consider. Christianity, whose greatest feast day we celebrate Sunday, is the cradle faith of the culture and the civilization of the West. And in our secularized world, Christianity remains the predominant faith.
A millennium ago, Christendom mounted crusades to ensure that its pilgrims would not lose the right to visit the Holy Land in peace.
Now, a decade and a half after we launched invasions and occupations of the Muslim world in Afghanistan and then Iraq to bring the blessings of democracy, the people there who profess that Christian faith are being persecuted as horribly as they were under the Romans in Nero’s time.
Where are the gains for religious freedom and human rights to justify all the bombings, invasions and wars we have conducted in the lands from Libya to Pakistan — to justify the losses we have endured and the death and suffering we have inflicted?
Truth be told, it is in part because of us that Christianity is on its way to being exterminated in its cradle.
Happy Easter!

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 18, 2017, 08:32:53 AM
War Cries Drown Out ‘America First’
Monday - April 17, 2017 at 10:53 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” tweeted President Donald Trump on Easter Sunday.
Earlier, after discovering “great chemistry” with Chinese President Xi Jinping over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had confided, “I explained … that a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they solve the North Korean problem!”
“America First” thus takes a back seat to big-power diplomacy with Beijing. One wonders: How much will Xi end up bilking us for his squeezing of Kim Jong Un?
Trump once seemed to understand how America had been taken to the cleaners during and after the Cold War. While allies supported us diplomatically, they piled up huge trade surpluses at our expense and became virtual free-riders off the U.S. defense effort.
No nations were more successful at this than South Korea and Japan. Now Xi is playing the game — and perhaps playing Trump.
What is the “North Korean problem” Beijing will help solve in return for more indulgent consideration on future U.S.-China trade deals?
North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. As 80 percent of Pyongyang’s trade comes through China, Trump believes that Beijing can force Kim to stop testing missiles and atomic bombs before he produces an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the U.S.
But what is to prevent Xi from pocketing Trump’s concessions and continuing on the strategic course China has long pursued?
For in many ways, Pyongyang’s goals parallel China’s.
Neither could want an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. For Kim, this would devastate his country, bring down his regime, and cost him his life. For China, war could mean millions of Koreans crossing the Yalu into Manchuria and a disruption of Beijing’s march to Asian hegemony.
A continuing crisis on the peninsula, however, with Trump and the U.S. relying on Beijing’s help, could leave Xi in the catbird seat.
And now that North Korea has declared its goal to be building missiles with nuclear warheads that could hit all U.S. bases in Asia — and even California — the clock is running for the White House.
“It won’t happen,” Trump has said of North Korea’s developing an ICBM that could hit the United States. “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”
“The threat is upon us,” says outgoing deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland. “This is something President Trump is going to deal with in the first year.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Vice President Mike Pence have declared that our policy of “strategic patience” with Pyonyang is at an end.
National security adviser H.R. McMaster said Sunday the U.S. has “to take action, short of armed conflict, so we can avoid the worst” in dealing with “this unpredictable regime.”
With a stunning parade of missiles in Pyongyang on Saturday, the North’s failed firing of a solid-fueled missile that same day, and the promise of new missile tests weekly, Kim is forcing our hand.
Either he backs away from building atomic bombs and long-range missiles or Trump and his generals must make good on their warnings.
How did we get to this point?
Why, 64 years after the Korean War, a quarter-century after the Cold War, are we still obliged to go to war to defend South Korea from a North with one-half the South’s population and 3 percent of its gross domestic product?
Why are we, on the far side of the Pacific, still responsible for containing North Korea when two of its neighbors — Russia and China — are nuclear powers and South Korea and Japan could field nuclear and conventional forces far superior to Kim’s?
How long into the future will containing militarist dictators in Pyongyang with nuclear missiles be America’s primary responsibility?
Another issue arises. Before the U.S. launches any pre-emptive strike on North Korea, Congress should be called back into session to authorize any act of war against the North.
Perhaps this time, Congress would follow the Constitution.
Though Korea is the crisis of the moment, it is not the only one.
Not since 9/11 have the Afghan Taliban been stronger or controlled more territory. The United States’ commanding general there is calling for thousands more U.S. troops. Russia and Iran are reportedly negotiating with the Taliban. Pakistan is said to be aiding them.
To counter Vladimir Putin’s Russia, we have moved U.S. and NATO troops into Poland, the Baltic States, Romania and Bulgaria. We have fired missiles into Syria. We are reportedly preparing to back the Saudis in the latest escalation of their war on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Twenty-four years after “Black Hawk Down,” the weekend brought reports of U.S. troops returning to Somalia.
The promise of a Trump presidency — that we would start looking out for our own country and own national interests first and let the rest of the world solve, or fail to solve, its own problems — appears, not 100 days in, to have been a mirage.
Will more wars make America great again?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 21, 2017, 10:32:23 AM
Is Democracy in a Death Spiral?
Friday - April 21, 2017 at 12:08 am

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“You all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don’t think it’s worth a damn. Churchill is right. The only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else that’s any better. …
“People say, ‘If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better.’ I say Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are, just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.”
This dismissal of democracy, cited by historian H. W. Brands in “The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War,” is attributed to that great populist Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Few would air such views today, as democracy has been divinized.
Indeed, for allegedly hacking the Clinton campaign and attacking “our democracy,” Vladimir Putin has been condemned to the ninth circle of hell. Dick Cheney and John McCain have equated Moscow’s mucking around in our sacred democratic rituals to an “act of war.”
Yet democracy seems everywhere to be losing its luster.
Among its idealized features is the New England town meeting. There, citizens argued, debated, decided questions of common concern.
Town hall meetings today recall a time when folks came out to mock miscreants locked in stocks in the village square. Congressmen returning to their districts in Holy Week were shouted down as a spectator sport. A Trump rally in Berkeley was busted up by a mob. The university there has now canceled an appearance by Ann Coulter.
Charles Murray, whose books challenge conventional wisdom about the equality of civilizations, and Heather Mac Donald, who has docuмented the case that hostility to cops is rooted in statistical ignorance, have both had their speeches violently disrupted on elite campuses.
In Washington, our two-party system is in gridlock. Comity and collegiality are vanishing. Across Europe, centrist parties shrink as splinter parties arise and “illiberal democracies” take power.
Russia and China, which have embraced autocratic capitalism, have attracted admirers and emulators by the seeming success of their strongman rule.
President Trump, seeing the way the world is going, welcomes to the White House Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi, whose army dumped over the elected government and jailed thousands.
Following a disputed referendum that granted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan near-dictatorial powers, Trump phoned his congratulations to the Turkish autocrat. It was Erdogan who described democracy as a bus you get off when it reaches your stop.
Why is liberal democracy, once hailed as the future of mankind, in a deepening bear market? First, Acheson was not all wrong.
When George W. Bush declared that the peoples of the Middle East should decide their future in democratic elections, Lebanon chose Hezbollah, the Palestinians chose Hamas, the Egyptians the Muslim Brotherhood. The first two are U.S.-designated terrorist groups, as members of Congress wish to designate the third. Not an auspicious beginning for Arab democracy.
In Sunday’s election in France, a Communist-backed admirer of Hugo Chavez, Jean-Luc Melenchon, and the National Front’s Marine Le Pen could emerge as the finalists on May 7.
Democracy is increasingly seen as a means to an end, not an end in itself. If democracy doesn’t deliver, dispense with it.
Democracy’s reputation also suffers from the corruption and incompetence of some of its celebrated champions.
The South African regime of Jacob Zuma, of Nelson Mandela’s ANC, faces a clamor for his resignation. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was impeached in August. South Korean President Park Geun-hye has been removed and jailed for corruption. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was elected president four times.
In Federalist No. 2, John Jay called us a “band of brethren” and “one united people” who shared the same ancestors, language, religion, principles, manners, customs.
Seventy years later, the brethren went to war with one another, though they seem to have had more in common in 1861 than we do today.
Forty percent of Americans now trace their ancestral roots to Latin America, Asia and Africa. The Christian component of the nation shrinks, as the numbers of Muslims, Hindu, atheists, agnostics grow. We have two major languages now. Scores of other languages are taught in schools.
Not only do we disagree on God, gαys and guns, but on politics and ideology, morality and faith, right and wrong. One-half of America sees the other as “a basket of deplorables. … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots.”
How, outside an external attack that unites us, like 9/11, do we find unity among people who dislike each other so much and regard each other’s ideas and ideals as hateful and repellent?
Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.
Where liberals see as an ever-more splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicity, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel.
Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: LaramieHirsch on April 21, 2017, 02:45:21 PM

Quote
How, outside an external attack that unites us, like 9/11, do we find unity among people who dislike each other so much and regard each other’s ideas and ideals as hateful and repellent?
The answer?  An American Catholic Monarch.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 24, 2017, 08:54:19 PM
Is Macron the EU’s Last Best Hope?
Monday - April 24, 2017 at 8:15 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
For the French establishment, Sunday’s presidential election came close to a near-death experience. As the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a “damn near-run thing.”
Neither candidate of the two major parties that have ruled France since Charles De Gaulle even made it into the runoff, an astonishing repudiation of France’s national elite.
Marine Le Pen of the National Front ran second with 21.5 percent of the vote. Emmanuel Macron of the new party En Marche! won 23.8 percent.
Macron is a heavy favorite on May 7. The Republicans’ Francois Fillon, who got 20 percent, and the Socialists’ Benoit Hamon, who got less than 7 percent, both have urged their supporters to save France by backing Macron.
Ominously for U.S. ties, 61 percent of French voters chose Le Pen, Fillon or radical Socialist Jean-Luc Melenchon. All favor looser ties to America and repairing relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Le Pen has a mountain to climb to win, but she is clearly the favorite of the president of Russia, and perhaps of the president of the United States. Last week, Donald Trump volunteered:
“She’s the strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France. … Whoever is the toughest on radical Islamic terrorism, and whoever is the toughest at the borders, will do well in the election.”
As an indicator of historic trends in France, Le Pen seems likely to win twice the 18 percent her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won in 2002, when he lost in the runoff to Jacques Chirac.
The campaign between now and May 7, however, could make the Trump-Clinton race look like an altarpiece of democratic decorum.
Not only are the differences between the candidates stark, Le Pen has every incentive to attack to solidify her base and lay down a predicate for the future failure of a Macron government.
And Macron is vulnerable. He won because he is fresh, young, 39, and appealed to French youth as the anti-Le Pen. A personification of Robert Redford in “The Candidate.”
But he has no established party behind him to take over the government, and he is an ex-Rothschild banker in a populist environment where bankers are as welcome as hedge-fund managers at a Bernie Sanders rally.
He is a pro-EU, open-borders transnationalist who welcomes new immigrants and suggests that acts of Islamist terrorism may be the price France must pay for a multiethnic and multicultural society.
Macron was for a year economic minister to President Francois Hollande who has presided over a 10 percent unemployment rate and a growth rate that is among the most anemic in the entire European Union.
He is offering corporate tax cuts and a reduction in the size of a government that consumes 56 percent of GDP, and presents himself as the “president of patriots to face the threat of nationalists.”
His campaign is as much “us vs. them” as Le Pen’s.
And elite enthusiasm for Macron seems less rooted in any anticipation of future greatness than in the desperate hope he can save the French establishment from the dreaded prospect of Marine.
But if Macron is the present, who owns the future?
Across Europe, as in France, center-left and center-right parties that have been on the scene since World War II appear to be emptying out like dying churches. The enthusiasm and energy seem to be in the new parties of left and right, of secessionism and nationalism.
The problem for those who believe the populist movements of Europe have passed their apogee, with losses in Holland, Austria and, soon, France, that the fever has broken, is that the causes of the discontent that spawned these parties are growing stronger.
What are those causes?
A growing desire by peoples everywhere to reclaim their national sovereignty and identity, and remain who they are. And the threats to ethnic and national identity are not receding, but growing.
The tide of refugees from the Middle East and Africa has not abated. Weekly, we read of hundreds drowning in sunken boats that tried to reach Europe. Thousands make it. But the assimilation of Third World peoples in Europe is not proceeding. It seems to have halted.
Second-generation Muslims who have lived all their lives in Europe are turning up among the ѕυιcιdє bombers and terrorists.
Fifteen years ago, al-Qaida seemed confined to Afghanistan. Now it is all over the Middle East, as is ISIS, and calls for Islamists in Europe to murder Europeans inundate social media.
As the numbers of native-born Europeans begin to fall, with their anemic fertility rates, will the aging Europeans become more magnanimous toward destitute newcomers who do not speak the national language or assimilate into the national culture, but consume its benefits?
If a referendum were held across Europe today, asking whether the mass migrations from the former colonies of Africa and the Middle East have on balance made Europe a happier and better place to live in in recent decades, what would that secret ballot reveal?
Does Macron really represent the future of France, or is he perhaps one of the last men of yesterday?

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If I was French and Living in France I would cast my vote for Le Pen.  If France becomes majority
Muslim, Christianity will be extinguished.
This is true with the rest of Europe, America and Canada.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 28, 2017, 09:41:04 AM


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The Rise of the Generals
Friday - April 28, 2017 at 2:10 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals?
So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS.
He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and Obama had plunged the country.
President Trump’s seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.
Trump no longer calls NATO “obsolete,” but moves U.S. troops toward Russia in the Baltic and eastern Balkans. Rex Tillerson, holder of Russia’s Order of Friendship, now warns that the U.S. will not lift sanctions on Russia until she gets out of Ukraine.
If Tillerson is not bluffing, that would rule out any rapprochement in the Trump presidency. For neither Putin, nor any successor, could surrender Crimea and survive.
What happened to the Trump of 2016?
When did Kiev’s claim to Crimea become more crucial to us than a cooperative relationship with a nuclear-armed Russia? In 1991, Bush I and Secretary of State James Baker thought the very idea of Ukraine’s independence was the product of a “suicidal nationalism.”
Where do we think this demonization of Putin and ostracism of Russia is going to lead?
To get Xi Jinping to help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending Taiwan, backed off Tillerson’s warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing in future trade deals.
“I like (Xi Jinping) and I believe he likes me a lot,” Trump said this week. One recalls FDR admonishing Churchill, “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than … your Foreign Office … Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better.”
FDR did not live to see what a fool Stalin had made of him.
Among the achievements celebrated in Trump’s first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan.
But what did these bombings accomplish?
The War Party seems again ascendant. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are happy campers. In Afghanistan, the U.S. commander is calling for thousands more U.S. troops to assist the 8,500 still there, to stabilize an Afghan regime and army that is steadily losing ground to the Taliban.
Iran is back on the front burner. While Tillerson concedes that Tehran is in compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, Trump says it is violating “the spirit of the agreement.”
How so? Says Tillerson, Iran is “destabilizing” the region, and threatening U.S. interests in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon.
But Iran is an ally of Syria and was invited in to help the U.N.-recognized government put down an ιnѕυrrєcтισn that contains elements of al-Qaida and ISIS. It is we, the Turks, Saudis and Gulf Arabs who have been backing the rebels seeking to overthrow the regime.
In Yemen, Houthi rebels overthrew and expelled a Saudi satrap. The bombing, blockading and intervention with troops is being done by Saudi and Sunni Arabs, assisted by the U.S. Navy and Air Force.
It is we and the Saudis who are talking of closing the Yemeni port of Hodeida, which could bring on widespread starvation.
It was not Iran, but the U.S. that invaded Iraq, overthrew the Baghdad regime and occupied the country. It was not Iran that overthrew Col. Gadhafi and created the current disaster in Libya.
Monday, the USS Mahan fired a flare to warn off an Iranian patrol boat, 1,000 meters away. Supposedly, this was a provocation. But Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif had a point when he tweeted:
“Breaking: Our Navy operates in — yes, correct — the Persian Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico. Question is what US Navy doing 7,500 miles from home.”
Who is behind the seeming conversion of Trump to hawk?
The generals, Bibi Netanyahu and the neocons, Congressional hawks with Cold War mindsets, the Saudi royal family and the Gulf Arabs — they are winning the battle for the president’s mind.
And their agenda for America?
We are to recognize that our true enemy in the Mideast is not al-Qaida or ISIS, but Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria and his patron, Putin. And until Hezbollah is eviscerated, Assad is gone, and Iran is smashed the way we did Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, the flowering of Middle East democracy that we all seek cannot truly begin.
But before President Trump proceeds along the path laid out for him by his generals, brave and patriotic men that they are, he should discover if any of them opposed any of the idiotic wars of the last 15 years, beginning with that greatest of strategic blunders — George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 01, 2017, 08:46:00 PM
Nixon’s Revenge: The Fall of the Adversary Press
Monday - May 1, 2017 at 6:52 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Saturday’s White House Correspondents Association dinner exposed anew how far from Middle America our elite media reside.
At the dinner, the electricity was gone, the glamor and glitz were gone. Neither the president nor his White House staff came. Even Press Secretary Sean Spicer begged off.
The idea of a convivial evening together of our media and political establishments is probably dead for the duration of the Trump presidency.
Until Jan. 20, 2021, it appears, we are an us-vs.-them country.
As for the Washington Hilton’s version of Hollywood’s red carpet, C-SPAN elected to cover instead Trump’s rollicking rally in a distant and different capital, hαɾɾιsburg, Pennsylvania (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICo39_Zuk9Q).
Before thousands of those Middle Pennsylvanians Barack Obama dismissed as clinging to their Bibles, bigotries and guns, Donald Trump, to cheers, hoots and happy howls, mocked the media he had stiffed:
“A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom … I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from Washington’s swamp … with a much, much larger crowd and much better people.”
Back at the Hilton, all pretense at press neutrality was gone. Said WHCA president Jeff Mason in scripted remarks: “We are not fake news. We are not failing news organizations. 
We are not the enemy of the American people.”
A standing ovation followed. The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press was repeatedly invoked and defiantly applauded, as though the president were a clear and present danger to it.
For behaving like a Bernie Sanders’ rally, the national press confirmed Steve Bannon’s insight — they are the real “opposition party.”
And so the war between an adversary press and a president it despises and is determined to take down is re-engaged.
As related in my book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (http://amzn.to/2pQQQLR),” out May 9, that war first broke out in November of 1969.
With the media establishment of that day cheering on the anti-war protests designed to break his presidency, President Nixon sought to rally the nation behind him with his “Silent Majority” speech.
His prime-time address was a smashing success — 70 percent of the country backed Nixon. But the post-speech TV analysis trashed him.
Nixon was livid. Two-thirds of the nation depended on the three networks as their primary source of national and world news. ABC, CBS and NBC not only controlled Nixon’s access to the American people but were the filter, the lens, through which the country would see him and his presidency for four years. And all three were full of Nixon-haters.
Nixon approved a counterattack on the networks by Vice President Spiro Agnew. And as he finished his edits of the Agnew speech, Nixon muttered, “This’ll tear the scab off those b———s!”
It certainly did.
Amazingly, the networks had rushed to carry the speech live, giving Agnew an audience of scores of millions for his blistering indictment of the networks’ anti-Nixon bias and abuse of their power over U.S. public opinion.
By December 1969, Nixon, the president most reviled by the press before Trump, was at 68 percent approval, and Agnew was the third-most admired man in America, after Nixon and Billy Graham.
Nixon went on to roll up a 49-state landslide three years later.
Before Watergate brought him down, he had shown that the vaunted “adversary press” was not only isolated from Middle America, it could be routed by a resolute White House in the battle for public opinion.
So where is this Trump-media war headed?
As of today, it looks as though it could end like the European wars of the last century, where victorious Brits and French were bled as badly and brought as low as defeated Germans.
Whatever happens to Trump, the respect and regard the mainstream media once enjoyed are gone. Public opinion of the national press puts them down beside the politicians they cover — and for good reason.
The people have concluded that the media really belong to the political class and merely masquerade as objective and conscientious observers. Like everyone else, they, too, have ideologies and agendas.
Moreover, unlike in the Nixon era, the adversary press today has its own adversary press: Fox News, talk radio, and media-monitoring websites to challenge their character, veracity, competence, and honor, even as they challenge the truthfulness of politicians.
Trump is being hammered as no other president before him, except perhaps Nixon during Watergate. It is hard to reach any other conclusion than that the mainstream media loathe him and intend to oust him, as they relished in helping to oust Nixon.
If this war ends well for Trump, it ends badly for his enemies in the press. If Trump goes down, the media will feel for a long time the hostility and hatred of those tens of millions who put their faith and placed their hopes in Trump.
For the mainstream media, seeking to recover the lost confidence of its countrymen, this war looks like a lose-lose.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 04, 2017, 07:50:03 PM
How Berkeley Birthed the Right
Thursday - May 4, 2017 at 7:18 pm

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In December 1964, a Silver Age of American liberalism, to rival the Golden Age of FDR and the New Deal, seemed to be upon us.
Barry Goldwater had been crushed in a 44-state landslide and the GOP reduced to half the size of the Democratic Party, with but 140 seats in the House and 32 in the Senate.
The Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the most liberal in history, was on a roll, and LBJ was virtually unopposed as he went about ramming his Great Society through Congress.
The left had it all. But then they blew it, beginning at Berkeley.
Protests, sit-ins, the holding of cops hostage in patrol cars — went on for weeks to force the University of California, Berkeley, to grant “free speech,” and then “filthy speech” rights everywhere on campus.
Students postured as revolutionaries at the barricades, and the Academic Senate, consisting of all tenured faculty, voted 824-115 to support all Free Speech Movement demands, while cravenly declining to vote to condemn the tactics used.
Middle America saw the students differently — as overprivileged children engaged in a tantrum at the most prestigious school in the finest university system in the freest nation on earth.
Here is how their leader Mario Savio described the prison-like conditions his fellow students had to endure on the Berkeley campus in 1964:
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
To borrow from Oscar Wilde, it takes a heart of stone to read Mario’s wailing — without laughing.
As I wondered in an editorial in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that week, “If there is so much restriction of speech on the campus, how it is that a few yards from Sproul Hall there is a Young Socialist League poster complaining of ‘American Aggression in the Congo’ and calling on students to support ‘the Congolese rebels.'”
Yet Berkeley proved a godsend to a dispirited right.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan would beat Berkeley like a drum in his run for governor, calling the campus, “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants.”
Reagan relished entertaining his populist following by mocking San Francisco Democrats. “A hippie,” said the Gipper, “looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
More seriously, the radicalism, intolerance, arrogance and fanaticism of the far left in the ’60s and ’70s helped to revive the Republican Party and bring it victories in five of the next six presidential elections.
In 1964, neither Nixon nor Reagan appeared to have a bright future. But after Berkeley, both captured the presidency twice. And both benefited mightily from denouncing rioting students, even as liberalism suffered from its perceived association with them.
Which brings us to Berkeley today.
Last week, columnist and best-selling author Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at Berkeley. Her security could not be guaranteed by the university.
In February, a speech of Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos also was canceled out of safety concerns after campus protesters hurled smoke bombs, broke windows and started a bonfire. The decision was made two hours before the event, as a crowd of 1,500 had gathered outside the venue.
The recent attacks on Charles Murray at Middlebury College and Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna call to mind an event from three decades before Berkeley ’64.
On Dec. 5, 1930, German moviegoers flocked to Berlin’s Mozart Hall to see the Hollywood film, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Some 150 Brownshirts, led by Joseph Goebbels, entered the theater, tossed stink bombs from the balcony, threw sneezing powder in the air and released mice. Theaters pulled that classic anti-war movie.
That same sense of moral certitude that cannot abide dissent to its dogmatic truths is on display in America today, as it was in Germany in the early 1930s. We are on a familiar slippery slope.
First come the marches and demonstrations. Then the assertion of the right to civil disobedience, to break the law for a higher cause by blocking streets and highways. Then comes the confronting of cops, the smashing of windows, the fistfights, the throwing of stones – as in Portland on May Day.
And, now, the shouting down of campus speakers.
The rage and resentment of the left at its rejection in 2016 are palpable. Sometimes this fever passes peacefully, as in the “Cooling of America” in the 1970s. And sometimes it doesn’t.
But to have crowds of left and right coming out to confront one another violently, in a country whose citizens possess 300 million guns, is probably not a good idea.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 09, 2017, 10:41:29 AM


 (http://buchanan.org/blog/nixon-trump-now-126940)
8May 2017
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Nixon and Trump, Then and Now
Monday - May 8, 2017 at 10:14 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects.
First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. (http://amzn.to/2pQQQLR)
The second has been the astonishing campaign of Donald Trump and his first 100-plus days as president.
In many ways, the two men could not have been more different.
Trump is a showman, a performer, a real estate deal-maker, born to wealth, who revels in the material blessings his success has brought. Nixon, born to poverty, was studious, reserved, steeped in history, consumed with politics and policy, and among the most prepared men ever to assume the presidency.
Yet the “mess” Trump inherited bears striking similarities to Nixon’s world in 1969.
Both took office in a nation deeply divided.
Nixon was elected in a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, race riots in 100 cities, and street battles between cops and radicals at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
By the fall of 1969, Nixon had buses surrounding his White House and U.S. Airborne troops in the basement of his Executive Office Building.
Trump’s campaign and presidency have also been marked by huge and hostile demonstrations.
Both men had their elections challenged by the toxic charge that they colluded with foreign powers to influence the outcome.
Nixon’s aides were accused of conspiring with Saigon to torpedo Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks. Trump aides were charged with collusion with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to disseminate stolen emails of the Democratic National Committee. The U.S. establishment, no stranger to the big lie, could not and cannot accept that the nation preferred these outsiders.
Nixon took office with 525,000 troops tied down in Vietnam. Trump inherited Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, and wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
Nixon pledged to end the Vietnam War with honor and begin an era of negotiations — and did. Trump promised to keep us out of new Mideast wars and to reach an accommodation with Russia.
Nixon and Trump both committed to remake the Supreme Court. Having pledged to select a Southerner, Nixon saw two of them, Judges Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, savaged by the Senate.
While Nixon was the first president since Zachary Taylor to take office without his party’s having won either house of Congress, Trump took office with his party in control of both. Thus, Trump’s nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, made it.
Probably no two presidents have ever faced such hostility and hatred from the media. After his 1969 “Silent Majority” speech on Vietnam was trashed, Nixon declared war, authorizing an attack on the three networks by Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Trump has not stopped bashing the media since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy.
In Trump’s first major victory on Capitol Hill, the House voted narrowly to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Only with a tiebreaking vote by Agnew in August 1969 did Nixon win his first big victory — Senate approval of a strategic missile defense.
Though Nixon had backed every civil rights law of the 1950s and ’60s, he was charged with pursuing a racist “Southern strategy” to capture the South from Dixiecrats, whose ilk had ruled it for a century.
Trump was also slandered for running a “racist” campaign.
Trump and Nixon were supported by the same loyalists — “forgotten Americans,” “Middle Americans,” “blue-collar Democrats” — and opposed and detested by the same enemy, a political-media-intellectual-cultural establishment. And this establishment is as determined to break and bring down Trump as it was to break and bring down Nixon.
Yet though Trump and Nixon ran up similar Electoral College victories, Nixon at the end of 1969 was at 68 percent approval and only 19 percent disapproval. Trump, a third of the way through his first year, is underwater in Gallup.
Nixon’s achievements in his first term were extraordinary.
He went to Beijing and opened up Mao Zedong’s China to the world, negotiated with Moscow the greatest arms limitation agreement since the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, and withdrew all U.S. forces from South Vietnam.
He desegregated the South, ended the draft, gave the vote to all 18-year-olds, indexed Social Security against inflation, created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, named four justices to the Supreme Court, presided over six moon landings, declared a “war on cancer,” proposed a guaranteed annual income, created revenue sharing with the states, took America off the gold standard, and let the dollar float.
He then won a 49-state landslide in 1972, creating a “New Majority,” and setting the stage for Republican control of the presidency for 16 of the next 20 years.
But in June 1972, a bungled bugging at the DNC, which Nixon briefly sought to contain and then discussed as the White House tapes were rolling, gave his enemies the sword they needed to run him through.
The same deep state enemies await a similar opening to do to Trump what they did to Nixon. Rely upon it.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 15, 2017, 08:19:26 PM
Comey & The Saturday Night Massacre
Monday - May 15, 2017 at 6:11 pm

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History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx.
On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon’s White House (http://amzn.to/2pQQQLR), President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried “Nixonian,” comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre.
Yet, the differences are stark.
The resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Bill Ruckelshaus and the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox came in the middle of an East-West crisis.
On Oct. 6, 1973, the high holy day of Yom Kippur, in a surprise attack, Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and breached Israel’s Bar Lev Line. Syria attacked on the Golan Heights.
Within days, 1,000 Israeli soldiers were dead, hundreds of tanks destroyed, dozens of planes downed by Soviet surface-to-air missiles. As Egypt’s army broke through in the Sinai, there came reports that Moshe Dayan was arming Israeli F-4s with nuclear weapons.
“This is the end of the Third Temple,” Dayan was quoted.
Nixon ordered every U.S. transport that could fly to deliver tanks and planes to Israel. Gen. Ariel Sharon crossed the Canal to the west and rolled north to cut off and kill the Egyptian 3rd army in Sinai.
The Gulf Arabs declared an oil embargo of the United States.
We got reports that nuclear-capable Russian ships were moving through the Dardanelles and Soviet airborne divisions were moving to airfields. U.S. nuclear forces were put on heightened alert.
On Oct. 10, another blow had befallen Nixon’s White House. Vice President Agnew pleaded nolo contendere to tax evasion and resigned.
Nixon immediately named Gerald Ford to replace him.
It was in this environment, with Henry Kissinger in Moscow trying to negotiate a ceasefire in the Mideast, that Cox refused to accept a compromise deal that would give him verified summaries of Nixon’s tapes, but not actual tapes. Democrat Senators Sam Ervin and John Stennis had accepted this compromise, as had Richardson, or so we believed.
Nixon had no choice. As he told me, he could not, in this Cold War crisis, have Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev see him back down in the face of defiance by one of his own Cabinet appointees.
If he had to, Nixon told me, he would reach down to a GS-7 at Justice to fire Cox: “We can’t have that viper sleeping in the bed with us.”
That Saturday night, I told friends, next week will bring resolutions of impeachment in the House. And so it did.
How do Nixon and Trump’s actions differ?
Where Nixon decapitated his Justice Department and shut down the special prosecutor’s office, Trump simply fired an FBI director who agreed that Trump had every right to do so.
By October 1973, with two dozen Nixon White House, Cabinet and campaign officers convicted or facing indictment and trial, we were steeped in the worst political scandal in U.S. history.
Nothing comparable exists today.
But if President Trump is enraged, he has every right to be.
Since July, the FBI has been investigating alleged Trump campaign collusion with Putin’s Russia to hack the DNC and John Podesta’s email accounts — and produced zilch. As of January, ex-CIA Director Mike Morell and ex-DNI James Clapper said no collusion had been found.
Yet every day we hear Democrats and the media bray about a Putin-Trump connection and Russian “control” of the president.
In the early 1950s, they had a term for this. It was called McCarthyism, and its greatest practitioners invariably turned out to be those who had invented the term.
“Justice delayed is justice denied!” applies to presidents, too.
Trump has been under a cloud of a “Russian connection” to him and his campaign for nearly a year. Yet no hard evidence of Trump-Russia collusion in the election has been produced.
Is not the endless airing of unproven allegations inherently un-American?
In 1973, NBC’s John Chancellor suggested the ouster of Richardson, Ruckelshaus and Cox was the “most serious constitutional crisis” in U.S. history, passing over the secession of 11 Southern states and a cινιℓ ωαr that cost 620,000 lives. One London reporter said that “the whiff of the Gestapo was in the clear October air.”
We see a similar hysteria rising today.
Yet that was not a constitutional crisis then, and the mandated early retirement of Jim Comey is not a constitutional crisis now.
And that the mainstream media are equating “Russia-gate” and Watergate tells you what is afoot.
Trump is hated by this city, which gave him 4 percent of its votes, as much as Nixon was. And the deep-state determination to bring him down is as great as it was with Nixon.
By 1968, the liberal establishment had lost the mandate it had held since 1933, but not lost its ability to wound and kill presidents.
Though Nixon won 49 states, that establishment took him down. Though Ronald Reagan won 49 states, that establishment almost took him down in the Iran-Contra affair.
And that is the end they have in mind for President Trump.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 18, 2017, 08:27:58 PM

Rosenstein Joins the Posse
Thursday - May 18, 2017 at 8:27 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“With the stroke of a pen, Rod Rosenstein redeemed his reputation,” writes Dana Milbank of The Washington Post.
What had Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein done to be welcomed home by the Post like the prodigal son?
Without consulting the White House, he sandbagged President Trump, naming a special counsel to take over the investigation of the Russia connection that could prove ruinous to this presidency.
Rod has reinvigorated a tired 10-month investigation that failed to find any collusion between Trump and Russian hacking of the DNC. Not a single indictment had come out of the FBI investigation.
Yet, now a new special counsel, Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI, will slow-walk his way through this same terrain again, searching for clues leading to potentially impeachable offenses. What seemed to be winding down for Trump is now only just beginning to gear up.
Also to be investigated is whether the president tried to curtail the FBI investigation with his phone calls and Oval Office meetings with FBI Director James Comey, before abruptly firing Comey last week.
Regarded as able and honest, Mueller will be under media pressure to come up with charges. Great and famous prosecutors are measured by whom they convict and how many scalps they take.
Moreover, a burgeoning special counsel’s office dredging up dirt on Trump and associates will find itself the beneficiary of an indulgent press.
Why did Rosenstein capitulate to a Democrat-media clamor for a special counsel that could prove disastrous for the president who elevated and honored him?
Surely in part, as Milbank writes, to salvage his damaged reputation.
After being approved 94-6 by a Senate that hailed him as a principled and independent U.S. attorney for both George Bush and Barack Obama, Rosenstein found himself being pilloried for preparing the docuмent White House aides called crucial to Trump’s decision to fire Comey.
Rosenstein had gone over to the dark side. He had, it was said, on Trump’s orders, put the hit on Comey. Now, by siccing a special counsel on the president himself, Rosenstein is restored to the good graces of this city. Rosenstein just turned in his black hat for a white hat.
Democrats are hailing both his decision to name a special counsel and the man he chose. Yet it is difficult to exaggerate the damage he has done.
As did almost all of its predecessors, including those which led to the resignation of President Nixon and impeachment of Bill Clinton, Mueller’s investigation seems certain to drag on for years.
All that time, there will be a cloud over Trump’s presidency that will drain his political authority. Trump’s enemies will become less fearful and more vocal. Republican Congressmen and Senators in swing states and marginal districts, looking to 2018, will have less incentive to follow Trump’s lead, rather than their own instincts and interests. Party unity will fade away.
And without a united and energized Republican Party on the Hill, how do you get repeal and replacement of Obamacare, tax reform or a border wall? Trump’s agenda suddenly seems comatose. And was it a coincidence that the day Mueller was appointed, the markets tanked, with the Dow falling 372 points?
Markets had soared with Trump’s election on the expectation that his pro-business agenda would be enacted. If those expectations suddenly seem illusory, will the boom born of hope become a bust?
A White House staff, said to be in disarray, and a president reportedly enraged over endless press reports of his problems and falling polls, are not going to become one big happy family again with a growing office of prosecutors and FBI agents poking into issues in which they were involved.
Nor is the jurisdiction of the special counsel restricted to alleged Russia interference in the campaign. Allegations about Trump’s taxes, investments, and associates, and those of his family, could be drawn into the maw of the special counsel’s office by political and business enemies enthusiastic about seeing him brought down.
More folks in Trump’s entourage will soon be lawyering up.
While it’s absurd today to talk of impeachment, that will not deter Democrats and the media from speculating, given what happened to Nixon and Clinton when special prosecutors were put on their trail.
Another consequence of the naming of a special counsel, given what such investigations have produced, will be that Vice President Pence will soon find himself with new friends and admirers, and will begin to attract more press as the man of the future in the GOP.
A rising profile for Pence is unlikely to strengthen his relationship with a besieged president.
In the United Kingdom, the odds are growing that Trump may not finish his term.
So how does he regain the enthusiasm and energy he exhibited in previous crises, with such talk in the air?
A debilitating and potentially dangerous time for President Trump has now begun, courtesy of his deputy attorney general.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 23, 2017, 08:32:02 AM
A Special Prosecutor for Criminal Leaks
Monday - May 22, 2017 at 11:01 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Who is the real threat to the national security?
Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners?
Or is it The Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting the world, and ISIS, to what we knew.
President Trump has the authority to declassify security secrets. And in sharing that intel with the Russians, who have had airliners taken down by bombs, he was trying to restore a relationship.
On fighting Islamist terror, we and the Russians agree.
Five years ago, Russia alerted us that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had become a violent radical Islamist. That was a year and a half before Tsarnaev carried out the Boston Marathon bombing.
But upon what authority did The Washington Post reveal code-word intelligence secrets? Where in the Constitution or U.S. law did the Post get the right to reveal state secrets every U.S. citizen is duty bound to protect?
The source of this top secret laptop-bomb leak that the Post published had to be someone in the intel community who was violating an oath that he had sworn to protect U.S. secrets, and committing a felony by leaking that secret.
Those who leaked this to hurt Trump, and those who published this in the belief it would hurt Trump, sees themselves as the “Resistance” — like the French Resistance to Vichy in World War II.
And they seemingly see themselves as above the laws that bind the rest of us.
“Can Donald Trump Be Trusted With State Secrets?” asked the headline on the editorial in The New York Times.
One wonders: Are these people oblivious to their own past?
In 1971, The New York Times published a hoard of secret docuмents from the Kennedy-Johnson years on Vietnam. Editors spent months arranging them to convince the public it had been lied into a war that the Times itself had supported, but had turned against.
Purpose of publication: Damage and discredit the war effort, now that Richard Nixon was commander in chief. This was tantamount to treason in wartime.
When Nixon went to the Supreme Court to halt publication of the Pentagon Papers until we could review them to ensure that sources and methods were not being compromised, the White House was castigated for failing to understand the First Amendment.
And for colluding with the thieves that stole them, and for publishing the secret docuмents, the Times won a Pulitzer.
Forty years ago, the Post also won a Pulitzer — for Watergate.
The indispensable source of its stories was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, who repeatedly violated his oath and broke the law by leaking the contents of confidential FBI interviews and grand jury testimony.
10 years in a federal penitentiary had his identity been revealed. But to protect him from being prosecuted and sent to prison, and to protect themselves from the public knowing their scoops were handed to them by a corrupt FBI agent, the Post kept Felt’s identity secret for 30 years. Yet, their motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Which brings us to the point.
The adversary press asserts in its actions a right to collude with and shelter disloyal and dishonorable officials who violate our laws by leaking secrets that they are sworn to protect.
Why do these officials become criminals, and why do the mainstream media protect them?
Because this seedy bargain is the best way to advance their common interests.
The media get the stolen goods to damage Trump. Anti-Trump officials get their egos massaged, their agendas advanced and their identities protected.
This is the corrupt bargain the Beltway press has on offer.
For the media, bringing down Trump is also good for business. TV ratings of anti-Trump media are soaring. The “failing New York Times” has seen a surge in circulation. The Pulitzers are beckoning.
And bringing down a president is exhilarating. As Ben Bradlee reportedly said during the Iran-Contra scandal that was wounding President Reagan, “We haven’t had this much fun since Watergate.”
When Nixon was brought down, North Vietnam launched a spring offensive that overran the South, and led to cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs and mass executions of our allies, South Vietnamese boat people perishing by the thousands in the South China Sea, and a h0Ɩ0cαųst in Cambodia.
When Trump gets home from his trip, he should direct Justice to establish an office inside the FBI to investigate all illegal leaks since his election and all security leaks that are de facto felonies, and name a special prosecutor to head up the investigation.
Then he should order that prosecutor to determine if any Trump associates, picked up by normal security surveillance, were unmasked, and had their names and conversations spread through the intel community, on the orders of Susan Rice and Barack Obama, to seed the bureaucracy to sabotage the Trump presidency before it began.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: congaudeant on May 23, 2017, 01:00:26 PM
I like PJB's commentaries.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 26, 2017, 07:59:52 AM


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25May 2017
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After the Confederates, Who’s Next?
Thursday - May 25, 2017 at 6:27 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecuмseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman’s troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah.
Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was transferred by rail to the Union POW stockade at Camp Douglas, Illinois.
By the standards of modernity, my great-grandfather, fighting to prevent the torching of Georgia’s capital, was engaged in a criminal and immoral cause. And “Uncle Billy” Sherman was a liberator.
Under President Grant, Sherman took command of the Union army and ordered Gen. Philip Sheridan, who had burned the Shenandoah Valley to starve Virginia into submission, to corral the Plains Indians on reservations.
It is in dispute as to whether Sheridan said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” There is no dispute as to the contempt Sheridan had for the Indians, killing their buffalo to deprive them of food.
Today, great statues stand in the nation’s capital, along with a Sherman and a Sheridan circle, to honor these most ruthless of generals in that bloodiest of wars that cost 620,000 American lives.
Yet, across the South and even in border states like Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, one may find statues of Confederate soldiers in town squares to honor the valor and sacrifices of the Southern men and boys who fought and fell in the Lost Cause.
When the Spanish-American War broke out, President McKinley, who as a teenage soldier had fought against “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah and been at Antietam, bloodiest single-day battle of the cινιℓ ωαr, removed his hat and stood for the singing of “Dixie,” as Southern volunteers and former Confederate soldiers paraded through Atlanta to fight for their united country. My grandfather was in that army.
For a century, Americans lived comfortably with the honoring, North and South, of the men who fought on both sides.
But today’s America is not the magnanimous country we grew up in.
Since the ’60s, there has arisen an ideology that holds that the Confederacy was the moral equivalent of nαzι Germany and those who fought under its battle flag should be regarded as traitors or worse.
Thus, in New Orleans, statues of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, and General Robert E. Lee were just pulled down. And a drive is underway to take down the statue of Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans and president of the United States, which stands in Jackson Square.
Why? Old Hickory was a slave owner and Indian fighter who used his presidential power to transfer the Indians of Georgia out to the Oklahoma Territory in a tragedy known as the Trail of Tears.
But if Jackson, and James K. Polk, who added the Southwest and California to the United States after the Mexican-American War, were slave owners, so, too, were four of our first five presidents.
The list includes the father of our country, George Washington, the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and the author of our Constitution, James Madison.
Not only are the likenesses of Washington and Jefferson carved on Mount Rushmore, the two Virginians are honored with two of the most magnificent monuments and memorials in Washington, D.C.
Behind this remorseless drive to blast the greatest names from America’s past off public buildings, and to tear down their statues and monuments, is an egalitarian extremism rooted in envy and hate.
Among its core convictions is that spreading Christianity was a cover story for rapacious Europeans who, after discovering America, came in masses to dispossess and exterminate native peoples. “The white race,” wrote Susan Sontag, “is the cancer of human history.”
Today, the men we were taught to revere as the great captains, explorers, missionaries and nation-builders are seen by many as part of a racist, imperialist, genocidal enterprise, wicked men who betrayed and eradicated the peace-loving natives who had welcomed them.
What they blindly refuse to see is that while its sins are scarlet, as are those of all civilizations, it is the achievements of the West that are unrivaled. The West ended slavery. Christianity and the West gave birth to the idea of inalienable human rights.
As scholar Charles Murray has written, 97 percent of the world’s most significant figures and 97 percent of the world’s greatest achievements in the arts, architecture, literature, astrology, biology, earth sciences, physics, medicine, mathematics and technology came from the West.
What is disheartening is not that there are haters of our civilization out there, but that there seem to be fewer defenders.
What happens, one wonders, when these Philistines discover that the seated figure in the statue, right in front of D.C.’s Union Station, is the High Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Christopher Columbus?
Happy Memorial Day!
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 30, 2017, 05:50:44 PM
May 30, 2017

Breakup of the West?
Tuesday - May 30, 2017 at 2:10 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
By the time Air Force One started down the runaway at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, to bring President Trump home, the Atlantic had grown markedly wider than it was when he flew to Riyadh.
In a Munich beer hall Sunday, Angela Merkel confirmed it.
Europe must begin to look out for itself, she said, “take our fate into our own hands. … The times in which we could rely fully on others, they are somewhat over.”
Merkel’s apprehensions are understandable. A divorce could be in the cards. During his visit to NATO in Brussels and the G-7 in Sicily, Trump, with both his words and body language, revealed his thinking on who are friends and who are freeloaders.
Long before arriving, Trump had cheered Brexit, the British decision to quit the EU, and shown a preference for nationalist Marine Le Pen in the French election won handily by Emmanuel Macron.
But when it comes to leaders, Trump seems to prefer Deke House to student council types. He has hailed Vladimir Putin as a “strong ruler” and “very smart.” In Riyadh, Trump declared King Salman a “wise man.” He calls China’s Xi Jinping “a great guy,” and welcomed Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the Oval Office: “It is a great honor to have you with us.”
When Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who has imprisoned and killed thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood, came to visit, Trump said, “He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation.”
In a phone call, Trump also praised Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who has had narcotics dealers gunned down in the streets, for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”
Trump has even found merit in Kim Jong Un, the 33-year-old dictator of North Korea, describing him as a “a pretty smart cookie.”
And where Trump was photographed by the Russians grinning broadly with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, his confab with Merkel was marked by a seeming reluctance to shake hands.
But the disagreements with Europe are deeper than matters of style. Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have indicated that in dealing with foreign nations, U.S. support for democratic norms and human rights will now take a back seat to strategic interests.
In Riyadh, Trump signaled the Sunni King of Bahrain we will no longer be giving him instructions on how to treat his Shiite majority. We’re not “here to lecture,” Trump assured the Arab royals.
After the conclave, the king’s police killed five and wounded dozens of demonstrators outside the home of a Shiite cleric, and arrested 286 of his supporters.
Of greater concern to Trump and Tillerson is the retention of the Persian Gulf naval base of the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain.
Trump also tilts toward GOP skepticism of the threat of global warming and is considering pulling out of the Paris climate accord that is the altarpiece of the environmentalist international.
In Brussels, Trump praised NATO’s decision to back the U.S. war in Afghanistan after 9/11, but did not specifically recommit to Article 5, requiring all NATO nations to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, which our nervous NATO allies had wanted to hear.
Instead, they got an earful of pure Trump about how they owed back pay for NATO and that only five NATO nations were meeting their obligation to allocate 2 percent of GDP to defense.
Merkel seemed to take this as an implied threat that the U.S commitment to defend Europe from a Russia with one-tenth of NATO-Europe’s GDP may be contingent, and may have a time limit on it.
Moreover, France, Britain and Germany appear far more solidly committed to the Iran nuclear deal than are Trump and Congress.
A U.S.-NATO collision could come here, and soon.
The Iranians have signed on to purchase 100 Airbus aircraft and 80 commercial airliners from Boeing. If the Republicans impose new sanctions on Iran, or scupper the Boeing deal, Europe would have to decide whether to abandon the Airbus sales, or deliver the planes and perhaps take over the Boeing contract. That could bring a crisis.
And any U.S. confrontation with Iran, pressed upon us by Saudis, Israelis and Sunni Arabs could find Europeans bailing out wholesale on the next U.S. war in the Middle East.
Trump also seems less committed to the sanctions on Russia for its reannexation of Ukraine and support of pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass than does NATO Europe or Congress.
From his rough remarks, Trump sees the Europeans as freeloaders on U.S. defense, laggards on their NATO contributions, and mercantilists who craft policies to run endless trade surpluses at our expense, especially the Germans who are “bad, very bad.”
The European half of Trump’s trip should be taken as a fire-bell-in-the-night warning: Shape up, Europe, or you may find yourselves on your own when it comes to the defense of your continent.
For we Americans have had about enough.
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http://buchanan.org/blog/breakup-of-the-west-127125
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 01, 2017, 11:41:08 PM
Is Afghanistan a Lost Cause?
Thursday - June 1, 2017 at 11:30 pm

By Patrick J. Buchanan
“We are there and we are committed” was the regular retort of Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the war in Vietnam.
Whatever you may think of our decision to go in, Rusk was saying, if we walk away, the United States loses the first war in its history, with all that means for Southeast Asia and America’s position in the world.
We face a similar moment of decision.
Wednesday, a truck bomb exploded near the diplomatic quarter of Kabul, killing 90 and wounding 460. So terrible was the atrocity that the Taliban denied complicity. It is believed to have been the work of the Haqqani network.
This “horrific and shameful attack demonstrates these terrorists’ compete disregard for human life and their nihilistic opposition to the dream of a peaceful future for Afghanistan,” said Hugo Llordens, a U.S. diplomat in Kabul.
The message the truck bombers sent to the Afghan people? Not even in the heart of this capital can your government keep civilian workers and its own employees safe.
Message to America: After investing hundreds of billions and 2,000 U.S. lives in the 15 years since 9/11, we are further from victory than we have ever been.
President Obama, believing Afghanistan was the right war, and Iraq the wrong war, ramped up the U.S. presence in 2011 to 100,000 troops. His plan: Cripple the Taliban, train the Afghan army and security forces, stabilize the government, and withdraw American forces by the end of his second term.
Obama fell short, leaving President Trump with 8,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and Kabul’s control more tenuous than ever. The Taliban hold more territory and are active in more provinces than they have been since being driven from power in 2001. And Afghan forces are suffering casualties at the highest rate of the war.
Stated starkly, the war in Afghanistan is slowly being lost. Indeed, Trump has inherited what seems to be an unwinnable war, if he is not prepared to send a new U.S. army to block the Taliban from taking power. And it is hard to believe that the American people would approve of any large reintroduction of U.S. forces.
The U.S. commander there, Gen. John Nicholson, has requested at least 3,000 more U.S. troops to train the Afghan army and stabilize the country while seeking a negotiated end to the war.
Trump’s conundrum: 3,000 or 5,000 more U.S. troops can at best help the Afghan security forces sustain the present stalemate.
But if we could not defeat the Taliban with 100,000 U.S. troops in country in 2011, we are not going to defeat a stronger Taliban with a U.S. force one-seventh of that size. And if a guerrilla army does not lose, it wins.
Yet it is hard to see how Trump can refuse to send more troops. If he says we have invested enough blood and treasure, the handwriting will be on the wall. Reports that both Russia and Iran are already talking to the Taliban suggest that they see a Taliban takeover as inevitable.
Should Trump announce any timetable for withdrawal, it would send shock waves through the Afghan government, army and society.
Any awareness that their great superpower ally was departing, now or soon, or refusing to invest more after 15 years, would be a psychological blow from which President Ashraf Ghani’s government might not recover.
What would a Taliban victory mean?
The Afghan people, especially those who cast their lot with us, could undergo something like what befell the South Vietnamese and Cambodians in 1975. It would be a defeat for us almost as far-reaching as was the defeat for the Soviet Union, when the Red Army was forced to pull out after a decade of war in the 1980s.
For the USSR, that Afghan defeat proved a near-fatal blow.
And if we pulled up stakes and departed, the exodus from Afghanistan would be huge and we would face a moral crisis of how many refugees we would accept, and how many we would leave behind to their fate.
Fifteen years ago, some of us argued that an attempt to remake Afghanistan and Iraq in our image was utopian folly, almost certain, given the history and culture of the entire region, to fail.
Yet we plunged in.
In 2001, it was Afghanistan. In 2003, we invaded and occupied Iraq. Then we attacked Libya and ousted Gadhafi. Then we intervened in Syria. Then we backed the Saudi war to crush the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Given the trillions sunk and lost, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead, how have we benefited ourselves, or these peoples?
As Rusk said, “We are there and we are committed.”
And the inevitable departure of the United States from the Middle East, which is coming, just as the British, French and Soviet empires had to depart, will likely do lasting damage to the American soul.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Meg on June 02, 2017, 10:54:36 AM
A Special Prosecutor for Criminal Leaks
Monday - May 22, 2017 at 11:01 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Who is the real threat to the national security?
Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners?
Or is it The Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting the world, and ISIS, to what we knew.
President Trump has the authority to declassify security secrets. And in sharing that intel with the Russians, who have had airliners taken down by bombs, he was trying to restore a relationship.
On fighting Islamist terror, we and the Russians agree.
Five years ago, Russia alerted us that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had become a violent radical Islamist. That was a year and a half before Tsarnaev carried out the Boston Marathon bombing.
But upon what authority did The Washington Post reveal code-word intelligence secrets? Where in the Constitution or U.S. law did the Post get the right to reveal state secrets every U.S. citizen is duty bound to protect?
The source of this top secret laptop-bomb leak that the Post published had to be someone in the intel community who was violating an oath that he had sworn to protect U.S. secrets, and committing a felony by leaking that secret.
Those who leaked this to hurt Trump, and those who published this in the belief it would hurt Trump, sees themselves as the “Resistance” — like the French Resistance to Vichy in World War II.
And they seemingly see themselves as above the laws that bind the rest of us.
“Can Donald Trump Be Trusted With State Secrets?” asked the headline on the editorial in The New York Times.
One wonders: Are these people oblivious to their own past?
In 1971, The New York Times published a hoard of secret docuмents from the Kennedy-Johnson years on Vietnam. Editors spent months arranging them to convince the public it had been lied into a war that the Times itself had supported, but had turned against.
Purpose of publication: Damage and discredit the war effort, now that Richard Nixon was commander in chief. This was tantamount to treason in wartime.
When Nixon went to the Supreme Court to halt publication of the Pentagon Papers until we could review them to ensure that sources and methods were not being compromised, the White House was castigated for failing to understand the First Amendment.
And for colluding with the thieves that stole them, and for publishing the secret docuмents, the Times won a Pulitzer.
Forty years ago, the Post also won a Pulitzer — for Watergate.
The indispensable source of its stories was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, who repeatedly violated his oath and broke the law by leaking the contents of confidential FBI interviews and grand jury testimony.
10 years in a federal penitentiary had his identity been revealed. But to protect him from being prosecuted and sent to prison, and to protect themselves from the public knowing their scoops were handed to them by a corrupt FBI agent, the Post kept Felt’s identity secret for 30 years. Yet, their motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Which brings us to the point.
The adversary press asserts in its actions a right to collude with and shelter disloyal and dishonorable officials who violate our laws by leaking secrets that they are sworn to protect.
Why do these officials become criminals, and why do the mainstream media protect them?
Because this seedy bargain is the best way to advance their common interests.
The media get the stolen goods to damage Trump. Anti-Trump officials get their egos massaged, their agendas advanced and their identities protected.
This is the corrupt bargain the Beltway press has on offer.
For the media, bringing down Trump is also good for business. TV ratings of anti-Trump media are soaring. The “failing New York Times” has seen a surge in circulation. The Pulitzers are beckoning.
And bringing down a president is exhilarating. As Ben Bradlee reportedly said during the Iran-Contra scandal that was wounding President Reagan, “We haven’t had this much fun since Watergate.”
When Nixon was brought down, North Vietnam launched a spring offensive that overran the South, and led to cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs and mass executions of our allies, South Vietnamese boat people perishing by the thousands in the South China Sea, and a h0Ɩ0cαųst in Cambodia.
When Trump gets home from his trip, he should direct Justice to establish an office inside the FBI to investigate all illegal leaks since his election and all security leaks that are de facto felonies, and name a special prosecutor to head up the investigation.
Then he should order that prosecutor to determine if any Trump associates, picked up by normal security surveillance, were unmasked, and had their names and conversations spread through the intel community, on the orders of Susan Rice and Barack Obama, to seed the bureaucracy to sabotage the Trump presidency before it began.
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This article in particular is very good. Patrick Buchanan asks the questions:

"Who is the real threat to national security? Is it president Trump, who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners? Or is it the Washington Post who ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting the world and ISIS to what we knew? President Trump has the authority to declassify security secrets. And in sharing that intel with Russians, who have had airliners taken down by bombs, he was trying to restore a relationship. On fighting Islamic terror, we and the Russians agree."

Mr. Buchanan then goes on to say that the source of the top-secret laptop bomb leak had to come from someone in the intel community who violated an oath that he took to protect U.S. secrets, and committed a felony by leaking that secret. He says also that those who leaked this were trying to hurt Trump, and that they see themselves as the "Resistance," similar to the French Resistance to Vichy in World War ll. 

The New York Times published "Can Donald Trump be trusted with state secrets?"

He also says..."For the media, bringing down Trump is also good for business. TV ratings of anti-Trump media are soaring. [...] And bringing down a president is exhilarating."

Buchanan has some good insight, but he doesn't take it far enough. IMO, it isn't just the thrill of bringing down Trump that the media enjoys, but rather the Elites that own the press here in the U.S. are traitors to this country, and they are upset that their manipulative brainwashing of Americans didn't work, and their candidate didn't win (Hillary). 
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 09, 2017, 10:17:08 AM
The Impeach-Trump Conspiracy
Thursday - June 8, 2017 at 11:06 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Pressed by Megyn Kelly on his ties to President Trump, an exasperated Vladimir Putin blurted out, “We had no relationship at all. … I never met him. … Have you all lost your senses over there?”
Yes, Vlad, we have.
Consider the questions that have convulsed this city since the Trump triumph, and raised talk of impeachment.
Did Trump collude with Russians to hack the DNC emails and move the goods to WikiLeaks, thus revealing the state secret that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was putting the screws to poor Bernie Sanders?
If not Trump himself, did campaign aides collude with the KGB?
Now, given that our NSA and CIA seemingly intercept everything Russians say to Americans, why is our fabled FBI, having investigated for a year, unable to give us a definitive yes or no?
The snail’s pace of the FBI investigation explains Trump’s frustration. What explains the FBI’s torpor? If J. Edgar Hoover had moved at this pace, John Dillinger would have died of old age.
We hear daily on cable TV of the “Trump-Russia” scandal. Yet, no one has been charged with collusion, and every intelligence official, past or prevent, who has spoken out has echoed ex-acting CIA Director Mike Morrell:
“On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. … There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark.”
Where are the criminals? Where is the crime?
As for the meetings between Gen. Mike Flynn, Jared Kushner, Sen. Jeff Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, it appears that Trump wanted a “back channel” to Putin so he could honor his commitment to seek better relations with Russia.
Given the Russophobia rampant here, that makes sense. And while it appears amateurish that Flynn would use Russian channels of communication, what is criminal about this?
Putin is not Stalin. Soviet divisions are not sitting on the Elbe. The Cold War is over. And many presidents have used back channels. Woodrow Wilson sent Col. Edward House to talk to the Kaiser and the Brits. FDR ran messages to Churchill through Harry Hopkins.
As for Trump asking Director James Comey to cut some slack for Flynn, it is understandable in human terms. Flynn had been a loyal aide and friend and Trump had to feel rotten about having to fire the man.
So, what is really going on here?
All the synthetic shock over what Kushner or Sessions said to Kislyak aside, this city’s hatred for President Trump, and its fanatic determination to bring him down in disgrace, predates his presidency.
For Trump ran in 2016 not simply as the Republican alternative. He presented his candidacy as a rejection, a repudiation of the failed elites, political and media, of both parties. Americans voted in 2016 not just for a change in leaders but for a revolution to overthrow a ruling regime.
Thus this city has never reconciled itself to Trump’s victory, and the president daily rubs their noses in their defeat with his tweets.
Seeking a rationale for its rejection, this city has seized upon that old standby. We didn’t lose! The election was stolen in a vast conspiracy, an “act of war” against America, an assault upon “our democracy,” criminal collusion between the Kremlin and the Trumpites.
Hence, Trump is an illegitimate president, and it is the duty of brave citizens of both parties to work to remove the usurper.
The city seized upon a similar argument in 1968, when Richard Nixon won, because it was said he had colluded to have South Vietnam’s president abort Lyndon Johnson’s new plan to bring peace to Southeast Asia in the final hours of that election.
Then, as now, the “t” word, treason, was trotted out.
Attempts to overturn elections where elites are repudiated are not uncommon in U.S. history. Both Nixon and Reagan, after 49-state landslides, were faced with attempts to overturn the election results.
With Nixon in Watergate, the elites succeeded. With Reagan in Iran-Contra, they almost succeeded in destroying that great president as he was ending the Cold War in a bloodless victory for the West.
After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson sought to prevent Radical Republicans from imposing a ruthless Reconstruction on a defeated and devastated South.
The Radicals enacted the Tenure of Office Act, stripping Johnson of his authority to remove any member of the Cabinet without Senate permission. Johnson defied the Radicals and fired their agent in the Cabinet, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
“Tennessee” Johnson was impeached, and missed conviction by one vote. John F. Kennedy, in his 1956 book, called the senator who had voted to save Johnson a “Profile in Courage.”
If Trump is brought down on the basis of what Putin correctly labels “nonsense,” this city will have executed a nonviolent coup against a constitutionally elected president. Such an act would drop us into the company of those Third World nations where such means are the customary ways that corrupt elites retain their hold on power.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/impeach-trump-conspiracy-127163
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Meg on June 09, 2017, 08:06:33 PM
The Impeach-Trump Conspiracy
Thursday - June 8, 2017 at 11:06 pm

 If Trump is brought down on the basis of what Putin correctly labels “nonsense,” this city will have executed a nonviolent coup against a constitutionally elected president. Such an act would drop us into the company of those Third World nations where such means are the customary ways that corrupt elites retain their hold on power.


http://buchanan.org/blog/impeach-trump-conspiracy-127163

I think that this is what it boils down to. Buchanan is right. The Elite are trying to execute a coup against a lawfully elected president, just like some third-world nations do. Except that the U.S. Elites have been complicit in many of those coups in third-world nations, so they have a lot of experience in bringing down a president. They seem to think that they have some sort of right to do so. The corrupt Elites need to have a corrupt media to do their bidding. Democracy no longer exists here. The Elites control who gets elected, though the media. Their plot didn't work this last time, and Trump was elected. So they will do whatever they have to, to bring down a lawfully-elected president. They are evil. 
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 13, 2017, 03:53:13 PM
Are We Nearing cινιℓ ωαr?
Monday - June 12, 2017 at 10:03 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
President Trump may be chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, but his administration is shot through with disloyalists plotting to bring him down.
We are approaching something of a cινιℓ ωαr where the capital city seeks the overthrow of the sovereign and its own restoration.
Thus far, it is a nonviolent struggle, though street clashes between pro- and anti-Trump forces are increasingly marked by fistfights and brawls. Police are having difficulty keeping people apart. A few have been arrested carrying concealed weapons.
That the objective of this city is to bring Trump down via a deep state-media coup is no secret. Few deny it.
Last week, fired Director of the FBI James Comey, a successor to J. Edgar Hoover, admitted under oath that he used a cutout to leak to The New York Times an Oval Office conversation with the president.
Goal: have the Times story trigger the appointment of a special prosecutor to bring down the president.
Comey wanted a special prosecutor to target Trump, despite his knowledge, from his own FBI investigation, that Trump was innocent of the pervasive charge that he colluded with the Kremlin in the hacking of the DNC.
Comey’s deceit was designed to enlist the police powers of the state to bring down his president. And it worked. For the special counsel named, with broad powers to pursue Trump, is Comey’s friend and predecessor at the FBI, Robert Mueller.
As Newt Gingrich said Sunday: “Look at who Mueller’s starting to hire. … (T)hese are people that … look to me like they’re … setting up to go after Trump … including people, by the way, who have been reprimanded for hiding from the defense information into major cases. …
“This is going to be a witch hunt.”
Another example. According to Daily Kos, Trump planned a swift lifting of sanctions on Russia after inauguration and a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin to prevent a second Cold War.
The State Department was tasked with working out the details.
Instead, says Daniel Fried, the coordinator for sanctions policy, he received “panicky” calls of “Please, my God, can you stop this?”
Operatives at State, disloyal to the president and hostile to the Russia policy on which he had been elected, collaborated with elements in Congress to sabotage any detente. They succeeded.
“It would have been a win-win for Moscow,” said Tom Malinowski of State, who boasted last week of his role in blocking a rapprochement with Russia. State employees sabotaged one of the principal policies for which Americans had voted, and they substituted their own.
Not in memory have there been so many leaks to injure a president from within his own government, and not just political leaks, but leaks of confidential, classified and secret docuмents. The leaks are coming out of the supposedly secure investigative and intelligence agencies of the U.S. government.
The media, the beneficiaries of these leaks, are giving cover to those breaking the law. The real criminal “collusion” in Washington is between Big Media and the deep state, colluding to destroy a president they detest and to sink the policies they oppose.
Yet another example is the unfolding “unmasking” scandal.
While all the evidence is not yet in, it appears an abnormal number of conversations between Trump associates and Russians were intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies.
On orders higher up, the conversations were transcribed, and, contrary to law, the names of Trump associates unmasked.
Then those transcripts, with names revealed, were spread to all 16 agencies of the intel community at the direction of Susan Rice, and with the possible knowledge of Barack Obama, assuring some would be leaked after Trump became president.
The leak of Gen. Michael Flynn’s conversation with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, after Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for the hacking of the DNC, may have been a product of the unmasking operation. The media hit on Flynn cost him the National Security Council post.
Trump has had many accomplishments since his election. Yet his enemies in the media and their deep state allies have often made a purgatory of his presidency.
What he and his White House need to understand is that this is not going to end, that this is a fight to the finish, that his enemies will not relent until they see him impeached or resigning in disgrace.
To prevail, Trump will have to campaign across this country and wage guerrilla war in this capital, using the legal and political weapons at his disposal to ferret out the enemies within his own government.
Not only is this battle essential, if Trump hopes to realize his agenda, it is winnable. For the people sense that the Beltway elites are cynically engaged in preserving their own privileges, positions and power.
If the president cannot rewrite Obamacare or achieve tax reform, he should not go around the country in 2018 wailing about Nancy Peℓσѕι or Chuck Schumer. They are not the real adversaries. They are but interchangeable parts.
He should campaign against the real enemies of America First by promising to purge the deep state and flog its media collaborators.
Time to burn down the Bastille.

http://buchanan.org/blog/nearing-civil-war-127177
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 16, 2017, 08:45:58 AM


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15June 2017
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A Long History of Leftist Hatred
Thursday - June 15, 2017 at 11:32 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, who aspired to end his life as a mass murderer of Republican Congressmen, was a Donald Trump hater and a Bernie Sanders backer.
Like many before him, Hodgkinson was a malevolent man of the hating and hard left.
His planned atrocity failed because two Capitol Hill cops were at that Alexandria baseball field, providing security for House Whip Steve Scalise. Had those cops not been there, a massacre would have ensued with many more dead than the gunman.
Recall. There were no armed citizens at that Tucson grocery in 2011, when six were murdered and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was gravely wounded along with a dozen others. The nutcase doing the shooting was only wrestled to the ground when he dropped a clip trying to reload.
The Alexandria attack brings back memories of long ago.
A day before my 12th birthday, when I was in Children’s Hospital with a broken leg, my parents brought me the news that Puerto Rican terrorists had just attempted to αssαssιnαtҽ Harry Truman at Blair House. A heroic cop, Leslie Coffelt, died stopping them.
In my second year in high school, blocks from the Capitol, Puerto Rican nationalists entered the visitor’s gallery of the House and began firing semiautomatic pistols. Five Congressmen were wounded.
Democratic politics has often proven a dangerous calling.
Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and JFK — one in every 10 of all our presidents — were αssαssιnαtҽd.
Attending a service for a South Carolina Congressman in the Capitol in 1835, President Jackson survived twin misfires of two pistols. Old Hickory used his cane to attack his assailant, who was collared by Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee.
As a third-party candidate for president in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” Teddy scoffed, and finished his speech.
In February 1933, President-elect FDR, in Miami, was the target of would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara, whose arm was jostled at the moment of firing. The bullet killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
Between the assassination of JFK in 1963 and near-mortal wounding of President Reagan by John Hinckley in 1981, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis in April 1968, and Sen. Robert Kennedy, two months later, in Los Angeles.
Presidential candidate George Wallace, campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, was shot five times in May 1972 by Arthur Bremer, who had spent weeks stalking President Nixon. President Ford was the target of two attempts on his life in 1975, the first by a Manson Family hanger-on Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the second by radical leftist Sara Jane Moore.
What drove the assassins?
In the early 20th century, it was anarchism. McKinley was killed by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York.
In 1919, Carlo Valdinoci tried to αssαssιnαtҽ Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer with a bomb on his porch at 2132 R Street. Valdinoci tripped on a wicket and his dynamite bomb exploded prematurely, blasting Carlo’s body parts all over the neighborhood.
Palmer’s neighbor across the street, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, rushed over to help.
Palmer ordered a roundup of anarchists in what came to be known as “Palmer Raids,” and put in charge of field operations a 24-year-old lawyer and D.C. law-enforcement prodigy by the name of John Edgar Hoover.
Hoover’s career flourished. But the career of America’s most famous anarchist, Emma Goldman, faded. She and ex-lover Alexander Berkman, who had tried to kill Carnegie Steel’s Henry Clay Frick during the violent Homestead Strike of 1892, were rounded up and deported in 1920 with hundreds of anarchists to the new Russia of Lenin and Trotsky in a ship the press dubbed “the Red Ark.”
A. Mitchell Palmer did not get the 1920 presidential nomination he was seeking. But neighbor FDR did make it onto the ticket.
 to Newark and Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and 100 cities after Dr. King’s death, were not the work of the Goldwater right.
Those were the days of the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Weatherman and the Symbionese Liberation Army. It was America’s radical left shooting cops and burning down ROTC buildings. Leftist violence propelled the political careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
As for James Hodgkinson, he was a Trump-hating left-wing terrorist.
And those who incite sick minds with images of a bloodstained decapitated head of the president, and cheer Central Park productions of “Julius Caesar” with the αssαssιnαtҽd Roman Consul made up to look like the president, cannot evade moral culpability.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 20, 2017, 09:15:05 AM
After the ISIS War, a US-Russia Collision?
Monday - June 19, 2017 at 11:34 pm

By Patrick J. Buchanan
Sunday, a Navy F-18 Hornet shot down a Syrian air force jet, an act of war against a nation with which Congress has never declared or authorized a war.
Washington says the Syrian plane was bombing U.S.-backed rebels. Damascus says its plane was attacking ISIS.
Vladimir Putin’s defense ministry was direct and blunt:
“Repeated combat actions by U.S. aviation under the cover of counterterrorism against lawful armed forces of a country that is a member of the U.N. are a massive violation of international law and de facto a military aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.”
An ABC report appears to back up Moscow’s claims:
“Over the last four weeks, the U.S. has conducted three air strikes on pro-regime forces backed by Iran that have moved into a deconfliction zone around the town of Tanf in southwestern Syria, where there is a coalition training base for local forces fighting ISIS.”
Russia has now declared an end to cooperation to prevent air clashes over Syria and asserted an intent to track and target aerial intruders in its area of operations west of the Euphrates.
Such targets would be U.S. planes and surveillance drones.
If Moscow is not bluffing, we could be headed for U.S.-Russian collision in Syria.
Sunday’s shoot-down of a hostile aircraft was the first by U.S. planes in this conflict. It follows President Trump’s launch of scores of cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield in April. The U.S. said the airfield was the base of Syrian planes that used chemical weapons on civilians.
We are getting ever deeper into this six-year sectarian and cινιℓ ωαr. And what we may be witnessing now are the opening shots of its next phase — the battle for control of the territory and population liberated by the fall of Raqqa and the death of the ISIS “caliphate.”
The army of President Bashar Assad seeks to recapture as much lost territory as possible and they have the backing of Russia, Iranian troops, Shiite militia from Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hezbollah.
Assad’s and his allied forces opposing ISIS are now colliding with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces opposing ISIS, which consist of Arab rebels and the Syrian Kurds of the PYD.
But if America has decided to use its air power to shoot down Syrian planes attacking rebels we support, this could lead to a confrontation with Russia and a broader, more dangerous, and deadly war for the United States.
How would we win such a war, without massive intervention?
Is this where we are headed? Is this where we want to go?
For, again, Congress has never authorized such a war, and there seems to be no vital U.S. interest involved in who controls Raqqa and neighboring lands, as long as ISIS is expelled. During the campaign, Trump even spoke of U.S.-Russian cooperation to kill ISIS.
While in Saudi Arabia, however, he seemed to sign on to what is being hyped as an “Arab NATO,” where the U.S. accepts Riyadh as the principal ally and leader of the Gulf Arabs in the regional struggle for hegemony with Shiite Iran.
Following that Trump trip, the Saudis — backed by Egypt, the UAE and Bahrain — sealed their border with Qatar, which maintains ties to Iran. And though Qatar is also host to the largest U.S. air base in the region, al-Udeid, Trump gave the impression its isolation was his idea.
President Trump and his country seem to be at a decision point.
If, after the fall of ISIS in Raqqa, we are going to use U.S. power and leverage to solidify the position of Syrian rebels and Kurds, at the expense of Damascus, we could find ourselves in a collision with Syria, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran and even Turkey.
For Turkish President Erdogan looks on our Kurdish allies in Syria as Kurdish allies of the terrorist PKK inside his own country.
During the campaign, candidate Trump won support by pledging to work with Russia to defeat our common enemy. But if, after ISIS is gone from Syria, we decide it is in our interests to confront Assad, we are going to find ourselves in a regional confrontation.
In Iraq, the U.S. and Iran have a common foe, ISIS, and a common ally, the government in Baghdad. In Syria, we have a common foe, ISIS. But our allies are opposed by Assad, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
The question before us: After Raqqa and Mosul fall and the caliphate disappears, who inherits the ISIS estate?
The U.S. needs now to delineate the lines of advance for Syria’s Kurds, and to talk to the Russians, Syrians and Iranians.
We cannot allow our friends in the Middle East and Persian Gulf to play our hand for us, for it is all too often in their interests to have us come fight their wars, which are not necessarily our wars.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 23, 2017, 09:13:47 AM
The Passing of the Peℓσѕι Era

Friday - June 23, 2017 at 12:26 am
And just as Trump put Bush-Romney Republicanism into the dumpster in the 2016 primaries, Hillary Clinton’s defeat, followed by losses in four straight special elections, portend a passing of the guard in the Democratic Party.
So where is the party going?
Clearly, the energy and fire are on the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren left. Moreover, the crudity of party chair Tom Perez’s attacks on Trump and the GOP, being echoed now by Democratic members of Congress, suggest that the new stridency to rally the angry left is gaining converts.
Trump’s rough rhetoric, which brought out the alienated working class in the ten of thousands to his rallies, is being emulated by “progressives” — imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.By Nor is this unusual. After narrow presidential defeats, major parties have often taken a And where are the Democratic successes since Obamacare?
The cities where crime is surging, Baltimore and Chicago, have been run for decades by Democrats. The worst-run state in the nation, Illinois, has long been dominated by Democratic legislators.
The crisis of the old order is apparent as well across the pond.
Jeremy Corbyn, a Bernie Sanders radical socialist, led his party to major gains in the recent parliamentary elections, as Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May saw her majority wiped out and faces the same ѕєdιтισnist grumbling as Nancy Peℓσѕι.
Western elites are celebrating the victory of Emmanuel Macron, the “youngest French President since Napoleon,” who defeated Marine Le Pen by a ratio of almost 2-to-1 and whose new party, En Marche! (In Motion!), captured the Assembly. But the celebrating seems premature.
For the first time in the history of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, neither the center-left Socialists nor center-right Republicans, the parties that have ruled France for 60 years, made it into the finals in a presidential election.
And while the first round of that election saw the ruling Socialist Party’s candidate run fifth, with 6 percent, the votes of the rightist Le Pen and far left-Communist Jean-Luc Melenchon together topped 40 percent. It is the flanks of European politics that seem still to be hard and growing, and the center that seems shaky and imperiled.
hard turn back toward their base.
After Richard Nixon lost narrowly to JFK in 1960, the Republican right blamed his “me-too” campaign, rose up and nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. A choice, not an echo.
After Hubert Humphrey lost narrowly to Nixon in 1968, the Democratic Party took a sharp turn to the left in 1972 and nominated George McGovern.
A 21st-century variant of McGovernism seems be in the cards for Democrats today. The salient positions of the party have less to do with bread-and-butter issues than identity politics, issues of race, gender, morality, culture, ethnicity and class.
Same-sex marriage, abortion rights, sanctuary cities, Black Lives Matter, racist cops, La Raza, bathroom rights, tearing down Confederate statues, renaming streets, buildings and bridges to remove any association with slave-owners or segregationists, putting sacred tribal lands ahead of pipelines, and erasing the name of the Washington Redskins.
The Democrats’ economic agenda?
Free tuition for college kids, forgiveness of student loan debt, sticking it to Wall Street and the 1 percent, and bailing out Puerto Rico.
And impeachment — though a yearlong FBI investigation has failed to find any Trump-Kremlin collusion to dethrone Debbie Wasserman Schultz or expose the debate-question shenanigans of Donna Brazile.Patrick J. Buchanan
In the first round of the special election for the House seat in Georgia’s Sixth District, 30-year-old Jon Ossoff swept 48 percent. He more than doubled the vote of his closest GOP rival, Karen 

.
A Peach State pickup for the Democrats and a huge humiliation for President Trump seemed at hand.
But in Tuesday’s final round, Ossoff, after the most costly House race in history, got 48 percent again, and lost. If Democratic donors are grabbing pitchforks, who can blame them?
And what was Karen Handel’s cutting issue?
Ossoff lived two miles outside the district and represented the values of the Democratic minority leader, whom he would vote to make the speaker of the house, Nancy Peℓσѕι of San Francisco.
The Peℓσѕι factor has been a drag on Democrats in all four of the special elections the party has lost since Trump’s November triumph.

Prediction: Democrats will not go into the 2018 Congressional elections with San Fran Nan as the party’s face and future. No way. As President Kennedy said, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”
Post-Trump, it is hard to see Republicans returning to NAFTA-GATT free-trade globalism, open borders, mass immigration or Bushite crusades for democracy. A cold realism about America’s limited power and potential to change the world has settled in.
And just as Trump put Bush-Romney Republicanism into the dumpster in the 2016 primaries, Hillary Clinton’s defeat, followed by losses in four straight special elections, portend a passing of the guard in the Democratic Party.
So where is the party going?
Clearly, the energy and fire are on the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren left. Moreover, the crudity of party chair Tom Perez’s attacks on Trump and the GOP, being echoed now by Democratic members of Congress, suggest that the new stridency to rally the angry left is gaining converts.
Trump’s rough rhetoric, which brought out the alienated working class in the ten of thousands to his rallies, is being emulated by “progressives” — imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
Nor is this unusual. After narrow presidential defeats, major parties have often taken a hard turn back toward their base.
After Richard Nixon lost narrowly to JFK in 1960, the Republican right blamed his “me-too” campaign, rose up and nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. A choice, not an echo.
After Hubert Humphrey lost narrowly to Nixon in 1968, the Democratic Party took a sharp turn to the left in 1972 and nominated George McGovern.
A 21st-century variant of McGovernism seems be in the cards for Democrats today. The salient positions of the party have less to do with bread-and-butter issues than identity politics, issues of race, gender, morality, culture, ethnicity and class.
Same-sex marriage, abortion rights, sanctuary cities, Black Lives Matter, racist cops, La Raza, bathroom rights, tearing down Confederate statues, renaming streets, buildings and bridges to remove any association with slave-owners or segregationists, putting sacred tribal lands ahead of pipelines, and erasing the name of the Washington Redskins.
The Democrats’ economic agenda?
Free tuition for college kids, forgiveness of student loan debt, sticking it to Wall Street and the 1 percent, and bailing out Puerto Rico.
And impeachment — though a yearlong FBI investigation has failed to find any Trump-Kremlin collusion to dethrone Debbie Wasserman Schultz or expose the debate-question shenanigans of Donna Brazile.
And where are the Democratic successes since Obamacare?
The cities where crime is surging, Baltimore and Chicago, have been run for decades by Democrats. The worst-run state in the nation, Illinois, has long been dominated by Democratic legislators.
The crisis of the old order is apparent as well across the pond.
Jeremy Corbyn, a Bernie Sanders radical socialist, led his party to major gains in the recent parliamentary elections, as Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May saw her majority wiped out and faces the same ѕєdιтισnist grumbling as Nancy Peℓσѕι.
Western elites are celebrating the victory of Emmanuel Macron, the “youngest French President since Napoleon,” who defeated Marine Le Pen by a ratio of almost 2-to-1 and whose new party, En Marche! (In Motion!), captured the Assembly. But the celebrating seems premature.
For the first time in the history of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, neither the center-left Socialists nor center-right Republicans, the parties that have ruled France for 60 years, made it into the finals in a presidential election.
And while the first round of that election saw the ruling Socialist Party’s candidate run fifth, with 6 percent, the votes of the rightist Le Pen and far left-Communist Jean-Luc Melenchon together topped 40 percent. It is the flanks of European politics that seem still to be hard and growing, and the center that seems shaky and imperiled.
Moreover, Macron faces daunting problems. Unemployment is nearly 10 percent, with youth unemployment twice that. Terrorist attacks from within Muslim communities continue to rise, as do the number of boats of Third Worlders migrating from across the Med.
Can anyone believe that, as these trends continue, Europeans will continue to back centrist policies and moderate politicians to deal with them?
Dream on. That is not the history of Europe.

http://buchanan.org/blog/passing-Peℓσѕι-era-127255

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 26, 2017, 05:39:40 PM
Are Illinois & Puerto Rico Our Future?

Monday - June 26, 2017 at 5:11 pm
By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Gov. Bruce Rauner and his legislature in Springfield do not put a budget together by Friday, the Land of Lincoln will be the first state in the Union to see its debt plunge into junk-bond status.
Illinois has $14.5 billion in overdue bills, $130 billion in unfunded pension obligations, and no budget. “We can’t manage our money,” says Rauner. “We’re like a banana republic.”
Speaking of banana republics, Puerto Rico, which owes $74 billion to creditors who hold its tax-exempt bonds, and $40 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, has already entered bankruptcy proceedings.
The island’s imaginative 38-year-old governor, Ricardo Rossello, however, has a solution. Call Uncle Sam. On June 11, Rossello held a plebiscite, with a 23 percent turnout, that voted 97 percent to make Puerto Rico our 51st state.
“(T)he federal government will no longer be able to ignore the voice of the majority of the American citizens in Puerto Rico,” said Rossello. Washington cannot “demand democracy in other parts of the world, and not respond to the legitimate right to self-determination that was exercised today in the American territory of Puerto Rico.”
Had the governor been talking about the island’s right to become free and independent, he would have had a point. But statehood inside the USA is something Uncle Sam decides.
Rossello calls to mind Count Mountjoy of Grand Fenwick, who, in “The Mouse that Roared,” plotted to rescue his bankrupt duchy by declaring war on the U.S., sailing to America to surrender, and then demanding the foreign aid America bestows on defeated enemies.
Yet Puerto Rico’s defaults on its debts may soon be our problem. Many bond funds in which Americans have invested their savings and retirement money are full of Puerto Rican bonds.
According to The New York Times, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas and Guam are in the same boat. With 100,000 people, the Virgin Islands owe $6.5 billion to pensioners and creditors.
Then there is Connecticut, a state that has long ranked in the top tier in per capita income and wealth.
Connecticut, too, appears wobbly. Rising pension benefits, the cost of servicing the state debt and falling tax revenue due to fleeing residents and companies like Aetna and General Electric, have dropped Connecticut to near the national bottom in growth prospects.
“The state’s population is falling: Its net domestic out-migration was nearly 30,000 from 2015 to 2016. In 2016, it lost slightly more than 8,000 people, leaving its population at 3.6 million,” reports Fox News: “(R)ecent national moving company surveys (show) more people leaving Connecticut than moving in. In 2016, the state also saw a population decline for the third consecutive year.”
As its example of a welfare state going belly up, the EU offers us Greece. And questions arise from all of these examples. Is this an inexorable trend? Has the old New Deal formula of “tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect” finally run its course?
Across the West, social welfare states are threatened by falling revenues, taxpayer flight, rising debt as a share of GDP, sinking bond ratings and proliferating defaults.
Record high social welfare spending is among the reasons that Western nations skimp on defense. Even the Americans, who spent 9 percent of GDP on defense under President Kennedy and 6 percent under President Reagan, are now well below that, though U.S. security commitments are as great as they were in the Cold War.
Among NATO nations, the U.S. is among the least socialist, with less than 40 percent of GDP consumed by government at all levels. France, with 57 percent of GDP siphoned off, is at the opposite pole.
Yet even here in America we no longer grow at 4 percent a year, or even 3 percent. We seem to be nearing a point of government consumption beyond the capacity of the private sector to provide the necessary funds.
Some Democrats are discovering there are limits to how much the government can consume of the nation’s wealth without adversely affecting their own fortunes. And in the Obamacare debate this week, Republicans are running head-on into the reality that clawing back social welfare benefits already voted may be political ѕυιcιdє.
Has democratic socialism passed its apogee?
Native-born populations in the West are aging, shrinking and dying, not reproducing themselves. The cost of pensions and health care for the elderly is inexorably going up. Immigration into the West, almost entirely from the Third World, is bringing in peoples who, on balance, take more in social welfare than they pay in taxes.
Deficits and national debts as a share of GDP are rising. Almost nowhere does one see the old robust growth rates returning. And the infrastructure of the West — roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, airports, subways, train tracks — continues to crumble for lack of investment.
The days of interstate highway systems and moon shots seem to be behind us. Are Puerto Rico and Illinois the harbingers of what is to come?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 30, 2017, 07:49:05 AM
An America First Korea Policy

By Patrick J. Buchanan
“The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems and is something that has to be dealt with, and probably dealt with rapidly.”
So President Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden this week.
But how this is to be done “rapidly” is not so easy to see.
North Korea has just returned to us Otto Warmbier, a student sentenced to 15 years hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster. Otto came home comatose, and died within days.
Trump’s conundrum: How to keep such a regime from acquiring an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, which Kim Jong Un is determined to do.
Having seen us attack Iraq and Libya, which had no nukes, Kim believes that only nuclear weapons that can hit America can deter America. He appears willing to risk war to achieve his goal.
Trump’s options as he meets South Korean President Moon Jae-in?
First, the decapitation of the Kim dynasty. But the U.S. has been unable to accomplish regime change for the 64 years following the Korean War. And killing Kim could ignite a war.
Then there is a U.S. pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear sites and missile arsenals. But this would surely mean a war in which Americans on the DMZ would be among the first to die, as thousands of North Korean artillery and mortar tubes fired into the suburbs and city of Seoul, which is as close as Dulles Airport is to the White House.
Asked by Congressman Tim Ryan why we don’t launch a war to end this threat, Defense Secretary James Mattis replied that, while we might “win … at great cost,” such a war would “involve the massive shelling of an ally’s capital … one of the most densely packed cities on earth.”
Seoul has a metro-area population of 25 million.
We are thus approaching a point where we accept North Korea having a nuclear weapon that can reach Seattle, or we attack its strategic arsenal and bring on a war in which millions could die.
What about sanctions?
The only nation that could impose sufficient hardships on North Korea to imperil the regime is China. But China refuses to impose the Draconian sanctions that might destabilize the regime, and might bring Korean refugees flooding into China. And Beijing has no desire to see Kim fall and Korea united under a regime aligned with the United States.
What FDR said of one Caribbean dictator, the Chinese are probably saying of Kim Jong Un, “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”
Early in his presidency, Trump gave the franchise for dealing with the North Korean threat to Beijing. But his friend Xi Jinping has either failed Trump or declined to deliver.
As for President Moon, he wants to negotiate, to engage the North economically, to invite its athletes to join South Koreans on joint teams for the Winter Olympics in 2018. Moreover, Moon is said to be willing to cut back on joint military exercises with the U.S. and regards the THAAD missile defense we introduced into South Korea as a negotiable item.
China, whose missile launches can be detected by THAAD radar, wants it removed and has so informed South Korea.
Where does this leave us?
We are committed to go to war to defend the South and have 28,000 troops there. But South Korea wants to negotiate with North Korea and is prepared to make concessions to buy peace.
As the nation that would suffer most in any second Korean War, South Korea has the sovereign right to play the hand. But what Seoul considers best for South Korea is not necessarily best for us.
What would be an America First Korean policy?
The U.S. would give Seoul notice that we will, by a date certain, be dissolving our mutual security treaty and restoring our full freedom to decide whether or not to fight in a new Korean War. Given the present risk of war, possibly involving nuclear weapons, it is absurd that we should be obligated to fight what Mattis says would be a “catastrophic” war, because of a treaty negotiated six decades ago by Eisenhower and Dulles.
“The commonest error in politics,” Lord Salisbury reminded us, “is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”
But we should also tell South Korea that if she desires a nuclear deterrent against an attack by the North, she should build it. Americans should not risk a nuclear war, 8,000 miles away, to defend a South Korea that has 40 times the economy of the North and twice the population.
No vital U.S. interest requires us, in perpetuity, to be willing to go to war to defend South Korea, especially if that war entails the risk of a nuclear attack on U.S. troops or the American homeland.
If the United States did not have a mutual security pact that obligates us to defend South Korea against a nuclear-armed North, would President Trump be seeking to negotiate such a treaty?
The question answers itself.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 04, 2017, 06:58:16 PM
Is America Still a Nation


In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of "one people." The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, "We the people..."

And who were these "people"?

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as "one united people ... descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs..."

If such are the elements of nationhood and peoplehood, can we still speak of Americans as one nation and one people?

We no longer have the same ancestors. They are of every color and from every country. We do not speak one language, but rather English, Spanish and a host of others. We long ago ceased to profess the same religion. We are Evangelical Christians, mainstream Protestants, Catholics, Jєωs, Mormons, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, agnostics and atheists.

Federalist No. 2 celebrated our unity. Today's elites proclaim that our diversity is our strength. But is this true or a tenet of trendy ideology?

After the attempted massacre of Republican Congressmen at that ball field in Alexandria, Fareed Zakaria wrote: "The political polarization that is ripping this country apart" is about "identity ... gender, race, ethnicity, sɛҳuąƖ orientation (and) social class." He might have added — religion, morality, culture and history.

Zakaria seems to be tracing the disintegration of our society to that very diversity that its elites proclaim to be its greatest attribute: "If the core issues are about identity, culture and religion ... then compromise seems immoral. American politics is becoming more like Middle Eastern politics, where there is no middle ground between being Sunni or Shiite."

Among the issues on which we Americans are at war with one another — abortion, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity, same-sex marriage, white cops, black crime, Confederate monuments, LGBT rights, affirmative action.

Was the discovery of America and conquest of this continent from 1492 to the 20th century among the most glorious chapters in the history of man? Or was it a half-millennium marked by mankind's most scarlet of sins: the genocide of native peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the annihilation of indigenous cultures, the spoliation of a virgin land?

Is America really "God's Country"? Or was Barack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, justified when, after 9/11, he denounced calls of "God Bless America!" with the curse "G. D. America!"?

With its silence, the congregation seemed to assent.

In 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance many of us recited daily at the end of noon recess in the schoolyard was amended to read, "one nation, under God, indivisible."

Are we still one nation under God? At the Democratic Convention in Charlotte to renominate Barack Obama, a motion to put "God" back into the platform was hooted and booed by half the assembly.

With this July 4 long weekend, many writers have bewailed the animus Americans exhibit toward one another and urged new efforts to reunite us. Yet, recall again those first words of Jefferson in 1776:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them..."

Are we approaching such a point? Could the Constitution, as currently interpreted, win the approval of two-thirds of our citizens and three-fourth of our states, if it were not already the supreme law of the land? How would a national referendum on the Constitution turn out, when many Americans are already seeking a new constitutional convention?

All of which invites the question: Are we still a nation? And what is a nation? French writer Ernest Renan gave us the answer in the 19th century:

"A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things ... constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.

"Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate: our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past with great men and glory ... is the social capital upon which the national idea rests. These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again."

Does this sound at all like us today?

Watching our Lilliputians tearing down statues and monuments, renaming buildings and streets, rewriting history books to replace heroes and historical truths with the doings of ciphers, are we disassembling the nation we once were?

"One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered," writes Renan, "One loves the house that one has built and that one passes on."

Are we passing on the house we inherited — or observing its demolition?

Happy Fourth. And God bless the USA.


Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: rosary93 on July 06, 2017, 12:33:49 PM
I will read all this later

thanks
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 10, 2017, 07:46:25 PM
Alone Perhaps, But Is Trump Right?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

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Tuesday - July 11, 2017

At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade.

Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid? Is not the Obama-Merkel vision of a nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr a utopian fantasy?

At the monument to the patriots of the Warsaw Uprising, Trump cited Poland as exemplar of how a great people behaves in a true national crisis.

Calling the Polish people "the soul of Europe," he related how, in the Miracle of the Vistula in 1920, Poland, reborn after 12 decades of subjugation, drove back the invading Red Army of Leon Trotsky.

He described the gang rape of Poland by nαzιs and Soviets after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He cited the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps by Stalin, and the rising of the Polish people against their nαzι occupiers in 1944, as the vulturous legions of Stalin watched from the safe side of the river.

When the Polish Pope, John Paul II, celebrated his first Mass in Victory Square in 1979, said Trump, "a million Polish men, women and children raised their voices in a single prayer. ... 'We want God.' ... Every Communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down." And so it did.

The crisis of the West today, said Trump, is akin to what Poland faced. For it is about the survival of a civilization, rooted in Christianity, that has made the greatest of all contributions to the ascent of man.

What enabled the Poles to endure was an unshakable belief in and a willingness to fight for who they were — a people of God and country, faith, families, and freedom — with the courage and will to preserve a nation built on the truths of their ancient tribe and Catholic traditions.

Given the threats to the West, from within and without, said Trump, we need such a spirit now. What are those threats?

"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

"We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive."

Trump professed confidence in the West's will to survive. But whether the West still has the character seems an open question.

Across the West, the traditional family has been collapsing for decades. Not one European nation has a birth rate that will enable its people to survive many more generations. Uninvited migrants in the millions have poured in — are pouring in — from Africa and the Middle East. The elite of Europe have been gladly surrendering their national sovereignties to transnational institutions like the EU.

Christianity is more of a dying than a thriving faith on the Old Continent. And as the churches empty out, the mosques are going up. Before our eyes, the West is being remade.

In June, gαys and lesbians celebrated in Berlin as the German Parliament voted to approve same-sex marriage.

In Moscow, from May to July, a million Russians stood in lines a mile long to view and venerate a relic of the 4th-century bishop, St. Nicholas, on display in a glass case in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, rebuilt under President Putin.

Liberated from Leninism, Russia returns to the old faith, as Germany returns to Weimar.

At that G-20 gathering in Hamburg, hundreds of criminal thugs went on a three-day rampage — rioting, burning, looting and battling police, some 300 of whom were injured.

Were the autocrats of the G-20 — Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Narendra Modi of India — impressed with the resolute response of Angela Merkel — the media-designated new "Leader of the West" — to mobs rioting in Germany's second city?

At Harvard, Alexander Solzhenitsyn described what was on display in Hamburg: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite."

Secularist and hedonist, New Europe worships at the altars of mammon. Handel's "Messiah" cannot compete with moonwalking Michael Jackson's "We Are the World."

Once Europe went out to convert, colonize and Christianize the world. Now the grandchildren of the colonized peoples come to Europe to demand their share of their inheritance from a West besotted with guilt over its past sins that cannot say "No!"

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 14, 2017, 07:52:06 AM

14 July 2017
Russia Baiters and Putin Haters

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.”

To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton could be considered “treason.”

Treason is giving aid and comfort to an enemy in a time of war.

Are we really at war with Russia? Is Russia really our enemy?

“Why Russia is a Hostile Power” is the title of today’s editorial in The Washington Post that seeks to explain why Middle America should embrace the Russophobia of our capital city:

“Vladimir Putin adheres to a set of values that are antithetical to bedrock American values. He favors spheres of influence over self-determination; corruption over transparency; and repression over democracy.”

Yet, accommodating a sphere of influence for a great power is exactly what FDR and Churchill did with Stalin, and every president from Truman to George H. W. Bush did with the Soviet Union.

When East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles rose up against Communist regimes, no U.S. president intervened. For those nations were on the other side of the Yalta line agreed to in 1945.

Bush I and James Baker even accused Ukrainians of “suicidal nationalism” for contemplating independence from Russia.

When did support for spheres of influence become un-American?

As for supporting “corruption over transparency,” ex-Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili resigned in disgust as governor of Odessa in November, accusing Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, our man in Kiev, of supporting corruption.

As for favoring “repression over democracy,” would that not apply to our NATO ally President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, our Arab ally Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt, and our Philippine ally Rodrigo Duterte? Were U.S. Cold War allies like the Shah of Iran and Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile all Jeffersonian Democrats? Have we forgotten our recent history?

The Post brought up the death in prison of lawyer-activist Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. Under the Magnitsky Act of 2012, Congress voted sanctions on Russia’s elites.

Yet China’s lone Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, sentenced to 11 years in prison for championing democracy, died Thursday of liver cancer, with police in his hospital room. Communist dictator Xi Jinping, who makes Putin look like Justin Trudeau, would not let the dying man go.

Will Magnitsky Act sanctions be slammed on China? Don’t bet on it. Too much trade. Congress will do what comes naturally — kowtow. Yet our heroic Senate voted 98-2 to slam new sanctions on Russia.

What are the roots of this hostility to Russia and hatred of Putin, whom a Fox analyst called “as bad as Hitler”?

During the Cold War, every president sought detente with a USSR that was arguably the most blood-soaked regime of the century.

When the Cold War ended in December 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved into 15 nations. Moscow had given up her empire, a third of her territory, and half the population of the USSR. Marxist-Leninist ideology was dead. An epochal change had taken place.

Yet hostility to Russia and hatred of Putin seem to exceed anything some of us remember from the worst days of the Cold War.

Putin’s Russia is called imperialist, though Estonia, next door, which Russia could swallow in one gulp, has been free for 25 years.

Russia invaded Georgia. Well, yes, after Georgia invaded the seceded province of South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers.

Russia has taken back Crimea from Ukraine. True, but only after a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev replaced the elected pro-Russian regime.

Russia has intervened to back Bashar Assad in Syria. Yes, but only after our insurgent allies collaborated with al-Qaida and ISIS to bring him down. Is Russia not allowed to support an ally, recognized by the U.N., which provides its only naval base on the Med?

Russia has meddled in our election. And we have meddled in the affairs of half a dozen nations with “color-coded revolutions.” The cry of “regime change!” may daily be heard in the U.S. Capitol.

Putin is not Pope Francis. But he is not Stalin; he is not Hitler; he is not Mao; and Russia today is not the USSR. Putin is an autocrat cut from the same bolt of cloth as the Romanov czars.

His cooperation is crucial to the peace of the world, the freedom of the Baltic States, an end to the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr, tranquility in the Persian Gulf, and solving the North Korean crisis.

While our tectonic plates may rub against one another, we are natural allies. The Russia of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn and the Orthodox Church belongs with the West.

If America stumbles into a war with Russia that all our Cold War presidents avoided, the Russia baiters and Putin haters will be put in same circle of hell by history as the idiot war hawks of 1914 and the three blind men of Versailles in 1919.


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The Answer why there is so much hostility against Russia today is because Putin took over the
Russian Banks that were controlled by the Jєωιѕн Bankers and the Zionists. Russia is now a
Christian Nation.  The Jєωs and and the Zionists control our politicians through the very money
our government gives to Israel every year.





Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 18, 2017, 01:26:02 PM

The Real Crimes of Russiagate
By Patrick J. Buchanan

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Tuesday - July 18, 2017

By Patrick J. Buchanan

For a year, the big question of Russiagate has boiled down to this: Did Donald Trump's campaign collude with the Russians in hacking the DNC?

And until last week, the answer was "no."

As ex-CIA director Mike Morell said in March, "On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians ... there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. ... There's no little campfire, there's no little candle, there's no spark."

Well, last week, it appeared there had been a fire in Trump Tower. On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with Russians — in anticipation of promised dirt on Hillary Clinton's campaign.

While not a crime, this was a blunder. For Donald Jr. had long insisted there had been no collusion with the Russians. Caught in flagrante, he went full Pinocchio for four days.

And as the details of that June 9 meeting spilled out, Trump defenders were left with egg on their faces, while anti-Trump media were able to keep the spotlight laser-focused on where they want it — Russiagate.

This reality underscores a truth of our time. In the 19th century, power meant control of the means of production; today, power lies in control of the means of communication.

Who controls the media spotlight controls what people talk about and think about. And mainstream media are determined to keep that spotlight on Trump-Russia, and as far away as possible from their agenda — breaking the Trump presidency and bringing him down.

Almost daily, there are leaks from the investigative and security arms of the U.S. government designed to damage this president.

Just days into Trump's presidency, a rifle-shot intel community leak of a December meeting between Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and Russia's ambassador forced the firing of Flynn.

An Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister in which Trump disclosed that Israeli intelligence had ferreted out evidence that ISIS was developing computer bombs to explode on airliners was leaked. This alerted ISIS, damaged the president, and imperiled Israeli intelligence sources and methods.

Some of the leaks from national security and investigative agencies are felonies, not only violations of the leaker's solemn oath to protect secrets, but of federal law.

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Yet the press is happy to collude with these leakers and to pay them in the coin they seek. First, by publishing the secrets the leakers want revealed. Second, by protecting them from exposure to arrest and prosecution for the crimes they are committing.

The mutual agendas of the deep-state leakers and the mainstream media mesh perfectly.

Consider the original Russiagate offense.

Confidential emails of the DNC and John Podesta were hacked, i.e., stolen by Russian intelligence and given to WikiLeaks. And who was the third and indispensable party in this "Tinker to Evers to Chance" double-play combination?

The media itself. While deploring Russian hacking as an "act of war" against "our democracy," the media published the fruits of the hacking. It was the media that revealed what Podesta wrote and how the DNC tilted the tables against Bernie Sanders.

If the media believed Russian hacking was a crime against our democracy, why did they publish the fruits of that crime?

Is it not monumental hypocrisy to denounce Russia's hacking of the computers of Democratic political leaders and institutions, while splashing the contents of the theft all over Page 1?

Not only do our Beltway media traffic in stolen secrets and stolen goods, but the knowledge that they will publish secrets and protect those who leak them is an incentive for bureaucratic disloyalty and criminality.

Our mainstream media are like the fellow who avoids the risk of stealing cars, but wants to fence them once stolen and repainted.

Some journalists know exactly who is leaking against Trump, but they are as protective of their colleagues' "sources" as of their own. Thus, the public is left in the dark as to what the real agenda is here, and who is sabotaging a president in whom they placed so much hope.

And thus does democracy die in darkness.

Do the American people not have a "right to know" who are the leakers within the government who are daily spilling secrets to destroy their president? Are the identities of the saboteurs not a legitimate subject of investigation? Ought they not be exposed and rooted out?

Where is the special prosecutor to investigate the collusion between bureaucrats and members of the press who traffic in the stolen secrets of the republic?

Bottom line: Trump is facing a stacked deck.

People inside the executive branch are daily providing fresh meat to feed the scandal. Anti-Trump media are transfixed by it. It is the Watergate of their generation. They can smell the blood in the water. The Pulitzers are calling. And they love it, for they loathe Donald Trump both for who he is and what he stands for.

It is hard to see when this ends, or how it ends well for the country.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 21, 2017, 06:17:26 PM


21 July 2017 
Is Iran in Our Gun Sights Now?

Friday - July 21, 2017 at 1:24 am

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Votes: 4.97 Stars!



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By Patrick J. Buchanan
 
“Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender.”
Thus does our Churchill, Newt Gingrich, dismiss, in dealing with Iran, the policy of containment crafted by George Kennan and pursued by nine U.S. presidents to bloodless victory in the Cold War.
Why is containment surrender? “Because freedom is threatened everywhere so long as this dictatorship stays in power,” says Gingrich.
But how is our freedom threatened by a regime with 3 percent of our GDP that has been around since Jimmy Carter was president?
Fortunately, Gingrich has found a leader to bring down the Iranian regime and ensure the freedom of mankind. “In our country that was George Washington and … the Marquis de Lafayette. In Italy it was Garibaldi,” says Gingrich.
Whom has he found to rival Washington and Garibaldi? Says Gingrich, “Maryam Rajavi.”
Who is she? The leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which opposed the Shah, broke with the old Ayatollah, collaborated with Saddam Hussein, and, until 2012, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State.
At the NCRI conference in Paris in July where Gingrich spoke, and the speaking fees were reportedly excellent, John Bolton Calling Iran’s twice-elected President Hassan Rouhani, “a violent, vicious murderer,” Giuliani said, “the time has come for regime change.”
Bolton followed suit. “Tehran is not merely a nuclear weapons threat, it is not merely a terrorist threat, it is a conventional threat to everybody in the region,” he said. Hence, “the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.”and Rudy Giuliani were also on hand.
We will all celebrate in Tehran in 2019, Bolton assured the NCRI faithful.
Good luck. Yet, as The New York Times said yesterday, all this talk, echoed all over this capital, is driving us straight toward war. “A drumbeat of provocative words, outright threats and actions — from President Trump and some of his top aides as well as Sunni Arab leaders and American activists — is raising tensions that could lead to armed conflict with Iran.”
Is this what America wants or needs — a new Mideast war against a country three times the size of Iraq?
After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, would America and the world be well-served by a war with Iran that could explode into a Sunni-Shiite religious war across the Middle East?

Bolton calls Iran “a nuclear weapons threat.”
But in 2007, all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies declared with high confidence Iran had no nuclear weapons program. They stated this again in 2011. Under the nuclear deal, Iran exported almost all of its uranium, stopped enriching to 20 percent, shut down thousands of centrifuges, poured concrete into the core of its heavy water reactor, and allows U.N. inspectors to crawl all over every facility.
Is Iran, despite all this, operating a secret nuclear weapons program? Or is this War Party propaganda meant to drag us into another Mideast war?
To ascertain the truth, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should call the heads of the CIA and DIA, and the Director of National Intelligence, to testify in open session.
We are told we are menaced also by a Shiite Crescent rising and stretching from Beirut to Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
And who created this Shiite Crescent?
It was George W. Bush who ordered the Sunni regime of Saddam overthrown, delivering Iraq to its Shiite majority. It was Israel whose invasion and occupation of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 gave birth to the Shiite resistance now known as Hezbollah.
As for Bashar Assad in Syria, his father sent troops to fight alongside Americans in the Gulf War.
The Ayatollah’s regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia are deeply hostile to this country. But Iran does not want war with the United States — for the best of reasons. Iran would be smashed like Iraq, and its inevitable rise, as the largest and most advanced country on the Persian Gulf, would be aborted.
Moreover, we have interests in common: Peace in the Gulf, from which Iran’s oil flows and without which Iran cannot grow, as Rouhani intends, by deepening Iran’s ties to Europe and the advanced world.
And we have enemies in common: ISIS, al-Qaida and all the Sunni terrorists whose wildest dream is to see their American enemies fight their Shiite enemies.
Who else wants a U.S. war with Iran, besides ISIS?
Unfortunately, their number is legion: Saudis, Israelis, neocons and their think tanks, websites and magazines, hawks in both parties on Capitol Hill, democracy crusaders, and many in the Pentagon who want to deliver payback for what the Iranian-backed Shiite militias did to us in Iraq.
President Trump is key. If he does the War Party’s bidding, that will be his legacy, as the Iraq War is the legacy of George W. Bush.



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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 25, 2017, 08:41:52 AM


25 July 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Are-Americas-Wars-Just-and-Moral-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/americas-wars-just-moral-127383)
Are America’s Wars Just and Moral?
Tuesday - July 25, 2017 at 12:20 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan

“One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies,” writes columnist David Ignatius.
Given that Syria’s prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America’s participation in this slaughter?
Columnist Eric Margolis summarizes the successes (http://www.unz.com/emargolis/trump-end-the-syria-war-now/) of the six-year cινιℓ ωαr to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
“The result of the western-engendered carnage in Syria was horrendous: at least 475,000 dead, 5 million Syrian refugees driven into exile in neighboring states (Turkey alone hosts three million), and another 6 million internally displaced. … 11 million Syrians … driven from their homes into wretched living conditions and near famine.
“Two of Syria’s greatest and oldest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, have been pounded into ruins. Jihadist massacres and Russian and American air strikes have ravaged once beautiful, relatively prosperous Syria. Its ancient Christian peoples are fleeing for their lives before US and Saudi takfiri religious fanatics.”
Realizing the futility of U.S. policy, President Trump is cutting aid to the rebels. And the War Party is beside itself. Says The Wall Street Journal:
“The only way to reach an acceptable diplomatic solution is if Iran and Russia feel they are paying too high a price for their Syria sojourn. This means more support for Mr. Assad’s enemies, not cutting them off without notice. And it means building up a Middle East coalition willing to fight Islamic State and resist Iran. The U.S. should also consider enforcing ‘safe zones’ in Syria for anti-Assad forces.”
Yet, fighting ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria, while bleeding the Assad-Iran-Russia-Hezbollah victors, is a formula for endless war and unending terrors visited upon the Syrian people.
What injury did the Assad regime, in power for half a century and having never attacked us, inflict to justify what we have helped to do to that country?
Is this war moral by our own standards?
We overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Moammar Gadhafi in 2012. Yet, the fighting, killing and dying in both countries have not ceased. Estimates of the Iraq civilian and military dead run into the hundreds of thousands.
Still, the worst humanitarian disaster may be unfolding in Yemen.
After the Houthis overthrew the Saudi-backed regime and took over the country, the Saudis in 2015 persuaded the United States to support its air strikes, invasion and blockade.

By January 2016, the U.N. estimated a Yemeni civilian death toll of 10,000, with 40,000 wounded. However, the blockade of Yemen, which imports 90 percent of its food, has caused a crisis of malnutrition and impending famine that threatens millions of the poorest people in the Arab world with starvation.
No matter how objectionable we found these dictators, what vital interests of ours were so imperiled by the continued rule of Saddam, Assad, Gadhafi and the Houthis that they would justify what we have done to the peoples of those countries?
“They make a desert and call it peace,” Calgacus said of the Romans he fought in the first century. Will that be our epitaph?
Among the principles for a just war, it must be waged as a last resort, to address a wrong suffered, and by a legitimate authority. Deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
The wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen were never authorized by Congress. The civilian dead, wounded and uprooted in Syria, and the malnourished millions in Yemen, represent a moral cost that seems far beyond any proportional moral gain from those conflicts.
In which of the countries we have attacked or invaded in this century — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen — are the people better off than they were before we came?
And we wonder why they hate us.
“Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return,” wrote W. H. Auden in “September 1, 1939.” As the peoples of Syria and the other broken and bleeding countries of the Middle East flee to Europe and America, will not some come with revenge on their minds and hatred in their hearts?
Meanwhile, as the Americans bomb across the Middle East, China rises. She began the century with a GDP smaller than Italy’s and now has an economy that rivals our own.
She has become the world’s first manufacturing power, laid claim to the islands of the East and South China seas, and told America to keep her warships out of the Taiwan Strait.
Xi Jinping has launched a “One Belt, One Road” policy to finance trade ports and depots alongside the military and naval bases being established in Central and South Asia.
Meanwhile, the Americans, $20 trillion in debt, running $800 billion trade deficits, unable to fix their health care system, reform their tax code, or fund an infrastructure program, prepare to fight new Middle East war.
Whom the Gods would destroy…

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 28, 2017, 08:30:48 AM
Is Trump Entering a Kill Box?
Thursday - July 27, 2017 at 10:34 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Given the bravery he showed in stepping out front as the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions deserves better from his boss than the Twitter-trashing he has lately received.
The attorney general has not only been loyal to Trump and his agenda, he has the respect and affection of ex-colleagues in Congress and, more broadly, of populists and conservatives nationally.
Trump’s tweets about Sessions are only demoralizing his base.
Yet the president is not wrong to be exasperated and enraged.
A yearlong FBI investigation into Russian hacking has failed to produce a single indictment. Yet the president watches impotently as a special counsel pulls together a lethal force, inside his own administration, whose undeclared ambition is to bring him down.
Trump’s behavior suggests that he sees the Mueller threat as potentially mortal.
How did we get to this peril point when there is no evidence that Trump or any senior aide colluded in the hacking? As for the June 2016 meeting with the Russians, called by Donald Trump Jr. when told by a friend that Moscow had dirt on Hillary Clinton, even that was no crime.
Foolish, yes; criminal, no. So, again, how did we get to where talk of impeachment and presidential pardons fills the air?
First, Attorney General Sessions, as a campaign adviser and surrogate for Trump who had met with the Russian ambassador, had to recuse himself from the investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein then assumed oversight authority.
Trump then fired FBI Director James Comey and boasted to Russia’s foreign minister about having gotten the “crazy nut job” off his case. His Oval Office comments leaked. Comey then leaked notes of his meeting with Trump. Rosenstein then washed his hands of the mess by naming a special counsel.
And he chose a bulldog, ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Hence, where are we? Despite zero evidence of Trump or his aides colluding in the hacking, a counterintelligence investigation is evolving into a criminal investigation. Mueller is now hiring veteran investigators and prosecutors specializing in white-collar crime.

This is not a witch hunt. It is an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, where the most colorful eggs are likely to be the tax returns and the financial records of Trump, who built a real estate empire in a town where winners brag about how they gutted the losers.

Every enemy of Trump is going to be dropping the dime on him to Mueller. Moreover, there is no history of special counsels being appointed and applauded by the press, who went home without taking scalps.

Trump understands this. Reports of his frustration and rage suggest that he knows he has been maneuvered, partly by his own mistakes, into a kill box from which there may be no bloodless exit.

What Trump needs is a leader at Justice who will confine the Mueller investigation to the Russian hacking, and keep Mueller's men from roaming until they hit prosecutorial pay dirt.

Consider now Trump's narrowing options.

He can fire Jeff Sessions. But that will enrage Trump's base to whom the senator is a loyal soldier. And anyone Trump nominates as AG would not be confirmed unless he or she pledged not to interfere with Mueller.

He could direct Rosenstein to fire Mueller. But Rosenstein would assume the Elliot Richardson role in the Saturday Night Massacre, when that AG refused to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, resigned, and was canonized as a martyr by the Never-Nixon media.

Even if Trump finds a Justice Department loyalist to play the role of Solicitor General Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon's orders and fired Cox, this would only mean Mueller's departure. Mueller's staff of prosecutors and investigators would still be there, beavering away.

When Archibald Cox was fired, Nixon ordered his entire office shut down. Yet, within days of the firestorm, it was up and running again with a new special prosecutor. And impeachment resolutions were blossoming in the House.
Another Trump option would be to leave Mueller alone and hope for a benign outcome. But from reports of his rage at the recusal of Sessions and unwillingness of Rosenstein to restrict Mueller to the Russian hacking scandal, Trump seems to sense that an unrestricted investigation represents a mortal threat to his presidency.

And all the talk of impeachment and pardons suggests that this city can also see what lies over the next hill. After all, we have been here before.

From his history, Mueller is not a man to be intimidated by charges of bias. These will only steel his resolve to pursue with his subpoena power every docuмent he wants, including tax returns, until he has satisfied himself.

The president is unlikely to view this process with indulgence, and patience does not appear to rank high among his virtues.

We are headed for a collision between President Trump and Director Mueller.


http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-entering-kill-box-127396 (http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=Gvg0.&m=IiZIvXUhO1xN9f&b=MFyLFyAL3SejhqkEq.I8EQ)
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: graceseeker on August 02, 2017, 11:46:24 AM
didn't Mueller hire a bunch of Clinton supporters?

That should be sufficient to show that he is biased against Trump
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 03, 2017, 09:30:11 PM
Shall We Fight Them All?
Monday - July 31, 2017 at 8:40 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry.
Unless we believe Kim is a suicidal madman, his goal seems clear. He wants what every nuclear power wants — the ability to strike his enemy’s homeland with horrific impact, in order to deter that enemy.
Kim wants his regime recognized and respected, and the U.S., which carpet-bombed the North from 1950-1953, out of Korea.
Where does this leave us? Says Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, “The U.S. is on the verge of a binary choice: either accept North Korea into the nuclear club or conduct a military strike that would entail enormous civilian casualties.”
A time for truth. U.S. sanctions on North Korea, like those voted for by Congress last week, are not going to stop Kim from acquiring ICBMs. He is too close to the goal line.
And any pre-emptive strike on the North could trigger a counterattack on Seoul by massed artillery on the DMZ, leaving tens of thousands of South Koreans dead, alongside U.S. soldiers and their dependents.
We could be in an all-out war to the finish with the North, a war the American people do not want to fight.
Saturday, President Trump tweeted out his frustration over China’s failure to pull our chestnuts out of the fire: “They do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem.”
Sunday, U.S. B-1B bombers flew over Korea and the Pacific air commander Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy warned his units were ready to hit North Korea with “rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force.”
Yet, also Sunday, Xi Jinping reviewed a huge parade of tanks, planes, troops and missiles as Chinese officials mocked Trump as a “greenhorn President” and “spoiled child” who is running a bluff against North Korea. Is he? We shall soon see.
According to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump vowed Monday he would take “all necessary measures” to protect U.S. allies. And U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley bristled, “The time for talk is over.”
Are we headed for a military showdown and war with the North? The markets, hitting records again Monday, don’t seem to think so.
But North Korea is not the only potential adversary with whom our relations are rapidly deteriorating.
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After Congress voted overwhelmingly for new sanctions on Russia last week and Trump agreed to sign the bill that strips him of authority to lift the sanctions without Hill approval, Russia abandoned its hopes for a rapprochement with Trump’s America. Sunday, Putin ordered U.S. embassy and consulate staff cut by 755 positions.
The Second Cold War, begun when we moved NATO to Russia’s borders and helped dump over a pro-Russian regime in Kiev, is getting colder. Expect Moscow to reciprocate Congress’ hostility when we ask for her assistance in Syria and with North Korea.
Last week’s sanctions bill also hit Iran after it tested a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, though the nuclear deal forbids only the testing of ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Defiant, Iranians say their missile tests will continue.
Recent days have also seen U.S. warships and Iranian patrol boats in close proximity, with the U.S. ships firing flares and warning shots. Our planes and ships have also, with increasingly frequency, come to close quarters with Russian and Chinese ships and planes in the Baltic and South China seas.
While wary of a war with North Korea, Washington seems to be salivating for a war with Iran. Indeed, Trump’s threat to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear arms deal suggests a confrontation is coming.
One wonders: If Congress is hell-bent on confronting the evil that is Iran, why does it not cancel Iran’s purchases and options to buy the 140 planes the mullahs have ordered from Boeing?
Why are we selling U.S. airliners to the “world’s greatest state sponsor of terror”? Let Airbus take the blood money.
Apparently, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia are insufficient to satiate our War Party. Now it wants us to lead the Sunnis of the Middle East in taking down the Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, Iraq, Syria and South Lebanon, and are a majority in Bahrain and the oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. military has its work cut out for it. President Trump may need those transgender troops.
Among the reasons Trump routed his Republican rivals in 2016 is that he seemed to share an American desire to look homeward.
Yet, today, our relations with China and Russia are as bad as they have been in decades, while there is open talk of war with Iran and North Korea.
Was this what America voted for, or is this what America voted against?

Shall We Fight Them All?
Monday - July 31, 2017 


http://buchanan.org/blog/shall-we-fight-them-all-127408


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 03, 2017, 09:33:33 PM
didn't Mueller hire a bunch of Clinton supporters?

That should be sufficient to show that he is biased against Trump

Mueller is a long time Democratic and Clinton supporter and operative.

He is an evil man.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 04, 2017, 08:20:55 AM


 (http://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-russia-policy-hijacked-127432)
3August 2017
(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Is-Trumps-Russia-Policy-Being-Hijacked-2-700x245.jpg)">(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Is-Trumps-Russia-Policy-Being-Hijacked-2-700x245.jpg) (http://<font)
Is Trump’s Russia Policy Being Hijacked?
Thursday - August 3, 2017 at 11:59 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run, America Firsters inflicted a major defeat on the War Party.
The platform committee rejected a plank to pull us deeper into Ukraine, by successfully opposing new U.S. arms transfers to Kiev.
Improved relations with Russia were what candidate Trump had promised, and what Americans would vote for in November.
Yet, this week, The Wall Street Journal reports:
“The U.S. Pentagon and State Department have devised plans to supply Ukraine with antitank missiles and other weaponry and are seeking White House approval … as Kiev battles Russia-backed separatists … Defense Secretary Mattis has endorsed the plan.”
As pro-Russia rebels in East Ukraine have armored vehicles, Kiev wants U.S. tank-killing Javelin missiles, as well as antiaircraft weapons.
State and Defense want Trump to send the lethal weapons.
This is a formula for a renewed war, with far higher casualties in Ukraine than the 10,000 dead already suffered on both sides.
And it is a war Vladimir Putin will not likely allow Kiev to win.
If Ukraine’s army, bolstered by U.S. weaponry, re-engages in the east, it could face a Moscow-backed counterattack and be routed, and the Russian army could take permanent control of the Donbass.
Indeed, if Trump approves this State-Defense escalation plan, we could be looking at a rerun of the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008.
Then, to recapture its lost province of South Ossetia, which had seceded in 1992, after Georgia seceded from Russia, Georgia invaded.
Putin sent his army in, threw the Georgians out, and recognized South Ossetia, as John McCain impotently declaimed, “We are all Georgians now!”

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[size={defaultattr}][font={defaultattr}]
Wisely, George W. Bush ignored McCain and did nothing.
But about this new arms deal questions arise.
As the rebels have no aircraft, whose planes are the U.S. antiaircraft missiles to shoot down? And if the Russian army just over the border can enter and crush the Ukrainian army, why would we want to restart a cινιℓ ωαr, the only certain result of which is more dead Ukrainians on both sides?
The Journal’s answer: Our goal is to bleed Russia.
“The point of lethal aid is to raise the price Mr. Putin pays for his imperialism until he withdraws or agrees to peace. … The Russians don’t want dead soldiers arriving home before next year’s presidential election.”
Also going neocon is Mike Pence. In Georgia this week, noting that Russian tanks are still in South Ossetia, the vice president not only declared, “We stand with you,” he told Georgians the U.S. stands by its 2008 commitment to bring them into NATO.
This would mean, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, that in a future Russia-Georgia clash the U.S. could find itself in a shooting war with Russia in the South Caucasus.
Russia’s security interests there seem clear. What are ours?
Along with Trump’s signing of the new sanctions bill imposed by Congress, which strips him of his authority to lift those sanctions without Hill approval, these developments raise larger questions.
Is President Trump losing control of Russia policy? Has he capitulated to the neocons? These are not academic questions. For consider the architect of the new arms package, Kurt Volker, the new U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations.
A former CIA agent, member of the National Security Counsel, and envoy to NATO, Volker believes Russian troops in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk are all there illegally — and U.S. policy should be to push them out.
A former staffer of Sen. McCain, Volker was, until July, executive director of the neocon McCain Institute. He has called for the imposition of personal sanctions on Putin and his family and European travel restrictions on the Russian president.
In the Journal this week, “officials” described his strategy:
“Volker believes … that a change in Ukraine can be brought only by raising the costs for Moscow for continued intervention in Ukraine. In public comments, he has played down the notion that supplying weapons to Ukraine would escalate the conflict with Russia.”
In short, Volker believes giving antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Ukraine will bring Putin to the negotiating table, as he fears the prospect of dead Russian soldiers coming home in caskets before his 2018 election.
As for concerns that Putin might send his army into Ukraine, such worries are unwarranted.
Volker envisions a deepening U.S. involvement in a Ukrainian cινιℓ ωαr that can bleed and break Russia’s Ukrainian allies and convince Putin to back down and accept what we regard as a just settlement.
Does Trump believe this? Does Trump believe that confronting Putin with rising casualties among his army and allies in Ukraine is the way to force the Russian president to back down and withdraw from Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, as Nikita Khrushchev did from Cuba in 1962?
What if Putin refuses to back down, and chooses to confront?[/font][/size]
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 08, 2017, 09:25:24 AM


 (http://buchanan.org/blog/after-the-coup-what-then-127443)
8August 2017

After the Coup, What Then?
 (http://buchanan.org/blog/after-the-coup-what-then-127443)
Tuesday - August 8, 2017 at 12:46 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
That the Trump presidency is bedeviled is undeniable.
As President Donald Trump flew off for August at his Jersey club, there came word that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III had impaneled a grand jury and subpoenas were going out to Trump family and campaign associates.
The jurors will be drawn from a pool of citizens in a city Hillary Clinton swept with 91 percent of the vote. Trump got 4 percent.
Whatever indictments Mueller wants, Mueller gets.
Thanks to a media that savages him ceaselessly, Trump is down to 33 percent approval in a Quinnipiac University poll and below 40 percent in most of the rest.
Before Trump departed D.C., The Washington Post ran transcripts of his phone conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia.
Even Obama administration veterans were stunned.
So, it is time to ask: If this city brings Trump down, will the rest of America rejoice?
What will be the reaction out there in fly-over country, that land where the “deplorables” dwell who produce the soldiers to fight our wars? Will they toast the “free press” that brought down the president they elected, and in whom they had placed so much hope?
My guess: The reaction will be one of bitterness, cynicism, despair, a sense that the fix is in, that no matter what we do, they will not let us win. If Trump is brought down, American democracy will take a pasting. It will be seen as a fraud. And the backlash will poison our politics to where only an attack from abroad, like 9/11, will reunite us.
Our media preen and posture as the defenders of democracy, devoted to truth, who provide us round-the-clock protection from tyranny. But half the nation already sees the media as a propaganda arm of a liberal establishment that the people have rejected time and again.
Consider the Post’s publication of the transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexico’s president and Australia’s prime minister.
When reporter Greg Miller got these transcripts, his editors, knowing they would damage Trump, plastered them on Page 1.
The Post was letting itself be used by a leaker engaged in disloyal and possibly criminal misconduct. Yet the Post agreed to provide confidentiality and to hide the Trump-hater’s identity.
This is what we do, says the Post. People have a right to know if President Trump says one thing at rallies about Mexico paying for the wall and another to the president of Mexico. This is a story.
But there is a far larger story here, of which this Post piece is but an exhibit. It is the story of a concerted campaign, in which the anti-Trump media publish leaks, even criminal leaks, out of the FBI, CIA, NSA and NSC, to bring down a president whom the Beltway media and their deep-state collaborators both despise and wish to destroy.
Did Trump collude with Putin to defeat Clinton, the Beltway media demand to know, even as they daily collude with deep-state criminals to bring down the president of the United States.
And if there is an unfolding silent coup by the regime Americans repudiated in 2016 — to use security leaks and the lethal weapon of a special counsel to overturn the election results — is that not a story worth covering as much as what Trump said to Pena Nieto?
Do the people not have a right know who are the snakes collaborating with the Never-Trump press to bring down their head of state? Is not discovering the identities of deep-state felons a story that investigative reporters should be all over?
If Greg Miller is obligated to protect his source, fine. But why are other journalists not exposing his identity?
The answer suggests itself. This is a collaborative enterprise, where everyone protects everyone else’s sources, because all have the same goal: the dumping of Trump. If that requires collusion with criminals, so be it.
The Justice Department is now running down the leaks, and the ACLU’s Ben Wizner is apoplectic: “Every American should be concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to step up its efforts against whistleblowers and journalists. A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy.”
That’s one way to put it. Another is that some of these “whistleblowers” are political criminals who reject the verdict of the American electorate in 2016 and are out to overturn it. And the aforementioned “journalists” are their enablers and collaborators.
And if, as Wizner’s asserts, protecting secrets is tantamount to a “crackdown on the free press and democracy,” no wonder the free press and democracy are falling into disrepute all over the world.
By colluding, the mainstream media, deep state, and the special prosecutor’s button men, with a license to roam, may bring down yet another president. So doing, they will validate John Adams’s insight:
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit ѕυιcιdє.”

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 12, 2017, 09:48:29 AM
Pat Buchanan Tells Sean Hannity the Deep State is Out to Get Donald Trump
Friday - August 11, 2017 at 1:33 am

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By Peter Barry Chowka at The American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/pat_buchanan_tells_sean_hannity_the_deep_state_is_out_to_get_donald_trump.html)
Patrick J. (“Pat”) Buchanan appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio program on Tuesday, August 8. The subject was Donald J. Trump and the efforts of the Deep State to unseat him. Earlier the same day, Buchanan’s latest column was published (http://buchanan.org/blog/after-the-coup-what-then-127443), “After the Coup, What Then?” In its simplicity, accuracy, and directness, it is an essential read. Buchanan’s thesis is that the Deep State is conspiring to oust President Trump. His column and his subsequent conversation with Hannity suggest that the effort might just succeed, with daunting consequences for the future of the Republic.
Buchanan is the ultimate D.C. insider-outsider. A conservative from his early years, Buchanan was a close aide to President Richard M. Nixon from 1966, and in the White House starting in 1969, and during the entire Watergate period until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Buchanan also served President Ronald Reagan as White House communications director for two years during Reagan’s second term. Buchanan ran for president himself, twice (1992 and ’96) in the primaries as a Republican and once in the general election of 2000 as the Reform Party candidate. He reinforced his conservative credentials by challenging President George H.W. Bush in 1992, opposing Bush for his expansionist foreign policy and breaking the pledge on no new taxes.
(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/pjb-time-mag-1996-hellraiser.jpg)
Time Magazine, November 6, 1995.
When he is not running for office or serving Republican presidents, Buchanan writes prolifically – books and columns – and broadcasts, on radio and serving as a TV talk show host and guest. For the past four decades, he has distinguished himself as one of the country’s most prescient and accurate political analysts.
In welcoming Buchanan to his nationally syndicated radio program on Tuesday, Hannity noted that the two have been friends for years although they have disagreed from time to time, including on issues like the Iraq War, which Buchanan opposed. The first subject to come up was Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations of President Trump.
PATRICK J. BUCHANAN: Mueller’s investigation: It’s really a carte blanche. He’s not hiring these folks [attorneys] to find out whether Donald Trump communicated with WikiLeaks. They’re going into Trump’s finances and any connections with the Russians that will require tax returns and the rest of it. Then you come into any other mistakes. This is really a hostile organism, inside the Executive branch, targeted primarily at the White House and the president that is going to grow and grow and grow. I’ve never known one of these Special Prosecutors to go home without taking some scalps.
Regarding the surveiling of Trump’s associates during the 2016 campaign and the subsequent unmasking of the targeted individuals:
BUCHANAN: Clearly it [the surveilling, unmasking, and leaking] was designed to have all of the revelations leaked constantly as soon as the POTUS takes office. You take that operation ongoing with the Deep State doing the leaking, and the hostile media publishing the leaks, hammering the POTUS every which way every day. And then you have this new powerful organism [Mueller’s investigation] that is growing inside the Administration, under the Justice Department, with enormous freedom to roam, that’s moving on the White House, moving on Trump campaign associates, the Trump family, and Trump himself. The writing is on the wall here.
If they succeed in bringing down the president, what’s the reaction of the American people going to be? I think it will be utter disillusionment with democracy. The folks out there in Middle America who say, “Look, we did everything we could. We elected the man and they threw him out. The Deep State that we wanted to throw out took over, and ousted the president we elected.”
I don’t know how we would come together after that. The reaction among those of us who supported him would not be that we’re going to take up arms. It would be disillusionment, despair, cynicism.
SEAN HANNITY: You’d probably see states wanting to secede from the Union. They’d feel like the Republic is gone.
BUCHANAN: That’s exactly right. “We’re just being led. It’s a fraud. We won and then they overturned our victory!”
The discussion then moved on to the situation in North Korea.
HANNITY: I’m afraid that North Korea will define the Trump presidency. I’m beginning to think it’s almost a certainty.
BUCHANAN: I think there’s real reluctance in the military and the Pentagon [to go to war] in the absence of absolute proof that Kim Jong Un is putting nuclear warheads on the tops of missiles and placing them to target the United States.
It should be remembered that Buchanan was in the White House with Nixon during the entire 26 months of the Watergate affair (1972-’74). He was never implicated in the scandal or the cover-up, and he stayed on during the early days of the Ford administration. He knows a scandal – and the machinations of the Deep State to undermine and destroy a presidency – when he sees one.
The podcast of Sean Hannity’s program with Buchanan can be streamed here (http://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ptw2v-2aa05c0) and downloaded from here (https://www.podbean.com/site/Download/DIR2AA05C0PTW2V). The segments with Buchanan begin 49 minutes and 30 seconds into the recording.
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about national politics, media, popular culture, and health care. He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. His new website is AltMedNews.net (http://altmednews.net/).
Read more at The American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/pat_buchanan_tells_sean_hannity_the_deep_state_is_out_to_get_donald_trump.html)
http://buchanan.org/blog/pat-buchanan-tells-sean-hannity-deep-state-get-donald-trump-127470

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 12, 2017, 09:56:45 AM
VIDEO: Pat Buchanan: Nation Focused on Russia Like Watergate in ’70s
Friday - August 11, 2017 at 2:24 am

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Newsmax TV’s “The Howie Carr Show”  (http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/watergate-pat-buchanan-collusion-investigation/2017/08/09/id/806798/)
Americans are as focused on the Russia investigation “as they were on Watergate in the final days,” former Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan told Newsmax TV on Wednesday.

“The lynch mob is almost as rabid now,” Buchanan, the former Republican presidential candidate told “The Howie Carr Show” in an interview that occurred on the 43rd anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
“But by 1974, it was two years and two months after the break-in” at the Watergate Hotel, “and you had all kinds of folks fired and indicted and convicted and gone to prison.
“Everybody, the whole Watergate crowd, had been convicted within the first year,” Buchanan said.
By contrast, with Russia, “the FBI’s been investigating a year. They said they knew the first day the Russians had done the hacking.
“But in one year, they haven’t been able to trace it to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin or Trump’s campaign.”
“You’ve got this machine that is working to dig and dig and dig and roam through the West Wing and Trump’s history,” Buchanan said.
“To dig up something where they can find what they would call criminal acts, filing wrong statements, misleading people, not telling the truth — where they can really almost paralyze his White House and eventually bring him down.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 15, 2017, 09:26:24 AM


If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?
Tuesday - August 15, 2017 at 12:48 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old nαzι sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson.
Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between extremists on both sides of the issue of whether Robert E. Lee’s statue should be removed from Lee Park.
With Heyer’s death, the brawl was elevated to a moral issue. And President Donald Trump’s initial failure to denounce the neo-nαzι and Klan presence was declared a moral failure.
How did we get here, and where are we going?
In June of 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof gunned down nine Christians at an evening Bible study in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church. A review of Roof’s selfies and website showed him posing with the Confederate battle flag.
Gov. Nikki Haley, five years in office, instantly pivoted and called for removal of the battle flag from the Confederate war memorial on the State House grounds, as a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.”
This ignited a national clamor to purge all statues that lionize Confederate soldiers and statesmen.
In Maryland, demands have come for removing statues and busts of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. Statues of Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson, President Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee have been pulled down in New Orleans.
After Charlottesville, pressure is building for removal of the statues of Lee, Jackson, Davis and Gen. “Jeb” Stuart from historic Monument Avenue in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy.
Many Southern towns, including Alexandria, Virginia, have statues of Confederate soldiers looking to the South. Shall we pull them all down? And once all the Southern cινιℓ ωαr monuments are gone, should we go after the statues of the slave owners whom we Americans have heroized?
Gen. George Washington and his subordinate, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, were slave owners, as was Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. Five of our first seven presidents owned slaves, as did James K. Polk, who invaded and annexed the northern half of Mexico, including California.
Jefferson, with his exploitation of Sally Hemings and neglect of their children, presents a particular problem. While he wrote in the Declaration of Independence of his belief that “all men are created equal,” his life and his depiction of Indians in that docuмent belie this.
And Jefferson is both on the face of Mount Rushmore and has a memorial in the U.S. capital.
Another term applied to the “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville is that they are “white supremacists,” a mortal sin to modernity. But here we encounter an even greater problem.
Looking back over the history of a Western Civilization, which we call great, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England all white supremacists?
They conquered in the name of the mother countries all the lands they discovered, imposed their rule upon the indigenous peoples, and vanquished and eradicated the native-born who stood in their way.
Who, during the centuries-long discovery and conquest of the New World, really believed that the lives of the indigenous peoples were of equal worth with those of the colonizers?
They believed European Man had the right to rule the world.
Beginning in the 16th century, Western imperialists ruled much of what was called the civilized world. Was not the British Empire, one of the great civilizing forces in human history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?
And if being a segregationist disqualifies one from being venerated in our brave new world, what do we do with Woodrow Wilson, who thought “Birth of a Nation” a 
splendid film and who re-segregated the U.S. government?
In 1955, Prime Minister Churchill, imperialist to the core, urged his Cabinet to consider the slogan, “Keep England White.”
Nor is a belief in the superiority of one’s race, religion, tribe and culture unique to the West. What is unique, what is an experiment without precedent, is what we are about today.
We have condemned and renounced the scarlet sins of the men who made America and embraced diversity, inclusivity and equality.
Our new America is to be a land where all races, tribes, creeds and cultures congregate, all are treated equally, and all move ever closer to an equality of results through the regular redistribution of opportunity, wealth and power.
We are going to become “the first universal nation.”
“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
Nevertheless, on to Richmond!
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 19, 2017, 09:47:02 AM
America’s Second cινιℓ ωαr
Saturday - August 19, 2017 at 1:29 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee — and what a leader! … No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.”
So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial “The Oxford History of the American People” in 1965.
First in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would not lift up his sword against his own people, and chose to defend his home state rather than wage war upon her.
This veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, “appears in the saying attributed to a Confederate soldier, ‘The rest of us may have … descended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert.'”
Growing up after World War II, this was accepted history.
Yet, on the militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of “racist and traitor.” A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in museums or tossed onto trash piles.
What has changed since 1965?
It is not history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.
What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores.
And the politicians are in panic.
Two years ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the giant statues of Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson on Richmond’s Monument Avenue “parts of our heritage.” After Charlottesville, New York-born-and-bred McAuliffe, entertaining higher ambitions, went full scalawag, demanding the statues be pulled down as “flashpoints for hatred, division, and violence.”
Who hates the statues, Terry? Who’s going to cause the violence? Answer: The Democratic left whom Terry must now appease.
McAuliffe is echoed by Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate in November to succeed McAuliffe. GOP nominee Ed Gillespie wants Monument Avenue left alone.
The election is the place to decide this, but the left will not wait.
In Durham, North Carolina, our Taliban smashed the statue of a Confederate soldier. Near the entrance of Duke University Chapel, a statue of Lee has been defaced, the nose broken off.
Wednesday at dawn, Baltimore carried out a cultural cleansing by taking down statues of Lee and Maryland Chief Justice Roger Taney who wrote the Dred Scott decision and opposed Lincoln’s suspension of the right of habeas corpus.
Like ISIS, which smashed the storied ruins of Palmyra, and the al-Qaida rebels who ravaged the fabled Saharan city of Timbuktu, the new barbarism has come to America. This is going to become a blazing issue, not only between but within the parties.
For there are 10 Confederates in Statuary Hall in the Capitol, among them Lee, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, vice president to Jefferson Davis, and Davis himself. The Black Caucus wants them gone.
Mount Rushmore-sized carvings of Lee, Jackson and Davis are on Stone Mountain, Georgia. Are they to be blasted off?
There are countless universities, colleges and high schools like Washington & Lee named for Confederate statesmen and soldiers. Across the Potomac from D.C. are Jefferson Davis Highway and Leesburg Pike to Leesburg itself, 25 miles north. Are all highways, streets, towns and counties named for Confederates to be renamed? What about Fort Bragg?
On every cινιℓ ωαr battlefield, there are monuments to the Southern fallen. Gettysburg has hundreds of memorials, statues and markers. But if, as the left insists we accept, the Confederates were traitors trying to tear America apart to preserve an evil system, upon what ground do Democrats stand to resist the radical left’s demands?
What do we do with those battlefields where Confederates were victorious: Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville?
“Where does this all end?” President Trump asked.
It doesn’t. Not until America’s histories and biographies are burned and new texts written to nαzιfy Lee, Jackson, Davis and all the rest, will a newly indoctrinated generation of Americans accede to this demand to tear down and destroy what their fathers cherished.
And once all the Confederates are gone, one must begin with the explorers, and then the slave owners like Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison, who seceded from slave-free Britain. White supremacists all.
Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun must swiftly follow.
Then there are all those segregationists. From 1865 to 1965, virtually all of the great Southern senators were white supremacists.
In the first half of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of a rigidly segregationist South all six times they ran, and FDR rewarded Dixie by putting a Klansman on the Supreme Court.
While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as nαzιs in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?
In this Second American cινιℓ ωαr, whose side are you on?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 22, 2017, 08:51:18 AM
 
22 August 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Is-Trumps-Agenda-Being-Eclipsed-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-agenda-eclipsed-127529)
Is Trump’s Agenda Being Eclipsed?

By Patrick J. Buchanan
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942.
True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation.
When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945, that role fell to Clement Attlee, who began the liquidation. Churchill, during his second premiership from 1951-1955, would continue the process, as would his successor, Harold Macmillan, until the greatest empire the world had ever seen had vanished.
While its demise was inevitable, the death of the empire was hastened and made more humiliating by the wars into which Churchill had helped to plunge Britain, wars that bled and bankrupted his nation.
At Yalta in 1945, Stalin and FDR treated the old imperialist with something approaching bemused contempt.
War is the health of the state, but the death of empires.
The German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires all fell in World War I. World War II ended the Japanese and Italian empires — with the British and French following soon after. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989. Afghanistan delivered the coup de grace.
Is it now the turn of the Americans?
Persuaded by his generals — Mattis at Defense, McMasters on the National Security Council, Kelly as chief of staff — President Trump is sending some 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to augment the 8,500 already there.
Like Presidents Obama and Bush, he does not intend to preside over a U.S. defeat in its longest war. Nor do his generals. Yet how can we defeat the Taliban with 13,000 troops when we failed to do so with the 100,000 Obama sent?
The new troops are to train the Afghan army to take over the war, to continue eradicating the terrorist elements like ISIS, and to prevent Kabul and other cities from falling to a Taliban now dominant in 40 percent of the country.
Yet what did the great general, whom Trump so admires, Douglas MacArthur, say of such a strategy?

“War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.”
Is not “prolonged indecision” what the Trump strategy promises? Is not “prolonged indecision” what the war policies of Obama and Bush produced in the last 17 years?
Understandably, Americans feel they cannot walk away from this war. For there is the certainty as to what will follow when we leave.
When the British left Delhi in 1947, millions of former subjects died during the partition of the territory into Pakistan and India and the mutual slaughter of Muslims and Hindus.
When the French departed Algeria in 1962, the “Harkis” they left behind paid the price of being loyal to the Mother Country.
When we abandoned our allies in South Vietnam, the result was mass murder in the streets, cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs and hundreds of thousands of boat people in the South China Sea, a final resting place for many. In Cambodia, it was a h0Ɩ0cαųst.

Trump, however, was elected to end America’s involvement in Middle East wars. And if he has been persuaded that he simply cannot liquidate these wars — Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan — he will likely end up sacrificing his presidency, trying to rescue the failures of those who worked hardest to keep him out of the White House.
Consider the wars, active and potential, Trump faces.
Writes Bob Merry in the fall issue of The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org/feature/stop-poking-the-russian-bear-21956):
“War between Russia and the West seems nearly inevitable. No self-respecting nation facing inexorable encirclement by an alliance of hostile neighbors can allow such pressures and forces to continue indefinitely. Eventually (Russia) must protect its interests through military action.”
If Pyongyang tests another atom bomb or ICBM, some national security aides to Trump are not ruling out preventive war.
Trump himself seems hell-bent on tearing up the nuclear deal with Iran. This would lead inexorably to a U.S. ultimatum, where Iran would be expected to back down or face a war that would set the Persian Gulf ablaze.
Yet the country did not vote for confrontation or war.
America voted for Trump’s promise to improve ties with Russia, to make Europe shoulder more of the cost of its defense, to annihilate ISIS and extricate us from Mideast wars, to stay out of future wars.
America voted for economic nationalism and an end to the mammoth trade deficits with the NAFTA nations, EU, Japan and China.
America voted to halt the invasion across our Southern border and to reduce legal immigration to ease the downward pressure on American wages and the competition for working-class jobs.
Yet today we hear talk of upping and extending the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, of confronting Iran, of sending anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine to battle pro-Russia rebels in the east.
Can the new custodians of Trump’s populist-nationalist and America First agenda, the generals and the Goldman Sachs alumni association, be entrusted to carry it out?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 25, 2017, 08:54:50 AM
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What Still Unites Us?
Thursday - August 24, 2017 at 11:41 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement.
Neocons claimed America was an “ideological nation” a “creedal nation,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Expropriating the biblical mandate, “Go forth and teach all nations!” they divinized democracy and made the conversion of mankind to the democratic faith their mission here on earth.
With his global crusade for democracy, George W. Bush bought into all this. Result: Ashes in our mouths and a series of foreign policy disasters, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Behind the Trumpian slogan “America First” lay a conviction that, with the Cold War over and the real ideological nation, the USSR, shattered into pieces along ethnic lines, it was time for America to come home.
Contra the neocons, traditionalists argued that, while America was uniquely great, the nation was united by faith, culture, language, history, heroes, holidays, mores, manners, customs and traditions. A common feature of Americans, black and white, was pride in belonging to a people that had achieved so much.
The insight attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville — “America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great” — was a belief shared by almost all.
What makes our future appear problematic is that what once united us now divides us. While Presidents Wilson and Truman declared us to be a “Christian nation,” Christianity has been purged from our public life and sheds believers every decade. Atheism and agnosticism are growing rapidly, especially among the young.
Traditional morality, grounded in Christianity, is being discarded. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Four-in-10 children are born out of wedlock. Unrestricted abortion and same-sex marriage — once regarded as marks of decadence and decline — are now seen as human rights and the hallmarks of social progress.
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Tens of millions of us do not speak English. Where most of our music used to be classic, popular, country and western, and jazz, much of it now contains rutting lyrics that used to be unprintable.
Where we used to have three national networks, we have three 24-hour cable news channels and a thousand websites that reinforce our clashing beliefs on morality, culture, politics and race.
Consider but a few events post-Charlottesville.
“Murderer” was painted on the San Fernando statue of Fr. Junipero Serra, the Franciscan who founded the missions that became San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano and Santa Clara.
America’s oldest monument honoring Columbus, in Baltimore, was vandalized. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called for Robert E. Lee’s statue to be removed from Capitol and replaced by — Pocahontas.
According to legend, this daughter of Chief Powhatan saved Captain John Smith from being beheaded by throwing herself across his neck. The Chief was a “person of interest” in the disappearance of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island, among whose missing was Virginia Dare, the first European baby born in British America.
Why did Kaine not call for John Smith himself, leader of the Jamestown Colony that fought off Indian attacks, to be so honored?
In New Orleans, “Tear It Down” was spray-painted on a statue of Joan of Arc, a gift from France in 1972. Besides being a canonized saint in the Catholic Church and a legendary heroine of France, what did the Maid of Orleans do to deserve this?
Taken together, we are seeing the discoverers, explorers and missionaries of North America demonized as genocidal racists all. The Founding Fathers are either slave owners or sanctioners of slavery.
Our nation-builders either collaborated in or condoned the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. Almost to the present, ours was a land where segregationists were honored leaders.
Bottom line for the left: Americans should be sickened and ashamed of the history that made us the world’s greatest nation. And we should acknowledge our ancestors’ guilt by tearing down any and all monuments and statues that memorialize them.
This rising segment of America, full of self-righteous rage, is determined to blacken the memory of those who have gone before us.
To another slice of America, much of the celebrated social and moral “progress” of recent decades induces a sense of nausea, summarized in the lament, “This isn’t the country we grew up in.”
Hillary Clinton famously described this segment of America as a “basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic … bigots,” and altogether “irredeemable.”
So, what still unites us? What holds us together into the indefinite future? What makes us one nation and one people? What do we offer mankind, as nations seem to recoil from what we are becoming, and are instead eager to build their futures on the basis of ethnonationalism and fundamentalist faith?
If advanced democracy has produced the disintegration of a nation that we see around us, what is the compelling case for it?
A sixth of the way through the 21st century, what is there to make us believe this will be the Second American Century?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 29, 2017, 02:29:42 PM


Can the GOP’s Shotgun Marriage Be Saved?
Tuesday - August 29, 2017 at 3:10 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections.
The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the halcyon years of the 1920s.
But not everyone was jubilant. Neocons and Never-Trumpers were appalled, and as morose as they had been since the primaries produced a populist slaughter of what GOP elites had boasted was the finest class of presidential candidates in memory.
And there was this sobering fact: Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote. Her margin would rise to near three million, making this the sixth in seven presidential elections that the GOP lost the popular vote. Trump had cracked the Democrats’ “blue wall,” but a shift of 70,000 votes would have meant a third straight GOP defeat.
Seven months into the Trump presidency, the promise of a new Republican era has receded. It is not because Nancy Peℓσѕι and Chuck Schumer have proven to be such formidable adversaries, but because the GOP coalition has gone to battle stations — against itself.
Trump has taken to disparaging Senate Leader Mitch McConnell for failing to pass health care reform, though the decisive vote to kill the bill came from John McCain, who, for his own motives and to media cheers, torpedoed McConnell’s effort and humiliated his party
And as Allan Ryskind writes in The Washington Times, McConnell is responsible for Neil Gorsuch being on the Supreme Court. Had Mitch not kept his troops in line to block a Senate vote on President Obama’s election-year nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, there would have been no vacancy for Trump to fill with Gorsuch.
McConnell is also indispensable to the Trump-GOP effort to repopulate federal appellate courts with disciples of Antonin Scalia.
What purpose is served by the coach trashing his quarterback — in midseason?
Undeniably, Congress, which the voters empowered to repeal Obamacare, reduce tax rates and rebuild America’s infrastructure, has thus far failed. And if Congress fails to produce on tax reform, the GOP will have some serious explaining to do in 2018.
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As for Trump, while public approval of his performance is at record lows for a president in his first year, he has fulfilled some major commitments and has had some major achievements.
He put Gorsuch on the court. He pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord. He persuaded NATO allies to put up more for defense. He approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
Border security is markedly better. The economic news has been excellent: Record run-ups in the stock market, near full employment, growth approaching the 3 percent he promised. The coal industry has been liberated, and the Trump folks are renegotiating NAFTA.
Yet the divisions over policy and the persona of the president are widening. Trump is disliked and disrespected by many in his own party on Capitol Hill, and much of the Republican media proudly despise him.
And that form of bribery so familiar to D.C. — trashing one’s president at the coaxing of the press, in return for plaudits to one’s “courage” and “independence” — is openly practiced.
More critically, there are disputes over policy that again seem irreconcilable.
Free-trade Republicans remain irredeemably hostile to economic nationalism, though countries like China continue to eat our lunch. In July, the U.S. trade deficit in goods was $65 billion, an annual rate of more than $780 billion.
Interventionists continue to push for confrontation with Russia in the Baltic States and Ukraine, for more U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, for scrapping the nuclear deal with Iran.
On social issues, the GOP seems split, with many willing to soft-peddle opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion and wait on a Supreme Court that ignited the culture wars to reverse course with new Trump appointees.
Even Cabinet members and Trump aides have let the media know they sharply dissent from Trump’s stand in the Charlottesville brawl. And the coming clash over statues of Confederate soldiers and statesmen is likely to split Northern and Southern Republicans.
The white working class that provided Trump’s his margins in the Middle West wonders why affirmative action, reverse discrimination at their expense, has not been abolished.
As for Speaker Paul Ryan and others committed to entitlement reform — paring back Social Security and Medicare benefits, while raising the contributions of the well-to-do to ensure the long-term solvency of the programs — they have not been heard from lately.
What seems apparent is that the historic opportunity the party had in January, to forge a coalition of conservatives and populists who might find common ground on immigration, trade, border security, spending, culture and foreign policy, is slipping away.
And the battle for the soul and future of the GOP, thought to have been suspended until 2020, is on once again.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 06, 2017, 11:18:31 PM
What Harvey Wrought
Friday - September 1, 2017 at 7:26 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together.
In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
On display this week was America at her best.
Yet the destruction will not soon be repaired. Nearly a third of hαɾɾιs County, home to 4.5 million people, was flooded. Beaumont and Port Arthur were swamped with 2 feet of rain and put underwater.
Estimates of the initial cost to the Treasury are north of $100 billion, with some saying the down payment alone will be closer to $200 billion. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the cost of Harvey will exceed that of the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after World War II.
Though the country has appeared united since the storm hit, it is not likely to remain so. Soon, the cameras and correspondents will go home, while the shelters remain full, as tens of thousands of people in those shelters have only destroyed homes to return to.
When the waters recede, the misery of the evacuees left behind will become less tolerable. Then will come the looters and gougers and angry arguments over who’s to blame and who should pay.
They have already begun. Republicans who balked at voting for the bailout billions for Chris Christie’s New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the coast in 2012 are being called hypocrites for asking for swift and massive federal assistance to repair red state Texas.
And whereas George W. Bush soared to 90 percent approval after 9/11, no such surge in support for Donald Trump appears at hand.
Indeed, the sneering and sniping began on his first visit to Texas.
He failed to celebrate the first responders, they said. He failed to hug any of the victims. He failed to show empathy. First lady Melania Trump wore spiked heels boarding Marine One for Texas.
A prediction: The damage done by Harvey — as well as the physical, psychic and political costs — will cause many to echo the slogan of George McGovern in 1972, when he exhorted the country to “come home, America.”
The nation seems more receptive now, for even before Harvey, the media seemed consumed with what ails America.
The New York and D.C. subway systems are crumbling. Puerto Rico is bankrupt. Some states, such as Illinois, cannot balance their budgets. The murder rates are soaring in Baltimore and Chicago. Congress this month will have to raise the debt ceiling by hundreds of billions and pass a budget with a deficit bloated by the cost of Harvey.
And the foreign crises seem to be coming at us, one after another.
Russia is beginning military maneuvers in the Baltic and Belarus, bordering Poland, with a force estimated by some at 100,000 troops — Vladimir Putin’s response to NATO’s deployment of 4,000 troops to the Baltic States and Poland.
The U.S. is considering sending anti-tank missiles to Kiev. This could reignite the Donbass war and bring Russian intervention, the defeat of the Ukrainian army and calls for U.S. intervention.
In the teeth of Trump’s threat to pour “fire and fury” on North Korea, Kim Jong Un just launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan. Trump’s answer: U.S. B-1Bs make practice bombing runs near the demilitarized zone. Reports from South Korea indicate that Kim may soon conduct a sixth underground test of an atomic bomb.
War in Korea has never seemed so close since Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War with an armistice more than 60 years ago.
Despite the opposition of his national security team, Trump is said to be ready to repudiate the Iranian nuclear deal in October, freeing Congress to reimpose the sanctions lifted by the deal.
This would split us from our NATO allies and, if Iran ignored the new U.S. sanctions or began anew to enrich uranium, force Trump’s hand. Is he, are we as a country, ready for another trillion-dollar war, with Iran, which so many inside the Beltway seem so eager to fight?
The U.S. and Turkey have urged Iraq’s Kurds to put off their nonbinding referendum on independence Sept. 25. The vote seems certain to endorse a separate state. A Kurdistan, seceded from Baghdad, would be a magnet for secession-minded Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran, 30 million in all, and present a strategic crisis for the United States.
Along with the steady growth of entitlement spending, the new dollars demanded for defense, the prospect of new wars and the tax cuts the White House supports, Hurricane Harvey should concentrate the mind.
Great as America is, there are limits to our wealth and power, to how many global problems we can solve, to how many wars we can fight and to how many hostile powers we can confront.
The “indispensable nation” is going to have to begin making choices. Indeed, that is among the reasons Trump was elected.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 06, 2017, 11:20:41 PM
Should Japan and South Korea Go Nuclear?
Tuesday - September 5, 2017 at 12:22 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention.
What else does he want?
Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed and the regime his grandfather built annihilated.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun Tzu. Kim likely has something like this in mind.
His nuclear and missile tests have already called the bluff of George W. Bush who, in his “axis of evil” speech, declared that the world’s worst regimes would not be allowed to acquire the world’s worst weapons.
Arguably the world’s worst regime now has the world’s worst weapon, an H-bomb, with ICBMs to follow.
What else does Kim want? He wants the U.S. to halt joint military maneuvers with the South, recognize his regime, tear up the security pact with Seoul, and get our forces off the peninsula.
No way, says President Trump. Emerging from church, Trump added, “South Korea’s … talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”
On Monday, South Korea was accelerating the activation of the high-altitude missile defense implanted by the United States. Russia and China were talking of moving missile forces into the area. And Mattis had warned Kim he was toying with the fate of his country:
“Any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam or our allies, will be met with a massive military response.”
As the United States can only lose from a new Korean war in which thousands of Americans and millions of Koreans could perish, the first imperative is to dispense with the war talk, and to prevent the war Mattis rightly says would be “catastrophic.”
China has declared that it will enter a new Korean conflict on the side of the North, but only if the North does not attack first.
For this and other reasons, the U.S. should let the North strike the first blow, unless we have hard evidence Kim is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
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But if and when we manage to tamp down this crisis, we should ask ourselves why we are in this crisis. Why are we a party to this frozen conflict from 1953 that is 8,000 miles away?
The first Korean War ended months into Ike’s first term. Our security treaty with Seoul was signed in October 1953.
That year, Stalin’s successors had taken over a USSR that was busy testing missiles and hydrogen bombs. China was ruled by Chairman Mao, who had sent a million “volunteers’ to fight in Korea. Japan, still recovering from World War II, was disarmed and entirely dependent upon the United States for its defense.
What has changed in six and a half decades?
That USSR no longer exists. It split, three decades ago, into 15 nations. Japan has risen to boast an economy 100 times as large as North Korea’s. South Korea is among the most advanced nations in Asia with a population twice that of the North and an economy 40 times as large.
Since the KORUS free trade deal took effect under President Obama, Seoul has been running surging trade surpluses in goods at our expense every year.
The world has changed dramatically since the 1950s. But U.S. policy failed to change commensurately.
The basic question that needs addressing:
Why do we still keep 28,000 troops in South Korea as a trip wire to bring us into a second Korean war from its first hours, a war that could bring nuclear strikes on our troops, bases, and, soon, our nation?
We cannot walk away from our Korean allies in this crisis. But we should look upon the North’s drive to marry nuclear warheads to ICBMs as a wake-up call to review a policy rooted in Cold War realities that ceased to exist when Ronald Reagan went home.
Consider. North Korea devotes 25 percent of GDP to defense. South Korea spends 2.6 percent, Japan 1 percent. Yet these mighty Asian allies, who run annual trade surpluses at our expense, require us to defend them from a maniacal little country right next door.
After this crisis, South Korea and Japan should begin to make the kind of defense effort the U.S. does, and create their own nuclear deterrents. This might get Beijing’s attention, as our pleas for its assistance with North Korea apparently have not.
Already involved in land disputes with a nuclear-armed Russia and India, China’s dominance of Asia — should Japan and South Korea acquire nuclear weapons — begins to diminish.
“As our case is new,” said Abraham Lincoln, “we must think anew and act anew.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 13, 2017, 10:07:03 AM
Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Friday - September 8, 2017 at 12:11 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!”
And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull the job of raising the debt ceiling away from Republican contractors Ryan & McConnell, and give it to Peℓσѕι & Schumer.
Hard to fault Trump. Over seven months, Congress showed itself incapable of repealing Obamacare, though the GOP promised this as its first priority in three successive elections.
Returning to D.C. after five weeks vacation, with zero legislation enacted, Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were facing a deadline to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government.
Failure to do so would crash the markets, imperil the U.S. bond rating, and make America look like a deadbeat republic.
Families and businesses do this annually. Yet, every year, it seems, Congress goes up to the precipice of national default before authorizing the borrowing to pay the bills Congress itself has run up.
To be sure, Trump only kicked this year’s debt crisis to mid-December.
Before year’s end, he and Congress will also have to deal with an immigration crisis brought on by his cancellation of the Obama administration’s amnesty for the “Dreamers” now vulnerable to deportation.
He will have to get Congress to fund his Wall, enact tax reform and finance the repair and renewal of our infrastructure, or have his first year declared a failure.
We are likely looking at a Congressional pileup,pre-Christmas, from which Trump will have to call on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peℓσѕι, again, to extricate him and his party.
The question that now arises: Has the president concluded that working with the GOP majorities alone cannot get him where he needs to go to make his a successful presidency?
Having cut a deal with Democrats for help with the debt ceiling, will Trump seek a deal with Democrats on amnesty for the “Dreamers,” in return for funding for border security? Trump seemed to be signaling receptivity to the idea this week.
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Will he give up on free-trade Republicans to work with Democrats to protect U.S. jobs and businesses from predator traders like China?
Will he cut a deal with Hill Democrats on which infrastructure projects should be funded first? Will he seek out compromise with Democrats on whose taxes should be cut and whose retained?
We could be looking at a seismic shift in national politics, with Trump looking to centrist and bipartisan coalitions to achieve as much of his agenda as he can. He could collaborate with Federalist Society Republicans on justices and with economic-nationalist Democrats on tariffs.
But the Congressional gridlock that exhausted the president’s patience may prove more serious than a passing phase. The Congress of the United States, whose powers were delineated in the late 18th century, may simply not be an institution suited to the 21st.
A century ago, Congress ceded to the Federal Reserve its right “to coin money (and) regulate the value thereof.” It has yielded to the third branch, the Supreme Court, the power to invent new rights, as in Roe v. Wade. Its power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations” has been assumed by an executive branch that negotiates the trade treaties, leaving Congress to say yea or nay.
Congress alone has the power to declare war. But recent wars have been launched by presidents over Congressional objection, some without consultation. We are close to a second major war in Korea, the first of which, begun in 1950, was never declared by the Congress, but declared by Harry Truman to be a “police action.”
In the age of the internet and cable TV, the White House is seen as a locus of decision and action, while Capitol Hill takes months to move. Watching Congress, the word torpor invariably comes to mind, which one Webster’s Dictionary defines as “a state of mental and motor inactivity with partial or total insensibility.”

Result: In a recent survey, 72 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in the military; 12 percent said the same of Congress.
The members of Congress the TV cameras reward with air time are most often mavericks like John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Jeff Flake, who will defy a president the media largely detest.
At the onset of the post-Cold War era, some contended that democracy was the inevitable future of mankind. But autocracy is holding its own. Russia, China, India, Turkey, Egypt come to mind.
If democracy, as Freedom House contends, is in global retreat, one reason may be that, in our new age, legislatures, split into hostile blocs checkmating one another, cannot act with the dispatch impatient peoples now demand of their rulers.
In the days of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Congress was a rival to even strong presidents. Those days are long gone.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 13, 2017, 10:14:24 AM
 12 September 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Tribalism-Marches-On-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/tribalism-marches-on-127639)
Tribalism Marches On!
Tuesday - September 12, 2017 at 7:14 am

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By Patrick J Buchanan
Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play.
Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991.
“Is there no room for new nations in the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr?” was my title, and the column began:
“In turning a stone face toward embattled Slovenia and Croatia, President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker have not only put America’s chips on the wrong horse. They have bet on a losing horse.
“Can the U.S. Government seriously believe that a Yugoslavia of such disparate peoples, all of whom wish greater freedom, most of whose republics wish to be free of Belgrade, is a viable nation?”
The State Department had denounced “these unilateral steps by Croatia and Slovenia” to break free: “As Secretary Baker made clear last Friday, we will neither encourage nor reward secession.”
Croatia and Slovenia are today free and members of NATO.
A month later in 1991, George H. W. Bush, in what Bill Safire dubbed his “Chicken Kiev” speech, warned that Ukraine’s desire to break free of Moscow manifested a “suicidal nationalism.”
Today, Ukraine is independent and the Bush-GOP establishment wants to send weapons to Kiev to fight pro-Russia secessionists.
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As nationalism tore apart Yugoslavia and the USSR in the 1990s, and surged to propel British secession from the EU and Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016, that primal force appears on the march again.
Wrote The Wall Street Journal Monday:
“Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban barely mentions his political rivals as he campaigns for a fourth term. Instead, he is targeting the European Union and its biggest members. ‘Our fiercest opponents are not in Hungarian opposition parties,’ Mr. Orban said in a speech last week, ‘They are abroad … Berlin, Brussels.’
“In neighboring Poland,” the Journal goes on, “government rhetoric is even harsher. Politicians have one-upped each other in attacking France and Germany, arguing they are forcing multicultural liberal democracy on more traditional Poles.”
Not only in the east of Europe but also in the west, nationalism is surging. Wrote The New York Times Friday:
“The accelerating battle over Catalonia’s status hit warp speed this week. Catalan lawmakers voted to go ahead with an Oct. 1 referendum on separating from Spain. Spain’s constitutional court declared the vote suspended. And Catalan politicians said they would proceed anyway.”
Yesterday, thousands of Catalans paraded through Barcelona under a banner proclaiming “Goodbye, Spain!” It was the Catalan National Day, which commemorates the 1714 capture of Barcelona by Philip V, the first Bourbon monarch of Spain.
Spain’s wealthiest region, Catalonia believes it is being milked by Madrid for the benefit of regions that contribute far less.
The question being raised by Catalonia is one America has faced before. Do peoples in a democratic republic have a right to declare their independence, secede, and establish a new nation, as the 13 colonies did in 1776 and the Confederate States of America sought to do in 1861?
Though America was born of secession, the U.S. establishment since the Cold War has been far more transnationalist and globalist than a great champion of new nations. Perhaps that is because the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr proclaimed by Bush I in 1991 envisioned the U.S. as the benevolent global hegemon.
Another ethnonational secession may be declared even before the Catalans go to the polls Oct. 1.
The Kurdistan Regional Government has scheduled a referendum for Sept. 25 — on independence from Iraq. Should it go forward, a massive vote to secede seems certain. And Kurds are relying on U.S. support. For they have sustained many casualties and shed much blood backing us in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State.
Yet while our sentiments may cheer the cause of an independent Kurdistan, our national interests may call for caution.
For though the Kurds, 30 million in number, are probably the largest ethnic group on earth without a nation-state of their own, creating a Kurdish homeland could ignite a Middle East war the Kurds could lose as badly as did the Confederate States.
Why? Because, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-20 not only left millions of Kurds in Iraq, it left most of them in Turkey, Iran and Syria.
A free and independent Kurdistan carved out of Iraq could prove a magnet for the 25 million Kurds in Iran, Turkey and Syria, and a sanctuary for Kurd rebels, causing those nations to join together to annihilate the new country.
Then, there is Kirkuk, seized by the Kurds after the Iraqi army fled from an invading ISIS. The city sits on some of the richest oil deposits in Iraq.
Yesterday, Massoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, told the BBC that if the Kurds vote for independence and Baghdad refuses to accept it, they will forcibly resist any Iraqi attempt to retake the city.
Tribalism appears to be doing to the Bush nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr what it did to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 15, 2017, 10:00:06 AM
 15 September 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/A-Read-My-Lips-Moment-for-Trump-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/read-lips-moment-trump-127650)
A ‘Read-My-Lips’ Moment for Trump?
Friday - September 15, 2017 at 12:45 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Having cut a deal with Democrats for help with the debt ceiling, will Trump seek a deal with Democrats on amnesty for the ‘Dreamers’ in return for funding for border security?”
The answer to that question, raised in my column a week ago, is in. Last night, President Donald Trump cut a deal with “Chuck and Nancy” for amnesty for 800,000 recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program who came here illegally as youngsters, in return for Democratic votes for more money for border security.
According to preening Minority Leader Peℓσѕι, the agreement contains not a dime for Trump’s Wall, and the “Dreamers” are to be put on a long glide “path to U.S. citizenship.”
Trump denies this is amnesty, and says the Wall comes later.
Fallout? Among the most enthusiastic of Trump backers, disbelief, disillusionment and wonderment at where we go from here.
Trump’s debt-ceiling deal cut the legs out from under the GOP budget hawks. But amnesty would pull the rug out from under all the folks at those rallies who cheered Trump’s promise to preserve the country they grew up in from this endless Third World invasion.
For make no mistake. If amnesty is granted for the 800,000, that will be but the first wave. “There are reasons no country has a rule that if you sneak in as a minor you’re a citizen,” writes Mickey Kaus, author of “The End of Equality,” in The Washington Post.
“We’d be inviting the world. … (An amnesty) would have a knock-on effect. Under ‘chain migration’ rules established in 1965 … new citizens can bring in their siblings and adult children, who can bring in their siblings and in-laws until whole villages have moved to the United States.
“(T)oday’s 690,000 dreamers would quickly become millions of newcomers who may well be low-skilled and who would almost certainly include the parents who brought them — the ones who in theory are at fault.”
Trump is risking a breach in the dam. If the populists who provided him with decisive margins in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania feel betrayed, it’s hard to blame them.
Why did Trump do it? Clearly, he relished the cheers he got for the debt ceiling deal and wanted another such victory. And with the rampant accusations of a lack of “compassion” for his cancellation of the temporary Obama administration amnesty, he decided he had had enough heat.
It is not easy to stand up for long to the gale force winds of hostile commentary that blow constantly through this city.
Trump’s capitulation, if that is what turns out to be, calls to mind George H. W. Bush’s decision in 1990 to raise the Reagan tax rates in a deal engineered for him by a White House-Hill coalition, that made a mockery of his “Read my lips! No new taxes!” pledge of 1988.
For agreeing to feed the beast of Big Government, rather than cut its rations as Reagan sought to do, Bush was called a statesman.
By the fall of ’92, the cheering had stopped.
Can Trump not know that those congratulating him for his newfound flexibility will be rejoicing, should Bob Mueller indict his family and his friends, and recommend his impeachment down the road?
What makes pre-emptive amnesty particularly disheartening is that the Trump policy of securing the border and returning illegal immigrants to their home countries appears, from a Census Bureau report this week, to be precisely the prescription America needs.
In 2016, paychecks for U.S. households reached an average of $59,039, up 3.2 percent from 2015, a year when they had surged.

U.S. median household income is now at its highest ever.
Yet there are inequalities. Where the median family income of Asian-Americans is above $81,400, and more than $65,000 for white Americans, the median family income of Hispanic families is $47,675, and that of African-American households far less, $39,490.
Consider. Though black Americans are predominantly native-born, while high percentages of Hispanics and Asians are immigrants, from the Census numbers, Hispanics earn more and Asians enjoy twice the median family income of blacks, which is below where it was in 2000.
Still, black America remains steadfastly loyal to a party that supports the endless importation of workers who compete directly for jobs with them and their families. Writes Kaus, “The median hourly wage (of DACA recipients) is only $15.34, meaning that many are competing with hard-pressed, lower-skilled Americans.”
Looking closer at the Census Bureau figures, Trumpian economic nationalism would appear to have its greatest appeal to the American working class, a huge slice of which is native-born, black and Hispanic.
The elements of that policy?
Secure the border. Halt the invasion of low-wage workers, here legally and illegally, from the Third World. Tighten the labor market to force employers to raise wages in our full-employment economy. Provide tax incentives to companies who site factories in the USA. Impose border taxes on the products of companies who move plants abroad.
Put America and American workers first.
Will any amnesty of undocuмented workers do that?

Secure the border. Halt the invasion of low-wage workers, here legally and illegally, from the Third World. Tighten the labor market to force employers to raise wages in our full-employment economy. Provide tax incentives to companies who site factories in the USA. Impose border taxes on the products of companies who move plants abroad.
Put America and American workers first.
Will any amnesty of undocuмented workers do that?

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I disagree with Pat that the American Income is the highest ever because it does not take account of all the inflation since
the 1970's.
The value of the dollar in 1970 would be 20 cents today.



Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 19, 2017, 02:34:28 PM
 19 September 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Who-Truly-Imperils-Our-Free-Society-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/truly-imperils-free-society-127663)
Who Truly Imperils Our Free Society?
Tuesday - September 19, 2017 at 3:40 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“The Barbarian cannot make … he can befog and destroy but … he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.”
Hilaire Belloc’s depiction of the barbarian is recalled to mind as the statues honoring the history and heroes of the Republic and of the West continue to be vandalized and smashed.
A week ago, the statue of missionary and Catholic Saint Fr. Junipero Serra was beheaded at the Santa Barbara Mission he founded. A century-old Columbus statue in Central Park was defaced and spray-painted with: “Hate will not be tolerated.”
Baltimore’s monument to Francis Scott Key, who observed the bombardment of Fort McHenry on a British warship late in the War of 1812 and was inspired to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was covered in red paint. “Racist anthem” was written across it.
In Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, the university last week had to spend $600,000 to protect an invited speaker of the college Republicans from being assaulted.
But St. Louis was where the real action was. Friday, a mob hurled rocks and bottles injuring 11 cops, leaving one with a broken jaw. They smashed windows at the mayor’s residence and marched miles to the Central West End to berate diners on patios of restaurants with the menacing chant: “Off the sidewalk. Into the street.”
Saturday, the mob invaded and shut down a suburban mall, and then smashed windows across a nightlife district.
The protesters rationale: rage at a not-guilty verdict in the murder trial of ex-cop Jason Stockley in the death of Anthony Lamar Smith — in 2011.
Stockley’s police van had been struck by Smith’s car, who had been nabbed in an alleged drug deal and led police on an 80-mile-an-hour chase, at the end of which Stockley emptied his gun in Smith.
Yet even Attorney General Eric Holder declined to investigate.
On Sunday, Black Lives Matter showed up at the St. Louis’ police headquarters chanting, “Stop killing us!” But if the killing of black folks is a legitimate grievance, we need to ask: Who is killing them?
Last year, there were 4,300 victims of shootings in Chicago and 762 deaths. How many of those shootings were by cops?
How many of those shootings, mostly of blacks, were acts of “terrorism by White supremacists, White nationalists, neo-nαzιs, the Ku Klux Klan,” all of whom our ever-heroic Congress demanded that President Trump, in a joint resolution after Charlottesville, denounce.
Nowhere in the resolution was there any mention of Antifa, the “anti-fascist” fighters on the other side of the Charlottesville brawl, where a protester was run down and killed by a nαzι sympathizer.
What is it in their DNA that causes Republicans reflexively to sign on to a one-sided Democratic denunciation of President Trump for the sin of suggesting there were two parties to the Charlottesville brawl?
And are neo-nαzιs really a threat to the republic?
In 1963, this writer was at Dr. King’s March on Washington, which began on the Monument grounds where George Lincoln Rockwell’s nαzιs were yelling slurs. On the site where Rockwell’s nαzιs stood, there stands today the African-American Museum.
When my father was a 21-year-old Al Smith Democrat in D.C. in the Calvin Coolidge era, scores of thousands of anti-Catholic Klansmen strode up Pennsylvania Avenue, and the national Klan numbered in the millions.
But is the KKK of today a serious threat to civil rights?
Lately, St. Louis and East St. Louis have boasted the highest murder rates in America. Is that the doing of white supremacists?
This morning we read there have been so many smashed and stolen bicycles that Baltimore is canceling its Bike Share program.
Did David Duke and his Klan friends steal all those bikes?
Who are the ones shouting down speakers? Who violently disrupts political rallies, on campuses and off? Who engages in mob violence after almost every police shooting of a black suspect? As for interracial assaults, rapes and murders, according to FBI crime statistics, these are primarily the work of black criminals against white victims.
The Justice Department should report on hate crimes by white racists. But from the stats, anti-white racism is far more common and far more manifest in crimes of violence. Who reports that truth?
re Christian supremacists murdering Muslims in Europe, or are Muslim supremacists committing acts of terrorism in Europe and conducting genocide against Christians in the Middle East?
The left has been marinated in an ideology where the enemy is always to the right. People blinded by ideology, unable to see the true enemies of their civilization, end up losing it, and their lives as well.
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian,” wrote Belloc, “We tolerate him … We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on those faces there are no smiles.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 22, 2017, 09:29:09 AM
 22 September 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Trump-American-Gaullist-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-american-gaullist-127678)
Trump — American Gaullist
Friday - September 22, 2017 at 2:44 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If a U.S. president calls an adversary “Rocket Man … on a mission to ѕυιcιdє,” and warns his nation may be “totally destroyed,” other ideas in his speech will tend to get lost.
Which is unfortunate. For buried in Donald Trump’s address is a clarion call to reject transnationalism and to re-embrace a world of sovereign nation-states that cherish their independence and unique identities.
Western man has engaged in this great quarrel since Woodrow Wilson declared America would fight in the Great War, not for any selfish interests, but “to make the world safe for democracy.”
Our imperialist allies, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, regarded this as self-righteous claptrap and proceeded to rip apart Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire and to feast on their colonies.
After World War II, Jean Monnet, father of the EU, wanted Europe’s nations to yield up their sovereignty and form a federal union like the USA.
Europe’s nations would slowly sink and dissolve in a single polity that would mark a giant leap forward toward world government — Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.”
Charles De Gaulle lead the resistance, calling for “a Europe of nation-states from the Atlantic to the Urals.”
For 50 years, the Gaullists were in constant retreat. The Germans especially, given their past, seemed desirous of losing their national identity and disappearing inside the new Europe.
Today, the Gaullist vision is ascendant.
“We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” said Trump at the U.N.
“Strong sovereign nations let diverse countries with different values, different cultures, and different dreams not just coexist, but work side by side on the basis of mutual respect. …
Translation: We Americans have created something unique in history. But we do not assert that we should serve as a model for mankind. Among the 190 nations, others have evolved in different ways from diverse cultures, histories, traditions. We may reject their values but we have no God-given right to impose ours upon them.
It is difficult to reconcile Trump’s belief in self-determination with a National Endowment for Democracy whose reason for being is to interfere in the politics of other nations to make them more like us.
Trump’s idea of patriotism has deep roots in America’s past.
After the uprisings of 1848 against the royal houses of Europe failed, Lajos Kossuth came to seek support for the cause of Hungarian democracy. He was wildly welcomed and hailed by Secretary of State Daniel Webster.
But Henry Clay, more true to the principles of Washington’s Farewell Address, admonished Kossuth:
“Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty that, adhering to our wise, pacific system, and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on the western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.”
Trump’s U.N. address echoed Clay: “In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty. Our government’s first duty is to its people … to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values.”
Trump is saying with John Quincy Adams that our mission is not to go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but to “put America first.” He is repudiating the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of Bush I, the democracy crusades of the neocons of the Bush II era, and the globaloney of Obama.
Trump’s rhetoric implies intent; and action is evident from Rex Tillerson’s directive to his department to rewrite its mission statement — and drop the bit about making the world democratic.
The current statement reads: “The Department’s mission is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world.”
Tillerson should stand his ground. For America has no divinely mandated mission to democratize mankind. And the hubristic idea that we do has been a cause of all the wars and disasters that have lately befallen the republic.
If we do not cure ourselves of this interventionist addiction, it will end our republic. When did we dethrone our God and divinize democracy?
And are 21st-century American values really universal values?
Should Share Pat's Columns!all nations embrace same-sex marriage, abortion on demand, and the separation of church and state if that means, as it has come to mean here, the paganization of public education and the public square?
If freedom of speech and the press here have produced a popular culture that is an open sewer and a politics of vilification and venom, why would we seek to impose this upon other peoples?
For the State Department to declare America’s mission to be to make all nations look more like us might well be regarded as a uniquely American form of moral imperialism.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Meg on September 22, 2017, 10:38:53 AM

Very good articles. Thanks for posting them.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 25, 2017, 08:59:52 PM
Will NFL Demand Respect for Old Glory?
Monday - September 25, 2017 at 9:28 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!”
That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in 2016. No NFL owner picked up his contract in 2017. But a few players began to copy Colin and to “take a knee.”
Friday night in Alabama, President Trump raged that any NFL player who disrespects Old Glory is a “son of a b—-h” who ought to be kicked off the field and fired by his team’s owner. And if the owners refuse to do their patriotic duty, the fans should take a walk on the NFL.
And so the stage was set for NFL Sunday.
Two hundred players, almost all black, knelt or sat during the national anthem. The Patriots’ Tom Brady stood in respect for the flag, while locking arms in solidarity with kneeling teammates.
The Pittsburgh Steelers coach kept his team in the locker room. Steeler Alejandro Villanueva, an ex-Army Ranger and combat vet, came out and stood erect and alone on the field.
For NFL players, coaches, commentators, owners and fans, it was an uncomfortable and sad day. And it is not going to get any better. Sundays with the NFL, as a day of family and friends, rest and respite from the name-calling nastiness of American politics, is over.
The culture war has come to the NFL. And Trump will be proven right. Having most players stand respectfully during the national anthem, while locking arms with other players sitting or kneeling in disrespect of the flag, is a practice the NFL cannot sustain.
The mega-millionaire and billionaire owners of NFL franchises are going to have to come down off the fence and take a stand.
The issue is not the First Amendment. It is not whether players have a right to air their views about what cops did to Michael Brown in Ferguson, or Eric Garner in Staten Island, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Players have a right to speak, march in protest, or even burn the flag.
The question NFL owners are going to have to answer soon with a definitive “yes” or “no” is this: Do players, before games, have a right, as a form of protest, to dishonor and disrespect the flag of the United States and the republic for which it stands? Or is that intolerable conduct that the NFL will punish?
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Trump is taking a beating from owners, players and press for being “divisive.” But he did not start this fight or divide the country over it.
Kaepernick did, and the players who emulated him, and the coaches and owners who refuse to declare whether insulting the flag is now permissible behavior in the NFL.
As Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Sunday, team owners and Commissioner Roger Goodell have strict rules for NFL games. No NASCAR-type ads on uniforms. Restrictions on end-zone dances. All shirttails tucked in. Certain behavior on the field can call forth 15-yard penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct, or even expulsion from the game.
Our Supreme Court has denied coaches of public high school teams the right to gather players for voluntary prayer before games. Why not an NFL rule requiring players to stand respectfully silent during the national anthem, and, if they refuse, suspend them from play for that day?
Or will the NFL permit indefinite disrespect for the flag of the United States for vastly privileged players whose salaries put them in the top 1 percent of Americans?
If watching players take a knee on the gridiron before every game, in insult to the flag, is what fans can expect every week, Trump again is right: The NFL fan base will dissipate.
Sunday’s game exposed a clash of loyalties in the hearts of NFL players. Do black players stand in solidarity with Kaepernick? Do white players stand beside black teammates, if that means standing with them as they disrespect the flag under which hundreds of thousands of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have died?
This conflict in loyalties among NFL players mirrors that of our country, as America divides and our society disintegrates over issues of morality, patriotism, race and culture.
We have been here before. At the Mexico City Olympics of 1968, gold and bronze medal-winning sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist as a sign of solidarity with Black America, and not the nation they were sent to represent.
A month later, America elected Richard Nixon.
In terms of fame and fortune, no professions have proven more rewarding for young black American males than the NFL and the NBA.
Whether they soil their nest is, in the last analysis, up to them.



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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 29, 2017, 12:35:03 PM
 29 September 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Judge-Moore-Gods-Law-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/judge-moore-gods-law-127700)
Judge Moore & God’s Law
Friday - September 29, 2017 at 2:46 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
When elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, Judge Roy Moore installed in his courthouse a monument with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai carved into it.
Told by a federal court his monument violated the separation of church and state, Moore refused to remove it and was suspended — to become famous as “The Ten Commandments Judge.”
Roy Moore is now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Alabama, having routed Sen. Luther Strange, whom President Trump endorsed and campaigned for.
Moore’s primary win is a fire bell in the night for GOP senators in 2018. And should he defeat his Democratic opponent, the judge will be coming to Capitol Hill, gunning for Mitch McConnell.
Yet it is the moral convictions of the candidate that make this an interesting race for all Americans. For Moore is a social conservative of a species that is almost extinct in Washington.
He believes that man-made law must conform to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” as written in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
If a law contradicts God’s law, it is invalid, nonbinding. In some cases, civil disobedience, deliberate violation of such a law, may be the moral duty of a Christian.
Moore believes God’s Law is even above the Constitution, at least as interpreted by recent Supreme Courts.
ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity, an abomination in the Old Testament, Moore sees as “an inherent evil.” When the high court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, discovered a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Moore, back on the Alabama court, defied the decision, was suspended again, and resigned.
Postmodern America may see the judge as a refugee from the Neolithic period. Yet, his convictions, and how he has stood by them, are going to attract folks beyond Alabama. And the judge’s views on God, man and law are not without a distinguished paternity.
In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King wrote: “(T)here are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.
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“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”
In his Declaration, Jefferson wrote that all men are endowed by their “Creator” with inalienable rights, and among these is the right to life.
Many Christians believe that what the Supreme Court did in Roe v. Wade — declare an unborn child’s right to life contingent upon whether its mother wishes to end it — violates God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Throughout our history, people acting upon such beliefs have defied laws, and are today celebrated for it.
Abolitionists, in violation of laws they believed immoral, set up the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape to freedom. King believed that laws imposing racial segregation violated the American “creed” that “all men are created equal” and acted on that belief.
Thomas Moore is considered by Catholics to be a saint and moral hero for defying Henry VIII’s demand, among others, that he endorse a lie, that the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was not adultery.
Early Christians accepted martyrdom rather than obey laws of the Caesars and burn incense to the gods of Rome.
After Hitler took power in 1933, he authorized the eradication of “useless eaters” in the Third Reich. Those who condemned these laws as violations of God’s law, and even attempted to αssαssιnαtҽ Hitler in 1944, are today regarded as moral heroes.
Moore, should he win, is going to become an object of fascination in The Secular City. Yet his questions and concerns are those of the silent millions on the losing side of America’s culture war.
Is the USA still a good and Godly country when 55 million abortions have been performed with the sanction of law in 45 years?
Do court decisions that force Christians to act against their religious beliefs have to be obeyed? What is the duty of Christians in a paganized and perverted society?
What is taking place today is a growing alienation of one-half of the country from the other, a growing belief of millions of Americans that our society has become morally sick.
Christianity and the moral truths it has taught for 2,000 years have been deposed from the pre-eminent position they held until after World War II, and are now rejected as a source of law. They have been replaced by the tenets of a secular humanism that is the prevailing orthodoxy of our new cultural, social and intellectual elites.
If elected, Judge Moore, one imagines, will not be rendering respectfully unto the new Caesar.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 03, 2017, 08:18:00 AM
 2 October 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Moment-of-Unity-in-a-Disintegrating-World-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/moment-unity-disintegrating-world-127716)
Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
Monday - October 2, 2017 at 10:34 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“An act of pure evil,” said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
“Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence,” Trump went on in his most presidential moment, “and though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is love that defines us today and always will. Forever.”
Uplifting words. But are they true?
Or will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers by Dylan Roof — uniting us briefly in “sadness, shock and grief” only to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.
“In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff,” said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure salaries “taking a knee” in disrespect of that flag.
Also on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of “people of color” in Puerto Rico.
And we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers, been desecrated and dragged down.
Only the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil discord.
To understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the disintegration appears more advanced.
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Sunday, 4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.
Televised pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of Europe.
This is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in 1921.
The second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.
The English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of the presidential vote in 2017.
Beyond the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe at the austerity imposed by the North.
The German elections underlined a new threat to European unity. The ruling coalition of Angela Merkel’s CDU and SPD suffered major losses. The Bavarian-based sister party of the CDU, the CSU, was itself shaken.
Angela Merkel as the new “leader of the West” in the time of Trump is an idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.
Some 13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.
What produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland: migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.
Europeans, like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the Third World.
Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Race, tribe, borders, culture, history — issues of identity — are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
We Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes.
Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT — all core constituencies of the Democratic Party — seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American life.
In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, “If you’re runnin’ down my country, man, You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”
A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics — our cherished diversity itself — appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: St Ignatius on October 03, 2017, 07:09:31 PM
Buchanan says, 

Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.

So when is Mr Buchanan going to muster up the courage as that of  Philip Giraldi?

This quote above indicates to me that he knows who's behind the curtian... the Russians suffered under the same hand except under a different guise... communism and western democracy are of the same author, producing the same ultimate result. 

Although, Putin spoiled it for the assumed victor...   it now begs the question, is there any fight left in the german people to reverse the current onslaught? 
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 06, 2017, 09:29:10 AM
 
The Dead Soul of Stephen Paddock
Friday - October 6, 2017 at 5:24 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
What was his motive? Why did he do it?
Why did Stephen Paddock, 64, rent rooms at the Mandalay Bay hotel, sneak in an arsenal of guns, a dozen of them converted to fully automatic, and rain down death on a country music concert?
“We will never know,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson.
“There can be no rational argument for mass murder … nothing can really explain the decision to spray thousands of concert-goers with automatic weapons fire, killing at least 59 and injuring hundreds more.”
But while there can be no justification for mass murder, there is an explanation. And like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” it is right there in front of us, in plain sight.
Having chosen to end his life, Paddock resolved to go out in a blaze of publicity. This nobody would leave this life as somebody we would have to remember. He would immortalize himself, as did Lee Harvey Oswald.
Reportedly, Paddock even filmed himself during his massacre.
Ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman, who murdered his wife and mother, and then climbed up into the Texas University Tower in Austin, 50 years ago, to shoot down 46 people and kill 15, is the prototype.
Whitman’s slaughter ended after 96 minutes when a cop climbed up in that tower and shot him. Yet, half a century on, Whitman remains famous. Many of us can yet recall his name and face.
Like Eric hαɾɾιs and Dylan Klebold before Columbine, and Dylan Roof before his sickening atrocity at the black church in Charleston, Paddock wanted to live on as one of the great mass murderers in U.S. history. And he has succeeded. We are today paying him in the currency he craved. He is famous, and we have made him so.
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Monday, the president spoke at the White House on the “act of pure evil” Paddock perpetrated Sunday night. Network and cable TV anchors and correspondents stampeded to Las Vegas to dig into his background and motivation.
Commentators discoursed on the meaning of it all. Congress is aflame with demands for gun laws against “bump stocks” that turn semiautomatic AR-15s and AK-47s to fully automatic. Paddock’s deeds pushed Puerto Rico and North Korea out of the headlines. By Wednesday, Trump himself was in Vegas. Five days later, police and FBI are still searching for the “motive.”
Whatever caused Paddock to conclude that ending his life was preferable to living it is not the crucial question. ѕυιcιdєs are not uncommon in America. About 3 of every 4 are carried out by white males; 121 are committed daily, with gunshot a common method.
The real question is what turned Paddock into a psychopath without conscience or a moral code that would scream to him that what he was planning was pure evil.
Unlike ISIS terrorists who believe they are soldiers of Islam doing the will of Allah, and will achieve paradise for slaughtering infidels, Stephen Paddock did not believe anything like this.
He coolly and patiently plotted mass murder almost for sport. He rented a hotel suite with windows overlooking a coming country music concert, his fighting fort. He ferried in, over five days, half his home arsenal of 40-some guns, with the semi-automatic assault rifles modified to fire fully automatic. He installed cameras to alert him to when police were about to break in and kill him. Then he smashed the windows on his 32nd floor suite, and began firing for 12 minutes.
Paddock murdered 59 people he did not know and against whom he had no grievance. How did he come to be a man who treated fellow humans as vermin? And does this say something about our civilization?
In “The Brothers Karamazov,” novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky has his character Ivan say, “If God is dead, all things are permissible.”
What Ivan meant is that if God does not exist, the idea of God’s law, of heaven or hell as reward or punishment, is nonsense. And if it is, there is no man-made law that can deter men who have decided to “end it all.”
Consider. Nevada has a death penalty for the mass murder Paddock was preparing to commit. But as he had already decided to end his life after shooting scores of innocent people, no death penalty or any other threatened state punishment could deter him.
Why not carry out his atrocity and end his life knowing that, within days, all of America would know who Stephen Paddock was?
In Shakespeare, Hamlet declares, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” And so, fearing damnation, Hamlet recoils from ending his life or exacting revenge on the king he believes seduced his mother into complicity in the murder of his father.
In Stephen Paddock, the conscience was dead. He was a dead soul, a moral nihilist, a post-Christian man in a post-Christian age, a monster.
Yet, we are going to see more such men, for we no longer have a convincing answer to that oldest of questions, “Why not?”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 10, 2017, 01:18:00 PM
Trump Embraces the Culture War
Tuesday - October 10, 2017 at 12:29 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
To attend the Indianapolis Colts game where the number of the legendary Peyton Manning was to be retired, Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, flew back from Las Vegas.
With him in the stadium was wife Karen. In honor of Manning, she wore a No. 18 jersey as “The Star Spangled Banner” began.
The Pences stood, hands over hearts. A dozen San Francisco 49ers took a knee. When the national anthem ended, Pence walked out. His limousine took him back to the airport to fly to LA.
“A stunt! That plane trip cost taxpayers $250,000,” wailed a media that was rarely critical of Michelle Obama’s million-dollar junkets with Sasha and Malia.
The president took credit for Pence’s walkout, tweeting, “I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled.”
Pence’s statement: “I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”
As Pence had left his press pool in the motorcade, and said he might not be too long, the walkout may not have been entirely spontaneous. But the game had been on Pence’s calendar for weeks.
What does this episode tell us?
In the culture wars, Trump has rejected compromise or capitulation and decided to defend the ground on which his most loyal folks stand.
Example: While The Washington Post was reporting Monday that Austin, Seattle, San Francisco and Denver had now joined Los Angeles in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, Trump issued a Columbus Day proclamation of bristling defiance.
“Five hundred and twenty-five years ago, Christopher Columbus completed an ambitious and daring voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. … a remarkable and then-unparalleled feat that helped launch the age of exploration and discovery. The permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that … changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation.”
Columbus, said Trump, was a “skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.”
The Admiral of the Ocean Sea “was a native of the City of Genoa, in present day Italy, and represents the rich history of important Italian American contributions to our great Nation. … Italy is a strong ally and a valued partner,” said Trump.
His proclamation failed to mention indigenous peoples.
How did CNN receive it? Not at all well.
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“Trump’s Praise of Columbus Omits Dark History,” ran the CNN headline. Lede sentence: “Never mind the disease and slavery wrought by Christopher Columbus’ voyage — or the fact that he didn’t actually ‘discover’ the New World.”
Trump’s proclamation closed a week in which he rolled back the Obamacare mandate requiring employers and institutions, against their religious beliefs, to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing pills to employees.
Religious groups cheered. The ACLU fumed. The in-your-face defiance of the dictates of political correctness has solidified Trump’s base behind him.
And Americans are coming to accept our new reality: On the essentials of nationhood — ancestry, morality, faith, culture, history, heroes — we really are no longer one nation and one people.
All weekend, viewers of cable TV were treated to self-righteous wailing from the acolytes of Colin Kaepernick, patron saint of the 49ers, that “taking the knee” to protest racism and racist cops is a most admirable exercise of the First Amendment right to protest.
What Trump’s folks are saying in response is this:
“You may have a First Amendment right to disrespect our flag, or even to burn it, but you have no right to make us listen to you, or respect you, or buy tickets to your games, or watch you on Sunday.”
And with shrinking audiences watching NFL games, declining attendance, and advertisers beginning to bail, the NFL appears belatedly to be getting the message.
Jerry Jones, owner of one of the most valuable franchises in the league, has told players that anyone who does not show respect for the flag during the national anthem does not play that day for the Dallas Cowboys.
“President Trump has a duty to unite us, not divide us” is the mantra of our elites. Yet, since the ’60s, it is these elites who have been imposing the social, moral and cultural revolution the American people never voted for and which has by now divided us irretrievably.
Call them “deplorables” if you will, but Trump does seem to relish going out to defend the views, values and beliefs of the people who put him where he is. He does not recoil from political conflict.
People who stand by you in a fight are not all that common in politics. When Trump exhibits this quality, he receives in reciprocity the kind of loyalty even his enemies concede he has.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 13, 2017, 01:04:07 PM
Is Trump the Heir to Reagan?
Thursday - October 12, 2017 at 11:37 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Three decades ago, as communications director in the White House, I set up an interview for Bill Rusher of National Review.
Among his first questions to President Reagan was to ask him to assess the political importance of Barry Goldwater. Said Reagan, “I guess you could call him the John the Baptist of our movement.”
I resisted the temptation to lean in and ask, “Sir, if Barry Goldwater is John the Baptist, who would that make you?”
What brings the moment back is Laura Ingraham’s new book: “Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump. (http://amzn.to/2ykOlnR)” Thesis: Donald Trump is a conservative populist and direct descendant and rightful heir to Ronald Reagan.
(http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1250150647&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=forthecause-20) (https://www.amazon.com/Billionaire-Barricades-Populist-Revolution-Reagan/dp/1250150647/ref=as_li_ss_il?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507864645&sr=1-1&keywords=billionaire+at+the+barricades&linkCode=li3&tag=forthecause-20&linkId=c8cb6935adf3767cb52da46d5ed6e878)(https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=forthecause-20&l=li3&o=1&a=1250150647)To never-Trumpers this is pure blasphemy. Yet the similarities are there.
Both men were outsiders, and neither a career politician. Raised Democratic, Reagan had been a Hollywood actor, union leader and voice of GE, before running for governor of California.
Trump is out of Queens, a builder-businessman in a Democratic city whose Republican credentials were suspect at best when he rode down that elevator at Trump Tower. Both took on the Republican establishment of their day, and humiliated it.
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Among the signature issues of Trumpian populism is economic nationalism, a new trade policy designed to prosper Americans first.
Reagan preached free trade, but when Harley-Davidson was in danger of going under because of Japanese dumping of big bikes, he slammed a 50 percent tariff on Japanese motorcycles. Though a free trader by philosophy, Reagan was at heart an economic patriot.
He accepted an amnesty written by Congress for 3 million people in the country illegally, but Reagan also warned prophetically that a country that can’t control its borders isn’t really a country any more.
Reagan and Trump both embraced the Eisenhower doctrine of “peace through strength.” And, like Ike, both built up the military.
Both also believed in cutting tax rates to stimulate the economy and balance the federal budget through rising revenues rather than cutting programs like Medicare and Social Security.
Both believed in engaging with the superpower rival of the day — the Soviet Union in Reagan’s day, Russia and China in Trump’s time.
And both were regarded in this capital city with a cosmopolitan condescension bordering on contempt. “An amiable dunce” said a Great Society Democrat of Reagan.
The awesome victories Reagan rolled up, a 44-state landslide in 1980 and a 49-state landslide in 1984, induced some second thoughts among Beltway elites about whether they truly spoke for America. Trump’s sweep of the primaries and startling triumph in the Electoral College caused the same consternation.
However, as the Great Depression, New Deal and World War II represented a continental divide in history between what came before and what came after, so, too, did the end of the Cold War and the Reagan era.
As Ingraham writes, Trumpism is rooted as much in the populist-nationalist campaigns of the 1990s, and post-Cold War issues as economic patriotism, border security, immigration control and “America First,” as it is in the Reaganite issues of the 1980s.
Which bring us to the present, with our billionaire president, indeed, at the barricades.
The differences between Trump in his first year and Reagan in 1981 are stark. Reagan had won a landslide. The attempt on his life in April and the grace with which he conducted himself had earned him a place in the hearts of his countrymen. He not only showed spine in giving the air traffic controllers 48 hours to get back to work, and then discharging them when they defied him, he enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history with the aid of boll weevil Democrats in the House.
Coming up on one year since his election, Trump is besieged by a hostile press and united Democratic Party. This city hates him. While his executive actions are impressive, his legislative accomplishments are not. His approval ratings have lingered in the mid-30s. He has lost half a dozen senior members of his original White House staff, clashed openly with his own Cabinet and is at war with GOP leaders on the Hill.
Moreover, we seem close to war with North Korea that would be no cakewalk. And the president appears determined to tear up the Obama nuclear deal with Iran that his own national security team believes is in the national interest.
Reagan was, as Trump claimed to be, an anti-interventionist. Reagan had no wish to be a war president. His dream was to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This does not sound like Trump in October 2017.
Steve Bannon may see the 25th Amendment, where a Cabinet majority may depose a president, as the great threat to Trump.
But it is far more likely that a major war would do for the Trump presidency and his place in history what it did for Presidents Wilson, Truman, LBJ and George W. Bush.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 17, 2017, 09:35:44 PM
Is War With Iran Now Inevitable?
Tuesday - October 17, 2017 at 9:03 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

With his declaration Friday that the Iran nuclear deal is not in the national interest, President Donald Trump may have put us on the road to war with Iran.

Indeed, it is easier to see the collisions that are coming than to see how we get off this road before the shooting starts.

After “de-certifying” the nuclear agreement, signed by all five permanent members of the Security Council, Trump gave Congress 60 days to reimpose the sanctions that it lifted when Teheran signed.

If Congress does not reimpose those sanctions and kill the deal, Trump threatens to kill it himself.

Why? Did Iran violate the terms of the agreement? Almost no one argues that — not the UN nuclear inspectors, not our NATO allies, not even Trump’s national security team.

Iran shipped all its 20 percent enriched uranium out of the country, shut down most of its centrifuges, and allowed intrusive inspections of all nuclear facilities. Even before the deal, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies said they could find no evidence of an Iranian nuclear bomb program.

Indeed, if Iran wanted a bomb, Iran would have had a bomb.

She remains a non-nuclear-weapons state for a simple reason: Iran’s vital national interests dictate that she remain so.

As the largest Shiite nation with 80 million people, among the most advanced in the Mideast, Iran is predestined to become the preeminent power in the Persian Gulf. But on one condition: She avoid the great war with the United States that Saddam Hussein failed to avoid.

Iran shut down any bomb program it had because it does not want to share Iraq’s fate of being smashed and broken apart into Persians, Azeris, Arabs, Kurds and Baluch, as Iraq was broken apart by the Americans into Sunni, Shiite, Turkmen, Yazidis and Kurds.

Tehran does not want war with us. It is the War Party in Washington and its Middle East allies — Bibi Netanyahu and the Saudi royals — who hunger to have the United States come over and smash Iran.

Thus, the Congressional battle to kill, or not to kill, the Iran nuclear deal shapes up as decisive in the Trump presidency.

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Yet, even earlier collisions with Iran may be at hand.

In Syria’s east, U.S.-backed and Kurd-led Syrian Democratic Forces are about to take Raqqa. But as we are annihilating ISIS in its capital, the Syrian army is driving to capture Deir Ezzor, capital of the province that sits astride the road from Baghdad to Damascus.

Its capture by Bashar Assad’s army would ensure that the road from Baghdad to Damascus to Hezbollah in Lebanon remains open.

If the U.S. intends to use the SDF to seize the border area, we could find ourselves in a battle with the Syrian army, Shiite militia, the Iranians, and perhaps even the Russians.

Are we up for that?

In Iraq, the national army is moving on oil-rich Kirkuk province and its capital city. The Kurds captured Kirkuk after the Iraqi army fled from the ISIS invasion. Why is a U.S.-trained Iraqi army moving against a U.S.-trained Kurdish army?

The Kurdistan Regional Government voted last month to secede. This raised alarms in Turkey and Iran, as well as Baghdad. An independent Kurdistan could serve as a magnet to Kurds in both those countries.

Baghdad’s army is moving on Kirkuk to prevent its amputation from Iraq in any cινιℓ ωαr of secession by the Kurds.

Where does Iran stand in all of this?

In the war against ISIS, they were de facto allies. For ISIS, like al-Qaida, is Sunni and hates Shiites as much as it hates Christians. But if the U.S. intends to use the SDF to capture the Iraqi-Syrian border, Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia could all be aligned against us.

Are we ready for such a clash?

We Americans are coming face to face with some new realities.

The people who are going to decide the future of the Middle East are the people who live there. And among these people, the future will be determined by those most willing to fight, bleed and die for years and in considerable numbers to realize that future.

We Americans, however, are not going to send another army to occupy another country, as we did Kuwait in 1991, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003.

Bashar Assad, his army and air force backed by Vladimir Putin’s air power, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, and Hezbollah won the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr because they were more willing to fight and die to win it. And, truth be told, all had far larger stakes there than did we.

We do not live there. Few Americans are aware of what is going on there. Even fewer care.

Our erstwhile allies in the Middle East naturally want us to fight their 21st-century wars, as the Brits got us to help fight their 20th-century wars.

But Donald Trump was not elected to do that. Or so at least some of us thought.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 20, 2017, 10:31:14 AM
Is Liberalism a Dying Faith?
Friday - October 20, 2017 at 2:06 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic — and the model for mankind’s future.
Equality, diversity, democracy — this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars Liberal Man worships.
But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting what America has on offer.
In a retreat from diversity, Catalonia just voted to separate from Spain. The Basque and Galician peoples of Spain are following the Catalan secession crisis with great interest.
The right-wing People’s Party and far-right Freedom Party just swept 60 percent of Austria’s vote, delivering the nation to 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, whose anti-immigrant platform was plagiarized from the Freedom Party. Summarized it is: Austria for the Austrians!
Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, and Veneto will vote Sunday for greater autonomy from Rome.
South Tyrol (Alto Adige), severed from Austria and ceded to Italy at Versailles, written off by Hitler to appease Mussolini after his Anschluss, is astir anew with secessionism. Even the Sicilians are talking of separation.
By Sunday, the Czech Republic may have a new leader, billionaire Andrej Babis. Writes The Washington Post, Babis “makes a sport of attacking the European Union and says NATO’s mission is outdated.”
Platform Promise: Keep the Muslim masses out of the motherland.
To ethnonationalists, their countrymen are not equal to all others, but superior in rights. Many may nod at Thomas Jefferson’s line that “All men are created equal,” but they no more practice that in their own nations than did Jefferson in his.
On Oct. 7, scores of thousands of Poles lined up along the country’s entire 2,000-mile border — to pray the rosary.
It was the centennial of the Virgin Mary’s last apparition at Fatima in Portugal in 1917, and the day in 1571 the Holy League sank the Muslim fleet at Lepanto to save Europe. G. K. Chesterton’s poem, “Lepanto,” was once required reading in Catholic schools.
Each of these traditionalist-nationalist movements is unique, but all have a common cause. In the hearts of Europe’s indigenous peoples is embedded an ancient fear: loss of the homeland to Islamic invaders.
Europe is rejecting, resisting, recoiling from “diversity,” the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual future that, say U.S. elites, is America’s preordained mission to bring about for all mankind.
Indeed, increasingly, the indigenous peoples of Europe seem to view as the death of their nations and continent, what U.S. liberal elites see as the Brave New World to come.
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To traditionalist Europeans, our heaven looks like their hell.
Thus Poles fall on their knees to pray to the Virgin Mary to spare them from threats of an Islamic future, as their ancestors prayed at the time of Lepanto, and of Vienna in 1683, when the Polish King John Sobieski marched to halt the last Muslim drive into the heart of Europe.
European peoples and parties are today using democratic means to achieve “illiberal” ends. And it is hard to see what halts the drift away from liberal democracy toward the restrictive right. For in virtually every nation, there is a major party in opposition, or a party in power, that holds deeply nationalist views.
European elites may denounce these new parties as “illiberal” or fascist, but it is becoming apparent that it may be liberalism itself that belongs to yesterday. For more and more Europeans see the invasion of the continent along the routes whence the invaders came centuries ago, not as a manageable problem but an existential crisis.
To many Europeans, it portends an irreversible alteration in the character of the countries their grandchildren will inherit, and possibly an end to their civilization. And they are not going to be deterred from voting their fears by being called names that long ago lost their toxicity from overuse.
And as Europeans decline to celebrate the racial, ethnic, creedal and cultural diversity extolled by American elites, they also seem to reject the idea that foreigners should be treated equally in nations created for their own kind.
Europeans seem to admire more, and model their nations more, along the lines of the less diverse America of the Eisenhower era, than on the polyglot America of 2017.
And Europe seems to be moving toward immigration polices more like the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950 than the open borders bill that Sen. Edward Kennedy shepherded through the Senate in 1965.
Kennedy promised that the racial and ethnic composition of the America of the 1960s would not be overturned, and he questioned the morality and motives of any who implied that it would.
So, why is liberalism dying?
Because it is proving to be what James Burnham called it in his 1964 “ѕυιcιdє of the West” — the ideology of Western ѕυιcιdє.
What we see in Europe today is people who, belatedly recognizing this, have begun to “rage, rage, against dying of the light.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 24, 2017, 11:13:24 AM
Are Our Mideast Wars Forever?
Tuesday - October 24, 2017 at 2:39 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds.
As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them out was trained and armed by the United States.
The U.S. had warned the Kurds against holding the referendum on independence on Sept. 25, which carried with 92 percent. Iran and Turkey had warned against an independent Kurdistan that could be a magnet for Kurdish minorities in their own countries.
But the Iraqi Kurds went ahead. Now they have lost Kirkuk and its oil, and their dream of independence is all but dead.
More troubling for America is the new reality revealed by the rout of the peshmerga. Iraq, which George W. Bush and the neocons were going to fashion into a pro-Western democracy and American ally, appears to be as close to Iran as it is to the United States.
After 4,500 U.S. dead, scores of thousands wounded and a trillion dollars sunk, our 15-year war in Iraq could end with a Shiite-dominated Baghdad aligned with Tehran.
With that grim prospect in mind, Secretary Rex Tillerson said Sunday, “Iranian militias that are in Iraq, now that the fight against … ISIS is coming to a close … need to go home. Any foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home.”
Tillerson meant Iran’s Quds Force in Iraq should go home, and the Shiite militia in Iraq should be conscripted into the army.
But what if the Baghdad regime of Haider al-Abadi does not agree? What if the Quds Force does not go home to Iran and the Shiite militias that helped retake Kirkuk refuse to enlist in the Iraqi army?
Who then enforces Tillerson’s demands?
Consider what is happening in Syria.
The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, largely Kurdish, just annihilated ISIS in Raqqa and drove 60 miles to seize Syria’s largest oil field, al-Omar, from ISIS. The race is now on between the SDF and Bashar Assad’s army to secure the border with Iraq.
Bottom line: The U.S. goal of crushing the ISIS caliphate is almost attained. But if our victory in the war against ISIS leaves Iran in the catbird seat in Baghdad and Damascus, and its corridor from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut secure, is that really a victory?
Do we accept that outcome, pack up and go home? Or do we leave our forces in Syria and Iraq and defy any demand from Assad to vacate his country?
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Sunday’s editorial in The Washington Post, “The Next Mideast Wars,” raises the crucial questions now before us.
Would President Trump be willing to fight a new war to keep Iran from consolidating its position in Iraq and Syria? Would the American people support such a war with U.S. troops?
Would Congress, apparently clueless to the presence of 800 U.S. troops in Niger, authorize a new U.S. war in Syria or Iraq?
If Trump and his generals felt our vital interests could not allow Syria and Iraq to drift into the orbit of Iran, where would we find allies for such a fight?
If we rely on the Kurds in Syria, we lose NATO ally Turkey, which regards Syria’s Kurds as collaborators of the PKK in Turkey, which even the U.S. designates a terrorist organization.
The decision as to whether this country should engage in new post-ISIS wars in the Mideast, however, may be taken out of our hands.
Saturday, Israel launched new air strikes against gun positions in Syria in retaliation for shells fired into the Golan Heights.
Damascus claims that Israel’s “terrorist” allies inside Syria fired the shells, to give the IDF an excuse to attack.
Why would Israel wish to provoke a war with Syria?
Because the Israelis see the outcome of the six-year Syrian cινιℓ ωαr as a strategic disaster.
Hezbollah, stronger than ever, was part of Assad’s victorious coalition. Iran may have secured its land corridor from Tehran to Beirut. Its presence in Syria could now be permanent.
And only one force in the region has the power to reverse the present outcome of Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr — the United States.
Bibi Netanyahu knows that if war with Syria breaks out, a clamor will arise in Congress to have the U.S. rush to Israel’s aid.
Closing its Sunday editorial the Post instructed the president:
“A failure by the United States to defend its allies or promote new political arrangements for (Syria and Iraq) will lead only to more war, the rise of new terrorist threats, and, ultimately, the necessity of more U.S. intervention.”
The interventionist Post is saying: The situation is intolerable. Confront Assad and Iran now, or fight them later.
Trump is being led to the Rubicon. If he crosses, he joins Bush II in the history books.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 27, 2017, 09:52:39 AM
 
It's Trump's Party Now
By Patrick J. Buchanan
 
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Friday - October 27, 2017

"More is now required of us than to put down our thoughts in writing," declaimed Jeff Flake in his oration against President Trump, just before he announced he will be quitting the Senate.

Though he had lifted the title of his August anti-Trump polemic, "Conscience of a Conservative," from Barry Goldwater, Jeff Flake is no Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater took on the GOP establishment in the primaries, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, defiantly declared, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," and then went down to defeat battling to the end after the assassination of JFK made LBJ invincible.

The real "Mr. Conservative" was a true profile in courage.

Flake, with only 18 percent approval in Arizona, decided to pack it in rather than get waxed in his own primary. With Falstaff, Flake appears to believe that "discretion is the better part of valor."

Sen. Bob Corker is another summertime soldier calling on colleagues to stand and fight Trump while he retires to Tennessee.

It's no wonder the establishment is viewed with such derision.

Flake calls Trump "dangerous to our democracy." But the real threat Trump represents is to the GOP establishment's control of the party's agenda and the party's destiny.

U.S. politics have indeed been coarsened, with Trump playing a lead role. Yet, beneath the savagery of the uncινιℓ ωαr in the party lies more than personal insults and personality clashes.

This is a struggle about policy, about the future. And Trump is president because he read the party and the country right, while the Bush-McCain Republican establishment had lost touch with both.

How could the Beltway GOP not see that its defining policies — open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism, compulsive military intervention in foreign lands for ideological ends — were alienating its coalition?

What had a quarter century of Bushite free trade produced?
 
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About $12 trillion in trade deficits, $4 trillion with China alone, a loss of 55,000 plants and 6 million manufacturing jobs.

We imported goods "Made in China," while exporting our future.

U.S. elites made China great again, to where Beijing is now challenging our strategic position and presence in Asia.

Could Republicans not see the factories shutting down, or not understand why workers' wages had failed to rise for decades?

What did the democracy crusades "to end tyranny in our world" accomplish?

Thousands of U.S. dead, tens of thousands of wounded, trillions of dollars sunk, and a Mideast awash in blood from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, with millions uprooted and homeless. Yet, still, the GOP establishment has not repudiated the mindset that produced this.

With the Cold War over for a quarter of a century, what is the case now for America, $20 trillion in debt, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy?

Consider. Bush-Obama "open borders" brought in tens of millions of Third World peoples, legally and illegally, to rising resistance from Americans forced to bear the economic and social costs.

What was the GOP establishment's reply to the opposition to amnesty for illegals and calls for a moratorium on legal immigration, to assimilate the tens of millions already here?

To call them nativists and parade their moral superiority.

Flake and Corker are being beatified by the Beltway elites, and George W. Bush and John McCain celebrated for their denunciations of Trumpism.

Yet no two people are more responsible for the blunders of the post-Cold War era than McCain and Bush.

About which of half a dozen wars were they right?

Yesterday's New York Times recognized Trump's triumph:

"Despite the fervor of President Trump's Republican opponents, the president's brand of hard-edged nationalism — with its gut-level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his adopted party."

Moreover, a new question arises:

Can the GOP establishment believe that if Trump falls, or they bring him down, they will inherit the estate and be welcomed home like the Prodigal Son? Do they believe their old agenda of open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism and democracy-crusading can become America's agenda again?

Trumpism is not a detour, after which we can all get back on the interstate to the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.

For though unpleasant, it is not unfair to say that if there was one desire common to Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump voters, it was be rid of the regime resting on top of all of us.

Should Trump fall, and a restored establishment attempt to reimpose the old policies, there will be a truly uncινιℓ ωαr in this country.

After the Trumpian revolt, there is no going back. As that most American of writers, Thomas Wolfe, put it, "You can't go home again."

Traditionalists have been told that for years. Now it's the turn of the GOP establishment to learn the truth as well.

Goldwater lost badly, but the establishment that abandoned him never had its patrimony restored. It was the leaders they abhorred, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to whom the future belonged.
 
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 31, 2017, 10:39:53 AM
That Other Plot — to Bring Down Trump
Tuesday - October 31, 2017 at 3:56 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Well over a year after the FBI began investigating “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016.
With a leak to CNN that indictments were coming, Mueller’s office stole the weekend headlines. This blanketed the explosive news on a separate front, as the dots began to be connected on a bipartisan plot to bring down Trump that began two years ago.
And like “Murder of the Orient Express,” it seems almost everyone on the train had a hand in the plot.
The narrative begins in October 2015.
Then it was that the Washington Free Beacon, a neocon website, engaged a firm of researchers called Fusion GPS to do deep dirt-diving into Trump’s personal and professional life — and take him out.
A spinoff of Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, the Beacon is run by his son-in-law. And its Daddy Warbucks is the GOP oligarch and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.
From October 2015 to May 2016, Fusion GPS dug up dirt for the neocons and never-Trumpers. By May, however, Trump had routed all rivals and was the certain Republican nominee.
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So the Beacon bailed, and Fusion GPS found two new cash cows to finance its dirt-diving — the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
To keep the sordid business at arm’s length, both engaged the party’s law firm of Perkins Coie. Paid $12.4 million by the DNC and Clinton campaign, Perkins used part of this cash hoard to pay Fusion GPS.
Here is where it begins to get interesting.
In June 2016, Fusion GPS engaged a British spy, Christopher Steele, who had headed up the Russia desk at MI6, to ferret out any connections between Trump and Russia.
Steele began contacting old acquaintances in the FSB, the Russian intelligence service. And the Russians began to feed him astonishing dirt on Trump that could, if substantiated, kill his candidacy.
Among the allegations was that Trump had consorted with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, that the Kremlin was blackmailing him, that there was provable collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In memos from June to October 2016, Steele passed this on to Fusion GPS, which passed it on to major U.S. newspapers. But as the press was unable to verify it, they declined to publish it.
Steele’s final product, a 35-page dossier, has been described as full of “unsubstantiated and salacious allegations.”
Steele’s research, however, had also made its way to James Comey’s FBI, which was apparently so taken with it that the bureau considered paying Steele to continue his work.
About this “astonishing” development, columnist Byron York of the Washington Examiner quotes Sen. Chuck Grassley:
“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises … questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends.”
The questions begin to pile up.
What was the FBI’s relationship with the British spy who was so wired into Russian intelligence?
Did the FBI use the information Steele dug up to expand its own investigation of Russia-Trump “collusion”? Did the FBI pass what Steele unearthed to the White House and the National Security Council?
Did the Obama administration use the information from the Steele dossier to justify unmasking the names of Trump officials that had been picked up on legitimate electronic intercepts?
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed they did not know that Perkins Coie had enlisted Fusion GPA or the British spy to dig up dirt on Trump.
Yet, when Podesta testified, the lawyer sitting beside him in the committee room was Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, who had engaged Fusion GPS and received the fruits of Steele’s undercover work.
Here one is tempted to cite Bismarck that, if you wish to enjoy politics or sausages, you should not inquire too closely how they are made.
Thus we have Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election.
If future revelations demonstrate that this is what went down, it is not only the White House that has major problems.
If you wish to know why Americans detest politics and hate the “swamp” that has been made of their capital city, follow this story all the way to its inevitable end. It will be months of unfolding.
The real indictment here is of the American political system, and the true tragedy is the decline of the Old Republic.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 03, 2017, 11:55:48 AM
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Their America, and Ours
Friday - November 3, 2017 at 3:27 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Meet you at Peace Cross.”
In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City.
The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American Legion, it had stood since 1925.
Before the Beltway was built, Peace Cross, at the junction of U.S. Route 1 and Maryland Route 450, was a landmark to us all.
Last month, two federal judges from the 4th Circuit ruled that Peace Cross “excessively entangles the government and religion” and must come down. A suggested compromise was to saw the arms off, so the monument ceases to be an offensive cross.
One wonders: At what moment did Peace Cross begin to violate the Constitution?
Answer: Never. No alteration has been made to the cross in a century. The change has come in the minds of intolerant judges and alienated elites where the dirty creek of anti-Christian bigotry now flows into the polluted stream of anti-Americanism.
Both are manifest in the rampage to rip down memorials to the men who brought Western Civilization to the New World and made America the great and good country we were blessed to inherit.
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Monday, on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly called Robert E. Lee “an honorable man,” who chose to defend the people among whom he had been raised.
“It was always loyalty to state first in those days,” said Kelly, when asked his view on Alexandria’s Episcopal Church taking down plaques to its greatest parishioners, Lee and George Washington.
An explosion of outrage greeted Kelly’s defense of Lee.
Yet, what has changed in half a century? As Ingraham noted, FDR, an icon of liberalism, referred to Lee as “one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.”
Asked in 1960 how he could keep a portrait of a man who tried to “destroy our government” in his Oval Office, President Eisenhower wrote his critic back:
“General Robert E. Lee was one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history…
“To the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
“Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.”
Have some terrible new truths been unearthed about Lee we did not know in 1960?
No. The change has taken place in the poisoned minds of modernity.
Some will never concede there was principle or honor in the cause of a South that declared independence in 1860-61, emulating the 13 colonies that declared their independence in 1776.
In his tribute to Lee in 1960, Ike addressed what was at issue in 1860 that brought on the war.
“We need to understand that at the time of the War Between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.”
Ike refers not to a “cινιℓ ωαr,” but to the “War Between the States.” And correctly so. For the South did not seek to bring down the U.S. government, or overturn Lincoln’s election, or seize power in the capital — but to leave the Union, to secede, as Jefferson and John Adams voted to secede from Britain in 1776.
Asked on Fox News about what is happening today with the public insults to our national anthem and the desecration of our monuments, Justice Clarence Thomas raises questions being asked by many Americans:
“What binds us? What do we all have in common anymore? … We always talk about E pluribus unum. What’s our unum now? We have the pluribus. What’s the unum?”
The spirit that produced the war in the 1860s, and lasting division in the 1960s, is abroad again. A great secession of the heart is underway.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 07, 2017, 09:03:00 AM
 
Red Lines & Lost Credibility
Tuesday - November 7, 2017 at 3:40 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
A major goal of this Asia trip, said National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, is to rally allies to achieve the “complete, verifiable and permanent denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”
Yet Kim Jong Un has said he will never give up his nuclear weapons. He believes the survival of his dynastic regime depends upon them.
Hence we are headed for confrontation. Either the U.S. or North Korea backs down, as Nikita Khrushchev did in the Cuban missile crisis, or there will be war.
In this new century, U.S. leaders continue to draw red lines that threaten acts of war that the nation is unprepared to back up.
Recall President Obama’s, “Assad must go!” and the warning that any use of chemical weapons would cross his personal “red line.”
Result: After chemical weapons were used, Americans rose in united opposition to a retaliatory strike. Congress refused to authorize any attack. Obama and John Kerry were left with egg all over their faces. And the credibility of the country was commensurately damaged.
There was a time when U.S. words were taken seriously, and we heeded Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.”
After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1991, George H.W. Bush said simply: “This will not stand.” The world understood that if Saddam did not withdraw from Kuwait, his army would be thrown out. As it was.
But in the post-Cold War era, the rhetoric of U.S. statesmen has grown ever more blustery, even as U.S. relative power has declined. Our goal is “ending tyranny in our world,” bellowed George W. Bush in his second inaugural.
Consider Rex Tillerson’s recent trip. In Saudi Arabia, he declared, “Iranian militias that are in Iraq, now that the fight against … ISIS is coming to a close … need to go home. Any foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home.”
The next day, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi responded:
“We wonder about the statements attributed to the American secretary of state about the popular mobilization forces. … No side has the right to intervene in Iraq’s affairs or decide what Iraqis do.”
This slap across the face comes from a regime that rules as a result of 4,500 U.S. dead, tens of thousands wounded and $1 trillion invested in the nation’s rebuilding after 15 years of war.
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Earlier that day, Tillerson made a two-hour visit to Afghanistan. There he met Afghan officials in a heavily guarded bunker near Bagram Airfield. Wrote The New York Times’ Gardiner hαɾɾιs:
“That top American officials must use stealth to enter these countries after more than 15 years of wars, thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars spent was testimony to the stubborn problems still confronting the United States in both places.”
Such are the fruits of our longest wars, launched with the neo-Churchillian rhetoric of George W. Bush.
In India, Tillerson called on the government to close its embassy in North Korea. New Delhi demurred, suggesting the facility might prove useful to the Americans in negotiating with Pyongyang.
In Geneva, Tillerson asserted, “The United States wants a whole and unified Syria with no role for Bashar al-Assad … The reign of the Assad family is coming to an end.”
Well, perhaps? But our “rebels” in Syria were routed and Assad not only survived his six-year cινιℓ ωαr but with the aid of his Russian, Iranian, Shiite militia, and Hezbollah allies, he won that war, and intends to remain and rule, whether we approve or not.
We no longer speak to the world with the assured authority with which America did from Eisenhower to Reagan and Bush 1. Our moment, if ever it existed, as the “unipolar power” the “indispensable nation” that would exercise a “benevolent global hegemony” upon mankind is over.
America needs today a recognition of the new realities we face and a rhetoric that conforms to those realities.
Since Y2K our world has changed.
Putin’s Russia has reasserted itself, rebuilt its strategic forces, confronted NATO, annexed Crimea and acted decisively in Syria, re-establishing itself as a power in the Middle East.
China, thanks to its vast trade surpluses at our expense, has grown into an economic and geostrategic rival on a scale that not even the USSR of the Cold War reached.
North Korea is now a nuclear power.
The Europeans are bedeviled by tribalism, secessionism and waves of seemingly unassimilable immigrants from the South and Middle East.
A once-vital NATO ally, Turkey, is virtually lost to the West. Our major Asian allies are dependent on exports to a China that has established a new order in the South China Sea.
In part because of our interventions, the Middle East is in turmoil, bedeviled by terrorism and breaking down along Sunni-Shiite lines.
The U.S. pre-eminence in the days of Desert Storm is history.
Yet, the architects of American decline may still be heard denouncing the “isolationists” who opposed their follies and warned what would befall the republic if it listened to them.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 13, 2017, 09:51:35 PM
 
Reining in the Rogue Royal of Arabia
By Patrick J. Buchanan
 
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Tuesday - November 14, 2017

If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran, President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America would be doing his fighting for him.

Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the 32-year-old son of the aging and ailing King Salman, is making too many enemies for his own good, or for ours.

Pledging to Westernize Saudi Arabia, he has antagonized the clerical establishment. Among the 200 Saudis he just had arrested for criminal corruption are 11 princes, the head of the National Guard, the governor of Riyadh, and the famed investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

The Saudi tradition of consensus collective rule is being trashed.

MBS is said to be pushing for an abdication by his father and his early assumption of the throne. He has begun to exhibit the familiar traits of an ambitious 21st-century autocrat in the mold of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Yet his foreign adventures are all proving to be debacles.

The rebels the Saudis backed in Syria's cινιℓ ωαr were routed. The war on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, of which MBS is architect, has proven to be a Saudi Vietnam and a human rights catastrophe.

The crown prince persuaded Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE to expel Qatar from the Sunni Arab community for aiding terrorists, but he has failed to choke the tiny country into submission.

Last week, MBS ordered Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Riyadh, where Hariri publicly resigned his office and now appears to be under house arrest. Refusing to recognize the resignation, Lebanon's president is demanding Hariri's return.

After embattled Houthi rebels in Yemen fired a missile at its international airport, Riyadh declared the missile to be Iranian-made, smuggled into Yemen by Tehran, and fired with the help of Hezbollah.

The story seemed far-fetched, but Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said the attack out of Yemen may be considered an "act of war" — by Iran. And as war talk spread across the region last week, Riyadh ordered all Saudi nationals in Lebanon to come home.

Riyadh has now imposed a virtual starvation blockade — land, sea and air — on Yemen, that poorest of Arab nations that is heavily dependent on imports for food and medicine. Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni are suffering from cholera. Millions face malnutrition.

The U.S. interest here is clear: no new war in the Middle East, and a negotiated end to the wars in Yemen and Syria.
 
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Hence, the United States needs to rein in the royal prince.

Yet, on his Asia trip, Trump said of the Saudi-generated crisis, "I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing."

Do they? In October, Jared Kushner made a trip to Riyadh, where he reportedly spent a long night of plotting Middle East strategy until 4 a.m. with MBS.

No one knows how a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran would end. The Saudis has been buying modern U.S. weapons for years, but Iran, with twice the population, has larger if less-well-equipped forces.

Yet the seeming desire of the leading Sunni nation in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, for a confrontation with the leading Shiite power, Iran, appears to carry the greater risks for Riyadh.

For, a dozen years ago, the balance of power in the Gulf shifted to Iran, when Bush II launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, ousted Saddam Hussein, disarmed and disbanded his Sunni-led army, and turned Iraq into a Shiite-dominated nation friendly to Iran.

In the Reagan decade, Iraq had fought Iran as mortal enemies for eight years. Now they are associates, if not allies.

The Saudis may bristle at Hezbollah and demand a crackdown. But Hezbollah is a participant in the Lebanese government and has the largest fighting force in the country, hardened in battle in Syria's cινιℓ ωαr, where it emerged on the victorious side.

While the Israelis could fight and win a war with Hezbollah, both Israel and Hezbollah suffered so greatly from their 2006 war that neither appears eager to renew that costly but inconclusive conflict.

In an all-out war with Iran, Saudi Arabia could not prevail without U.S. support. And should Riyadh fail, the regime would be imperiled. As World War I, with the fall of the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires demonstrated, imperial houses do not fare well in losing wars.

So far out on a limb has MBS gotten himself, with his purge of cabinet ministers and royal cousins, and his foreign adventures, it is hard to see how he climbs back without some humiliation that could cost him the throne.

Yet we have our own interests here. And we should tell the crown prince that if he starts a war in Lebanon or in the Gulf, he is on his own. We cannot have this impulsive prince deciding whether or not the United States goes to war again in the Middle East.

We alone decide that.
 
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 17, 2017, 12:10:12 PM
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Is America Up for a Second Cold War?
Thursday - November 16, 2017 at 11:07 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
After the 19th national congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October, one may discern Premier Xi Jinping’s vision of the emerging nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.
By 2049, the centennial of the triumph of Communist Revolution, China shall have become the first power on earth. Her occupation and humiliation by the West and Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries will have become hated but ancient history.
America will have been pushed out of Asia and the western Pacific back beyond the second chain of islands.
Taiwan will have been returned to the motherland, South Korea and the Philippines neutralized, Japan contained. China’s claim to all the rocks, reefs and islets in the South China Sea will have been recognized by all currentclaimants.
Xi’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy will have brought South and Central Asia into Beijing’s orbit, and he will be in the Pantheon beside the Founding Father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
Democracy has been rejected by China in favor of one-party rule of all political, economic, cultural and social life.
And as one views Europe, depopulating, riven by secessionism, fearful of a Third World migrant invasion, and America tearing herself apart over politics and ideology, China must appear to ambitious and rising powers as the model to emulate.
Indeed, has not China shown the world that authoritarianism can be compatible with national growth that outstrips a democratic West?
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Over the last quarter century, China, thanks to economic nationalism and $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States, has exhibited growth unseen since 19th-century America.
Whatever we may think of Xi’s methods, this vision must attract vast numbers of China’s young — they see their country displace America as first power, becoming the dominant people on earth.
What is America’s vision? What is America’s cause in the 21st century? What is the mission and goal that unites, inspires and drives us on?
After World War II, America’s foreign policy was imposed upon her by the terrible realities the war produced: brutalitarian Stalinist domination of Eastern and Central Europe and much of Asia.
Under nine presidents, containment of the Soviet empire, while avoiding a war that would destroy civilization, was our policy. In Korea and Vietnam, Americans died in the thousands to sustain that policy.
But with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the breakup of the USSR, it seemed that by 1992 our great work was done. Now democracy would flourish and be embraced by all advanced peoples and nations.
But it did not happen. The “end of history” never came. The nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of Bush I did not last. Bush II’s democracy crusade to end tyranny in our world produced disasters from Libya to Afghanistan.
Authoritarianism is now ascendant and democracy is in retreat.
Is the United States prepared to accept a world in which China, growing at twice our rate, more united and purposeful, emerges as the dominant power? Are we willing to acquiesce in a Chinese Century?
Or will we adopt a policy to ensure that America remains the world’s preeminent power?
Do we have what is required in wealth, power, stamina and will to pursue a Second Cold War to contain China, which, strategic weapons aside, is more powerful and has greater potential than the Soviet Union ever did?
On his Asia tour, President Trump spoke of the “Indo-Pacific,” shorthand for the proposition that the U.S., Japan, Australia and India form the core of a coalition to maintain the balance of power in Asia and contain the expansion of China.
Yet, before we create some Asia-Pacific NATO to corral and contain China in this century, as we did the USSR in the 20th century, we need to ask ourselves why.
Does China, even if she rises to surpass the U.S. in manufacturing, technology and economic output, and is a comparable military power, truly threaten us as the USSR did, to where we should consider war to prevent its expansion in places like the South China Sea that are not vital to America?
While China is a great power, she has great problems.
She is feared and disliked by her neighbors. She has territorial quarrels with Russia, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan. She has separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang. Christianity is growing while Communism, the state religion, is a dead faith. Moreover, the monopoly of power now enjoyed by the Communist Party and Xi Jinping mean that if things go wrong, there is no one else to blame.
Finally, why is the containment of China in Asia the responsibility of a United States 12 time zones away? For while China seeks to dominate Eurasia, she appears to have no desire to threaten the vital interests of the United States. China’s Communism appears to be an ideology disbelieved by her own people, that she does not intend to impose it on Asia or the world.
Again, are we Americans up for a Second Cold War, and, if so, why?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 21, 2017, 09:55:10 AM


November 20, 2017 Unserious Nation
http://buchanan.org/blog/unserious-nation-127877
Monday - November 20, 2017 at 9:54 pm

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How stands John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” this Thanksgiving?

How stands the country that was to be “a light unto the nations”?

To those who look to cable TV for news, the answer must at the least be ambiguous. For consider the issues that have lately convulsed the public discourse of the American republic.

Today’s great question seems to be whether our 45th president is as serious a sɛҳuąƖ predator as our 42nd was proven to be, and whether the confessed sins of Sen. Al Franken are as great as the alleged sins of Judge Roy Moore.

On both questions, the divide is, as ever, along partisan lines.

And every day for weeks, beginning with Hollywood king Harvey Weinstein, whose accusers nearly number in three digits, actors, media personalities and politicians have been falling like nine pins over allegations and admissions of sɛҳuąƖ predation.

What is our civil rights issue, and who are today’s successors to the Freedom Riders of the ‘60s? Millionaire NFL players “taking a knee” during the national anthem to dishonor the flag of their country to protest racist cops.

And what was the great cultural issue of summer and fall?

An ideological clamor to tear down memorials and monuments to the European discoverers of America, any Founding Father who owned slaves and any and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen.

Stained-glass windows of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson have been removed from the National Cathedral. Plaques to Lee and George Washington have been taken down from the walls of the Episcopal church in Alexandria where both men worshipped.

But the city that bears Washington’s name is erecting a new statue on Pennsylvania Avenue — to honor the four-term mayor who served time on a cocaine charge: Marion Shepilov Barry.

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Whatever side one may take on these questions, can a country so preoccupied and polarized on such pursuits be taken seriously as a claimant to be the “exceptional nation,” a model to which the world should look and aspire?

Contrast the social, cultural and moral morass in which America is steeped with the disciplined proceedings and clarity of purpose, direction and goals of our 21st century rival: Xi Jinping’s China.

Our elites assure us that America today is a far better place than we have ever known, surely better than the old America that existed before the liberating cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Yet President Trump ran on a pledge to “Make America Great Again,” implying that while the America he grew up in was great, in the time of Barack Obama it no longer was. And he won.

Certainly, the issues America dealt with half a century ago seem more momentous than what consumes us today.

Consider the matters that riveted America in the summer and fall of 1962, when this columnist began to write editorials for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. What was the civil rights issue of that day?

In September of ‘62, Gov. Ross Barnett decided not to allow Air Force vet James Meredith to become the first black student at Ole Miss. Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent U.S. Marshals to escort Meredith in.

Hundreds of demonstrators arrived on campus to join student protests. A riot ensued. Dozens of marshals were injured. A French journalist was shot to death. The Mississippi Guard was federalized. U.S. troops were sent in, just as Ike had sent them into Little Rock when Gov. Orville Faubus refused to desegregate Central High.

U.S. power was being used to enforce a federal court order on a recalcitrant state government, as it would in 1963 at the University of Alabama, where Gov. George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.

As civil rights clashes go, this was the real deal.

That fall, in a surprise attack, Chinese troops poured through the passes in the Himalayas, invading India. China declared a truce in November but kept the territories it had occupied in Jammu and Kashmir.

Then there was the Cuban missile crisis, the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War.

Since August, the Globe-Democrat had been calling for a blockade of Cuba, where Soviet ships were regularly unloading weapons. When President Kennedy declared a “quarantine” after revealing that missiles with nuclear warheads that could reach Washington were being installed, the Globe urged unity behind him, as it had in Oxford, Mississippi.

We seemed a more serious and united nation and people then than we are today, where so much that roils our society and consumes our attention seems unserious and even trivial.

“And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?” wrote the British poet Thomas Macaulay.

Since 1962, this nation has dethroned its God and begun debates about which of the flawed but great men who created the nation should be publicly dishonored. Are we really a better country today than we were then, when all the world looked to America as the land of the future?


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 28, 2017, 07:22:56 AM

Linda Muller <lindamuller@buchanan.org>
Nov 28 at 12:14 AM

Why Roy Moore Matters
By Patrick J. Buchanan

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Tuesday - November 28, 2017

Why would Christian conservatives in good conscience go to the polls Dec. 12 and vote for Judge Roy Moore, despite the charges of sɛҳuąƖ misconduct with teenagers leveled against him?

Answer: That Alabama Senate race could determine whether Roe v. Wade is overturned. The lives of millions of unborn may be the stakes.

Republicans now hold 52 Senate seats. If Democrats pick up the Alabama seat, they need only two more to recapture the Senate, and with it the power to kill any conservative court nominee, as they killed Robert Bork.

Today, the GOP, holding Congress and the White House, has a narrow path to capture the Third Branch, the Supreme Court, and to dominate the federal courts for a decade. For this historic opportunity, the party can thank two senators, one retired, the other still sitting.

The first is former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

In 2013, Harry exercised the "nuclear option," abolishing the filibuster for President Obama's judicial nominees. The Senate no longer needed 60 votes to confirm judges. Fifty-one Senate votes could cut off debate, and confirm.

Iowa's Chuck Grassley warned Harry against stripping the minority of its filibuster power. Such a move may come back to bite you, he told Harry. Grassley is now judiciary committee chairman.

And this year a GOP Senate voted to use the nuclear option to shut down a filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who was then confirmed with 55 votes.

Yet the Democratic minority still had one card to play to block President Trump's nominees — the "blue slip courtesy."

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If a senator from the state where a federal judicial nominee resides asks for a hold on proceedings, by not returning a blue slip, the judiciary committee has traditionally honored that request and not held hearings.

Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota used the blue slip to block the Trump nomination of David Stras of Minnesota to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Franken calls Stras too ideological, too conservative.

But Grassley has now decided to reject the blue slip courtesy for appellate court judges, since their jurisdiction is not just over a single state like Minnesota, but over an entire region.

Thus have the skids been greased for a conservative recapture of the federal judiciary unseen since the early days of FDR.

Eighteen of the 179 seats on the U.S. appellate courts and 119 of the 677 seats on federal district courts are already open. More will be opening up. No president in decades has seen the opportunity Trump has to remake the federal judiciary.

Not only are the federal court vacancies almost unprecedented, a GOP Senate and Trump are working in harness to fill them before January 2019, when a new Congress is sworn in.

If Republicans blow this opportunity, it is unlikely to come again. For the Supreme Court has seemed within Republican grasp before, only to have it slip away because of presidential errors.

Nixon had four nominees to the Supreme Court confirmed and Gerald Ford saw his nominee, John Paul Stevens, unanimously confirmed. But of those five justices confirmed from 1969 to 1976, Stevens and Harry Blackmun joined the liberal bloc, and Chief Justice Warren Burger and Lewis Powell voted for Roe v. Wade.

Of Reagan's three Supreme Court nominees confirmed, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy cast crucial votes in 5-4 decisions to defeat the strict constructionists led by Antonin Scalia.

George H.W. Bush named Clarence Thomas to the court, but only after he had elevated David Souter, who also joined the liberal bloc.

Hence, both Trump, by whom he nominates, and a Republican Senate, with its power to confirm with 51 votes, are indispensable if we are to end judicial dictatorship in America.

And 2018 is the crucial year.

While Democrats, with 25 Senate seats at risk, would seem to be facing more certain losses than the GOP, with one-third as many seats at stake, history teaches that the first off-year election of Trump could prove a disaster.

Consider. Though Ike ended the Korean War in his first year, he lost both Houses of Congress in his second. Reagan enacted one of the great tax cuts in history in his first year, and then lost 26 seats in the House in his second.

Bill Clinton lost control of both the House and Senate in his first off-year election. Barack Obama in 2010 lost six Senate seats and 54 seats and control of the House. And both presidents were more popular than Trump is today.

If the election in Virginia this year is a harbinger of what is to come, GOP control of Congress could be washed away in a tidal wave in 2018.

Hence, this coming year may be a do-or-die year to recapture the Third Branch of Government for conservatism.

Which is why that Dec. 12 election in Alabama counts.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Gwaredd Thomas on November 28, 2017, 10:41:00 AM
In my experience, these "conservatives" are not much different than liberals. At the end of the day, they'll cast their vote which is dependant on how many shekels are stuff in their pockets via the usual (((suspects))). Yeah, I know, I'm too cynical.

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 01, 2017, 10:29:02 AM
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Little Rocket Man’s Risky Game
Friday - December 1, 2017 at 12:53 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In the morning darkness of Wednesday, Kim Jong Un launched an ICBM that rose almost 2,800 miles into the sky before falling into the Sea of Japan.
North Korea now has the proven ability to hit Washington, D.C.
Unproven still is whether Kim can put a miniaturized nuclear warhead atop that missile, which could be fired with precision, and survive the severe vibrations of re-entry. More tests and more time are needed for that.
Thus, U.S. markets brushed off the news of Kim’s Hwasong-15 missile and roared to record heights on Wednesday and Thursday.
President Donald Trump took it less well. “Little Rocket Man” is one “sick puppy,” he told an audience in Missouri.
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley told the Security Council that “if war comes … the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.” She then warned Xi Jinping that “if China does not halt the oil shipments” to North Korea, “we can take the oil situation into our own hands.”
Is Haley talking about bombing pipelines in North Korea — or China?
The rage of the president and bluster of Haley reflect a painful reality: As inhumane and ruthless as the 33-year-old dictator of North Korea is, he is playing the highest stakes poker game on the planet, against the world’s superpower, and playing it remarkably well.
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Reason: Kim may understand us better than we do him, which is why he seems less hesitant to invite the risks of a war he cannot win.
While a Korean War II might well end with annihilation of the North’s army and Kim’s regime, it would almost surely result in untold thousands of dead South Koreans and Americans.
And Kim knows that the more American lives he can put at risk, with nuclear-tipped missiles, the less likely the Americans are to want to fight him.
His calculation has thus far proven correct.
As long as he does not push the envelope too far, and force Trump to choose war rather than living with a North Korea that could rain nuclear rockets on the U.S., Kim may win the confrontation.
Why? Because the concessions Kim is demanding are not beyond the utterly unacceptable.
What does Kim want?
Initially, he wants a halt to U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which he sees as a potential prelude to a surprise attack. He wants an end to sanctions, U.S. recognition of his regime, and acceptance of his status as a nuclear weapons state. Down the road, he wants a U.S. withdrawal of all forces from South Korea and international aid.
Earlier administrations — Clinton, Bush II, Obama — have seen many of these demands as negotiable. And accepting some or even all of them would entail no grave peril to U.S. national security or vital interests.
They would entail, however, a serious loss of face.
Acceptance of such demands by the United States would be a triumph for Kim, validating his risky nuclear strategy, and a diplomatic defeat for the United States.
Little Rocket Man would have bested The Donald.
Moreover, the credibility of the U.S. deterrent would be called into question. South Korea and Japan could be expected to consider their own deterrents, out of fear the U.S. would never truly put its homeland at risk, but would cut a deal at their expense.
We would hear again the cries of “Munich” and the shade of Neville Chamberlain would be called forth for ritual denunciation.
Yet it is a time for truth: Our demand for “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” is not going to be met, absent a U.S. war and occupation of North Korea.
Kim saw how Bush II, when it served U.S. interests, pulled out of our 30-year-old ABM treaty with Moscow. He saw how, after he gave up all his WMD to reach an accommodation with the West, Moammar Gadhafi was attacked by NATO and ended up being lynched.
He can see how much Americans honor nuclear treaties they sign by observing universal GOP howls to kill the Iranian nuclear deal and bring about “regime change” in Tehran, despite Iran letting U.N. inspectors roam the country to show they have no nuclear weapons program.
For America’s post-Cold War enemies, the lesson is clear:
Give up your WMD, and you wind up like Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein. Build nuclear weapons that can threaten Americans, and you get respect.
Kim Jong Un would be a fool to give up his missiles and nukes, and while the man is many things, a fool is not one of them.
We are nearing a point where the choice is between a war with North Korea in which thousands would die, or confirming that the U.S. is not willing to put its homeland at risk to keep Kim from keeping what he already has — nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 05, 2017, 08:58:29 AM
Is Flynn’s Defection a Death Blow?
Tuesday - December 5, 2017 at 2:10 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Why did Gen. Mike Flynn lie to the FBI about his December 2016 conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak?
Why did he not tell the FBI the truth?
As national security adviser to the president-elect, Flynn had called the ambassador. Message: Tell President Putin not to overreact to President Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats. Trump will be president in three weeks, and we are committed to a new relationship.
Not only was this initiative defensible, it proved successful.
Putin accepted the loss of his diplomats and country houses on Long lsland and the Eastern Shore. Rather than expel U.S. diplomats in retaliation, he invited them and their families to the Kremlin’s New Year’s parties.
“Great move…(by V. Putin),” tweeted Trump, “I always knew he was very smart.” This columnist concurred:
“Among our Russophobes, one can hear the gnashing of teeth.
“Clearly, Putin believes the Trump presidency offers Russia the prospect of a better relationship with the United States. He appears to want this, and most Americans seem to want the same. After all, Hillary Clinton, who accused Trump of being ‘Putin’s puppet,’ lost.”
Flynn, it now appears, was not freelancing, but following instructions. His deputy, K. T. McFarland, sent an email to six Trump advisers saying that Obama, by expelling the Russians, was trying to “box Trump in diplomatically.”
“If there is a tit-for-tat escalation,” warned McFarland, “Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia.” Exactly.
Flynn was trying to prevent Russian retaliation. Yet, as the ex-director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he had to know his call to Kislyak was being monitored and recorded.
So, again, why would he lie to the FBI about a conversation, the contents of which were surely known to the people who sent the FBI to question him?
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The other charge of lying about a call with Kislyak was Flynn’s request for Russian help in getting postponed or canceled a Security Council vote on a resolution denouncing Israeli settlements on the West Bank.
Obama’s White House was backing the anti-Israel resolution. And Bibi Netanyahu had asked Trump to weigh in to block the vote.
Bottom line: Flynn, acting on instructions, tried to prevent a U.N. condemnation of Israel, and to dissuade Russia from a mass expulsion of U.S. diplomats, lest this poison the well against a rapprochement for which the American people had voted.
In the court of public opinion, Flynn’s actions would find broad support. Rather than deny knowledge of them, Trump should have taken credit for them.
Why the general would lie to the FBI about conversations he had to know U.S. intelligence had recorded is a puzzling question, but now also an irrelevant one, water over the dam.
For Trump’s general is now the newly conscripted collaborator of the media-Mueller-Democrat-deep state conspiracy to overturn the election of 2016 and bring down the Trump presidency.
Remarkable.
After 18 months, we have no evidence Trump colluded with Russia in hacking the emails of the DNC or John Podesta, which is what the FBI investigation was supposedly about.
There is no conclusive evidence Flynn committed a crime when, as national security adviser-designate, he tried to prevent Obama from sabotaging the policies Trump had run on — and won on.
Yet there is evidence Russian intelligence agents colluded with a British spy in the pay of the oppo research arm of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign — to find dirt on Donald Trump.
And there is evidence James Comey’s FBI wanted to hire the British spy who appeared to have access to the Russian agents who appeared to possess all that wonderful dirt on the Donald.
It is hard to see how this ends well.
This weekend, after Flynn’s admission he lied to the FBI, Beltway media were slavering like Pavlov’s dogs at anticipated indictments and plea bargains by present and former White House aides, Trump family members, and perhaps Trump himself.
The joy on the TV talk shows was transparent.
Yet the media have already been badly damaged; first, by the relentless Trump attacks and the cheering for those attacks by a huge slice of the country; second, by their reflexive reaction. The media have behaved exactly like the “enemy” Trump said they were.
In this us-versus-them country, the media now seem to relish the role of “them.” The old proud journalistic boast to be objective and neutral reporters, observers and commentators is gone.
We are all partisans now.
As last Friday’s sudden 300-point drop in the Dow reveals, if Trump’s enemies bring him down, they will almost surely crash the markets and abort the recovery that took hold in Trump’s first year.
And if the establishment, repudiated by Trump’s victory, thinks it will be restored to the nation’s good graces if they destroy Trump, they are whistling past the graveyard.
When Caesar falls, the cheering for Brutus and Cassius tends to die down rather quickly. Then their turn comes.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 08, 2017, 12:16:45 PM
The Nutball the Neocons Wanted in NATO

Friday - December 8, 2017 at 1:17 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

Even interventionists are regretting some of the wars into which they helped plunge the United States in this century.

Among those wars are Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest in our history; Libya, which was left without a stable government; Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr, a six-year human rights disaster we helped kick off by arming rebels to overthrow Bashar Assad; and Yemen, where a U.S.-backed Saudi bombing campaign and starvation blockade is causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Yet, twice this century, the War Party was beaten back when seeking a clash with Putin’s Russia. And the “neo-isolationists” who won those arguments served America well.

What triggered this observation was an item on Page 1 of Wednesday’s New York Times that read in its entirety:

“Mikheil Saakashvili, former president of Georgia, led marchers through Kiev after threatening to jump from a five-story building to evade arrest. Page A4”

Who is Saakashvili? The wunderkind elected in 2004 in Tbilisi after a “Rose Revolution” we backed during George W. Bush’s crusade for global democracy.

During the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, Saakashvili sent his army crashing into the tiny enclave of South Ossetia, which had broken free of Georgia when Georgia broke free of Russia.

In overrunning the enclave, however, Saakashvili’s troops killed Russian peacekeepers. Big mistake. Within 24 hours, Putin’s tanks and troops were pouring through Roki Tunnel, running Saakashvili’s army out of South Ossetia, and occupying parts of Georgia itself.

As defeat loomed for the neocon hero, U.S. foreign policy elites were alive with denunciations of “Russian aggression” and calls to send in the 82nd Airborne, bring Georgia into NATO, and station U.S. forces in the Caucasus.

“We are all Georgians!” thundered John McCain.

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Not quite. When an outcry arose against getting into a collision with Russia, Bush, reading the nation right, decided to confine U.S. protests to the nonviolent. A wise call.

And Saakashvili? He held power until 2013, and then saw his party defeated, was charged with corruption, and fled to Ukraine. There, President Boris Poroshenko, beneficiary of the Kiev coup the U.S. had backed in 2014, put him in charge of Odessa, one of the most corrupt provinces in a country rife with corruption.

In 2016, an exasperated Saakashvili quit, charged his patron Poroshenko with corruption, and fled Ukraine. In September, with a band of supporters, he made a forced entry back across the border.

Here is the Times’ Andrew Higgins on his latest antics:

“On Tuesday … Saakashvili, onetime darling of the West, took his high-wire political career to bizarre new heights when he climbed onto the roof of his five-story apartment building in the center of Kiev…

“As … hundreds of supporters gathered below, he shouted insults at Ukraine’s leaders … and threatened to jump if security agents tried to grab him.

“Dragged from the roof after denouncing Mr. Poroshenko as a traitor and a thief, the former Georgian leader was detained but then freed by his supporters, who … blocked a security service van before it could take Mr. Saakashvili to a Kiev detention center and allowed him to escape.

“With a Ukrainian flag draped across his shoulders and a pair of handcuffs still attached to one of his wrists, Mr. Saakashvili then led hundreds of supporters in a march across Kiev toward Parliament. Speaking through a bullhorn he called for ‘peaceful protests’ to remove Mr. Poroshenko from office, just as protests had toppled the former President, Victor F. Yanukovych, in February 2014.”

This reads like a script for a Peter Sellers movie in the ’60s.

Yet this clown was president of Georgia, for whose cause in South Ossetia some in our foreign policy elite thought we should go to the brink of war with Russia.

And there was broad support for bringing Georgia into NATO. This would have given Saakashvili an ability to ignite a confrontation with Russia, which could have forced U.S. intervention.

Consider Ukraine. Three years ago, McCain was declaring, in support of the overthrow of the elected pro-Russian government in Kiev, “We are all Ukrainians now.”

Following that coup, U.S. elites were urging us to confront Putin in Crimea, bring Ukraine, as well as Georgia, into NATO, and send Kiev the lethal weapons needed to defeat Russian-backed rebels in the East.

This could have led straight to a Ukraine-Russia war, precipitated by our sending of U.S. arms.

Do we really want to cede to folks of the temperament of Mikhail Saakashvili an ability to instigate a war with a nuclear-armed Russia, which every Cold War president was resolved to avoid, even if it meant accepting Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Europe all the way to the Elbe?

Watching Saakashvili losing it in the streets of Kiev like some blitzed college student should cause us to reassess the stability of all these allies to whom we have ceded a capacity to drag us into war.

Alliances, after all, are the transmission belts of war.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 12, 2017, 06:29:44 PM
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What Should We Fight For?
Tuesday - December 12, 2017 at 7:50 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“We will never accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea,” declaimed Rex Tillerson last week in Vienna.
“Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine.”
Tillerson’s principled rejection of the seizure of land by military force — “never accept” — came just one day after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and pledged to move our embassy there.
How did Israel gain title to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights? Invasion, occupation, colonization, annexation.
Those lands are the spoils of victory from Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War.
Is Israel being severely sanctioned like Russia? Not quite.
Her yearly U.S. stipend is almost $4 billion, as she builds settlement after settlement on occupied land despite America’s feeble protests.
What Bibi Netanyahu just demonstrated is that, when dealing with the Americans and defending what is vital to Israel, perseverance pays off. Given time, the Americans will accept the new reality.
Like Bibi, Vladimir Putin is a nationalist. For him, the recapture of Crimea was the achievement of his presidency. For two centuries that peninsula had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and critical to her security.
Putin is not going to return Crimea to Kiev, and, eventually, we will accept this new reality as well.
For while whose flag flies over Crimea has never been crucial to us, it is to Putin. And like Israelis, Russians are resolute when it comes to taking and holding what they see as rightly theirs.
Both these conflicts reveal underlying realities that help explain America’s 21st-century long retreat. We face allies and antagonists who are more willing than are we to take risks, endure pain, persevere and fight to prevail.
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This month, just days after North Korea tested a new ICBM, national security adviser H. R. McMaster declared that Trump “is committed to the total denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
If so, we are committed to a goal we almost surely are not going to achieve. For, short of a war that could go nuclear, Kim Jong Un is not going to yield to our demands.
For Kim, nuclear weapons are not an option.
He knows that Saddam Hussein, who had given up his WMD, was hanged after the Americans attacked. He knows the grisly fate of Moammar Gadhafi, after he invited the West into Libya to dismantle his nuclear program and disarm him of any WMD.
Kim knows that if he surrenders his nuclear weapons, he has nothing to deter the Americans should they choose to use their arsenal on his armed forces, his regime, and him.
North Korea may enter talks, but Kim will never surrender the missiles and nukes that guarantee his survival. Look for the Americans to find a way to accommodate him.
Consider, too, China’s proclaimed ownership of the South China Sea and her building on reefs and rocks in that sea, of artificial islands that are becoming air, missile and naval bases.
Hawkish voices are being raised that this is intolerable and U.S. air and naval power must be used if necessary to force a rollback of China’s annexation and militarization of the South China Sea.
Why is this not going to happen?
While this area is regarded as vital to China, it is not to us. And while China, a littoral state that controls Hainan Island in that sea, is a legitimate claimant to many of its islets, we are claimants to none.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan are the other claimants. But though their interests in the fishing grounds and seabed resources may be as great as China’s, none has seen fit to challenge Beijing’s hegemony.
Why should we risk war with China to validate the claims of Communist Vietnam or Rodrigo Duterte’s ruthless regime in Manila? Why should their fight become our fight?
China’s interests in the sea are as crucial to her as were U.S. interests in the Caribbean when, a rising power in 1823, we declared the Monroe Doctrine. Over time, the world’s powers came to recognize and respect U.S. special interests in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
Given the steady rise of Chinese military power, the proximity of the islets to mainland China, the relative weakness and reluctance to confront of the other claimants, China will likely become the controlling power in the South China Sea, as we came to be the predominant power in the Western Hemisphere.
What we are witnessing in Crimea, across the Middle East, in the South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, are nations more willing than we to sacrifice and take risks, because their interests there are far greater than ours.
What America needs is a new national consensus on what is vital to us and what is not, what we are willing to fight to defend and what we are not.
For this generation of Americans is not going to risk war, indefinitely, to sustain some Beltway elite’s idea of a “rules-based nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.” After the Cold War, we entered a new world — and we need new red lines to replace the old.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 14, 2017, 11:01:13 PM
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Unlike Nixon, Trump Will Not Go Quietly
Thursday - December 14, 2017 at 7:43 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
On Aug. 9, 1974, Richard Nixon bowed to the inevitability of impeachment and conviction by a Democratic Senate and resigned.
The prospect of such an end for Donald Trump has this city drooling. Yet, comparing Russiagate and Watergate, history is not likely to repeat itself.
First, the underlying crime in Watergate, a break-in to wiretap offices of the DNC, had been traced, within 48 hours, to the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
In Russiagate, the underlying crime — the “collusion” of Trump’s campaign with the Kremlin to hack into the emails of the DNC — has, after 18 months of investigating, still not been established.
Campaign manager Paul Manafort has been indicted, but for financial crimes committed long before he enlisted with Trump.
Gen. Michael Flynn has pled guilty to lying about phone calls he made to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, but only after Trump had been elected and Flynn had been named national security adviser.
Flynn asked Kislyak for help in blocking or postponing a Security Council resolution denouncing Israel, and to tell Vladimir Putin not to go ballistic over President Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats.
This is what security advisers do.
Why Flynn let himself be ensnared in a perjury trap, when he had to know his calls were recorded, is puzzling.
Second, it is said Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to cut slack for Flynn.
But even Comey admits Trump acted within his authority.
And Comey had usurped the authority of Justice Department prosecutors when he announced in July 2016 that Hillary Clinton ought not to be prosecuted for having been “extremely careless” in transmitting security secrets over her private email server.
We now know that the first draft of Comey’s statement described Clinton as “grossly negligent,” the precise statute language for an indictment.
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We also now know that helping to edit Comey’s first draft to soften its impact was Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. His wife, Jill McCabe, a candidate for state senate in Virginia, received $467,000 in campaign contributions from the PAC of Clinton bundler Terry McAuliffe.
Comey has also admitted he leaked to The New York Times details of a one-on-one with Trump to trigger the naming of a special counsel — to go after Trump. And that assignment somehow fell to Comey’s predecessor, friend, and confidant Robert Mueller.
Mueller swiftly hired half a dozen prosecutorial bulldogs who had been Clinton contributors, and Andrew Weinstein, a Trump hater who had congratulated Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to carry out Trump’s travel ban.
FBI official Peter Strzok had to be been removed from the Mueller probe for hatred of Trump manifest in emails to his FBI lady friend.
Strzok was also involved in the investigation of Clinton’s email server and is said to have been the one who persuaded Comey to tone down his language about her misconduct, and let Hillary walk.
In Mueller’s tenure, still no Trump tie to the hacking of the DNC has been found. But a connection between Hillary’s campaign and Russian spies — to find dirt to smear and destroy Trump and his campaign — has been fairly well established.
By June 2016, the Clinton campaign and DNC had begun shoveling millions of dollars to the Perkins Coie law firm, which had hired the oppo research firm Fusion GPS, to go dirt-diving on Trump.
Fusion contacted ex-British MI6 spy Christopher Steele, who had ties to former KGB and FSB intelligence agents in Russia. They began to feed Steele, who fed Fusion, which fed the U.S. anti-Trump media with the alleged dirty deeds of Trump in Moscow hotels.
While the truth of the dirty dossier has never been established, Comey’s FBI rose like a hungry trout on learning of its contents.
There are credible allegations Comey’s FBI sought to hire Steele and used the dirt in his dossier to broaden the investigation of Trump — and that its contents were also used to justify FISA warrants on Trump and his people.
This week, we learned that the Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr had contacts with Fusion during the campaign, while his wife actually worked at Fusion investigating Trump. This thing is starting to stink.
Is the Trump investigation the rotten fruit of a poisoned tree?
Is Mueller’s Dump Trump team investigating the wrong campaign?
There are other reasons to believe Trump may survive the deep state-media conspiracy to break his presidency, overturn his mandate, and reinstate a discredited establishment.
Trump has Fox News and fighting congressmen behind him and the mainstream media is deeply distrusted and widely detested. And there is no Democratic House to impeach him or Democratic Senate to convict him.
Moreover, Trump is not Nixon, who, like Charles I, accepted his fate and let the executioner’s sword fall with dignity.
If Trump goes, one imagines, he will not go quietly.
In the words of the great Jerry Lee Lewis, there’s gonna be a “whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 18, 2017, 08:05:48 PM
Who Wants War with Iran — and Why?
Monday - December 18, 2017 at 7:32 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In the run-up to Christmas, President Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of some surprisingly good news and glad tidings.
Sunday, Vladimir Putin called to thank him and the CIA for providing Russia critical information that helped abort an ISIS plot to massacre visitors to Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
Monday found polls showing Trump at his highest in months. Stocks soared 200 points at the opening bell in anticipation of pre-Christmas passage of the Republican tax bill. The Dow has added a record 5,000 points in Trump’s first year.
And the Russiagate investigation may have busted an axle. Though yet unproven, charges are being made that Robert Mueller’s sleuths gained access to Trump transition emails illicitly.
This could imperil prosecutions by Mueller’s team, already under a cloud for proven malice toward the president.
Recall: Daniel Ellsberg, who delivered the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, walked free when it was learned that the White House “Plumbers” had burgled his psychiatrist’s office.
With things going Trump’s way, one must ask:
What was U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley doing last week at what looked like a prewar briefing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in D.C.?
Looming behind Haley was part of what was said to be an Iranian missile fired at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh.
Though the rocket had Iranian markings, it was not launched from Iran, or by Iranians. Houthi rebels, for two years victims of a savage war waged by the Saudis — using U.S.-made planes, missiles, bombs and drones — say they fired it at the Riyadh airport in retaliation for what the Saudis have done to their people and country.
If so, it was a legitimate act of war.
Indeed, so great is the Yemeni civilian suffering from a lack of food and medicine, and from malnutrition and disease, Trump himself has told the Saudis to ease up on their air, sea, and land blockades.
As there is no evidence as to when the Houthis acquired the missile, or where, the question arises: What was Haley’s motive in indicting Iran? Was this part of a new propaganda campaign to drum up support for America’s next big Mideast war?
There are reasons to think so.
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Haley went on: “It’s hard to find a conflict or a terrorist group in the Middle East that does not have Iran’s fingerprints all over it.”
But Iran is Shiite, while al-Qaida, which brought down the twin towers, aided by 15 Saudi nationals, is Sunni. So, too, are ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in Somalia and Islamic Jihad. Most Mideast terrorist groups are Sunni, not Shiite.
As for these Mideast “conflicts,” which did Iran start?
We started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO started the war in Libya. The U.S. helped trigger the horrific Syrian cινιℓ ωαr by arming “rebels.” Only when President Bashar Assad looked like he was about to fall did Russia and Iran intervene on his side.
As for the “Shiite crescent,” from Tehran to Bagdad to Damascus to Beirut, who created it?
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was Sunni dominated. It was the Americans who overthrew him and brought Shiite power to Baghdad.
In Syria, it was U.S.- and Sunni-backed “rebels,” allied at times with al-Qaida, who drew Iran and the Shiite militias in to save Assad.
And the Israelis called the Shiite Hezbollah movement into being by invading and occupying South Lebanon in 1982. As Yitzhak Rabin ruefully said, “We let the Shia genie out of the bottle.”
Are we now to fight a new Mideast war against a larger enemy than any of the others we have fought, to clean up the bloody mess we made of the region by our previous military interventions?
Before we march, with Haley as head cheerleader, Trump should consider the likely consequences for his country, the Middle East, and his presidency.
A war in the Persian Gulf would send oil prices soaring, and stock markets plummeting, even as it would split us off from our major allies in Europe and Asia. The Airbus-Boeing deal to sell Iran 300 commercial aircraft would be dead.
While the U.S. would prevail in an air, naval and missile war, where would the troops come from to march to Tehran to “democratize” that nation? Do we think a bloodied revanchist Iran would be easier to deal with than the one with which John Kerry negotiated a nuclear deal?
Would Hezbollah go after U.S. soft targets in Beirut? Would Iraqi Shiite militias go after Americans in the Green Zone? Would the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the oil-rich northeast of Saudi Arabia rise up and rebel?
And who would our great fighting Arab ally be?
Jared Kushner’s new friend: a 32-year-old Saudi prince who has become famous for putting down $500 million each for a chateau near Versailles, a yacht on the Riviera, and a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.
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http://buchanan.org/blog/wants-war-iran-128309
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 23, 2017, 10:30:41 AM

Republicans Bet the Farm
Friday - December 22, 2017 at 3:31 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan

President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan’s House just put the future of their party on the line.

By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm.

They have rewritten America’s tax code to reflect their belief that cutting taxes on the private sector will produce the prosperity they have promised. If it happens, the GOP will reap the rewards, if not by 2018, then in 2020.

Democrats, as the Party of Government, egalitarian and neo-socialist, have come to see their role as redistributing wealth from those who have too much — to those who have too little. For, as men (and women) are born unequal in ambition, ability, talent, energy, personality and drive, free markets must inevitably produce an inequality of results.

The mission of Democrats is to reduce those inequalities. And as the very rich are also the very few, in a one-man, one-vote democracy the Democratic Party will always have a following.

Winston Churchill called this the philosophy of failure and the gospel of envy.

Republicans see themselves as the party of free enterprise, of the private not the public sector. They believe that alleviating the burden of regulation and taxation on business will unleash that sector, growing the economy and producing broader prosperity.

By how they voted Wednesday, Republicans yet believe in “supply-side” economics. In the early ’80s, this was derided as “voodoo economics” and “trickle-down” economics, and pungently disparaged by John Kenneth Galbraith as an economic philosophy rooted in the belief that, if you wish to feed the sparrows, you must first feed the horses.

The problem for Democrats is that Reaganomics worked, and is seen historically to have been successful. In 1984, growth was near 6 percent and Reagan rode to a 49-state landslide over Fritz Mondale who, at his San Francisco convention, had declared he would raise taxes.

Thus the importance of what happened Tuesday and Wednesday on Capitol Hill should not be underestimated.

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On their legislative agenda, Republicans broke out of a slump. Though they got not a single Democratic vote in either chamber, they showed they can govern alone. On the lead item on the GOP-Trump agenda — taxes — they delivered. They shifted policy dramatically toward Republican philosophy. They wagered their future on their convictions. And the splenetic rage among Democrat elites suggests that they know they have suffered a defeat difficult to reverse.

Moreover, though the bill that came out of Congress is unpopular, the nation will not vote on Trumpian management of the economy until November 2018, after the early returns from the tax cut have come in.

And the Democratic Party has also been put into a tight box.

As Democrats have denounced the tax bill for exploding the debt by $1.5 trillion, how do they propose to pay for all the free stuff, including free tuition and infrastructure, that they will have on offer?

There are only two options: borrowing and growing the national debt themselves or raising taxes, as Mondale promised to do.

Another problem for Democrats is the new $10,000 limit on the tax deduction for state and local income and property taxes.

In blue states like Oregon, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, Hawaii, the top state income tax rate is 8 to 10 percent. In Jerry Brown’s California and Andrew Cuomo’s New York, it hits 13 percent — before adding property taxes on homes and condos in Manhattan and second homes out on Long Island.

Virtually eliminating state and local tax deductions is going to cause some of the rich to consider relocating to low-tax or no-tax red states in the Sun Belt like Florida. And it is going to put pressure on blue state pols to cease adding to the state and local tax burdens that Uncle Sam is no longer helping to carry.

Stepping back from all the Sturm und Drang of 2017, the Trump-Republican record of achievement, of meeting commitments made in the campaign of 2017, is not unimpressive.

The largest tax cuts in decades. Elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the Antonin Scalia seat on the Supreme Court. A record number of new U.S. appellate court judges approved by the Senate. The U.S. is out of the Paris climate accord and out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

NAFTA is being renegotiated. Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be open for drilling. The U.S. is at full employment, with minority unemployment near record lows. The stock market has consistently broken records, with the Dow having added 5,000 points. The Obamacare individual mandate tax is gone. Obama-era regulations have been cut and some eliminated.

And one year deeper into Russiagate, and still there is no proven collusion between candidate Trump and the Russians.

Indeed, the Robert Mueller investigators appear now to be coming under as much scrutiny and suspicion for how they behaved during the election and transition as Vladimir Putin and the Russians.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/republicans-bet-farm-128341
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 28, 2017, 12:19:48 PM

McLaughlin Group Returns to the Airwaves in 2018!
Sunday - December 24, 2017 at 1:57 pm


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From Buchanan.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP RETURNS TO THE AIRWAVES IN 2018!

THE ICONIC “AMERICAN ORIGINAL” RELAUNCHES ON ABC7-WJLA

MCLEAN, VA – The McLaughlin Group, “The American Original” for over three decades, the sharpest minds, best sources, and hardest talk, returns on Sundays at 12:00 Noon on ABC7-WJLA beginning January 7.

John McLaughlin mentee Tom Rogan will be taking over as moderator, joined by iconic panelists Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan and Clarence Page. Rogan, in his early 30’s, has been working in Washington, DC as a respected political journalist and national TV commentator, and is not shy about expressing his opinions on major issues of the day. His cool demeanor will drive a lively yet respectful debate amongst his esteemed panelists.

A weekly rotating guest panelist will also join the group. This is the time, now more than ever, for balanced debate.

Tom Rogan:
“John McLaughlin was my mentor and a very close friend. I can never fill his shoes, but I believe The McLaughlin Group’s unique blend of unfiltered news and unrestrained analysis has never been more necessary. With determination and mutual respect, the panel and myself will deliver for our viewers.”

Pat Buchanan:
“From Spring 1982 to August 2016, John McLaughlin never missed a weekly “McLaughlin Group” show, giving America some of the most spirited public debates since the early Reagan years. The New Year will see the reunion and the return of “The Group” with the entire cast that was there when The Leader passed on. Look for us.”

Have something to say about this?
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Eleanor Clift:
“John helped me find my voice. We didn’t agree on much, and he valued debate, so it was a good match. In that spirit that he embodied, the Group returns to do friendly battle in the clash of ideas in the Age of Trump. Game on!”

Clarence Page:
“I’m delighted by the many people who tell me they miss our program in these polarized times — for its ‘civility,’ of all things. I miss it, too. I’m eager to get the old gang back together again.”

The broadcast deal was brokered by Seth Berenzweig and Tod Castleberry of BL Sports & Media Group, a full service media agency located in McLean, VA.

For additional information contact:

WJLA/NewsChannel 8/WJLA.com BL Sports & Media Group
Dan Mellon Tod Castleberry
General Manager Director of Broadcast & Digital Media
1100 Wilson Blvd 8300 Greensboro Drive Suite 1250
Arlington, VA 22209 McLean, VA 22102
O-703-236-9300 O-703-940-3301
dmellon@sbgtv.com tcastleberry@blsportsandmedia.com

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McLaughlin Group Returns to the Airwaves in 2018!
Sunday - December 24, 2017 at 1:57 pm

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From Buchanan.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP RETURNS TO THE AIRWAVES IN 2018!
THE ICONIC “AMERICAN ORIGINAL” RELAUNCHES ON ABC7-WJLA
MCLEAN, VA – The McLaughlin Group, “The American Original” for over three decades, the sharpest minds, best sources, and hardest talk, returns on Sundays at 12:00 Noon on ABC7-WJLA beginning January 7.
John McLaughlin mentee Tom Rogan will be taking over as moderator, joined by iconic panelists Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan and Clarence Page. Rogan, in his early 30’s, has been working in Washington, DC as a respected political journalist and national TV commentator, and is not shy about expressing his opinions on major issues of the day. His cool demeanor will drive a lively yet respectful debate amongst his esteemed panelists.
A weekly rotating guest panelist will also join (http://buchanan.org/blog/mclaughlin-group-returns-airwaves-2018-128370#) the group. This is the time, now more than ever, for balanced debate.
Tom Rogan:
“John McLaughlin was my mentor and a very close friend. I can never fill his shoes, but I believe The McLaughlin Group’s unique (http://buchanan.org/blog/mclaughlin-group-returns-airwaves-2018-128370#) blend of unfiltered news and unrestrained analysis has never been more necessary. With determination and mutual respect, the panel and myself will deliver for our viewers.”
Pat Buchanan:
“From Spring 1982 to August 2016, John McLaughlin never missed a weekly “McLaughlin Group” show, giving America some of the most spirited public debates since the early Reagan years. The New Year will see the reunion and the return of “The Group” with the entire cast that was there when The Leader passed on. Look for us.”
Have something to say about this?
 Visit Pat's FaceBook page and post your comments…. (https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
Eleanor Clift:
“John helped me find my voice. We didn’t agree on much, and he valued debate, so it was a good match. In that spirit that he embodied, the Group returns to do friendly battle in the clash of ideas in the Age of Trump. Game on!”
Clarence Page:
“I’m delighted by the many people who tell me they miss our program in these polarized times — for its ‘civility,’ of all things. I miss it, too. I’m eager to get the old gang back together again.”
The broadcast deal was brokered by Seth Berenzweig and Tod Castleberry of BL Sports & Media Group, a full service media agency located in McLean, VA.
For additional information contact:
WJLA/NewsChannel 8/WJLA.com BL Sports & Media Group
Dan Mellon Tod Castleberry
General Manager Director of Broadcast & Digital Media
1100 Wilson Blvd 8300 Greensboro Drive Suite 1250
Arlington, VA 22209 McLean, VA 22102
O-703-236-9300 O-703-940-3301
dmellon@sbgtv.com tcastleberry@blsportsandmedia.com
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McLaughlin Group Returns to the Airwaves in 2018!
Sunday - December 24, 2017 at 1:57 pm

This post was viewed 63 times.
(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif) Votes: 5.00 Stars!
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From Buchanan.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP RETURNS TO THE AIRWAVES IN 2018!
THE ICONIC “AMERICAN ORIGINAL” RELAUNCHES ON ABC7-WJLA
MCLEAN, VA – The McLaughlin Group, “The American Original” for over three decades, the sharpest minds, best sources, and hardest talk, returns on Sundays at 12:00 Noon on ABC7-WJLA beginning January 7.
John McLaughlin mentee Tom Rogan will be taking over as moderator, joined by iconic panelists Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan and Clarence Page. Rogan, in his early 30’s, has been working in Washington, DC as a respected political journalist and national TV commentator, and is not shy about expressing his opinions on major issues of the day. His cool demeanor will drive a lively yet respectful debate amongst his esteemed panelists.
A weekly rotating guest panelist will also join (http://buchanan.org/blog/mclaughlin-group-returns-airwaves-2018-128370#) the group. This is the time, now more than ever, for balanced debate.
Tom Rogan:
“John McLaughlin was my mentor and a very close friend. I can never fill his shoes, but I believe The McLaughlin Group’s unique (http://buchanan.org/blog/mclaughlin-group-returns-airwaves-2018-128370#) blend of unfiltered news and unrestrained analysis has never been more necessary. With determination and mutual respect, the panel and myself will deliver for our viewers.”
Pat Buchanan:
“From Spring 1982 to August 2016, John McLaughlin never missed a weekly “McLaughlin Group” show, giving America some of the most spirited public debates since the early Reagan years. The New Year will see the reunion and the return of “The Group” with the entire cast that was there when The Leader passed on. Look for us.”
Have something to say about this?
 Visit Pat's FaceBook page and post your comments…. (https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
Eleanor Clift:
“John helped me find my voice. We didn’t agree on much, and he valued debate, so it was a good match. In that spirit that he embodied, the Group returns to do friendly battle in the clash of ideas in the Age of Trump. Game on!”
Clarence Page:
“I’m delighted by the many people who tell me they miss our program in these polarized times — for its ‘civility,’ of all things. I miss it, too. I’m eager to get the old gang back together again.”
The broadcast deal was brokered by Seth Berenzweig and Tod Castleberry of BL Sports & Media Group, a full service media agency located in McLean, VA.
For additional information contact:
WJLA/NewsChannel 8/WJLA.com BL Sports & Media Group
Dan Mellon Tod Castleberry
General Manager Director of Broadcast & Digital Media
1100 Wilson Blvd 8300 Greensboro Drive Suite 1250
Arlington, VA 22209 McLean, VA 22102
O-703-236-9300 O-703-940-3301
dmellon@sbgtv.com tcastleberry@blsportsandmedia.com
Do You Appreciate Reading Our
Emails and Website?
 Let us know how we are doing –
Send us a Thank You Via Paypal! (https://paypal.me/lindamuller)
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McLaughlin Group Returns to the Airwaves in 2018!
Sunday - December 24, 2017 at 1:57 pm

This post was viewed 63 times.
(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif) Votes: 5.00 Stars!
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From Buchanan.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THE MCLAUGHLIN GROUP RETURNS TO THE AIRWAVES IN 2018!
THE ICONIC “AMERICAN ORIGINAL” RELAUNCHES ON ABC7-WJLA
MCLEAN, VA – The McLaughlin Group, “The American Original” for over three decades, the sharpest minds, best sources, and hardest talk, returns on Sundays at 12:00 Noon on ABC7-WJLA beginning January 7.
John McLaughlin mentee Tom Rogan will be taking over as moderator, joined by iconic panelists Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan and Clarence Page. Rogan, in his early 30’s, has been working in Washington, DC as a respected political journalist and national TV commentator, and is not shy about expressing his opinions on major issues of the day. His cool demeanor will drive a lively yet respectful debate amongst his esteemed panelists.
A weekly rotating guest panelist will also join (http://buchanan.org/blog/mclaughlin-group-returns-airwaves-2018-128370#) the group. This is the time, now more than ever, for balanced debate.
Tom Rogan:
“John McLaughlin was my mentor and a very close friend. I can never fill his shoes, but I believe The McLaughlin Group’s unique (http://buchanan.org/blog/mclaughlin-group-returns-airwaves-2018-128370#) blend of unfiltered news and unrestrained analysis has never been more necessary. With determination and mutual respect, the panel and myself will deliver for our viewers.”
Pat Buchanan:
“From Spring 1982 to August 2016, John McLaughlin never missed a weekly “McLaughlin Group” show, giving America some of the most spirited public debates since the early Reagan years. The New Year will see the reunion and the return of “The Group” with the entire cast that was there when The Leader passed on. Look for us.”
Have something to say about this?
 Visit Pat's FaceBook page and post your comments…. (https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
Eleanor Clift:
“John helped me find my voice. We didn’t agree on much, and he valued debate, so it was a good match. In that spirit that he embodied, the Group returns to do friendly battle in the clash of ideas in the Age of Trump. Game on!”
Clarence Page:
“I’m delighted by the many people who tell me they miss our program in these polarized times — for its ‘civility,’ of all things. I miss it, too. I’m eager to get the old gang back together again.”
The broadcast deal was brokered by Seth Berenzweig and Tod Castleberry of BL Sports & Media Group, a full service media agency located in McLean, VA.
For additional information contact:
WJLA/NewsChannel 8/WJLA.com BL Sports & Media Group
Dan Mellon Tod Castleberry
General Manager Director of Broadcast & Digital Media
1100 Wilson Blvd 8300 Greensboro Drive Suite 1250
Arlington, VA 22209 McLean, VA 22102
O-703-236-9300 O-703-940-3301
dmellon@sbgtv.com tcastleberry@blsportsandmedia.com
Do You Appreciate Reading Our
Emails and Website?
 Let us know how we are doing –
Send us a Thank You Via Paypal! (https://paypal.me/lindamuller)
Share Pat's Columns!
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 28, 2017, 12:28:07 PM
 26 December 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Did-the-FBI-Conspire-to-Stop-Trump-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/fbi-conspire-stop-trump-128359)
Did the FBI Conspire to Stop Trump?
Tuesday - December 26, 2017 at 11:20 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer (http://buchanan.org/blog/fbi-conspire-stop-trump-128359#) was a simple one: Did he do it?
Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/fbi-conspire-stop-trump-128359#)?
A year and a half into the investigation, and, still, no “collusion” has been found. Yet the investigation goes on, at the demand of the never-Trump media and Beltway establishment.
Hence, and understandably, suspicions have arisen.
Are the investigators after the truth, or are they after Trump?
Set aside the Trump-Putin conspiracy theory momentarily, and consider a rival explanation for what is going down here:
That, from the outset, Director James Comey and an FBI camarilla were determined to stop Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Having failed, they conspired to break Trump’s presidency, overturn his mandate and bring him down.
Essential to any such project was first to block any indictment of Hillary for transmitting national security (http://buchanan.org/blog/fbi-conspire-stop-trump-128359#) secrets over her private email (http://buchanan.org/blog/fbi-conspire-stop-trump-128359#) server. That first objective was achieved 18 months ago.
On July 5, 2016, Comey stepped before a stunned press corps to declare that, given the evidence gathered by the FBI, “no reasonable prosecutor” would indict Clinton. Therefore, that was the course he, Comey, was recommending.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, compromised by her infamous 35-minute tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton — to discuss golf and grandkids — seconded Comey’s decision.
And so Hillary walked. Why is this suspicious?
First, whether or not to indict was a decision that belonged to the Department of Justice, not Jim Comey or the FBI. His preemption of Justice Department authority was astonishing.
Second, while Comey said in his statement that Hillary had been “extremely careless” with security secrets, in his first draft, Clinton was declared guilty of “gross negligence” — the precise language in the statute to justify indictment.
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Who talked Comey into softening the language to look less than criminal? One man was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife, Jill, a Virginia state senate candidate, received a munificent PAC contribution of $474,000 from Clinton family friend and big bundler Terry McAuliffe.
Also urging Comey to soften the fatal phrase “gross negligence” was key FBI agent Peter Strzok. In text messages to his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok repeatedly vented his detestation of the “idiot” Trump.
After one meeting with “Andy” (McCabe), Strzok told Page an “insurance policy” was needed to keep Trump out of the White House.
Also, it appears Comey began drafting his exoneration statement of Hillary before the FBI had even interviewed her. And when the FBI did, Hillary was permitted to have her lawyers present.
One need not be a conspiracy nut to conclude the fix was in, and a pass for Hillary wired from the get-go. Comey, McCabe, Strzok were not going to recommend an indictment that would blow Hillary out of the water and let the Trump Tower crowd waltz into the White House.
Yet, if Special Counsel Robert Mueller cannot find any Trump collusion with the Kremlin to tilt the outcome of the 2016 election, his investigators might have another look at the Clinton campaign.
For there a Russian connection has been established.
Kremlin agents fabricated, faked, forged, or found the dirt on Trump that was passed to ex-British MI6 spy Christopher Steele, and wound up in his “dirty dossier” that was distributed to the mainstream media and the FBI to torpedo Trump.
And who hired Steele to tie Trump to Russia?
Fusion GPS, the oppo research outfit into which the DNC and Clinton campaign pumped millions through law firm Perkins Coie.
Let’s review the bidding.
The “dirty dossier,” a mixture of fabrications, falsehoods and half-truths, created to destroy Trump and make Hillary president, was the product of a British spy’s collusion with Kremlin agents.
In Dec. 26’s Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough writes that the FBI relied on this Kremlin-Steele dossier of allegations and lies to base their decision “to open a counterintelligence investigation (of Trump).” And press reports “cite the docuмent’s disinformation in requests for court-approved wiretaps.”
If this is true, a critical questions arises:
Has the Mueller probe been so contaminated by anti-Trump bias and reliance on Kremlin fabrications that any indictment it brings will be suspect in the eyes of the American people?
Director Comey has been fired. FBI No. 2 McCabe is now being retired under a cloud. Mueller’s top FBI investigator, Peter Strzok, and lover Lisa, have been discharged. And Mueller is left to rely upon a passel of prosecutors whose common denominator appears to be that they loathe Trump and made contributions to Hillary.
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had his “Get Hoffa Squad” to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. J. Edgar Hoover had his vendetta against Dr. Martin Luther King.
Is history repeating itself — with the designated target of an elite FBI cabal being the President of the United States?
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http://buchanan.org/blog/fbi-conspire-stop-trump-128359
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: graceseeker on December 28, 2017, 12:55:51 PM
I am cuttin and pasting and have only gotten to the end of Nov

the dude is a prolific writer.

i am too but my audience probably would never be so big...

i have interesting things to say but people shut me out bc i dont have $$ and prestige and fame etc...

se la vie on Planet Earth

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 30, 2017, 12:55:36 AM
 28 December 2017 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Will-War-Cancel-Trumps-Triumphs-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-war-cancel-trumps-triumphs-128383)
Will War Cancel Trump’s Triumphs?
Thursday - December 28, 2017 at 11:04 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Asked what he did during the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes replied, “I survived.”
Donald Trump can make the same boast.
No other political figure has so dominated our discourse. And none, not Joe McCarthy in his heyday in the early ’50s, nor Richard Nixon in Watergate, received such intensive and intemperate coverage and commentary as has our 45th president.
Whatever one may think of Trump, he is a leader and a fighter, not a quitter. How many politicians could have sustained the beatings Trump has taken, and remained as cocky and confident?
And looking back on what may fairly be called The Year of Trump, his achievements have surprised even some of his enemies.
With the U.S. military given a freer hand by Trump, a U.S.-led coalition helped expel ISIS from its twin capitals of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, driving it back into a desert enclave on the Iraq-Syria border. The caliphate is dead, and the caliph nowhere to be found.
The economy, with the boot of Barack Obama off its neck, has been growing at 3 percent. The stock market (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-war-cancel-trumps-triumphs-128383#) has soared to record highs. Unemployment is down to 4 percent. And Trump and Congress just passed the largest tax cut since Ronald Reagan.
With deregulation, which conservative Republicans preached to deaf ears in the Bush I and Bush II eras, Trump and those he has put into positions of power have exceeded expectations.
Pipelines Obama blocked have been approved. Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge has been opened to exploratory drilling. We have exited a Paris climate accord that favored China over the U.S.
Though Beijing’s trade surplus with us is returning to record highs, a spirit of “America First” economic nationalism is pervasive among U.S. trade negotiators,
The one justice named to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, appears in the Antonin Scalia tradition. And under Chairman Chuck Grassley, the Senate judiciary committee is moving conservatives and strict constructionists onto U.S. appellate and district courts.
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Politically, however, the year brought bad news, with portents of worse to come. In November, the Republican Party was thrashed in Virginia, losing all state offices, and then lost a Senate seat in Alabama.
Given polls showing Trump under water and the GOP running 10 points behind the Democratic Party in favorability, there is a possibility the GOP could lose the House (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-war-cancel-trumps-triumphs-128383#) in 2018.
And though Democrats have three times as many seats at risk in 2018, the GOP losing the Senate is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Should that happen, the conservative dream of a recapture of the U.S. Supreme Court could swiftly vanish.
Recall: Democratic Senates turned down two Nixon nominees and Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork, forcing both presidents to name justices who evolved into moderates and liberals on the high court.
But it is in the realm of foreign policy where the real perils seem to lie. President Trump has been persuaded by his national security team to send Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, for use against the tanks and armor of pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Should Petro Poroshenko’s Kiev regime reignite the war in his breakaway provinces bordering Russia, Vladimir Putin is less likely to let him crush the rebels than to intervene with superior forces and rout the Ukrainian army.
Trump’s choice then? Accept defeat and humiliation for our “ally” — or escalate and widen the conflict with Russia.
Putin’s interest in the Donbass, a part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for centuries, is obvious.
What, exactly, is ours — to justify a showdown with Moscow?
In this city there is also a powerful propaganda push to have this country tear up the nuclear deal John Kerry negotiated with Iran, and confront the Iranians in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Persian Gulf.
But how much backing would Trump have for another U.S. war in that blood-soaked region, after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria?
Who would stand with us, and for how long?
When Trump declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel and pledged to move our embassy there, we had to veto a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution condemning us. Then the General Assembly denounced the U.S. in a resolution supported by all our key NATO allies, Russia and China, and every Arab and Muslim nation.
A day later, Trump complained on Twitter that we have “foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East.”
What then would justify a new $1 or $2 trillion war with the largest nation on the Persian Gulf, which could send oil to $200 a barrel and sink the global economy?
Cui bono? For whose benefit all these wars?
The Korean War finished Truman. Vietnam finished LBJ. Reagan said putting Marines into Lebanon was his worst mistake. Iraq cost Bush II both houses of Congress and his party the presidency in 2008.
Should Trump become a war president, he’ll likely become a one-term president.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 03, 2018, 09:13:02 AM
 3 January 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/The-Times-Rides-to-Muellers-Rescue-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/times-rides-muellers-rescue-128401)
The Times Rides to Mueller’s Rescue
Wednesday - January 3, 2018 at 12:36 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
What caused the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, which evolved into the criminal investigation that is said today to imperil the Trump presidency?
As James Comey’s FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have, for 18 months, failed to prove Donald Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin, what was it, in mid-2016, that justified starting this investigation?
What was the basis for the belief Trump was colluding, that he was the Manchurian candidate of Vladimir Putin? What evidence did the FBI cite to get FISA court warrants (http://buchanan.org/blog/times-rides-muellers-rescue-128401#) to surveil and wiretap Trump’s team?
Republican congressmen have for months been demanding answers to these questions. And, as Mueller’s men have stonewalled, suspicions have arisen that this investigation was, from the outset, a politicized operation to take down Trump.
Feeding those suspicions has been the proven anti-Trump bias of investigators. Also, wiretap warrants of Trump’s team are said to have been issued on the basis of a “dirty dossier” that was floating around town in 2016 — but which mainstream media refused to publish as they could not validate its lurid allegations.
Who produced the dossier?
Ex-British spy Christopher Steele, whose dirt was delivered by ex-Kremlin agents. And Steele was himself a hireling of Fusion GPS, the oppo research (http://buchanan.org/blog/times-rides-muellers-rescue-128401#) outfit enlisted and paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
Writes the Washington Times, Steele “paid Kremlin sources with Democratic cash.”
Yet, if Steele’s dossier is a farrago of falsehoods and fake news, and the dossier’s contents were used to justify warrants for wiretaps on Trump associates, Mueller has a problem.
Prosecutions his team brings could be contaminated by what the FBI did, leaving his investigation discredited.
Fortunately, all this was cleared up for us New Year’s Eve by a major revelation in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html). Top headline on page one:
“Unlikely Source Propelled Russia Meddling Inquiry”
The story that followed correctly framed the crucial question:
“What so alarmed American officials to provoke the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?”
The Times then gave us the answer (http://buchanan.org/blog/times-rides-muellers-rescue-128401#) we have been looking for:
“It was not, as Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”
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The ally: Australia, whose ambassador to Britain was in an “upscale London Bar” in the West End in May 2016, drinking with a sloshed George Papadopoulos, who had ties to the Trump campaign and who informed the diplomat that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos had reportedly been told in April that Russia had access to Clinton’s emails.
Thus, when the DNC and John Podesta emails were splashed all over the U.S. press in June, Amb. Alexander Downer, recalling his conversation with Papadopoulos, informed his government, which has excellent ties to U.S. intelligence, and the FBI took it from there.
The Times’ story pounds home this version of events:
“The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Trump’s associates conspired.”
This, the Times assures us, “answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year.”
Well, perhaps.
But if Papadopoulos’s drunken babbling to the Aussie ambassador triggered the investigation in July 2016, why was George not interviewed by the FBI until January 2017?
According to the Times, an FBI agent in Rome had been told by Steele in June 2016 what he had learned from the Russians.
And Steele was interviewed by the FBI in October 2016.
If Papadopoulos triggered the investigation, why the seeming FBI disinterest in him — as compared to Steele?
Yet another major question remains unanswered.
If, as the Times writes, the FBI was looking “into Russian attempts to disrupt the elections,” why did the FBI not open an investigation into the KGB roots of the Steele dossier that was written to destroy the Republican candidate, Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/times-rides-muellers-rescue-128401#)?
If Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Putin to damage Clinton was worthy of an all-out FBI investigation, why did the Clinton-DNC scheme to tie Trump to Russian prostitutes, using British spies and former KGB agents, not merit an FBI investigation?
Why was there less concern about the Clinton campaign’s ties to Russian agents, than to Trumpian “collusion” that is yet unproven?
Consider what the British spy Steele and his former KGB/FSB comrades accomplished:
They have kept alive a special counsel’s investigation that has divided our country, imperiled the FBI’s reputation, preoccupied and damaged a president, and partially paralyzed the U.S. government.
Putin must be marveling at the astonishing success of his old comrades from KGB days, who could pull off an intelligence coup like this and so cripple the superpower that won the Cold War.

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The New York Times is a Jєωιѕн Run Newspaper since 1894
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 05, 2018, 07:41:01 AM
(http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Fire-Bell-in-the-Night-for-the-Ayatollah-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/fire-bell-night-ayatollah-128424)
Fire Bell in the Night for the Ayatollah
Friday - January 5, 2018 at 1:51 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the “ѕєdιтισn” had been defeated.
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard.
The protests that broke out a week ago and spread and became riots are a fire bell in the night for the Islamic Republic.
The protesters denounced President Hassan Rouhani, re-elected last year with 57 percent of the vote, for failing to curb inflation or deliver the benefits he promised when Iran signed the nuclear deal.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, commander in chief and head of state, in power three decades, was also denounced, as were Iran’s interventions in wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen.
In 2009, the uprising of millions in Tehran was driven by middle-class rage over an election stolen by the populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This past week’s protests began in the working class, in what might be called Iran’s “fly-over country.”
The protesters were Red State and Tea Party types, demanding their own version of “Come Home, Iran” and “Iran First!”
The charge against Rouhani is that he has failed to deliver the good times promised. Against the ayatollah and the mullahs, the charge is that what they have delivered — power and wealth to the clerics, social repression, foreign wars — are not what the Iranian people want.
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The greater long-term threat of the protests is to the Islamic regime.
For if the protests are about people being denied the freedom and material goods the young enjoy in the West, the protesters are demanding what theocracies do not deliver. How could the ayatollah and the mullahs, who restrict freedom by divine law, accept democratic freedoms without imperiling their own theological dictatorship?
How could the Republican Guard surrender its slice of the Iranian economy and end its foreign interventions without imperiling its reason for being — to protect and promote the Iranian Islamic revolution?
Half of Iran’s population is 31 or younger. This new generation was not even born until a decade after the Revolution that overthrew the Shah.
How does a clerical regime speak to a people, 40 million of whom have smartphones connecting them to an outside world where they can see the freedom and prosperity they seek, but their government cannot or will not deliver?
The protesters are also telling Rouhani’s “reformers,” in power now for five years, that they, too, have failed.
Rouhani’s dilemma? To grow Iran’s economy and improve the quality of life, he needs more foreign investment and more consumer goods. Yet any surge in material prosperity Rouhani delivers is certain to undermine the religious faith undergirding the theocratic regime.
And as any transfer of power to the elected regime has to come at the expense of the clerics and the Guard, Rouhani is not likely to get that power.
Thus, he and his government are likely to continue to fail.
Bottom line: The Islamic Republic of Iran was not established to create a materially prosperous and socially free society, because, in the ayatollah’s theology, such societies, like the USA, are of the devil and corruptive of the people.
Social freedom is irreconcilable with Iranian theocracy.
And Iranian hard-liners, clerical and military, are not going to permit protests demanding Western freedom and material goods, to cause them to commit what they believe would be ideological ѕυιcιdє.
Yet the U.S. and President Trump also face a dilemma.
If as Trump says, we wish the Iranian people well, how do we justify scraping the nuclear deal in which Iranians have placed so much hope, and reimposing the sanctions that will restore the hardships of yesterday?
How does America proclaim herself a friend of the Iranian people, if we are trying to persuade Europeans to abrogate the nuclear accord and reimpose the sanctions that impoverish the Iranian people?
Will we urge the Iranians to rise up and overthrow their regime, as we did the Hungarians in 1956, which resulted in their massacre by Soviet tanks sent into Budapest? Ike’s response: He sent Vice President Nixon to greet the surviving Hungarian patriots fleeing across the Andau Bridge into Austria.
After Desert Storm in 1991, George H.W. Bush urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. When the Shiites did rise up, they, too, were massacred, as our Army from Desert Storm stood by in Kuwait.
If there is an Iranian uprising and it results in a Tiananmen Square slaughter in Tehran, do we really want the U.S., which would not likely intervene to save the patriots, held morally accountable?
The Iranian protests suggest that the Islamic Revolution, after 40 years, is failing the rising generation. It is hard to see how this is not ominous news for the Iranian regime.
As it was not on the side of the Soviets, time is not on the side of the ayatollahs either.
We need not go to war with them. Time will take care of them, too.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: graceseeker on January 08, 2018, 01:04:10 PM
Buchanan

he is Catholic, I think

convert? But anyway.. need more Catholics in politics
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 09, 2018, 12:07:14 PM
 8 January 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/What-Is-Americas-Mission-Now-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/americas-mission-now-128460)
What Is America’s Mission Now?
Monday - January 8, 2018 at 9:29 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Informing Iran, “The U.S. is watching what you do,” Amb. Nikki Haley called an emergency meeting Friday of the Security Council regarding the riots in Iran. The session left her and us looking ridiculous.
France’s ambassador tutored Haley that how nations deal with internal disorders is not the council’s concern. Russia’s ambassador suggested the United Nations should have looked into our Occupy Wall Street clashes and how the Missouri cops handled Ferguson.
Fifty years ago, 100 U.S. cities erupted in flames after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Federal troops were called in. In 1992, Los Angeles suffered the worst U.S. riot of the 20th century, after the LA cops who pummeled Rodney King were acquitted in Simi Valley.
Was our handling of these riots any business of the U.N.?
Conservatives have demanded that the U.N. keep its nose out of our sovereign affairs since its birth in 1946. Do we now accept that the U.N. has authority to oversee internal disturbances inside member countries?
Friday’s session fizzled out after Iran’s ambassador suggested the Security Council might take up the Israeli-Palestinian question or the humanitarian crisis produced by the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen.
The episode exposes a malady of American foreign policy. It lacks consistency, coherence and moral clarity, treats friends and adversaries by separate standards, and is reflexively interventionist.
Thus has America lost much of the near-universal admiration and respect she enjoyed at the close of the Cold War.
This hubristic generation has kicked it all away.

Consider. Is Iran’s handling of these disorders more damnable than the thousands of extrajudicial killings of drug dealers attributed to our Filipino ally Rodrigo Duterte, whom the president says is doing an “unbelievable job”?
And how does it compare with Gen. Abdel el-Sissi’s 2012 violent overthrow of the elected president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, and Sissi’s imprisonment of scores of thousands of followers of the Muslim Brotherhood?
Is Iran really the worst situation in the Middle East today?
Hassan Rouhani is president after winning an election with 57 percent of the vote. Who elected Mohammed bin Salman crown prince and future king of Saudi Arabia?
Vladimir Putin, too, is denounced for crimes against democracy for which our allies get a pass.
In Russia, Christianity is flourishing and candidates are declaring against Putin. Some in the Russian press regularly criticize him.
How is Christianity faring in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan?
It is alleged that Putin’s regime is responsible for the death of several journalists. But there are more journalists behind bars in the jails of our NATO ally Turkey than in any other country in the world.
When does the Magnitsky Act get applied to Turkey?
What the world too often sees is an America that berates its adversaries for sins against our “values,” while giving allies a general absolution if they follow our lead.
A day has not gone by in 18 months that we have not read or heard of elite outrage over the Kremlin attack on “our democracy,” with the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails.
How many even recall the revelation in 2015 that China hacked the personnel files of millions of U.S. government employees, past, present and prospective?
While China persecutes Christians, Russia supports a restoration of Christianity after 70 years of Leninist rule.
In Putin’s Russia, the Communist Party is running a candidate against him. In China, the Communist Party exercises an absolute monopoly of political power and nobody runs against Xi Jinping.
China’s annexation of the Paracel and Spratly Islands and the entire South China Sea is meekly protested, while Russia is endlessly castigated for its bloodless retrieval of a Crimean peninsula that was recognized as Russian territory under the Romanovs.
China, with several times Russia’s economy and 10 times her population, is far the greater challenger to America’s standing as lone superpower. Why, then, this tilt toward China?
Among the reasons U.S. foreign policy lacks consistency and moral clarity is that we Americans no longer agree on what our vital interests are, who our real adversaries are, what our values are, or what a good and Godly country looks like.
Was JFK’s America a better country than Obama’s America?
World War II and the Cold War gave us moral clarity. If you stood against Hitler, even if you were a moral monster like Joseph Stalin, we partnered with you.
From Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946 to the end of the Cold War, if you stood with us against the “Evil Empire” of Reagan’s depiction, even if you were a dictator like Gen. Pinochet or the Shah, you were welcome in the camp of the saints.
But now that a worldwide conversion to democracy is no longer America’s mission in the world, what exactly is our mission?
“Great Britain has lost an empire,” said Dean Acheson in 1962, “but not yet found a role.”
Something of the same may fairly be said of us today.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Tiberius on January 09, 2018, 09:48:47 PM
It would be nice if we had a coherent foreign policy, based on America's true interests.  
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 12, 2018, 09:59:35 AM
Little Rocket Man Wins the Round
Friday - January 12, 2018 at 12:47 am


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By Patrick Buchanan

After a year in which he tested a hydrogen bomb and an ICBM, threatened to destroy the United States, and called President Trump “a dotard,” Kim Jong Un, at the gracious invitation of the president of South Korea, will be sending a skating team to the “Peace Olympics.”

An impressive year for Little Rocket Man.

Thus the most serious nuclear crisis since Nikita Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba appears to have abated. Welcome news, even if the confrontation with Pyongyang has probably only been postponed.

Still, we have been given an opportunity to reassess the 65-year-old Cold War treaty that obligates us to go to war if the North attacks Seoul, and drove us to the brink of war today.

2017 demonstrated that we need a reassessment. For the potential cost of carrying out our commitment is rising exponentially.

Two decades ago, a war on the Korean Peninsula, given the massed Northern artillery on the DMZ, meant thousands of U.S. dead.

Today, with Pyongyang’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, American cities could face Hiroshima-sized strikes, if war breaks out.

What vital U.S. interest is there on the Korean Peninsula that justifies accepting in perpetuity such a risk to our homeland?

We are told that Kim’s diplomacy is designed to split South Korea off from the Americans. And this is undeniably true.

For South Korean President Moon Jae-in is first and foremost responsible for his own people, half of whom are in artillery range of the DMZ. In any new Korean war, his country would suffer most.

And while he surely welcomes the U.S. commitment to fight the North on his country’s behalf as an insurance policy, Moon does not want a second Korean war, and he does not want President Trump making the decision as to whether there shall be one.

Understandably so. He is looking out for South Korea first.

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Yet Moon rightly credits Trump with bringing the North Koreans to the table: “I give President Trump huge credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks, and I’d like to thank him for that.”

But again, what are the U.S. interests there that we should be willing to put at risk of nuclear attack tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Korea and our bases in Asia, and even our great cities, in a war that would otherwise be confined to the Korean Peninsula?

China shares a border with the North, but is not treaty-bound to fight on the North’s behalf. Russia, too, has a border with North Korea, and, with China, was indispensable to saving the North in the 1950-53 war. But Russia is not committed by any treaty to fight for the North.

Why, then, are Americans obligated to be among the first to die in a second Korean War? Why is the defense of the South, with 40 times the economy and twice the population of the North, our eternal duty?

Kim’s drive for a nuclear deterrent is propelled by both fear and calculation. The fear is that the Americans who detest him will do to him and his regime and country what they did to Saddam Hussein.

The calculation is that what Americans fear most, and the one thing that deters them, is nuclear weapons. Once Soviet Russia and Communist China acquired nukes, the Americans never attacked them.

If he can put nuclear weapons on U.S. troops in Korea, U.S. bases in Japan, and U.S. cities, Kim reasons, the Americans will not launch a war on him. Have not recent events proven him right?

Iran has no nuclear weapons and some Americans clamor daily for “regime change” in Tehran. But because Kim has nukes, the Americans appear more anxious to talk. His policy is succeeding.

What he is saying with his nuclear arsenal is: As you Americans have put my regime and country at risk of annihilation, I am going to put your cities at risk. If we go down in your nuclear “fire and fury,” so, too, will millions of Americans.

The whole world is watching how this plays out.

For the American Imperium, our system of alliances, is held together by a credible commitment: If you attack any of our scores of allies, you are at war with the United States.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the South China Sea to Korea and Japan today, the costs and the risks of maintaining the imperium are growing.

With all these promissory notes out there — guarantees to go to war for other nations — one is inevitably going to be called.

And this generation of Americans, unaware of what their grandfathers obligated them to do, will demand to know, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan: What are we over doing there, on the other side of the world?

America First is more than a slogan.

http://buchanan.org/blog/little-rocket-man-wins-round-128478
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 16, 2018, 08:50:42 AM
Trump: In Immigration Debate, Race Matters
Tuesday - January 16, 2018 at 2:39 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
President Trump “said things which were hate-filled, vile and racist. … I cannot believe … any president has ever spoken the words that I … heard our president speak yesterday.”
So wailed Sen. Dick Durbin after departing the White House.
And what caused the minority leader to almost faint dead away?
Trump called Haiti a “s—-hole country,” said Durbin, and then asked why we don’t have more immigrants from neat places “like Norway.”
With that, there erupted one of the great media firestorms of the Trump era. On Martin Luther King Day, it was still blazing.
Trump concedes he may have disparaged Haiti, which, at last check, was not listed among “Best Places to Live” in the Western Hemisphere. Yet Trump insists he did not demean the Haitian people.
Still, by contrasting Norway as a desirable source of immigrants, as opposed to Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, Trump tabled a question that is roiling the West, the answer (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-immigration-debate-race-matters-128528#) to which will decide its fate.
Trump is saying with words, as he has with policies, that in taking in a million people a year, race, religion and national origin matter, if we are to preserve our national unity and national character.
Moreover, on deciding who comes, and who does not, Americans have the sovereign right to discriminate in favor of some continents, countries and cultures, and against others.
Moreover, in stating his own preferences, Trump is in a tradition as old as the Republic.
The original Colonies did not want Catholics here. Ben Franklin feared Pennsylvania was being overrun by stupid Germans:
“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
Just as anti-immigrant parties have arisen in Europe to stem the flood of refugees from the Mideast and Africa, an American Party (“Know-Nothings”) was formed to halt the surge of Irish immigrants during the Potato Famine of 1845-1849.
Lincoln wanted slaves repatriated to Africa. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we had Chinese and Japanese exclusion acts.
(https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
“Californians have properly objected” to Japanese migrants, said V.P. nominee FDR “on the sound basic ground that … the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”
After the Great Migration of Italians, Poles, Jєωs and East Europeans, from 1890 to 1920, the Immigration Act of 1925 established quotas based on the national origins of the American people in 1890, thus favoring Brits, Scots-Irish, Irish and Germans.
Civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, a major figure in Dr. King’s March on Washington, said of the Harding-Coolidge restrictive quotas:
“We favor reducing immigration to nothing … shutting out the Germans … Italians … Hindus … Chinese and even the Negroes from the West Indies. The country is suffering from immigration indigestion (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-immigration-debate-race-matters-128528#).”
The Senate floor leader of the 1965 Immigration Act addressed what were then regarded as valid concerns about the future racial and ethnic composition of the country. Sen. Edward Kennedy pledged:
“Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually … the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. … S. 500 will not inundate America with immigrants from … the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia.”
What Kennedy assured America would not happen, did happen.
Today, issues of immigration and race are tearing countries and continents apart. There are anti-immigrant parties in every nation in Europe. Turkey is being bribed to keep Syrian refugees out of Europe.
Boatloads of Africans from Libya are being turned back in the Med. After building a wall to keep them out, Bibi Netanyahu has told “illegal aliens” from Africa: Get out of Israel by March, or go to jail.
Angela Merkel’s Party may have suffered irreparable damage when she let a million Mideast refugees in. The larger concentrations of Arabs, Africans and Turks in Britain, France and Germany are not assimilating. Central European nations are sealing borders.
Europe fears a future in which the continent, with its shrinking numbers of native-born, is swamped by peoples from the Third World.
Yet the future alarmed Europeans are resisting is a future U.S. elites have embraced. Among the reasons, endless mass migration here means the demographic death of the GOP.
In U.S. presidential elections, persons of color whose roots are in Asia, Africa and Latin America vote 4-1 Democratic, and against the candidates favored by American’s vanishing white majority. Not for the first time, liberal ideology comports precisely with liberal interests.
Mass immigration means an America in 2050 with no core majority, made up of minorities of every race, color, religion and culture on earth, a continent-wide replica of the wonderful diversity we see today in the U.N. General Assembly.
Such a country has never existed before. Are we on the Yellow Brick Road to the new Utopia — or on the path to national ѕυιcιdє?

 (https://paypal.me/lindamuller)
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I predict that by 2050 America will resemble Haiti and by that time will have ceased as a world power.
All because the Democrats want votes to win every election.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 19, 2018, 06:39:44 PM
A US-Turkish Clash in Syria?

Thursday - January 18, 2018 at 9:01 PM
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By Patrick J. Buchanan

The war for dominance in the Middle East, following the crushing of ISIS, appears about to commence in Syria — with NATO allies America and Turkey on opposing sides.

Turkey is moving armor and troops south to Syria’s border enclave of Afrin, occupied by Kurds, to drive them out, and then drive the Syrian Kurds out of Manbij further south as well.

Says President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “We will destroy all terror nests, one by one, in Syria, starting from Afrin and Manbij.”

For Erdogan, the Kurdish YPG, the major U.S. ally in Syria, is an arm of the Kurdish PKK in Turkey, which we and the Turks have designated as a terrorist organization.

While the Kurds were our most effective allies against ISIS in Syria, Turkey views them as a mortal peril and intends to deal with that threat.

If Erdogan is serious, a clash with the U.S. is coming, as our Kurdish allies occupy most of Syria’s border with Turkey.

Moreover, the U.S. has announced plans to create a 30,000-man Border Security Force of Kurds and Arabs to keep ISIS out of Syria.

Erdogan has branded this BSF a “terror army,” and President Bashar Assad of Syria has called BSF members “traitors.”

This U.S. plan to create a BSF inside Syria, Damascus declared, “represents a blatant attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity and unity of Syria, and a flagrant violation of international law.”

Does not the Syrian government have a point?

Now that ISIS has been driven out of Raqqa and Syria, by what authority do U.S. forces remain to arm troops to keep the Damascus government from reimposing its authority on its own territory?

Secretary of State Tillerson gave Syria the news Wednesday.

The U.S. troop commitment to Syria, he said, is now open-ended.

Our goals: Guarantee al-Qaida and ISIS do not return and set up sanctuary; cope with rising Iranian influence in Damascus; and pursue the removal of Bashar Assad’s ruthless regime.

But who authorized this strategic commitment, of indefinite duration, in Syria, when near two decades in Afghanistan have failed to secure that nation against the return of al-Qaida and ISIS?


Again and again, the American people have said they do not want to be dragged into Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr. Donald Trump won the presidency on a promise of no more unnecessary wars.

Have the American people been had again?

Will they support a clash with NATO ally Turkey, to keep armed Kurds on Turkey’s border, when the Turks regard them as terrorists?

Are we prepared for a shooting war with a Syrian army, backed by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to hold onto a fourth of Syria’s territory in alliance with Kurds?

The U.S. coalition in Syria said this week the BSF will be built up “over the next several years” and “be stationed along the borders … to include portions of the Euphrates river valley and international borders to the east and north.”

Remarkable: A U.S.-created border army is going to occupy and control long stretches of Syria’s borders with Turkey and Iraq, over Syria’s objections. And the U.S. military will stand behind the BSF.

Are the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria really up to that task, should the Turks decide to cleanse the Syrian border of Kurds, or should the Syrian regime decide to take back territory occupied by the Kurds?

Who sanctioned this commitment to a new army, which, if Syria and its Russian and Iranian allies, and the Turks, do not all back down, risks a major U.S. war with no allies but the Kurds?

As for Syria’s Kurds casting their lot with the Americans, one wonders: Did they not observe what happened when their Iraqi cousins, after helping us drive ISIS out of Mosul, were themselves driven out of Kirkuk by the Iraqi army, as their U.S. allies watched?

In the six-year Syrian cινιℓ ωαr, which may be about to enter a new phase, America faces a familiar situation.

While our “allies” and adversaries have vital interests there, we do not. The Assads have been in power for the lifetime of most Americans. And we Americans have never shown a desire to fight there.

Assad has a vital interest: preservation of his family regime and the reunification of his country. The Turks have a vital interest in keeping armed Kurds out of their border regions adjacent to their own Kurdish minority, which seeks greater independence.

The Israelis and Saudi royals want the U.S. to keep Iran from securing a land bridge from Tehran to Damascus to Lebanon.

The U.S. War Party wants us to smash Iran and remain in the Middle East forever to assure the hegemony of its favorites.

Have the generals taking us into Syria told the president how and when, if ever, they plan to get us out?


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I cannot believe by this time Pat does not know that ISSIS is a mercenary army that are highly supported by the US
Israel, and the coalition forces.  



Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 23, 2018, 09:47:05 AM
Is Democracy on the Way Down?
Tuesday - January 23, 2018 at 12:09 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country,” mocked China’s official new agency.
“However, what’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system.”
There is a worldwide audience for what Beijing had to say about the shutdown of the U.S. government, for there is truth in it.
According to Freedom House, democracy has been in decline for a dozen years. Less and less do nations look to the world’s greatest democracy, the United States, as a model of the system to best preserve and protect what is most precious to them.
China may be a single-party Communist state that restricts freedom of speech, religion and the press, the defining marks of democracy. Yet Beijing has delivered what makes the Chinese people proud — a superpower nation to rival the mighty United States.
Chinese citizens appear willing to pay, in restricted freedoms, the price of national greatness no modern Chinese generation had ever known.
The same appears true of the Russian people.
After the humiliation of the Boris Yeltsin era, Russians rallied to Vladimir Putin, an autocrat 18 years in power, for having retrieved Crimea and restored Russia to a great power that can stand up to the Americans.

Consider those “illiberal” democracies of Central and Eastern Europe — the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Hungary.
To preserve their national character and identity, all have chosen to refuse refugees from Africa and the Middle East. And if this does not comport with the liberal democratic values of the EU, so be it.
President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that if the French had voted at the time Britain did, for Brexit, France, too, might have voted to get out of the European Union.
Why? One reason, and, no, it’s not the economy, stupid.
It is the tribe. As the English wished to remain English, and voted to regain control of their borders, so the French wish to remain who they were and are — whether ruled by a Louis XIV, Napoleon, General de Gaulle or the Fifth Republic.
In these countries, the common denominator (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-democracy-on-the-way-down-128573#) is that the nation comes first, and that political system is best which best protects and preserves the unique character of the nation.
Nationalism trumps democratism.
Recall. Donald Trump was not elected because he promised to make America more democratic, but to “make America great again.”
As for the sacred First Amendment right to democratic protest, Trump got a roaring ovation for declaring that NFL players who “take a knee” during the national anthem should be kicked off the field and off the team.
Circling back to the government shutdown, what, at root, was that all about, if not national identity.
The Democrats who refused to vote to keep the government open did not object to anything in the Republican bill. They objected to what was not in the bill: amnesty for the illegal immigrants known as “dreamers.” It was all about who gets to become an American.
And what is the divisive issue of “open borders” immigration all about, if not the future ethnic composition of the United States?
Consider a few of the issues that have convulsed our country in recent months. White cops. The NFL players’ protests. Desecration and removal of statues of Columbus, Lee, Jackson. The Charlottesville battle of antifa versus the “alt-right.” The “s—-hole countries” crack of the president. The weeklong TV tirade of rants against the “racist” Trump.
Are they not all really issues of race, culture and identity?
On campuses, leftist students and faculty protest the presence of right-wing speakers, whom they identify as fascists, racists and homophobes. To radicals, there is no right to preach hate, as they see it, for to permit that is to ensure that hate spreads and flourishes.
What the left is saying is this. Our idea of a moral society is one of maximum ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, and, in the burying of the old wicked America, and the creation of a new better America, we will not accord evil ideas equal rights.
In the old rendering, “Error has no rights!”
That fifth of mankind that is Islamic follows a similar logic.
As there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, why would we allow inside our societies and nations the propagation of false faiths like Christianity that must inevitably lead to the damnation of many of our children?
“The best test of truth,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
But in our world, more and more people believe, and rightly so, that truth exists independent of whether people accept or reject it.
And there are matters, like the preservation of a unique (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-democracy-on-the-way-down-128573#) people and nation, that are too important to be left to temporary majorities to decide.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 25, 2018, 09:12:58 PM
 25 January 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/In-a-Trump-Hunt-Beware-the-Perjury-Trap-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-hunt-beware-perjury-trap-128607)
In a Trump Hunt, Beware the Perjury Trap
Thursday - January 25, 2018 at 9:21 pm

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By Patrick Buchanan
Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it … as soon as possible. … under oath, absolutely.”
On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room after the 38-7 rout of the Vikings put them in the Super Bowl.
If the president’s legal team lets Trump sit for hours answering Mueller’s agents, they should be disbarred for malpractice.
For what Mueller is running here is not, as Trump suggests, a “witch hunt.” It is a Trump hunt.
After 18 months investigating Trumpian “collusion” with Putin’s Russia in hacking the DNC’s and John Podesta’s emails, the FBI has hit a stone wall. Failing to get Trump for collusion, the fallback position is to charge him with obstruction of justice. As a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, the tactic is understandable.
Mueller’s problem: He has no perjury charge to go with it. And the heart of his obstruction case, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.
Consider what is now known of how Comey and the FBI set about ensuring Hillary Clinton would not be indicted for using a private email (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-hunt-beware-perjury-trap-128607#) server to transmit national security (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-hunt-beware-perjury-trap-128607#) secrets.
The first draft of Comey’s statement calling for no indictment was prepared before 17 witnesses, and Hillary, were even interviewed.
Comey’s initial draft charged Clinton with “gross negligence,” the requirement for indictment. But his team softened that charge in subsequent drafts to read, “extreme carelessness.”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others, appears to have known in advance an exoneration of Clinton was baked in the cake. Yet Comey testified otherwise.
Also edited out of Comey’s statement was that Hillary, while abroad, communicated with then-President Obama, who had to see that her message came through a private server. Yet Obama told the nation he only learned Hillary had been using a private server at the same time the public did.
A trial of Hillary would have meant Obama in the witness chair being asked, “What did you know, sir, and when did you know it?”

More information has also been unearthed about FBI collusion with British spy Christopher Steele, who worked up — for Fusion GPS, the dirt-divers of the Clinton campaign — the Steele dossier detailing Trump’s ties to Russia and alleged frolics with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
While the Steele dossier was shopped around town to the media, which, unable to substantiate its lurid and sensational charges, declined to publish them, Comey’s FBI went all in.
Not only did the Steele dossier apparently trigger a wider FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, it served as the basis of FBI requests for FISA court warrants (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-hunt-beware-perjury-trap-128607#) to put on Trump the kind of full-court press J. Edgar Hoover put on Dr. King for the Kennedys and LBJ.
Amazing. Oppo-research dirt, unsourced and unsubstantiated, dredged up by a foreign spy with Kremlin contacts, is utilized by our FBI to potentially propel an investigation to destroy a major U.S. presidential candidate. And the Beltway media regard it as a distraction.
An aggressive Republican Party on the Hill, however, has forced the FBI to cough up docuмents that are casting the work of Comey’s cohorts in an ever more partisan and sinister light.
This cabal appears to have set goals of protecting Obama, clearing Hillary, defeating Trump, and bringing down the new president the people had elected, before he had even taken his oath.
Not exactly normal business for our legendary FBI.
What have these people done to the reputation of their agency when congressmen not given to intemperate speech are using words like “criminal,” “conspiracy,” “corruption” and “coup” to describe what they are discovering went on in the FBI executive chambers?
Bob Mueller, who inherited this investigation, is sitting on an IED because of what went on before he got there. Mueller needs to file his charges before his own investigation becomes the subject of a Justice Department investigation by a special counsel.
As for Trump, he should not sit for any extended interview by FBI agents whose questions will be crafted by prosecutors to steer our disputatious president into challenging or contradicting the sworn testimony of other witnesses.
This a perjury trap.
Let the special counsel submit his questions in writing, and let Trump submit his answers in writing.
At bottom, this is a political issue, an issue of power, an issue of whether the Trump revolution will be dethroned by the deep state it was sent to this capital to corral and contain.
If Trump is guilty of attempted obstruction, it appears to be not of justice, but obstruction of an injustice being perpetrated against him.
Trump should be in no hurry to respond to Mueller, for time no longer appears to be on Mueller’s side.
 (https://paypal.me/lindamuller)
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: graceseeker on January 26, 2018, 02:35:34 PM
I read these

interesting
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 29, 2018, 08:44:50 PM
 
Too Many Wars. Too Many Enemies
Monday - January 29, 2018 at 8:22 pm



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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week’s end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history.
Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded.
Erdogan’s foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the U.S. to end its support of the Kurds, who control the Syrian border with Turkey east of the Euphrates, all the way to Iraq.
If the Turks attack Manbij, the U.S. will face a choice: Stand by our Kurdish allies and resist the Turks, or abandon the Kurds.
Should the U.S. let the Turks drive the Kurds out of Manbij and the entire Syrian border area with Turkey, as Erdogan threatens, U.S. credibility would suffer a blow from which it would not soon recover.
But to stand with the Kurds and oppose Erdogan’s forces could mean a crackup of NATO and loss of U.S. bases inside Turkey, including the air base at Incirlik.
Turkey also sits astride the Dardanelles entrance to the Black Sea. NATO’s loss of Turkey would thus be a triumph for Vladimir Putin, who gave Ankara the green light to cleanse the Kurds from Afrin.
Yet Syria is but one of many challenges to U.S. foreign policy.
The Winter Olympics in South Korea may have taken the threat of a North Korean ICBM that could hit the U.S. out of the news. But no one believes that threat is behind us.
Last week, China charged that the USS Hopper, a guided missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Scarborough Shoal, a reef in the South China Sea claimed by Beijing, though it is far closer to Luzon in the Philippines. The destroyer, says China, was chased off by one of her frigates. If we continue to contest China’s territorial claims with U.S. warships, a clash is inevitable.
In a similar incident Monday, a Russian military jet came within five feet of a U.S. Navy EP-3 Orion surveillance plane in international airspace over the Black Sea, forcing the Navy plane to end its mission.
U.S. relations with Cold War ally Pakistan are at rock bottom. In his first tweet of 2018, President Trump charged Pakistan with being a duplicitous and false friend.
“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
(https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
As for America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, now in its 17th year, the end is nowhere on the horizon.
A week ago, the International Hotel in Kabul was attacked and held for 13 hours by Taliban gunmen who killed 40. Midweek, a Save the Children facility in Jalalabad was attacked by ISIS, creating panic among aid workers across the country.
Saturday, an ambulance exploded in Kabul, killing 103 people and wounding 235. Monday, Islamic State militants attacked Afghan soldiers guarding a military academy in Kabul. With the fighting season two months off, U.S. troops will not soon be departing.
If Pakistan is indeed providing sanctuary for the terrorists of the Haqqani network, how does this war end successfully for the United States?
Last week, in a friendly fire incident, the U.S.-led coalition killed 10 Iraqi soldiers. The Iraq war began 15 years ago.
Yet another war, where the humanitarian crisis rivals Syria, continues on the Arabian Peninsula. There, a Saudi air, sea and land blockade that threatens the Yemeni people with starvation has failed to dislodge Houthi rebels who seized the capital Sanaa three years ago.
This weekend brought news that secessionist rebels, backed by the United Arab Emirates, have seized power in Yemen’s southern port of Aden, from the Saudi-backed Hadi regime fighting the Houthis.
These rebels seek to split the country, as it was before 1990.
Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE appear to be backing different horses in this tribal-civil-sectarian war into which America has been drawn.
There are other wars — Somalia, Libya, Ukraine — where the U.S. is taking sides, sending arms, training troops, flying missions.
Like the Romans, we have become an empire, committed to fight for scores of nations, with troops on every continent, and forces in combat operations of which the American people are only vaguely aware.
“I didn’t know there were 1,000 troops in Niger,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham when four Green Berets were killed there. “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing.”
No, we don’t, Senator.
As in all empires, power is passing to the generals.
And what causes the greatest angst today in the imperial city?
Fear that a four-page memo worked up in the House Judiciary Committee may discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia-gate.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 01, 2018, 07:09:05 PM
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A Never-Trump Press in Near Panic
Thursday - February 1, 2018 at 7:26 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“All the News That’s Fit to Print” proclaims the masthead of The New York Times. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” echoes The Washington Post.
“The people have a right to know,” the professors at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism hammered into us in 1962. “Trust the people,” we were admonished.
Explain then this hysteria, this panic in the press over the release of a four-page memo detailing one congressional committee’s rendering of how Trump-hate spawned an FBI investigation of Republican candidate and President Donald Trump.
What is the press corps afraid of? For it has not ceased keening and caterwauling that this memo must not see the light of day.
Do the media not trust the people? Can Americans not handle the truth?
Is this the same press corps that celebrates “The Post,” lionizing Kay Graham for publishing the Pentagon Papers, top-secret docuмents charging the “Best and the Brightest” of the JFK-LBJ era with lying us into Vietnam?
Why are the media demanding a “safe space” for us all, so we will not be harmed by reading or hearing what the memo says?
Security secrets will be compromised, we are warned.
Really? Would the House Intelligence Committee majority vote (http://buchanan.org/blog/never-trump-press-near-panic-128652#) to expose secrets that merit protection? Would Speaker Paul Ryan and White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, who have read and approved the release of the memo, go along with that?
Is Gen. Kelly not a proven patriot, many times over?
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff, who earlier warned of a threat to national security, now seems ready to settle for equal time. If the majority memo is released, says Schiff, the minority version of events should be released.
Schiff is right. It should be, along with the backup behind both.
(https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
This week, however, FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein slipped into the White House to plead with Kelly to keep the Republican memo secret. Wednesday, both went public to warn the White House against doing what Trump said he was going to do.
This is defiant insubordination. And it is not unfair to ask if Rosenstein and Wray are more alarmed about some threat to the national security than they are about the exposure of misconduct in their own agencies.
The memo is to be released Friday. Leaks suggest what it contends:
That the Russiagate investigation of Trump was propelled by a “dossier” of lies and unproven allegations of squalid conduct in Moscow and Trumpian collusion with Russia.
Who prepared the dossier?
The leading dirt-diver hired by the Clinton campaign, former British spy Christopher Steele. In accuмulating his Russian dirt, Steele was spoon-fed by old comrades in the Kremlin’s security apparatus.
Not only did the FBI use this dirt to launch a full investigation of Trump, the bureau apparently used it to convince a FISA court judge to give the FBI a warrant to surveil and wiretap the Trump campaign.
If true, the highest levels of the FBI colluded with a British spy digging dirt for Hillary to ruin the opposition candidate, and, having failed, to bring down an elected president.
Is this not something we have a right to know? Should it be covered up to protect those at the FBI who may have engaged in something like this?
“Now they are investigating the investigators!” comes the wail of the media. Well, yes, they are, and, from the evidence, about time.
In this divided capital, there are warring narratives.
The first is that Trump was compromised by the Russians and colluded with them to hack the DNC and Clinton campaign to destroy her candidacy. After 18 months, the FBI and Robert Mueller probes have failed to demonstrate this.
The second narrative is now ascendant. It is this:
In mid-2016, James Comey and an FBI cabal, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, lead investigator Peter Strzok and his FBI paramour Lisa Page, decided Clinton must not be indicted in the server scandal, as that would make Trump president.
So they colluded and put the fix in.
This alleged conspiracy is being investigated by the FBI inspector general. His findings may explain last week’s sudden resignation of McCabe and last summer’s ouster of Strzok from the Mueller probe.
If true, this conspiracy to give Hillary a pass on her “gross negligence” in handling secrets, and take down Trump based on dirt dug up by hirelings of the Clinton campaign would make the Watergate break-in appear by comparison to be a prank.
Here we may have hit the reason for the panic in the media.
Trump-haters in the press may be terrified that the memo may credibly demonstrate that the “Deplorables” were right, that the elite media have been had, that they were exploited and used by the “deep state,” that they let their detestation of Trump so blind them to reality that they made fools of themselves, and that they credited with high nobility a major conspiracy to overthrow an elected president of the United States.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 05, 2018, 07:18:55 PM

Nunes Duels the Deep State
Monday - February 5, 2018 at 7:19 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

That memo worked up in the Intel Committee of Chairman Devin Nunes may not have sunk the Mueller investigation, but from the sound of the secondary explosions, this torpedo was no dud.

The critical charge:

To persuade a FISA court to issue a warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page, the FBI relied on a dossier produced by a Trump-hating British spy, who was using old Kremlin contacts, while being paid to dig up dirt on Donald Trump by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Not only were the Clinton campaign and DNC paying the spy, Christopher Steele, for his dirt-diving, the FBI put Steele on its own payroll, until they caught him lying about leaking to the media.

In their requests for search warrants, the FBI never told the FISA court judge their primary source was a 35-page dossier delivered by Steele that their own Director James Comey described as “salacious and unverified.”

From the Nunes memo, there was, at the highest level of the FBI, a cabal determined to derail Trump and elect Clinton. Heading the cabal was Comey, who made the call to exonerate Hillary of criminal charges for imperiling national security secrets, even before his own FBI investigation was concluded.

Assisting Comey was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife, running for a Virginia state senate seat, received a windfall of $467,000 in contributions from Clinton bundler Terry McAuliffe.

Last week, McCabe was discharged from the FBI. Seems that in late September 2016, he learned from his New York field office that it was sitting on a trove of emails between Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, which potentially contained security secrets.

Not until late October did Comey inform Congress of what deputy McCabe had known a month earlier.

Other FBI plotters were Peter Strzok, chief investigator in both the Clinton email server scandal and Russiagate, and his FBI girlfriend, Lisa Page. Both were ousted from the Mueller investigation when their anti-Trump bias and behavior were exposed last summer.

Filling out the starting five was Bruce Ohr, associate deputy attorney general under Loretta Lynch. In 2016, Ohr’s wife was working for Fusion GPS, the oppo research arm of the Clinton campaign, and Bruce was in direct contact with Steele.

Now virtually all of this went down before Robert Mueller was named special counsel. But the poisoned roots of the Russiagate investigation and the bristling hostility of the investigators to Trump must cast a cloud of suspicion over whatever charges Mueller will bring.

Now another head may be about to fall, that of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

If Mueller has given up trying to prove Trump collusion with the Kremlin and moved on to obstruction of justice charges, Rosenstein moves into the crosshairs.

For the heart of any obstruction scenario is Trump’s firing of James Comey and his boasting about why he did it.

But not only did Rosenstein discuss with Trump the firing of Comey, he went back to Justice to produce the docuмent to justify what the president had decided to do.

How can Rosenstein oversee Mueller’s investigation into the firing of James Comey when he was a witness to and a participant in the firing of James Comey?

The Roman poet Juvenal’s question comes to mind. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchmen?

Consider where we are. Mueller is investigating alleged Trump collusion with Russia, and the White House is all lawyered up.

The House intel committee is investigating Clinton-FBI collusion to defeat Trump and break his presidency. FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz is looking into whether the fix was in to give Hillary a pass in the probe of her email server.

Comey has been fired, his deputy McCabe removed, his chief investigator Strzok ousted by Mueller for bigoted anti-Trump behavior, alongside his FBI paramour, Page. Bruce Ohr has been demoted for colluding with Steele, who was caught lying to the FBI and fired, and for his wife’s role in Fusion GPS, which was being paid to dig up dirt on Trump for Clinton’s campaign.

If Americans are losing confidence in the FBI, whose fault is that? Is there not evidence that a hubristic cadre at the apex of the FBI — Comey, McCabe, Strzok foremost among them — decided the Republic must be saved from Trump and, should Hillary fail, they would step in and move to abort the Trump presidency at birth?

To the deep state, the higher interests of the American people almost always coincide with their own.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 09, 2018, 08:01:28 AM

8
February 2018 Trump — Middle American Radical
Trump — Middle American Radical
Thursday - February 8, 2018 at 1:18 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan

President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party.

Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley.

In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart.

Who, then, and what is Donald Trump?

In a Federalist essay, “Trump Isn’t a Conservative — And That’s a Good Thing,” Frank Cannon comes close to the mark.

Trump, he writes, “would more accurately be described as a ‘radical anti-progressive'” who is “at war with the progressives who have co-opted American civil society.” Moreover, Trump “is willing to go further than any other previous conservative to defeat them.”

Many “elite conservatives,” writes Cannon, believe the “bedrock institutions” they treasure are “not subject to the same infectious politicization to which the rest of society has succuмbed.”

This belief is naive, says Cannon, “ridiculous on its face.”

“Radical anti-progressives” recognize that many institutions — the academy, media, entertainment and the courts — have been co-opted and corrupted by the left. And as these institutions are not what they once were, they no longer deserve the respect they once had.

Yet most conservatives will only go so far in criticizing these institutions. We see this in how cradle Catholics find it difficult to criticize the Church in which they were birthed and raised, despite scandals and alterations in the liturgy and doctrine.

Trump sees many institutions as fortresses lately captured by radical progressives that must be attacked and besieged if they are to be recaptured and liberated. Cannon deals with three such politicized institutions: the media, the NFL and the courts.

Trump does not attack freedom of the press but rather the moral authority and legitimacy of co-opted media institutions. It is what CNN has become, not what CNN was, that Trump disrespects.



These people are political enemies posturing as journalists who create “fake news” to destroy me, says Trump. Enraged media, responding, reveal themselves to be not far removed from what Trump says they are.

And, since Trump, media credibility has plummeted.

Before 2016, the NFL was an untouchable. When the league demanded that North Carolina accept the radical transgender agenda or face NFL sanctions, the Tar Heel State capitulated. When Arizona declined to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday in 1990, the NFL took away the Super Bowl. The Sun State caved.

This year, the league demanded respect for the beliefs and behavior of NFL players insulting Old Glory by “taking a knee” during the national anthem.

Many conservative politicians and commentators, fearing the NFL’s almost mythic popularity in Middle America, remained mute.

But believing instinctively America would side with him, Trump delivered a full-throated defense of the flag and called for kicking the kneelers off the field, out of the game, and off the team.

“Fire them!” Trump bellowed.

And Trump triumphed. The NFL lost fans and viewers. The players ended the protests. No one took a knee at the Super Bowl.

Before Trump, the FBI was sacrosanct. But Trump savaged an insiders’ cabal at the top of the FBI he saw as having plotted to defeat him.

Trump has not attacked an independent judiciary, but courts like the Ninth Circuit, controlled by progressives and abusing their offices to advance progressive goals, and federal judges using lifetime tenure and political immunity to usurp powers that belong to the president — on immigration, for example.

Among the reasons Congress is disrespected is that it let the Supreme Court seize its power over social policy and convert itself into a judicial dictatorship — above Congress.

Trump is no Beltway conservative, writes Cannon.

“Trump doesn’t play by these ridiculous rules designed to keep conservatives stuck in a perpetual state of losing — a made-for-CNN version of the undefeated Harlem Globetrotters versus the winless Washington Generals. Trump instead seeks to fight and delegitimize any institution the Left has captured, and rebuild it from the ground up.”

The Trump supporters who most relish the wars he is waging are the “Middle American Radicals,” of whom my columnist-colleague and late friend Sam Francis used to write.

There was a time such as today before in America.

After World War II, as it became clear our long-ruling liberal elites had blundered horribly in trusting Stalin, patriots arose to cleanse our institutions of treason and its fellow travelers.

The Hollywood Ten were exposed and went to jail. Nixon nailed Alger Hiss. Truman used the Smith Act to shut down Stalin’s subsidiary, the Communist Party USA. Spies in the atom bomb program were run down. The Rosenbergs went to the electric chair.

Liberals call it the “Red Scare.” And they are right to do so.

For when the patriots of the Greatest Generation like Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy came home from the war and went after them, the nation’s Reds had never been so scared in their entire lives.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 12, 2018, 08:27:33 PM
 12 February 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-syria-flag-wall-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/us-sucked-syrias-war-128732)
Is US Being Sucked Into Syria’s War?
Monday - February 12, 2018 at 8:15 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed.
Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran’s hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan Heights, and was shot down by an Apache helicopter.
Israel seized upon this to send F-16s to strike the airfield whence the drone originated. Returning home, an F-16 was hit and crashed, unleashing the most devastating Israeli attack in decades on Syria. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu says a dozen Syrian and Iranian bases and antiaircraft positions were struck.
Monday’s headline on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page blared:
“The Iran-Israel War Flares Up: The fight is over a Qods Force presence on the Syria-Israeli border. How will the U.S. respond?”
Op-ed writers Tony Badran and Jonathan Schanzer, both from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, closed thus:
“The Pentagon and State Department have already condemned Iran and thrown their support behind Israel. The question now is whether the Trump administration will go further. … Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (has) affirmed that the U.S. seeks not only to ensure its allies’ security but to deny Iran its ‘dreams of a northern arch’ from Tehran to Beirut. A good way to achieve both objectives would be back Israel’s response to Iran’s aggression — now and in the future.”
The FDD is an annex of the Israeli lobby and a charter member of the War Party.
Chagai Tzuriel, who heads the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, echoed the FDD: “If you (Americans) are committed to countering Iran in the region, then you must do so in Syria — first.”
Our orders have been cut.
Iran has dismissed as “lies” and “ridiculous” the charge that it sent the drone into Israeli airspace.
If Tehran did, it would be an act of monumental stupidity. Not only did the drone bring devastating Israeli reprisals against Syria and embarrass Iran’s ally Russia, it brought attacks on Russian-provided and possibly Russian-manned air defenses.
Moreover, in recent months Iranian policy — suspending patrol boat harassment of U.S. warships — appears crafted to ease tensions and provide no new causes for Trump to abandon the nuclear deal Prime Minister Hassan Rouhani regards as his legacy.
Indeed, why would Iran, which, with Assad, Russia and Hezbollah, is among the victors in Syria’s six-year cινιℓ ωαr, wish to reignite the bloodletting and bring Israeli and U.S. firepower in on the other side?

In Syria’s southeast, another incident a week ago may portend an indefinite U.S. stay in that broken and bleeding country.
To recapture oil fields lost in the war, forces backed by Assad crossed the Euphrates into territory taken from ISIS by the U.S. and our Kurd allies. The U.S. response was a barrage of air and artillery strikes that killed 100 soldiers.
What this signals is that, though ISIS has been all but evicted from Syria, the U.S. intends to retain that fourth of Syria as a bargaining chip in negotiations.
In the northwest, Turkey has sent its Syrian allies to attack Afrin and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened Manbij, 80 miles to the east, where U.S. troops commingle with the Kurd defenders and U.S. generals were visible last week.
Midweek, Erdogan exploded: “(The Americans) tell us, ‘Don’t come to Manbij.’ We will come to Manbij to hand over these territories to their rightful owners.”
The U.S. and Turkey, allies for six decades, with the largest armies in NATO, may soon be staring down each other’s gun barrels.
Has President Trump thought through where we are going with this deepening commitment in Syria, where we have only 2,000 troops and no allies but the Kurds, while on the other side is the Syrian army, Hezbollah, Russia and Iran, and Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Clearly, we have an obligation not to abandon the Kurds, who took most of the casualties in liberating eastern Syria from ISIS. And we have a strategic interest in not losing Turkey as an ally.
But this calls for active diplomacy, not military action.
And now that the rebels have been defeated and the cινιℓ ωαr is almost over, what would be the cost and what would be the prospects of fighting a new and wider war? What would victory look like?
Bibi and the FDD want to see U.S. power deployed alongside that of Israel, against Iran, Assad and Hezbollah. But while Israel’s interests are clear, what would be the U.S. vital interest?
What outcome would justify another U.S. war in a region where all the previous wars in this century have left us bleeding, bankrupt, divided and disillusioned?
When he was running, Donald Trump seemed to understand this.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: graceseeker on February 13, 2018, 04:10:09 PM
copied to read later

But all this talk about big people

what about the little people?

sigh

I thought that was what the 16 campaign was all about.. I do like how Trump is focusing on the rural folks who have many problems city folk don't u/stand...

I hate all the big spending, though... hate it... I want small gov... the closer we get to no government, the better
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 16, 2018, 05:19:20 PM
 15 February 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-gun-youth-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/motives-behind-massacre-128747)
The Motives Behind the Massacre
Thursday - February 15, 2018 at 11:55 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Enough is enough!” “This can’t go on!” “This has to stop!”
These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before.
Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such slaughters are present and abundant in American society.
And what can stop a man full of hate, who has ceased to care about his life and is willing to end it, from getting a weapon in a country of 300 million guns and killing as many as he can in a public place before the police arrive?
An act of “absolute pure evil,” said Gov. Rick Scott, of the atrocity that took 17 lives and left a dozen more wounded. And evil is the right word.
While this massacre may be a product of mental illness, it is surely a product of moral depravity. For this was premeditated and plotted, done in copycat style to the mass killings to which this country has become all too accustomed.
Nikolas Cruz thought this through. He knew it was Valentine’s Day. He brought his fully loaded AR-15 with extra magazines and smoke grenades to the school that had expelled him. He set off a fire alarm, knowing it would bring students rushing into crowded halls where they would be easy to kill. He then escaped by mixing in with fleeing students.
The first ingredient then was an icy indifference toward human life and a willingness to slaughter former fellow students to deliver payback for whatever it was Cruz believed had been done to him at Douglas High.
In his case, the conscience was dead, or was buried beneath hatred, rage or resentment at those succeeding where he had failed. He had been rejected, cast aside, expelled. This would be his revenge, and it would be something for Douglas High and the nation to see — and never forget.
Indeed, it seems a common denominator of the atrocities to which we have been witness in recent years is that the perpetrators are nobodies who wish to die as somebodies.

If a sense of grievance against those perceived to have injured them is the goad that drives misfits like Cruz to mass murder, the magnet that draws them to it is infamy. Infamy is their shortcut to immortality.
From the killings in Columbine to Dylann Roof’s murder of black parishioners at the Charleston Church, from the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando to the slaughter of first-graders in Newtown, to Las Vegas last October where Stephen Paddock, firing from an upper floor of the Mandalay Bay, shot dead 58 people and wounded hundreds at a country music festival — these atrocities enter the social and cultural history of the nation. And those who carry them out achieve a recognition few Americans ever know. Charles Whitman, shooting 47 people from that Texas tower in 1966, is the original model.
Evil has its own hierarchy of rewards. Perhaps the most famous man of the 20th century was Hitler, with Stalin and Mao among his leading rivals.
Some of these individuals who seek to “go out” this way take their own lives when the responders arrive, or they commit “ѕυιcιdє by cop” and end their lives in a shootout. Others, Cruz among them, prefer to star in court, so the world can see who they are. And the commentators and TV cameras will again give them what they crave: massive publicity.
And we can’t change this. As soon as the story broke, the cameras came running, and we watched another staging of the familiar drama — the patrol cars, cops in body armor, ambulances, students running in panic or walking in line, talking TV heads demanding to know why the cowards in Congress won’t vote to outlaw AR-15s.
Yet, among the reasons gun-owners prize the AR-15 is that, not only in movies and TV shows is it the hero’s — and the villain’s — weapon of choice, but in real life, these are the kinds of rifles carried by the America’s most-admired warriors.
They are the modern version of muskets over the fireplace.
Another factor helps to explain what happened Wednesday: We are a formerly Christian society in an advanced state of decomposition.
Nikolas Cruz was a product of broken families. He was adopted. Both adoptive parents had died. Where did he get his ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? Before the Death of God and repeal of the Ten Commandments, in those dark old days, the 1950s, atrocities common now were almost nonexistent.
One imagines Nikolas sitting alone, watching coverage of the Las Vegas shooting, and thinking, “Why not? What have I got to lose? If this life is so miserable and unlikely to get better, why not go out, spectacularly, like that? If I did, they would remember who I was and what I did for the rest of their lives.”
And, so, regrettably, we shall.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 20, 2018, 09:53:23 AM
Is That Russia Troll Farm an Act of War?
Tuesday - February 20, 2018 at 12:25 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
According to the indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian trolls, operating out of St. Petersburg, took American identities on social media and became players in our 2016 election.
On divisive racial and religious issues, the trolls took both sides. In the presidential election, the trolls favored Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Donald Trump, and almost never Hillary Clinton.
One imaginative Russian troll urged Trumpsters to dress up a female volunteer in an orange prison jump suit, put her in a cage on a flatbed truck, then append the slogan, “Lock Her Up!”
How grave a matter is this?
This Russian troll farm is “the equivalent (of) Pearl Harbor,” says Cong. Jerrold Nadler, who would head up the House Judiciary Committee, handling any impeachment, if Democrats retake the House.
When MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pressed, Nadler doubled down: The Russians “are destroying our democratic process.” While the Russian trolling may not equal Pearl Harbor in its violence, said Nadler, in its “seriousness, it is very much on a par” with Japan’s surprise attack.
Trump’s reaction to the hysteria that broke out after the Russian indictments: “They are laughing their (expletives) off in Moscow.”
According to Sunday’s Washington Post, the troll story is old news in Russia, where reporters uncovered it last year and it was no big deal.
While Mueller’s indictments confirm that Russians meddled in the U.S. election, what explains the shock and the fear for “our democracy”?
Is the Great Republic about to fall because a bunch of trolls tweeted in our election? Is this generation ignorant of its own history?
Before and after World War II, we had Stalinists and Soviet spies at the highest levels of American culture and government.
The Hollywood Ten, who went to prison for contempt of Congress, were secret members of a Communist Party that, directed from Moscow, controlled the Progressive Party in Philadelphia in 1948 that nominated former Vice President Henry Wallace to run against Harry Truman.
Soviet spies infiltrated the U.S. atom bomb project and shortened the time Stalin needed to explode a Soviet bomb in 1949.
As for Russian trolling in our election, do we really have clean hands when it comes to meddling in elections and the internal politics of regimes we dislike?

Sen. John McCain and Victoria Nuland of State egged on the Maidan Square crowds in Kiev that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. When the democratically elected regime of Mohammed Morsi was overthrown, the U.S. readily accepted the coup as a victory for our side and continued aid to Egypt as tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members were imprisoned.
Are the CIA and National Endowment for Democracy under orders not to try to influence the outcome of elections in nations in whose ruling regimes we believe we have a stake?
“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Laura Ingraham asked former CIA Director James Woolsey this weekend.
With a grin, Woolsey replied, “Oh, probably.”
“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”
“Well,” Woolsey said with a smile. “Only for a very good cause.”
Indeed, what is the National Endowment for Democracy all about, if not aiding the pro-American side in foreign nations and their elections?
Did America have no active role in the “color-coded revolutions” that have changed regimes from Serbia to Ukraine to Georgia?
When Republicans discuss Iran on Capitol Hill, the phrase “regime change” is frequently heard. When the “Green Revolution” took to the streets of Tehran to protest massively the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, Republicans denounced President Obama for not intervening more energetically to alter the outcome.
When China, Russia and Egypt expel NGOs, are their suspicions that some have been seeded with U.S. agents merely marks of paranoia?
The U.S. role in the overthrow of Premier Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and of President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963 are established facts.
When the democratically elected Marxist Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile in 1973, and committed ѕυιcιdє with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro, the Nixon White House may have had no direct role. But the White House welcomed the ascendancy of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
What do these indictments of Russians tell us? After 18 months, the James Comey-Robert Mueller FBI investigation into the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails has yet to produce evidence of collusion.
Yet we do have evidence that a senior British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele, paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC to dig up dirt on Trump, colluded with Kremlin agents to produce a dossier of scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges, to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump. And the FBI used this disinformation to get FISA Court warrants to surveil and wiretap the Trump campaign.
Why is this conspiracy and collusion with Russians less worthy of Mueller’s attention than a troll farm in St. Petersburg?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 23, 2018, 08:24:30 AM
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Protect Kids or Confiscate Guns?
Thursday - February 22, 2018 at 8:26 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together.
But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart.
The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite.
Having confessed, he faces life in prison. For the next half-century, Nikolas Cruz will be fed, clothed, sheltered and medicated at the expense of Florida taxpayers, including the families of those he murdered.
Cruz’s punishment seems neither commensurate with his crimes nor a deterrent for sick and evil minds contemplating another Columbine.
It didn’t use to be this way.
On Feb 15, 1933, anarchist Giuseppe Zangara tried to αssαssιnαtҽ President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami. His arm jostled, he killed instead Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Five weeks later, on March 20, 1933, Zangara died in the electric chair.
Swift, sure and pitiless, but that legal justice system worked.
With Cruz, the system failed up and down the line.
Cruz should never have been allowed to purchase or possess a gun. He was angry, alienated, isolated. Police had been to his family home to deal with complaints 39 times. Yet he had no arrest record when he purchased his AR-15.
Classmates at Douglas High had speculated that if there ever were a school shooting, Cruz would be the one to do it. The FBI was alerted a month before that Nikolas Cruz was a time bomb ready to explode.
The NRA was not responsible for the system-wide failure from Douglas High to the FBI. As the NRA’s Dana Loesch told CPAC Thursday:
“The government can’t keep you safe and some people want us to give up our firearms and rely solely upon the protection of the same government that’s already failed us numerous times to keep us safe.”
As for the AR-15, it is the most popular rifle sold. Five million to 8 million are in circulation. Veterans since Vietnam have trained with, and many fought with, the M16, which is first cousin to the AR-15. Veterans are among the millions who own them.
While all agree AR-15s should be kept out of the hands of crazies like Cruz, the establishment insists that it is the gun that is the problem.
We hear demands that AR-15s be banned and confiscated.
Proponents should put that proposition to a vote. But a prediction: The moment it is brought up for a vote, sales of AR-15s will explode, as they have before. If the weapon is banned, as alcohol was banned in Prohibition, millions of law-abiding Americans will become law-breakers.
And who will barge into America’s homes to seize and collect the rifles?
Moreover, if people have decided to mass murder classmates or co-workers, inviting “ѕυιcιdє by cop,” are they going to be stopped from acquiring a semiautomatic by a congressional law?
Have our drug laws halted drug use?
Many of the guns confiscated by police are in the possession of thugs, criminals and ex-cons who have no legal right to own them. Yet, if we are going to prosecute the illegal sale or transfer of weapons severely, we will have hundreds of thousands more in prisons, at a time when we are instructed to empty them of nonviolent offenders.
As for mental illness, it seems more prevalent than it used to be, and the numbers of those on medication seems a greater share of the population.
Do doctors decide which of their patients are fit to own a gun, and which are not? Should doctors be held criminally liable if they fail to alert police and one of their patients uses a gun in a violent crime?
Who will maintain the federal registry of the mentally sick unfit to own a firearm?
The anger and anguish of those who lost family or friends in this atrocity is understandable. But passion is not a substitute for thought.
There are twice as many guns in America as there were just decades ago. And a primary reason people acquire them is because they believe they need them to protect themselves and their families, and they no longer trust the government to protect them.
They view the demand for banning and confiscating specific weapons as a first step down the inexorable road that ends in the disarmament of the people.
Most mass shootings take place in gun-free zones, where crazed men of murderous intent know their chances of maximizing the dead and wounded are far better than in attacking a police station.
Our embassies are defended by Marines with M16s. Security guards with guns defend banks and military bases, presidents and politicians.
The best way to protect kids in schools may be to protect schools, and run down and incarcerate the known criminals and crazies who are the primary threats.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 27, 2018, 06:54:08 PM
The Eternal Lure of Nationalism
Monday - February 26, 2018 at 11:26 pm



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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3.
But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the sounds of the Olympic anthem.
One recalls the scene in “Casablanca,” where French patrons of Rick’s saloon stood and loudly sang the “La Marseillaise” to drown out the “Die Wacht am Rhein” being sung by a table of German officers.
When the combined North-South Korean Olympic team entered the stadium, Vice President Mike Pence remained seated and silent. But tens of thousands of Koreans stood and cheered the unified team.
America may provide a defensive shield for the South, but Koreans on both sides of the DMZ see themselves as one people. And, no fool, Kim Jong Un is exploiting the deep tribal ties he knows are there.
Watching the Russians defiantly belt out their anthem, one recalls also the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City where sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium, black gloved fists thrust skyward in a Black Power salute, asserting their separate racial identity
Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all about.
Some attendees at the CPAC conclave this past week were appalled that Britain’s Nigel Farage and France’s Marion Le Pen were present.
But Farage was the man most responsible for Brexit, the historic British decision to leave the EU. Le Pen is perhaps the most popular figure in a National Front party that won 35 percent of the vote in the runoff election won by President Emmanuel Macron.

And the most unifying stand of the NF appears to be “Let France be France!” The French people do not want their country invaded by unassimilable millions of migrants from Africa and the Islamic world.
They want France to remain what she has been. Is this wrong?
Is preservation of a country, the national family one grew up in, not conservative?
In Hungary and Poland, ethnonationalism, the belief that nation-states are created and best suited to protect and defend a separate and unique people, with its separate and unique history and culture, is already ascendant.
Globalists may see the U.N., EU, NAFTA, TPP as stepping stones to a “universal nation” of all races, tribes, cultures and creeds. But growing numbers in every country, on every continent, reject this vision. And they are seeking to restore what their parents and grand-parents had, a nation-state that is all their own.
Nationalists like Farage, who seek to pull their countries out of socialist superstates like the EU, and peoples seeking to secede and set up new nations like Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica and Veneto today, and Quebec yesterday, are no more anti-conservative than the American patriots of Lexington and Concord who also wanted a country of their own.
Why are European peoples who wish to halt mass migration from across the Med, to preserve who and what they are, decried as racists?
Did not the peoples of African and Middle Eastern countries, half a century ago, expel the European settlers who helped to build those countries?
The Rhodesia of Spitfire pilot Ian Smith was a Jєωel of a nation of 250,000 whites and several million blacks that produced trade surpluses even when boycotted and sanctioned by a hating world.
When Smith was forced to yield power, “Comrade Bob” Mugabe took over and began the looting of white Rhodesians, and led his Shona tribesmen in a slaughter of the Matabele of rival Joshua Nkomo.
Eighty-five percent of the white folks who lived in Rhodesia, prior to “majority rule,” are gone from Zimbabwe. More than half of the white folks who made South Africa the most advanced and prosperous country on the continent are gone.
Are these countries better places than they were? For whom?
Looking back over this 21st century, the transnational elite that envisions the endless erosion of national sovereignty, and the coming of a nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of open borders, free trade and global custody of mankind’s destiny, has triggered a counter-revolution.
Does anyone think Angela Merkel looks like the future?
Consider the largest countries on earth. In China, ethnonationalism, not the ruling Communist Party, unites and inspires 1.4 billion people to displace the Americans as the first power on earth.
Nationalism sustains Vladimir Putin. Nationalism and its unique identity as a Hindu nation unites and powers India.
Here, today, it is “America First” nationalism.
Indeed, now that George W. Bush’s crusade for democracy has ended up like Peter the Hermit’s Children’s Crusade, what is the vision, what is the historic goal our elites offer to inspire and enlist our people?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 02, 2018, 01:03:50 PM
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Fatal Delusions of Western Man
Thursday - March 1, 2018 at 10:32 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in The Washington Post.
“Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence.
America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People’s Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West.
We deluded ourselves. It did not happen.
Xi Jinping just changed China’s constitution to allow him to be dictator for life. He continues to thieve intellectual property from U.S. companies and to occupy and fortify islets in the South China Sea, which Beijing now claims as entirely its own.
Meanwhile, China sustains North Korea as Chinese warplanes and warships circuмnavigate Taiwan threatening its independence.
We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth, and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific.
Who is responsible for this epochal blunder?
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The elites of both parties. Bush Republicans from the 1990s granted China most-favored-nation status and threw open America’s market.
Result: China has run up $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States. Her $375 billion trade surplus with us in 2017 far exceeded the entire Chinese defense budget.
We fed the tiger, and created a monster.
Why? What is in the mind of Western man that our leaders continue to adopt policies rooted in hopes unjustified by reality?
Recall. Stalin was a murderous tyrant unrivaled in history whose victims in 1939 were 1,000 times those of Adolf Hitler, with whom he eagerly partnered in return for the freedom to rape the Baltic States and bite off half of Poland.
When Hitler turned on Stalin, the Bolshevik butcher rushed to the West for aid. Churchill and FDR hailed him in encomiums that would have made Pericles blush. At Yalta, Churchill rose to toast the butcher:
“I walk through this world with greater courage and hope when I find myself in a relation of friendship and intimacy with this great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia, but the world. … We regard Marshal Stalin’s life as most precious to the hopes and hearts of all of us.”
Returning home, Churchill assured a skeptical Parliament, “I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”
George W. Bush, with the U.S. establishment united behind him, invaded Iraq with the goal of creating a Vermont in the Middle East that would be a beacon of democracy to the Arab and Islamic world.
Ex-Director of the NSA Gen. William Odom correctly called the U.S. invasion the greatest strategic blunder in American history. But Bush, un-chastened, went on to preach a crusade for democracy with the goal of “ending tyranny in our world.”
What is the root of these astounding beliefs — that Stalin would be a partner for peace, that if we built up Mao’s China she would become benign and benevolent, that we could reshape Islamic nations into replicas of Western democracies, that we could eradicate tyranny?
Today, we are replicating these historic follies.
After our victory in the Cold War, we not only plunged into the Middle East to remake it in our image, we issued war guarantees to every ex-member state of the Warsaw Pact, and threatened Russia with war if she ever intervened again in the Baltic Republics.
No Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing such an in-your-face challenge to a great nuclear power like Russia.
If Putin’s Russia does not become the pacifist nation it has never been, these guarantees will one day be called. And America will either back down — or face a nuclear confrontation.
Why would we risk something like this?
Consider this crazed ideology of free trade globalism with its roots in the scribblings of 19th-century idiot savants, not one of whom ever built a great nation.
Adhering religiously to free trade dogma, we have run up $12 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Our cities have been gutted by the loss of plants and factories. Workers’ wages have stagnated. The economic independence Hamilton sought and Republican presidents from Lincoln to McKinley achieved is history.
But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.
Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 06, 2018, 09:35:27 AM
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Why Is the GOP Terrified of Tariffs?
Monday - March 5, 2018 at 8:14 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
From Lincoln to William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Warren Harding through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party erected the most awesome manufacturing machine the world had ever seen.
And, as the party of high tariffs through those seven decades, the GOP was rewarded by becoming America’s Party.
Thirteen Republican presidents served from 1860 to 1930, and only two Democrats. And Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson were elected only because the Republicans had split.
Why, then, this terror of tariffs that grips the GOP?
Consider. On hearing that President Trump might impose tariffs on aluminum and steel, Sen. Lindsey Graham was beside himself: “Please reconsider,” he implored the president, “you’re making a huge mistake.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Graham had confidently assured us that war with a nuclear-armed North Korea is “worth it.”
“All the damage that would come from a war would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security,” said Graham.
A steel tariff terrifies Graham. A new Korean war does not?
“Trade wars are not won, only lost,” warns Sen. Jeff Flake.
But this is ahistorical nonsense.

The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900.
Bismarck’s Germany, born in 1871, followed the U.S. example, and swept past free trade Britain before World War I.
Does Senator Flake think Japan rose to post-war preeminence through free trade, as Tokyo kept U.S. products out, while dumping cars, radios, TVs and motorcycles here to kill the industries of the nation that was defending them. Both Nixon and Reagan had to devalue the dollar to counter the predatory trade policies of Japan.
Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits, and, in the first decade in this century, we lost 55,000 factories and 6,000,000 manufacturing jobs.
Does Flake see no correlation between America’s decline, China’s rise, and the $4 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up at the expense of his own country?
The hysteria that greeted Trump’s idea of a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum suggest that restoring this nation’s economic independence is going to be a rocky road.
In 2017, the U.S. ran a trade deficit in goods of almost $800 billion, $375 billion of that with China, a trade surplus that easily covered Xi Jinping’s entire defense budget.
If we are to turn our $800 billion trade deficit in goods into an $800 billion surplus, and stop the looting of America’s industrial base and the gutting of our cities and towns, sacrifices will have to be made.
But if we are not up to it, we will lose our independence, as the countries of the EU have lost theirs.
Specifically, we need to shift taxes off goods produced in the USA, and impose taxes on goods imported into the USA.
As we import nearly $2.5 trillion in goods, a tariff on imported goods, rising gradually to 20 percent, would initially produce $500 billion in revenue.
All that tariff revenue could be used to eliminate and replace all taxes on production inside the USA.
As the price of foreign goods rose, U.S. products would replace foreign-made products. There’s nothing in the world that we cannot produce here. And if it can be made in America, it should be made in America.
Consider. Assume a Lexus cost $50,000 in the U.S., and a 20 percent tariff were imposed, raising the price to $60,000.
What would the Japanese producers of Lexus do?
They could accept the loss in sales in the world’s greatest market, the USA. They could cut their prices to hold their U.S. market share. Or they could shift production to the United States, building their cars here and keeping their market.
How have EU nations run up endless trade surpluses with America? By imposing a value-added tax, or VAT, on imports from the U.S., while rebating the VAT on exports to the USA. Works just like a tariff.
The principles behind a policy of economic nationalism, to turn our trade deficits, which subtract from GDP, into trade surpluses, which add to GDP, are these:
Production comes before consumption. Who consumes the apples is less important than who owns the orchard. We should depend more upon each other and less upon foreign lands.
We should tax foreign-made goods and use the revenue, dollar for dollar, to cut taxes on domestic production.
The idea is not to keep foreign goods out, but to induce foreign companies to move production here.
We have a strategic asset no one else can match. We control access to the largest richest market on earth, the USA.
And just as states charge higher tuition on out-of state students at their top universities, we should charge a price of admission for foreign producers to get into America’s markets.
And — someone get a hold of Sen. Graham — it’s called a tariff.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: graceseeker on March 08, 2018, 01:57:50 PM
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 13, 2018, 10:45:31 AM
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Globalists & Nationalists: Who Owns the Future?
Tuesday - March 13, 2018 at 12:33 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, was a free trade zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: “There shall be open borders.”
Bartley accepted what the erasure of America’s borders and an endless influx or foreign peoples and goods would mean for his country.
Said Bartley, “I think the nation-state is finished.”
His vision and ideology had a long pedigree.
This free trade, open borders cult first flowered in 18th-century Britain. The St. Paul of this post-Christian faith was Richard Cobden, who mesmerized elites with the grandeur of his vision and the power of his rhetoric.
In Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Jan. 15, 1846, the crowd was so immense the seats had to be removed. There, Cobden thundered:
“I look farther; I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe — drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.”
Britain converted to this utopian faith and threw open her markets to the world. Across the Atlantic, however, another system, that would be known as the “American System,” had been embraced.
The second bill signed by President Washington was the Tariff Act of 1789. Said the Founding Father of his country in his first address to Congress: “A free people … should promote such manufactures as tend to make them independent on others for essential, particularly military supplies.”
In his 1791 “Report on Manufactures,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Every nation ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means of subsistence, habitat, clothing and defense.”
This was wisdom born of experience.

At Yorktown, Americans had to rely on French muskets and ships to win their independence. They were determined to erect a system that would end our reliance on Europe for the necessities of our national life, and establish new bonds of mutual dependency — among Americans.
Britain’s folly became manifest in World War I, as a self-reliant America stayed out, while selling to an import-dependent England the food, supplies and arms she needed to survive but could not produce.
America’s own first major steps toward free trade, open borders and globalism came with JFK’s Trade Expansion Act and LBJ’s Immigration Act of 1965.
By the end of the Cold War, however, a reaction had set in, and a great awakening begun. U.S. trade deficits in goods were surging into the hundreds of billions, and more than a million legal and illegal immigrants were flooding in yearly, visibly altering the character of the country.
Americans were coming to realize that free trade was gutting the nation’s manufacturing base and open borders meant losing the country in which they grew up. And on this earth there is no greater loss.
The new resistance of Western man to the globalist agenda is now everywhere manifest.
We see it in Trump’s hostility to NAFTA, his tariffs, his border wall.
We see it in England’s declaration of independence from the EU in Brexit. We see it in the political triumphs of Polish, Hungarian and Czech nationalists, in anti-EU parties rising across Europe, in the secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia and Ukraine, and in the admiration for Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin.
Europeans have begun to see themselves as indigenous peoples whose Old Continent is mortally imperiled by the hundreds of millions of invaders wading across the Med and desperate come and occupy their homelands.
Who owns the future? Who will decide the fate of the West?
The problem of the internationalists is that the vision they have on offer — a world of free trade, open borders and global government — are constructs of the mind that do not engage the heart.
Men will fight for family, faith and country. But how many will lay down their lives for pluralism and diversity?
Who will fight and die for the Eurozone and EU?
On Aug. 4, 1914, the anti-militarist German Social Democrats, the oldest and greatest socialist party in Europe, voted the credits needed for the Kaiser to wage war on France and Russia. With the German army on the march, the German socialists were Germans first.
Patriotism trumps ideology.
In “Present at the Creation,” Dean Acheson wrote of the postwar world and institutions born in the years he served FDR and Truman in the Department of State: The U.N., IMF, World Bank, Marshall Plan, and with the split between East and West, NATO.
We are present now at the end of all that.
And our transnational elites have a seemingly insoluble problem.
To rising millions in the West, the open borders and free trade globalism they cherish and champion is not a glorious future, but an existential threat to the sovereignty, independence and identity of the countries they love. And they will not go gentle into that good night.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 22, 2018, 06:43:11 PM
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Did Putin Order the Salisbury Hit?
Monday - March 19, 2018 at 11:15 pm



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By Patrick Buchanan
Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England.
But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit.
“We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the U.K.”
“Unforgivable,” says Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov of the charge, which also defies “common sense.” On Sunday, Putin echoed Peskov: “It is just sheer nonsense, complete rubbish, to think that anyone in Russia could do anything like that in the run-up to the presidential election and the World Cup. … It’s simply unthinkable.”
Putin repeated Russia’s offer to assist in the investigation.
But Johnson is not backing down; he is doubling down.
“We gave the Russians every opportunity to come up with an alternative hypothesis … and they haven’t,” said Johnson. “We actually have evidence … that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination but has also been creating and stockpiling Novichok,” the poison used in Salisbury.
Why Russia is the prime suspect is understandable. Novichok was created by Russia’s military decades ago, and Skripal, a former Russian intel officer, betrayed Russian spies to MI6.
But what is missing here is the Kremlin’s motive for the crime.
Skripal was convicted of betraying Russian spies in 2006. He spent four years in prison and was exchanged in 2010 for Russian spies in the U.S. If Putin wanted Skripal dead as an example to all potential traitors, why didn’t he execute him while he was in Kremlin custody?
Why wait until eight years after Skripal had been sent to England? And how would this murder on British soil advance any Russian interest?

Putin is no fool. A veteran intelligence agent, he knows that no rival intel agency such as the CIA or MI6 would trade spies with Russia if the Kremlin were to go about killing them after they have been traded.
“Cui bono?” runs the always relevant Ciceronian question. “Who benefits” from this criminal atrocity?
Certainly, in this case, not Russia, not the Kremlin, not Putin.
All have taken a ceaseless beating in world opinion and Western media since the Skripals were found comatose, near death, on that bench outside a mall in Salisbury.
Predictably, Britain’s reaction has been rage, revulsion and retaliation. Twenty-three Russian diplomats, intelligence agents in their London embassy, have been expelled. The Brits have been treating Putin as a pariah and depicting Russia as outside the circle of civilized nations.
Russia is “ripping up the international rulebook,” roared Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson. Asked how Moscow might respond to the expulsions, Williamson retorted: Russia should “go away and shut up.”
Putin sympathizers, including Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have been silenced or savaged as appeasers for resisting the rush to judgment.
The Americans naturally came down on the side of their oldest ally, with President Donald Trump imposing new sanctions.
We are daily admonished that Putin tried to tip the 2016 election to Trump. But if so, why would Putin order a public assassination that would almost compel Trump to postpone his efforts at a rapprochement?
Who, then, are the beneficiaries of this atrocity?
Is it not the coalition — principally in our own capital city — that bears an endemic hostility to Russia and envisions America’s future role as a continuance of its Cold War role of containing and corralling Russia until we can achieve regime change in Moscow?
What should Trump’s posture be? Stand by our British ally but insist privately on a full investigation and convincing proof before taking any irreversible action.
Was this act really ordered by Putin and the Kremlin, who have not only denied it but condemned it?
Or was it the work of rogue agents who desired the consequences that they knew the murder of Skripal would produce — a deeper and more permanent split between Russia and the West?
Only a moron could not have known what the political ramifications of such an atrocity as this would be on U.S.-British-Russian relations.
And before we act on Boris Johnson’s verdict — that Putin ordered it — let us recall:
The Spanish, we learned, did not actually blow up the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, which ignited the Spanish-American War.
The story of North Vietnamese gunboats attacking U.S. destroyers, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and 58,000 dead Americans in Vietnam, proved not to be entirely accurate.
We went to war in Iraq in 2003 to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction we later discovered Saddam Hussein did not really have.
Some 4,500 U.S. dead and tens of thousands of wounded paid for that rush to judgment. And some of those clamoring for war then are visible in the vanguard of those clamoring for confronting Russia.
Before we set off on Cold War II with Russia — leading perhaps to the shooting war we avoided in Cold War I — let’s try to get this one right.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 22, 2018, 06:50:39 PM
 16 March 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-Congress_Capitol221-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-gop-staring-at-another-1930-128908)
Is the GOP Staring at Another 1930?
Friday - March 16, 2018 at 3:06 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
After the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the GOP held the Senate and House, two-thirds of the governorships, and 1,000 more state legislators than they had on the day Barack Obama took office.
“The Republican Party has not been this dominant in 90 years,” went the exultant claim.
A year later, Republicans lost the governorship of Virginia and almost lost the legislature.
Came then the loss of a U.S. Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama.
Tuesday, Democrats captured a House seat in a Pennsylvania district Trump carried by 20 points, and where Democrats had not even fielded a candidate in 2014 and 2016.
Republicans lately congratulating themselves on a dominance not seen since 1928, might revisit what happened to the Class of 1928.
In 1930, Republicans lost 52 House seats, portending the loss of both houses of Congress and the White House in 1932 to FDR who would go on to win four straight terms. For the GOP, the ’30s were the dreadful decade.
Is the GOP staring at another 1930?
Perhaps.
Unlike 1930, though, the nation has not endured a Great Crash or gone through year one of a Great Depression where unemployment hit 10 percent in June, when the Smoot-Hawley tariff was passed.
Today, the economy is moving along smartly. The labor force is larger than it has ever been. Workers are re-entering and seeking jobs. Black and Hispanic unemployment are at record lows. Confidence is high. Our Great Recession is 10 years in the past.
The problem for Republicans may be found in a truism: When the economy is poor, the economy is the issue. When the economy is good, something else is the issue.
A good economy did not save the GOP in the 18th Congressional District of Pennsylvania, where the party’s tax cut was derided by Democrat Conor Lamb as a wealth transfer to the rich. Nor did Lamb hurt himself by implying Republicans were planning to pay for their tax cut by robbing Social Security and Medicare.
Republican candidate Rick Saccone reportedly stopped using the tax cut as his major issue in his TV ads that ran closest to Election Day.
Other factors point to a bad day for the GOP on Nov. 6.

Republican retirees from Congress far outnumber Democratic retirees.
Democratic turnout has been reaching record highs, while GOP turnout has been normal. And even in the special elections Democrats have lost, they are outperforming the Democrats who lost in 2016.
Relying upon hostility to Trump to bring out the resistance, savvy Democrats are taking on the political coloration of their districts and states, rather than of the national party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.
There is, however, troubling news from Pennsylvania for Nancy Peℓσѕι.
Lamb promised voters of “Deerhunter” country he would not support San Francisco Nancy for speaker. Look for Democrats in districts Trump carried to begin talking of the “need for new leaders.”
Trump seems fated to be the primary target of attack this fall, and not only in districts Clinton carried. For an average of national polls shows that disapproval of his presidency is 14 points higher than his approval rating. And this is when the economy is turning up good numbers not seen in this century.
At the national level, Democrats will turn 2018 into a referendum on the Trump persona and Trump presidency. For while the Trump base is loyal and solid, the anti-Trump base is equally so, and appreciably larger.
Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton, not the most charismatic candidate the Democrats have put up in decades, beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes. And while Trump pierced the famous “blue wall” — the 18 states that voted Democratic in every presidential election between 1992 and 2012 — the demographic trend that created the wall is still working.
White voters, who tend to vote Republican, continue to decline as a share of the population. Peoples of color, who vote 70 to 90 percent Democratic in presidential elections, are now nearly 40 percent of the nation.
Mass migration into America is re-enforcing that trend.
Moreover, millennials, who have many elections ahead of them, are more liberal than seniors, who have fewer elections ahead and are the GOP base.
But if Republicans face problems of demography, the party of “tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect” appears to be reaching the end of its tether. Federal deficits are rising toward trillion-dollar levels.
The five largest items in the budget — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, interest on the debt — are rising inexorably. And there appears no disposition in either party to cut back on spending for education, college loans, food stamps, housing assistance or infrastructure.
If the Fed did not retain the power to control the money supply, then the fate of New Jersey and Illinois, and beyond, of Greece and Argentina, would become our national destiny.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 23, 2018, 08:56:55 AM
 22 March 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-washington-riderless-horse01-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-the-deep-state-break-trump-128952)
Will the Deep State Break Trump?
Thursday - March 22, 2018 at 11:59 pm



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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“It is becoming more obvious with each passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon,” wrote David Broder on Oct. 8, 1969.
“The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.”
A columnist for The Washington Post, Broder was no fan of Nixon.
His prediction, however, proved wrong. Nixon, with his “Silent Majority” address rallied the nation and rocked the establishment. He went on to win a 49-state victory in 1972, after which his stumbles opened the door to the establishment’s revenge.
Yet, Broder’s analysis was spot on. And, today, another deep state conspiracy, to break another presidency, is underway.
Consider. To cut through the Russophobia rampant here, Trump decided to make a direct phone call to Vladimir Putin. And in that call, Trump, like Angela Merkel, congratulated Putin on his re-election victory.
Instantly, the briefing paper for the president’s call was leaked to the Post. In bold letters it read, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
Whereupon, the Beltway went ballistic.
How could Trump congratulate Putin, whose election was a sham? Why did he not charge Putin with the Salisbury poisoning? Why did Trump not denounce Putin for interfering with “our democracy”?
Amazing. A disloyal White House staffer betrays his trust and leaks a confidential paper to sabotage the foreign policy of a duly elected president, and he is celebrated in this capital city.

If you wish to see the deep state at work, this is it: anti-Trump journalists using First Amendment immunities to collude with and cover up the identities of bureaucratic snakes out to damage or destroy a president they despise. No wonder democracy is a declining stock worldwide.
And, yes, they give out Pulitzers for criminal collusion like this.
The New York Times got a Pulitzer and the Post got a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep, for publishing stolen secret papers from the Pentagon of JFK and LBJ — to sabotage the Vietnam War policy of Richard Nixon.
Why? Because the hated Nixon was succeeding in extricating us with honor from a war that the presidents for whom the Times and Post hauled water could not win or end.
Not only have journalists given up any pretense of neutrality in this campaign to bring down the president, ex-national security officers of the highest rank are starting to sound like resisters.
Ex-CIA Director John Brennan openly speculated Tuesday that the president may have been compromised by Moscow and become an asset of the Kremlin.
“I think he’s afraid of the president of Russia,” Brennan said of Trump and Putin. “The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump and may have things they could expose.”
If Brennan has evidence Trump is compromised, he should relay it to Robert Mueller. If he does not, this is speculation of an especially ugly variety for someone once entrusted with America’s highest secrets.
What is going on in this city is an American version of the “color revolutions” we have employed to dump over governments in places like Georgia and Ukraine.
Goal: Break Trump’s presidency, remove him, discredit his election as contaminated by Kremlin collusion, upend the democratic verdict of 2016, and ash-can Trump’s agenda of populist conservatism. Then, return America to the open borders, free trade, democracy-crusading Bushite globalism beloved by our Beltway elites.
Trump, in a way, is the indispensable man of the populist right.
In the 2016 primaries, no other Republican candidate shared his determination to secure the border, bring back manufacturing or end the endless wars in the Middle East that have so bled and bankrupted our nation.
Whether the Assads rule in Damascus, the Chinese fortify Scarborough Shoal, or the Taliban return to Kabul are not existential threats.
But if the borders of our country are not secured, as Reagan warned, in a generation, America will not even be a country.
Trump seems now to recognize that the special counsel’s office of Robert Mueller, which this city sees as the instrument of its deliverance, is a mortal threat to his presidency.
Mueller’s team wishes to do to Trump what Archibald Cox’s team sought to do to Nixon: Drive him out of office or set him up for the kill by a Democratic Congress in 2019.
Trump appears to recognize that the struggle with Mueller is now a political struggle — to the death.
Hence Trump’s hiring of Joe diGenova and the departure of John Dowd from his legal team. In the elegant phrase of Michael Corleone, diGenova is a wartime consigliere.
He believes that Trump is the target of a conspiracy, where Jim Comey’s FBI put in the fix to prevent Hillary’s prosecution, and then fabricated a crime of collusion with Russia to take down the new president the American people had elected.
The Trump White House is behaving as if it were the prospective target of a coup d’etat. And it is not wrong to think so.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Meg on March 23, 2018, 10:17:43 AM
16 March 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-Congress_Capitol221-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-gop-staring-at-another-1930-128908)
Is the GOP Staring at Another 1930?
Friday - March 16, 2018 at 3:06 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
After the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the GOP held the Senate and House, two-thirds of the governorships, and 1,000 more state legislators than they had on the day Barack Obama took office.
“The Republican Party has not been this dominant in 90 years,” went the exultant claim.
A year later, Republicans lost the governorship of Virginia and almost lost the legislature.
Came then the loss of a U.S. Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama.
Tuesday, Democrats captured a House seat in a Pennsylvania district Trump carried by 20 points, and where Democrats had not even fielded a candidate in 2014 and 2016.
Republicans lately congratulating themselves on a dominance not seen since 1928, might revisit what happened to the Class of 1928.
In 1930, Republicans lost 52 House seats, portending the loss of both houses of Congress and the White House in 1932 to FDR who would go on to win four straight terms. For the GOP, the ’30s were the dreadful decade.
Is the GOP staring at another 1930?
Perhaps.
Unlike 1930, though, the nation has not endured a Great Crash or gone through year one of a Great Depression where unemployment hit 10 percent in June, when the Smoot-Hawley tariff was passed.
Today, the economy is moving along smartly. The labor force is larger than it has ever been. Workers are re-entering and seeking jobs. Black and Hispanic unemployment are at record lows. Confidence is high. Our Great Recession is 10 years in the past.
The problem for Republicans may be found in a truism: When the economy is poor, the economy is the issue. When the economy is good, something else is the issue.
A good economy did not save the GOP in the 18th Congressional District of Pennsylvania, where the party’s tax cut was derided by Democrat Conor Lamb as a wealth transfer to the rich. Nor did Lamb hurt himself by implying Republicans were planning to pay for their tax cut by robbing Social Security and Medicare.
Republican candidate Rick Saccone reportedly stopped using the tax cut as his major issue in his TV ads that ran closest to Election Day.
Other factors point to a bad day for the GOP on Nov. 6.

Republican retirees from Congress far outnumber Democratic retirees.
Democratic turnout has been reaching record highs, while GOP turnout has been normal. And even in the special elections Democrats have lost, they are outperforming the Democrats who lost in 2016.
Relying upon hostility to Trump to bring out the resistance, savvy Democrats are taking on the political coloration of their districts and states, rather than of the national party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.
There is, however, troubling news from Pennsylvania for Nancy Peℓσѕι.
Lamb promised voters of “Deerhunter” country he would not support San Francisco Nancy for speaker. Look for Democrats in districts Trump carried to begin talking of the “need for new leaders.”
Trump seems fated to be the primary target of attack this fall, and not only in districts Clinton carried. For an average of national polls shows that disapproval of his presidency is 14 points higher than his approval rating. And this is when the economy is turning up good numbers not seen in this century.
At the national level, Democrats will turn 2018 into a referendum on the Trump persona and Trump presidency. For while the Trump base is loyal and solid, the anti-Trump base is equally so, and appreciably larger.
Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton, not the most charismatic candidate the Democrats have put up in decades, beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes. And while Trump pierced the famous “blue wall” — the 18 states that voted Democratic in every presidential election between 1992 and 2012 — the demographic trend that created the wall is still working.
White voters, who tend to vote Republican, continue to decline as a share of the population. Peoples of color, who vote 70 to 90 percent Democratic in presidential elections, are now nearly 40 percent of the nation.
Mass migration into America is re-enforcing that trend.
Moreover, millennials, who have many elections ahead of them, are more liberal than seniors, who have fewer elections ahead and are the GOP base.
But if Republicans face problems of demography, the party of “tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect” appears to be reaching the end of its tether. Federal deficits are rising toward trillion-dollar levels.
The five largest items in the budget — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, interest on the debt — are rising inexorably. And there appears no disposition in either party to cut back on spending for education, college loans, food stamps, housing assistance or infrastructure.
If the Fed did not retain the power to control the money supply, then the fate of New Jersey and Illinois, and beyond, of Greece and Argentina, would become our national destiny.

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Well, as long as the liberals allow their views to be controlled by the deep state, which includes the media, then the situation is only going to get worse. The Dems will, as Buchanan says, likely get more congressional seats this next November, due to all of the anti-Trump rhetoric from the corrupt media. Buchanan is right, too, about there being an organized coup against a lawful president. Oh well. Not much that we can do about it. 
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 27, 2018, 09:06:39 AM
 27 March 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-washington-arlington01-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-assembling-a-war-cabinet-128988)
Is Trump Assembling a War Cabinet?
Tuesday - March 27, 2018 at 4:51 am



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By Patrick J. Buchanan
The last man standing between the U.S. and war with Iran may be a four-star general affectionately known to his Marines as “Mad Dog.”
Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, appears to be the last man in the Situation Room who believes the Iran nuclear deal may be worth preserving and that war with Iran is a dreadful idea.
Yet, other than Mattis, President Donald Trump seems to be creating a war cabinet.
Trump himself has pledged to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal — “the worst deal ever” — and reimpose sanctions in May.
His new national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” has called for preemptive strikes and “regime change.”
Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo calls Iran “a thuggish police state,” a “despotic theocracy,” and “the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”
Trump’s favorite Arab ruler, 32-year-old Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, calls Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei “the Hitler of the Middle East.”
Bibi Netanyahu is monomaniacal on Iran, calling the nuclear deal a threat to Israel’s survival and Iran “the greatest threat to our world.”
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley echoes them all.
Yet Iran appears not to want a war. U.N. inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.
While U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf often encountered Iranian “fast attack” boats and drones between January 2016 and August 2017, that has stopped. Vessels of both nations have operated virtually without incident.
What would be the result of Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal?
First would be the isolation of the United States.
China and Russia would not abrogate the deal but would welcome Iran into their camp. England, France and Germany would have to choose between the deal and the U.S. And if Airbus were obligated to spurn Iran’s orders for hundreds of new planes, how would that sit with the Europeans?
How would North Korea react if the U.S. trashed a deal where Iran, after accepting severe restrictions on its nuclear program and allowing intrusive inspections, were cheated of the benefits the Americans promised?
Why would Pyongyang, having seen us attack Iraq, which had no WMD, and Libya, which had given up its WMD to mollify us, ever consider given up its nuclear weapons — especially after seeing the leaders of both nations executed?
And, should the five other signatories to the Iran deal continue with it despite us, and Iran agree to abide by its terms, what do we do then?
Find a casus belli to go to war? Why? How does Iran threaten us?
A war, which would involve U.S. warships against swarms of Iranian torpedo boats could shut down the Persian Gulf to oil traffic and produce a crisis in the global economy. Anti-American Shiite jihadists in Beirut, Baghdad and Bahrain could attack U.S. civilian and military personnel.
As the Army and Marine Corps do not have the troops to invade and occupy Iran, would we have to reinstate the draft?
And if we decided to blockade and bomb Iran, we would have to take out all its anti-ship missiles, submarines, navy, air force, ballistic missiles and air defense system.
And would not a pre-emptive strike on Iran unite its people in hatred of us, just as Japan’s pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor united us in a determination to annihilate her empire?
What would the Dow Jones average look like after an attack on Iran?
Trump was nominated because he promised to keep us out of stupid wars like those into which folks like John Bolton and the Bush Republicans plunged us.
After 17 years, we are still mired in Afghanistan, trying to keep the Taliban we overthrew in 2001 from returning to Kabul. Following our 2003 invasion, Iraq, once a bulwark against Iran, became a Shiite ally of Iran.
The rebels we supported in Syria have been routed. And Bashar Assad — thanks to backing from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shiite militias from the Middle East and Central Asia — has secured his throne.
The Kurds who trusted us have been hammered by our NATO ally Turkey in Syria, and by the Iraqi Army we trained in Iraq.
What is Trump, who assured us there would be no more stupid wars, thinking? Truman and LBJ got us into wars they could not end, and both lost their presidencies. Eisenhower and Nixon ended those wars and were rewarded with landslides.
After his smashing victory in Desert Storm, Bush I was denied a second term. After invading Iraq, Bush II lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and his party lost the presidency in 2008 to the antiwar Barack Obama.
Once Trump seemed to understand this history.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 13, 2018, 06:18:55 PM
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Is Trump Standing Down in Syria?
Friday - April 13, 2018 at 6:12 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Wednesday morning, President Trump jolted the nation with a tweet that contained both threat and taunt:
“Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!”
Trump was responding to a warning by Russia that she would shoot down U.S. missiles fired at her Syrian allies, and she reserved the right to fire on U.S. warships and bases from which any such missiles were launched.
The “Gas Killing Animal” was Syrian President Bashar Assad.
That afternoon, Defense Secretary James Mattis dialed it down. Had he seen enough evidence to convict Assad of a poison gas attack in Douma, Mattis was asked. His reply: “We are still assessing the intelligence. … We’re still working on this.”
Thursday morning, Trump seemed to walk back his threat: “Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!”
Is Trump planning a larger attack and silently gathering allies? Is he signaling that a U.S. attack on Syria may not be coming?
Whichever, the relief at his apparent stand down was palpable.
Yet the interlude should cause some sober second thoughts.
Why risk war with Russia in Syria, when, by our own inaction during this seven-year cινιℓ ωαr, we have shown we have no vital interest there? And, surely, we have no interest in Syria so crucial as to justify a war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

Trump allowed his revulsion at the awful pictures of dead children, allegedly gassed, to impel him to threaten military action almost certain to result in more dead children.
Emotions should not be allowed to overrule what the president has thought and expressed many times: While the outcome of Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr may mean everything to Assad, and much to Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel, it means comparatively little to a USA 5,000 miles away.
We cannot forever fight other peoples’ wars without ending up on the same ash heap of history as the other world powers before us.
And why not talk directly to our adversaries there?
If Trump can talk to Kim Jong Un, who used an anti-aircraft gun to execute his uncle and had his half-brother murdered in a Malaysian airport with a chemical weapon, why cannot we talk to Bashar Assad?
In 1974, Richard Nixon flew to Damascus to establish ties to Assad’s father, the future “Butcher of Hama.” George H.W. Bush enlisted Hafez al-Assad and 4,000 Syrian troops in his Gulf War to liberate Kuwait.
What are America’s limited interests in Syria in 2018?
Containing al-Qaida, exterminating the ISIS caliphate, and effecting the best deal we can for the Kurds who have been loyal and crucial to our campaign against ISIS. Damascus, Moscow and Tehran are not fighting us on these fronts. For al-Qaida and ISIS are their enemies as well.
As for the political future of Syria, it is not vital to us and not ours to determine. And the efforts of others to have us come fight their wars, while understandable, need to be resisted.
All over this city, and across the Middle East, there are people who wish to conscript U.S. wealth and power to advance their goals and achieve their visions. Having let them succeed so often has diminished us as a superpower from what we were at the end of the Cold War.
This should stop, and the nation knows it.
Among the reasons Democrats nominated Barack Obama and America elected him was that his opponents, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, supported the Iraq War Obama opposed.
Among the reasons the Republican Party nominated Trump and the nation elected him was that he promised to take us out and keep us out of wars like this Syrian cινιℓ ωαr.
Is it not ironic that today our War Party, which, almost to a man, loathed Trump and rejected his candidacy, is goading and cheering him on, deeper and deeper into the Syrian quagmire?
Trump is heading into a 60-day period that will go far to determine the fate of his presidency and the future of the Middle East.
If investigators determine that Assad’s forces used poison gas on civilians in Douma, Trump will have to decide whether to repeat the strike he made on Syria, a year ago, and, this time, risk war with Russia.
He will have to decide by May 12 whether the U.S. walks away from the Iran nuclear deal. On May 15 comes the formal move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the 70th anniversary of the birth of Israel and of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of the Palestinians, and the culmination of the Friday protests in Gaza that have turned so bloody.
We and Mr. Trump are heading into interesting times.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 17, 2018, 09:38:12 AM
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Trump: Prisoner of the War Party?
Monday - April 16, 2018 at 10:45 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Ten days ago, President Trump was saying ‘the United States should withdraw from Syria.’ We convinced him it was necessary to stay.”
Thus boasted French President Emmanuel Macron Saturday, adding, “We convinced him it was necessary to stay for the long term.”
Is the U.S. indeed in the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr “for the long term”?
If so, who made that fateful decision for this republic?
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley confirmed Sunday there would be no drawdown of the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, until three objectives were reached. We must fully defeat ISIS, ensure chemical weapons would not again be used by Bashar Assad and maintain the ability to watch Iran.
Translation: Whatever Trump says, America is not coming out of Syria. We are going deeper in. Trump’s commitment to extricate us from these bankrupting and blood-soaked Middle East wars and to seek a new rapprochement with Russia is “inoperative.”
The War Party that Trump routed in the primaries is capturing and crafting his foreign policy. Monday’s Wall Street Journal editorial page fairly blossomed with war plans:
“The better U.S. strategy is to … turn Syria into the Ayatollah’s Vietnam. Only when Russia and Iran began to pay a larger price in Syria will they have any incentive to negotiate an end to the war or even contemplate a peace based on dividing the country into ethnic-based enclaves.”
Apparently, we are to bleed Syria, Russia, Hezbollah and Iran until they cannot stand the pain and submit to subdividing Syria the way we want.
But suppose that, as in our cινιℓ ωαr of 1861-1865, the Spanish cινιℓ ωαr of 1936-1939, and the Chinese cινιℓ ωαr of 1945-1949, Assad and his Russian, Iranian and Shiite militia allies go all out to win and reunite the nation.
Suppose they choose to fight to consolidate the victory they have won after seven years of cινιℓ ωαr. Where do we find the troops to take back the territory our rebels lost? Or do we just bomb mercilessly?
The British and French say they will back us in future attacks if chemical weapons are used, but they are not plunging into Syria.
Defense Secretary James Mattis called the U.S.-British-French attack a “one-shot” deal. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appears to agree: “The rest of the Syrian war must proceed as it will.”
The Journal’s op-ed page Monday was turned over to former U.S. ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker and Brookings Institute senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon: “Next time the U.S. could up the ante, going after military command and control, political leadership, and perhaps even Assad himself. The U.S. could also pledge to take out much of his air force. Targets within Iran should not be off limits.”
And when did Congress authorize U.S. acts of war against Syria, its air force or political leadership? When did Congress authorize the killing of the president of Syria whose country has not attacked us?

Can the U.S. also attack Iran and kill the ayatollah without consulting Congress?
Clearly, with the U.S. fighting in six countries, Commander in Chief Trump does not want any new wars, or to widen any existing wars in the Middle East. But he is being pushed into becoming a war president to advance the agenda of foreign policy elites who, almost to a man, opposed his election.
We have a reluctant president being pushed into a war he does not want to fight. This is a formula for a strategic disaster not unlike Vietnam or George W. Bush’s war to strip Iraq of nonexistent WMD.
The assumption of the War Party seems to be that if we launch larger and more lethal strikes in Syria, inflicting casualties on Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah and the Syrian army, they will yield to our demands.
But where is the evidence for this?
What reason is there to believe these forces will surrender what they have paid in blood to win? And if they choose to fight and widen the war to the larger Middle East, are we prepared for that?
As for Trump’s statement Friday, “No amount of American blood and treasure can produce lasting peace in the Middle East,” the Washington Post Sunday dismissed this as “fatalistic” and “misguided.”
We have a vital interest, says the Post, in preventing Iran from establishing a “land corridor” across Syria.
Yet consider how Iran acquired this “land corridor.”
The Shiites in 1979 overthrew a shah our CIA installed in 1953.
The Shiites control Iraq because President Bush invaded and overthrew Saddam and his Sunni Baath Party, disbanded his Sunni-led army, and let the Shiite majority take control of the country.
The Shiites are dominant in Lebanon because they rose up and ran out the Israelis, who invaded in 1982 to run out the PLO.
How many American dead will it take to reverse this history?
How long will we have to stay in the Middle East to assure the permanent hegemony of Sunni over Shiite?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 20, 2018, 11:06:03 AM
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Why the Authoritarian Right Is Rising
Friday - April 20, 2018 at 7:17 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
A fortnight ago, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country’s constitution.
To progressives across the West, this was disturbing news.
For the bete noire of Orban’s campaign was uber-globalist George Soros. And Orban’s commitments were to halt any further surrenders of Hungarian sovereignty and independence to the European Union, and to fight any immigrant invasion of Hungary from Africa or the Islamic world.
Why are autocrats like Orban rising and liberal democrats failing in Europe? The autocrats are addressing the primary and existential fear of peoples across the West — the death of the separate and unique tribes into which they were born and to which they belong.
Modern liberals and progressives see nations as transitory — here today, gone tomorrow. The autocrats, however, have plugged into the most powerful currents running in this new century: tribalism and nationalism.
The democracy worshippers of the West cannot compete with the authoritarians in meeting the crisis of our time because they do not see what is happening to the West as a crisis.
They see us as on a steady march into a brave new world, where democracy, diversity and equality will be everywhere celebrated.

To understand the rise of Orban, we need to start seeing Europe and ourselves as so many of these people see us.
Hungary is a thousand years old. Its people have a DNA all their own. They belong to a unique and storied nation of 10 million with its own language, religion, history, heroes, culture and identity.
Though a small nation, two-thirds of whose lands were torn away after World War I, Hungarians wish to remain and endure as who they are.
They don’t want open borders. They don’t want mass migrations to change Hungary into something new. They don’t want to become a minority in their own country. And they have used democratic means to elect autocratic men who will put the Hungarian nation first.
U.S. elites may babble on about “diversity,” about how much better a country we will be in 2042 when white European Christians are just another minority and we have become a “gorgeous mosaic” of every race, tribe, creed and culture on earth.
To Hungarians, such a future entails the death of the nation. To Hungarians, millions of African, Arab and Islamic peoples settling in their lands means the annihilation of the historic nation they love, the nation that came into being to preserve the Hungarian people.
President Emmanuel Macron of France says the Hungarian and other European elections where autocrats are advancing are manifestations of “national selfishness.”
Well, yes, national survival can be considered national selfishness.
But let Monsieur Macron bring in another 5 million former subject peoples of the French Empire and he will discover that the magnanimity and altruism of the French has its limits, and a Le Pen will soon replace him in the Elysee Palace.
Consider what else the “world’s oldest democracy” has lately had on offer to the indigenous peoples of Europe resisting an invasion of Third World settlers coming to occupy and repopulate their lands.
Our democracy boasts of a First Amendment freedom of speech and press that protects blasphemy, pornography, filthy language and the burning of the American flag. We stand for a guaranteed right of women to abort their children and of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs to marry.
We offer the world a freedom of religion that prohibits the teaching of our cradle faith and its moral code in our public schools.
Our elites view this as social progress upward from a dark past.
To much of the world, however, America has become the most secularized and decadent society on earth, and the title the ayatollah bestowed upon us, “The Great Satan,” is not altogether undeserved.
And if what “our democracy” has delivered here has caused tens of millions of Americans to be repulsed and to secede into social isolation, why would other nations embrace a system that produced so poisoned a politics and so polluted a culture?
“Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the march,” writes The Washington Post: “Democracy as an ideal and in practice seems under siege.” Yes, and there are reasons for this.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” said John Adams. And as we have ceased to be a moral and religious people, the poet T. S. Eliot warned us what would happen:
“The term ‘democracy’ … does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike — it can be easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.” Recall: Hitler rose to power through a democratic election.
Democracy lacks content. As a political system, it does not engage the heart. And if Europe’s peoples see their leaders as accommodating a transnational EU, while failing to secure national borders, they will use democracy to replace them with men of action.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 24, 2018, 08:42:09 AM
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America’s Unsustainable Empire
Monday - April 23, 2018 at 9:44 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Before President Trump trashes the Iran nuclear deal, he might consider: If he could negotiate an identical deal with Kim Jong Un, it would astonish the world and win him the Nobel Peace Prize.
For Iran has no nuclear bomb or ICBM and has never tested either. It has never enriched uranium to bomb grade. It has shipped 98 percent of its uranium out of the country. It has cameras inside and inspectors crawling all over its nuclear facilities.
And North Korea? It has atom bombs and has tested an H-bomb. It has intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can hit Guam and an ICBM that, fully operational, could hit the West Coast. It has shorter-range missiles that could put nukes on South Korea and Japan.
Hard to believe Kim Jong Un will surrender these weapons, his ticket of admission to the table of great powers.
Yet the White House position is that the Iran nuclear deal should be scrapped, and no deal with Kim Jong Un signed that does not result in the “denuclearization” of the peninsula.
If denuclearization means Kim gives up all his nukes and strategic missiles, ceases testing, and allows inspectors into all his nuclear facilities, we may be waiting a long time.
Trump decides on the Iran deal by May 12. And we will likely know what Kim is prepared to do, and not prepared to do, equally soon.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron is in D.C. to persuade Trump not to walk away from the Iran deal and to keep U.S. troops in Syria. Chancellor Angela Merkel will be arriving at week’s end with a similar message.
On the White House front burner then are these options:
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Will North Korea agree to surrender its nuclear arsenal, or is it back to confrontation and possible war?
Will we stick with the nuclear deal with Iran, or walk away, issue new demands on Tehran, and prepare for a military clash if rebuffed?
Do we pull U.S. troops out of Syria as Trump promised, or keep U.S. troops there to resist the reconquest of his country by Bashar Assad and his Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah and Shiite allies?
Beyond, the larger question looms: How long can we keep this up?
How long can this country, with its shrinking share of global GDP, sustain its expanding commitments to confront and fight all over the world?
U.S. planes and ships now bump up against Russians in the Baltic and Black seas. We are sending Javelin anti-tank missiles to Kiev, while NATO allies implore us to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance.
This would mean a U.S. guarantee to fight an alienated, angered and nuclear-armed Russia in Crimea and the Caucasus.
Sixteen years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, we are still there, assisting Afghan troops against a Taliban we thought we had defeated.
We are now fighting what is left of ISIS in Syria alongside our Kurd allies, who tug us toward conflict with Turkey.
U.S. forces and advisers are in Niger, Djibouti, Somalia. We are aiding the Saudis in their air war and naval blockade of Yemen.
The last Korean War, which cost 33,000 U.S. lives, began in the June before this writer entered 7th grade. Why is the defense of a powerful South Korea, with an economy 40 times that of the North, still a U.S. responsibility?
We are committed, by 60-year-old treaties, to defend Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand. Voices are being heard to have us renew the war guarantee to Taiwan that Jimmy Carter canceled in 1979.
National security elites are pushing for new naval and military ties to Vietnam and India, to challenge Beijing in the South China Sea, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.
How long can we sustain a worldwide empire of dependencies?
How many wars of this century — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen — turned out to have been worth the blood shed and the treasure lost? And what have all the “color-coded revolutions” we have instigated to advance “democracy” done for America?
In a New York Times essay, “Adapting to American Decline,” Christopher Preble writes: “America’s share of global wealth is shrinking. By some estimates, the United States accounted for roughly 50 percent of global output at the end of World War II. … It has fallen to 15.1 percent today.”
Preble continues: “Admitting that the United States is incapable of effectively adjudicating every territorial dispute or of thwarting every security threat in every part of the world is hardly tantamount to surrender. It is rather a wise admission of the limits of American power.”
It is imperative, wrote Walter Lippmann, that U.S. commitments be brought into balance with U.S. power. This “forgotten principle … must be recovered and returned to the first place in American thought.”
That was 1943, at the height of a war that found us unprepared.
We are hugely overextended today. And conservatives have no higher duty than to seek to bring U.S. war guarantees into conformity with U.S. vital interests and U.S. power.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 27, 2018, 09:17:46 AM
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Macron: The Last Multilateralist
Friday - April 27, 2018 at 12:23 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Together,” President Macron instructed President Trump, “we can resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history and divide the world.”
Before Congress he denounced “extreme nationalism,” invoked the U.N., NATO, WTO, and Paris climate accord, and implored Trump’s America to come home to the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr.
“The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron went on, “you are the one now who has to help preserve and reinvent it.”
His visit was hailed and his views cheered, but, on reflection, the ideas of Emmanuel Macron seem to be less about tomorrow than yesterday.
For the world he celebrates is receding into history.
The America of 2018 is coming to see NATO as having evolved into an endless U.S. commitment to go to war with Russia on behalf of a rich Europe that resolutely refuses to provide for its own defense.
Since the WTO was created in the mid-’90s, the U.S. has run $12 trillion in trade deficits; and among the biggest beneficiaries — the EU.
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Under the Paris climate accord, environmental restrictions are put upon the United States from which China is exempt.
As for the U.N., is that sinkhole of anti-Americanism, the General Assembly, really worth the scores of billions we have plunged into it?
“Aggressive nationalism” is a term that might well fit Napoleon Bonaparte whose Arc de Triomphe sits on the Champs-Elysees. But does it really fit the Hungarians, Poles, Brits, Scots, Catalans and other indigenous peoples of Europe who are now using democratic methods and means to preserve a national home for the unique peoples to whom they belong?
And the United States would seem an odd place to go about venting on “aggressive nationalisms that deny our history.”
Did Macron not learn at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris or the Ecole Nationale d’Administration how the Americans acquired all that land?
General Washington, at whose Mount Vernon home Macron dined, was a nationalist who fought for six years to sever America’s ties to the nation under which he was born.
How does Macron think Andrew Jackson acquired Florida from Spain, Sam Houston acquired Texas from Mexico, and Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor acquired the Southwest? By bartering?
Aggressive nationalism is a good synonym for the Manifest Destiny of a republic that went about relieving Spain of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
How does Macron think the “New World” was conquered and colonized if not by aggressive British, French and Spanish nationalists determined to impose their rule upon weaker indigenous tribes?
Was it not nationalism that broke up the USSR into 15 nations?
Was not the Zionist movement that resurrected Israel in 1948, and, in 1967, captured the West Bank, and then annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a manifestation of aggressive nationalism?
Macron is an echo of that George H.W. Bush who, in Kiev in 1991, warned Ukrainians against the “suicidal nationalism” of declaring independence from the Russian Federation.
“Aggressive nationalisms … divide the world,” warns Macron.
Well, yes, they do, which is why we have now 194 members of the U.N., rather than the original 50. Is this a problem?
“Together,” said Macron, “we will build a new, strong multilateralism that defends pluralism and democracy in the face of ill winds.”
Macron belongs to a political class that sees open borders and free trade thickening and tightening the ties of dependency, and eventually creating a One Europe, whose destiny his crowd will forever control.
But if his idea of pluralism is multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nations, with a multilateral EU overlord, he is describing a future that tens millions of Europeans believe means the death of the nations that give meaning to their lives.
And they will not go gentle into that good night.
In America, too, millions have come to recognize that there is a method to the seeming madness of open borders. Name of the game: dispossessing the deplorables of the country they love.
With open borders and mass migration of over a million people a year into the USA, almost all of them peoples of color from Third World countries who vote 70-90 percent Democratic, the left is foreclosing the future. The left is converting the greatest country of the West into what Teddy Roosevelt called a “polyglot boarding house for the world.” And in that boarding house the left will have a lock on the presidency.
With the collaboration of co-conspirators in the media, progressives throw a cloak of altruism over the cynical seizure of permanent power.
For, as the millions of immigrants, here legally and illegally, register, and the vote is extended to prison inmates, ex-cons and 16-year-olds, the political complexion of America will come to resemble San Francisco.
End goal: Ensure that what happened in 2016, when the nation rose up and threw out a despised establishment, never happens again.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 01, 2018, 02:19:13 PM
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Smut Night at the Press Dinner
Tuesday - May 1, 2018 at 6:44 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, billed as a celebration of the First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who “speak truth to power,” has to be the worst advertisement in memory for our national press corps.
Comedian Michelle Wolf, the guest speaker, recited one filthy joke after another at the expense of President Trump and his people, using words that would have gotten her kicked out of school not so long ago.
Media critic Howard Kurtz said he had “never seen a performance like that,” adding that Wolf “was not only nasty but dropping F-bombs on live television.” Some of her stuff was grungier than that.
The anti-Trump media at the black-tie dinner laughed and whooped it up, and occasionally “oohed” as Wolf went too far even for them, lending confirmation to Trump’s depiction of who and what they are.
While the journalistic elite at the black-tie dinner was reveling in the raw sewage served up by Wolf, Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Michigan.
The contrast between the two assemblies could not have been more stark. We are truly two Americas now.
“Why would I want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of fake-news liberals who hate me?” said Trump in an email to supporters, adding that he would much rather “spend the evening with my favorite deplorables who love our movement and love America.”
Her objective in arranging this year’s dinner, said WHCA president Margaret Talev, was “in unifying the country,” but “we may have fallen a little bit short on that goal.” The lady has a gift for understatement.

With revulsion at Wolf’s performance coming in strong on Sunday, journalists began to call for a halt to inviting comedians, with some urging an end to the annual dinner that Trump has twice boycotted.
These dinners are becoming “close to suicidal for the press’s credibility,” writes Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post.
How did the White House Correspondents’ Association descend to this depth?
In 1962, along with friends at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, this writer hung out outside the dinner, as we talked to legendary Pulitzer Prize-wining investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff.
A memorable evening and though most of the press there had probably been JFK voters in 1960, these journalists would never have sat still for Saturday night’s festival of contempt.
Nor has the older Gridiron dinner descended to this depth.
A white-tie affair at the Statler Hilton, it is put on by the Gridiron Club, one of whose rules is, “Women are always present.” Nothing is to be said from the podium that might affront a lady. And the jokes from the rival party speakers are to “singe, but not burn.”
What happened to the WHCA dinner? The evening has become less a celebration of the First Amendment than a celebration of the press themselves, how wonderful they are and how indispensable they are to our democracy.
Yet in the eyes of tens of millions of their countrymen, they are seen not as “speaking truth to power,” but as using their immense power over American communications to punish their enemies, advance their own agendas, and, today, bring down a president.
The press denounces Trump for calling the media “the enemy of the people.” But is there any doubt that the mainstream media are, by and large, enemies of Trump and looking to Robert Mueller to solve their problem?
Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ dinner recalls to mind T.S. Eliot’s insight that, “Things reveal themselves passing away.”
It was saturated with detestation of Trump, his people, and what they represent.
How did we get here?
Like our cultural elite in Hollywood and the arts, and our academic elite in the Ivy League, our media elite is a different breed than we knew in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Our institutions passed through the great cultural, social and moral revolution of the late 20th century, and they have emerged different on the other side.
Most of the Washington press corps at that dinner have next to nothing in common with the folks who voted for Trump and cheered him in Michigan. And Hillary Clinton surely spoke for many of the Beltway media laughing at Wolf’s jokes when she said:
“(Y)ou could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic … (Trump) tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
It’s good to know what folks really think of you.
Perhaps, rather than seeking to create a synthetic unity, those who so deeply and viscerally disagree — on politics, morality, culture and even good and evil — ought peacefully to go their separate ways.
We both live in the USA, but we inhabit different countries.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 04, 2018, 08:55:08 AM

May 2018 Memo to Trump: Defy Mueller
Memo to Trump: Defy Mueller
Friday - May 4, 2018 at 1:14 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions.

Should Mueller subpoena him, as he has threatened to do, Trump should ignore the subpoena, and frame it for viewing in Trump Tower.

If Mueller goes to the Supreme Court and wins an order for Trump to comply and testify to a grand jury, Trump should defy the court.

The only institution that is empowered to prosecute a president is Congress. If charges against Trump are to be brought, this is the arena, this is the forum, where the battle should be fought and the fate and future of the Trump presidency decided.

The goal of Mueller’s prosecutors is to take down Trump on the cheap. If they can get him behind closed doors and make him respond in detail to questions — to which they already know the answers — any misstep by Trump could be converted into a perjury charge.

Trump has to score 100 on a test to which Mueller’s team has all the answers in advance while Trump must rely upon memory.

Why take this risk?

By now, witnesses have testified in ways that contradict what Trump has said. This, plus Trump’s impulsiveness, propensity to exaggerate, and often rash responses to hostile questions, would make him easy prey for the perjury traps prosecutors set up when they cannot convict their targets on the evidence.

Mueller and his team are the ones who need this interrogation.



For, after almost two years, their Russiagate investigation has produced no conclusive proof of the foundational charge — that Trump’s team colluded with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to hack and thieve the emails of the Clinton campaign and DNC.

Having failed, Mueller & Co. now seek to prove that, even if Trump did not collude with the Russians, he interfered with their investigation.

How did Trump obstruct justice?

Did he suggest that fired NSC Advisor Gen. Mike Flynn might get a pardon? What was his motive in firing FBI Director James Comey? Did Trump edit the Air Force One explanation of the meeting in June 2016 between his campaign officials and Russians? Did he pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire Mueller?

Mueller’s problem: These questions and more have all been aired and argued endlessly in the public square. Yet no national consensus has formed that Trump committed an offense to justify his removal. Even Democrats are backing away from talk of impeachment.

Trump’s lawyers should tell Mueller to wrap up his work, as Trump will not be testifying, no matter what subpoena he draws up, or what the courts say he must do. And if Congress threatens impeachment for defying a court order, Trump should tell them: Impeach me and be damned.

Will a new Congress impeach and convict an elected president?

An impeachment battle would become a titanic struggle between a capital that detests Trump and a vast slice of Middle America that voted to repudiate that capital’s elite, trusts Trump, and will stand by him to the end.

And in any impeachment debate before Congress and the cameras of the world, not one but two narratives will be heard.

The first is that Trump colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton and then sought to obstruct an investigation of his collusion.

The second is the story of how an FBI cabal went into the tank on an investigation of Clinton to save her campaign. Then it used the product of a Clinton-DNC dirt-diving operation, created by a British spy with Russian contacts, to attempt to destroy the Trump candidacy. Now, failing that, it’s looking to overthrow the elected president of the United States.

In short, the second narrative is that the “deep state” and its media auxiliaries are colluding to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

Unlike Watergate, with Russiagate, the investigators will be on trial as well.

Trump needs to shift the struggle out of the legal arena, where Mueller and his men have superior weapons, and into the political arena, where he can bring his populous forces to bear in the decision as to his fate.

This is the terrain on which Trump can win — an us-vs-them fight, before Congress and country, where not only the alleged crimes of Trump are aired but also the actual crimes committed to destroy him and to overturn his victory.

Trump is a nationalist who puts America first both in trade and securing her frontiers against an historic invasion from the South. If he is overthrown, and the agenda for which America voted is trashed as well, it may be Middle America in the streets this time.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 08, 2018, 09:46:22 AM

May 7 2018 Don’t Trash the Nuclear Deal!

Monday - May 7, 2018 at 8:07 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

This next week may determine whether President Trump extricates us from that cauldron of conflict that is the Middle East, as he promised, or plunges us even deeper into these forever wars.

Friday will see the sixth in a row of weekly protests at the Gaza border fence in clashes that have left 40 Palestinians dead and 1,500 wounded by live fire from Israeli troops.

Monday, the U.S. moves its embassy to Jerusalem. Tuesday will see the triumphal celebration of the 70th birthday of the state of Israel.

Palestinians will commemorate May 15 as Nakba, “The catastrophe,” where hundred of thousands of their people fled their homes in terror to live in stateless exile for seven decades.

Violence could begin Friday and stretch into next week.

Yet more fateful for our future is the decision Trump will make by Saturday. May 12 is his deadline to decide whether America trashes the Iran nuclear deal and reimposes sanctions.

While our NATO allies are imploring Trump not to destroy the deal and start down a road that is likely to end in war with Iran, Bibi Netanyahu on Sunday called this a Munich moment:

“Nations that did not act in time against murderous aggression against them paid a much higher price later on.”

From a U.S. standpoint, the Munich analogy seems absurd.

Iran is making no demands on the United States. Its patrol boats have ceased harassing our warships in the Persian Gulf. Its forces in Iraq and Syria do not interfere with our operations against ISIS. And, according to U.N. inspectors, Iran is abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.

Iran has never tested a nuclear device and never enriched uranium to weapons grade. Under the deal, Iran has surrendered 95 percent of its uranium, shut down most of its centrifuges and allowed cameras and inspectors into all of its nuclear facilities.



Why Iran is abiding by the deal is obvious. For Iran it is a great deal.

Having decided in 2003 not to build a bomb, Iran terminated its program. Then Tehran decided to negotiate with the U.S. for return of $100 billion in frozen assets from the Shah’s era — by proving they were not doing what every U.S. intelligence agency said they were not doing.

Should Iran rashly decide to go for a nuclear weapon, it would have to fire up centrifuges to enrich uranium to a level that they have never done, and then test a nuclear device, and then weaponize it.

A crash bomb program would be detected almost instantly and bring a U.S. ultimatum which, if defied, could bring airstrikes. Why would Trump risk losing the means to monitor Iran’s compliance with the deal?

Israel, too, has an arsenal of nuclear weapons that can be delivered by Jericho missile, submarine-based cruise missile, and the Israeli air force.

Why then is the world anxiously awaiting a decision by President Trump that could lead to an unnecessary war with Iran?

The president painted himself into this corner. He has called the Iran nuclear deal “insane” and repeatedly pledged to tear it up.

The Israelis, Saudis and Beltway War Party want the deal trashed, because they want a U.S. clash with Iran. They are not afraid of war. Instead, they fear Trump will extricate us from the Middle East before we do our historic duty and effect regime change in Iran.

What is Israel’s motive? Israel fears that the Iranians, having contributed to Bashar Assad’s victory in Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr, will stay on and establish bases and a weapons pipeline to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has launched scores of airstrikes into Syria to prevent this.

The problem for Bibi: While Trump sees no vital U.S. interest in Syria and has expressed his wish to get out when ISIS is demolished and scattered, Bibi has cast us in the lead role in taking down Iran in Syria.

Trump may want to stay out of the next phase of the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr. Bibi is counting on the Americans to fight it.

But while Bibi may have a vital interest in driving Iran out of Syria, Iran is no threat to any vital interest of the United States.

Iran’s economy is in dreadful shape. Its youth have voted repeatedly against presidential candidates favored by the Ayatollah. There are regular constant demonstrations against the regime.

Time is not on the side of the Islamic Republic.

Fifty million Persians, leading a Shiite nation of Persians, Azeris, Baloch, Arabs and Kurds, are not going to control a vast Middle East of hundreds of millions of Arabs and Turks in an Islamic world where Shiites are outnumbered five times over by Sunnis.

For the United States, the strategic challenge of this century is not Iran, North Korea or Russia. If it is any nation, it is China.

Trump the dealmaker should find a way to keep the nuclear deal with Iran. We are far better off with it than without it.

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And again nothing is said  about Israel nuclear arsenal and the Sampson Option.  Israel has not signed off on the
nuclear non proliferation treaty. Iran has.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 11, 2018, 09:28:23 AM
 10 May 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Are-Bibi-and-Bolton-in-the-Wheel-House-Now-2-700x245.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-bibi-and-bolton-in-the-wheel-house-now-129294)
Are Bibi and Bolton in the Wheel House Now?
Thursday - May 10, 2018 at 11:39 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Brushing aside the anguished pleas of our NATO allies, President Trump Tuesday contemptuously trashed the Iranian nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions.
Prime Minister Theresa May of Great Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were put on notice that their ties to Iran are to be severed, or secondary sanctions will be imposed on them.
Driving the point home, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin ordered Airbus to cancel its $19 billion contract to sell 100 commercial planes to Iran.
Who is cheering Trump’s trashing of the treaty?
The neocons who sought his political extinction in 2016, the royals of the Gulf, Bibi Netanyahu, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC had warned Iranians that the Americans were duplicitous.
When Trump finished speaking, Bibi launched strikes on Iranian bases in Syria, and flew to Moscow to persuade Vladimir Putin not to give the Iranians any air defense against Israeli attacks.
Iranian forces responded with 20 missiles fired at the Golan, which ignited a massive Israeli counterstrike Thursday night, a 70-missile attack on Iranian bases in Syria.
We appear to be at the beginning of a new war, and how it ends we know not. But for Bibi and National Security Adviser John Bolton, the end has always been clear — the smashing of Iran and regime change.
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Tuesday, Trump warned that Iran is on “a quest for nuclear weapons,” and “if we do nothing … in just a short period of time, the world’s worst sponsor of state terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapon.”
And where is the evidence for this Bush-like assertion?
If Iran is on a “quest” for nukes, why did 17 U.S. intel agencies, “with high confidence,” in 2007 and 2011, say Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program?
Saddam Hussein could not convince us he had no WMD, because the nonexistent WMD were the pretext, the casus belli, for doing what the War Party had already decided to do: invade Iraq.
We were lied into that war. And how did it turn out?
Why has the Foreign Relations committee not called in the heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies and asked them flat out: Does Iran have an active nuclear bomb program, or is this a pack of lies to stampede us into another war?
If Iran is on a quest for nukes, let the intel agencies tell us where the work is being done, so we can send inspectors and show the world.
Efforts to pull us back from being dragged into a new war have begun.
The Europeans are begging Iran to abide by the terms of the nuclear deal, even if the Americans do not. But the regime of Hassan Rouhani, who twice defeated Ayatollah-backed candidates, is in trouble.
The nuclear deal and opening to the West were the reasons the children of the Green Movement of 2009 voted for Rouhani. If his difficulties deepen because of reimposed U.S. and Western sanctions, his great achievement, the nuclear deal, will be seen by his people as the failed gamble of a fool who trusted the Americans.
Should Rouhani’s regime fall, we may get a Revolutionary Guard regime rather less to the liking of everyone, except for the War Party, which could seize upon that as a pretext for war.
What happens next is difficult to see.
Iran does not want a war with Israel in Syria that it cannot win.
Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, which just swept democratic elections in Lebanon, does not want a war with Israel that would bring devastation upon the nation it now leads.
The Russians don’t want a war with Israel or the Americans.
But as Putin came to the rescue of a Syria imperiled by ISIS and al-Qaida, to save his ally from a broad insurgency, he is not likely to sit impotently and watch endless air and missile strikes on Syria.
Trump has said U.S. troops will be getting out of Syria. But Bolton and the generals appear to have walked him back.
There are reports we are reinforcing the Kurds in Manbij on the west bank of the Euphrates, though President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded that the Kurds vacate all Syrian border towns with Turkey.
Americans are also reportedly on the border of Yemen, assisting Saudi Arabia in locating the launch sites of the rockets being fired at Riyadh by Houthi rebels in retaliation for the three years of savage Saudi assault on their country.
Meanwhile, the news out of Afghanistan, our point of entry into the Near East wars almost a generation ago, is almost all bad — most of it about terrorist bombings of Afghan troops and civilians.
Is the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives? So it would appear.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 15, 2018, 08:35:16 AM
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Israel at 70: Bibi’s Troubled Hour of Power
Tuesday - May 15, 2018 at 1:35 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
For Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister save only founding father David Ben-Gurion, it has been a week of triumph.
Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal as Bibi had demanded. Thursday, after Iran launched 20 missiles at the Golan Heights, Bibi answered with a 70-missile attack on Iran in Syria.
“If it rains on us, it will storm on them. I hope we have finished the episode,” Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, boasting that Israel’s raids hit “nearly all Iranian infrastructure in Syria.”
The day before, Bibi was in Moscow, persuading Vladimir Putin to cancel the sale of Russia’s S-300 air defense system to Damascus.
Yesterday, in an event televised worldwide, the U.S. embassy was transferred to Jerusalem, with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner doing the honors in what Bibi called a “glorious day.” Few can recall a time when Israel seemed in so favorable a position.
The White House and the Republican Party that controls Congress are solidly behind Israel. Egypt is cooperating to battle terrorists in Sinai.
Israel has a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf royals. And the Palestinians have never been more divided, isolated and alone.
Yet, there is another side to this story, also visible this last week.
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As the transfer ceremony of the Jerusalem embassy was taking place, TV split screens showed pictures of protesting Palestinians, 52 of whom were shot dead Monday, with thousands wounded by snipers. Some 40,000 had rallied against the U.S. embassy move.
Even before Monday’s body count, the Gaza Health Ministry said that, over the previous six Fridays of “March of Return” protests, 49 Palestinians had been killed and 2,240 hit by live fire from Israeli troops.
Those dead and wounded Palestinians are not likely to be forgotten in Gaza. And while Israel has never had so many Arab regimes willing to work with her in pushing back against Iran, Arab League Chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit called the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem, a “clear violation of international law.”
Gheit added: “The fall of Palestinian martyrs by the bullets of the Israeli occupation must ring an alarm … bell to any state that does not find anything wrong with the immoral and illegal stance that we are watching.”
Last week, Hezbollah, which arose in resistance to the 1982 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and expelled the Israeli army 18 years later, won Lebanon’s elections. A Hezbollah-backed coalition will likely form the new government in Beirut.
Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. and Bibi ally, said that any attack by Hezbollah, which fought Israel to a standstill in 2006, should bring an Israeli declaration of war — on Lebanon.
While Israel launched some 100 strikes on Syria in recent years, Syrian President Bashar Assad has survived and, with the aid of Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, won his cινιℓ ωαr.
Assad and his army and allies are far stronger now, while President Trump, Israel’s indispensable ally, speaks of bringing U.S. troops home from Syria. In polls, a majority of Americans lines up behind Israel in its clashes, but a majority also wants no more U.S. wars in the Middle East.
Also, Sunday, the U.S. sustained another major political defeat.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi lost his re-election bid. Based on early results, the winning coalition was that of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, against whose forces U.S. troops fought a decade ago.
Running second was a ticket led by a Shiite militia general close to Iran. When a new government is formed in Baghdad, the orientation of Iraq seems certain to shift away from the United States.
While the Israelis are the most powerful nation in the region, how long can they keep 2 million Palestinian Arabs confined in the penal colony that is the Gaza Strip? How long can they keep the 2 million Palestinians of the West Bank living in conditions even Israeli leaders have begun to compare to apartheid?
Across the West, especially in universities, a BDS movement (https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds) to have students, companies and consumers boycott, divest and sanction Israeli-produced products has been gaining ground.
The Palestinians may have been abandoned by Arab rulers and the wider world. Yet, history teaches that people forced to survive in such conditions eventually rise in rebellion and revolution, take revenge, and exact retribution for what was done to them and their own.
Republican leaders often say that we cannot permit “any daylight” between the U.S. position and that of Israel.
But can the country that decried for decades the panicked reaction of an Ohio National Guard that shot and killed four students at Kent State University sit silent as scores of unarmed protesters are shot to death and thousands are wounded by Israeli troops in Gaza?
Bibi and Israel appear to be on a winning streak. It is difficult to see how, over the long run, it can be sustained.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 18, 2018, 07:50:37 AM
A Trump Doctrine for Singapore and Beyond
Thursday - May 17, 2018 at 10:55 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
After Pyongyang railed this week that the U.S.-South Korean Max Thunder military drills were a rehearsal for an invasion of the North, and imperiled the Singapore summit, the Pentagon dialed them back.
The B-52 exercises alongside F-22 stealth fighters were canceled.
But Pyongyang had other objections.
Sunday, NSC adviser John Bolton spoke of a “Libyan model” for the North’s disarmament, referring to Moammar Gadhafi’s surrender of all his weapons of mass destruction in 2004. The U.S. was invited into Libya to pick them up and cart them off, whereupon sanctions were lifted.
As Libya was subsequently attacked by NATO and Gadhafi lynched, North Korea denounced Bolton and all this talk of the “Libyan model” of unilateral disarmament.
North Korea wants a step-by-step approach, each concession by Pyongyang to be met by a U.S. concession. And Bolton sitting beside Trump, and across the table from Kim Jong Un in Singapore, may be inhibiting.
What was predictable and predicted has come to pass.
If we expected Kim to commit at Singapore to Bolton’s demand for “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization,” and a swift follow-through, we were deluding ourselves.
At Singapore, both sides will have demands, and both will have to offer concessions, if there is to be a deal.
What does Kim Jong Un want?
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An end to U.S. and South Korean military exercises and sanctions on the North, trade and investment, U.S. recognition of his regime, a peace treaty, and the eventual removal of U.S. bases and troops.
He is likely to offer an end to the testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, no transfer of nuclear weapons or strategic missiles to third powers, a drawdown of troops on the DMZ, and the opening of North Korea’s borders to trade and travel.
As for his nuclear weapons and the facilities to produce them, these are Kim’s crown Jєωels. These brought him to the attention of the world and the Americans to the table. These are why President Trump is flying 10,000 miles to meet and talk with him.
And, unlike Gadhafi, Kim is not going to give them up.
Assuming the summit comes off June 12, this is the reality Trump will face in Singapore: a North Korea willing to halt the testing of nukes and ICBMs and to engage diplomatically and economically.
As for having Americans come into his country, pick up his nuclear weapons, remove them and begin intrusive inspections to ensure he has neither nuclear bombs nor the means to produce, deliver or hide them, that would be tantamount to a surrender by Kim.
Trump is not going to get that. And if he adopts a Bolton policy of “all or nothing,” he is likely to get nothing at all.
Yet, thanks to Trump’s threats and refusal to accept a “frozen conflict” on the Korean peninsula, the makings of a real deal are present, if Trump does not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
For there is nothing North Korea is likely to demand that cannot be granted, as long as the security of South Korea is assured to the degree that it can be assured, while living alongside a nuclear-armed North.
Hence, when Kim cavils or balks in Singapore, as he almost surely will, at any demand for a pre-emptive surrender of his nuclear arsenal, Trump should have a fallback position.
If we cannot have everything we want, what can we live with?
Moreover, while we are running a risk today, an intransigent North Korea that walks out would be running a risk as well.
A collapse in talks between Kim and the United States and Kim and South Korea would raise the possibility that he and his Chinese patrons could face an East Asia Cold War where South Korea and Japan also have acquired nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
In the last analysis, the United States should be willing to accept both the concessions to the North that the South is willing to make and the risks from the North that the South is willing to take.
For, ultimately, they are the one who are going to have to live on the same peninsula with Kim and his nukes.
Trump ran on a foreign policy that may fairly be described as a Trump Doctrine: In the post-post-Cold War era, the United States will start looking out for America first.
This does not mean isolationism or the abandonment of our allies. It does mean a review and reassessment of all the guarantees we have issued to go to war on behalf of other countries, and the eventual transfer of responsibility for the defense of our friends over to our friends.
In the future, the U.S. will stop futilely imploring allies to do more for their own defense and will begin telling them that their defense is primarily their own responsibility. Our allies must cease to be our dependents.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 22, 2018, 07:37:07 AM
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Can a Pope Change Moral Truth?
Tuesday - May 22, 2018 at 3:04 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question.
Asked five years ago about a “gαy lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gαy and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”
As judgment was thought to be part of the papal job description, traditional Catholics were startled at what the new pope had volunteered.
Now the Holy Father has apparently fleshed out what he meant.
According to a childhood victim of a pedophile priest in Chile, Juan Carlos Cruz, a ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ to whom the pope apologized, Francis said: “God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope does love you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.”
The Vatican has not denied what Cruz relates.
What makes this remarkable is that the catechism of the Catholic Church, based on the Old and New Testament and tradition, has always taught that ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity is a moral disorder, a proclivity toward sɛҳuąƖ relations that are unnatural and immoral.
The idea that God is responsible for ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ orientations, that the pope and the Catholic Church are fine with men being attracted to one another, and that those so oriented should be happy with it, appears, on its face, to be heresy.
It implies that what Catholics regarded for centuries as moral truth was wrong, or that moral truth has evolved and must be made to conform to modernity. This is moral relativism: Truth changes with the times.
And if what Cruz reports is accurate, the pope’s position is close to Hillary Clinton’s.
In 2016, at a New York fundraiser, Clinton recited her infamous litany of sins common to the “basket of deplorables” backing Donald Trump.
Said Hillary, they are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”
A phobia is “an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.” Clinton was thus saying that those who have an aversion to ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity are morally or mentally sick.
Yet, up until December 1973, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity itself was listed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
The new morality we hear from the pope and Hillary reflects a historic change in the moral thinking of the West. For the belief that ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity is normal and natural, and not only acceptable but even praiseworthy, has carried the day.
Legislatures and courts have written this “truth” into law. It has been discovered by the Supreme Court to be lurking in that Constitution whose authors regarded and treated ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity as a grave crime.
And, yet, from this historic change, questions naturally arise:
On the issue of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity, have we ascended to a higher moral plateau? Or has America jettisoned the truths we believed and replaced them with the tenets of an ideology that may be politically and culturally ascendant but is rooted in nothing but baseless assertions and lies?
Consider the views of Cardinal Gerhard Muller, lately removed as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as to what is behind the drive to have “homophobia” regarded as a mental disorder.
“Homophobia (is) an invention and an instrument of the totalitarian dominance over the thoughts of others. The homo-movement is lacking scientific arguments, which is why it created an ideology which wants to dominate by creating its own reality.”
In short, cultural Marxists and their progressive allies have taken an ideological assertion — ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity is normal, natural and moral — without any historical, biological or scientific basis, and asserted it as truth, established it as law, and demanded that we accept and act upon this truth, or face the wrath of the regime.
Said Muller: “It is the Marxist pattern according to which reality does not create thinking, but thinking creates its own reality. He who does not accept this created reality is to be considered as being sick.
“It is as if one could influence an illness with the help of the police or with the help of courts. In the Soviet Union, Christians were put into psychiatric clinics. These are the methods of totalitarian regimes, of National Socialism and of Communism.”
As Russell Kirk wrote, ideology is political religion. And the dogmas of the political religion by which we are increasingly ruled have displaced the teachings of Christianity and tradition.
Since the Stonewall Riot of 1969, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ relationships have gone from being seen as indecent and immoral, to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being on the same plane as traditional marriage, to being a constitutional right.
And if you do not accept the new morality, you are a deplorable bigot. And if you act on your disbelief in the equality of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity, you will be ostracized and punished.
The truths being jettisoned built the greatest civilization known to man. Will the invented truths of our new egalitarianism survive the arrival of the new barbarians? It’s not looking all that good right now.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 25, 2018, 10:11:28 AM
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Is US Bellicosity Backfiring?
Friday - May 25, 2018 at 12:26 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
U.S. threats to crush Iran and North Korea may yet work, but as of now neither Tehran nor Pyongyang appears to be intimidated.
Repeated references by NSC adviser John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence to the “Libya model” for denuclearization of North Korea just helped sink the Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong Un. To North Korea, the Libya model means the overthrow and murder of Libya strongman Col. Gadhafi, after he surrendered his WMD.
Wednesday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui exploded at Pence’s invocation of Libya: “Vice-President Pence has made unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya … I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks.
“Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.”
Yesterday, Trump canceled the Singapore summit.
Earlier this week at the Heritage Foundation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out our Plan B for Iran in a speech that called to mind Prussian Field Marshal Karl Von Moltke.
Among Pompeo’s demands: Iran must end all support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, withdraw all forces under Iranian command in Syria, and disarm its Shiite militia in Iraq.
Iran must confess its past lies about a nuclear weapons program, and account publicly for all such activity back into the 20th century.
Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it has no secret nuclear program, and stop testing ballistic missiles.
And unless Iran submits, she will be strangled economically.

What Pompeo delivered was an ultimatum: Iran is to abandon all its allies in all Mideast wars, or face ruin and possible war with the USA.
It is hard to recall a secretary of state using the language Pompeo deployed: “We will track down Iranian operatives and their Hezbollah proxies operating around the world and crush them. Iran will never again have carte blanche to dominate the Middle East.”
But how can Iran “dominate” a Mideast that is home to Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt, as well as U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and Syria?
To Iran’s east is a nuclear-armed Pakistan. To its west is a nuclear-armed U.S. Fifth Fleet and a nuclear-armed Israel. Iran has no nukes, no warships to rival ours and a 1970s air force.
Yet, this U.S.-Iran confrontation, triggered by Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal and Pompeo’s ultimatum, is likely to end one of three ways:
First, Tehran capitulates, which is unlikely, as President Hassan Rouhani retorted to Pompeo: “Who are you to decide for Iran and the world? We will continue our path with the support of our nation.” Added Ayatollah Khamenei, “Iran’s presence in the region is our strategic depth.”
Second, Iran defies U.S. sanctions and continues to support its allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen. This would seem likely to lead to collisions and war.
Third, the U.S. could back off its maximalist demands, as Trump backed off Bolton’s demand that Kim Jong Un accept the Libyan model of total and verifiable disarmament before any sanctions are lifted.
Where, then, are we headed?
While our NATO allies are incensed by Trump’s threat to impose secondary sanctions if they do not re-impose sanctions on Tehran, the Europeans are likely to cave in to America’s demands. For Europe to choose Iran over a U.S. that has protected Europe since the Cold War began and is an indispensable market for Europe’s goods would be madness.
Vladimir Putin appears to want no part of an Iran-Israel or U.S.-Iran war and has told Bashar Assad that Russia will not be selling Damascus his S-300 air defense system. Putin has secured his bases in Syria and wants to keep them.
As for the Chinese, she will take advantage of the West’s ostracism of Iran by drawing Iran closer to her own orbit.
Is there a compromise to be had?
Perhaps, for some of Pompeo’s demands accord with the interests of Iran, which cannot want a war with the United States, or with Israel, which would likely lead to war with the United States.
Iran could agree to release Western prisoners, move Shiite militia in Syria away from the Golan Heights, accept verifiable restrictions on tests of longer-range missiles and establish deconfliction rules for U.S. and Iranian warships in the Persian Gulf.
Reward: aid from the West and renewed diplomatic relations with the United States.
Surely, a partial, verifiable nuclear disarmament of North Korea is preferable to war on the peninsula. And, surely, a new nuclear deal with Iran with restrictions on missiles is preferable to war in the Gulf.
Again, we cannot make the perfect the enemy of the good.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 28, 2018, 09:13:45 PM
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What Is America’s Cause in the World Today?
Monday - May 28, 2018 at 8:26 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
After being sworn in for a fourth term, Vladimir Putin departed the Kremlin for Annunciation Cathedral to receive the televised blessing of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The patriarch and his priests in sacred vestments surrounded Putin, who, standing alone, made the sign of the cross.
Meanwhile, sacred vestments from the Sistine Chapel were being transported by the Vatican to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to adorn half-clad models in a sexy show billed as “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” One model sported a papal tiara.
The show proved a sensation in secular media.
In Minsk, Belarus, on May 17, to celebrate International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, Britain’s embassy raised the rainbow flag. Belarus’s Ministry of Internal Affairs was not amused:
“Same-sex relationships are a fake. And the essence of fake is always the same — the devaluation of truth. The LGBT community and all this struggle for ‘their rights,’ and the day of the community itself, are just a fake!”
Belarus is declaring moral truth — to Great Britain.
What is going on? A scholarly study sums it up: “The statistical trends in religion show two separate Europes: the West is undergoing a process of secularization while the post-socialist East, de-secularization.”
One Europe is turning back to God; the other is turning its back on God.
And when Vladimir Putin and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko are standing up for traditional values against Western cultural elites, the East-West struggle has lost its moral clarity.
And, so, what do we Americans stand for now? What is our cause in the world today?
In World War II, Americans had no doubt they were in the right against nαzιsm and a militaristic Japan that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor.
In the Cold War, we believed America was on God’s side against the evil ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which declared the Communist state supreme and that there was no such thing as God-given rights.

With the moral clarity of the Cold War gone, how do we rally Americans to fight on the other side of the world in places most of them can’t find on a map?
A weekend article in The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/could-the-us-fight-dual-wars-in-north-korea-and-iran-after-diplomacy-breaks-down-questions-loom/2018/05/25/691b78b6-604d-11e8-8c93-8cf33c21da8d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b68b871d0461) discusses the strategic difficulty of our even prevailing, should we become involved in wars with both Iran and North Korea.
“You would expect the U.S. and its allies to prevail but at a human and material cost that would be almost incalculable, particularly in the case of the Korean example,” said Rand researcher David Ochmanek,
Added John Hopkins professor Mara Karlin, “If you want to ensure the Pentagon can actually plan and prepare and resource for a potential conflict with China or Russia, then getting into conflict with Iran or North Korea is the exact wrong thing to do.”
One wonders: How many of these potential wars — with North Korea, Iran, Russia, China — could we fight without having America bled and bankrupted. What conceivable benefit could we derive from these wars, especially with a China or Russia, to justify the cost?
Looking back, only one great power survived the last century as a world power. The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires did not survive World War I. World War II brought to an end the British, French, Italian and Japanese empires.
The Soviet Union and the United States were the only great surviving powers of World War II, and the USSR itself collapsed between 1989 and 1991.
Then, in 1991, we Americans started down the well-traveled road of empire, smashing Iraq to rescue Kuwait. Heady with that martial triumph, we plunged into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Though still embroiled, we are now talking war with North Korea or Iran, or even Russia or China, the former over its annexation of Crimea, the latter over its annexation of the South China Sea.
Donald Trump is president today because he told the people he would “Make America Great Again” and put “America First.”
Which bring us back to the question: What is America’s cause today?
Defeating nαzιsm and fascism was a cause. Defending the West against Communism was a cause. But what cause now unites Americans?
It is certainly not Christianizing the world as it was in centuries long ago, or imposing Western rule on mankind as it was in the age of empires from the 17th to the 20th century.
Democracy crusading is out of style as the free elections we have demanded have produced Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and nationalists, populists and autocrats from Asia to the Middle East to Europe.
Perhaps our mission is to defend and protect what is vital to us, to stay out of foreign wars where our critical interests are not imperiled, and to reunite our divided and disputatious republic — if we are not too far beyond that.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 01, 2018, 06:18:04 AM
Is America’s Racial Divide Permanent?
Friday - June 1, 2018 at 12:05 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
For Roseanne Barr, star of ABC’s hit show “Roseanne,” there would be no appeal. When her tweet hit, she was gone.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement, is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” declaimed Channing Dungey, the black president of ABC Entertainment.
Targeting Valerie Jarrett, a confidante and aide of President Barack Obama, Roseanne had tweeted: If the “muslim brotherhood & the planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”
Offensive, juvenile, crude, but was that not pretty much the job description ABC had in mind for the role of Roseanne in the show?
Roseanne also tweeted that George Soros, 87-year-old radical-liberal billionaire, had been a nαzι “who turned in his fellow Jєωs 2 be murdered in German cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs and stole their wealth.”
The Soros slur seems far more savage than the dumb racial joke about Jarrett, but it was the latter that got Roseanne canned.
Her firing came the same day that 175,000 employees of 8,000 Starbucks’s stores were undergoing four hours of instruction to heighten their racial sensitivities.
These training sessions, said The Washington Post, “marked the start of Starbucks’ years-long commitment to new diversity and sensitivity programs after two African-Americans were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on April 12.”
The Philly Starbucks manager, a woman, had called the cops when the two black men she took to be loiterers refused to leave.
Rachel Siegel of the Post describes the four-hour session:
“At first the employees are prompted to find differences. They watched a video in which (Starbucks head) Howard Schultz talks about his vision for a more inclusive company and country. They reflected what a place of belonging means to them. And they examine their own biases.
“Each group viewed a docuмentary underwritten by Starbucks and directed by Stanley Nelson. In the film people of color talk about experiences of being followed in stores. Footage from the civil rights movement quickly progresses to 21st-century cellphone videos capturing people being dragged off a plane, threatened in a New York deli and choked at a North Carolina Waffle House.”
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On reading this, the terms “Orwellian” and “re-education camp” come to mind.
Earlier in May, the NFL issued a rule saying players who refuse to stand for the national anthem must remain in the locker room. If they take a knee on the field this coming season, they can be punished and the team fined.
Great was the outrage when this ruling came. The First Amendment rights of black players were being brutally trampled upon.
Yet the NFL has always had restrictions on behavior, from evicting players from the game for unsportsmanlike conduct to curtailing end-zone dances.
What is the common thread that runs through these social clashes from just this last month?
It is race. Each episode fits neatly into the great media narrative of an irredeemably racist America of white oppressors and black victims.
Had it been two white guys hanging out in that Philly Starbucks, who were told by the manager to buy a cup of coffee or get out, the spat would never have become a national story.
These incidents, coming as they do 50 years after the historic advances in civil rights, induce a deep pessimism that this country will ever escape from the endlessly boiling cauldron of racial conflict.
Today, because of cellphone videos, social media, 24-hour cable and the subsequent nationalization of even the most trivial incidents, our national conversation is more suffused than ever with matters of race.
For many, race has become a constant preoccupation.
And in each of these incidents and disputes, the country divides along the familiar fault lines, and the accusations and arguments go on and on until a new incident engenders a new argument.
The America of the 1960s, with its civil rights clashes and “long hot summers,” was a far more segregated society than today. Yet the toxic charge of “racist” is far more common now.
And how much do these conversations correspond to the real crisis of black America? Here is a sentence culled from another Post story this week: “Three fatal shootings …over the Memorial Day weekend brought the (Ward 8 total) to 30 homicides so far this year.”
Are white cops really the problem in Ward 8, Anacostia, when 30 people in that black community have been shot or stabbed to death in the first five months of 2018?
Washington, D.C., spends more per student than almost any other school district. Yet the test scores of vast numbers of black kids have already fallen below “proficiency” levels by the time they reach fourth and eighth grade, and the high school truancies have reached scandalous levels.
How does ABC’s cashiering of “Roseanne,” or apologies to the two guys at Starbucks, or restrictions on the rights of millionaire NFL players to kneel during our national anthem address the real crisis?
Is white America really black America’s biggest problem?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 12, 2018, 10:35:44 AM
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Behind Trump’s Exasperation
Tuesday - June 12, 2018 at 4:20 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
At the G-7 summit in Canada, President Donald Trump described America as “the piggy bank that everybody is robbing.”
After he left Quebec, his director of Trade and Industrial Policy, Peter Navarro, added a few parting words for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. … And that’s … what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did. And that comes right from Air Force One.”
In Singapore, Trump tweeted more about that piggy bank.
“Why should I, as President of the United States, allow countries to continue to make Massive Trade Surpluses, as they have for decades … (while) the U.S. pays close to the entire cost of NATO-protecting many of these same countries that rip us off on Trade?”
To understand what drives Trump, and explains his exasperation and anger, these remarks are a good place to begin.
Our elites see America as an “indispensable nation,” the premier world power whose ordained duty it is to defend democracy, stand up to dictators and aggressors, and uphold a liberal world order.
They see U.S. wealth and power as splendid tools that fate has given them to shape the future of the planet.

Trump sees America as a nation being milked by allies who free ride on our defense effort, as they engage in trade practices that prosper their own peoples at America’s expense.
Where our elites live to play masters of the universe, Trump sees a world laughing behind America’s back, while allies exploit our magnanimity and idealism for their own national ends.
The numbers are impossible to refute and hard to explain.
Last year, the EU had a $151 billion trade surplus with the U.S. China ran a $376 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the largest in history. The world sold us $796 billion more in goods than we sold to the world.
A nation that spends more than it takes in from taxes, and consumes more of the world’s goods than it produces itself for export, year in and year out, is a nation on the way down.
We are emulating our British cousins of the 19th century.
Trump understands that this situation is not sustainable. His strength is that the people are still with him on putting America first.
Yet he faces some serious obstacles.
What is his strategy for turning a $796 billion trade deficit into a surplus? Is he prepared to impose the tariffs and import restrictions that would be required to turn America from the greatest trade-deficit nation in history to a trade-surplus nation, as we were up until the mid-1970s?
Americans are indeed carrying the lion’s share of the load of the defense of the West, and of fighting the terrorists and radical Islamists of the Middle East, and of protecting South Korea and Japan.
But if our NATO and Asian allies refuse to make the increases in defense he demands, is Trump really willing to cancel our treaty commitments, walk away from our war guarantees, and let these nations face Russia and China on their own? Could he cut that umbilical cord?
Ike’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spoke of conducting an “agonizing reappraisal” of U.S. commitments to defend NATO allies, if they did not contribute more money and troops.
Dulles died in 1959, and that reappraisal, threatened 60 years ago, never happened. Indeed, when the Cold War ended, out NATO allies cut defense spending again. Yet we are still subsidizing NATO in Europe and have taken on new allies since the Soviet Empire fell.
If Europe refuses to invest the money in defense Trump demands, or accept the tariffs America needs to reduce and erase its trade deficits, what does he do? Is he prepared to shut U.S. bases and pull U.S. troops out of the Baltic republics, Poland and Germany, and let the Europeans face Vladimir Putin and Russia themselves?
This is not an academic question. For the crunch that was inevitable when Trump was elected seems at hand.
He promised to negotiate with Putin and improve relations with Russia. He promised to force our NATO allies to undertake more of their own defense. He pledged to get out and stay out of Mideast wars, and begin to slash the trade deficits that we have run with the world.
And that’s what America voted for.
Now, after 500 days, he faces formidable opposition to these defining goals of his campaign, even within his own party.
Putin remains a pariah on Capitol Hill. Our allies are rejecting the tariffs Trump has imposed and threatening retaliation. Free trade Republicans reject tariffs that might raise the cost of the items U.S. companies makes abroad and then ships back to the United States.
The decisive battles between Trumpian nationalism and globalism remain ahead of us. Trump’s critical tests have yet to come.
And our exasperated president senses this.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 15, 2018, 09:42:56 AM
 

Trump’s Bold Historic Gamble
Friday - June 15, 2018 at 2:49 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
President Donald Trump appears to belong to what might be called the Benjamin Disraeli school of diplomacy.
The British prime minister once counseled, “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”
At his Singapore summit, Trump smartly saluted a North Korean general and then lavished praise on Kim Jong Un as a “strong guy” with a “good personality” and a “great negotiator.” “He’s funny, and … very, very smart … and a very strategic kind of a guy. … His country does love him.”
Predictably, Trump is being scourged for this.
Yet, during his trip to Peking in 1972, Richard Nixon did not confront Chairman Mao on his history of massacres and murder, though Nixon’s visit came in the midst of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a nationwide pogrom.
Nor did Churchill or FDR at their wartime summits confront their ally Stalin for his legendary crimes against humanity. Both gushed over “Uncle Joe.”
Still, if the Trump-Kim camaraderie goes south and the crisis of 2017, when war seemed possible, returns, Trump, as he concedes, will be charged with naivety for having placed his trust in such a tyrant.

Yet, to Trump’s credit, we are surely at a better place than we were a year ago when Kim was testing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs, and he and Trump were trading threats and insults in what seemed the prelude to a new Korean War.
Whatever one may think of his diplomacy, Trump has, for now, lifted the specter of nuclear war from the Korean peninsula and begun a negotiating process that could lead to tolerable coexistence.
The central questions to emerge from the summit are these: What does Kim want, and what is he willing to pay for it?
Transparently, he does not want a war with the United States. That black cloud has passed over. Second, Kim and North Korea have emerged from their isolation in as dramatic a fashion as did Mao’s China in 1972.
In 2018, the North was invited to the Seoul Olympics. Kim met twice with South Korea’s president and twice with China’s Xi Jinping. Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister stopped by. And Kim had a face-to-face summit with a U.S. president, something his grandfather and father never came close to achieving.
It is unlikely Kim will be retreating back into the cloisters of the Hermit Kingdom after being courted by the world’s foremost powers.
What does Trump have on offer to induce Kim to end the lifetime of hostility? It is a long menu of what Kim can expect if he will surrender his nuclear weapons and dismantle the factories and facilities that produce them.
Among the benefits proffered: recognition of his dynasty and U.S. security guarantees, an end of sanctions, foreign investment, a peace treaty signed by the United States to replace the 65-year-old armistice and the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula.
Trump has already attended to one of Kim’s complaints. The joint military exercises we have conducted annually with South Korea for decades have been declared by Trump to be “war games” and “very provocative” and have been suspended.
What is being asked of Kim in return?
He must provide an inventory of all nuclear weapons and where they are hidden, surrender them all, dismantle his plutonium and uranium production plants, and shut down his testing sites, all under the watch of U.S.-approved inspectors.
He must renounce any and all nuclear weapons forever, and accept a regime of international inspections that would guarantee he never cheats on that commitment.
Here is where the crunch comes. Kim is being told that he must give up the weapons whose very possession by him are the reason why the world powers are paying him heed.
As leader of a country with a per capita income smaller than Haiti’s, Kim is being told he must surrender the weapons that placed him and North Korea in the world’s most exclusive club, to which only eight other nations belong: the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.
Will Kim, whose nuclear weapons have enabled him to strut on the world stage and trade insults with the president of the United States, give them up to become the leader of a poor backward nation, with half the population of South Korea and not even 4 percent of the economy of the South?
Will he give up his most reliable deterrent against an attack by the United States or China?
In the Kim-Trump relationship, this is where the rubber meets the road. Kim has seen how Americans treat nations — like Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam’s Iraq, and Iran — that decline to develop or surrender the kind of weapons his country took decades to plan, test, produce and deploy.
Should Kim give up his nukes, what U.S. president would fly halfway around the world to meet him one-to-one?
Hence the crucial question: Will he ever really give them up?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 19, 2018, 12:36:35 PM
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Trump and the Invasion of the West
Tuesday - June 19, 2018 at 10:29 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance,” under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents.
“Disgraceful,” adds Dr. Franklin Graham.
“We need to be … a country that governs with a heart,” says first lady Melania Trump. “No one likes this policy,” says White House aide Kellyanne Conway, even “the president wants this to end.”
And so it shall — given the universal denunciations and photos of sobbing children being pulled from parents. Yet striking down the policy will leave America’s immigration crisis still unresolved.
Consider. Since 2016, some 110,000 children have entered the U.S. illegally and been released, along with 200,000 Central American families caught sneaking across the border.
Reflecting its frustration, the White House press office declared:
“We can’t deport them, we can’t separate them, we can’t detain them, we can’t prosecute them. What (the Democrats) want is a radical open-border policy that lets everyone out into the interior of this country with virtually no docuмentation whatsoever.”
Where many Americans see illegal intruders, Democrats see future voters.
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And with 11,000 kids of illegal immigrants in custody and 250 more arriving every day, we could have 30,000 in custody by summer’s end.
The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?
The U.S. Hispanic population, already estimated at nearly 60 million, is predicted to exceed 100 million by 2050, just 32 years away.
And Europe’s southern border is more imperiled than ours.
A week ago, the new populist regime in Rome refused to allow a boat full of migrants from Libya to land in Sicily. Malta also turned them away. After a voyage of almost a week and 1,000 miles, 630 migrants were landed in Valencia, Spain.
Why did Italy reject them? Under EU law, migrants apply for asylum in the country where they first enter Europe. This burdens Italy and Greece where the asylum-seekers have been arriving for years.
Of the landing in Spain, Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini, a leader of the populist League party, chortled:
“I thank the Spanish government. I hope they take in the other 66,629 refugees (inside Italy). We will not be offended if the French follow the Spanish, the Portuguese and Maltese, we will be the happiest people on earth.”
If the migrants boats of the Med are redirected to Spanish ports, one suspects that the Spanish people will soon become as unwelcoming as many other peoples in Europe.
And Trump is not backing down. Monday he tweeted:
“The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!”
Whatever European leaders may think of him, many Europeans are moving in Trump’s direction, toward more restrictions on immigration.
In Germany, a political crisis is percolating. The Bavarian-based CSU, longtime coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, is now talking divorce if Merkel does not toughen German policy.
Merkel has never fully recovered from the nationalist backlash against the million migrants she allowed in from Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr. A New Year’s Eve rampage in Cologne, featuring wilding attacks on German girls by Arabs and Muslims, cost her dearly.
Among the reasons Bavarians are pulling away from Berlin is that, being in the south of Germany, Bavaria is a primary point of entry.
Virtually every one of the populist parties of Europe, especially of the right, have arisen to contest or to seize power by riding the issue of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East.
Yet the progressives adamantly refuse to act, apparently paralyzed by a belief that restricting the free movement of peoples from foreign lands violates one of the great commandments of liberal democracy.
We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western ѕυιcιdє.
If Europe does not act, its future is predictable.
The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet.
If but a tiny fraction of the African and Middle Eastern population decides to cross the Mediterranean to occupy the emptying towns and villages of an aging and dying continent, who and what will stop them?
Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents.
But on the mega-issue — the Third World invasion of the West — he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future.
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Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 22, 2018, 08:23:23 AM
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Has the West the Will to Survive?
Friday - June 22, 2018 at 12:50 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“If you’re … pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart, that’s a tough dilemma. … I’d rather be strong.”
So said President Donald Trump, on issuing his order halting the separation of children from parents caught breaking into the country. Trump’s enemies are celebrating a victory. Yet the issue remains.
Under U.S. law, teenagers and tots cannot be detained for more than 20 days and must be held in the least-restrictive facilities. But if the children cannot be separated from the parents as they await trial, both will have to be released to keep families together.
We are back to “catch and release.”
When that welcome news hits Central America, the migrant stream moving north will become a river that never ceases to flow.
The questions America and the West face might thus be framed:
Is there a liberal, progressive, Christian way to seal a 2,000-mile border, halt millions of migrants from crossing it illegally, and send intruders back whence they came? Or does the preservation of Western nations and peoples require measures from which liberal societies today reflexively recoil?
Does the survival of the West as a civilization require a ruthlessness the West no longer possess?
Consider what our fathers did to build this country.

The English settlers brought in 600,000 slaves, ethnically cleansed the Indians, joined their cousins in a war to expel the French, then revolted and threw out those cousins to claim all the land to the Mississippi for ourselves.
Jefferson grabbed the vast Louisiana Territory for $15 million from Napoleon, who had no right to sell it. Andrew Jackson drove the Spanish out of Florida, sent the Cherokee packing on the Trail of Tears, and told a dissenting Chief Justice John Marshall where he could go.
Sam Houston tore Texas away from Mexico. “Jimmy” Polk took the Southwest and California in a war Ulysses Grant called “the most unjust ever fought.” When the South declared independence, Lincoln sent a million-man army to march them back in a war that cost 600,000 lives.
William McKinley sent armies and warships to seize Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. The indigenous peoples were not consulted. “God told me to take the Philippines,” said McKinley.
The conquest and colonization of the New World and the creation of the United States and its rise to world power required acts of aggression and war of which many among our elites are ashamed. They exhibit their guilt by tearing down the statues of the men who perpetrated the “crimes” that created America. But of these elites, it may be fairly said: they could never have built a nation like ours.
Which brings us again to the larger questions.
While our forefathers would have not hesitated to do what was needed to secure our borders and expel intruders, it is not a settled matter as to whether this generation has the will to preserve the West.
Progressives may parade their moral superiority as they cheer the defeat of the “zero tolerance” policy. But they have no solution to the crisis. Indeed, many do not even see it as a crisis because they do not see themselves as belonging to a separate tribe, nation or people threatened by an epochal invasion from the Third World.
They see themselves as belonging to an ideological nation, a nation of ideas, whose mission is to go forth and preach and teach all peoples the gospel of democracy, diversity and equality.
And this is why the establishment was repudiated in 2016. It was perceived as too elite, too liberal, too weak to secure the borders and repel the invaders.
“If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people,” said Trump Wednesday. Is he wrong?
Since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has grown apparent that the existential threat to the West comes not from Czar Vladimir’s Russian divisions returning to the Elbe.
The existential threat came from the south.
Half a century ago, Houari Boumedienne, the leader of a poor but militant Algeria, allegedly proclaimed at the United Nations:
“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.”
This is the existential crisis of the West.
Thus, Trump seeks to build a wall, turn back the intruders, and bring Vladimir Putin back into the Western camp, where Russia belongs. Thus the new populist regime in Rome blocks boats of refugees from landing in Italy. Thus Angela Merkel looks like yesterday, and Viktor Orban like tomorrow.

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Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 26, 2018, 07:52:37 AM
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A Fascist Right — or a Hysterical Left?
Tuesday - June 26, 2018 at 7:16 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Trump’s supporters are truly “a basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” and “irredeemable,” as Hillary Clinton described them to an LGBT crowd, is not shunning and shaming the proper way to deal with them?
So a growing slice of the American left has come to believe.
Friday, gαy waiters at the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, appalled that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was being served, had the chef call the owner. All decided to ask Sanders’ party to leave.
When news reached the left coast, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was ecstatic, yelling to a crowd, “God is on our side!”
Maxine’s raving went on: “And so, let’s stay the course. Let’s make sure we show up wherever … you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Apparently, the left had been issued its marching orders.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled and booed at a Mexican restaurant last week, and then hassled by a mob outside her home. White House aide Steven Miller was called out as a “fascist” while dining in D.C. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was driven from a movie theater.
Last June, the uglier side of leftist politics turned lethal. James Hodgkinson, 66-year-old volunteer in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, opened fire on GOP congressmen practicing for their annual baseball game with the Democrats.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was wounded, almost mortally. Had it not been for Scalise’s security detail, Hodgkinson might have carried out a mass atrocity.
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And the cultural atmosphere is becoming toxic.
Actor Robert De Niro brings a Hollywood crowd to its feet with cries of “F—- Trump!” Peter Fonda says that 12-year-old Barron Trump should be locked up with pedophiles. Comedienne Kathy Griffin holds up a picture of the decapitated head of the president.
To suggest what may be happening to the separated children of illegal migrants, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden puts on social media a photo of the entrance to the nαzι camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
What does this tell us about America in 2018?
The left, to the point of irrationality, despises a triumphant Trumpian right and believes that to equate it with fascists is not only legitimate, but a sign that the accusers are the real moral, righteous and courageous dissenters in these terrible times.
Historians are calling the outbursts of hate unprecedented. They are not.
In 1968, mobs cursed Lyndon Johnson, who had passed all the civil rights laws, howling, “Hey, hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today!”
After Dr. King’s assassination, a hundred cities, including the capital, were looted and burned. Scores died. U.S. troops and the National Guard were called out to restore order. Soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat upon. Cops were gunned down by urban terrorists. Bombings and bomb attempts were everyday occurrences. Campuses were closed down. In May 1971, tens of thousands of radicals went on a rampage to shut down D.C.
A cautionary note to progressives: Extremism is how the left lost the future to Nixon and Reagan.
But though our media may act like this is 1968, we are not there, yet. That was history; this is still largely farce.
The comparisons with nαzι Germany are absurd. Does anyone truly believe that the centers where the children of illegal migrants are being held, run as they are by liberal bureaucrats from the Department of Health and Human Services, are like Stalin’s Gulag or Hitler’s camps?
This is hyperbole born of hysteria and hate.
Consider. Two million Americans are in jails and prisons, all torn from their families and children. How many TV hours have been devoted to showing what those kids are going through?
Thirty percent of all American children grow up with only one parent.
How many TV specials have been devoted to kids separated for months, sometimes years, sometimes forever, from fathers and mothers serving in the military and doing tours of duty overseas in our endless wars?
Because of U.S. support for the UAE-Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, hundreds of thousands of children face the threat of famine. Those Yemeni kids are not being served burgers in day care centers.
How many Western TV cameras are recording their suffering?
When it comes to the rhetoric of hate, the cursing of politicians, the shouting down of speakers, the right is not innocent, but the left is infinitely more guilty. It was to the Donald Trump rallies, not the Bernie Sanders rallies, that the provocateurs came to start the fights.
Why? Because if you have been told and believe your opponents are fascists, then their gatherings are deserving not of respect but of disruption.
And, as was true in the 1960s, if you manifest your contempt, you will receive the indulgence of a media that will celebrate your superior morality.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 28, 2018, 11:02:44 PM
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No Party for Old White Men
Thursday - June 28, 2018 at 9:40 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
For Nancy Peℓσѕι, 78, Steny Hoyer, 79, and Joe Biden, 75, the primary results from New York’s 14th congressional district are a fire bell in the night.
All may be swept away in the coming revolution. That is the message of the crushing defeat of 10-term incuмbent Joe Crowley, who had aspired to succeed Peℓσѕι and become speaker of the House (http://buchanan.org/blog/no-party-for-old-white-men-129547#).
The No. 4 House Democrat, Crowley, 56, had not faced primary opposition since 2004. He outspent his opponent, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was tending bar a year ago, by 10 to one.
The son of an Irish immigrant, Crowley was leader of the Queens Democratic Club. He had the unions’ support. So confident was he that he skipped a debate and sent a Latina politician to stand in for him.
First comes Hubris, the god of arrogance. Then comes Nemesis, the goddess of retribution.

Tossing Crowley’s credentials back in his face, Ocasio-Cortez ran as a Latina, a person of color, a millennial and militant socialist who lived in her district, and painted Crowley as a white male with lots of PAC money who had moved to D.C. and sent his kids to school in Virginia.
“The Democratic Party takes working-class communities for granted; they take people of color for granted,” railed Ocasio-Cortez. The party assumes “that we’re going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping (their) proposals are.”
“Bland or half-stepping” are not words her agenda calls to mind.
A Democratic Socialist, endorsed by MoveOn, Black Lives Matter and People for Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez favors Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, free tuition at public colleges, federal jobs (http://buchanan.org/blog/no-party-for-old-white-men-129547#) for all who want them, and abolishing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that runs “black sites” on the Mexican border where “human rights abuses are happening.”
When tear gas was used in Puerto Rico, whence her family came, Ocasio-Cortez laid it at Crowley’s feet: “You are responsible for this.”
Crowley tried gamely to keep up, declaring that ICE, for which thousands of Americans work to protect our borders, is a “fascist” organization, presumably something like Ernst Rohm’s Brown Shirts.
While the victory of Ocasio-Cortez is bad news for Peℓσѕι and Hoyer, it may also be a harbinger of what is to come. For the Democratic Party appears about to unleash its radical left, its Maxine Waters wing, and give its ideology another run in the yard.
When the party has done this before, however, it did not end well.
After Hubert Humphrey lost narrowly in 1968, an enraged left seized the nomination for George McGovern, who went on to lose 49 states to Richard Nixon.
After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the left, whose champion, Bernie Sanders, they believe, was robbed by the establishment, seems to be looking to settle scores and seize the nomination for one of its own.
But if an apertura a sinistra, an opening to the left, is what lies ahead for the Democratic Party, then that is better news for the party of Trump than for the party of Peℓσѕι.
Just as Crowley’s congressional district had changed, so, too, has his party in Congress. Columnist Dana Milbank, who sees it as progress, writes, “A majority of House Democrats are … women, people of color or gαy.”
These rising forces in the Democratic coalition are looking to bury the Democratic Party of yesterday, where white males and older ethnic groups — Irish, Italians, Poles and Jєωs — were dominant.
It seems certain now that the summer of 2020 will see a woman, a person of color, or both, on the Democratic ticket. Two whites would likely offend the rising base. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Tim Kaine may have been the last of the all-white Democratic tickets.
However, inside this emerging Democratic majority of peoples of color, fractures and fissures are already visible.
In New York City, the Asian community, which votes Democratic in presidential elections, is in an uproar over efforts by leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio to eliminate the entrance exams that have enabled Asian kids to capture most of the seats in the city’s elite public schools.
De Blasio and his allies want the Asian numbers in these select schools reduced, so the schools mirror the city’s demography, no matter how well the Asian kids are doing on the competitive admissions tests.
Also, the hard left in the Democratic Party, oriented more toward the Third World than the West, is increasingly anti-Israel. And while the Jєωιѕн vote is small and largely concentrated in blue states, among donors to the Democratic Party the Jєωιѕн contingent looms large.
The new demography of the Democratic Party brought about the defeat of Crowley. A majority white district when he first ran, the Bronx-Queens district he now represents is only one-sixth white.
The Irish and Italians have moved out or passed on. And Archie Bunker? He rests in peace in Calvary Cemetery. Like his party.
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Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 03, 2018, 05:26:50 AM
The Liberal Stampede to ‘Abolish ICE’
Tuesday - July 3, 2018 at 1:35 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!” “Abolish ICE!”
Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country.
By last week, however, “Abolish ICE!” was no longer the exclusive slogan of the unhinged left. National Democrats were signing on.
Before his defeat in New York’s 14th Congressional District, Joe Crowley, fourth-ranked Democrat in the House, called ICE a “fascist” organization.
After Crowley’s rout by a 28-year-old socialist who called for killing the agency, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., declared ICE to be “a cruel deportation force (that) we need to abolish.”
Cynthia Nixon, a candidate for governor of New York, described ICE as a “terrorist organization … terrorizing people who are coming to this country. … We need to abolish ICE.”
A star of “Sex and the City” castigated the men and women of ICE as terrorists at St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Manhattan. One wonders what the pastor thought of this Christian message.
Friday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio joined the clamor: “We should abolish ICE.” Over the weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., signed on:
“President Trump seems to think that the only way to have immigration rule is to rip parents from their family (and) treat rape victims and refugees like terrorists and to put children in cages.”
What ICE does is “ugly” and “wrong,” said Warren.
“We need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality.”
Wisconsin Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan plans to introduce legislation to do exactly that — abolish ICE.
President Donald Trump describes this latest liberal campaign as social and political insanity: “You get rid of ICE you’re going to have a country that you’re going to be afraid to walk out of your house (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-liberal-stampede-to-abolish-ice-129591#).”

What is going on here?
Democrats, having just gone through the worst week in memory for progressives, are in imminent danger of losing it altogether.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that not only is the Trump travel ban constitutional, government unions have no right to extract “agency fees” from workers who do not wish to support the union.
Such fees violate the First Amendment rights of government workers not to promote policies or ideas in which they disbelieve.
Then came word that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the “swing vote” on the Supreme Court who was crucial to the decisions that established abortion, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity and same-sex marriage as constitutional rights, will be stepping down
And Trump informed the press that he would announce Kennedy’s successor on July 9, to be drawn from a list of 20 jurists and legal scholars, all of whom have been vetted by the Federalist Society.
Panic ensued.
“I’m scared. You’re scared. We’re all scared,” says Warren in a video her campaign has released.
On Bill Maher’s show, leftist film director Michael Moore called for a million citizens to surround the Capitol to prevent a vote on Kennedy’s successor. How Moore’s million-man march proposes to get into Mitch McConnell’s Senate chamber was left unexplained.
At a fundraiser in Berkeley, California, Barack Obama tried to calm his terrified minions: “All these people that are out here kvetching and wringing their hands and stressed and anxious and constantly watching cable tv and howling at the moon, ‘What are we going to do?’ Their hair is falling out.”
But liberal elites making fools of themselves is a less serious matter than the savage slanders Democrats are hurling at the 20,000 men and women of ICE who are daily protecting us and our country.
ICE, after all, was established to prevent another 9/11, when real terrorists, some of whom had overstayed their visas, massacred 3,000 innocent people, most of them Americans.
This vilification of ICE, writes Deputy Director Thomas D. Homan, represents both an injustice and an act of ingratitude:
“Since September 2016, ICE has arrested nearly 5,000 criminal aliens in New York — individuals with a criminal conviction in addition to their violation of immigrant laws. Many of these arrests were conducted at large in the community which ICE is increasingly forced to do due to sanctuary policies in the state that prevent us from taking custody of criminal aliens in the secure confines of a jail.
“Governor (Andrew Cuomo) supports these policies at the expense of the safety of the very same communities he took an oath to protect.”
Whatever one may think of Trump’s policy of “zero tolerance” of immigrants who break into our country, for elites to smear the 20,000 men and women who risk their lives to keep us safe, as “terrorists” and “fascists,” is an especially egregious form of liberal ingratitude.
What is it in the DNA of the left that it is always ready to enlist in any new war on cops?
The issue of 2018: Should we, or should we not, abolish ICE and embrace the progressive alternative of open borders?

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Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 06, 2018, 07:46:28 AM
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The Never-Trumpers Are Never Coming Back
Thursday - July 5, 2018 at 10:54 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Peℓσѕι to save us, some painful truths need to be restated.
The Republican Party of Bush I and II, of Bob Dole and John McCain (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-never-trumpers-are-never-coming-back-129609#), is history. It’s not coming back. Unlike the Bourbons after the Revolution and the Terror, after Napoleon and the Empire, no restoration is in the cards.
It is over. The GOP’s policies of recent decades — the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr of George H.W. Bush, the crusades for democracy of Bush II — failed, and are seen as having failed. With Trump’s capture of the party they were repudiated.
There will be no turning back.
What were the historic blunders?
It was not supporting tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges and justices, or funding a defense second to none. Donald Trump has delivered on these as well as any president since Reagan.
The failures that killed the Bush party, and that represented departures from Reaganite traditionalism and conservatism, are:
First, the hubristic drive, despite the warnings of statesmen like George Kennan, to exploit our Cold War victory and pursue a policy of permanent containment of a Russia that had lost a third of its territory and half its people.
We moved NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic, onto her doorstep. We abrogated the ABM treaty Nixon had negotiated and moved defensive missiles into Poland. John McCain pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and even to send U.S. forces to face off against Russian troops.
Thus we got a second Cold War that need never have begun and that our allies seem content to let us fight alone.
Europe today is not afraid of Vladimir Putin reaching the Rhine. Europe is afraid of Africa and the Middle East reaching the Danube.
Let the Americans, who relish playing empire, pay for NATO.
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Second, in a reflexive response to 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, dumped over the regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Bashar Assad in Syria, and backed Saudi intervention in a Yemeni cινιℓ ωαr, creating a humanitarian crisis in that poorest of Arab countries that is exceeded in horrors only by the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr.
Since Y2K, hundreds of thousands in the Middle East have perished, the ancient Christian community has all but ceased to exist, and the refugees now number in the millions. What are the gains for democracy from these wars, all backed enthusiastically by the Republican establishment?
Why are the people responsible for these wars still being listened to, rather than confessing their sins at second-thoughts conferences?
The GOP elite also played a crucial role in throwing open U.S. markets to China and ceding transnational corporations full freedom to move factories and jobs (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-never-trumpers-are-never-coming-back-129609#) there and ship their Chinese-made goods back here, free of charge.
Result: In three decades, the U.S. has run up $12 trillion in merchandise trade deficits — $4 trillion with China — and Beijing’s revenue from the USA has more than covered China’s defense budget for most of those years.
Beijing swept past Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Japan to become the premier manufacturing power on earth (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-never-trumpers-are-never-coming-back-129609#) and a geo-strategic rival. Now, from East Africa to Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, and from the South and East China Sea to Taiwan, Beijing’s expansionist ambitions have become clear.
And where are the Republicans responsible for building up this potentially malevolent power that thieves our technology? Talking of building a Reagan-like Navy to contain the mammoth they nourished.
Since the Cold War, America’s elites have been exhibiting symptoms of that congenital blindness associated since Rome with declining and falling empires.
While GOP grass roots have begged for measures to control our bleeding southern border, they were regularly denounced as nativists by party elites, many of whom are now backing Trump’s wall.
For decades, America’s elites failed to see that the transnational moment of the post-Cold War era was passing and an era of rising nationalism and tribalism was at hand.
“We live in a time,” said U2’s Bono this week, “when institutions as vital to human progress as the United Nations are under attack.”
The institutions Bono referenced — the U.N., EU, NATO — all trace their roots to the 1940s and 1950s, a time that bears little resemblance to the era we have entered, an era marked by a spreading and desperate desire of peoples everywhere to preserve who and what they are.
No, Trump didn’t start the fire.
The world was ablaze with tribalism and was raising up authoritarians to realize nationalist ends — Xi Jinping, Putin, Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Gen. el-Sissi in Egypt — before he came down that escalator.
And so the elites who were in charge when the fire broke out, and who failed to respond and refused even to recognize it, and who now denounce Trump for how he is coping with it, are unlikely to be called upon again to lead this republic.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 10, 2018, 08:15:13 AM
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Is a Trump Court in the Making?
Tuesday - July 10, 2018 at 12:09 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Mitch McConnell’s Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party.
Not bad for a rookie.
And the lamentations on the left are surely justified.
For liberalism’s great strategic ally and asset of 60 years, the judicial dictatorship erected by Earl Warren and associates, may be about to fall.
Judicial supremacy may be on the way out.
Another constitutionalist on the court, in the tradition of Antonin Scalia, could ring down the curtain on the social revolution the court has been imposing since the salad days of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Among the changes Warren’s court and its successors succeeded in imposing: The de-Christianization of all public institutions in America. The social war of the 1970s over forced busing for racial balance in the public schools. The creation, ex nihilo, of new constitutional rights, first to an abortion, and then to ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity and same-sex marriage.
But while the confirmation of a new Trump justice may bring an end to the revolution, it will return power to where it belongs in a constitutional republic, with elected legislators and elected executives.
There will not likely be any sudden and radical rollback of changes wrought in six decades. For some of those changes have become embedded in the public consciousness as the new normal, and will endure.
Roe v. Wade may be challenged. But even if overturned, states like New York and California, which had liberalized abortion laws before Roe, are not likely to re-criminalize it.
Affirmative action, however, racial discrimination against white males to promote diversity, may be on the chopping block.
Why did it take until Trump to restore constitutionalism to the Supreme Court, when the Warren Court had been a blazing issue since the 1950s and Republicans held the presidency for 28 years from 1968 to 2016, and had managed to elevate 12 justices?
Answer: Every GOP president save Bush II, has appointed justices who grew to believe the court had a right to remake America to conform to their image of the ideal liberal democracy. And they so acted.
Said Ike ruefully on his retirement: Two of my worst mistakes are sitting up there on the Supreme Court.
The two were Warren, who, as California’s governor, had pushed to put Japanese-Americans in cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs in World War II, and William Brennan, the most radical justice to sit in over half a century.
Nixon came to office committed to rein in the court by naming “strict constructionists.” Yet three of the four justices he named would vote for Roe v. Wade in 1973. Harry Blackmun, whom Nixon rushed onto the bench after his Southern nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell were trashed and rejected, became the author of Roe.
Nixon’s fourth nominee, William Rehnquist, was his best, a brilliant jurist whom Reagan himself would elevate to chief justice.
Gerald Ford’s sole nominee, John Paul Stevens, confirmed 97-0 in the Senate, turned left soon after his confirmation to join Blackmun.
Reagan named Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman, and Scalia.
But when his effort to elevate Judge Robert Bork failed, he turned to Anthony Kennedy of California, whose seat Trump is filling today.
Over 30 years, Kennedy’s vote proved decisive in 5-4 decisions to uphold Roe, to discover ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity as a constitutional right, and to raise same-sex unions to the legal level of traditional marriage.
George H.W. Bush’s first choice was David Souter, who also turned left to join the liberal bloc. Bush I got it right on his second try in 1991, naming the constitutionalist Clarence Thomas.
As for George W. Bush, he chose John Roberts as Chief Justice to succeed Rehnquist and then Sam Alito as associate justice.
Thus, of 15 justices Republican Presidents have named since World War II, five — Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens and Souter — became liberal activists. Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor, both Reagan choices, became swing justices and voted with the court’s liberals on critical social issues.
Democratic presidents have done far better by their constituents.
Of seven justices named by LBJ, Clinton and Obama, every one — Thurgood Marshall, Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor — turned out to be predictably and consistently liberal.
Clearly, the advisers to George W. Bush and President Trump looked back at the successes and the failures of previous GOP presidents, and have done a far better job of vetting nominees. They reached outside for counsel.
It was Trump’s 2016 pledge to draw his nominees to the high court from a list of 20 judges and scholars supplied by the Federalist Society that reassured conservatives and helped him unite his party and get elected.
On the issue of judicial nominees and justices to the Supreme Court, Trump has kept his word.
And the next Supreme Court may one day be called the Trump Court.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 19, 2018, 08:10:40 PM
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Trump Calls Off Cold War II
Monday - July 16, 2018 at 11:24 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.”
He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.”
It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-calls-off-cold-war-ii-129662#).
He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia, not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely on the U.S. establishment.
In a tweet prior to the meeting, Trump indicted the elites of both parties: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”
Trump thereby repudiated the records and agendas of the neocons and their liberal interventionist allies, as well as the archipelago of War Party think tanks beavering away inside the Beltway.
Looking back over the week, from Brussels to Britain to Helsinki, Trump’s message has been clear, consistent and startling.
NATO is obsolete. European allies have freeloaded off U.S. defense while rolling up huge trade surpluses at our expense. Those days are over. Europeans are going to stop stealing our markets and start paying for their own defense.
And there will be no Cold War II.

We are not going to let Putin’s annexation of Crimea or aid to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine prevent us from working on a rapprochement and a partnership with him, Trump is saying. We are going to negotiate arms treaties and talk out our differences as Ronald Reagan did with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Helsinki showed that Trump meant what he said when he declared repeatedly, “Peace with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
On Syria, Trump indicated that he and Putin are working with Bibi Netanyahu, who wants all Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias kept far from the Golan Heights. As for U.S. troops in Syria, says Trump, they will be coming out after ISIS is crushed, and we are 98 percent there.
That is another underlying message here: America is coming home from foreign wars and will be shedding foreign commitments.
Both before and after the Trump-Putin meeting, the cable news coverage was as hostile and hateful toward the president as any this writer has ever seen. The media may not be the “enemy of the people” Trump says they are, but many are implacable enemies of this president.
Some wanted Trump to emulate Nikita (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-calls-off-cold-war-ii-129662#) Khrushchev, who blew up the Paris summit in May 1960 over a failed U.S. intelligence operation — the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Urals just weeks earlier.
Khrushchev had demanded (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-calls-off-cold-war-ii-129662#) that Ike apologize. Ike refused, and Khrushchev exploded. Some media seemed to be hoping for just such a confrontation.
When Trump spoke of the “foolishness and stupidity” of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that contributed to this era of animosity in U.S.-Russia relations, what might he have had in mind?
Was it the U.S. provocatively moving NATO into Russia’s front yard after the collapse of the USSR?
Was it the U.S. invasion of Iraq to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction he did not have that plunged us into endless wars of the Middle East?
Was it U.S. support of Syrian rebels determined to oust Bashar Assad, leading to ISIS intervention and a seven-year cινιℓ ωαr with half a million dead, a war which Putin eventually entered to save his Syrian ally?

Was it George W. Bush's abrogation of Richard Nixon's ABM treaty and drive for a missile defense that caused Putin to break out of the Reagan INF treaty and start deploying cruise missiles to counter it?

Was it U.S. complicity in the Kiev coup that ousted the elected pro-Russian regime that caused Putin to seize Crimea to hold onto Russia's Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol?

Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did.

Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the U.S. bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo?

How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?

If Russian military intelligence hacked into the emails of the DNC, exposing how they stuck it to Bernie Sanders, Trump says he did not collude in it. Is there, after two years, any proof that he did?

Trump insists Russian meddling had no effect on the outcome in 2016 and he is not going to allow media obsession with Russiagate to interfere with establishing better relations.

Former CIA Director John Brennan rages that, "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki ... was ... treasonous. ... He is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???"

Well, as Patrick Henry said long ago, "If this be treason, make the most of it!"

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 19, 2018, 09:07:59 PM
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Trump Stands His Ground on Putin
Thursday - July 19, 2018 at 8:11 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Under the Constitution (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-stands-his-ground-on-putin-129692#), these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached.
And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all.
Trump’s refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin’s claim at Helsinki — that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign — has been called treason, a refusal to do his sworn duty to protect and defend the United States, by a former director of the CIA.
Famed journalists and former high officials of the U.S. government have called Russia’s hacking of the DNC “an act of war” comparable to Pearl Harbor (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-stands-his-ground-on-putin-129692#).
The New York Times ran a story on how many are now charging Trump with treason. Others suggest Putin is blackmailing Trump, or has him on his payroll, or compromised Trump a long time ago.
Wailed Congressman Steve Cohen: “Where is our military folks? The Commander in Chief is in the hands of our enemy!”
Apparently, some on the left believe we need a military coup to save our democracy.
Not since Robert Welch of the John Birch Society called Dwight Eisenhower a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” have such charges been hurled at a president. But while the Birchers were a bit outside the mainstream, today it is the establishment itself bawling “Treason!”
What explains the hysteria?

The worst-case scenario would be that the establishment actually believes the nonsense it is spouting. But that is hard to credit. Like the boy who cried “Wolf!” the establishment has cried “Fascist!” too many times to be taken seriously.
A month ago, the never-Trumpers were comparing the separation of immigrant kids from detained (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-stands-his-ground-on-putin-129692#) adults, who brought them to the U.S. illegally, to FDR’s cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs for Japanese-Americans.
Some commentators equated the separations to what the nαzιs did at Auschwitz.
If the establishment truly believed this nonsense, it would be an unacceptable security risk to let them near the levers of power ever again.
Using Occam’s razor, the real explanation for this behavior is the simplest one: America’s elites have been driven over the edge by Trump’s successes and their failure to block him.
Trump is deregulating the economy, cutting taxes, appointing record numbers of federal judges, reshaping the Supreme Court, and using tariffs to cut trade deficits and the bully pulpit to castigate freeloading (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-stands-his-ground-on-putin-129692#) allies.
Worst of all, Trump clearly intends to carry out his campaign pledge to improve relations with Russia and get along with Vladimir Putin.
“Over our dead bodies!” the Beltway elite seems to be shouting.
Hence the rhetorical WMDs hurled at Trump: Liar, dictator, authoritarian, Putin’s poodle, fascist, demagogue, traitor, nαzι.
Such language approaches incitement to violence. One wonders if the haters are considering the impact of the words they are so casually using. Some of us yet recall how Dallas was charged with complicity in the death of JFK for slurs far less toxic than this.
The post-Helsinki hysteria reveals not merely the mindset of the president’s enemies, but the depth of their determination to destroy him.
They intend to break Trump and bring him down, to see him impeached, removed, indicted and prosecuted, and the agenda on which he ran and was nominated and elected dumped onto the ash heap of history.
Thursday, Trump indicated that he knows exactly what is afoot, and threw down the gauntlet of defiance:
“The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war. They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin.”
Spot on. Trump is saying: I am going to call off this Cold War II before it breaks out into the hot war that nine U.S. presidents avoided, despite Soviet provocations far graver than Putin’s pilfering of DNC emails showing how Debbie Wasserman Schultz stuck it to Bernie Sanders (http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-stands-his-ground-on-putin-129692#).
Then the White House suggested Vlad may be coming to dinner this fall.
Trump is edging toward the defining battle of his presidency: a reshaping of U.S. foreign policy to avoid clashes and conflicts with Russia, and the shedding of Cold War commitments no longer rooted in the national interests of this country.
Yet, should he attempt to carry out his agenda — to get out of Syria, pull troops out of Germany, take a second look at NATO’s Article 5 commitment to go to war for 29 nations, some of which, like Montenegro, most Americans have never heard of — he is headed for the most brutal battle of his presidency.
This Helsinki hysteria is but a taste.
By cheering Brexit, dissing the EU, suggesting NATO is obsolete, departing Syria, trying to get on with Putin, Trump is threatening the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment with what it fears most — irrelevance.
For if there is no war on, no war imminent, and no war wanted, what does a War Party do?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Pax Vobis on July 19, 2018, 10:03:32 PM
GREAT articles!
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 24, 2018, 12:03:36 AM
 23 July 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-evil-clown-pixabay-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-putins-russia-an-evil-empire-129726)
Is Putin’s Russia an ‘Evil Empire’?
Monday - July 23, 2018 at 10:51 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-putins-russia-an-evil-empire-129726#), comes to mind in this time of Trump.
To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from the Channel, the threat seemed infinitely more serious. And so it was.
There were real traitors in that time.
Alger Hiss, a top State Department aide, at FDR’s side at Yalta, was exposed as a Stalinist spy by Congressman Richard Nixon (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-putins-russia-an-evil-empire-129726#). Harry Dexter White, No. 2 at Treasury, Laurence Duggan at State, and White House aide Lauchlin Currie were all exposed as spies. Then there was the Rosenberg spy ring that gave Stalin the secrets of the atom bomb.
Who do we have today to match Hiss and the Rosenbergs? A 29-year-old redheaded Russian Annie Oakley named Maria Butina, accused of infiltrating the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast.
Is Putin’s Russia really a reincarnation of Stalin’s Soviet Union (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-putins-russia-an-evil-empire-129726#)? Is Russia a threat of similar magnitude?
Russia is “our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” thundered Mitt Romney in 2012, now cited as a sage by liberals who used to castigate Republicans for any skepticism of detente during the Cold War.
Perhaps it is time to contrast the USSR of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev with the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
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By the beginning of Reagan’s tenure in 1981, 400,000 Red Army troops were in Central Europe, occupying the eastern bank of the Elbe.
West Berlin was surrounded by Russian troops. East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria were all ruled by Moscow’s puppets (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-putins-russia-an-evil-empire-129726#). All belonged to a Warsaw Pact created to fight NATO. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine were inside the USSR.
By the end of the Jimmy Carter (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-putins-russia-an-evil-empire-129726#) era, Moscow had driven into Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola in Africa, Cuba in the Caribbean, and Nicaragua in Central America, in the greatest challenge ever to the Monroe Doctrine.
The Soviets had invaded and occupied Afghanistan. The Soviet navy, built up over 25 years by Adm. Sergey Gorshkov, was a global rival of a U.S. Navy that had sunk to 300 ships.
And today? The Soviet Empire is history. The Soviet Union is history, having splintered into 15 nations. Russia is smaller than it was in the 19th century. Russia is gone from Cuba, Grenada, Central America, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique.
The Warsaw Pact is history. The Red Army is gone from Eastern Europe. The former Warsaw Pact nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria all belong to NATO, as do the former Soviet “republics” of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.
When the flagship of Russia’s navy, the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, sailed from Murmansk to Syria, it had to pass through the North Sea, the Channel, the east Atlantic, the Straits of Gibraltar, and then sail the length of the Med to anchor off Latakia.
Coming and going, the Kuznetsov was within range of anti-ship missiles, aircraft, submarines and surface ships of 20 NATO nations, among them Norway, Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal, and many U.S. bases and warships.
Entering the Med, the Kuznetsov had to travel, without a naval base to refuel, within range of the missiles, planes and ships of Spain, France, Italy and Greece. Along the banks of the Adriatic and Aegean there are only NATO nations, except for Kosovo, which is home to the largest U.S. base in the Balkans, Camp Bondsteel.
To sail from St. Petersburg through the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic, Russian warships must pass within range of 11 NATO nations — the three Baltic republics, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Britain and France.
The Black Sea’s western and southern shores are now controlled entirely by NATO: Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey. Russia’s lone land passage to its naval base in Crimea is a narrow bridge from the Kerch Peninsula.
With the breakup of the USSR, Russia has been reduced to two-thirds of the territory and half the population of the Soviet Union.
Its former republics and now neighbors Georgia and Ukraine are hostile. Its space launches are now done from a foreign land, Kazakhstan. Its economy has shrunk to the size of Italy’s.
It has one-tenth the population and one-fifth the economy of its looming neighbor, China, and, except for territory, is even more dwarfed by the United States with a GDP of $20 trillion, and troops, bases and allies all over the world.
Most critically, Russia’s regime is no longer Communist. The ideology that drove its imperialism is dead. There are parties, demonstrations and dissidents in Russia, and an Orthodox faith that is alive and promoted by Putin.
Where, today, is there a vital U.S. interest imperiled by Putin?
Better to jaw-jaw, than war-war, said Churchill. He was right, as is President Trump to keep talking to Putin — right through the Russophobia rampant in this city.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 27, 2018, 10:45:49 AM
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Did Tariffs Make America Great?
Friday - July 27, 2018 at 6:53 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Make America Great Again!” will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history.
Yet it raises a question: How did America first become the world’s greatest economic power?
In 1998, in “The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy (http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-shop),” this writer sought to explain.
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However, as the blazing issue of that day was Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, it was no easy task to steer interviewers around to the McKinley Tariff.
Free trade propaganda aside, what is the historical truth?
As our Revolution was about political independence, the first words and acts of our constitutional republic were about ensuring America’s economic independence.
“A free people should promote such manufactures as tend to render them independent on others for essentials, especially military supplies,” said President Washington in his first message to Congress.
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The first major bill passed by Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789.
Weeks later, Washington imposed tonnage taxes all foreign shipping. The U.S. Merchant Marine was born.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (http://buchanan.org/blog/did-tariffs-make-america-great-129752#) wrote in his famous Report on Manufactures:
“The wealth … independence, and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation … ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These compromise the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defence.”
During the War of 1812, British merchants lost their American markets. When peace came, flotillas of British ships arrived at U.S. ports to dump underpriced goods and to recapture the markets the Brits had lost.
Henry Clay and John Calhoun backed James Madison’s Tariff of 1816, as did ex-free traders Jefferson and John Adams. It worked.
In 1816, the U.S. produced 840 thousand yards of cloth. By 1820, it was 13,874 thousand yards. America had become self-sufficient.
Financing “internal improvements” with tariffs on foreign goods would become known abroad as “The American System.”
Said Daniel Webster, “Protection of our own labor against the cheaper, ill-paid, half-fed, and pauper labor of Europe, is … a duty which the country owes to its own citizens.”
This is economic patriotism, a conservatism of the heart. Globalists, cosmopolites and one-worlders recoil at phrases like “America First.”
Campaigning for Henry Clay, “The Father of the American System,” in 1844, Abe Lincoln issued an impassioned plea, “Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth.”
Battling free trade in the Polk presidency, Congressman Lincoln said, “Abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government must result in the increase of both useless labor and idleness and … must produce want and ruin among our people.”
In our time, the abandonment of economic patriotism produced in Middle America what Lincoln predicted, and what got Trump elected.
From the cινιℓ ωαr to the 20th century, U.S. economic policy was grounded in the Morrill Tariffs, named for Vermont Congressman and Senator Justin Morrill who, as early as 1857, had declared: “I am for ruling America for the benefit, first, of Americans, and, for the ‘rest of mankind’ afterwards.”
To Morrill, free trade was treason:
“Free trade abjures patriotism and boasts of cosmopolitanism. It regards the labor of our own people with no more favor than that of the barbarian on the Danube or the cooly on the Ganges.”
William McKinley, the veteran of Antietam who gave his name to the McKinley Tariff, declared, four years before being elected president:
“Free trade results in our giving our money … our manufactures and our markets to other nations. … It will bring widespread discontent. It will revolutionize (http://buchanan.org/blog/did-tariffs-make-america-great-129752#) our values.”
Campaigning in 1892, McKinley said, “Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor will either drive out of existence (http://buchanan.org/blog/did-tariffs-make-america-great-129752#) American industry or lower American wages.”
Substitute (http://buchanan.org/blog/did-tariffs-make-america-great-129752#) “Asian labor” for “European labor” and is this not a fair description of what free trade did to U.S. manufacturing these last 25 years? Some $12 trillion in trade deficits, arrested wages for our workers, six million manufacturing jobs lost, 55,000 factories and plants shut down.
McKinley’s future Vice President Teddy Roosevelt agreed with him, “Thank God I am not a free trader.”
What did the Protectionists produce?
From 1869 to 1900, GDP quadrupled. Budget surpluses were run for 27 straight years. The U.S. debt was cut two-thirds to 7 percent of GDP. Commodity prices fell 58 percent. U.S. population doubled, but real wages rose 53 percent. Economic growth averaged 4 percent a year.
And the United States, which began this era with half of Britain’s production, ended it with twice Britain’s production.
Under Warren Harding, Cal Coolidge and the Fordney-Mccuмber Tariff, GDP growth from 1922 to 1927 hit 7 percent, an all-time record.
Economic patriotism put America first, and made America first.
Of GOP free traders, the steel magnate Joseph Wharton, whose name graces the college Trump attended, said it well:
“Republicans who are shaky on protection are shaky all over.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Neil Obstat on July 28, 2018, 03:29:13 AM
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No Party for Old White Men
Thursday - June 28, 2018 at 9:40 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
A Democratic Socialist, endorsed by MoveOn, Black Lives Matter and People for Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez favors Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, free tuition at public colleges, federal jobs (http://buchanan.org/blog/no-party-for-old-white-men-129547#) for all who want them, and abolishing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that runs “black sites” on the Mexican border where “human rights abuses are happening.”
When tear gas was used in Puerto Rico, whence her family came, Ocasio-Cortez laid it at Crowley’s feet: “You are responsible for this.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 31, 2018, 07:41:06 AM
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Will Tribalism Trump Democracy?
Tuesday - July 31, 2018 at 3:10 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law.
Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jєωιѕн people. Hebrew is to be the state language.
Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jєωs, came swift.
Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism calls the law a “retreat from democracy” as it restricts the right of self-determination, once envisioned to include all within Israel’s borders (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-tribalism-trump-democracy-129792#), to the Jєωιѕн people. Inequality is enshrined.
And Israel, says Brownfeld, is not the nation-state of American Jєωs.
What makes this clash of significance is that it is another battle in the clash that might fairly be called the issue of our age.
The struggle is between the claims of tribe, ethnicity, peoples and nations, against the commands (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-tribalism-trump-democracy-129792#) of liberal democracy.
In Europe, the Polish people seek to preserve the historic and ethnic character of their country with reforms that the EU claims violate Poland’s commitment to democracy.
If Warsaw persists, warns the EU, the Poles will be punished. But which comes first: Poland, or its political system, if the two are in conflict?
Other nations are ignoring the open-borders requirements of the EU’s Schengen Agreement, as they attempt to block migrants from Africa and the Middle East.
They want to remain who they are, open borders be damned.

Britain is negotiating an exit from the EU because the English voted for independence from that transitional institution whose orders they saw as imperiling their sovereignty and altering their identity.
When Ukraine, in the early 1990s, was considering secession from Russia, Bush I warned Kiev against such “suicidal nationalism.”
Ukraine ignored President Bush. Today, new questions have arisen.
If Ukrainians had a right to secede from Russia and create a nation-state to preserve their national identity, do not the Russians in Crimea and the Donbass have the same right — to secede from Ukraine and rejoin their kinsmen in Russia?
As Georgia seceded from Russia at the same time, why do not the people of South Ossetia have the same right to secede from Georgia?
Who are we Americans, 5,000 miles away, to tell tribes, peoples and embryonic nations of Europe whether they may form new states to reflect and preserve their national identity?
Nor are these minor matters.
At Paris in 1919, Sudeten Germans and Danzig Germans were, against their will, put under Czech and Polish rule. British and French resistance to permitting these peoples to secede and rejoin their kinfolk in 1938 and 1939 set the stage for the greatest war in history.
Here in America, we, too, appear to be in an endless quarrel about who we are.
Is America a different kind of nation, a propositional nation, an ideological nation, defined by a common consent to the ideas and ideals of our iconic docuмents like the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address?
Or are we like other nations, a unique people with our own history, heroes, holidays, religion, language, literature, art, music, customs and culture, recognizable all over the world as “the Americans”?
Since 2001, those who have argued that we Americans were given, at the birth of the republic, a providential mission to democratize mankind, have suffered an unbroken series of setbacks.
Nations we invaded, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, to bestow upon them the blessings of democracy, rose up in resistance. What our compulsive interventionists saw as our mission to mankind, the beneficiaries (http://buchanan.org/blog/will-tribalism-trump-democracy-129792#) saw as American imperialism.
And the culture wars on history and memory continue unabated.
According to The New York Times, the African-American candidate for governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, has promised to sandblast the sculptures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis off Stone Mountain.
The Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, has a pickup truck, which he promises to use to transfer illegal migrants out of Georgia and back to the border.
In Texas, a move is afoot to remove the name of Stephen Austin from the capital city, as Austin, in the early 1830s, resisted Mexico’s demands to end slavery in Texas when it was still part of Mexico.
One wonders when they will get around to Sam Houston, hero of Texas’ War of Independence and first governor of the Republic of Texas, which became the second slave republic in North America.
Houston, after whom the nation’s fourth-largest city is named, was himself, though a Unionist, a slave owner and an opponent of abolition.
Today, a large share of the American people loathe who we were from the time of the explorers and settlers, up until the end of segregation in the 1960s. They want to apologize for our past, rewrite our history, erase our memories and eradicate the monuments of those centuries.
The attacks upon the country we were and the people whence we came are near constant.
And if we cannot live together amicably, secession from one another, personally, politically, and even territorially, seems the ultimate alternative.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 03, 2018, 09:44:57 AM
 
Would War With Iran Doom Trump?
Friday - August 3, 2018 at 4:15 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man.
Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea?
Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into, what was gained to justify the cost in American blood and treasure, and the death and destruction we visited upon that region? How has our great rival China suffered by not getting involved?
Oil is the vital strategic Western interest in the Persian Gulf. Yet a war with Iran would imperil, not secure, that interest.
Mass migration from the Islamic world, seeded with terrorist cells, is the greatest threat to Europe from the Middle East. But would not a U.S. war with Iran increase rather than diminish that threat?
Would the millions of Iranians who oppose the mullahs’ rule welcome U.S. air and naval attacks on their country? Or would they rally behind the regime and the armed forces dying to defend their country?
“Mr Trump, don’t play with the lion’s tail,” warned President Hassan Rouhani in July: “War with Iran is the mother of all wars.”
But he added, “Peace with Iran is the mother of all peace.”
Rouhani left wide open the possibility of peaceful settlement.
Trump’s all-caps retort virtually invoked Hiroshima: “Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the like of which few throughout history have suffered before.”
When Trump shifted and blurted out that he was open to talks — “No preconditions. They want to meet? I’ll meet.” — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contradicted him: Before any meeting, Iran must change the way they treat their people and “reduce their malign behavior.”
We thus appear to be steering into a head-on collision.
For now that Trump has trashed the nuclear deal and is reimposing sanctions, Iran’s economy has taken a marked turn for the worse.
Its currency has lost half its value. Inflation is surging toward Venezuelan levels. New U.S. sanctions will be imposed this week and again in November. Major foreign investments are being canceled. U.S. allies are looking at secondary sanctions if they do not join the strangulation of Iran.
Tehran’s oil exports are plummeting along with national revenue.
Demonstrations and riots are increasingly common.
Rouhani and his allies who bet their futures on a deal to forego nuclear weapons in return for an opening to the West look like fools to their people. And the Revolutionary Guard Corps that warned against trusting the Americans appears vindicated.
Iran’s leaders have now threatened that when their oil is no longer flowing freely and abundantly, Arab oil may be blocked from passing through the Strait of Hormuz out to Asia and the West.
Any such action would ignite an explosion in oil prices worldwide and force a U.S. naval response to reopen the strait. A war would be on.
Yet the correlation of political forces is heavily weighted in favor of driving Tehran to the wall. In the U.S., Iran has countless adversaries and almost no advocates. In the Middle East, Israelis, Saudis and the UAE would relish having us smash Iran.
Among the four who will decide on war, Trump, Pompeo and John Bolton have spoken of regime change, while Defense Secretary James Mattis has lately renounced any such strategic goal.
With Israel launching attacks against Iranian-backed militia in Syria, U.S. ships and Iranian speedboats constantly at close quarters (http://buchanan.org/blog/would-war-with-iran-doom-trump-129815#) in the Gulf, and Houthi rebels in Yemen firing at Saudi tankers in the Bab el-Mandeb entrance to the Red Sea, a military clash seems inevitable.
While America no longer has the ground forces to invade and occupy an Iran four times the size of Iraq, in any such war, the U.S., with its vastly superior air, naval and missile forces, would swiftly prevail.
But if Iran called into play Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and sectarian allies inside the Arab states, U.S. casualties would mount and the Middle East could descend into the kind of civil-sectarian war we have seen in Syria these last six years.
Any shooting war in the Persian Gulf could see insurance (http://buchanan.org/blog/would-war-with-iran-doom-trump-129815#) rates (http://buchanan.org/blog/would-war-with-iran-doom-trump-129815#) for tankers soar, a constriction of oil exports, and surging prices, plunging us into a worldwide recession for which one man would be held responsible: Donald Trump.
How good would that be for the GOP or President Trump in 2020?
And when the shooting stopped, would there be installed in Iran a liberal democracy, or would it be as it was in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, with first the religious zealots taking power, and then the men with guns.
If we start a war with Iran, on top of the five in which we are engaged still, then the party that offers to extricate us will be listened to, as Trump was listened to, when he promised to extricate us from the forever wars of the Middle East.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 07, 2018, 10:04:33 AM
 6 August 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-globalism22-pixabay-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-globalists-plotting-a-counter-revolution-129848)
Are Globalists Plotting a Counter-Revolution?
Monday - August 6, 2018 at 9:29 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
On meeting with the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-globalists-plotting-a-counter-revolution-129848#) tweeted: “Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade.”
Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump’s phone?
We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer broke into the “Hallelujah” chorus of Handel’s “Messiah.”
“Amen,” they thundered in The New York Times.
Trump should declare “total trade disarmament” to be national policy and make free trade his “legacy” to America. Such a proclamation, they wrote, would assure Trump the “moral high ground” in the global debate and transform him from “evil disrupter of international commerce to potential savior.”
For free trade is always and ever a “win-win for trading partners.”
To read the Times op-ed is to appreciate that what we are dealing with here is an ideology, a political religion, a creed, a cult.
For consider the fruits of free trade policy during the last 25 years: the frozen wages of U.S. workers, $12 trillion in U.S. trade deficits, 55,000 factories lost, 6 million manufacturing jobs (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-globalists-plotting-a-counter-revolution-129848#) gone, China surpassing the U.S in manufacturing, all causing a backlash that pushed a political novice to the Republican nomination and into the presidency.
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To maintain a belief in the superiority of free trade to economic patriotism, in the face of such results, is to recognize that this belief system is impervious to contradictory proof.
Still, the enduring enthusiasm of free trade zealots is not the only sign that GOP globalists, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, are looking to a post-Trump era to resurrect their repudiated dogmas.
In USA Today, Jeffrey Miron, director of economic studies at the libertarian flagship think tank Cato Institute, wrote last week:
“The solution to America’s immigrant problems is open borders. … Open borders means no walls, fences, screenings at airports, ICE … deportations, detention centers or immigration courts.”
And what would happen after we declare open borders?
“Immigrants will not flood into America. … Crime will not skyrocket. … Even if values and culture change, so what? … Who says America’s current values — some of them deeply evil — are the right ones?”
Bottom line for Cato’s Miron: If we throw open America’s borders and invite the world to come in and to remake who we are as a nation, “Think about the money we could save and make (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-globalists-plotting-a-counter-revolution-129848#).”
This is truly economics uber alles, economy before country.
Other open borders and free trade true believers have begun speaking out. Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, a megadonor to the GOP, has just lashed out at Trump as “divisive” and denounced the “rise in protectionism.”
Nations, organizations and individuals, said Koch, “are doing whatever they can to close themselves off from the new, hold onto the past and prevent change.”
He added, “This is a natural tendency, but it is a destructive one.”
In a pair of tweets, Trump fired back:
“The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. I made them richer.
“Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First and the American Worker — a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!”
The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, are threatening to have their network, Americans for Prosperity, withhold funding from GOP candidates who echo Trump on immigration and trade.
The open borders, free trade ideology of the Kochs, the Cato Institute, and such supply-siders as Moore, Forbes and Laffer, have deep roots in the Republican Party establishment.
Milton Friedman was of this school, as was the longtime editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Bob Bartley, who for years pushed for a constitutional amendment declaring, “There shall be open borders.”
Bartley, somewhat prematurely, predicted that the nation-state was “finished” in the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr. Yet, today, as tribalism and nationalism are making a comeback, it looks more like the transnational “nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr” that may be headed for the dumpster.
As long as Trump is in the White House and the party base is so viscerally behind him and his America First agenda, a renunciation of tariffs or a return to globalism is dead.
But what happens after Trump? Who and what comes next?
Republican recidivism — a return to the rejected open borders, free trade agenda of the Bush Republicans — would ignite a firestorm of protest that would tear the party of Trump apart.
Yet, while these ideas have lost Middle America, they are alive and well among the establishment elites of both parties, who have also not given up on a foreign policy of using America’s economic and military power to attempt to convert mankind to democracy.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 10, 2018, 09:21:27 AM
 10 August 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-muslim-woman-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-saudi-canada-clash-a-values-war-129864)
The Saudi-Canada Clash: A Values War
Friday - August 10, 2018 at 1:11 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Is it any of Canada’s business whether Saudi women have the right to drive?
Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business.
Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh’s arrest of women’s rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations.
“Reprehensible” said Riyadh of Freeland’s tweeted attack. Canada is “engaged in blatant interference in the Kingdom’s domestic affairs.”
The Saudis responded by expelling Canada’s ambassador and ordering 15,000 Saudi students to end their studies in Canada and barred imports of Canadian wheat. A $15 billion contract to provide armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia may be in jeopardy.
Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been backsliding on his promises to modernize the kingdom, appears to have had enough of Western lectures on democratic values and morality.
A week after Pope Francis denounced the death penalty as always “impermissible,” Riyadh went ahead and crucified a convicted murderer in Mecca. In Saudi Arabia, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity can get you a death sentence.
Neither President Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-saudi-canada-clash-a-values-war-129864#) nor the State Department has taken sides, but The Washington Post has weighed in with an editorial: “Human Rights Are Everyone’s Business.”
“What Ms. Freeland and Canada correctly understand is that human rights … are universal values, not the property of kings and dictators to arbitrarily grant and remove on a whim. Saudi Arabia’s long-standing practice of denying basic rights to citizens, especially women — and its particularly cruel treatment of some dissidents — such as the public lashes meted out to (Ms. Badawi’s brother) — are matters of legitimate concern to all democracies and free societies.
“It is the traditional role of the United States to defend universal values everywhere they are trampled upon and to show bullying autocrats they cannot get away with hiding their dirty work behind closed doors.”
The Post called on the foreign ministers of all Group of Seven nations to retweet Freeland’s post saying, “Basic rights are everybody’s business.”
But these sweeping assertions raise not a few questions.
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Who determines what are “basic rights” or “universal values”?
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has never permitted women to drive and has always whipped criminals and had a death penalty.
When did these practices first begin to contradict “universal values”?
When did it become America’s “traditional role” to defend women’s right to drive automobiles in every country, when women had no right to vote in America until after World War I?
In the America of the 1950s, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity and abortion were regarded as shameful offenses and serious crimes. Now abortion and ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity have been declared constitutional rights.
Are they basic human rights? To whom? Do 55 million abortions in the U.S. in 45 years not raise an issue of human rights?
Has it become the moral duty of the U.S. government to champion abortion and LGBT rights worldwide, when a goodly slice of America still regards them as marks of national decadence and decline?
And if the Saudis are reactionaries whom we should join Canada in condemning, why are we dreaming up an “Arab NATO” in which Saudi Arabia would be a treaty ally alongside whom we would fight Iran?
Iran, at least, holds quadrennial elections, and Iranian women seem less restricted and anti-regime demonstrations more tolerated than they are in Saudi Arabia.
Consider our own history.
From 1865 to 1965, segregation was the law in the American South. Did those denials of civil and political rights justify foreign intervention in the internal affairs of the United States?
How would President Eisenhower, who used troops to integrate Little Rock High, have responded to the British and French demanding that America end segregation now?
In a newly de-Christianized America, all religions are to be treated equally and none may be taught in any public school.
In nearly 50 nations, however, Muslims are the majority, and they believe there is but one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet, and all other religions are false. Do Muslims have no right to insist upon the primacy of their faith in the nations they rule?
Is Western interference with this claim not a formula for endless conflict?
In America, free speech and freedom of the press are guaranteed. And these First Amendment rights protect libel, slander, filthy language, blasphemy, pornography, flag burning and published attacks on religious beliefs, our country itself, and the government of the United States.
If other nations reject such freedoms as suicidal stupidity, do we have some obligation to intervene in their internal affairs to promote them?
Recently, The Independent reported:
“Since last year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in northwest China have been unjustly arrested and imprisoned in what the Chinese government calls ‘political re-education camps.’ Thousands have disappeared. There are credible reports of torture and death among the prisoners. … The international community has largely reacted with silence.”
Anyone up for sanctioning Xi Jinping’s China?
Or do Uighurs’ rights rank below those of Saudi feminists?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 14, 2018, 08:09:19 AM
 14 August 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-map-eye-morguefile-e1534235244377.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/americas-lengthening-enemies-list-129887)
America’s Lengthening Enemies List
Tuesday - August 14, 2018 at 4:18 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, deep into the 17th year of America’s longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar.
The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle.
“As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to soar on Sunday,” The Wall Street (http://buchanan.org/blog/americas-lengthening-enemies-list-129887#) Journal reported, “hospitals were spilling over with dead bodies, corpses lay in Ghazni’s streets, and gunfire and shelling were preventing relatives from reaching cemeteries to bury their dead.”
In Yemen Monday, a funeral was held in the town square of Saada for 40 children massacred in an air strike on a school bus by Saudis or the UAE, using U.S.-provided planes and bombs.
“A crime by America and its allies against the children of Yemen,” said a Houthi rebel leader.
Yemen is among the worst humanitarian situations in the world, and in creating that human-rights tragedy, America has played an indispensable role.
The U.S. also has 2,000 troops in Syria. Our control, with our Kurd allies, of that quadrant of Syria east of the Euphrates is almost certain to bring us into eventual conflict with a regime and army insisting that we get out of their country.
As for our relations with Turkey, they have never been worse.
President Erdogan regards our Kurd allies in Syria as collaborators of his own Kurdish-terrorist PKK. He sees us as providing sanctuary for exile cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan says was behind the attempted coup in 2016 in which he and his family were targeted for assassination.
Last week, when the Turkish currency, the lira, went into a tailspin, President Trump piled on, ratcheting up U.S. tariffs on Turkish aluminum and steel. If the lira collapses and Turkey cannot meet its debt (http://buchanan.org/blog/americas-lengthening-enemies-list-129887#) obligations, Erdogan will lay the blame at the feet of the Americans and Trump.
Which raises a question: How many quarrels, conflicts and wars, and with how many adversaries, can even the mighty United States sustain?
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In November, the most severe of U.S. sanctions will be imposed on Iran. Among the purposes of this policy: Force as many nations as possible to boycott Iranian oil and gas, sink its economy, bring down the regime.
Iran has signaled a possible response to its oil and gas being denied access to world markets. This August, Iranian gunboats exercised in the Strait of Hormuz, backing up a regime warning that if Iranian oil cannot get out of the Gulf, the oil of Arab OPEC nations may be bottled up inside as well. Last week, Iran test-fired an anti-ship ballistic missile.
Iran has rejected Trump’s offer of unconditional face-to-face talks, unless the U.S. first lifts the sanctions imposed after withdrawing from the nuclear deal.
With no talks, a U.S. propaganda offensive underway, the Iranian rial sinking and the economy sputtering, regular demonstrations against the regime, and new sanctions scheduled for November, it is hard to see how a U.S. collision with Tehran can be avoided.
This holds true as well for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Last week, the U.S. imposed new sanctions on Russia for its alleged role in the nerve-agent poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the British town of Salisbury.
Though the U.S. had already expelled 60 Russian diplomats for the poisoning, and Russia vehemently denies responsibility — and conclusive evidence has not been made public and the victims have not been heard from — far more severe sanctions are to be added in November.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is warning that such a U.S. move would cross a red line: “If … a ban on bank operations or currency use follows, it will amount to a declaration of economic war. … And it will warrant a response with economic means, political means and, if necessary, other means.”
That the sanctions are biting is undeniable. Like the Turkish lira and Iranian rial, the Russian ruble has been falling and the Russian people are feeling the pain (http://buchanan.org/blog/americas-lengthening-enemies-list-129887#).
Last week also, a U.S. Poseidon reconnaissance plane, observing China’s construction of militarized islets in the South China Sea, was told to “leave immediately and keep out.”
China claims the sea as its national territory.
And North Korea’s Kim Jong Un apparently intends to hold onto his arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“We’re waiting for the North Koreans to begin the process of denuclearization, which they committed to in Singapore and which they’ve not yet done,” John Bolton told CNN last week.
A list of America’s adversaries here would contain the Taliban, the Houthis of Yemen, Bashar Assad of Syria, Erdogan’s Turkey, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China — a pretty full plate.
Are we prepared to see these confrontations through, to assure the capitulation of our adversaries? What do we do if they continue to defy us?
And if it comes to a fight, how many allies will we have in the battles and wars that follow?
Was this the foreign policy America voted for?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 17, 2018, 07:53:02 AM
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Can America Ever Come Together Again?
Friday - August 17, 2018 at 4:10 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/can-america-ever-come-together-again-129899#), he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance.
He would have been challenged to a duel and shot.
“Trump’s … performance in Helsinki,” Brennan had said, “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was … treasonous.”
Why should the president not strip from a CIA director who calls him a traitor the honor and privilege of a security clearance? Or is a top-secret clearance an entitlement like Social Security?
CIA directors retain clearances because they are seen as national assets, individuals whose unique experience, knowledge and judgment may be called upon to assist a president in a national crisis.
Not so long ago, this was a bipartisan tradition.
Who trashed this tradition?
Was it not the former heads of the security agencies — CIA, FBI, director of national intelligence — who have been leveling the kind of savage attacks on the chief of state one might expect from antifa?
Are ex-security officials entitled to retain the high privileges of the offices they held, if they descend into cable-TV hatred and hostility?
Former CIA chief Mike Hayden, in attacking Trump for separating families of detained illegal immigrants at the border, tweeted a photo of the train tracks leading into Auschwitz.
“Other governments have separated mothers and children” was Hayden’s caption.
Is that fair criticism from an ex-CIA director?

Thursday, The New York Times decried Trump’s accusation that the media are “the enemy of the people.”
“Insisting that truths you don’t like are ‘fake news’ is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists ‘the enemy of the people’ is dangerous, period,” said the Times.
Fair enough (http://buchanan.org/blog/can-america-ever-come-together-again-129899#), but is it not dangerous for a free press to be using First Amendment rights to endlessly bash a president as a racist, fascist, sexist, neo-nαzι, liar, tyrant and traitor?
The message of journalists who use such terms may be to convey their detestation of Trump. But what is the message received in the sick minds of people like that leftist who tried to massacre Republican congressmen practicing for their annual softball game with Democrats?
And does Trump not have a point when he says the Boston Globe-organized national attack on him, joined in by the Times and 300 other newspapers, was journalistic “collusion” against him?
If Trump believes that CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post are mortal enemies who want to see him ousted or impeached, is he wrong?
We are an irreconcilable us-against-them nation today, and given the rancor across the ideological, social and cultural chasm that divides us, it is hard to see how, even post-Trump, we can ever come together again.
Speaking at a New York LGBT gala in 2016, Hillary Clinton said: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … Some of those folks … are irredeemable, but … they are not America.”
When Clinton’s reflections on Middle America made it into print, she amended her remarks. Just as Gov. Andrew Cuomo rushed to amend his comments yesterday when he blurted at a bill-signing ceremony:
“We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.” America was “never that great”?
Cuomo’s press secretary hastened to explain, “When the president speaks about making America great again … he ignores the pain (http://buchanan.org/blog/can-america-ever-come-together-again-129899#) so many endured and that we suffered from slavery, discrimination, segregation, sexism and marginalized women’s contributions.”
Clinton and Cuomo committed gaffes of the kind Michael Kinsley described as the blurting out of truths the speaker believes but desperately does not want a wider audience to know.
In San Francisco in 2008, Barack Obama committed such a gaffe.
Asked why blue-collar workers in industrial towns decimated by job losses were not responding to his message, Obama trashed these folks as the unhappy losers of our emerging brave new world:
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
These clingers to their Bibles, bigotries and guns are the people the mainstream media, 10 years later, deride and dismiss as “Trump’s base.”
What Clinton, Cuomo and Obama spilled out reveals what is really behind the cultural and ideological wars of America today.
Most media elites accept the historic indictment — that before the Progressives came, this country was mired in racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, and that its history had been a long catalog of crimes against indigenous peoples, Africans brought here in bondage, Mexicans whose lands we stole, migrants, and women and gαys who were denied equality.
The people who cheer Trump believe the country they inherited from their fathers was a great, good and glorious country, and that the media who detest Trump also despise them.
For such as these, Trump cannot scourge the media often enough.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 21, 2018, 09:42:59 AM
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In Spies Battle, Trump Holds the High Ground
Monday - August 20, 2018 at 11:14 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In backing John Brennan’s right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of “a freight train” and his rhetoric had become “an issue in and of itself.”
After Donald Trump’s Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, Brennan had called the president’s actions “nothing short of treasonous.”
The battle is now engaged. Trump cannot back down. He must defy and defeat the old bulls of the intel community. And he can.
For a security clearance is not a right. It is not an entitlement.
It is a privilege, an honor and a necessity for those serving in the security agencies of the U.S. government — while they serve.
Brennan is not being deprived of his First Amendment rights. He can still make any accusation and call the president any name he wishes.
But to argue that a charge of treason against a president is not a justification for pulling a clearance is a claim both arrogant and absurd.
Again, a security clearance is not a constitutional right.

Said Defense Secretary James Mattis: “I have taken security clearances away from people in my previous time in uniform … a security clearance is something that is granted on an as-needed basis.”
Brennan is now threatening to sue the president. Bring it on, says national security adviser John Bolton.
With 4 million Americans holding top-secret clearances, and this city awash in leaks to the media from present and past intel and security officials, it is time to strip the swamp creatures of their special privileges.
The White House should press upon Congress a policy of automatic cancellation of security clearances, for intelligence and military officers, upon resignation, retirement (http://buchanan.org/blog/in-spies-battle-trump-holds-the-high-ground-129941#) or severance.
Clearances should be retained only for departing officers who can demonstrate that their “need to know” national secrets remains crucial to our security, not merely advantageous to their pursuit of lucrative jobs (http://buchanan.org/blog/in-spies-battle-trump-holds-the-high-ground-129941#) in the military-industrial complex.
Officials in the security (http://buchanan.org/blog/in-spies-battle-trump-holds-the-high-ground-129941#) realm who take clearances with them on leaving office are like House members who retain all the access, perks and privileges of Congress after they step down to earn seven-figure salaries lobbying their former congressional colleagues.
The White House statement of Sarah Huckabee Sanders on John Brennan’s loss of his clearances was spot on:
“Any access granted to our nation’s secrets should be in furtherance of national, not personal, interests.
“Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the Internet and television — about this administration. Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, and facilitates the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.”
Trump is said to be evaluating pulling the security clearances of Clapper, ex-FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
This is a good start. Some of these individuals have been fired. Some are under investigation. Some were involved in the FBI’s “get-Trump” cabal to prevent his election and then to abort his presidency.
Some have become talking heads on cable TV, exploiting the credibility of their former titles and offices to undermine an elected president.
Again, they have a First Amendment right to do this. But they should be stripped of their clearances to show the nation that the president is dealing with insiders who have joined the Resistance.
At bottom, the issue is: Who speaks for America?
Is it the mainstream media, the deep state, the permanent government, the city that gave Trump 4 percent of its votes? Or is it that vast slice of Middle America that sent Trump to drain the swamp?
Trump’s enemies, and they are legion, want to see Robert Mueller charge him with collusion with Russia and obstructing the investigation of that collusion. They want to see the Democratic Party take over the House in November, and the Senate, and move on to impeach and remove Trump from office. Then they want to put him where Paul Manafort sits today.
For Trump, a truce or a negotiated peace with these people is never going to happen. But this issue of security clearances is a battlefield where the president cannot lose, if he fights wisely.
Americans sense that these are privileges that should be extended to those who protect us, not perks for former officials to exploit and monetize (http://buchanan.org/blog/in-spies-battle-trump-holds-the-high-ground-129941#) while they attempt to bring down the commander in chief.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 24, 2018, 07:37:57 PM
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Do Democrats Want an Impeachment Fight?
Friday - August 24, 2018 at 2:20 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/do-democrats-want-an-impeachment-fight-129957#) ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn.
Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime.
Cohen had fronted the cash, $130,000, to pay porn star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a decade-old tryst with Trump. He had also brokered a deal whereby the National Enquirer bought the rights to a story about a Trump affair with a Playboy model, to kill it.
Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president.
Would a Democratic House, assuming we get one, really impeach a president for paying hush money (http://buchanan.org/blog/do-democrats-want-an-impeachment-fight-129957#) to old girlfriends?
Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature.
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But if Cohen’s guilty plea and Tuesday’s conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump’s dealings for more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation.
Nothing that comes of this collaboration will be helpful to Trump.
Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of motives to “flip” and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump.
Then there is the Mueller probe itself.
Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin’s Russia, though this was his mandate.
However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down.
Mueller may not have the power to haul the president before a grand jury or indict him. After all, it is Parliament that deposes and beheads the king, not the sheriff of Nottingham. But Mueller will file a report with the Department of Justice that will be sent to the House.
And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller’s report.
Still, as of now, it is hard to see how two-thirds of a new Senate would convict this president of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Thus we are in for a hellish year.
Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas, federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his enemies.
No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted.
Democrats who have grown giddy about taking the House should consider what a campaign to bring down a president, who is supported by a huge swath of the nation and has fighting allies in the press, would be like.
Why do it? Especially if they knew in advance the Senate would not convict.
That America has no desire for a political struggle to the death over impeachment is evident. Recognition of this reality is why the Democratic Party is assuring America that impeachment is not what they have in mind.
Today, it is Republicans leaders who are under pressure to break with Trump, denounce him, and call for new investigations into alleged collusion with the Russians. But if Democrats capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media auxiliaries to pursue impeachment.
Taking the House would put newly elected Democrats under fire from the right for forming a lynch mob, and from the mainstream media for not doing their duty and moving immediately to impeach Trump.
Democrats have been laboring for two years to win back the House. But if they discover that the first duty demanded of them, by their own rabid followers, is to impeach President Trump, they may wonder why they were so eager to win it.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 28, 2018, 09:58:51 AM
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Are the Interventionists Now Leaderless?
Monday - August 27, 2018 at 10:09 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“McCain’s Death Leaves Void” ran The Wall Street Journal headline over a front-page story that began:
“The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.”
Certainly, the passing of the senator whose life story will dominate the news until he is buried at his alma mater (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-the-interventionists-now-leaderless-129973#), the Naval Academy, on Sunday, leaves America’s interventionists without their greatest champion.
No one around has the prestige or media following of McCain.
And the cause he championed, compulsive intervention in foreign quarrels to face down dictators and bring democrats to power, appears to be a cause whose time has passed.
When 9/11 occurred, America was united in crushing the al-Qaida terrorists who perpetrated the atrocities. John McCain then backed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which had no role in the attacks.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, he slipped into northern Syria to cheer rebels who had arisen to overthrow President Bashar Assad, an insurgency that led to a seven-year cινιℓ ωαr and one of the great humanitarian disasters of our time.
McCain supported the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic, right up to Russia’s border. When Georgia invaded South Ossetia in 2008, and was expelled by the Russian army, McCain roared, “We are all Georgians now!”
He urged intervention. But Bush, his approval rating scraping bottom, had had enough of the neocon crusades for democracy.
McCain’s contempt for Vladimir Putin was unconstrained. When crowds gathered in Maidan Square in Kiev to overthrow an elected pro-Russian president, McCain was there, cheering them on.
He supported sending arms to the Ukrainian army to fight pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass. He backed U.S. support for Saudi intervention in Yemen. And this war, too, proved to be a humanitarian disaster.
John McCain was a war hawk, and proud of it. But by 2006, the wars he had championed had cost the Republican Party both houses of Congress.

In 2008, when he was on the ballot, those wars helped cost him the presidency.
By 2016, the Republican majority would turn its back on McCain and his protege, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and nominate Donald Trump (http://buchanan.org/blog/are-the-interventionists-now-leaderless-129973#), who said he would seek to get along with Russia and extricate America from the wars into which McCain had helped plunge the country.
Yet, while interventionism now has no great champion and has proven unable to rally an American majority, it retains a residual momentum. This compulsion is pushing us to continue backing the Saudi war in Yemen and to seek regime change in Iran.
Yet if either of these enterprises holds any prospect of bringing about a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East, no one has made the case.
While the foreign policy that won the Cold War, containment, was articulated by George Kennan and pursued by presidents from Truman to Bush I, no grand strategy for the post-Cold War era has ever been embraced by a majority of Americans.
Bush I’s “nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr” was rejected by Ross Perot’s economic patriots and Bill Clinton’s baby boomers who wanted to spend America’s peace dividend from our Cold War victory on America’s homefront.
As for the Bush II crusades for democracy “to end tyranny in our world,” the fruits of that Wilsonian idealism turned into ashes in our mouths.
But if the foreign policy agendas of Bush I and Bush II, along with McCain’s interventionism, have been tried and found wanting, what is America’s grand strategy?
What are the great goals of U.S. foreign policy? What are the vital interests for which all, or almost all Americans, believe we should fight?
“Take away this pudding; it has no theme,” said Churchill. Britain has lost an empire, but not yet found a role, was the crushing comment of Dean Acheson in 1962.
Both statements appear to apply to U.S. foreign policy in 2018.
We are bombing and fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, partly John McCain’s legacy. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has sent a virtual ultimatum to Iran. We have told North Korea, a nuclear power with the world’s fourth-largest army, either to denuclearize or the U.S. may use its military might to get the job done.
We are challenging Beijing in its claimed territorial waters of the South China Sea. From South Korea to Estonia, we are committed by solemn treaty to go to war if any one of dozens of nations is attacked.
Now one hears talk of an “Arab NATO” to confront the ayatollah’s Iran and its Shiite allies. Lest we forget, ISIS and al-Qaida are Sunni.
With all these war guarantees, the odds are excellent that one day we are going to be dragged in yet another war that the American people will sour upon soon after it begins.
Where is the American Kennan of the new century?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: klasG4e on August 29, 2018, 04:13:14 PM
(http://buchanan.org/blog/are-the-interventionists-now-leaderless-129973)

By Patrick J. Buchanan

When 9/11 occurred, America was united in crushing the al-Qaida terrorists who perpetrated the atrocities. John McCain then backed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which had no role in the attacks.

Patrick Buchanan is a traditional Catholic.  He is a well educated man and a well informed man with considerable years of political experience.  During his many years as a widely syndicated political and social commentator he has often exhibited much wisdom.  Why is it then that after all these years he has consistently maintained one of the most catastrophic and monstrous worldly falsehoods (i.e., al-Qaida terrorists did 9-11) of the 21st Century on the face of the Earth?  This is a disconnect of truly monumental magnitude!
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 31, 2018, 06:40:29 PM
 31 August 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-catholic-church05-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/a-cancer-on-the-papacy-129988)
A Cancer On the Papacy
Friday - August 31, 2018 at 1:01 
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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Priests who prey on parochial school children and altar boys are not only sinners, they are criminal predators who belong in penitentiary cells not parish rectories….”
This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical.
First came the stunning revelation that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington and friend to presidents, had for decades been a predator-priest who preyed on seminarians and abused altar boys, and whose depravity was widely known and covered up.
Came then the report of a Pennsylvania grand jury that investigated six dioceses and found that some 300 priests had abused 1,000 children over the last 70 years.
The bishop of Pittsburgh, Donald Wuerl, now cardinal archbishop of Washington, defrocked some of these corrupt priests, but reassigned others to new parishes where new outrages were committed.
This weekend brought the most stunning accusation. (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-by-Archbishop-Carlo-Maria-Vigano.pdf)
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Vatican envoy to the United States under Pope Benedict XVI, charged that Pope Francis had been told of McCarrick’s abuses, done nothing to sanction him, and that, as “zero tolerance” of sɛҳuąƖ abuse is Francis’ own policy, the pope should resign.
In his 11-page letter of accusations (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-by-Archbishop-Carlo-Maria-Vigano.pdf), Vigano further charged that there is a powerful “ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ current” among the Vatican prelates closest to the pope.
What did the pope know and when did he know it?
Read More…
— New evidence backs
 Viganò’s claim about
 Benedict-imposed sanctions… (https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-evidence-backs-viganos-claim-about-benedict-imposed-sanctions-on-mccarr)

— Archbishop Carlo Maria
 Viganò Exposes ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ
 Coverup at Highest Levels.. (http://catholicism.org/archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano-exposes-ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ-coverup-at-highest-levels.html)

— Pope Francis covered
 up McCarrick abuse,
 former US nuncio testifies.. (https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/former-us-nuncio-pope-francis-knew-of-mccarricks-misdeeds-repealed-sanction)
Not unlike Watergate, the issue here is whether Pope Francis knew what was going on in the Vatican and in his Church, and why he was not more resolute in rooting out the moral squalor.
Orthodox, conservative and traditionalist Catholics are the most visible and vocal demanding an accounting. Progressive and liberal Catholics, to whom Pope Francis and Cardinal McCarrick were seen as allies on issues of sɛҳuąƖ morality, have been thrown on the defensive.
Now, accusations alone are neither proof nor evidence.
Yet there is an obligation, an imperative, given the gravity of the revelations, that the Vatican address the charges.
When did Pope Francis become aware of McCarrick’s conduct, which appears to have been widely known? Did he let his close friendship with McCarrick keep him from doing his papal and pastoral duty?
This destructive scandal has been bleeding for decades. Too long. The Church is running out of time. It needs to act decisively now.
Priests who prey on parochial school children and altar boys are not only sinners, they are criminal predators who belong in penitentiary cells not parish rectories. They ought to be handed over to civil authorities.
While none of us is without sin, sɛҳuąƖly active and abusive clergy should be severed from the priesthood. There needs to be a purge at the Vatican, removing or retiring bishops, archbishops and cardinals, the revelation of whose past misconduct would further feed this scandal.
For too long, the Catholic faithful have been forced to pay damages and reparations for crimes and sins of predator priests and the hierarchy’s collusion and complicity in covering them up.
And it needs be stated clearly: This is a ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ scandal.
Almost all of the predators and criminals are male, as are most of the victims: the boys, the teenagers, the young seminarians.
Applicants to the seminary should be vetted the way applicants to the National Security Council are. Those ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖly inclined should be told the priesthood of the Church is not for them, as it is not for women.
Secular society will call this invidious discrimination, but it is based on what Christ taught and how he established his Church.
Inevitably, if the Church is to remain true to herself, the clash with secular society, which now holds that ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity is natural and normal and entitled to respect, is going to widen and deepen.
For in traditional Catholic teaching, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity is a psychological and moral disorder, a proclivity toward acts that are intrinsically wrong, and everywhere and always sinful and depraved, and ruinous of character.
The idea of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ marriages, recently discovered to be a constitutional right in the USA, remains an absurdity in Catholic doctrine.
If the Church’s highest priority is to coexist peacefully with the world, it will modify, soften, cease to preach, or repudiate these beliefs, and follow the primrose path of so many of our separated Protestant brethren.
But if she does, it will not be the same Church that over centuries accepted martyrdom to remain the faithful custodian of Gospel truths and sacred tradition.
And how has the embrace of modernity and its values advanced the religious faiths whose leaders sought most earnestly to accommodate them?
The Church is going through perhaps its gravest crisis since the Reformation. Since Vatican II, the faithful have been departing, some leaving quietly, others embracing agnosticism or other faiths.
“Who am I to judge?” said the pope when first pressed about the morality of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity.
Undeniably, Francis, and the progressive bishops who urge a new tolerance, a new understanding, a new appreciation of the benign character of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity, have won the plaudits of a secular press that loathed the Church of Pius XII.
Of what value are all those wonderful press clippings now, as the chickens come home to roost in Vatican City?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: rum on August 31, 2018, 07:51:57 PM
For too long, the Catholic faithful have been forced to pay damages and reparations for crimes and sins of predator priests and the hierarchy’s collusion and complicity in covering them up.
And it needs be stated clearly: This is a ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ scandal.
Almost all of the predators and criminals are male, as are most of the victims: the boys, the teenagers, the young seminarians.
Applicants to the seminary should be vetted the way applicants to the National Security Council are. Those ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖly inclined should be told the priesthood of the Church is not for them, as it is not for women.

This is a Catholic scandal. When the Church ceased to criticize Jєωs and call them out as children of the devil it led the way to all sorts of other aberrations.

Though if comparing the novus ordo Church to other organizations I'm not so sure (http://blogs.denverpost.com/hark/2010/05/25/scandal-creates-contempt-for-catholic-clergy/39/) it has any greater problem, and may have less of one, with fαɢɢօts in authority than other groups.


Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 07, 2018, 08:29:58 AM


Regime Change — American Style
Friday - September 7, 2018 at 1:01 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week.

Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain.

Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Henry Kissinger, the leaders of both houses of Congress, and too many generals and admirals to list.

Striding into the pulpit, Obama delivered a searing indictment of the man undoing his legacy:

“So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. … It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear.”

Speakers praised McCain’s willingness to cross party lines, but Democrats took away a new determination: From here on out, confrontation!

Tuesday morning, as Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court began, Democrats disrupted the proceedings and demanded immediate adjournment, as scores of protesters shouted and screamed to halt the hearings.

Taking credit for orchestrating the disruption, Sen. Dick Durbin boasted, “What we’ve heard is the noise of democracy.”

But if mob action to shut down a Senate hearing is the noise of democracy, this may explain why many countries are taking a new look at the authoritarian rulers who can at least deliver a semblance of order.



Wednesday came leaks in The Washington Post from Bob Woodward’s new book, attributing to Chief of Staff John Kelly and Gen. James Mattis crude remarks on the president’s intelligence, character and maturity, and describing the Trump White House as a “crazytown” led by a fifth- or sixth-grader.

Kelly and Mattis both denied making the comments.

Thursday came an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous “senior official” claiming to be a member of the “resistance … working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his (Trump’s) agenda.”

A pedestrian piece of prose containing nothing about Trump one cannot read or hear daily in the media, the op-ed caused a sensation, but only because Times editors decided to give the disloyal and seditious Trump aide who wrote it immunity and cover to betray his or her president.

The transaction served the political objectives of both parties.

While the Woodward book may debut at the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and “Anonymous,” once ferreted out and fired, will have his or her 15 minutes of fame, what this portends is not good.

For what is afoot here is something America specializes in — regime change. Only the regime our establishment and media mean to change is the government of the United States. What is afoot is the overthrow of America’s democratically elected head of state.

The methodology is familiar. After a years-long assault on the White House and president by a special prosecutor’s office, the House takes up impeachment, while a collaborationist press plays its traditional supporting role.

Presidents are wounded, disabled or overthrown, and Pulitzers all around.

No one suggests Richard Nixon was without sin in trying to cover up the Watergate break-in. But no one should delude himself into believing that the overthrow of that president, not two years after he won the greatest landslide in U.S. history, was not an act of vengeance by a hate-filled city that ran a sword through Nixon for offenses it had covered up or brushed under the rug in the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson years.

So, where are we headed?

If November’s elections produce, as many predict, a Democratic House, there will be more investigations of President Trump than any man charged with running the U.S. government may be able to manage.

There is the Mueller investigation into “Russiagate” that began before Trump was inaugurated. There is the investigation of his business and private life before he became president in the Southern District of New York. There is the investigation into the Trump Foundation by New York State.

There will be investigations by House committees into alleged violations of the Emoluments Clause. And ever present will be platoons of journalists ready to report the leaks from all of these investigations.

Then, if media coverage can drive Trump’s polls low enough, will come the impeachment investigation and the regurgitation of all that went before.

If Trump has the stamina to hold on, and the Senate remains Republican, he may survive, even as Democrats divide between a rising militant socialist left and the Democrats’ septuagenarian caucus led by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders and Nancy Peℓσѕι.

2019 looks to be the year of bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. Entertaining, for sure, but how many more of these coups d’etat can the Republic sustain before a new generation says enough of all this?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 11, 2018, 08:01:14 AM
 10 September 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-war-plane-pixabay22-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-going-neocon-in-syria-130055)
Is Trump Going Neocon in Syria?
Monday - September 10, 2018 at 10:15 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling.
Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get very, very angry. And the United States is going to get very angry, too.”
In a front-page story Monday, “Assad is Planning Chlorine Attack, U.S. Says,” The Wall Street Journal reports that, during a recent meeting, “President Trump threatened to conduct a massive attack against Mr. Assad if he carries out a massacre in Idlib.”
Idlib contains three million civilians and refugees and 70,000 rebels, 10,000 of whom are al-Qaida.
Friday, The Washington Post reported that Trump is changing U.S. policy. America will not be leaving Syria any time soon.
The 2,200 U.S. troops in Syria will remain until we see “the exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces and the establishment of a stable, non-threatening government acceptable to all Syrians.”
“We are not in a hurry to go,” said James Jeffrey, the retired Foreign Service officer brought back to handle the Syria account. “The new policy is we’re no longer pulling out by the end of the year.”
President Obama had a red line against Syria’s use of poison gas, which Trump enforced with bombing runs. Now we have a new red line. Said Jeffrey, the U.S. “will not tolerate an attack. Period.”
In an editorial Friday, the Post goaded Trump, calling his response to Assad’s ruthless recapture of his country “pathetically weak.” To stand by and let the Syrian army annihilate the rebels in Idlib, said the Post, would be “another damaging abdication of U.S. leadership.”
What Trump seems to be signaling, the Post demanding, and Jeffrey suggesting, is that, rather than allow a bloody battle for the recapture of Idlib province to play out, the United States should engage Russian and Syrian forces militarily and force them to back off.
On Friday, near the U.S. garrison at Tanf in southern Syria, close to Iraq, U.S. Marines conducted a live-fire exercise. Purpose: Warn Russian forces to stay away. The Americans have declared a 35-mile zone around Tanf off-limits. The Marine exercise followed a Russian notification, and U.S. rejection, of a plan to enter the zone in pursuit of “terrorists.”

Is Trump ready to order U.S. action against Russian and Syrian forces if Assad gives his army the green light to take Idlib? For the bombing of Idlib has already begun.
What makes this more than an academic exercise is that Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, at a meeting in Tehran last Friday, told President Erdogan of Turkey that the reconquest of Idlib is going forward.
Erdogan fears that the Syrian army’s recapture of Idlib would send hundreds of thousands more refugees streaming to his border.
Turkey already hosts millions of refugees from Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr.
Yet the massing of the Syrian army near Idlib and the Russian and Syrian bombing now begun suggest that the Assad-Putin-Rouhani coalition has decided to accept the risk of a clash with the Americans in order to bring an end to the rebellion. If so, this puts the ball in America’s court.
Words and warnings aside, is Trump prepared to take us into the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr against the forces who, absent our intervention, will have won the war? When did Congress authorize a new war?
What vital U.S. interest is imperiled in Idlib, or in ensuring that all Iranian forces and Shiite allies are removed, or that a “non-threatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international community” is established in Damascus?
With these conditions required before our departure, we could be there for eternity.
The Syrian cινιℓ ωαr is arguably the worst humanitarian disaster of the decade. The sooner it is ended the better. But Assad, Russia and Iran did not start this war. Nor have Syria, Russia or Iran sought a clash with U.S. forces whose mission, we were repeatedly assured, was to crush ISIS and go home.
Trump has struck Syria twice for its use of poison gas, and U.S. officials told the Journal that Assad has now approved the use of chlorine on the rebels in Idlib. Moscow, however, is charging that a false-flag operation to unleash chlorine on civilians in Idlib is being prepared to trigger and justify U.S. intervention.
Many in this Russophobic city would welcome a confrontation with Putin’s Russia, even more a U.S. war on Iran. But that is the opposite of what candidate Trump promised.
It would represent a triumph of the never-Trumpers and President Trump’s relinquishing of his foreign policy to the interventionists and neoconservatives.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 14, 2018, 09:51:55 AM
 13 September 2018 (http://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-culture-pixabay-29-700x285.jpg) (http://buchanan.org/blog/the-unpardonable-heresy-of-tucker-carlson-130088)
The Unpardonable Heresy of Tucker Carlson
Thursday - September 13, 2018 at 10:52 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Our diversity is our greatest strength.
After playing clips of Democratic politicians reciting that truth of modern liberalism, Tucker Carlson asked, “How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific.”
Reaction to Carlson’s question, with some declaring him a racist for having raised it, suggests that what we are dealing with here is not a demonstrable truth but a creed not subject to debate.
Yet the question remains valid: Where is the scientific, historic or empirical evidence that the greater the racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of a nation, the stronger it becomes?
From recent decades, it seems more true to say the reverse: The more diverse a nation, the greater the danger of its disintegration.
Ethnic diversity, after all, tore apart our mighty Cold War rival, splintering the Soviet Union into 15 nations, three of which — Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia — have since split further along ethnic lines.
Russia had to fight two wars to hold onto Chechnya and prevent the diverse peoples of the North Caucasus from splitting off on ethnic grounds, as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan had done.
Ethnic diversity then shattered Yugoslavia into seven separate nations.
And even as we proclaim diversity to be our greatest strength, nations everywhere are recoiling from it.

The rise of populism and nationalism across Europe is a reaction to the new diversity represented by the Arab, Asian and African millions who have lately come, and the tens of millions desperate to enter.
Center-left and center-right parties are losing ground in European elections because they are seen as feckless in meeting what more and more indigenous Europeans believe to be an existential threat — mass migration from across the Med.
Japan’s population has ceased to grow, and each year brings fewer toddlers into its schools. Yet Tokyo resists the racial and ethnic diversity greater immigration would bring. Why, if diversity is a strength?
What South Koreans dream of is uniting again with the 22 million separated members of their national family who live in the North, but share the same history and blood.
This summer, in its Basic Law, Israel declared itself an ethnonational state and national home of the Jєωιѕн people. African migrants crossing the Sinai to seek sanctuary in Israel are unwelcome.
Consider China, which seeks this century to surpass America as the first power on earth. Does Xi Jinping welcome a greater racial, ethnic and cultural diversity within his county as, say, Barack Obama does in ours?
In his western province of Xinjiang, Xi has set up an archipelago of detention camps. Purpose: Re-educate his country’s Uighurs and Kazakhs by purging them of their religious and tribal identities, and making them and their children more like Han Chinese in allegiance to the Communist Party and Chinese nation.
Xi fears that the 10 million Uighurs of Xinjiang, as an ethnic and religious minority, predominantly Muslim, wish to break away and establish an East Turkestan, a nation of their own, out of China. And he is correct.
What China is doing is brutalitarian. But what China is saying with its ruthless policy is that diversity — religious, racial, cultural — can break us apart as it did the USSR. And we are not going to let that happen.
Do the Buddhists of Myanmar cherish the religious diversity that the Muslim Rohingya of Rakhine State bring to their country?
America has always been more than an idea, an ideology or a propositional nation. It is a country that belongs to a separate and identifiable people with its own history, heroes, holidays, symbols, songs, myths, mores — its own culture.
Again, where is the evidence that the more Americans who can trace their roots to the Third World, and not to Europe, the stronger we will be?
Is the Britain of Theresa May, with its new racial, religious and ethnic diversity, a stronger nation than was the U.K. of Lloyd George, which ruled a fourth of mankind in 1920?
Was it not the unity Bismarck forged among the diverse Germanic peoples, bringing them into a single nation under the Kaiser in 1871, that made Germany a far stronger and more formidable power in Europe?
Empires, confederations and alliances are multiethnic and multicultural. And, inevitably, their diversity pulls them apart.
The British Empire was the greatest in modern history. What tore it apart? Tribalism, the demands of diverse peoples, rooted in blood and soil, to be rid of foreign rule and to have their own place in the sun.
And who are loudest in preaching that our diversity is our strength?
Are they not the same people who told us that democracy was the destiny of all mankind and that, as the world’s “exceptional nation,” we must seize the opportunity of our global preeminence to impose its blessings on the less enlightened tribes of the Middle East and Hindu Kush?
If the establishment is proven wrong about greater diversity bringing greater strength to America, there will be no do-over for the USA.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 18, 2018, 09:32:37 AM
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The Late Hit on Judge Kavanaugh
Tuesday - September 18, 2018 at 12:55 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Upon the memory and truthfulness of Christine Blasey Ford hangs the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his reputation and possibly his career on the nation’s second-highest court.
And much more. If Kavanaugh is voted down or forced to withdraw, the Republican Party and conservative movement could lose their last best hope for recapturing the high court for constitutionalism.
No new nominee could be vetted and approved in six weeks. And the November election could bring in a Democratic Senate, an insuperable obstacle to the elevation of a new strict constructionist like Kavanaugh.
The stakes are thus historic and huge.
And what is professor Ford’s case against Judge Kavanaugh?
When she was 15 in the summer of ’82, she went to a beer party with four boys in Montgomery County, Maryland, in a home where the parents were away.
She says she was dragged into a bedroom by Brett Kavanaugh, a 17-year-old at Georgetown Prep, who jumped her, groped her, tried to tear off her clothes and cupped her mouth with his hand to stop her screams.
Only when Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, laughing “maniacally,” piled on and they all tumbled off the bed, did she escape and lock herself in a bathroom as the “stumbling drunks” went downstairs. She fled the house and told no one of the alleged rape attempt.
Not until 30 years later in 2012 did Ford, now a clinical psychologist in California, relate, in a couples therapy session with her husband, what happened. She says she named Kavanaugh as her assailant, but the therapist’s notes of the session make no mention of Kavanaugh.
During the assault, says Ford, she was traumatized. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me.”
Here the story grows vague. She does not remember who drove her to the party. She does not say how much she drank. She does not remember whose house it was. She does not recall who, if anyone, drove her home. She does not recall what day it was.
She did not tell her parents, Ford says, as she did not want them to know she had been drinking. She did not tell any friend or family member of this traumatic event that has so adversely affected her life.
Said Kavanaugh in response, “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time.”
Mark Judge says it never happened.

Given the seriousness of the charges, Ford must be heard out. But she also needs to be cross-examined and have her story and character probed as Kavanaugh’s has been by FBI investigators as an attorney for the Ken Starr impeachment investigation of Bill Clinton, a White House aide to George Bush, a U.S. appellate judge and a Supreme Court nominee.
During the many investigations of Kavanaugh’s background, nothing was unearthed to suggest something like this was in character.
Some 65 women who grew up in the Chevy Chase and Bethesda area and knew Kavanaugh in his high school days have come out and spoken highly of his treatment of girls and women.
Moreover, the way in which all of this arose, at five minutes to midnight in the long confirmation process, suggests that this is political hardball, if not dirt ball.
When Ford, a Democrat, sent a letter detailing her accusations against Kavanaugh to her California congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, Ford insisted that her name not be revealed as the accuser.
She seemingly sought to damage or destroy the judge’s career behind a cloak of anonymity. Eshoo sent the letter on to Sen. Diane Feinstein, who held it for two months.
Excising Ford’s name, Feinstein then sent it to the FBI, who sent it to the White House, who sent it on to the Senate to be included in the background material on the judge.
Thus, Ford’s explosive charge, along with her name, did not surface until this weekend.
What is being done here stinks. It is a transparently late hit, a kill shot to αssαssιnαtҽ a nominee who, before the weekend, was all but certain to be confirmed and whose elevation to the Supreme Court is a result of victories in free elections by President Trump and the Republican Party.
Palpable here is the desperation of the left to derail Kavanaugh, lest his elevation to the high court imperil their agenda and the social revolution that the Warren Court and its progeny have been able to impose upon the nation.
If Kavanaugh is elevated, the judicial dictatorship of decades past, going back to the salad days of Earl Warren, William Brennan, Hugo Black and “Wild Bill” Douglas, will have reached its end. A new era will have begun.
That is what is at stake.
The Republican Senate should continue with its calendar to confirm Kavanaugh before Oct. 1, while giving Ford some way to be heard, and then Kavanaugh the right to refute. Then let the senators decide.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 21, 2018, 10:04:14 AM
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Has Russia Given Up on the West?
Thursday - September 20, 2018 at 11:26 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph?
This month, China’s leader-for-life Xi Jinping stood beside Vladimir Putin as 3,000 Chinese troops maneuvered with 300,000 Russians, 1,000 planes and 900 tanks in Moscow’s largest military exercise in 40 years.
An uncoded message to the West from the East.
Richard Nixon’s great achievement in bringing Peking in from the cold, and Reagan’s great achievement of ending the Cold War, are history.
Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO’s quick march to Russia’s ancient frontiers, is alive and well.
Russia appears to have given up on the West and accepted that its hopes for better times with President Donald Trump are not to be.
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is berating Russia for secretly trading with North Korea in violation of U.N. sanctions, saying, “Lying, cheating, and rogue behavior have become the new norm of the Russian culture.”
Cold wars don’t get much colder than defaming another country’s culture as morally debased.

The U.S. has also signaled that it may start supplying naval and anti-aircraft weaponry to Ukraine, as Russia is being warned to cease its inspections of ships passing from the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov.
The three-mile-wide strait lies between Crimea and Kerch Peninsula. In Russia’s eyes, both banks of the strait are Russian national territory.
With U.S. backing, Ukraine has decided to build a naval base on the Sea of Azov to “create conditions for rebuffing the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation in this region.”
Kiev has several patrol boats in the Sea of Azov, with a few more to be transferred there in coming months. Russia’s navy could sink those boats and wipe out that base in minutes.
Are we going to send our Navy across the Black Sea to protect Ukraine’s naval rights inside a sea that has been as historically Russian as the Chesapeake Bay is historically American?
Poland this week invited the U.S. to establish a major base on its soil, for which Poland would pay two billion dollars, to be called “Fort Trump.”
Trump seemed to like the idea, and the name.
Yet, the Bush II decision to install a missile defense system in Poland brought a Kremlin counter-move: the installation of nuclear-capable Iskander cruise missiles in Kaliningrad, the former German territory on Poland’s northern border annexed by Stalin at the end of World War II.
In the Balkans, over Russian protests, the U.S. is moving to bring Macedonia into NATO. But before Macedonia can join, half its voters have to come out on Sept. 30 to approve a change in the nation’s name to North Macedonia. This is to mollify Greece, which claims the birthplace of Alexander the Great as it own.
Where are we going with all this?
With U.S. warships making regular visits into the Eastern Baltic and Black Sea, the possibility of a new base in Poland, and growing lethal aid to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass and the Russian navy on the Sea of Azov, are we not crowding the Russians a bit?
Are we confident the Russians will always back down?
When Georgia, believing it could kick Russian peacekeepers out and re-annex its seceded province of South Ossetia, attacked in August 2008, the Russian Army came crashing in and ran the Georgians out in 48 hours.
George W. Bush wisely decided not to issue an ultimatum or send troops. He ignored the hawks in his own party who had helped goad him into the great debacle of his presidency: Iraq.
So, what exactly is the U.S. grand strategy with regard to Russia?
What might be called the McCain wing of the Republican Party has sought to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, which would make the containment of Russia America’s policy in perpetuity.
Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy? What are the prospects of Russia yielding always to U.S. demands? And are we not today stretched awfully thin?
Our share of the global economy is much shrunken from Reagan’s time. Our deficit is approaching $1 trillion. Our debt is surging toward 100 percent of GDP. Entitlements are consuming our national wealth.
We are committed to containing the two other greatest powers, Russia and China. We are tied down militarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, with the War Party beating the drums for another and larger war — with Iran. And we are sanctioning adversaries and allies for not following our leadership of the West and the world.
In looking at America’s global commitments, greatly expanded since our Cold War victory, one word come to mind: unsustainable.
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http://buchanan.org/blog/has-russia-given-up-on-the-west-130125
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 25, 2018, 10:19:41 AM


September 2018 The Huge Stakes of Thursday’s Confrontations
The Huge Stakes of Thursday’s Confrontations
Monday - September 24, 2018 at 9:59 pm



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By Patrick J. Buchanan

Thursday is shaping up to be the Trump presidency’s “Gunfight at O.K. Corral.”

That day, the fates of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and much else, may be decided.

The New York Times report that Rosenstein, sarcastically or seriously in May 2017, talked of wearing a wire into the Oval Office to entrap the president, suggests that his survival into the new year is improbable.

Whether Thursday is the day President Donald Trump drops the hammer is unknown.

But if he does, the recapture by Trump of a Justice Department he believes he lost as his term began may be at hand. Comparisons to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre may not be overdone.

The Times report that Rosenstein also talked of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump suggests that Sen. Lindsey Graham had more than a small point on “Fox News Sunday”: “There’s a bureaucratic coup going on at the Department of Justice and the FBI, and somebody needs to look at it.”

Indeed, they do. And it is inexplicable that a special prosecutor has not been named. For while the matter assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller, to investigate any Trump collusion with Russia in hacking the emails of the Clinton campaign and DNC, is serious, a far graver matter has gotten far less attention.

To wit, did an anti-Trump cabal inside the Department of Justice and the FBI conspire to block Trump’s election, and having failed, plot to bring down his presidency in a “deep state” coup d’etat?

Rosenstein’s discussion of wearing a wire into the Oval Office lends credence to that charge, but there is much more to it.



The story begins with the hiring by the Clinton campaign, though its law firm cutout, in June 2016, of the dirt-divers of Fusion GPS.

Fusion swiftly hired retired British spy and Trump hater Christopher Steele, who contacted his old sources in the Russian intel community for dirt to help sink a U.S. presidential candidate.

What his Russian friends provided was passed on by Steele to his paymaster at GPS, his contact in the Justice Department, No. 3 man Bruce Ohr, and to the FBI, which was also paying the British spy.

The FBI then used the dirt Steele unearthed, much of it false, to persuade a FISA court to issue a warrant to wiretap Trump aide Carter Page. The warrant was renewed three times, the last with the approval of Trump’s own deputy attorney general, Rosenstein.

Regrettably, Trump, at the request of two allies — the Brits almost surely one of them — has put a hold on his recent decision to declassify all relevant docuмents inside the Justice Department and FBI.

Yet, as The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday, “As for the allies, sometimes U.S. democratic accountability has to take precedence over the potential embarrassment of British intelligence.”

Thursday’s meeting between Trump and Rosenstein will coincide with the Judiciary Committee’s hearing into the charge by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that, as a 15-year-old, she was sɛҳuąƖly assaulted by 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

This weekend brought fresh charges, from a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh, Deborah Ramirez, that at a drunken party in their freshman year, Kavanaugh exposed himself.

Kavanaugh has fired off a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein, chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, calling the accusations “smears, pure and simple.”

Kavanaugh continued: “I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed.”

What is at stake in Thursday’s appearance by Kavanaugh and Ford is huge. A successful defense of his good name could mean Kavanaugh’s swift elevation to the high court, a historic victory for the GOP’s judicial philosophy, and the culmination of a decades-long campaign dating back to the Earl Warren era of the Supreme Court.

As for the judge himself, the issue is not just his behavior as a teenager and university student, but his credibility and honor as a man.

He has asked friends and allies to trust and believe him when he says that he is a victim of a character assassination steeped that is rooted in ideology and lies.

Thus far, no credible individual has come forward to corroborate the charges against him when he was at Georgetown Prep or at Yale. And almost all who knew him testify to his character.

We are often told that the moment we are in has historic significance and will be long remembered. Yet, how many can still recall what the “resister” in the Trump White House or Cabinet wrote in his or her anonymous op-ed in The New York Times?

How Kavanaugh conducts himself Thursday, however, and whether he is elevated to the court, could decide the fate of constitutional conservatism and the Republican Congress in 2018.



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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 02, 2018, 10:58:25 AM
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Are Republicans Born Wimps?
Tuesday - October 2, 2018 at 3:12 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Republican leaders are “a bunch of wimps,” said Jerry Falwell Jr.
Conservatives and Christians need to stop electing “nice guys.”
“The US needs street fighters like Donald Trump at every level of government because the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps.”
So tweeted the son and namesake of the founder of the Moral Majority, and he has here a self-evident point.
Thursday, 11 GOP senators on the judiciary committee freely forfeited to a female prosecutor their right to cross-examine Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
The Republicans feared that televised images of 11 white men, sharply questioning the credibility of Ford’s claim to be a victim of Kavanaugh’s sɛҳuąƖ assault, would be politically lethal.
So, while the Republicans mutely abstained from challenging her, Ford was treated by the Democrats as the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, though not a single witness has corroborated her story.
Friday, Sen. Jeff Flake caved to Democratic demands for another weeklong FBI investigation of the judge. The Republicans, egg visible on their faces, endorsed their colleague’s capitulation.
Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham had been the Republican lion of the hearing, indicting Democrats for the moral atrocity they had deceitfully and dishonorably perpetrated against the judge.
By Friday, our Cicero was reaching out in collegiality to the same senators he was castigating 24 hours before.
Falwell’s point: Democrats fight savagely and for keeps, while Republicans — street-fighter Trump excepted — are wimps, often bewailing any loss of camaraderie with their colleagues across the aisle.
As my late friend Sam Francis said in the title of his book, many Republicans are perfectly content with being “Beautiful Losers.”

Yet the stakes here are immense. Consider how the Supreme Court has remade the America we grew up in.
Since World War II, the court has de-Christianized all public schools and the public life of a land Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman called a “Christian nation.” It has established secularism as our state religion.
Despite civil right laws declaring race discrimination illegal, the court has given its blessing to affirmative action, deliberate discrimination in favor of peoples of color against white men in the name of diversity and equality.
The court has declared that what were once crimes, abortion and ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity, are now constitutional rights all Americans must respect.
These changes were not legislated democratically, but imposed dictatorially by the high court. While a Senate confirmation of Kavanaugh would not reverse these mandated changes, it might halt any further imposition of this radical social revolution by unelected judges.
But while the Democratic left, understanding the stakes, is fighting bare-fisted, Republicans are sparring with 14-ounce gloves and seeking to observe Marquess of Queensberry Rules.
In other ways as well America has been remade.
Not only has Christianity, and all its symbols and expressions of faith and belief, been removed, but also a purge is underway of monuments and statues of the explorers, colonists and statesmen who, believing in the superiority of their religion, culture and civilization, set out to create the county we inherited.
And William Frey, resident demographer at the Brookings Institution, writes about how America is being changed — without the consent of the people.
“Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is … a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.
“The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others.”
When we are all minorities, and all behave as minorities, making our separate demands upon the country, what then holds America together?
In Federalist 2, John Jay famously wrote:
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion … very similar in their manners and customs…
“This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”
Yet, each decade, less and less are we descended from the same ancestors. Less and less do we speak the same language, profess the same religion, share the same manners, customs, traditions, history, heroes and holidays.
Does America look today like the “band of brethren united to each other” of which Jay wrote, and we seemed to be as late as 1960?
Or does not the acrimony attendant to the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh suggest that we have already become a land “split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.”
With all our new diversity, whatever became of our unity?
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http://buchanan.org/blog/are-republicans-born-wimps-130269
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 05, 2018, 10:47:34 AM
We Are All Deplorables Now

Friday - October 5, 2018 at 5:05 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan

Four days after he described Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, as a “very credible witness,” President Donald Trump could no longer contain his feelings or constrain his instincts.

With the fate of his Supreme Court nominee in the balance, Trump let his “Make America Great Again” rally attendees in Mississippi know what he really thought of Ford’s testimony.

[WebNote: See full video of Trump’s massive MAGA rally in Southaven, MS here…]

“‘Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer.’ ‘Right?’ ‘I had one beer.’ ‘Well, you think it was (one beer)?’ ‘Nope, it was one beer.’ ‘Oh, good. How did you get home?'”

‘I don’t remember.’ ‘How did you get there?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Where is the place?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘How many years ago was it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.'”

By now the Mississippi MAGA crowd was cheering and laughing.

Trump went on: “‘What neighborhood was it in?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Where’s the house?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Upstairs, downstairs, where was it?’ ‘I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.'”

Since that day three years ago when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to talk of “rapists” crossing the U.S. border from Mexico, few Trump remarks have ignited greater outrage.

Commentators have declared themselves horrified and sickened that a president would so mock the testimony of a victim of sɛҳuąƖ assault.


The Republican senators who will likely cast the decisive votes on Kavanaugh’s confirmation — Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski — they all decried Trump’s mimicry.

Yet, in tossing out the “Catechism of Political Correctness” and treating the character assassination of Kavanaugh as what it was, a rotten conspiracy to destroy and defeat his nominee, Trump’s instincts were correct, even if they were politically incorrect.

This was not a “job interview” for Kavanaugh.

In a job interview, half the members of the hiring committee are not so instantly hostile to an applicant that they will conspire to criminalize and crush him to the point of wounding his family and ruining his reputation.

When Sen. Lindsey Graham charged the Democratic minority with such collusion, he was dead on. This was a neo-Bolshevik show trial where the defendant was presumed guilty and due process meant digging up dirt from his school days to smear and break him.

Our cultural elites have declared Trump a poltroon for daring to mock Ford’s story of what happened 36 years ago. Yet, these same elites reacted with delight at Matt Damon’s “SNL” depiction of Kavanaugh’s angry and agonized appearance, just 48 hours before.

Is it not hypocritical to laugh uproariously at a comedic depiction of Kavanaugh’s anguish, while demanding quiet respect for the highly suspect and uncorroborated story of Ford?

Ford was handled by the judiciary committee with the delicacy of a Faberge egg, said Kellyanne Conway, while Kavanaugh was subjected to a hostile interrogation by Senate Democrats.

In our widening and deepening cultural-cινιℓ ωαr, the Kavanaugh nomination will be seen as a landmark battle. And Trump’s instincts, to treat his Democratic assailants as ideological enemies, with whom he is in mortal struggle, will be seen as correct.

Consider. In the last half-century, which Supreme Court nominees were the most maligned and savaged?

Were they not Nixon nominee Clement Haynsworth, chief judge of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Reagan nominee Robert Bork, Bush 1 nominee Clarence Thomas, and Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the last three all judges on the nation’s second-highest court, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals?

Is it a coincidence that all four were Republican appointees, all four were judicial conservatives, and all four were gutted on the grounds of philosophy or character?

Is it a coincidence that Nixon in Watergate, Reagan in the Iran-Contra affair, and now Trump in Russiagate, were all targets of partisan campaigns to impeach and remove them from office?

Consider what happened to decent Gerald Ford who came into the oval office in 1974, preaching “the politics of compromise and consensus.”

To bring the country together after Watergate, Ford pardoned President Nixon. For that act of magnanimity, he was torn to pieces by a Beltway elite that had been denied its anticipated pleasure of seeing Nixon prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to prison.

Trump is president because he gets it. He understands what this Beltway elite are all about — the discrediting of his victory as a product of criminal collusion with Russia and his resignation or removal in disgrace. And the “base” that comes to these rallies to cheer him on, they get it, too.

Since Reagan’s time, there are few conservatives who have not been called one or more of the names in Hillary Clinton’s litany of devils, her “basket of deplorables” — racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, bigoted, irredeemable.

The battle over Kavanaugh’s nomination, and the disparagement of the Republicans who have stood strongest by the judge, seems to have awakened even the most congenial to the new political reality.

We are all deplorables now.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 09, 2018, 10:03:24 AM
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Casualty Lists From the Kavanaugh Battle
Tuesday - October 9, 2018 at 7:45 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
After a 50-year siege, the great strategic fortress of liberalism has fallen. With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court seems secure for constitutionalism — perhaps for decades.
The shrieks from the gallery of the Senate chamber as the vote came in on Saturday, and the sight of that bawling mob clawing at the doors of the Supreme Court as the new justice took his oath, confirm it.
The Democratic Party has sustained a historic defeat.
And the triumph is President Trump’s.
To unite the party whose nomination he had won, Donald Trump pledged to select his high court nominees from lists prepared by such judicial conservatives as the Federalist Society. He kept his word and, in the battle for Kavanaugh, he led from the front, even mocking the credibility of the primary accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
Trump has achieved what every GOP president has hoped to do since the summer of ’68, when a small group of GOP senators, led by Bob Griffin of Michigan, frustrated and then foiled a LBJ-Earl Warren plot to elevate LBJ crony Abe Fortas to chief justice in order to keep a future President Nixon from naming Warren’s successor.

Sharing the honors with Trump is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Throughout 2016, McConnell took heat for refusing to hold a hearing on Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, to fill the chair of Justice Antonin Scalia, who had died earlier that year.
In 2017, McConnell used Harry Reid’s “nuclear option” to end filibusters for Supreme Court nominations, and then got Judge Neil Gorsuch confirmed 54-45.
Last week, in one of the closest and most brutal court battles in Senate history, McConnell kept his troops united, losing only Sen. Lisa Murkowski, to put Kavanaugh on the court by 50-48. McConnell will enter the history books as the Senate architect of the recapture of the Supreme Court for constitutionalism.
This was a huge victory for conservatism and for the Republican Party. And the presence on the court of octogenarian liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both appointed by Bill Clinton, suggests that McConnell may have an opportunity to ensure the endurance of his great achievement.
The ferocity and ugliness of the attacks on Kavanaugh united Republicans to stand as one against what a savage Senate minority was trying to do to kill the nomination. And at battle’s end, the GOP is more energized than it has been all year for this fall’s election.
How united is the GOP? Conservatives are hailing the contributions of Sens. Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, who delivered a masterful summation of the Kavanaugh case Saturday afternoon.
For the Democratic Party, the Kavanaugh battle was the Little Bighorn, as seen from General Custer’s point of view.
Unable to derail the judge during the regular confirmation process, they lay in the weeds until it was over, and then sandbagged the judge by leaking to The Washington Post a confidential letter Dr. Ford did not want released.
They thus forced a public hearing of charges of attempted rape against a nominee, demanded the FBI investigate all charges of sɛҳuąƖ misconduct when Kavanaugh was a teenager, and ended up losing anyway.
Then the Dems watched protesters dishonor the Senate in which they serve by screaming from the gallery. It was among the lowest moments in the modern history of the Senate, and it was the Democratic minority that took it down to that depth.
Understandably, they are a bitter lot today.
And the #MeToo movement has been set back. For many of its champions were, in Kavanaugh’s case, demanding a suspension of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” and calling for the judge’s rejection in disgrace, based solely on their belief in a wholly uncorroborated 36-year-old story.
So where are we going now?
While Republicans are united and celebrating a great victory, the left and its media auxiliary are seething with rage and doubly determined to deliver payback in the elections four weeks away, where Democrats could pick up the two dozen seats needed to recapture the House.
Should they do so, however, they will face two years of frustration and failure. For the enactment of any major element of their liberal agenda — a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare-for-all” — would die in a Republican Senate, or in the Oval Office where it would face an inevitable veto by Trump.
So, what does 2019 look like, if Democrats capture the House?
Speaker Nancy Peℓσѕι. A House Judiciary Committee headed by New York’s Jerrold Nadler who is already howling for impeachment hearings on both Kavanaugh and Trump.
And, by spring, a host of presidential candidates, none of whom looks terribly formidable, led by Cory (“I am Spartacus”) Booker, trooping through Iowa and New Hampshire, trashing President Trump (and each other), and offering themselves as the answer to America’s problems.
Bring it on!
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 16, 2018, 08:06:51 AM
Should US-Saudi Alliance Be Saved?
Tuesday - October 16, 2018 at 8:26 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of “severe punishment” if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Riyadh then counter-threatened, reminding us that, as the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia “plays an impactful and active role in the global economy.”
Message: Sanction us, and we may just sanction you.
Some of us yet recall how President Nixon’s rescue of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War triggered a Saudi oil embargo that led to months of long gas lines in the United States, and contributed to Nixon’s fall.
Yesterday, a week after Jared Kushner had been assured by his friend Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Khashoggi walked out of the consulate, Trump put through a call to King Salman himself.
According to a Trump tweet, the king denied “any knowledge of whatever may have happened ‘to our Saudi Arabian citizen.'”
Trump said he was “immediately” sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh to meet with the king on the crisis. The confrontation is escalating. Crown Prince Mohammed and King Salman have both now put their nation’s honor and credibility on the line.
Both are saying that what the Turks claim they can prove — Khashoggi was tortured and murdered in the consulate, cut up, and his body parts flown to Saudi Arabia — is a lie.
For Trump and the U.S., this appears a classic case of the claims of international morality clashing with the claims of national interest.
The archetype occurred in the mid-1870s when Ottoman Turks perpetrated a slaughter of Bulgarian Christians under their rule.
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Former Prime Minister William Gladstone set Britain ablaze with a pamphlet titled, “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East,” calling for the expulsion of the Turks from Europe.
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria were apoplectic. For they were relying on the Turks to block the encroachment of Czarist Russia into the Eastern Balkans and down to the Turkish Straits.
Disraeli prevailed. The Brits put morality on the shelf.
For the U.S., morality and interests collided when FDR recognized the Bolshevik regime of Joseph Stalin in 1933, even as Stalin’s agents were starving to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and landowners.
Foreign policy moralists also took a holiday to cheer Nixon for flying to Peking and toasting Mao Zedong, even as Chairman Mao’s Red Guards were carrying out the national pogrom known as the Cultural Revolution.
Questions arise: If Khashoggi was αssαssιnαtҽd and the order came from the royal family, does that make the Saudis morally unacceptable to us as allies or partners in the Middle East? And if it does, how do we justify our Cold War ties to autocrats such as Chile’s Gen. Pinochet, South Korea’s Gen. Park Chung-hee, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, or the Shah of Iran?
How did Franklin Roosevelt handle such associations? “He may be an SOB,” FDR said of one Caribbean dictator, “but he’s our SOB.”
During World War II, when the Germans uncovered in the Katyn Forest a vast gravesite containing the remains of thousands from Poland’s officer corps, dating to Stalin’s occupation, Poles in Britain came to Prime Minister Churchill to ask for an investigation.
Churchill, for whom Stalin was by now an indispensable ally, replied dismissively: “There is no use prowling round the three-year-old graves of Smolensk.”
Nor is it only during wartime that the U.S. has associated with authoritarians with repellent human rights records.
The U.S. maintains a treaty alliance with the Philippines of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has approved the extrajudicial killing of drug dealers, thousands of whom have been murdered.
Gen. el-Sissi came to power in Cairo in a military coup that ousted an elected government headed by a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is, along with thousands of Brotherhood members, now in prison.
Since the coup attempt in NATO ally Turkey in 2017, President Recep Erdogan has imprisoned thousands, including more journalists than any country on earth.
Last week came reports that China has arrested the head of Interpol, and has indeed been operating an archipelago of re-education camps in its west to purge the ethnic and religious beliefs of the Uighur people.
As for Saudi Arabia, members of Congress are said to be readying sanctions to impose on the Saudi regime if it is proven Khashoggi was killed on royal orders.
However, which would be a greater violation of human rights: the sanctioned killing of a political enemy of the regime or 10,000 dead Yemenis, including women and children, and millions facing malnutrition and starvation in a Saudi war of aggression being fought with the complicity and cooperation of the United States?
Rather than resist Congress’ proposed sanctions, President Trump might take this opportunity to begin a long withdrawal from decades of entanglement in Mideast wars that have availed us nothing and cost us greatly.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 19, 2018, 06:39:42 AM
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Caravan Puts Trump Legacy on the Line
Thursday - October 18, 2018 at 11:52 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East.
Yet far more critical to the future of our civilization is the ongoing invasion of the West from the Third World.
Consider the impact of the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 to throw open Germany’s doors to 1 million refugees from Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr.
Last weekend, in a crushing blow to Merkel, the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of her CDU, won its smallest share of the vote in half a century, 37 percent. Her coalition party, the SPD, saw its share of the Bavarian vote fall to a historic low of less than 10 percent.

The right-wing Alternative for Deutchland saw its support rise to 10 percent and has become a force in German politics. Some conservatives are urging the CDU to adopt the AfD hardline on illegal immigration.
The message sent by the Bavarian electorate is the message voters across Europe have been sending to their own capitals for years: You are failing in your first duty — defense of the homeland from foreign invasion. Mass migration of unassimilable peoples and cultures from a global South represents an existential threat to our Europe.
As Merkel’s chancellorship approaches its end, French President Emmanuel Macron, her progressive EU partner, has seen his approval fall to below 30 percent.
The U.S.-led NATO alliance may guard the Baltic and Black Sea regions against a Russian invasion from the east. But in Central, Southern and Western Europe, the more feared invaders are the peoples of Africa and the Muslim world, whose numbers are expected to triple or quadruple by this century’s end.
And as their numbers grow, so, too, does their desperation to escape, even at risk of their lives, the poverty, wars and repression of their homelands to cross the Med and fill the empty spaces left by a depopulating Europe.
It also now appears that the U.S. elections, not three weeks away, may be affected by another immigration crisis on the U.S. border.
As of Thursday, a caravan of 4,000 refugees without visas had crossed from Honduras into Guatemala and was heading toward Mexico. By Election Day, it will either have been stopped, or it will be here. And this caravan is a portent of things to come.
According to The Washington Post, during FY 2018, which ended last month, 107,212 members of “family units” crossed over into the U.S., “obliterating the previous record of 77,857 set in 2016.”
Citing DHS figures, the Post adds, “Border patrol agents arrested 16,658 family members in September alone, the highest one-month total on record and an 80 percent increase from July.”
When Trump, under intense political fire, ended his “zero tolerance” policy of separating refugees from their children, this message went out to Mexico and Central America:
Bring your kids with you when you cross the border. They will have to stay with you, and they cannot be held for more than 20 days. Thus, when they are released, you will be released to await a hearing on your claim of asylum. The odds are excellent that you can vanish into the U.S. population and never be sent back.
Enraged, Trump has threatened to cut off aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala if they do not stop the caravans and has warned Mexico he will use the U.S. military to secure our border.
Unwanted mass migration is the issue of our time, as there is no foreseeable end to it before it alters America irremediably.
As these migrants are almost all poor, not highly skilled, and do not speak English, most will join that segment of our population that pays no income taxes but qualifies for social welfare benefits like food stamps, medical care and free education in our public schools.
They are thus a net drain upon the resources of a nation that is already, at full employment, running a deficit of $779 billion a year.
These migrants, however, are a present and future benefit to the Democratic Party that built and maintains our mammoth welfare state, and which, in presidential elections, routinely wins 70 to 90 percent of the votes of people whose trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Not without reason, Democrats believe that if they can change the composition of the American electorate, they can control America forever.
If Donald Trump was elected on any one issue, it was immigration and his promises to secure the border, build the wall and halt the invasion.
How he deals with the impending crisis of the migrant caravan may affect both the fate of his party in November and his presidency in 2020.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 19, 2018, 06:51:42 AM
Mexican Government sends Federal Police to intercept caravan of U.S. bound migrants:

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 23, 2018, 12:20:27 PM
Time for Trump to Cut the Prince Loose?
Tuesday - October 23, 2018 at 12:47 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall.

Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not killed by an American, and died not on U.S. soil but in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, consumes our elite press.

The top two stories in Monday’s Washington Post were about the Khashoggi affair. A third, inside, carried the headline, “Trump, who prizes strength, may look weak in hesitance to punish Saudis.”

On Sunday, the Post put three Khashoggi stories on Page 1. The Post’s lead editorial bashed Trump for his equivocal stance on the killing.

Two of the four columns on the op-ed page demanded that the Saudis rid themselves of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the prime suspect in ordering the execution.



“Corey A. Stewart’s impulse to use provocative and evidence-free slurs reached new heights Friday when the Republican nominee for Senate disparaged slain Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi…

“Stewart appears to be moving in lockstep with extremist Republicans and conservative commentators engaging in a whisper campaign to smear Khashoggi and insulate Trump from global rebuke.”

This was presented as a news story.


Inside the Business section of Sunday’s Post was a major story, “More CEOs quietly withdraw from Saudi conference.” Featured was a photo of JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who had canceled his appearance.

On the top half of the front page of the Sunday New York Times were three stories about Khashoggi, as were the two top stories on Monday.

The Times’ lead editorial Monday called for a U.N. investigation, a cutoff in U.S. arms sales to Riyadh and a signal to the royal house that we regard their crown prince as “toxic.”

Why is our prestige press consumed by the murder of a Saudi dissident not one in a thousand Americans had ever heard of?

Answer: Khashoggi had become a contributing columnist to the Post. He was a journalist, an untouchable. The Post and U.S. media are going to teach the House of Saud a lesson: You don’t mess with the American press!

Moreover, the preplanned murder implicating the crown prince, with 15 Saudi security agents and an autopsy expert with a bone saw lying in wait at the consulate to kill Khashoggi, carve him up, and flee back to Riyadh the same day, is a terrific story.

Still, what ought not be overlooked here is the political agenda of our establishment media in driving this story as hard as they have for the last three weeks.

Our Beltway elite can smell the blood in the water. They sense that Khashoggi’s murder can be used to discredit the Trump presidency, expose the amorality of his foreign policy and sever his ties to patriotic elements of his Middle American constituency.

How so?

First, there are those close personal ties between Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, son of the King, and Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the president of the United States.

Second, there are the past commercial connections between builder Donald Trump, who sold a floor of a Trump building and a yacht to the Saudis when he was in financial straits.

Third, there is the strategic connection. The first foreign trip of the Trump presidency was, at Kushner’s urging, to Riyadh to meet the king, and the president has sought to tighten U.S. ties to the Saudis ever since.

Fourth, Trump has celebrated U.S. sales arms to the Saudis as a job-building benefit to America and a way to keep the Saudis as strategic partners in a Mideast coalition against Iran.

Fifth, the leaders of the two wings of Trump’s party in the Senate, anti-interventionist Rand Paul and interventionist Lindsey Graham, are already demanding sanctions on Riyadh and an ostracizing of the prince.

As story after story comes out of Riyadh about what happened in that consulate on Oct. 2, each less convincing than the last, the coalition of forces, here and abroad, pressing for sanctions on Saudi Arabia and dumping the prince, grows.

The time may be right for President Trump to cease leading from behind, to step out front, and to say that, while he withheld judgment to give the Saudis every benefit of the doubt, he now believes that the weight of the evidence points conclusively to a plot to kill Jamal Khashoggi.

Hence, he is terminating U.S. military aid for the war in Yemen that Crown Prince Mohammed has been conducting for three years. Win-win.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 26, 2018, 05:58:20 AM
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Did Trump Goad and Guide the Pipe Bomber?
Friday - October 26, 2018 at 2:00 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
By Thursday, the targets of the mailed pipe bombs had risen to nine: George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Maxine Waters, John Brennan, Eric Holder, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Biden and Robert De Niro.
That list contains four of the highest-ranking officials of Barack Obama’s administration: the president himself, his vice president, his secretary of state and his attorney general.
Yet, by Thursday morning, there was heartening news.
Not one of the mailed bombs had reached its target. Not one handler of a mailed bomb had been injured. Not one bomb had exploded.
Several of the bombs were said to be deficient. While they contained elements of pipe bombs, with shards of glass and powder, there was no trigger to ignite an explosion.
Were these devices simply poorly made, or did the bomber intend not to wound or kill, but simply to cause a panic?
As of this writing, we don’t know. Moreover there is this oddity: All of the bombs had the same return address — that of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who was ousted as leader of the DNC when hacked DNC emails revealed she had tilted the party machinery to defeat Hillary Clinton’s principal rival in the primaries, Bernie Sanders.
Was putting Wasserman Schultz’s return address on all the bomb packages some kind of joke?
What was going on here?

Beltway residents, however, did not need to look far to learn who inspired and motivated the would-be mass-murderer of our liberal elite. In a front-page story headlined, “Subjects of Trump’s ire in bomb-maker’s sights,” The Washington Post identified the suspect:
“(A) common theme among the targets was unmistakable. Each has been a recurring subject of Trump attacks.”
The Post elaborated. Trump has called Democrats “evil.” Trump has denounced Obama’s presidency. Trump has “demonized Hillary Clinton, inspiring chants of ‘Lock her up!'” Trump has “used his bully pulpit to taunt Maxine Waters … as a ‘low IQ individual.'”
Trump has impugned ex-CIA Director John Brennan and fanned “conspiracy theories about George Soros.” Trump has called the news media “the enemy of the people.” Trump has singled out CNN’s reporting as “fake news.”
What the Post was implying was that Trump at his rallies had done the target acquisition for the bomber who intended to maim or murder the leading lights of liberalism and enemies of Trumpism.
If one missed the point on Page 1, the headline over the balance of the story inside the Post drove it home: “Amid incendiary rhetoric, targets of Trump’s words become bombs’ targets.”
The correlation between Trump’s targets and the bomber’s targets is no accident, comrade, the Post is saying.
Yet, as of late Thursday, still, no bomb had exploded. And what had been called bombs were being called “suspicious packages.” And the person or persons who made and mailed them had yet to be identified.
But still the attacks on Trump and the calls to hold him morally culpable for the bombs, because of his rhetoric, went on unabated.
Said Nancy Peℓσѕι and Chuck Schumer, jointly responding to the president’s call for civility in Wisconsin: Trump’s “words ring hollow until he reverses his statements that condone acts of violence.”
This is not the first time a political atrocity has been to exploited to wound political enemies.
Though Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union, the city of Dallas, then a conservative stronghold, was indicted by the media for having “created the atmosphere” in which JFK was αssαssιnαtҽd.
In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the media blamed the anti-government rhetoric of conservative talk radio for poisoning the minds of extremists like Timothy McVeigh.
Guilt by association seems a more common recourse of the left.
When members of the Republican Congressional baseball team were shot and wounded at their morning practice, no major GOP figure blamed Bernie Sanders, though the would-be mass murderer was one of Bernie’s volunteers.
“Democracy dies in darkness,” reads the motto of The Washington Post. But democracy dies in other ways as well.
Democracy dies when the divisions in a society become so bitter and rancorous that a segment of that society becomes so estranged it decides that it would rather leave and live apart.
With their endless charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia America’s elite has let Trump’s “base” know what it thinks of them.
And at his rallies, where Trump’s mockery of that elite and its media allies evokes hoots and cheers, Middle America is telling our cultural and political establishment what it thinks of them.
Before we were a democracy, we were a republic. And we were always more than just a polity. We were a people and a nation.
Today we seem to be two countries and two peoples.
And if that is true, a political system based on majority rule is not going to be strong enough to hold us together indefinitely.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 30, 2018, 06:31:52 PM
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Is This Worse Than ’68?
Monday - October 29, 2018 at 9:03 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life ѕуηαgσgυє became the site of the largest mass murder of Jєωs in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman.
Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators.
Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what Charles Dickens called “the worst of times” in America? Is today worse than 1968?
Certainly, the hatred and hostility, the bile and bitterness of our discourse, seem greater now than 50 years ago. But are the times really worse?
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1968 began with one of the greatest humiliations in the history of the American Navy. The U.S. spy ship Pueblo was hijacked in international waters and its crew interned by North Korea.
A week later came the Tet Offensive, where every provincial capital in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand U.S. troops died in February, 10,000 more through 1968.
On March 14, anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against President Johnson.(https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=forthecause-20&language=en_US&l=li3&o=1&a=0143107976)
With LBJ wounded, Robert Kennedy leapt into the race, accusing the president who had enacted civil rights of “dividing the country” and removing himself from “the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.” Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, is “calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”
Today, RFK is remembered as a “uniter.”

With Gov. George Wallace tearing at Johnson from the right and Kennedy and McCarthy attacking from the left — and Nixon having cleared the Republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire — LBJ announced on March 31 he would not run again.
Four days later, Martin Luther King, leading a strike of garbage workers, was αssαssιnαtҽd in Memphis. One hundred U.S. cities exploded in looting, arson and riots. The National Guard was called up everywhere and federal troops rushed to protect Washington, D.C., long corridors of which were gutted, not to be rebuilt for a generation.
Before April’s end, Columbia University had exploded in the worst student uprising of the decade. It was put down only after the NYPD was unleashed on the campus.
Nixon called the Columbia takeover by black and white radicals “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.” Which many have since become.
In June, Kennedy, after defeating McCarthy in the crucial primary of California, was mortally wounded in the kitchen of the hotel where he had declared victory. He was buried in Arlington beside JFK.
Nixon, who had swept every primary, was nominated on the first ballot in Miami Beach, and the Democratic Convention was set for late August.
Between the conventions, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his Warsaw Pact armies and hundreds of tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful uprising known as “Prague Spring.”
With this bloodiest of military crackdowns since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West: There will be no going back in Europe. Once a Communist state, always a Communist state!
At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the thousands of radicals who had come to raise hell congregated nightly in Grant Park, across from the Hilton where the candidates and this writer were staying.
Baited day and night, the Chicago cops defending the hotel, by late in the week, had had enough. Early one evening, platoons of fresh police arrived and charged into the park clubbing and arresting scores of radicals as the TV cameras rolled. It would be called a “police riot.”
When Sen. Abe Ribicoff took the podium that night, he directed his glare at Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Daley’s reply from the floor was unprintable.
Through September, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without being cursed and shouted down.
Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said, these people “aren’t just hecklers,” but “highly disciplined, well-organized agitators. … Some are anarchists and some of these groups are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the country.”
After his slim victory, Nixon declared that his government would take as its theme the words on a girl’s placard that he had seen in the Ohio town of Deshler: “Bring us together.”
Nixon tried in his first months, but it was not to be.
According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”
No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 07, 2018, 06:12:32 PM
Has Bloomberg Begun the Battle for 2020?
Tuesday - November 6, 2018 at 10:36 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Did former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just take a page out of the playbook of Sen. Ed Muskie from half a century ago?
In his first off-year election in 1970, President Richard Nixon ran a tough attack campaign to hold the 52 House seats the GOP had added in ’66 and ’68, and to pick up a few more seats in the Senate.
The issue: law and order. The targets: the “radical liberals.”
In that campaign’s final hours, Muskie delivered a statesmanlike address from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, excoriating the “unprecedented volume” of “name-calling” and “deceptions” from the “highest offices in the land.”
Nixon picked up a pair of Senate seats, but Democrats gained a dozen House seats, and the press scored it as a victory for Muskie, who was vaulted into the lead position for the 1972 Democratic nomination.
In the final days of this election, Bloomberg just invested $5 million to air, twice nationally, a two-minute ad for the Democratic Party that features Bloomberg himself denouncing the “fear-mongering,” and “shouting and hysterics” coming out of Washington.
“Americans are neither naive nor heartless,” says the mayor. “We can be a nation of immigrants while also securing our borders.”
That $5 million ad buy was only Bloomberg’s latest contribution to the Democratic Party during an election campaign into which he had already plunged $110 million of his own money.

Contributions of this magnitude support the idea that Bloomberg will seek the presidential nomination as a Democrat. With resources like this at his disposal, and a willingness to spend into the hundreds of millions, he could last in the primaries as long as he wants.
Yet, Bloomberg is no Ed Muskie, who had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and was widely regarded a top contender for 1972.
The mayor has been a Republican and independent as well as a Democrat. And as The Washington Post’s Robert Costa relates, Bloomberg has drawbacks: “He speaks flatly with the faded Boston accent from his youth, devoid of partisan passion and with a technocratic emphasis.”
With the energy of the Democratic Party coming from militants, minorities and millennials, would these true believers rally to a 76-year-old Manhattan media magnate who wants to make their party more centrist and problem-solving, and to start beavering away at cutting the deficit?
Yet Bloomberg’s opening move may force the pace of the politics of 2020. Should he announce, and start spending on ads, he could force the hand of Vice President Joe Biden, who appears the Democrats’ strongest candidate in taking back Pennsylvania, and the states of the industrial Midwest, from Trump.
On the left wing of the Democratic Party, which seems certain to have a finalist in the run for the 2020 nomination, the competition is stiff and the pressure to move early equally great.
If Socialist Bernie Sanders is not to lock up this wing of the party as he did in 2016, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala hαɾɾιs of California, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts may have to move soon.
But even before attention can turn to the presidential race, the U.S. House of Representatives seems certain to witness a leadership battle.
Nancy Peℓσѕι is determined to become speaker again if Democrats take the House Tuesday, while the Congressional Black Caucus has entered a demand for one of the two top positions in the House.
Millennials also want new leadership. And to many centrist Democrats in swing districts, Peℓσѕι as the visible voice and face of the national party remains a perpetual problem.
If the Democrats fail to recapture the House, the recriminations will be sweeping and the demand for new leadership overwhelming.
But even if they do capture the House, the rewards may be fleeting.
A Democratic House will be a natural foil for President Trump, an institution with responsibility but without real power.
And should the economy, which has been running splendidly under a Republican Congress and president start to sputter under a divided Congress, there is no doubt that the Democratic House majority, with its anti-capitalist left and socialist ideology, would emerge as the primary suspect.
Also, if Democrats win the House, Maxine Waters could be the new chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, Adam Schiff the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Jerrold Nadler of New York the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the repository for resolutions of impeachment. Does that look like a winning lineup?
2019 is thus shaping up to be a year of gridlock on Capitol Hill, with the Senate attempting to expeditiously move through Trump’s nominated judges, and a Democratic House potentially hassling the White House and Trump administration with a snowstorm of subpoenas.
This could be the kind of battleground Donald Trump relishes.
A victorious Democratic Party on Tuesday could be set up to take the fall, both for gridlock and any major reversal in the progress of the economy.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 09, 2018, 07:22:01 AM
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The War for the Soul of America
Friday - November 9, 2018 at 3:32 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now.
This is a fight to the finish.
A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Peℓσѕι — “I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished” — was ancient history by nightfall.
With the forced resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his replacement by his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, the long-anticipated confrontation with Robert Mueller appears at hand.
Sessions had recused himself from the oversight role of the special counsel’s investigation into Russiagate. Whitaker has definitely not.
Before joining Justice, he said that the Mueller probe was overreaching, going places it had no authority to go, and that it could be leashed by a new attorney general and starved of funds until it passes away.
Whitaker was not chosen to be merely a place holder until a new AG is confirmed. He was picked so he can get the job done.
And about time.
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For two years, Trump has been under a cloud of unproven allegations and suspicion that he and top campaign officials colluded with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to thieve and publish the emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It is past time for Mueller to prove these charges or concede he has a busted flush, wrap up his investigation and go home.
And now, in T.S. Eliot’s words, Trump appears to have found “the strength to force the moment to its crisis.”
His attitude toward Mueller’s probe is taking on the aspect of Andrew Jackson’s attitude toward Nicholas Biddle’s Second Bank of the United States: It’s “trying to kill me, but I will kill it.”
Trump has been warned by congressional Democrats that if he in any way impedes the work of Mueller’s office, he risks impeachment.
Well, let’s find out.
If the House Judiciary Committee of incoming chairman Jerrold Nadler wishes to impeach Trump for forcing Mueller to fish or cut bait, Trump’s allies should broaden the debate to the real motivation here of the defeated establishment: It detests the man the American people chose to lead their country and thus wants to use its political and cultural power to effect his removal.
Even before news of Sessions’ departure hit Wednesday, Trump was subjected to an antifa-style hassling by the White House press corps.
One reporter berated the president and refused to surrender the microphone. Others shouted support for his antics. A third demanded to know whether Trump’s admission that he’s a “nationalist” would give aid and comfort to “white nationalists.”
By picking up the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta and booting him out of the White House, Trump has set a good precedent.
Freedom of the press does not mean guaranteed immunity of the press from the same kind of abuse the press directs at the president.
John F. Kennedy was beloved by the media elite. Yet JFK canceled all White House subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune and called the publisher of The New York Times to get him to pull reporter David Halberstam out of Vietnam for undermining U.S. morale in a war in which Green Berets were dying.
Some journalists have become Trump haters with press passes. And Trump is right to speak truth to mainstream media power and to accord to the chronically hostile press the same access to the White House to which Robert De Niro is entitled. Since the days of John Adams, the White House has been the president’s house, not the press’s house.
Peℓσѕι appears the favorite to return as speaker of the House. But she may find her coming days in the post she loves to be less-than-happy times.
Some of her incoming committee chairs — namely, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and Elijah cuмmings — seem less interested in legislative compromises than in rummaging through White House files for docuмents to damage the president, starting with his tax returns.
To a world watching with fascination this death struggle convulsing our capital, one wonders how attractive American democracy appears.
And just how much division can this democracy stand?
We know what the left thinks of Trump’s “base.”
Hillary Clinton told us. Half his supporters, she said, are a “basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” Lately, America’s populist right has been called fascist and neo-nαzι.
How can the left “unite” with people like that? Why should the left not try to drive such “racists” out of power by any means necessary?
This is the thinking that bred antifa.
As for those on the right — as they watch the left disparage the old heroes, tear down their monuments, purge Christianity from their public schools — they have come to conclude that their enemies are at root anti-Christian and anti-American.
How do we unify a nation where the opposing camps believe this?
What the Trump-establishment war is about is the soul of America, a war in which a compromise on principle can be seen as a betrayal.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 13, 2018, 08:21:53 AM
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Macron to Trump: ‘You’re No Patriot!’
Tuesday - November 13, 2018 at 5:07 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In a rebuke bordering on national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron retorted to Donald Trump’s calling himself a nationalist.
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.”
As for Trump’s policy of “America first,” Macron trashed such atavistic thinking in this new age: “By saying we put ourselves first and the others don’t matter, we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values.”
Though he is being hailed as Europe’s new anti-Trump leader who will stand up for transnationalism and globalism, Macron reveals his ignorance of America.
Trump’s ideas are not ideological but rooted in our country’s history.
America was born between the end of the French and Indian War, the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Both the general who led us in the Revolution and the author of that declaration became president. Both put America first. And both counseled their countrymen to avoid “entangling” or “permanent” alliances with any other nation, as we did for 160 years.
Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson lacking in patriotism?
When Woodrow Wilson, after being re-elected in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” took us into World War I, he did so as an “associate,” not as an Allied power. U.S. troops fought under U.S. command.
After that war, the U.S. Senate rejected an alliance with France. Under Franklin Roosevelt, Congress formally voted for neutrality in any future European war.
The U.S. emerged from World War II as the least bloodied and least damaged nation because we remained out of the war for more than two years after it had begun.
We did not invade France until four years after France was occupied, the British had been thrown off the Continent, and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union had been fighting and dying for three years.
The leaders who kept us out of the two world wars as long as they did — did they not serve our nation well, when America’s total losses were just over 500,000 dead, compared with the millions other nations lost?
At the Armistice Day ceremony, Macron declared, “By saying we put ourselves first and the others don’t matter, we erase what a nation holds dearest … its moral values.”
But Trump did not say that other countries don’t matter. He only said we should put our own country first.
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What country does Emmanuel Macron put first?
Or does the president of France see himself as a citizen of the world with responsibility for all of Europe and all of mankind?
Charles de Gaulle was perhaps the greatest French patriot in the 20th century. Yet he spoke of a Europe of nation-states, built a national nuclear arsenal, ordered NATO out of France in 1966, and, in Montreal in 1967, declared, “Long live a free Quebec” — inciting French Canadians to rise up against “les Anglo-Saxons” and create their own nation.
Was de Gaulle lacking in patriotism?
By declaring American nationalists anti-patriotic, Macron has asserted a claim to the soon-to-be-vacant chair of Angela Merkel.
But is Macron really addressing the realities of the new Europe and world in which we now live, or is he simply assuming a heroic liberal posture to win the applause of Western corporate and media elites?
The realities: In Britain, Scots are seeking secession, and the English have voted to get out of the European Union. Many Basques and Catalans wish to secede from Spain. Czechs and Slovaks have split the blanket and parted ways.
Anti-EU sentiment is rampant in populist-dominated Italy.
A nationalism their peoples regard as deeply patriotic has triumphed in Poland and Hungary and is making gains even in Germany.
The leaders of the world’s three greatest military powers — Trump in the U.S., Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China — are all nationalists.
Turkish nationalist Recep Tayyip Erdogan rules in Ankara, Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi in India. Jair Bolsonaro, a Trumpian nationalist, is the incoming president of Brazil. Is not Benjamin Netanyahu an Israeli nationalist?
In France, a poll of voters last week showed that Marine Le Pen’s renamed party, Rassemblement National, has moved ahead of Macron’s party for the May 2019 European Parliament elections.
If there is a valid criticism of Trump’s foreign policy, it is not that he has failed to recognize the new realities of the 21st century but that he has not moved expeditiously to dissolve old alliances that put America at risk of war in faraway lands where no vital U.S. interests exist.
Why are we still committed to fight for a South Korea far richer and more populous than a nuclear-armed North? Why are U.S. planes and ships still bumping into Russian planes and ships in the Baltic and Black seas?
Why are we still involved in the half-dozen wars into which Bush II and Barack Obama got us in the Middle East?
Why do we not have the “America first” foreign policy we voted for?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 16, 2018, 06:18:17 AM
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Trump Raises the Stakes With CNN
Friday - November 16, 2018 at 12:23 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Last week, the White House revoked the press pass of CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, and denied him access to the building.
CNN responded by filing suit in federal court against the president.
Acosta’s First and Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, said CNN. The demand: Acosta’s press pass must be returned immediately and his White House press privileges restored.
“If left unchallenged,” CNN warned, “the actions of the White House would create a dangerous chilling effect for any journalist who covers our elected officials.” A dozen news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, are filing amicus briefs on CNN’s behalf.
On Thursday, the Trump administration raised the stakes.
Justice Department lawyer James Burnham declared in court: “If the president wants to exclude all reporters from the White House grounds, he clearly has the authority to do that.”
After all, whose house is it if not the “President’s House,” the home of Donald Trump as long as he serves in the office to which he was elected by the American people?
The West Wing contains the Oval Office and the offices of senior staff. As for the West Wing briefing room, it was built by President Richard Nixon in 1969, when White House passes were regarded as privileges.
When did they become press rights or press entitlements?
Is Trump obligated to provide access to whomever CNN chooses to represent the network in the West Wing, even if the individual assigned routinely baits the press secretary and bashes the president?
Whence comes this obligation on the president?
White House aides can be fired, forced to surrender their passes and be escorted out of the building.
Whence comes the immunity of White House correspondents?
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The First Amendment guarantees CNN reporters and anchors the right to say what they wish about Trump. It does not entitle Acosta to a front-row seat in the White House briefing room or the right to grill the president at East Room press conferences.
Why was he expelled from the White House?
Says press secretary Sarah Sanders, “The First Amendment is not served when a single reporter, of more than 150 present, attempts to monopolize the floor.”
Acosta baits the president, argues, refuses to yield the floor, manifests a hostility to Trump and trashes him regularly on-air.
Such conduct has made him a champion to Trump haters. But to others, it makes him a biased witness to the Trump presidency who has no legal or constitutional claim to a chair in the West Wing briefing room.
When this writer entered the White House in January 1969, a reporter who had traveled in the 1968 campaign came by to explain that I had to understand that he was now part of “the adversary press.”
What we had done to be declared an adversary, I do not know. I had assumed that the opposition party would become the adversaries of a Nixon White House.
But if the press declares itself an adversary of the White House and if it acts as an adversary — as it has a First Amendment right to do — such members of the media are no more entitled to the run of the West Wing than would be a member of Congress who regularly attacks the president.
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Theodore White wrote in “The Making of the President 1972 (https://amzn.to/2DJhBc3)” that the real enemies of Nixon’s White House were not Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and House Speaker John McCormack but CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
This holds true for Trump. If the media are not “the enemy of the people,” the major media are certainly — and proudly — the enemy of Trump.
Trump’s most visible and persistent adversaries are not Nancy Peℓσѕι or Chuck Schumer. And it is Trump’s attacks on CNN and “fake news” that bring his loyalists to their feet. With his use of Twitter, Trump has found a way around an overwhelmingly hostile media.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller gets a favorable press, as he is seen by the media as the instrument of their deliverance from Trump.
But should the special counsel bring in a report that says, “Donald Trump did not collude with Russia in the 2016 election, and we could find no obstruction of justice in how he dealt with our investigation,” Mueller’s indulgent press would turn on him overnight.
CNN says that if Trump succeeds in pulling Acosta’s press pass, it could have a “chilling” effect on other White House correspondents.
But if it has a chilling effect on journalists who relish confronting the president and reaping the cheers, publicity and benefits that go with being a leader of the adversary press, why is that a problem?
The White House should set down rules of conduct for reporters in the briefing room, and if reporters repeatedly violate them, that should cost them their chairs and, in cases like Acosta’s, their credentials.
This confrontation is healthy, and the republic will survive if the press loses this fight, which the press itself picked.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Maria Regina on November 17, 2018, 11:50:08 AM
Is Kelly an Obama holdover given a federal judgeship by Trump in a deal that Demoncrats would approve future Trump appointees?

Is this why he ruled in favor of CNN?

Or could this be a temporary one step backwards blow to the Trump Administration to disarm CNN into thinking that they are winning just before the hammer hits and sends CNN crawling out of the White House?

Stay tuned for the next scenario with the Drama Queen Acosta.

This could be a Wag the Dog scenario played by Trump to distract us from other important events like the upcoming FISA DECLASS.

Two can play this game.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 20, 2018, 05:41:10 AM

Will Democratic Rebels Dethrone Nancy?
Monday - November 19, 2018 at 11:32 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

After adding at least 37 seats and taking control of the House by running on change, congressional Democrats appear to be about to elect as their future leaders three of the oldest faces in the party.

Nancy Peℓσѕι of California and Steny Hoyer of Maryland have led the House Democrats for 16 years. For 12 years, they have been joined in the leadership triumvirate by Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.

If these three emerge as speaker, majority leader and majority whip, all three Democratic leaders will be older than our oldest president, Ronald Reagan, was when he went home after two terms.

By 2020’s election, all three House leaders would be over 80.

Was this gerontocracy what America voted for when it awarded Democrats control of the U.S. House?



Hardly. Some Democrats won in 2018 by pledging not to vote for Peℓσѕι as speaker, so unpopular is she in their districts. And if all who said they want new leadership were to vote for new leaders on the House floor Jan. 3 — when the speaker will be chosen — Peℓσѕι would fall short. The race for speaker could then break wide-open.

Some 16 Democrats vowed Monday to oppose Peℓσѕι on the House floor, one shy of being enough to block her return to the speakership after eight years.

In a letter that went public, the 16 declared: “Our majority came on the backs of candidates who said that they would support new leadership because voters in hard-won districts, and across the country, want to see real change in Washington. We promised to change the status quo, and we intend to deliver on that promise.”

The likelihood of the rebellion succeeding, however, remains slim, for no credible challenger to Peℓσѕι has yet announced.

What explains the timidity in the Democratic caucus?

Peℓσѕι punishes enemies. Democrats calling for new leaders have already been branded as sexists with the hashtag “#FiveWhiteGuys.”

Yet evidence is mounting that a Peℓσѕι speakership would prove to be an unhappy close to her remarkable career.

One week after the election, 150 protesters from the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats blocked Peℓσѕι’s House office to demand action on climate change. They were joined by the youngest member of the incoming Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Peℓσѕι declared herself “inspired” by the protesters, 51 of whom were arrested. She urged police to let them exercise their democratic rights and pledged to revive the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which Republicans abolished.

Dismissing the committee as “toothless,” the protesters demanded that Peℓσѕι’s party commit to bringing an end to the use of all fossil fuels and to accepting no more campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

Not going to happen with Peℓσѕι as speaker. For when it comes to the leftist agenda of liberal Democrats from safe districts — Medicare for all, abolish ICE, impeach Trump — Peℓσѕι would pigeonhole such measures to avoid the party’s being dragged too far to the left for 2020.

And if the House were to pass radical measures, the bills would die in the Senate or be vetoed by the president.

Moreover, within Peℓσѕι’s party in the House, the various factions are going to be demanding a new distribution of the seats of power, of which there are only so many to go around.

Democratic women, who won more seats than ever, will want more, as will the Congressional Black Caucus and the Hispanics. It will most likely be white male Democrats, that shrinking cohort, who will be the principal losers in the new House.

That adage about Democrats being a collection of warring tribes gathered together in anticipation of common plunder has never seemed truer.

What, then, does the new year promise?

As it becomes apparent that there is little common ground for bipartisan legislation on Capitol Hill — except perhaps on infrastructure, and that would take a long time to enact — the cable news channels will look elsewhere for the type of action that causes ratings to soar. That action will inevitably come in the clashes between Trump and his enemies and the media that sustain them.

Out of the House — with Adam Schiff, Elijah cuмmings, Maxine Waters and Jerrold Nadler as new chairs — will come a blizzard of subpoenas and a series of confrontations with witnesses.

From special counsel Robert Mueller’s office will almost surely come new indictments, trials and the long-anticipated report, which will go to the Justice Department, where Matthew Whitaker is acting attorney general.

Then there is the presidential race of 2020, where the Democratic Party has yet another gerontocracy problem.

By spring, there could be 20 Democrats who will have announced for president. And five of the most prominent mentioned — Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg — are also over 70, with Elizabeth Warren turning 70 in June.

While some candidates will be granted airtime because they are famous, the lesser-known will follow the single sure path to the cable studios and the weekend TV shows — the trashing of Trump.

Trading barbs is not Nancy Peℓσѕι’s kind of fight.


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 30, 2018, 05:24:41 PM
 
Posted on November 28, 2018 (https://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-crucial-test-at-san-ysidro-130686) by Pat Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
Trump’s Crucial Test at San Ysidro
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By Patrick j, Buchanan
Mass migration “lit the flame” of the right-wing populism that is burning up the Old Continent, she said. Europe must “get a handle on it.”
“Europe must send a very clear message — ‘we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.'” Should Europe fail to toughen up, illegal migration will never cease to “roil the body politic.”
And who is the lady who issued the dire warning and dispensed the tough-love advice to Europe? Marine Le Pen?
No. It is Hillary Clinton, spouse of the Great Triangulator.

Democrats may have piled on Clinton for selling out progressivism, but her political instincts here are dead on. She has grasped something her party willfully refuses to recognize — the growing salience of the issue of mass illegal migration into Western societies.
According to a new Gallup Poll, concern over immigration and illegal aliens soared from 13 to 21 percent of the public in November, as the No. 1 problem on the minds of the American people.
And this was before Sunday’s violent collision at San Ysidro where the Border Patrol fired rubber bullets and used tear gas to stop a mob of hundreds — out of the thousands of migrants housed in a stadium in Tijuana — from breaching our border and pouring into our country.
TV footage of the attempted breach, and photos and stories that major newspapers are putting on Page One, will sustain the national focus on what, since the election, has re-emerged as the nation’s primary concern.
With Mexico about to install a leftist government and new caravans forming in Central America to move through Mexico to the U.S. border, this issue is not going away before the 2020 election.
And with nearly 10,000 migrants being held in Tijuana for more than a week, in what the city’s mayor calls a humanitarian crisis, new and more desperate attempts to breach our border can be expected.
Rocks and bottles were hurled at the men and women of the Border Patrol Sunday, which brought the tear gas and temporary closing of the San Ysidro crossing. New, more serious, casualties cannot be ruled out.
Monday, Trump called on Mexico City to deal with the migrants seeking to breach our border, and threatened that if Mexico does not act, he could close one of the world’s busiest crossings, and for good:
“Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries. Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A.,” Trump tweeted, “We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!”
Trump thus laid down a marker for himself. Either he halts the caravans, or he will be seen as the failed enforcer of America’s border.
In that Gallup Poll there is other major news.
Among the problems facing America, in the eyes of her people in November, not one of the top 10 involved a foreign threat. In the following order, all involve the troubled state of our splintered nation: immigration/illegal aliens; dissatisfaction with government/poor leadership; health care; unifying the country; race relations/racism; lack of respect for each other; ethics/moral/religious/family decline; economy in general; unemployment/jobs; and education.
Immigration, race, culture, the economy and education appear to be the agenda Americans want addressed in 2020.
What does this portend?
While progressives may have piled on Clinton for her comments, and she may have “clarified” what she said, she has hit on something. Mass migration from the Third World has not only been the major progenitor and propellant of the right-wing populism that is raging across Europe, it also played an indispensable role in defeating her and electing Donald Trump.
And if the Democratic Party and its presidential candidates in 2020 are seen as abolish-ICE, pro-amnesty, open borders liberals, they will pull their party out of the mainstream of this nation on the most divisive issue of our time — the Third World invasion of the West.
For Trump, the die is cast. Not only are border security, the wall, and his pledge to halt the illegal invasion of his country what got him elected, they appear to be a primary argument for his re-election.
Washington’s think tank and media elites may be focused on other issues — Brexit, the Russia-Ukraine naval clash in the Kerch Strait, Kim Jong Un’s nukes, the South China Sea, Syria, Iran, the Saudi crown prince’s role in the grisly murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
But according to Gallup, none of these issues is a top concern or problem for the American people.
Progressives fail to understand that what they describe as greater and ever more desirable diversity, millions of Americans see as the conquest of their country by an endless flood of uninvited strangers.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 04, 2018, 10:47:49 AM
Will Paris Riots Scuttle Climate Accord?
Tuesday - December 4, 2018 at 5:33 am


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
In Katowice, Poland, all the signers of the 2015 Paris climate accord are gathered to assess how the world’s nations are meeting their goals to cut carbon emissions.
Certainly, the communications strategy in the run-up was impressive.
In October came that apocalyptic U.N. report warning that the world is warming faster than we thought and the disasters coming sooner than we thought.
What disasters? More and worse hurricanes, uncontrollable fires, floods, the erosion of coastlines, typhoons, drought, tsunamis, the sinking of islands into the sea.
In November, a scientific report issued by 13 U.S. agencies warned that if greater measures are not taken to reduce global warming, the damage could knock 10 percent off the size of the U.S. economy by century’s end.
At the G-20 meeting in Buenos Aires, 19 of the attending nations recommitted to the Paris accord. Only President Trump’s America did not.
Yet, though confidence may abound in Katowice that the world will meet the goals set down in Paris in 2015, the global environmentalists seem to be losing momentum and losing ground.
Consider what happened this weekend in France.
Saturday, rage over a fuel tax President Emmanuel Macron has proposed to cut carbon emissions brought mobs into the heart of Paris, where they battled police, burned cars, looted, smashed show windows of elite stores such as Dior and Chanel, and desecrated the Arc de Triomphe.
In solidarity with the Paris rioters, protests in other French cities erupted.
Virulently anti-elite, the protesters say they cannot make ends meet with the present burdens on the working and middle class.
Specifically, what the rioters seem to be saying is this:

We cannot see the benefits you are promising to future generations from cutting carbon emissions. And we cannot survive the taxes you are imposing on us in the here and now.
What is happening in Paris carries a message for all Western countries.
Democracies, which rely on the sustained support of electorates, have to impose rising costs on those electorates, if they are to deeply cut carbon emissions.
But when the electorates cannot see the benefits of these painful price hikes, the greater the likelihood the people will rise up and repudiate those whom progressives regard as far-sighted leaders — such as Macron.
Paris shows that Western elites may be reaching the limits of their political capacity to impose major sacrifices upon their constituents, who are turning to populists of the left and right to dethrone those elites.
Trump has been using tariffs to cut the trade deficits America has been running in recent decades, to bring manufacturing back to the USA, and to restore America’s economic independence.
Excellent goals all. But the immediate impact of those tariffs is rising prices at the mall and retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports. Before the long-term benefits can be realized, the pain comes and the protests begin.
No one wins a trade war, we are told. But an America willing to endure lost access to British imports in the 19th century emerged in the 20th as the greatest manufacturing power history had ever seen, a nation independent of all others, and able to stay out of the great wars of that century.
Are the American people willing to make the sacrifices to restore that independence? Are the British people willing to pay the price that the restoration of their national independence, via Brexit, entails?
Authoritarians have it easier. Morally revolting and socially ruinous as its hellish policy was, China was able to impose, for decades, a one-couple, one-child mandate on the most populous nation on earth.
According to the Paris agreement, poorer nations were promised $100 billion a year, starting in 2020, to cut carbon emissions. Anyone think that the newly nationalistic peoples of the West will tolerate that kind of wealth transfer to the Third World indefinitely?
In the Paris climate accord, China and India were given a pass to produce carbon emissions, while reductions were mandated for the Western powers.
How long will the West go along with that, while paying ever-rising prices to cut their own carbon emissions?
China, according to The New York Times, “consumes half the world’s coal. More than 4.3 million Chinese are employed in the country’s coal mines. China has added 40 percent of the world’s coal capacity since 2002.”
Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, is planning new coal-fired power plants and financing them across Asia.
What we are witnessing is an irrepressible conflict between democratic governments committed to cutting carbon emissions “to save the planet,” and their constituents who can refuse to bear those sacrifices by throwing out politicians like Macron.
Perhaps it says something about the future that the host city for this meeting of Paris climate accord signatories, Katowice, is in Silesia, a region that is home to some 90,000 coal workers — around half of all the coal workers in the EU.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 07, 2018, 12:23:52 AM
Who Lost the World Bush 41 Left Behind?
Friday - December 7, 2018 at 12:45 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
George H.W. Bush was America’s closer.
Called in to pitch the final innings of the Cold War, Bush 41 presided masterfully over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the liberation of 100 million Eastern Europeans and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nations.
History’s assignment complete, Bush 41 was retired.
And what happened to the world he left behind?
What became of that world where America was the lone superpower, which 41 believed should lead in creation of the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr?
The Russia that back then was led by Boris Yeltsin, a man desperate to be our friend and ally, is now ruled by an autocratic nationalist.
Was not Vladimir Putin an inevitable reaction to our treating Russia like an untrustworthy and dangerous recidivist, by our expansion of NATO into the Balkans, the eastern Baltic and the Black Sea — the entire front porch of Mother Russia?
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Did the America that in her early decades declared the Monroe Doctrine believe a great nation like Russia would forever indulge the presence of a hostile alliance on her doorstep led by a distant superpower?
In this same quarter century that we treated Russia like a criminal suspect, we welcomed China as the prodigal son. We threw open our markets to Chinese goods, escorted her into the WTO, smiled approvingly as U.S. companies shifted production there.
Beijing reciprocated — by manipulating her currency, running up hundreds of billions of dollars in trade surpluses with us, and thieving our technology when she could not extort it from our industries in China. Beijing even sent student spies into American universities.
Now the mask has fallen. China is claiming all the waters around her, building island bases in the South China Sea and deploying weapons to counter U.S. aircraft carriers. Creating ports and bases in Asia and Africa, confronting Taiwan — China clearly sees America as a potentially hostile rival power and is reaching for hegemony in the Western Pacific and East Asia.
And who produced the policies that led to the “unipolar power” of 1992 being challenged by these two great powers now collaborating against us? Was it not the three presidents who sat so uncomfortably beside President Donald Trump at the state funeral of 41?
Late in the 20th century, Osama bin Laden declared war on us for our having planted military bases on the sacred soil of Mecca and Medina; and, on Sept. 11, 2001, he made good on his declaration.
America recoiled, invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban, and set out to build an Afghan regime on American principles. Bush 43, declaring that we were besieged by “an axis of evil,” attacked and occupied Iraq.
We then helped ignite a cινιℓ ωαr in Syria that became, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions uprooted, the greatest humanitarian disaster of the century,
Then followed our attack on Libya and support for Saudi Arabia’s war to crush the Houthi rebels in Yemen, a war that many believe has surpassed Syria as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Where are the fruits of our forever war in the Middle East that justify the 7,000 U.S. dead, 60,000 wounded and untold trillions of dollars lost?
Since George H.W. Bush left the White House, the U.S. has incurred 12 trillion dollars in trade deficits, lost scores of thousands of manufacturing plants and 5 million manufacturing jobs. Our economic independence is ancient history.
After 41 left, the Republican Party supported an immigration policy that brought tens of millions, mostly unskilled and poor, half of them illegal, into the country. Result: The Nixon-Reagan coalition that delivered two 49-state landslides in the ’70s and ’80s is history, and the Republican nominee has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.
From 1992 to 2016, the American establishment contemptuously dismissed as “isolationists” those who opposed their wars for democracy in the Middle East, and as “protectionists” those who warned that by running up these massive trade deficits we were exporting America’s future.
The establishment airily dismissed those who said that pushing NATO right up to Russia’s borders would enrage and permanently antagonize a mighty military power. They ridiculed skeptics of our embrace of the Chinese rulers who defended the Tiananmen massacre.
The establishment won the great political battles before 2016. But how did the democracy crusaders, globalists, open borders progressives and interventionists do by their country in these decades?
Did the former presidents who sat beside Trump at National Cathedral, and the establishment seated in the pews behind them, realize that it was their policies, their failures, that gave birth to the new America that rose up to throw them out, and put in Donald Trump?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 11, 2018, 08:20:30 AM
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How Democracy Is Losing the World
Tuesday - December 11, 2018 at 12:16 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Donald Trump told Michael Cohen to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels about a one-night stand a decade ago, that, says Jerome Nadler, incoming chair of House Judiciary, would be an “impeachable offense.”
This tells you what social media, cable TV and the great herd of talking heads will be consumed with for the next two years — the peccadillos and misdeeds of Trump, almost all of which occurred before being chosen as president of the United States.
“Everywhere President Trump looks,” writes The Washington Times’ Rowan Scarborough, “there are Democrats targeting him from New York to Washington to Maryland… lawmakers, state attorneys general, opposition researchers, bureaucrats and activist defense lawyers.
“They are aiming at Russia collusion, the Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, a Trump hotel, Trump tax returns, Trump campaign finances and supposed money laundering.”
The full-court press is on. Day and night we will be hearing debate on the great question: Will the elites that loathe him succeed in bringing Trump down, driving him from office, and prosecuting and putting him in jail?

Says Adam Schiff, the incoming chair of the House intelligence committee: “Donald Trump may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time.”
And what will a watching world be thinking when it sees the once-great republic preoccupied with breaking yet another president?
Will that world think: Why can’t we be more like America?
Does the world still envy us our free press, which it sees tirelessly digging up dirt on political figures and flaying them with abandon?
Among the reasons democracy is in discredit and retreat worldwide is that its exemplar and champion, the USA, is beginning to resemble France’s Third Republic in its last days before World War II.
Also, democracy no longer has the field largely to itself as to how to create a prosperous and powerful nation-state.
This century, China has shown aspiring rulers how a single-party regime can create a world power, and how democracy is not a necessary precondition for extraordinary economic progress.
Vladimir Putin, an autocratic nationalist, has shown how a ruined nation can be restored to a great power in the eyes of its people and the world, commanding a new deference and respect.
Democracy is a bus you get off when it reaches your stop, says Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the attempted coup in the summer of 2017, Erdogan purged his government and military of tens of thousands of enemies and jailed more journalists than any other nation.
Yet he is welcomed in the capitals of the world.
What does American democracy now offer the world as its foremost attribute, its claim to greatness?
“Our diversity is our strength!” proclaims this generation.
We have become a unique nation composed of peoples from every continent and country, every race, ethnicity, culture and creed on earth.
But is not diversity what Europe is openly fleeing from?
Is there any country of the Old Continent clamoring for more migrants from the Maghreb, sub-Sahara or Middle East?
Broadly, it seems more true to say that the world is turning away from transnationalism toward tribalism, and away from diversity and back to the ethno-nationalism whence the nations came.
The diversity our democracy has on offer is not selling.
Ethnic, racial and religious minorities, such as the Uighurs
and Tibetans in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, minority black tribes in sub-Sahara Africa and white farmers in South Africa, can testify that popular majority rule often means mandated restrictions or even an end to minority rights.
In the Middle East, free elections produced a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon. After this, a disillusioned Bush 43 White House called off the democracy crusade.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, relates how one minority is treated in much of the Muslim world:
“Christians face daily the threat of violence, murder, intimidation, prejudice and poverty…”
“In the last few years, they have been slaughtered by so-called Islamic State. … Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes. Many have been killed, enslaved and persecuted or forcibly converted. Even those who remain ask the question, ‘Why stay?’
“Christian communities that were the foundation of the universal Church now face the threat of imminent extinction.”
And all the while this horror is going on, Ronald Reagan’s treaty that banned all U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles faces collapse. And President Trump’s initiative to bring about a nuclear-free North Korea appears in peril.
Yet, for the next two years, we will be preoccupied with whether paying hush money to Stormy Daniels justifies removing a president, and exactly when Michael Cohen stopped talking to the Russians about his boss building a Trump Tower in Moscow.
We are an unserious nation, engaged in trivial pursuits, in a deadly serious world.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 14, 2018, 10:05:43 AM
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What Lies Behind the Malaise of the West?
Friday - December 14, 2018 at 12:26 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West?
With lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen’s confession that he colluded with Donald Trump in making hush money payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, America’s stage is set for a play that will run two years.
As Democrats test the waters for a presidential run by savaging Trump, the establishment Trump detests and defeated in 2016 will use every weapon in its considerable arsenal to break and bring him down, as it did half a century ago to Richard Nixon.
By spring 2019, Americans will be unable to escape the vitriol on cable and social media. And the outside world will see America again as a house divided. Our politics will be even more poisonous than now, and it is not easy to see what would bring our warring tribes together again.
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Consider, then, the situation of our old ally Great Britain.
Prime Minister Theresa May was just forced to pledge that she would not lead her party in the next election — to survive a no-confidence vote in Parliament. A third of all Tory members voted to throw her out.
The no-confidence vote was called after May had to cancel a vote on the Brexit plan she had negotiated with the EU, when it was evident that a coalition of Tories and Labor would vote to kill her plan.
May has been humiliated. Yet her humiliation solves nothing. The clock is running toward a March deadline for concluding a Brexit deal. And no plan acceptable to both Parliament and the EU is on the table.
The possibility exists that Britain could simply crash out of the EU, causing severe economic damage to both.
Realizing this, Brussels has left the door open if Britain should vote in a second referendum to remain in the EU. But calling and carrying out that referendum would be a betrayal of the 52 percent of the British people that voted to restore full national independence.
While London wanted to stay in the EU in 2016, England voted to leave. Northern Ireland wanted to stay, as did Scotland, though 45 percent of Scots had earlier voted to declare their own independence from Great Britain.
In France, after four Saturdays of anarchy, arson, looting and vandalism of her national monuments, President Emmanuel Macron capitulated to the rioters. He withdrew the fuel tax that triggered the uprisings. He agreed to have his government add $113 a month to those earning the minimum wage, and to let workers get overtime pay and Christmas bonuses tax-free, and to revoke higher social charges on modest pensions.
The cost of Macron’s retreat is estimated at $11 billion, 0.4 percent of France’s GDP. Saturday will tell us if his appeasement bought peace.
The political collapse of Macron has been extraordinary.
In 2017, he won almost two-thirds of the national vote, and his La Republique en Marche! won an absolute majority of the National Assembly.
Today, one poll puts Macron’s approval at 21 percent. The idea that he can replace Angela Merkel as the recognized leader of the EU seems ridiculous.
As for Merkel herself, hailed as leader of the West in the time of Trump, her party and coalition lost so much support in the recent election that she stepped down as leader of the CDU and pledged not to run for another term as chancellor.
Europe’s fourth-largest economy, Italy, is now led by a coalition of the populist-left Five Star Movement and populist-right Lega party. The coalition seeks greater freedom on spending than Brussels is willing to allow, and a halt to migration from across the Med.
With Poland and Hungary at odds with Brussels over alterations in their political systems, the EU has never seemed less united.
What are the underlying causes of these 21st-century crises of Western democracies?
Certainly, globalization, with its creation of ties among transnational elites at the expense of nation-states and their indigenous peoples is one. Capitals — Washington, London, Paris, Berlin — seem ever more distant from the countries they rule.
Then there is demography. The native-born of almost all Western nations are aging, shrinking and dying. Death rates exceed birth rates. While peoples of the West are living longer, they are producing fewer children to replace them.
At the same time, Western elites have welcomed foreign workers and left borders unsecured against mass migration. And the people coming in, almost all now from the Third World, are not assimilating as the children of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants to the USA had largely done by 1960.
A consequence and related cause is the rise of tribalism, or ethno-nationalism, the search for identity and community with one’s own. Loyalties to family, tribe, neighborhood, culture and country appear paramount, rising above intellectual and political alignments.
The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing, said Pascal. And so it does.
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Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 18, 2018, 05:34:53 PM
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Can America Fight Two Cold Wars at Once?
Tuesday - December 18, 2018 at 10:29 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Kim Jong Un, angered by the newest U.S. sanctions, is warning that North Korea’s commitment to denuclearization could be imperiled and we could be headed for “exchanges of fire.”
Iran, warns Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is testing ballistic missiles that are forbidden to them by the U.N. Security Council.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned that, within days, he will launch a military thrust against U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria, regarding them as allies of the PKK terrorist organization inside Turkey.
Vladimir Putin just flew two Tu-160 nuclear capable bombers to Venezuela. Ukraine claims Russia is amassing tanks on its border.
How did the United States, triumphant in the Cold War, find itself beset on so many fronts?

First, by intervening militarily and repeatedly in a Mideast where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, and thereby ensnaring ourselves in that Muslim region’s forever war.
Second, by extending our NATO alliance deep into Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltics, thereby igniting a Cold War II with Russia.
Third, by nurturing China for decades before recognizing she was becoming a malevolent superpower whose Asian-Pacific ambitions could be realized only at the expense of friends of the United States.
The question, then, for our time is this: Can the U.S. pursue a Cold War policy of containment against both of the other great military powers, even as we maintain our Cold War commitments to defend scores of countries around the globe?
And, if so, for how long can we continue to do this, and at what cost?
Belatedly, the U.S. establishment has recognized the historic folly of having chaperoned China onto the world stage and seeking to buy her lasting friendship with $4 trillion in trade surpluses at our expense since Bush 41.
Consider how China has reciprocated America’s courtship.
She has annexed the South China Sea, built air and missile bases on half a dozen disputed islets, and told U.S. ships and planes to stay clear.
She has built and leased ports and bases from the Indian Ocean to Africa. She has lent billions to poor Asian and African countries like the Maldives, and then demanded basing concessions when these nations default on the debts owed for building their facilities.
She has sent hundreds of thousand of students to U.S. colleges and universities, where many have allegedly engaged in espionage.
She kept her currency below market value to maintain her trade advantage and entice U.S. corporations to China where they are shaken down to transfer their technology secrets.
China has engaged in cyber theft of the personnel files of 20 million U.S. federal applicants and employees. She apparently thieved the credit card and passport numbers of 500 million guests at Marriott hotels over the years.
She has sought to steal the secrets of America’s defense contractors, especially those working with the Navy whose 7th Fleet patrols the Western Pacific off China’s coast.
She is believed to be behind the cybersecurity breaches that facilitated the theft of data on the U.S. F-22 and F-35, information now suspected of having played a role in Beijing’s development of its fifth-generation stealth fighters.
Christians are persecuted in China. And Beijing has established internment camps for the Uighur minority, where these Turkic Muslim peoples are subjected to brainwashing with Chinese propaganda.
China’s interests, as manifest in her behavior, are thus in conflict with U.S. interests. And the notion that we should continue to cede her an annual trade surplus at our expense of $400 billion seems an absurdity.
We have, for decades, been financing the buildup of a Communist China whose ambition is to expel us from East Asia and the Western Pacific, achieve dominance over peoples we have regarded as friends and allies since World War II, and to displace us as the world’s first power.
Yet if engagement with China has failed and left us facing a new adversary with 10 times Russia’s population, and an economy nearly 10 times Russia’s size, what should be our policy?
Can we, should we, pursue a Cold War with Russia and China, using Kennan’s containment policy and threatening war if U.S. red lines are crossed by either or both?
Should we cut back on our treaty commitments, terminating U.S. war guarantees until they comport with what are true vital U.S. interests?
Should we, faced with two great power adversaries, do as Nixon did and seek to separate them?
If, however, we conclude, as this city seems to be concluding, that the long-term threat to U.S. interests is China, not Putin’s Russia, President Trump cannot continue a trade relationship that provides the Communist Party of Xi Jinping with a yearly $400 billion trade surplus.
For that would constitute a policy of almost suicidal appeasement.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 20, 2018, 10:14:02 PM
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Will Trump Hold Firm on Syrian Pullout?
Thursday - December 20, 2018 at 10:51 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” wrote President Donald Trump, as he ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria, stunning the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Trump overruled his secretaries of state and defense, and jolted this city and capitals across NATO Europe and the Middle East.
Yet, Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do in his campaign. And what his decision seems to say is this:
We are extricating America from the forever war of the Middle East so foolishly begun by previous presidents. We are coming home. The rulers and peoples of this region are going to have to find their own way and fight their own wars. We are not so powerful that we can fight their wars while we also confront Iran and North Korea and face new Cold Wars with Russia and China.
As for the terrorists of ISIS, says Trump, they are defeated.

Yet, despite the heavy casualties and lost battles ISIS has suffered, the collapse of the caliphate, expulsion from its Syrian capital Raqqa and Iraqi capital Mosul, and from almost all territories it controlled in both countries, ISIS is not dead. It lives on in thousands of true believers hidden in those countries. And, like al-Qaida, it has followers across the Middle East and inspires haters of the West living in the West.
The U.S. pullout from Syria is being called a victory for Vladimir Putin. “Russia, Iran, Assad… are ecstatic!” wails Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Graham is echoed by Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse who called the withdrawal a “retreat” and charged that Trump’s generals “believe the high-fiving winners today are Iran, ISIS and Hezbollah.”
But ISIS is a Sunni terrorist organization. And, as such, it detests the Alawite regime of Bashar Assad, and Hezbollah and Iran, both of which are hated by ISIS as Shiite heretics.
“Russia, Iran, Syria… are not happy about the US leaving,” Trump tweeted, “despite what the Fake News says, because now they will have to fight ISIS and others, who they hate, without us.”
If Putin, victorious in the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr, wishes to fight al-Qaida and ISIS, the last major enemies of Assad in Syria, why not let him?
The real losers?
Certainly the Kurds, who lose their American ally. Any dream they had of greater autonomy inside Syria, or an independent state, is not going to be realized. But then, that was never really in the cards.
Forced to choose between Turkey, with 80 million people and the second-largest army in NATO, which sits astride the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrance to the Black Sea, and the stateless Kurds with their Syrian Democratic Forces, or YPG, Trump chose Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
And Erdogan regards the YPG as kinfolk and comrades of the Kurdish terrorist PKK in Turkey. A week ago, he threatened to attack the Kurds in northern Syria, though U.S. troops are embedded alongside them.
What kind of deal did Trump strike with Erdogan?
Turkey will purchase the U.S. Patriot anti-aircraft and missile defense system for $3.5 billion, and probably forego the Russian S-400.
Trump also told Erdogan, we “would take a look at” extraditing Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen whom Erdogan says instigated the 2016 coup attempt that was to end with his assassination.
National security adviser John Bolton, who said U.S. troops would remain in Syria until all Iranian forces and Iranian-backed militias have been expelled, appears not to have been speaking for his president.
And if the Israelis were relying on U.S. forces in Syria to intercept any Iranian weapons shipments headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon through Damascus, then the Israelis are going to have to make other arrangements.
The war party project, to bring about regime change in Tehran through either severe sanctions leading to ιnѕυrrєcтισn or a U.S.-Iranian clash in the Gulf, will suffer a severe setback with the U.S. pullout from Syria.
However, given the strength of the opposition to a U.S. withdrawal — Israel, Saudi Arabia, the GOP foreign policy establishment in Congress and the think tanks, liberal interventionists in the Beltway press, Trump’s own national security team of advisers — the battle to overturn Trump’s decision has probably only just begun.
From FDR’s abandonment of 100 million East Europeans to Stalin at Yalta in 1945, to the abandonment of our Nationalist Chinese allies to Mao in 1949, and of our South Vietnamese allies in 1975, America has often been forced into retreats leading to the deaths of allies. Sasse says Trump is risking the same outcome: “A lot of American allies will be slaughtered if this retreat is implemented.”
But is that true?
Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria at least has assured us of a national debate on what it will mean to America to extricate our country from these Mideast wars, the kind of debate we have not had in the 15 years since we were first deceived into invading Iraq.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 25, 2018, 10:24:14 AM
Christmas 2018: Not the Worst of Times
Tuesday - December 25, 2018 at 3:09 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” goes the old Christmas carol. “‘Tis the season to be jolly.” Yet if there were a couplet less befitting the mood of this capital city, I am unaware of it.
“The wheels are coming off,” was a common commentary on the Trump presidency on Sunday’s talk shows. And the ostensible causes of what is looking like a panic in the political establishment?
The December crash of the stock and bond markets, the worst since the Great Recession. The shutdown of a fourth of the U.S. government over the Trump border wall. The president’s decision to pull 2,200 troops out of Syria. Resignation, in protest of Donald Trump’s treatment of U.S. allies, by Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
But there has to be more to it than this. For America has endured, in the lifetime of its older generations, far worse Christmases than this.
By Christmas 1941, America had just suffered the worst attack in her history. At Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, some 2,400 soldiers, sailors and Marines had died, six battleships were destroyed or crippled, and scores of warplanes were smashed on their runways.
By Christmas 1941, the Japanese had landed in the Philippines where, in six months, they would inflict on the United States the worst military defeat in its history with the loss of 23,000 troops killed or captured, most of them on Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor.

Franklin Roosevelt had temporarily abandoned the Philippines as indefensible, as they were on the far side of the Pacific, and had adopted a “Europe First” strategy, believing nαzι Germany to be the greater threat.
For, by Christmas 1941, Hitler controlled all of Europe from the Pyrenees and the Atlantic to the suburbs of Leningrad and Moscow, and from northern Norway above the Arctic Circle to the Western Sahara.
Beyond Hitler’s empire lay Stalin’s. Beyond that lay Japan’s Empire of the Sun, which occupied Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, the coast of China and much of Southeast Asia.
By Christmas 1941, a Japanese attack on the Malay Peninsula was underway that would lead to the surrender of Singapore in February, the greatest strategic defeat ever suffered by the British empire.
Nine years later, at Christmas 1950, thousands of American troops were being evacuated from Hungnam, the North Korean port city to which they had retreated before hordes of Chinese troops.
Veterans of Mao’s revolution had been sent to drive Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces away from the Yalu River on China’s border, and back across the 38th parallel into South Korea.
The Korean War would end in bloody stalemate, after Harry Truman, facing defeat, declined to run again and left office with only a fourth of the nation behind him, and his nemesis Sen. Joe McCarthy victorious and exultant in 1952, along with President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
Does our situation at Christmas 2018 remotely compare in gravity with those times? Does whether Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies prevail in Syria remotely compare in seriousness with whether Hitler or his former ally and successor in tyranny, Stalin, would prevail?
An unacknowledged cause of establishment frustration and rage at Trump’s pullout from Syria and Afghanistan is the growing realization that the post-Cold War nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr it has sought and still seeks to create is likely never to be. Indeed, it is now visibly slipping away. The American people refuse to subscribe to its global agenda.
They will not pay the price in blood, treasure and distraction from our own troubles here at home. Trump’s victory was America’s way of saying, “Goodbye to all that!” And it is this dawning recognition that helps explain the establishment’s exasperation.
While cable news and social media are on fire over the shutdown and the pullout from Syria, the Silent Majority, one imagines, is more focused on an earlier event, 2,000 years ago, that has made a far greater impact upon mankind, and that yet inspires hope that, in the end, all can be well. That event was perhaps best described in the last Advent gospel of Luke:
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
And a Merry Christmas to all.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 28, 2018, 10:23:53 AM
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2020: Year of the Democrats? Maybe Not
Friday - December 28, 2018 at 1:41 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Democrats are optimistic as 2019 begins, it is understandable.
Their victory on Nov. 6, adding 40 seats and taking control of the House of Representatives, was impressive. And with the party’s total vote far exceeding the GOP total, in places it became a rout.
In the six New England states, Republicans no longer hold a single House seat. Susan Collins of Maine is the last GOP senator.
In California, Democrats took the governorship, every state office, 45 of 53 House seats and both houses of the legislature by more than 2-to-1. In the Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Golden State bastion of Orange County, no GOP congressman survived.
Does this rejection of the GOP in 2018 portend the defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, assuming he is still in office then?
Not necessarily.
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For consider. Nancy Peℓσѕι may want to close out her career as speaker with solid achievements, but she could face a rebellion in her party, which is looking to confront and not compromise with Trump.
The national debt may be surging, but Capitol Hill progressives will be demanding “Medicare-for-all” and free college tuition. Trump-haters will be issuing reams of subpoenas and clamoring for impeachment.
Other Democrats, seeing the indulgent attention their colleagues are getting from the media, will join in. Chairman Jerrold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee may have to accommodate the sans-culottes.
Is this what America voted for?
By the Ides of March, a dozen Democrats may have declared for president. But looking over the field, no prospective candidate seems terribly formidable, and the strongest, unlike Barack Obama in 2008, are too old to set the base afire.
According to a USA Today poll, 59 percent of Democrats say they would be “excited” about “someone entirely new” leading the party in 2020. Only 11 percent say they would prefer a familiar face.
Yet, who did these same Democrats view most favorably? Joe Biden, a 76-year-old white male first elected to the Senate when Richard Nixon was president.
Biden polls better than any of his rivals, with 53 percent of all Democrats saying they would be “excited” about his candidacy, and only 24 percent saying he ought not run a third time for president.
The candidate who comes closest to Biden in exciting the base is 77-year-old Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Bernie’s problem?
Almost as many Democrats believe he should not run again as would be excited about having him as nominee.
As for Elizabeth Warren, the USA Poll must be depressing news. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats would be excited about her candidacy, but 33 percent believe the 69-year-old Massachusetts Senator should not run.
Beto O’Rourke, the three-term Congressman from Texas who put a scare into Sen. Ted Cruz in November is less well-known than Bernie or Biden. But those excited about an O’Rourke run outnumber those who think he should not run.
Senators Kamala hαɾɾιs and Cory Booker, both African-American, are less well-known but have more Democrats excited about their running than are opposed to it.
However, as hαɾɾιs is from California and Booker from New Jersey, both blue states that Democrats are almost certain to carry in 2020, and both are from a minority that already votes 90 percent Democratic, even their appeal as vice presidential nominees would not seem to equal that of O’Rourke or Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who won re-election while his state was going Republican.
Yet, Brown, too, at 66, is eligible for Medicare.
A Biden-Brown ticket would present problems for the GOP. But could a Democratic Party that ceaselessly celebrates its racial and ethnic diversity and appeal to women and millennials get away with nominating a ticket of two white males on Social Security?
Other problems are becoming acute within the Democrats’ coalition of blacks, gαys, Asians, Hispanics, women and LGBT, fraying the seams of the party.
After Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan praised the Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory, and declared Jєωs to be the enemy in a speech last February, the Women’s March movement has splintered.
Asian-Americans who vote Democratic nationally are growing bitter over diversity policies in the Ivy League and elite schools that admit black and Hispanic students over Asian students with far higher test scores.
The BDS movement (boycott, divest, sanctions), targeted against Israel, is angering Jєωιѕн Democrats while gaining support on campuses.
Elizabeth Warren opposes BDS, but also opposes efforts to punish those who champion BDS. “I think the boycott of Israel is wrong,” said Warren at a town hall meeting, but added that “outlawing protected free speech activity violates our basic constitutional rights.”
In identity politics, loyalty to race, ethnic group and gender often trump the claims of party. The diversity Democrats celebrate is one day going to pull their party apart, as the social, cultural and racial revolutions of the 1960s pulled apart the party of FDR and LBJ.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 02, 2019, 03:10:22 AM
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How the War Party Lost the Middle East
Wednesday - January 2, 2019 at 2:34 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Assad must go, Obama says.”
So read the headline in The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2011.
The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:
“The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. … the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum: Assad must go!
Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron who are gone. Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.
But we cannot “leave now,” insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or “the Kurds are going to get slaughtered.”
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Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian cινιℓ ωαr, and so managed our intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will “get slaughtered”?
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad is today negotiating for peace talks with that same Taliban. Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell, writing in The Washington Post today, the “remnants of al-Qaeda work closely” with today’s Taliban.
It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left us with these alternatives: Stay there, and fight a forever war to keep the Taliban out of Kabul, or withdraw and let the Taliban overrun the place.
Who got us into this debacle?
After Trump flew into Iraq over Christmas but failed to meet with its president, the Iraqi Parliament, calling this a “U.S. disregard for other nations’ sovereignty” and a national insult, began debating whether to expel the 5,000 U.S. troops still in their country.
George W. Bush launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMD he did not have and to convert Iraq into a democracy and Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic world.
Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating our expulsion.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric with American blood on his hands from the fighting of a decade ago, is leading the charge to have us booted out. He heads the party with the largest number of members in the parliament.
Consider Yemen. For three years, the U.S. has supported with planes, precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information, a Saudi war on Houthi rebels that degenerated into one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.
Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off U.S. support for this war. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its architect, has been condemned by Congress for complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate in Istanbul. And the U.S. is seeking a truce in the fighting.
Who got us into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which we have been collaborators, done to make Americans safer?
Consider Libya. In 2011, the U.S. attacked the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and helped to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.
Told of news reports of Gadhafi’s death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, “We came, we saw, he died.”
The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output of Libya’s crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. In 2016, Obama said that not preparing for a post-Gadhafi Libya was probably the “worst mistake” of his presidency.
The price of all these interventions for the United States?
Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.
For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian and soldier alike, pogroms against Christians, massacres, and millions uprooted and driven from their homes.
How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better place or Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in the Middle East and North Africa found that more of them felt that Russia was a closer partner than was the United States of America.
The fruits of American intervention?
We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of Muslims, that if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will notch a victory.
In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump enraged our foreign policy elites, though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon enough.
In Monday’s editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The New York Times wrote, “As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created.”
Correction: Make that “the wreckage Mr. Trump inherited.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 04, 2019, 08:49:55 AM
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Trump & The Post: Whose Side Is Mitt On?
Thursday - January 3, 2019 at 8:10 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
If there is a more anti-Trump organ in the American establishment than The Washington Post, it does not readily come to mind.
Hence, in choosing to send his op-ed attack on President Donald Trump to the Post, Mitt Romney was collaborating with an adversary of his party and his president.
And he knew it, and the Post rewarded his collusion.
“The president has not risen to the mantle of his office,” said Romney; in “qualities of character” Trump’s “shortfall has been most glaring.”
Our leaders must “inspire and unite us,” not “promote tribalism,” wrote Romney. We must defend the “free press.”
All music to Post ears.

As senator, Romney promised, “I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant.”
Sounds like a litany of media slanders against Trump, some of which, seven years ago, were lodged against a GOP presidential nominee whose name was Mitt Romney.
Thursday, the Post paid Romney in its special currency, with a Page 1 photo and headline about having discovered “a new voice of resistance.”
But Romney had not exactly pledged his life, fortune and sacred honor to dethrone the tyrant. Rather he declared, “I look forward to working on these priorities … with Mitch McConnell.”
A day later, The New York Times, perhaps miffed it had not been the beneficiary of Romney’s dump on Trump, dumped all over him:
“Romney Cools Fiery Tone After Trump Allies Assail Him,” ran the headline. A CNN interview, wrote the Times, found Romney “repeatedly declining to escalate his attacks on the president and explaining that he would only speak out against Mr. Trump on issues of ‘great significance.'”
Does Romney not see presidential character as an issue of “great significance”? The Washington Times said Romney appeared to be auditioning for the role of Jeff Flake in the new Senate.
Though the Romney screenplay seemed to fizzle after the early negative reviews, the episode is revelatory.
Clearly Romney senses Trump is in trouble, and may not survive, or may not run, and there may be an opening for him. He seems to want to be properly positioned with the anti-Trumpers and never-Trumpers, should that happen.
Yet, in seeing Trump as besieged, Romney is not wrong.
With loss of the House and resignation of his defense secretary, the president had a rough year’s end. Now the expectations of his enemies and the hopes of this hostile city for his fall are greater than ever.
Blood is in the water. If Trump seeks re-election, he will be challenged in the primaries. And as presidents from Truman to LBJ, to Carter, Ford and Bush 41 discovered, these can prove problematic.
Looking over to the other side of the aisle, however, that party, too, has problems. The more hot-headed of the House majority have already said they will introduce articles of impeachment against the president.
And when the militant members are rewarded by major media with favorable coverage and commentary, this will induce others to join in, in anticipation of the same media rewards.
An impeachment battle thus seems inevitable.
Speaker Nancy Peℓσѕι and her Democratic leadership may see this rush to impeachment as a strategic blunder. But they will be unable to contain or control what will by spring resemble a mob.
Today, unelected media, not elected politicians, decide what gets attention. For our media, President Trump is the issue, as he was in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and removing him from the presidency the strategic goal.
But beyond the issue of Trump, 2019 looks to be a rough year for America. The deficit will reach a trillion dollars. National debt is near $22 trillion. The budget is out of balance. No consensus exists in Congress on how to deal with it.
If sanctions are not first lifted on North Korea, there will be no nuclear deal, and the probability grows that “Little Rocket Man” will begin anew to test his missiles and nuclear warheads.
With U.S. troops pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan, the day is coming, and soon, when we must face up to and act upon these facts:
America lost both wars. Afghanistan will fall to the Taliban from whom we took it in 2003, and Bashar Assad, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are, for the near-term, dominant in Syria.
As for our Kurdish allies, they will have to turn to Assad and offer to give him the Syrian lands they captured from ISIS, in return for the Syrian regime’s protection from the Turks.
And as for Russia and China, our great adversaries, our foreign policy elite succeeded in this century in undoing the best work of Nixon and Reagan.
Where those presidents split China from Russia and ensured that Beijing and Moscow would have better relations with us than with each other, our elite revels in that it has alienated both China and Russia — and united both against us.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 08, 2019, 08:46:52 AM
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No, This Is Not JFK’s Democratic Party
Monday - January 7, 2019 at 10:34 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan
Speaker Nancy Peℓσѕι’s House has more women, persons of color and LGBT members than any House in history — and fewer white males.
And Thursday, the day Rashida Tlaib was sworn in, her hand on a Quran, our first Palestinian-American congresswoman showed us what we may expect. As a rally of leftists lustily cheered her on, Tlaib roared, “We’re gonna impeach the (expletive deleted)!”
Not only was no apology forthcoming, the host of the New American Leaders event where Tlaib spoke warmly endorsed her gutter language.
Her remarks, said Sayu Bhojwani, “were raw and honest, and came straight from the heart. … a refreshing break from the canned comments our elected leaders usually make. Tlaib spoke … with the fire that so many at our event wanted to hear.”
Sunday, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, 29, the youngest member of the new House, told CNN there is “no question” President Donald Trump is a “racist,” for he regularly uses “historic dog whistles of white supremacy.”
While the Democratic Party is celebrating a diversity that insists that the more women, persons of color and gαys in leadership ranks, and the fewer white males, the stronger and better the party, has all of America embraced this as an ideal?
Is there no limit to the ideological, political, religious, racial and ethnic diversity a party and nation can tolerate before it comes apart?
Are Democrats inviting an eventual Balkanization of their party and country?

Consider. This week, Julián Castro, former mayor of San Antonio and HUD secretary, appeared about to enter the race for the Democratic nomination. Castro has seen fellow Texan Robert F. O’Rourke, who goes by the nickname “Beto,” walk off with his Hispanic constituency in a 2018 Senate race. Castro intends to win it back it in the Democratic primaries.
Former Congressman O’Rourke has been accused of trying to pass himself off as Hispanic, though he is of Irish descent. Elizabeth Warren suffered a near-fatal wound trying to pass herself off as part Cherokee Indian.
In December, Maze Jackson, morning host of a radio station that reaches into Chicago’s black community, said of the mayoral election to succeed Rahm Emanuel, where 21 candidates have filed and a black woman and a Hispanic woman are the front-runners, “This thing is going to get so tribal.”
The Democratic front-runners for the presidential nomination — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto — are all white males. Ranked just below them are black Senators Cory Booker and Kamala hαɾɾιs.
South Carolina is a state where a large slice of the Democratic vote is African-American — Jesse Jackson won the caucuses in 1988 — and hαɾɾιs and Booker should expect to do well if they do not split that vote.
While racial and ethnic voting is not new, it appears much more intense.
In the last Congress, the 33 U.S. congressional districts with the largest concentrations of black voters almost all elected African-Americans who became members of the racially exclusive Black Caucus.
The first two battles of 2020, Iowa and New Hampshire, are in states predominantly white. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made several stops in Iowa with impressive turnouts, putting pressure on Biden and Sanders to decide soon.
But while Biden is the front-runner, consider how far away the ex-vice president is from the new realities in his party.
Though millennials are one voting bloc Democrats are courting most, Biden would be the oldest president ever elected. He was in the Senate for a decade before Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib were even born.
Biden is an old white male in a party that wants the torch passed to women and minorities. He backed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in voting for the war in Iraq. He backed an anti-crime bill in the early 1990s that incarcerated individuals now gaining release by the latest crime bill. As Judiciary Committee chair, he presided over the hearings that resulted in a vote to elevate Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
The Republican Party, even with the never-Trumpers gone, still seems more united than a Democratic Party where the differences are not only ideological but also racial, religious and tribal.
Ocasio-Cortez is backing a hike in the top federal income tax rate to 70 percent. Castro has suggested taking a look at a top rate of 90 percent. How will this sit with the big Democratic donors?
Joe Biden, like Peℓσѕι, was raised Catholic in a Church that taught that ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity was immoral and abortion was the killing of the innocent unborn for which the sanction was automatic excommunication.
Today, the Democratic Party celebrates same-sex marriage as social progress and regards abortion as a cherished constitutional right. A floor battle erupted at its 2012 Charlotte, North Carolina, convention over whether God should even be mentioned in the party platform.
Yet Nancy Peℓσѕι did last week denounce as “immoral” the idea of building a security wall along America’s border with Mexico.
No, this is not JFK’s party anymore. That party is long dead.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 11, 2019, 10:51:20 AM



January 2019 Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency
Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency
Thursday - January 10, 2019 at 9:20 pm


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By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump’s stand on a border wall to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States.

Why? Because mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West.

The American people know this, and even the elites sense it.

Think not? Well, check out the leading liberal newspapers Thursday.

The Washington Post and The New York Times each had two front-page stories about the president’s battle with Nancy Peℓσѕι and Chuck Schumer on funding the border wall.

Inside the first section, the Post had more stories, including one describing walls in history from China’s Great Wall to the Berlin Wall to the Israeli West Bank wall to the wall separating Hungary from Serbia.

Inside the Times was a story on a new anti-immigration party, Vox, surging in Andalusia in Spain, and a story about African migrants being welcomed in Malta after being denied entry into Europe.

Another Times story related how the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has pulled out of a U.N. pact on migration, declaring, “Brazil has a sovereign right to decide whether or not it accepts immigrants.”

Half the columns on the op-ed pages of the papers dealt with Trump, immigration and the wall. And there was nothing significant in either on the Democrats’ hot new issue, a Green New Deal.

Consider. In 1992, this writer’s presidential campaign had to fight to have inserted in the GOP platform a call for “structures” on the border.

Now, the whole Western world is worried about its borders as issues of immigration and identity convulse almost every country.

Looking ahead, does anyone think Americans in 2030 are going to be more concerned about the border between North Korea and South Korea, or Turkey and Syria, or Kuwait and Iraq, or Russia and Ukraine, than about the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico?

Does anyone think Peℓσѕι’s position that a wall is immoral will not be regarded as absurd?



America’s southern border is eventually going to be militarized and defended or the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist. And Americans will not go gentle into that good night.

Whatever one may think of the face-off Tuesday with “Chuck and Nancy,” Trump’s portrait of an unsustainable border crisis is dead on: “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 violent killings.”

The Democrats routine retort, that native-born Americans have a higher crime rate, will not suffice as new atrocities, like those Trump related, are reported and repeated before November 2020.

What should Trump do now? Act. He cannot lose this battle with Peℓσѕι without demoralizing his people and imperiling his presidency.

Since FDR, we have had presidential government. And when U.S. presidents have been decisive activists, history has rewarded their actions.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. On taking office, FDR declared a bank holiday. When Britain was barely hanging on in World War II, he swapped 50 destroyers for British bases. He ordered U.S. ships to chase down German submarines and lied about it. Truman fired General MacArthur.

Reagan fired the striking air controllers and ordered the military to occupy Grenada to stop Marxist thugs who had taken over in a coup from taking 500 U.S. medical students hostage.

Critics raged: Reagan had no right to invade. But the American people rewarded Reagan with a 49-state landslide.

Trump should declare a national emergency, shift funds out of the Pentagon, build his wall, open the government and charge Democrats with finding excuses not to secure our border because they have a demographic and ideological interest in changing the face of the nation.

For the larger the share of the U.S. population that requires welfare, the greater the need for more social workers, and the more voters there will be to vote to further grow the liberal welfare state.

The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes — the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America — the more dependably Democratic it will become.

The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the U.S. population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.

The only way to greater “diversity,” the golden calf of the Democratic Party, is to increase the number of women, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics, and thereby reduce the number of white men.

The decisive issues on which Trump was elected were not the old Republican litany of tax cuts, conservative judges and increased defense spending.

They were securing the borders, extricating America from foolish wars, eliminating trade deficits with NAFTA nations, the EU and China, making allies pay their fair share of the common defense, resurrecting our manufacturing base, and getting along with Russia.

“America First!” is still a winning hand


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 15, 2019, 10:21:34 AM
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Is Bolton Steering Trump into War with Iran?
Tuesday - January 15, 2019 at 8:35 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Stop the ENDLESS WARS!” implored President Donald Trump in a Sunday night tweet.
Well, if he is serious, Trump had best keep an eye on his national security adviser, for a U.S. war on Iran would be a dream come true for John Bolton.
Last September, when Shiite militants launched three mortar shells into the Green Zone in Baghdad, which exploded harmlessly in a vacant lot, Bolton called a series of emergency meetings and directed the Pentagon to prepare a menu of targets, inside Iran, for U.S. air and missile strikes in retaliation.
The Wall Street Journal quoted one U.S. official as saying Bolton’s behavior “rattled people. … People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”
Bolton’s former deputy, Mira Ricardel, reportedly told a gathering the shelling into the Green Zone was “an act of war” to which the U.S. must respond decisively.
Bolton has long believed a U.S. confrontation with Iran is both inevitable and desirable. In 2015, he authored a New York Times op-ed whose title, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” said it all. He has urged that “regime change” in Iran be made a declared goal of U.S. foreign policy.

When Trump announced his decision to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops now in Syria, Bolton swiftly imposed conditions: ISIS must first be eliminated, Iranian forces and allied militias must leave, and the Kurds must be protected.
Yet enforcing such red lines would require a permanent presence of American troops. For how, without war, would we effect the removal of Bashar Assad’s Iranian allies, if he declines to expel them and the Iranians refuse to go?
Bolton has an ally in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In Cairo last week, Pompeo declared it U.S. policy “to expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria.
And though Hezbollah has been a “major presence” in Lebanon for several decades, “we won’t accept this as the status quo,” said Pompeo, for Hezbollah is a “wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian regime.”
But how does the secretary of state propose to push Hezbollah out of Lebanon peacefully when the Israelis could not do it in a month-long war in 2006?
Pompeo’s purpose during his tour of the Middle East? Build a new Middle East Strategic Alliance, a MESA, an Arab NATO, whose members are to be Egypt, Jordan and the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
There are other signs a confrontation is coming soon. The U.S. has objected to Iran’s pending launch of two space satellites, saying these look like tests of missiles designed to deliver nuclear warheads. Yet Iran has never produced weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and never tested an ICBM.
Pompeo has also called for a conclave in Poland in February to bring together an anti-Iran alliance to discuss what is to be done about what he calls “our common enemy.”
Over the weekend, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu boasted of Israel’s latest strike in Syria: “Just in the last 36 hours, the air force attacked Iranian warehouses with Iranian weapons at the international airport in Damascus. The accuмulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”
Israel brags that it has hit 200 targets inside Syria in recent years. The boasting may be connected to Bibi’s desire to strengthen his credentials as a security hawk for the coming Israeli election. But it is also a provocation to the Iranians and Syrians to retaliate, which could ignite a wider war between Israel and Syrian and Iranian forces.
What does the U.S. think of the Israeli strikes? Said Pompeo: “We strongly support Israel’s efforts to stop Iran from turning Syria into the next Lebanon.”
In short, forces are moving in this country and in Israel to bring about a U.S. confrontation with Iran — before our troops leave Syria.
But the real questions here are not about Bolton or Pompeo.
They are about Trump. Was he aware of Bolton’s request for a menu of targets in Iran for potential U.S. strikes? Did he authorize it? Has he authorized his national security adviser and secretary of state to engage in these hostile actions and bellicose rhetoric aimed at Iran? And if so, why?
While Trump has urged that the U.S. pull out of these Mideast wars, Pompeo has corrected him, “When America retreats, chaos often follows.”
Is Trump looking for a showdown with Iran, which could result in a war that might vault his approval rating, but be a disaster for the Middle East and world economy and do for him what Operation Iraqi Freedom did for George W. Bush?
One thing may confidently be said of the rhetoric and actions of Bolton and Pompeo: This is not what brought out the new populists who made Donald Trump president, the people who still share his desire to “stop the endless wars.”
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 18, 2019, 09:27:00 AM
 
Posted on January 18, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/at-age-70-time-to-rethink-nato-135716) by Linda (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/linda)

At Age 70, Time to Rethink NATO

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By Patrick J.Buchanan
“Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”
So said President Charles De Gaulle, who in 1966 ordered NATO to vacate its Paris headquarters and get out of France.
NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.
And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania as an attack on the United States.
The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.
Apparently, President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
The shock of our establishment that Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans suggests that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.
Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories. Some of us can yet recall its beginnings.
In 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city.
The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. Foreign minister Jan Masaryk fell, or was thrown, from a third-story window to his death. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb.

As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, the U.S. formed a new alliance to protect the crucial European powers — West Germany, France, Britain, Italy. Twelve nations agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on them all.
Cross the Elbe and you are at war with us, including the U.S. with its nuclear arsenal, Stalin was, in effect, told. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returned to Europe to send the message that America was serious.
Crucial to the alliance was the Yalta line dividing Europe agreed to by Stalin, FDR and Churchill at the 1945 Crimean summit on the Black Sea.
U.S. presidents, even when monstrous outrages were committed in Soviet-occupied Europe, did not cross this line into the Soviet sphere.
Truman did not send armored units up the highway to Berlin. He launched an airlift to break the Berlin blockade. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian rebels in 1956. JFK confined his rage at the building of the Berlin Wall to the rhetorical: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
LBJ did nothing to help the Czechs when, before the Democratic convention in 1968, Leonid Brezhnev sent Warsaw Pact tank armies to crush the Prague Spring.
When the Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa was crushed in Gdansk, Reagan sent copy and printing machines. At the Berlin Wall in 1988, he called on Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Reagan never threatened to tear it down himself.
But beginning in 1989, the Wall was torn down, Germany was united, the Red Army went home, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the USSR broke apart into 15 nations, and Leninism expired in its birthplace.
As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that threat should be allowed to fade away, and a free and prosperous Europe should now provide for its own defense.
It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”
This, said Kennan, would “inflame the nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations.” Kennan was proven right.
America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.
And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.
Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory.
Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions.
Our foreign policy establishment is determined to prevent Trump from carrying out his mandate. And if he means to carry out his agenda, he had best get on with it.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 22, 2019, 09:33:44 AM

When Democracy Fails to Deliver
January 22, 2019 by Pat Buchanan   



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By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible … make violent revolution inevitable,” said John F. Kennedy.

In 2016, the U.S. and Britain were both witness to peaceful revolutions.

The British voted 52-48 to sever ties to the European Union, restore their full sovereignty, declare independence and go their own way in the world. Trade and immigration policy would henceforth be decided by a parliament elected by the people, not by bureaucrats in Brussels.

“Brexit” it was called. And British defiance stunned global elites.

Two and a half years later, Britain is still inside the EU, and no one seems to know when or whether the divorce will take place — a victory of London and European elites over the expressed will of the British people.

Appalled by the Brexit vote, these elites played a waiting game, broadcasting warnings of what could happen, to panic the British public into reconsidering and reversing its democratic decision.

Losing candidates and losing parties accept defeat and yield power.

Establishments have agendas they do not regard as subject to electoral repudiation or repeal. Defeated, they use their non-electoral powers to prevent unwanted policies from ever being implemented.



Call it limited democracy.

In 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected president when a spirit of rebellion against America’s failed elites roiled both parties. Both the Trump campaign and the Ted Cruz campaign, which ran second in the Republican race, offered anti-establishment ideas. So, too, did the Bernie Sanders campaign in the Democratic primaries.

Trump’s defining agenda was basically this:

He would build a wall across the Mexican border to halt the flood of illegal migrants. He would extricate us from the half dozen Middle East wars into which Bush II and Obama had plunged us.

He would abrogate the trade deals that had seen imports from NAFTA nations, China, the EU and Japan replace goods made in the USA. He would halt the shuttering of tens of thousands of U.S. factories and the hemorrhaging of millions of manufacturing jobs.

He would call off the new cold war with Russia.

Halfway through this presidential term, where are we?

Part of the U.S. government has been shut down for a month. The wall has not been built and may never be. President Trump’s decision to pull 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria has met massive resistance from our foreign policy establishment. Trump is being pushed to confront Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to trash the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty that Ronald Reagan negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev.

And we are being pushed toward a new Mideast war with Iran.

This was the establishment’s agenda, not Trump’s.

We have lately learned that after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, a cabal inside the FBI initiated a counterintelligence investigation to discover if Trump was a conscious agent of a Kremlin conspiracy.

Who made this call? Who approved it? Did the FBI discover that Trump is a patriot, or another Alger Hiss? We have not been told by the FBI after two years of investigation. Why not?

We do know that the dirt-diving arm of the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, hired a British former spy with KGB connections to cook up a “dirty dossier” that was used to persuade the secret FISA court to approve the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Foremost among these was “the New Journalism.”

Yet there seems a massive media disinterest in a conspiracy that might portray Trump as the victim of dirty campaign tricks.

Which brings us back to the larger question: While populists have won elections and carried out peaceful revolutions, often the policies for which they have successfully worked are never implemented.

In the 1975 book “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed,” this writer sought to explore and explain the forces that so often deny the right the policy fruits of its political victories.

“The essence of press power lies in the authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others,” this writer wrote. “The press determines what ‘people will talk and think about’ because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington.”

Among the reasons for Trump’s political success, such as it is, is that today’s conservative media did not exist back then, nor did the new social media that he has mastered so well.

Yet still, the left’s power over America’s character- and culture-forming institutions remains overwhelming. It dominates public schools and teachers unions, mainstream churches, college and university faculties, media and entertainment, TV and film.

What is taking place in the West today might be described as a struggle between the capital and the country it rules. England voted to leave the EU; London voted to remain.

In the last analysis, Kennedy was surely right. People who see the policies they have voted for rejected again and again, by the very elites they defeated, will inevitably turn to other means to preserve what they have.

The “yellow vest” protests in Paris show us that.



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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 25, 2019, 11:28:34 AM
Democrat's America: Heart of Darkness

1/25/2019 By Pat Buchanan

By Patrick J. Buchanan

If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.

Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Peℓσѕι’s House, speaking Monday, on the holiday set aside to honor King:

“We have a hater in the White House. The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. … While Jim Crow may be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well.”

At the headquarters of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, wrote The New York Times, Jeffries’ remarks were “met with … much cheering.”

At a Boston breakfast that same day, Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose to honor King’s memory in her way: “Our government is shut down for one reason … So the president of the United States can fund a monument to hate and division along our southern border.”

At a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, Sen. Cory Booker declaimed — in what could be taken as a shot at his New Jersey colleague, the lately acquitted Sen. Bob Menendez — “We live a nation where you get a better justice system if you’re rich and guilty than poor and innocent.”

Booker urged the crowd “to apply the ideals of Dr. King” and avoid vitriol in dealing with political adversaries.

But his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, also in South Carolina, wasn’t buying it. Routed by Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina primary in 2016, Sanders is determined not to lose the party’s African-American majority that badly in 2020.

“Today we talk about racism,” said Sanders. “It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we now have a president of the United States who is a racist.”

Sanders apparently connected, with his remarks “drawing applause.”

Joe Biden spoke in D.C. in the full apology-tour mode made famous by his former boss, Barack Obama. He brought up the 1994 crime bill he shepherded though the Senate, which treated consumption and distribution of crack cocaine as more serious crimes than the use of powder cocaine, and then confessed to the crowd that it was “a big mistake.”

“We were told by the experts that, ‘crack you never go back,’ that the two were somehow fundamentally different. It’s not. But it’s trapped an entire generation.”



Biden meant that lots of black folks got locked up for a long time, unjustly, conceding, “We may not have always got things right.”

Biden then proceeded to slander the nation that has honored him as it has few of his generation: “Systematic racism that most of us whites don’t even like to acknowledge” is “built into every aspect of our system.”

Is America, 50 years after segregation was outlawed in our public life, really a land saturated with systemic racism?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also in D.C.

The mayor’s problem with African-Americans is that he pursued a policy of stop-and-frisk with criminal suspects in New York. So, he sought to find common ground with his audience by relating “a series of events that had shaped his recent thinking about race.”

The mayor said he had “recently learned about the deadly race riots in which white residents destroyed the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and murdered several dozen black residents.”

But why did his honor have to go all the way back to 1921 and Tulsa to find race riots, when Harlem, in the heart of the town he served as mayor for 12 years, exploded in a riot in 1964 that spread to Brooklyn and Queens and lasted six days?

Why did Bloomberg not bring up the worst riot in U.S. history, when Lincoln sent Union veterans of Gettysburg to shoot down Irish immigrants protesting the draft in New York?

“It’s up to us to bring these stories out of the shadows so they never happen again,” said the mayor.

But where are black communities threatened by white mob violence in 2019? Was the Watts riot of 1965, were the Detroit and Newark riots of 1967, was the rioting, looting and arson that ravaged 100 cities after King’s death a result of rampaging whites assaulting black folks?

Was the LA riot of 1992, which targeted Koreatown, the work of white racists?

Monday, after a meeting with Sharpton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand offered her message of conciliation. Said the successor to Sen. Hillary Clinton, President Trump has “inspired a hate and a darkness in this country that I have never experienced myself.

“It is wrong to ask men and women of color to bear these burdens every single day. … White women like me must bear part of this burden.”

Does there not come a time when the pandering has to stop?

Ronald Reagan preached America as the Pilgrim fathers’ “shining city on a hill.” For Democrats today, America is the heart of darkness.

Can people lead a republic that they have come to see as a sinkhole of racism?





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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 29, 2019, 10:01:21 AM
 If the Army Stands With Maduro, What Is Plan B?
January 29, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/if-the-army-stands-with-maduro-what-is-plan-b-135899) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter.”
This was the deathbed counsel given to his sons by Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in A.D. 211.
Nicolas Maduro must today appreciate the emperor’s insight.
For the political survival of this former bus driver and union boss hangs now upon whether Venezuela’s armed forces choose to stand by him or to desert him and support National Assembly leader Juan Guaido.
Wednesday, Guaido declared Maduro’s election last May to a second six-year term to be a sham, and had himself inaugurated as acting president.
Thursday, the defense minister and army chief General Vladimir Padrino Lopez, with his top brass, dismissed the 35-year-old Guaido as a U.S. puppet, and pledged allegiance to Maduro.
Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.N. Security Council: “Now it is time for every other nation to pick a side. … Either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you’re in league with Maduro and his mayhem.”
By Friday, however, the world had already taken sides.

Russia and China stood by Maduro, as did NATO ally Turkey, with President Erdogan phoning his support. Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia were also with Maduro.
Backing Guaido are Venezuela’s neighbors Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia, the U.S. and Canada, and the Organization of American States.
Britain, France, Germany and Spain have sent Maduro a diplomatic ultimatum: Agree in eight days to new elections or we back the 35-year-old Guaido, who, until this year, was an unknown.
All options are on the table, says President Donald Trump. But Russia called Guaido’s action a “quasi-coup” and warned that intervention could result in “catastrophic consequences.” Vladimir Putin also phoned Maduro with his support.
The stakes for all sides here are huge. Russia has contractors in Venezuela and has lent the regime billions. In a show of solidarity, Putin recently flew two strategic bombers to Venezuela.
China has loaned Venezuela tens of billions, with Caracas paying Beijing back in oil.
Cuba has sent military and intelligence officers to maintain internal security. Hugo Chavez had seen in Fidel Castro a father figure and modeled his new Venezuela on Castro’s Cuba — with similar results.
Where hundreds of thousands fled Castro’s revolution in the 1960s, three million Venezuelans have fled to Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and other South American countries and the USA.
The economy is in a shambles. Though Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth, production is a fraction of what it once was. Cronyism and corruption are endemic. Inflation has destroyed the currency. There is poverty, malnutrition and shortages of every necessity of modern life.
Yet, still, the crucial question: What will the soldiers do? And if the military stands with Maduro, and Maduro refuses to go, what do the Americans do to force him out?
Invade? That would invite disaster. Venezuela is not Panama, Haiti or Grenada. Larger than Texas, its population is more than 30 million. And U.S. forces are already committed around the world.
A blockade and sanctions would magnify and deepen the suffering of the people of Venezuela long before they would bring down the regime. Would our allies support a blockade? And if years of suffering by the Venezuelan people have not shaken Maduro’s hold on power, what makes us believe more of the same would persuade him?
Maduro and his army are being offered amnesty if they peacefully depart. But what would Maduro’s fate be if he flees?
If he gives up power under U.S. threat, he is finished and disgraced as a coward. Would he not prefer to go down fighting?
And if the leadership of the army should abandon Maduro, there are younger ambitious officers who would surely see a rewarding future in fighting to save the regime.
Are we inviting a cινιℓ ωαr in Venezuela? Should the shooting start in Caracas, what do we do then?
Did anyone think this through?
Maduro is an incompetent brutal dictator whose ideology has helped to destroy a nation. But if he can change the narrative from a confrontation between a tyrant and his persecuted people to that of an embattled defender of Venezuela being attacked by Yankee imperialists and their domestic lackeys, that could resonate among the masses in Latin America.
And from all indications, Maduro intends to defy the U.S. and rally the radicals and anti-Americans in the hemisphere and the Third World.
Guiado’s constitutional claim to the presidency of Venezuela was a scheme cooked up in collusion with Washington, made in the USA, with Secretary of State Pompeo, John Bolton and Sen. Marco Rubio signing on, and President Trump signing off. This was Plan A.
But if Plan A does not succeed, and Maduro, with America’s prestige on the line, defies our demand that he yield, what do we do then? What is Plan B?
“Assad must go!” said Barack Obama. Well, Assad is still there — and Obama is gone.
Will the same be said of Maduro?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 01, 2019, 09:59:25 AM
Trump vs. the Spy Chiefs: Who’s Right?
February 1, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-vs-the-spy-chiefs-whos-right-135918) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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To manifest his opposition to President Donald Trump’s decision to pull all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan, Gen. James Mattis went public and resigned as secretary of defense.
Now Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in public testimony to Congress, has contradicted Trump about the threats that face the nation.
Contrary to what the president believes, Coats says, North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons. ISIS remains a serious threat, even if the caliphate has been rolled up. And there is no evidence that Iran, though hostile and aggressive, is acquiring nuclear weapons.
CIA Director Gina Haspel agreed: Iran remains in compliance with the nuclear treaty that Trump has trashed and abandoned. The treaty is still doing what it was designed to do.
At this perceived public defiance, Trump exploded:
“The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong! … They [the Iranians] are testing Rockets (last week), and more, and are coming very close to the edge. … Be careful of Iran.”
Trump added: “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”

Trump then brought up the epochal blunder of U.S. intelligence in backing the Bush II claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (a “slam dunk”), and was a grave threat to the USA.
Born of incompetence and mendacity, that counsel led to the greatest strategic blunder of the 21st century, if not of U.S. history — the second Iraq War. Launched by George W. Bush, this invasion plunged us into the Middle East’s forever war and got the Republican Party ejected from power in 2006 and 2008.
While it’s not unusual for a president and the intel community to diverge on the gravity of threats, what is astonishing is that the intel leaders would declare a president to be flat-out wrong.
Yet the confrontation is not unhealthy, for it reflects reality. On foreign policy, we are divided not only on means but ends.
And the division calls to mind Walter Lippmann’s words, after U.S. political clashes and unpreparedness in FDR’s New Deal decade led to the early disasters at Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Corregidor.
“For nearly fifty years,” wrote the dean of American columnists, “the nation had not had a settled and generally accepted foreign policy. This is a danger to the Republic. For when a people is divided … about the conduct of its foreign relations, it is unable to agree on the determination of its true interest. It is unable to prepare adequately for war or to safeguard successfully its peace.”
We seem to be in just such a situation today.
Indeed, Trump is president because of the foreign policy disasters produced by his predecessors, who leaned on the U.S. intel community, and because Trump, in 2016, appeared to read the nation right.
Yet there is common ground between Trump and the spy chiefs.
Coats and Haspel are correct that the U.S. faces a Russia and China that are closer and more collaborative than they have been since the 1950s, before the Cuban missile crisis, which Mao saw as a Moscow capitulation.
And as we have more in common with Russia, with its historic ties to the West, and Russia appears by far the lesser long-term threat, how do we split Russia off from China? Here, Trump’s instincts are right and the Beltway Russophobes are wrong.
As for Iran, the intelligence community is consistent.
In 2007 and 2011, the CIA declared “with high confidence” that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. Now, with U.N. inspectors crawling all over Tehran’s nuclear facilities under the treaty, the CIA and DNI are still saying the same thing.
What of the contention that Iran is seeking hegemony in the Middle East?
Really? How? Would a nuclear-armed Israel, which has launched 200 strikes on Iran’s allies in Syria, accept that? What would Turkey, with the second-largest army in NATO, Egypt, the largest Arab nation, and Saudi Arabia have to say about that?
How could Shiite Iran, whose Persian majority is nearly matched by its Arab, Azeri, Baloch and Kurdish minorities, gain dominance over a Middle East where the vast majority is Sunni Arab? How is Iran a threat to us over here, compared to the threat we pose to Iran over there?
Iran broke out of its isolation for two reasons. First, George W. Bush came in and overthrew its Taliban enemies on its eastern border, and then he overthrew Saddam Hussein, the enemy on its western border.
As Trump contends, ISIS has been defeated and driven from its twin capitals — Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. But it is also true that ISIS and al-Qaida still have tens of thousands of jihadists living among the peoples of the Middle East.
And the great question remains:
Are U.S. troops necessary over there — to prevent terrorists from coming over here? Or are they over here — because we are over there?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 05, 2019, 10:29:00 AM
Sacrificing Northam Will Not Be Enough
February 5, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/sacrificing-northam-will-not-be-enough-135950) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia.”
So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor Gov. Ralph Northam.
Et tu, Brute?
Yet Northam had all but sworn Saturday he had no knowledge of the 1984 yearbook photo and that he was not either man in the photo.
McAuliffe, who is considering a run for president, joined Kamala hαɾɾιs, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Julian Castro and Joe Biden in the pile-on. All had washed their hands of Northam.
That a moderate Democratic governor is near friendless in a fight for his life reveals much about the Democratic Party.
Earlier last week, Northam was at the center of another blazing controversy. He had backed legislation to permit abortions up to birth.
And then he volunteered that, if a child were born after a botched abortion, the “infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Northam seemed to be not only endorsing third-trimester abortion, but infanticide, “mercy killing,” the murder of a living but wounded baby after birth. A public outcry forced the legislature to back off the bill.
Then the photo from the yearbook of Eastern Virginia Medical School surfaced. Yet, in term of moral gravity, which is worse?
Public advocacy of late-term abortions with an option to execute babies who survive, or a stupid and insensitive 35-year-old photo of two beer-drinking guys, one dressed up in Klan costume, the other in blackface.
Other Democrats are saying that even if Northam is not in the “racist” photo, he admitted to putting shoe polish on his face, to imitate Michael Jackson and his moonwalk, for a 1984 dance contest.
To some Democrats, third-trimester abortions are a step forward for women’s rights. Gov. Andrew Cuomo was cheered in Albany for enacting a law to guarantee late-term abortions should Roe v. Wade be overturned.
By week’s end, Virginia Democrats were bewailing the “horrible” history of their state, where, in 1619, the first slave ship arrived at Point Comfort with men and women from Africa who would work the plantations until the cινιℓ ωαr ended, 250 years later.
One cannot rewrite history.
Four of America’s first six presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe — were Virginians. All were slave owners. Richmond, the capital of Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy. The commander in chief of the Confederate armies was a Virginian, Robert E. Lee.
Northam attended Virginia Military Institute, where Thomas Jonathan (“Stonewall”) Jackson had been Instructor of Artillery. The VMI cadet corps fought proudly in the Battle of New Market.
The most memorialized of Virginia’s heroes, in its monuments and statues, are colonists, Revolutionary War and Confederate soldiers and statesmen, and 19th- and 20th-century senators and governors. Almost all supported slavery or segregation.
When the Warren Court outlawed segregation in 1954, Virginia and the South replied with the Dixie Manifesto, declaring open defiance and “massive resistance” to the court order to integrate.
Not until Nixon’s presidency was the order carried out.
In recent years, there has been a running debate about what kind of country America is.
Is she a blood and soil nation, a separate people, with their own unique history, heroes, holidays, language, literature, myths and music? Or is America a propositional nation, united solely by its values, whose mission it is to transmit these values to mankind?
The question raised this weekend, however, is even more divisive.
Is America a good country, or has she, like Virginia, such a past of sins and crimes as to make her eternally ashamed and for which she should make eternal amends? Does America owe the world?
Should Western civilization be held responsible for what it has done through the centuries to persons of color the world over? Should we conduct a purging of monuments to all of America’s “white racists,” as antifa and its allies are determined to do in Virginia?
The Democratic Party may believe that by throwing Northam to the wolves it will satisfy these forces. It won’t.
We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built and ruled the country, and once believed that they, their nation, their faith, and their civilization were superior to all others. And, without apology, they so acted in the world.
Those two guys drinking beer in blackface and Klan robes and a hood thought they were being funny, but to the unamused members of a radicalized Democratic Party, there is nothing funny about them.
And, after Northam, these intolerant people will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 08, 2019, 08:29:12 AM
Has Trump Found the Formula for 2020?
February 8, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/has-trump-found-the-formula-for-2020-135970) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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If the pollsters at CNN and CBS are correct, Donald Trump may have found the formula for winning a second term in 2020.
His State of the Union address (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6mszxVEjw), say the two networks, met with the approval of 76 percent of all viewers — 97 percent of Republicans, 82 percent of independents and 30 percent of Democrats. Seventy-two percent agreed with the president’s plans for securing the border with Mexico.
Trump was not only unapologetic in defense of his wall. He seemed to relish savaging the rising radicalism of Democrats on two critical issues many Democrats have, since their 2018 triumph, seized upon: abortion on demand, right up to the day of birth, and soak-the-rich socialism.
“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” Trump thundered. “America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”
“America will never be a socialist country,” Trump roared, as the camera focused in on the scowling face of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The GOP ovation was thunderous, the Democratic silence revealing. Understandable. For, as in the 1972 Nixon landslide, Democrats appear to be coming down with “McGovernism.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rookie sensation in Nancy Peℓσѕι’s House, has called for a U.S. income tax rate of 70 percent. As California and New York City have state and local tax rates of 12 percent that are no longer deductible on federal taxes, their most successful residents could be forced to fork over four-fifths of all income every year in taxes.
Some Democrats have called for an 80 percent federal tax rate. New Yorkers who earn $1 million a year would be allowed to keep less than a dime of every added dollar they earn.
Sanders would impose a 45 percent tax on all estates over $3.5 million, rising to 77 percent on estates worth $1 billion.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax to scoop off 2 percent of all the wealth of folks whose net worth reaches $50 million, and 3 percent of all the wealth of every billionaire, every year.
To ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a potential rival in the presidential race, whose New York is witnessing an exodus of its wealthy to Sun Belt states, Warren’s ideas represent a gospel-of-greed stupidity.
Says Bloomberg: “If you want to look at a system that is not capitalistic, just take a look at what was perhaps the wealthiest country in the world and today people are starving to death. It’s called Venezuela.”
Democrats have also embraced the cause of “Medicare-for-all.”
Asked how private health companies that now insure 177 million people would fare under her health care system, Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs was dismissive: “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
Trump also delivered in-your-face defiance to feminists who seek to guarantee unrestricted access to abortion on demand.
Recalling the celebration, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s guarantee of abortion rights up to the moment before birth became law, Trump declared:

“Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth.
“These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world.
“And then, we had the case of the governor of Virginia where he stated he would execute a baby after birth. To defend the dignity of every person, I am asking the Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother’s womb. Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life.
“And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.”
Has any president, in any State of the Union, made a stronger statement in defense of life?
Are Democrats losing their minds? Only 13 percent of Americans believe in letting babies be aborted up to and through the ninth month of pregnancy. In what states are infanticide and socialism winning issues?
In this writer’s home state, Virginia, the resignation of Democratic Governor Ralph Northam, for “racism,” is being demanded by state and national Democrats, because he put on blackface for a Michael Jackson imitation at a dance 35 years ago.
Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, whose ancestors were slaves on the Revolutionary War plantation of Lord Fairfax, has been accused of raping a young woman at the Democratic convention in 2004.
The next in line to succeed the governor, the attorney general, also a Democrat, has just admitted to wearing blackface when he was in school.
And Sen. Warren, says The Washington Post, listed “American Indian” as her race on a State Bar of Texas registration card in 1986.
Yet, according to her DNA and the Cherokee chief, she ain’t one.
Somebody up there likes Donald Trump.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 12, 2019, 09:28:10 AM

Are the Democrats Bent on ѕυιcιdє?
February 12, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan   


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After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest ѕυιcιdє note in history.”

The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic candidates for president.

The Green New Deal is designed to recall the halcyon days of the 1930s, when, so the story goes, FDR came to Washington to enact the historic reforms that rescued America from the Great Depression.

Only that story is more than a small myth.

The unemployment rate when FDR took the oath in 1933 was 25 percent. It never fell below 14 percent through the 1930s. In June 1938, despite huge Democratic majorities in Congress, FDR was presiding over a nation where unemployment was back up to 19 percent.

World War II and the conscription of 16 million young men gave us “full employment.” And the war’s end and demobilization saw the return of real prosperity in 1946, after FDR was dead.

Yet this Green New Deal is nothing if not ambitious.

To cope with climate change, the GND calls for a 10-year plan to meet “100 percent of the power demand of the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

This appears to require a phase-out by 2030 of all carbon-emitting power plants fueled by coal and oil and their replacement by power plants fueled by wind and solar.

Will natural gas be permitted? Will nuclear power? There are 60 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 98 nuclear reactors in 30 states. Will they be shut down? Will the Greens agree to dam up more U.S. rivers to produce renewable hydroelectric power?

Air travel consumes huge quantities of carbon-producing jet fuel. What will replace it? Perhaps progressive Democratic candidates will set an example by not flying, and then by voting to end production of private aircraft and to ground all corporate jets. Let the elites sail to Davos.

The GND calls for an overhaul of the “transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector … through … clean, affordable and accessible public transportation; and high-speed rail.”

Gas-powered cars are out. How long will that train trip from DC to LA take? And if China continues its relentless rise in carbon emissions until 2030, as permitted by the Paris climate accord, while the U.S. spends itself into bankruptcy going green, where would that leave America and China at midcentury?



“By the end of the Green New Deal resolution (and accompanying fact sheet) I was laughing so hard I nearly cried,” tweeted the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel: “If a bunch of GOPers plotted to forge a fake Democratic bill showing how bonkers the party is, they could not have done a better job. It is beautiful.”

The Green New Deal, say its authors, has as a goal “stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, the elderly, the unhoused, peoples with disabilities, and youth.”

Fifty years after the Great Society, apparently half the country consists of victims of oppression.

Who are their oppressors? Guess.

Among the endorsers of this Green New Deal is Sen. Cory Booker, who compares the battle to stop climate change to fighting the nαzιs in World War II. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala hαɾɾιs and Elizabeth Warren have all endorsed it. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who calls climate change “an existential threat,” was an original co-sponsor.

Nancy Peℓσѕι has more sense. Interviewed last week, the speaker batted the Green New Deal aside: “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

With her own agenda and priorities, Peℓσѕι does not want to be dragged into having to defend a docuмent that reads like it was written by the college socialists club.

The question, though, is why Democrats, who, if nominated, are likely to face Donald Trump in 2020, are signing on to so radical a scheme.

In a presidential election, the “out” party candidate usually has an advantage. No record to defend. He or she can choose the terrain on which to attack the incuмbent, who has a four-year record.

Rarely does an out party present a fixed and stationary target as exposed as this, as out-of the-mainstream as this, as vulnerable as this.

The only explanation for the endorsement of the Green New Deal by candidates with a prospect of winning the Democratic nomination is that they are so fearful of Ocasio-Cortez and the left for whom she speaks that they must endorse her plan.

That British Tory got it right. This thing reads like a Democratic Party ѕυιcιdє pact.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 15, 2019, 09:30:22 AM
Will Diversity Be the Death of the Democrats?
February 15, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/will-diversity-be-the-death-of-the-democrats-136436) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Both of America’s great national parties are coalitions.
But it is the Democratic Party that never ceases to celebrate diversity — racial, religious, ethnic, cultural — as its own and as America’s “greatest strength.”
Understandably so, for the party is home to a multitude of minorities.
It is the domain of the LGBTQ movement. In presidential elections, Democrats win 70 percent of Hispanics, Jєωs and Asian-Americans, and 90 percent of African-Americans.
Yet, lately, the party seems to be careening into a virtual war of all against all.
Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring of Virginia have both admitted to using blackface.
Northam imitated Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” in a 1984 dance contest. Herring, in 1980 at the University of Virginia, did a blackface impression of rap icon Kurtis Blow, who called it ugly and degrading.
The resignations of both have been demanded by Virginia’s black leadership. Northam and Herring, however, are defying the demands.
Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, only the second black ever to win statewide office, has been charged by two women with rape. And the demands for his resignation are growing louder and most insistent.
Yet if Fairfax is forced out, while the white governor and white attorney general get a pass, black leaders warn, all hell is going to bust loose.
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The Democratic Party of Virginia was already convulsed over all the monuments, statues, schools, parks, highways and streets that bear the names of slave owners, Confederate soldiers and 19th- and 20th-century segregationists.
Across the Potomac, Ilhan Omar, the first ever Somali-American to serve in Congress, and a Muslim, ignited a firestorm last week when she gave this as the reason Congress faithfully votes the AIPAC line on Israel: “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”
The reference is to $100 bills, on which Ben Franklin’s face appears. The line is a rap lyric from a 1997 song by Puff Daddy.
Omar was saying Congress has been bought.
The House Democratic leadership demanded and got an apology from Omar for her use of an “anti-Semitic trope.”
But Omar now has company in the House. Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, also a Muslim, shares and airs her views on Israel.
The problem for Democrats?
These provocateurs are magnets for media. They speak for a rising minority in the party that regards Israel as an apartheid state that oppresses Palestinians. And they find an echo among millennials on the party’s socialist left.
As Thursday’s Washington Post headlined, this Omar flap “could forecast a Democratic divide on Israel.”
Indeed, it may have already done so.
When Senate Republicans proposed legislation to allow states to refuse to hire individuals or contractors who support the BDS movement to boycott Israel, Senators Kamala hαɾɾιs, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders all voted no.
The four say they are supporting freedom of speech to condemn Israeli policy. But to others it looks like a progressive Democratic blessing for those urging that Israel be treated the same way Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were treated.
Within the Democratic coalition, Asian-Americans are now in conflict with blacks and Hispanics over admission policies at elite schools and universities.
Asian-Americans are “overrepresented” where students are admitted based on test scores or entrance exams. Black and Hispanic leaders are demanding that student bodies, regardless of test scores, look like the community. And if this requires affirmative action based upon race and ethnicity, so be it.
The LBGTQ community is now in court demanding all the rights and protections of the civil rights laws of the ’60s. This will bring gαy groups into constant collisions with religious communities that adhere to traditional moral views on ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity.
The minorities of color in the Democratic coalition are growing, as the base of the GOP is aging and shrinking. But these minorities are also becoming more rivalrous, competitive and demanding. And the further they move left, they more they move outside the American mainstream.
The pledge of allegiance this writer recited every day of school, reads: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Today, the antifa left desecrates the flag, as liberals praise NFL players who “take a knee” during the national anthem. Militant migrants march under Mexican flags to protest border security policies. The “republic” has been by “our democracy.”
We are no longer “one nation … indivisible” We have almost ceased talking to one another. As for “under God,” added in 1954, Democrats at their Charlotte Convention sought to have God excised from the party platform.
“Liberty” has been supplanted by diversity, “justice” by equality.
But as Revolutionary France, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela proved, regimes that promise utopian and egalitarian societies inevitably reveal themselves to be undertakers of freedom, America’s cause.

https://buchanan.org/blog/will-diversity-be-the-death-of-the-democrats-136436
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 19, 2019, 07:22:41 AM
Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats
February 19, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/why-autocrats-are-replacing-democrats-136467) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“If you look at Trump in America or Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people now want politicians who are tough enough to do what they promise,” said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreno.
The Spaniard was explaining to The New York Times what lay behind the rise of Vox, which the Times calls “Spain’s first far-right party since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.”
Indeed, the growing impatience of peoples with elected leaders and legislators who cannot or will not act decisively explains two realities of our time: the eclipse of Congress and the rise of autocracy worldwide.
In condemning President Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency and use Pentagon funds to build his wall, Beltway elites have charged the president with a multitude of sins against the Constitution.
He has usurped the “power of the purse” that the Founding Fathers invested in Congress. He has disregarded the “checks and balances” of Madisonian democracy. He is acting like an imperial president.
Yet the decline of Congress is not a recent phenomenon. And the principal collaborator in its fall from grace, from being “the first branch of government” to the least esteemed, has been Congress itself, its own timidity and cowardice.
Contrast, if you will, the now-inveterate torpor and inaction of Congress with how presidents, declared by historians to be great or near great, have acted.

Thomas Jefferson seized upon Napoleon’s sudden offer to sell the vast Louisiana territory for $15 million in an act of dubious constitutionality by Jefferson’s own judgment. History has validated his decision.
Andrew Jackson — “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” — shoved aside a Supreme Court ruling denying him the right to transfer the Indians of Florida to the middle of the country.
Abraham Lincoln arrested Maryland legislators to prevent a secessionist-minded legislature from meeting, violated the habeas corpus rights of thousands, ordered Chief Justice Roger Taney arrested, shut down newspapers, and, in January 1863, declared free all the slaves of every state still in rebellion against the Union.
“I took Panama!” said Theodore Roosevelt, whose agents helped rebels shear off the province from Colombia to build his canal.
FDR ordered some 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps in 1942 for the duration of the war.
Without authorization from Congress, Harry Truman ordered U.S. troops into South Korea in 1950 to resist the invasion by North Korea, calling it a police action.
Though a Republican House voted against attacking Serbia in 1998, Bill Clinton continued his 78-day bombing campaign until Belgrade yielded up its cradle province of Kosovo.
Yet while presidents have acted decisively, without congressional authorization and sometimes unconstitutionally, Congress has failed to defend, and even surrendered, its legitimate constitutional powers.
Congress’s authority “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” has been largely ceded to the executive branch, with Congress agreeing to confine itself to a “yeah” or “nay” vote on whatever trade treaty the White House negotiates and sends to the Hill.
Congress’s authority to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof” was long ago transferred to the Federal Reserve.
Congress’s power to declare war has been ignored by presidents since Truman. Authorizations for the use of military force have replaced declarations of war, with presidents deciding how broadly they may be interpreted.
In declaring the national emergency Friday, Trump rested his case on authority given the president by Congress in the National Emergencies Act of 1976.
The Supreme Court has usurped Congress’ powers with impunity.
While the civil rights acts of the 1960s were enacted by Congress, the desegregation of America’s public schools was simply ordered by the Warren Court in 1954.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Congress sat indolent as busing for racial balance was imposed on countless school districts by federal judges.
As the Supreme Court, for decades, exploited the establishment clause of the First Amendment to de-Christianize all public schools and public places, Congress did nothing. A triumphant court then moved on to declare abortion and same-sex marriage constitutional rights.
Yet Congress had the latent power, in Article III, Section 2, to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and every other federal court. But the big stick the founders left for Congress to corral a runaway Supreme Court was never picked up, never used.
High among the reasons Trump was elected was that, for all his flaws and failings, he was seen as a doer, a man who “gets things done.”
And high among the reasons that autocrats are on the rise is that the centrist parties being shoved aside are perceived as having failed the people in their most basic demands — fewer migrants, more secure borders, preservation of national identity, putting their own people and their country own first.
Whatever may be said of the autocrats, be it Trump, Putin or Xi Jinping, they are not talkers but doers. They act.
And they may very well own the future.

https://buchanan.org/blog/why-autocrats-are-replacing-democrats-136467
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 22, 2019, 07:50:37 AM
On to Caracas and Tehran!
February 22, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/on-to-caracas-and-tehran-136490) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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In the Venezuelan crisis, said President Donald Trump in Florida, “All options are on the table.” And if Venezuela’s generals persist in their refusal to break with Nicolas Maduro, they could “lose everything.”
Another example of Yankee bluster and bluff?
Or is Trump prepared to use military force to bring down Maduro and install Juan Guaido, the president of the national assembly who has declared himself president of Venezuela?
We will get an indication this weekend, as a convoy of food and humanitarian aid tries to force its way into Venezuela from Colombia.
Yet, even given the brutality of the regime and the suffering of the people — 1 in 10 have fled — it is hard to see Trump sending the Marines to fight the Venezuelan army in Venezuela.
Where would Trump get the authority for such a war?
Still, the lead role that Trump has assumed in the crisis raises a question. Does the reflexive interventionism — America is “the indispensable nation!” — that propelled us into the forever war of the Middle East, retain its hold on the American mind?
Next week, Trump meets in Hanoi with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
While Kim has not tested his missiles or nuclear warheads in a year, few believe he will ever surrender the weapons that secure his survival and brought the U.S. superpower to the negotiating table.
Is Trump prepared to accept a deal that leaves a nuclear North but brings about a peace treaty, diplomatic relations and a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula? Or are American forces to be in Korea indefinitely?

Nancy Peℓσѕι’s House just voted to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Senate may follow.
Yet Trump is prepared to use his first veto to kill that War Powers Resolution and retain the right to help the Saudi war effort.
What is our vital interest in Yemen’s cινιℓ ωαr? Why would Trump not wish to extricate us from that moral and humanitarian disaster?
Answer: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his regime would sustain a strategic defeat should the Houthis, supported by Iran, prevail.
Before the Warsaw conference called by the U.S. to discuss the Middle East, Bibi Netanyahu’s office tweeted: “This is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries, that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.”
The “war-with-Iran” tweet was swiftly deleted, replaced with a new tweet that spoke of “the common interest of combating Iran.”
Like many Americans with whom he is close, Bibi has never hidden his belief as to what we Americans must do to Iran.
Early this week came leaks that Trump officials have discovered that Shiite Iran has been secretly collaborating with the Sunni terrorists of al-Qaida. This could, headlined The Washington Times, provide “the legal rationale for U.S. military strikes” on Iran.
At the Munich Security Conference, however, NATO allies Britain, France and Germany recommitted to the Iran nuclear treaty from which Trump withdrew, and to improved economic relations with Tehran.
Trump pledged months ago to bring home the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan. But he is meeting resistance in his own party in Congress and even in his own administration.
Reasons: A U.S. pullout from Syria would abandon our Kurdish allies to the Turks, who see them as terrorists, and would force the Kurds to cut a deal with Syria’s Bashar Assad and Russia for their security and survival.
This week, Britain and France informed us that if we leave Syria, then they leave, too.
As for pulling out of Afghanistan, the probable result would be the fall of the Kabul government and return of the Taliban, who hold more territory now than they have since being overthrown 18 years ago. For Afghans who cast their lot with the Americans, it would not go well.
U.S. relations with Russia, which Trump promised to improve, have chilled to Cold War status. The U.S. is pulling out of Ronald Reagan’s INF treaty, which bans land-based nuclear missiles of 300 to 3,000 mile range.
Putin has said that any reintroduction of land-based U.S. missiles to Europe would mean a new class of Russian missiles targeted on Europe — and on the United States.
Today, the U.S. maintains a policy of containment of Russia and China, which are more united than they have been since the first days of the Cold War. We are responsible for defending 28 NATO nations in Europe, twice as many as during the Cold War, plus Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.
We have troops in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and appear on the cusp of collisions with Venezuela and Iran. Yet we field armed forces a fraction of the size they were in the 1950s and 1960s and the Reagan era.
And the U.S. national debt is now larger than the U.S. economy.
This is imperial overstretch. It is unsustainable.

https://buchanan.org/blog/on-to-caracas-and-tehran-136490
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on February 26, 2019, 04:55:47 PM
Left’s Latest Demand: Race-Based Reparations
February 26, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/lefts-latest-demand-race-based-reparations-136513) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party.    It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did…”
Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on.
Presidential candidates Kamala hαɾɾιs and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery.
“Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, legal discrimination and segregation, and discrimination that exist today have led to a systemic wealth gap between black and white Americans,” hαɾɾιs told The New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”
Echoed Sen. Warren: “We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country.” This history has crippled “the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.”
That black Americans are handicapped by their history in this country, and cannot accuмulate wealth as easily, and require compensatory reparations for slavery and segregation, is more than a controversial assertion.
Are the Democrats going to say this in their national platform in 2020? And how much will be the rest of America be forced to pay, and for how long?
Warren says Native Americans, too, must be “part of the conversation.” Apparently, they suffer from a similar handicap and need the same reparations.
How far and fast has the Democratic Party lunged leftward? In 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all rejected reparations.
Have Warren and hαɾɾιs thought this through?
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The questions that instantly arise are: Who would qualify as a beneficiary of reparations, and who would pay the immense transfer sums involved?
In 1860, there were 4 million slaves in 15 states and D.C. There are 45 to 50 million African-Americans in the USA today.
Would all black Americans, even the middle class and affluent, be entitled to reparations? How would the government go about proving that folks living here today had ancestors in slavery before 1865?
Do we, as Warren did to prove her Native American ancestry, conduct a DNA test? Do we consult Ancestry.com for every applicant for reparations?
The last 50 years have seen many marriages between blacks and whites. Would the children of such marriages qualify for reparations?
Barack Obama, whose mother was a white teenager and father was a Kenyan, would not qualify. But would wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia?
hαɾɾιs’s mother was from India, her father from Jamaica, where the British abolished slavery in the mid-1830s. But if the father had ancestors who were enslaved in Jamaica, would the senator qualify, or do reparations go only to the descendants of slaves within the USA?
While a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites are poor, there are more white poor than black poor in the USA. Does not endemic poverty produce the same negative consequence regardless of race?
What is the justice in excluding poor whites, or poor Asians and Hispanics, whose ancestors were not here in the USA when slavery existed before 1865?
From 1845 to 1849, the Irish fled a potato famine that persisted under the indifferent rule of the same British who introduced slavery into what became the United States.
As for the great migration of Eastern and Southern Europeans — Poles, Italians, Jєωs, Slavs, Slovaks — slavery was gone before they arrived. They had nothing to do with instituting Jim Crow. Why should they pay reparations?
Asians and Hispanics were a tiny fraction of the U.S. population as late as 1960, when segregation was being outlawed everywhere, but they are more than 75 million Americans today.
Should they be made to pay for sins their ancestors did not commit?
Warren took a DNA test to prove she was partly American Indian, as she put down on various legal forms. Would her less than 1 percent of Indian DNA be sufficient to provide her with reparations for America’s Indian wars?
If slavery and segregation explain the disparity in wealth between black and white in the U.S., what explains the equally wide disparity in wealth between Hispanics and Asians?
Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party. It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did.
One need not be a cynic to suspect Warren’s motivation. Her claim to be an American Indian angered Native Americans, and she would like to mollify them, and ingratiate herself with African-Americans, who constitute more than 60 percent of all Democratic voters in the crucial South Carolina Primary.
By pushing for compensatory reparations, Warren and hαɾɾιs may be helping themselves, but they are further splitting their party along the lines of ethnicity and race and elevating an issue certain to divide their country more than it already is.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 01, 2019, 08:31:37 AM
Is the American Century Over For Good?
February 28, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-american-century-over-for-good-136596) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Indulging its hatred of Trump is a preoccupation, an obsession of this capital city.
“Politics stops at the water’s edge” was a tradition that, not so long ago, was observed by both parties, particularly when a president was abroad, speaking for the nation.
The tradition was enunciated by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in 1947, as many of the Republicans in the 80th Congress moved to back Truman’s leadership in the Cold War against Stalin’s empire.
The tradition lasted until the mid-1960s, when the left wing of the Democratic Party turned viscerally, and even violently, against the war in Vietnam and President Lyndon Johnson.
Republican Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush I, with the support of conservative Democrats, led America to final victory in the Cold War
Yet except for brief intervals, like the rallying around George H. W. Bush after the triumphant Gulf War of 1991 and George W. Bush after 9/11, true national unity has never been restored.
Were proof needed, this week provided it.
President Trump flew to Hanoi, Vietnam, to meet North Korea’s dictator. Subject of negotiations: Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons, including his missiles that may be able to reach our homeland.
How did the Democratic Party wish the commander in chief well on his mission for America?
During Trump’s first full day in Hanoi, a committee of Nancy Peℓσѕι’s House held a public hearing featuring ex-Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, a convicted perjurer and felon who cut a deal with the prosecution for a reduced sentence.
The city loved it. Cable and network TV coverage went gavel to gavel. Cohen’s testimony crowded out the Trump-Kim summit and even news of aerial clashes between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers that have fought three wars since independence, 70 years ago.
What were the headlines Trump came home to after refusing to lift sanctions on North Korea, in return for meager concessions Kim offered?

“Cohen Paints Trump as Crooked” was the banner atop page one of The Washington Post. Cohen’s depiction of his old boss was boldly quoted above: “He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat.”
“Cohen Accuses Trump of Lies and Cover-ups” ran the page-one headline in The New York Times.
“Cohen Declares Trump a Racist, Cheat and Conman” read the huge headline in the Financial Times.
“Cohen Says Trump Guided Coverup” was at the top of page one in The Wall Street Journal.
Trump is denounced for calling media the “enemy of the people.” Yet that media, in news columns as well as editorials, routinely describes him as a racist, sexist, xenophobe, homophobe, Islamophobe and bigot.
Indulging its hatred of Trump is a preoccupation, an obsession of this capital city. Those headlines reveal not only the news judgment of the editors but the agenda of the elite who turn to them first every morning.
That agenda is the breaking of this president; his disgrace and fall; and, if impeachment proves not possible, his crushing defeat in 2020 and subsequent indictment. Our so-called Dreamers in Washington, D.C., look to the triumphal return to power of the establishment the American people threw out in 2016.
Yet the alliance that seeks to bring down Trump is formidable: deep-state leakers and media collaborators; the Democratic Party and House; most of America’s commentariat; and the cultural elites in the arts, academia and Hollywood.
How far beyond normal politics have the divisions in our society gone? As the Covington Catholic kids found out, wearing a MAGA hat is now seen as a racist provocation.
In the play unfolding, Cohen’s testimony to the House committee was scene one of act one.
Next comes the Mueller report, though it appears Robert Mueller and his team, after investigating for two years, have found no collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee or the Clinton campaign.
Hence, the hopes of Trump haters are being redirected to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Subjects of investigation: the Trump Organization, the Trump Inaugural Committee, the Trump Foundation, the Trump family and any entity with which Donald Trump has been associated in 40 years.
Again, as the president is chief of state and head of government, he cannot be indicted. He must first be removed from the presidency. But to remove him, Democrats have to impeach him in the House and convict him in a Republican Senate.
If they cannot, they will have to defeat him at the polls.
In 1968, George Wallace of Alabama tore the Southern populist right out of the Democratic Party. Liberals Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern then savaged Vice President Hubert Humphrey from the left. The Grant Park rioters did the rest.
Nixon, leading a minority Republican Party, had a compelling argument: “If the Democrats cannot unite their own party, how can they unite the nation?”
Today, a watching world is asking: If you Americans are at war with yourselves over race, religion, morality, culture and politics, if you cannot unite yourselves, how can you unite the world? And around what?
Maybe the American Century is really over.

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-american-century-over-for-good-136596
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 05, 2019, 09:49:54 AM
Mike Pompeo’s War Warning to China
March 4, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/mike-pompeos-war-warning-to-china-136609) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Could America sustain such a commitment? More important, why should we? Has the White House thought through the implications of what the Pompeo threat may bring?
As President Trump flew home from his Hanoi summit with Kim Jong Un, Mike Pompeo peeled off and flew to Manila. And there the Secretary of State made a startling declaration.
Any armed attack by China on a Philippine ship or plane in the South China Sea, he told the Philippine government, will be treated as an attack on an American ship or plane, bringing a U.S. military response.
“China’s island building and military activities in the South China Sea threaten your sovereignty, security and, therefore, economic livelihood, as well as that of the United States,” said Pompeo. “As the South China Sea is part of the Pacific, any armed attack on Philippine forces, aircraft or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger mutual defense obligations under article 4 of our mutual defense treaty.”
Article 4 requires the U.S. and the Philippines to come to the defense of the other if one is attacked. The treaty dates back to August 1951. There are Americans on Social Security who were not born when this Cold War treaty was signed.
Pompeo’s declaration amounts to a U.S. war guarantee.
Why would we make such a commitment? Why take such a risk?
Is Trump aware of what Pompeo’s promise could entail?

For years, Beijing has claimed as national territory virtually the entire South China Sea. Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines all reject China’s claims to the Paracel and Spratly Islands within that sea. But Beijing has occupied and expanded half a dozen islets; landed planes and troops; and fortified them as military and naval bases.
Beijing is not going to give them up, and Manila is too weak to take them back. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies says a Philippine attempt to build on a disputed islet in the Spratly chain brought a flotilla of nearly 100 Chinese ships to halt Philippine construction.
Why did Pompeo issue this war guarantee?
Because Duterte and members of his Cabinet are unsure the U.S. would come to the defense of the Philippines in such a clash, and they believe their best course may be to appease Beijing, the rising power in Asia and the western Pacific.
Since the end of the Cold War, when Manila ordered us to vacate the Subic Bay Naval Base — only to invite us back when Manila grew nervous about her neighbors — and we were forced to abandon the Clark Air Base, the U.S. has not faced the fundamental question here.
Do we have a vital interest, justifying a war with China, in defending Manila’s claim to the Spratly Islands that China also claims, holds and defends as sovereign territory?
If so, how do we plan to get the Chinese off these islands, short of a naval and air war that could escalate? Is the Philippines capable of holding these islands if we help to retake them? Or would Manila rely on U.S. naval and air power in perpetuity to keep them?
Could America sustain such a commitment? More important, why should we? Has the White House thought through the implications of what the Pompeo threat may bring?
If the Chinese politely inform President Duterte that any attempt to take a Chinese-claimed island by force will be met by superior force, what do we do? Tell Duterte it is still his call, even if it means our war?
Is it wise for a great power to cede to a weak ally the ability to drag it into a great war? Ask the late Kaiser Wilhelm II.
When a Chinese fighter crashed into a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea in 2001, then-President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell apologized for the death of the Chinese pilot — to retrieve the crew China had interned on Hainan Island.
We were unprepared to confront China over an act of aggression over international waters. Yet we are now prepared to fight China over who owns and occupies Mischief Reef or Scarborough Shoal?
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal article “The U.S. Is Ceding the Pacific to China,” writer Mark Helprin says America must “alter the correlation of military forces in the Western Pacific … so that it no longer moves rapidly and inevitably in China’s favor.”
He urges a massive buildup of U.S. ships, planes, missiles, troops and Marines all across the Asia-Pacific theater. And if we do not?
“Frankly, if we do not, the Pacific Coast of the United States will eventually look out upon a Chinese lake,” says Helprin.
Today, the U.S., $22 trillion in debt, has treaty commitments dating to the early Cold War to defend Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, all thousands of miles of ocean away from the USA.
If Trump cannot cut back these war guarantees, who will?

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https://buchanan.org/blog/mike-pompeos-war-warning-to-china-136609
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 08, 2019, 09:18:16 AM
Can Trump Stop the Invasion?
March 8, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/can-trump-stop-the-invasion-136630) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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With 328 million people here now, approaching twice the number as in 1960, how many more can we take in before government sinks under the weight of its beneficiaries?
In its lead editorial Wednesday, The New York Times called upon Congress to amend the National Emergency Act to “erect a wall against any President, not just Mr. Trump, who insists on creating emergencies where none exist.”
Trump “took advantage” of a “loophole” in the NEA, said The Times, to declare “a crisis at the border, contrary to all evidence.”
The Times news desk, however, apparently failed to alert the editorial page on what the top story would be that day.
“Record Numbers Crossing to U.S., Deluging Agents” was the page-one headline. The Times quoted Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection: “The system is well beyond capacity, and remains at the breaking point. … This is … a border security and a humanitarian crisis.”
Reporter Caitlin Dickerson explained what is behind CPB’s alarm: “The number of migrant families crossing the Southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly double what they were a year ago.”
She continued, “More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without authorization in February, an 11-year high … newcomers continue to arrive, sometimes by the busload, at the rate of 2,200 a day.”
Only if one believes in open borders is this not an emergency, not a crisis. Consider the budgetary impact alone of this invasion.
The majority of migrants breaching the border are from Mexico and Central and South America. Most do not read, write or speak our English language, are not college graduates and arrive with few skills.
Almost all will enter the half of the U.S. population that consumes more in social benefits during their lifetime than they will ever pay in taxes.
With the U.S. debt over 100 percent of gross domestic product and the deficit running at nearly 5 percent of GDP, at full employment, the burden the migrant millions are imposing upon our social welfare state will one day collapse the system. For these folks are coming to a country where education K-12 is free and where, if the Democrats take over, pre-K through college will be free.
These folks will be eligible for city, county, state and federal programs that provide free or subsidized food, rent, housing and health care.
All were enacted for the benefit of U.S. citizens. Uninvited, the Third World is coming to partake of and enjoy them.

With 328 million people here now, approaching twice the number as in 1960, how many more can we take in before government sinks under the weight of its beneficiaries?
And there is a larger issue.
If, as appears probable, President Trump is not going to be able to build his wall and all the security measures taken in this century have proved inadequate to stanch the invasion of America, how does the invasion end?
Or is this the endless invasion, where the future is decided on our 1,900-mile border with Mexico and we, as the last superpower, are a pitiful, helpless giant too morally paralyzed to stop it?
The resolution and determination of Third World peoples to come to America, even if they have to break our laws to get in and stay, is proven.
And if there is no matching national will to halt the invasion, and no truly effective means that would be acceptable to our elites, the migrants are never going to stop coming. And why should they?
Politically, this invasion means the inevitable death of the national Republican Party, as peoples of color, who vote 70-90 percent Democratic in presidential elections, become the new majority of 21st-century America.
The bell will toll for the Grand Old Party when Texas votes like California in some presidential election. That is game, set, match.
What is remarkable is how our cultural elites are giddily embracing what most of the advanced world is recoiling from.
The Times that berates Trump for trying to secure the border with his wall constantly bewails the rise of ethnic nationalism, populism, tribalism and “illiberal democracies” in Europe. But the rising “isms” of the new Europe are driven by popular fear and loathing of the very future The Times cannot wait to embrace.
Japan’s population of 127 million, the second oldest on Earth, has begun to shrink. But there seems to be no desire in Japan to import millions of East or South Asians or Africans to replace the vanishing Japanese.
Does China look upon its diversity as its greatest strength?
Hardly. Beijing is repopulating Tibet with Han Chinese, and has set up “re-education camps” to de-program Uighur Muslims and Kazakhs in the west so they sever their birth attachments to their ethnicity and faith and convert into good communists.
In the U.S., the ball is now in Trump’s court.
If he cannot get a Democratic House to fund his wall and the forces now on the border are being overwhelmed by the migrants, as CPB reports, how does he propose to halt the invasion?
And if he does not stop it, who will? And what does failure mean for America’s future as one nation and one people?

https://buchanan.org/blog/can-trump-stop-the-invasion-136630

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 12, 2019, 07:51:48 AM
How Middle America Is to Be Dispossessed
March 12, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/how-middle-america-is-to-be-dispossessed-136645) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)




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The Democratic Party does not want to close the door to voting on migrants who broke our laws to get here and do not belong here, as these illegals would likely vote for pro-amnesty Democrats.
In all but one of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. George W. Bush and Donald Trump won only by capturing narrow majorities in the Electoral College.
Hence the grand strategy of the left: to enlarge and alter the U.S. electorate so as to put victory as far out of reach for national Republicans as it is today for California Republicans, and to convert the GOP into America’s permanent minority party.
In the Golden State, Democrats control the governors’ chair, every elective state office, both U.S. Senate seats, 46 of 53 U.S. House seats and three-fourths of each house of the state legislature in Sacramento.
How does the left expect to permanently dispossess Middle America?
Let us count the ways.
In 2018, over 60 percent of Floridians voted to expand the electorate by restoring voting rights to 1.5 million ex-cons, all of Florida’s felons except those convicted of sex crimes and murder.
Florida gave Bush his razor-thin victory over Al Gore. Should Trump lose Florida in 2020, he is a one-term president. If the GOP loses Florida indefinitely, the presidency is probably out of reach indefinitely.
Florida’s Amendment 4 is thus a great leap forward in the direction in which the republic is being taken. Gov. Terry McAuliffe of the swing state of Virginia restored voting rights to 156,000 felons by executive order in 2016, calling it his “proudest achievement.”
In California and Oregon, moves are afoot to reduce the voting age to 17 or 16. Understandable, as high schoolers are more enthusiastic about socialism.
Last week, a bold attempt was made by House Democrats to lower the U.S. voting age to 16. It failed — this time.
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Some House Democrats apparently feel that with “Medicare-for-all” and the Green New Deal of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on the table, they have enough progressive legislation to satisfy the socialist base.
Thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown, every adult citizen in California who gets or renews a driver’s license, gets a state ID card, or fills out a change of address form with the Department of Motor Vehicles is automatically registered to vote. Purpose: expand voter rolls to include those who have shown no interest in politics, so they can be located on Election Day and bused to the polls.
Ari Berman of Mother Jones writes that Nancy Peℓσѕι’s 700-page For the People Act that did pass the House contains “a slew of measures designed to expand voting rights, which … include nationwide automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting in every state … restoration of voting rights for ex-felons, and declaring Election Day a federal holiday.”
House Republicans offered an amendment to the bill with language that said, “allowing illegal immigrants the right to vote devalues the franchise and diminishes the voting power of United States citizens.”
All but six Democrats voted against the GOP proposal.
The Democratic Party does not want to close the door to voting on migrants who broke our laws to get here and do not belong here, as these illegals would likely vote for pro-amnesty Democrats.
If the new U.S. electorate of, say, 2024, includes tens of millions of new voters — 16- and 17-year-olds; illegal migrants; ex-cons; new legal immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America who vote 70 to 90 percent Democratic, the political future of America has already been determined.
California, here we come.
As a Democratic insurance policy, Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen has introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.
Some Republicans support statehood for Puerto Rico, which would add six electoral votes that would go Democratic in presidential elections about as often as Washington, D.C.’s three have, which is always.
Ben Franklin told the lady in Philadelphia, “We have a republic, if you can keep it.” Our elites today, however, ceaselessly celebrate “our democracy.”
Yet John Adams was not optimistic about such a political system: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit ѕυιcιdє.”
Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong believer in a “natural aristocracy” among men, was contemptuous: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.”
Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “democracies … have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
If one day not far off, as seems probable, tax consumers achieve a permanent hegemony over the nation’s taxpayers, and begin to impose an equality of result that freedom rarely delivers, the question of who should choose the nation’s rulers will be tabled anew.
We do not select NFL coaches or corporate executives or college professors or generals or admirals by plebiscite. What is the empirical evidence that this is the best way to choose a president or commander in chief?
Peoples are wondering that the world over, as our democracy does not appear to be an especially attractive stock.
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https://buchanan.org/blog/how-middle-america-is-to-be-dispossessed-136645
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 15, 2019, 08:00:45 PM
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Is Diversity a Root Cause of Dual Loyalty?
March 14, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-diversity-a-root-cause-of-dual-loyalty-136659) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Our Founding Fathers, too, were ever alert to the dangers of dual loyalty.
“We can’t be divided by race, religion, by tribe. We’re defined by those enduring principles in the Constitution, even though we don’t necessarily all know them.”
So Joe Biden told the firefighters union this week.
But does Joe really believe that? Or does that not sound more like a plea, a wistful hope, rather than a deep conviction?
For Biden surely had in mind the debate that exploded last week in the House Democratic caucus on how to punish Somali-American and Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for raising the specter of dual loyalty.
Rebutting accusations of anti-Semitism lodged against her, Omar had fired back: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Omar was talking about Israel.
Republicans raged that Nancy Peℓσѕι’s caucus must denounce Omar for anti-Semitism. Journalists described the raising of the “dual loyalty” charge as a unique and awful moment, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come.
Yet, allegations of dual loyalty against ethnic groups, even from statesmen, have a long history in American politics.
In 1915, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, at a convention of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, bellowed: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism … German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans.
“There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is a man who is an American and nothing else.”
The New York Times headline the next morning:
“Roosevelt Bars the Hyphenated.”
It continued: “No Room in This Country for Dual Nationality, He Tells Knights of Columbus. Treason to Vote as Such.”


What would Roosevelt think of the dual citizenship of many Americans today? If someone is a citizen of more than one country, how do we know where his primary allegiance lies?
Does not dual citizenship, de facto, imply dual loyalty?
Nor was the Rough Rider alone in his alarm. As America edged toward intervention in the European war, President Woodrow Wilson, too, tore into “the hyphenates”:
“The passions and intrigues of certain active groups and combinations of men amongst us who were born under foreign flags injected the poison of disloyalty into our most critical affairs. …
“I am the candidate of a party, but I am above all things else, an American citizen. I neither seek the favor nor fear the displeasure of that small alien element amongst us which puts loyalty to any foreign power before loyalty to the United States.”
In another address, Wilson declared:
“There is disloyalty active in the United States, and it must be absolutely crushed. It proceeds from … a very small minority, but a very active and subtle minority. It works underground but it shows its ugly head where we can see it, and there are those at this moment who are trying to levy a species of political blackmail, saying: ‘Do what we wish in the interest of foreign sentiment or we will wreak our vengeance at the polls.'”
What did Ilhan Omar say to compare with that?
Roosevelt and Wilson had in mind some German and Irish citizens whose affection for the lands and peoples whence they came made them adversaries of Wilson’s war, into which we would soon be dragged by a WASP elite with deep ties to Great Britain.
Our Founding Fathers, too, were ever alert to the dangers of dual loyalty. In his Farewell Address, President Washington warned against a “passionate attachment” to any foreign nation that might create the illusion of some “common interest … where no common interest exists.”
Did FDR fear dual loyalty? His internment of 110,000 Japanese, mostly U.S. citizens, for the duration of World War II, suggests that he did.
Did not the prosecution of American Communists under the Smith Act, begun by Truman and continued by Eisenhower, suggest that these first postwar presidents saw peril in a secret party that gave allegiance to a hostile foreign power?
Where Wilson, TR and FDR distrusted ethnic and racial minorities, Truman went after the ideological enemies within — the Communists.
What defines us, said Joe Biden, are the “enduring principles in the Constitution, even though we don’t necessarily all know them.”
But if these principles, of which many Americans are not even aware, says Joe, are what define us and hold us together, then what is it that is tearing us apart?
Is it not our differences? Is it not our diversity?
Is it not the powerful and conflicting claims of a multiplicity of races, religions, tribes, ethnicities, and nationalities, as well as clashing ideologies, irreconcilable moral codes, a culture war, and conflicting visions of America’s past — the one side seeing it as horrible and hateful, the other as great and good?
“Diversity is our greatest strength!” we are ever admonished.
But where is the evidence for what appears to be not only an inherently implausible claim but a transparently foolish and false one?

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-diversity-a-root-cause-of-dual-loyalty-136659
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 22, 2019, 09:05:22 PM
Why Joe May Be Courting Stacey
March 22, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/why-joe-may-be-courting-stacey-136709) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)

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How, with a record like this, does Biden inoculate himself against attacks by rival candidates, especially candidates of color, in his run for the nomination?
Of 895 slots (https://buchanan.org/blog/why-joe-may-be-courting-stacey-136709#) in the freshman class of Stuyvesant High in New York City, seven were offered this year to black students, down from 10 last year and 13 the year before.a
In the freshman class of 803 at The Bronx High School of Science, 12 students are black, down from last year’s 25.
Of 303 students admitted to Staten Island Technical High School, one is African-American.
According to The New York Times, similar patterns of admission apply at the other five most elite high schools in the city.
Whites and Asians are 30 percent of middle school students, but 83 percent of the freshman at Bronx High School of Science, 88 percent at Staten Island Technical and 90 percent at Stuyvesant.
What do these numbers tell us?
They reveal the racial composition of the cohort of scientists and technicians who will lead America in the 21st century. And they tell us which races will not be well represented in that vanguard (https://buchanan.org/blog/why-joe-may-be-courting-stacey-136709#).
They identify a fault line that runs through the Democratic Party, separating leftists who believe in equality of results for all races and ethnic groups, and those who believe in a meritocracy.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has expressed anger and frustration at the under-representation of blacks and Hispanics in the elite schools. But Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature have ignored his pleas to change the way students are admitted.
Currently, the same test, of English and math, is given to middle school applicants. And admission to the elite eight is offered to those who get the highest scores.
Moreover, Asians, not whites, are predominant.

Though 15 percent of all middle school students, Asians make up two-thirds of the student body at Stuyvesant, with 80 times as many slots as their African-American classmates.
The egalitarian wing of the Democratic Party sees this as inherently unjust. And what gives this issue national import are these factors:
First, the recent scandal where rich (https://buchanan.org/blog/why-joe-may-be-courting-stacey-136709#) parents paid huge bribes to criminal consultants to get their kids into elite colleges, by falsifying records of athletic achievement and cheating on Scholastic Aptitude Tests, has caused a wave of populist resentment.
Second, Harvard is being sued for systemic reverse racism, as black and Hispanic students are admitted with test scores hundreds of points below those that would disqualify Asians and whites.
Third, Joe Biden has a history on compulsory integration dating back to the 1970s that Sen. Jesse Helms called “enlightened.”
Here are Biden’s quotes, unearthed by The Washington Post, that reflect his beliefs about forced busing for racial balance in public schools:
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with.
“What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist!
“Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?
“I am philosophically opposed to quota systems. They insure mediocrity.”
That was 44 years ago. While those views were the thinking of many Democrats, and perhaps of most Americans, in the mid-’70s, they will be problematic in the 2020 primaries, where African-Americans could be decisive in the contests that follow Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden knows that just as Bernie Sanders, another white male, fell short in crucial South Carolina because of a lack of support among black voters, he, too, has a problem with that most loyal element in the Democratic coalition.
In 1991, Biden failed to rise to the defense of Anita Hill when she charged future Justice Clarence Thomas with sɛҳuąƖ harassment. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was a law-and-order champion responsible for tough anti-crime legislation that is now regarded as discriminatory.
And he has a record on busing for racial balance that made him a de facto ally of Louise Day Hicks of the Boston busing case fame (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restore_Our_Alienated_Rights_%28ROAR%29).
How, with a record like this, does Biden inoculate himself against attacks by rival candidates, especially candidates of color, in his run for the nomination?
One way would be to signal to his party that he has grown, he has changed, and his 2020 running mate will be a person of color. Perhaps he’ll run with a woman of color such as Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia.
An ancillary benefit would be that Abrams on the ticket would help him carry Georgia, a state Donald Trump probably cannot lose and win re-election.
Wrote Axios this morning:
“Close advisers to former Vice President Joe Biden are debating the idea of packaging his presidential campaign announcement with a pledge to choose Stacey Abrams as his vice president.”

https://buchanan.org/blog/why-joe-may-be-courting-stacey-136709
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 26, 2019, 10:40:53 AM
Russiagate — a Bright, Shining Lie
March 26, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/russiagate-a-bright-shining-lie-136733) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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The instigators of this investigation, launched to bring down a president, have damaged and divided this nation, and they need to be exposed, as do their collaborators in the press.
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia … to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign.”
So stated Attorney General (https://buchanan.org/blog/russiagate-a-bright-shining-lie-136733#) William Barr in his Sunday letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller report.
On the charge of collusion with Russia, not guilty on all counts.
After two years of hearing from haters in politics and the media that President Donald Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” an agent of the Kremlin, guilty of treason, an illegitimate president who would leave the White House in handcuffs and end his days in prison, we learn the truth.
It was all a bright, shining lie.
Reeling from Trump’s exoneration, big media are now scurrying to their fallback position: Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice.
But Mueller was not obstructed. No one impeded his labors.
As for Trump’s rages against his investigation, they were the natural reaction of an innocent man falsely accused and facing disgrace and ruin for a crime he did not commit, indeed, a crime that had never been committed.

The House Judiciary Committee may try to replicate what Mueller did, and re-investigate obstruction. Fine. This would confirm what this whole rotten business has at root always been about: a scheme by the deep state and allied media to bring down another president.
The Mueller investigation employed 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents. It took two years. It issued 2,800 subpoenas. It executed 500 search warrants. It interviewed 500 witnesses. And it failed to indict a single member of Trump’s campaign for collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Which raises this question:
If Mueller could find no collusion, after an exhaustive two-year search, what was the compelling evidence that caused James Comey’s FBI and Barack Obama’s Department of Justice to believe that such collusion had occurred and to launch this investigation?
Sunday, after Barr’s summary of the Mueller report became public, Trump aired his justified anger: “It’s a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it’s a shame that your president has had to go through this. … This was an illegal takedown that failed.”
Is there not truth in this?
Millions of Americans still believe what is now a manifest falsehood — that their president collaborated with Putin in cheating Hillary Clinton out of the presidency. The legal bills of Trump, his family, his campaign aides and his White House staff must be huge. Careers (https://buchanan.org/blog/russiagate-a-bright-shining-lie-136733#), reputations have been damaged.
The nation has been distracted and bitterly divided over this since Trump’s first days in office. He has had a cloud over his presidency since he gave his inaugural address. Any ability the president had to fulfill his campaign pledge and negotiate with the largest country on earth, Russia, a superpower rival, has had to be put off.
Is it unfair to ask: Who did this to us?
Who led the Justice Department into believing Trump conspired with the Russians? Why did it take two years to discover there was no collusion? Who gave Putin and the GRU this victory by helping to tear our own country apart?
Our establishment is forever demanding apologies. Where are the apologies for the outrageous accusations that Trump was guilty of something next to treason?
Sen. Joe McCarthy did not do a fraction of the damage to the reputations of Dean Acheson or George Marshall that the elite media have done, unjustly and maliciously, to the reputation of Donald Trump.
Years after French Artillery Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of colluding with the Germans in the late 19th century, and was sent to Devil’s Island, evidence against another officer emerged.
Soon, it was Dreyfus’ accusers who were in the dock of public Opinion.

That needs to happen now. The instigators of this investigation, launched to bring down a president, have damaged and divided this nation, and they need to be exposed, as do their collaborators in the press.
The roots of Mueller’s investigation go back to the Clinton campaign’s hiring of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion GPS (https://buchanan.org/blog/russiagate-a-bright-shining-lie-136733#) hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele. He had sources in Russian intelligence who provided him with the contents of his infamous dossier. This was delivered to a grateful cabal at the FBI, which used it as the basis of a FISA court warrant to surveil the Trump campaign.
The dirt in the Steele dossier, much of it false, would be secretly shared with Trump-haters in the media to torpedo his candidacy; then, when Trump won, to destroy his presidency before it began.
Now that Trump has been exonerated, the story of how his accusers, using the power of the state, almost murdered a presidency with lies, propaganda and innuendo, needs to be brought out into the sunlight.
For democracy dies in darkness, and this can’t happen again.

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https://buchanan.org/blog/russiagate-a-bright-shining-lie-136733
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on March 30, 2019, 06:54:40 AM
Must the West Beg the World for Forgiveness?
March 29, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/must-the-west-beg-the-world-for-forgiveness-136755) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Are all civilizations and cultures equal, or are some more equal than others?
As the Democratic Party quarrels over reparations for slavery, a new and related issue has arisen, raised by the president of Mexico.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has written Pope Francis I and King Felipe VI to demand their apologies for the Spanish conquest of Mexico that began 500 years ago with the “invasion” of Hernando Cortez.
Arriving on the Gulf Coast in 1519, Cortes marched in two years to what is today’s Mexico City to impose Spanish rule, the Spanish language and culture, and the Catholic faith upon the indigenous peoples.
“One culture, one civilization was imposed upon another,” wrote President Lopez Obrador: “There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the temples.”
He demanded that the king and the pope ask for “forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on the indigenous peoples of Mexico.”
Now no one denies that great sins and crimes were committed in that conquest. But are not the Mexican people, 130 million of them, far better off because the Spanish came and overthrew the Aztec Empire?
Did not 300 years of Spanish rule and replacement of Mexico’s pagan cults with the Catholic faith lead to enormous advances for its civilization and human rights?
Or is there never a justification for one nation to invade another, conquer its people, impose its rule, and uproot and replace its culture and civilization? Is “cultural genocide” always a crime against humanity, even if the uprooted culture countenanced human sacrifice?
Did the Aztecs have a right to be left alone by the European world?
If so, whence came that right?
Which leads to another question: Are all civilizations and cultures equal, or are some more equal than others? Are some superior?
Before recent decades, most Americans were taught to believe the West stood above all other civilizations, and America was its supreme manifestation. And much of the world seemed to agree.
As for the assertion that all civilizations and cultures are equal, that is an ideological statement. But where is the historic, scientific or empirical evidence to support that proposition? How many people really believe that?
Spain’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said it was “weird to receive now this request for an apology for events that occurred 500 years ago.”
He wondered if Spain should seek an apology from France for the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and crimes committed by the armies of Napoleon, or if France could demand an apology from Italy for the invasion of Gaul by Julius Caesar?
Unlikely to get an apology from the king, Lopez Obrador may do better with Pope Francis who is into begging for forgiveness for crimes committed in the Spanish-Portuguese conquest and rule of South America.
In Bolivia in 2015, the pope declared:
“I say this to you with regret. Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God. … I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native people during the so-called conquest of America.”
As The New York Times related in its story on the “chilly response” in Madrid to Mexico’s demand, other Western leaders — not only Barack Obama — are very much into this apology fad.
Justin Trudeau has apologized for Canada’s mistreatment of its indigenous peoples. France’s Emmanuel Macron has apologized for the torture of rebels in Algeria’s war for independence.
The Spanish right, however, is not with the program.
Alberto Rivera, leader of the Ciudadanos, called Lopez Obrador’s demand “an intolerable offense to the Spanish people.”
Rafael Hernando of the Popular Party dismissed it with contempt: “We Spaniards went there (to Mexico) and ended the power of tribes that αssαssιnαtҽd their neighbors with cruelty and fury.”
Behind this demand for an apology from Spain and the Church is a view of history familiar to Americans, and rooted in clashing concepts about who we are, and were.
Have the Western peoples who conquered and changed much of the world been, on balance, a blessing to mankind or a curse? Is the history of the West, though replete with the failings of all civilizations, not unique in the greatness of what it produced?
Or are the West’s crimes of imperialism, colonialism, genocide, racism, slavery and maltreatment of minorities of color so sweeping, hateful and shameful they cancel out the good done?
Is the white race, as Susan Sontag wrote, “the cancer of human history”?
As we see the monuments and memorials to the great men of our past desecrated and dragged down, the verdict among a slice of our intellectual and cultural elites is already in. Thumbs down. They agree with the moral shakedown artist of Mexico City.
Query: Can peoples who are ashamed of their nation’s past do great things in its future? Or is a deep-seated national guilt, such as that which afflicts many Germans today, a permanent incapacitating feature of a nation’s existence?

(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-mexico-pagan-pb-234.jpg)

https://buchanan.org/blog/must-the-west-beg-the-world-for-forgiveness-136755
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 02, 2019, 04:22:17 PM
Trump Should Close NATO Membership Rolls
(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Trump-Should-Close-NATO-Membership-Rolls.jpg)

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“Among neocon and GOP interventionists, there has also long been a vocal constituency for bringing Ukraine into NATO…”
When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message:
The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is bleeding profusely.
And no one needs to hear this message more than Stoltenberg.
In Tblisi, Georgia, on March 25, Stoltenberg declared to the world: “The 29 allies have clearly stated that Georgia will become a member of NATO.”
As for Moscow’s objection to Georgia joining NATO, Stoltenberg gave Vladimir Putin the wet mitten across the face:
“We are not accepting that Russia, or any other power, can decide what (NATO) members can do.”
Yet what would it mean for Georgia to be brought into NATO?
The U.S. would immediately be ensnared in a conflict with Russia that calls to mind the 1938 and 1939 clashes over the Sudetenland and Danzig that led straight to World War II.
In 2008, thinking it had U.S. backing, Georgia rashly ordered its army into South Ossetia, a tiny province that had broken away years before.
In that Georgian invasion, Russian peacekeepers were killed and Putin responded by sending the Russian army into South Ossetia to throw the Georgians out. Then he invaded Georgia itself.
“We are all Georgians now!” roared uber-interventionist John McCain. But George W. Bush, by now a wiser man, did nothing.
Had Georgia been a NATO nation in 2008, the U.S. could have been on the brink of war with Russia over the disputed and minuscule enclave of South Ossetia, which few Americans had ever heard of.
Why would we bring Georgia into NATO now, when Tblisi still claims the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which Moscow controls and defends?
Are we not in enough quarrels already that could lead to new wars — with Iran in the Gulf, China in the South China Sea, North Korea, Russia in the Baltic and Black Sea, Venezuela in our own hemisphere — in addition to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia where we are already fighting?
Among neocon and GOP interventionists, there has also long been a vocal constituency for bringing Ukraine into NATO.
Indeed, changes in the GOP platform in Cleveland on U.S. policy toward Ukraine, it was said, were evidence of Trumpian collusion with the Kremlin.
But bringing Ukraine into NATO would be an even greater manifestation of madness than bringing in Georgia.
Russia has annexed Crimea. She has supported pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass who seceded when the elected president they backed was ousted in the Kiev coup five years ago.
Kiev’s recent attempt to enter the Sea of Azov by sailing without formal notification under the Putin-built Kerch Strait Bridge between Russia and Crimea, proved a debacle. Ukrainian sailors are still being held.
No matter how supportive we are of Ukraine, we cannot commit this country to go to war with Russia over its territorial integrity. No Cold War president from Truman to George H. W. Bush would have dreamed of doing such a thing. Bush I thought Ukraine should remain tied to Russia and the Ukrainian independence movement was born of “suicidal nationalism.”
Trump has rightly demanded that Europeans start (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-should-close-nato-membership-rolls-136770#) paying their fair share of the cost of NATO. But a graver question than the money involved are the risks involved.
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has added 13 nations: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and six Balkan countries — Bulgaria, Rumania, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro.
Also attending the NATO gathering in Tblisi a week ago were Sweden, Finland and Azerbaijan. Are these three also candidates for U.S. war guarantees?
The larger NATO becomes, the further east it moves, the greater the probability of a military clash that could lead to World War III.
Yet none of the nations admitted to NATO in two decades was ever regarded as worth a war with Russia by any Cold War U.S. president.
When did insuring the sovereignty and borders of these nations
suddenly become vital interests of the United States?
And if they are not vital interests, why are we committed to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia over them, when avoidance of such a war was the highest priority of our eight Cold War presidents?
Putin’s Russia, once hopeful about a new relationship under Trump, appears to be giving up on the Americans and shifting toward China.
Last week, 100 Russian troops arrived in Caracas. Whereupon, The Wall Street (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-should-close-nato-membership-rolls-136770#) Journal lost it: Get them out of our “backyard.” The Monroe Doctrine demands it.
Yet, who has been moving into Russia’s front yard for 20 years?
As the Scotsman wrote, the greatest gift (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-should-close-nato-membership-rolls-136770#) the gods can give us is to see ourselves as others see us.

https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-should-close-nato-membership-rolls-136770
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 05, 2019, 10:56:46 PM
(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-dark-man-girl-pb-443s-e1554459384685.jpg)2020: Socialist America or Trump’s America?
April 5, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/2020-socialist-america-or-trumps-america-136794) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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And what would then happen if the Democrats simply held the House, added three Senate seats and defeated Trump in 2020?
In the new Democratic Party, where women and people of color are to lead, and the white men are to stand back, the presidential field has begun to sort itself out somewhat problematically.
According to a Real Clear Politics average of five polls (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html) between mid-March and April 1, four white men — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, “Beto” O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg — have corralled 62 percent of all Democratic voters.
The three white women running — Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand — have, together, a piddling 8 percent.
The lone Hispanic candidate, Julian Castro, is at 1 percent.
African American candidates Kamala hαɾɾιs and Cory Booker fare better, with hαɾɾιs at 10 and Booker at 3.
Who has raised the most money from the most contributors?
Sanders is first with $18 million; hαɾɾιs is next with $12 million; Beto is third with $9 million in 18 days; and “Mayor Pete” is fourth with $7 million.
But the big takeaway from recent weeks is the sudden stunning vulnerability of the front-runner. Seven women have come forward to berate Biden for unwanted and offensive touching and crowding. Joe is on the defensive. Some in the #MeToo movement want him gone.
He is also being slammed for decisions across his 36-year Senate career — opposing busing for integration, deserting Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings, supporting a racially discriminatory crime bill, voting to authorize George W. Bush to take us into war in Iraq.
And unkindest cut of all: Barack Obama’s stony silence about Joe’s candidacy.
The most compelling case for the 76-year-old ex-vice president is that he can win back Trump’s white working-class voters, and return Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to the Democratic fold.
Thus a major drop in Biden’s polls could be terminal to his candidacy.
If Biden can’t guarantee a victory over Trump, why go with Joe?
Yet, if he fades away as a candidate, as he has done twice before, who emerges as front-runner? The 77-year-old Socialist Bernie Sanders. If Joe fades, Bernie and the comrades will have removed the last large roadblock to a socialist takeover of the national Democratic Party.
And what would then happen if the Democrats simply held the House, added three Senate seats and defeated Trump in 2020?
An all-out effort to abolish the Electoral College that is integral to the historic compromise that created our federal Union. Puerto Rico and D.C. would become states, giving Democrats four more Senators and making America a bilingual nation.
A drive would be on to give 16-year-olds and convicted felons the right to vote in federal elections, freezing Republicans out of power forever. A packing of the Supreme Court would begin by raising by six the number of justices and elevating liberal activists to the new seats.
On the southern border, where 100,000 illegal migrants were apprehended in March, Trump’s wall would come down, all peoples fleeing repression in Central America would be welcomed into the U.S., sanctuary cities would become the norm, and ICE would be abolished.
Open borders would be a reality, along with amnesty for the 12 million-20 million people here illegally, with a path to citizenship for all.
It is impossible to see how the U.S. border would ever be secured.
The Green New Deal would be enacted. Medicare (https://buchanan.org/blog/2020-socialist-america-or-trumps-america-136794#) for all. Free tuition for college students. Millennial college debts paid off by the government. Free pre-K schooling and day care. Guaranteed jobs for all. A guaranteed living wage. Repeal of the Reagan and Trump tax cuts. A re-raising of the corporate rate and a return of the top rate for individuals to 70 percent. New wealth taxes (https://buchanan.org/blog/2020-socialist-america-or-trumps-america-136794#) on the rich.
With climate change seen as an existential planetary peril, fossil fuel-powered energy plants — coal, oil, natural gas — would be phased out and a new national reliance on solar (https://buchanan.org/blog/2020-socialist-america-or-trumps-america-136794#) and wind begun.
There would be reparations for slavery. Abortion on demand right up to birth for all women. Marijuana would be legalized. hαɾɾιs has urged that prostitution, sex work, be legalized.
How would the Green New Deal be paid for?
Under “modern monetary theory, (https://mises.org/library/upside-down-world-mmt)” currency is a public monopoly for the government, and unemployment is evidence that the monopoly is choking off the needed supply. So print the money necessary to get to rising wages, full employment and a booming economy.
With climate change seen as an existential planetary peril, fossil fuel-powered energy plants — coal, oil, natural gas — would be phased out and a new national reliance on solar (https://buchanan.org/blog/2020-socialist-america-or-trumps-america-136794#) and wind begun.
There would be reparations for slavery. Abortion on demand right up to birth for all women. Marijuana would be legalized. hαɾɾιs has urged that prostitution, sex work, be legalized.
How would the Green New Deal be paid for?
Under “modern monetary theory, (https://mises.org/library/upside-down-world-mmt)” currency is a public monopoly for the government, and unemployment is evidence that the monopoly is choking off the needed supply. So print the money necessary to get to rising wages, full employment and a booming economy.
To achieve Bernie Sanders’ Socialist America, the filibuster would have to be abolished, easily done, and the Constitution altered, requiring the support of three-fourths of the states, not so easy.
Yet, as of today, the unannounced front-runner Joe Biden, who is taking fire from many quarters, appears to be the last man standing between Sanders Socialism and the Democratic nomination.
Should Joe falter and fall, Trump would be the nation’s last line of defense against the coming of a Socialist America. For never-Trump conservatives, the day of reckoning may be just ahead.

https://buchanan.org/blog/2020-socialist-america-or-trumps-america-136794

 (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html)
 (https://mises.org/library/upside-down-world-mmt)
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Pax Vobis on April 06, 2019, 12:09:39 AM
Thx for posting these all together. It’s nice to binge-read.  
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 09, 2019, 09:35:04 AM
Already Deep in the Politics of Hate
April 8, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/already-deep-in-the-politics-of-hate-136808) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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If this is the level of discourse from Beto and Bernie, 2020 looks to be one of the ugliest campaigns in American history.
During an Iowa town hall last week, “Beto” O’Rourke, who had pledged to raise the level of national discourse, depicted President Donald Trump’s rhetoric as right out of nαzι Germany.
Trump “describes immigrants as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals'” and as “‘animals’ and ‘an infestation,'” said Beto.
“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as ‘an infestation’ in the Third Reich. I would not expect it in the United States of America.” The crowd lustily cheered the analogy.
By week’s end, Beto’s Third Reich comparison had been matched in nastiness by Bernie Sanders’ description of the president to the cheering activists of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network:
“It gives me no pleasure to say this but today we have a president who is a racist, sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot.”
Sanders managed to appeal to almost all elements of the Democrats’ coalition by accusing Trump of hating blacks, women, gαys, foreigners and Muslims.
Sanders’ outline of Trump calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s now-famous attack on the white working-class folks who would give Trump his victory:
“(Y)ou could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it … he has lifted them up.”
Where Hillary’s slander of the Donald’s MAGA constituents as a thoroughly rotten crowd of Americans came two months before the 2016 election, Bernie’s assault on Trump’s character comes fully 20 months before the 2020 election.
If this is the level of discourse from Beto and Bernie, two of the leading candidates for the nomination, two years from Election Day, 2020 looks to be one of the ugliest campaigns in American history.

And what does it say about democracy if this is the character of politics at the highest level in the world’s leading democracy?
When such language is deployed without admonition from the major media, what does that say about the sincerity of the media’s calls to unite and heal the country?
And if Democratic leaders are openly massaging the hatreds of the party base with such slanders, what does it tell us about those leaders?
If they believe such charges — “It is the truth and we need to confront that,” said Sanders — why do Democrats not impeach and remove such a ogre? Why has Nancy Peℓσѕι ruled that out?
At the end of a week where he withdrew his nominee to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement and saw the departure of his Secretary of Homeland Security (https://buchanan.org/blog/already-deep-in-the-politics-of-hate-136808#), Trump, referring to the 175,000 migrants apprehended crossing the U.S. border in February and March, protested repeatedly, “Our country is full.”
Echoes of Hitler’s Germany, said The Washington Post:
“Adolf Hitler promised ‘living space’ for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today’s xenophobic governments. Still, experts found parallels.
“‘The echoes do indeed remind one of the nαzι period, unfortunately,’ John Connelly, a historian of modern Europe at the University of (https://buchanan.org/blog/already-deep-in-the-politics-of-hate-136808#) California at Berkeley, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“‘The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space — this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.’
“The president’s words became even more freighted when he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jєωιѕн coalition in Las Vegas, saying, ‘Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.'”
Trump’s actions and words last week do seem to portend tougher action on illegal immigration, but one need not look to nαzι Germany for precedents. They may be found in our own history.
The 1924 immigration act restricted legal immigration into the U.S. and imposed ethnic quotas. That was American, not nαzι, law and was enforced by Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Eisenhower, who led the Allies to victory over Germany, sent Gen. Joseph Swing to the U.S. border to remove a million people who had entered Texas illegally from Mexico, which the general (https://buchanan.org/blog/already-deep-in-the-politics-of-hate-136808#) proceeded to do.
Ike had crushed fascism and understood that securing the homeland against illegal mass migration is fascism only in the minds of those who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what a country is.
From his words and actions, Trump clearly senses that this may be the existential issue of his presidency: Can he secure the border against what seems to be an unstoppable invasion from the global south?
Nor is this only an American issue. In the capitals of Europe — Budapest, Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, Madrid — the gnawing fear is not of Vladimir Putin leading a mighty Russian army back to the Elbe to recreate Stalin’s empire, but of the African and Muslim hundreds of millions looking hungrily north to the pleasant lands of the former mother countries.

https://buchanan.org/blog/already-deep-in-the-politics-of-hate-136808
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 12, 2019, 09:36:15 AM
Where Trump’s and Bibi’s Interests Clash
April 12, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/where-trumps-and-bibis-interests-clash-136842) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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While a U.S. war with Iran may be what Bibi wants, it is not what America wants or needs.
On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation’s government as such a threat.
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist group.
With 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria, often in proximity to Iranian units, this inches America closer to war.
Why did we do it? What benefit did the U.S. derive?
How do we now negotiate with the IRGC on missile tests?
Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu took credit for Trump’s decision, tweeting, “Once again you are keeping the world safe from Iran aggression and terrorism. … Thank you for accepting another important request of mine.”
Previous “requests” to which Trump acceded include moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, declaring Jerusalem Israel’s eternal capital, closing the Palestinian consulate and cutting off aid, and U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, as sovereign Israeli territory.
What Bibi wants, Bibi gets.
One hopes his future requests will not include a demand that we cease dithering and deliver the same “shock and awe” to Iran that George W. Bush delivered to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
With Bibi’s election win Tuesday, his fifth, the secret Mideast peace plan Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been laboring on these last two years is likely to be unveiled.
Yet it is hard to see how Jared’s baby is not stillborn.
Bibi is not going to accept a Palestinian right of return to Israel, or a sharing of the Holy City with a Palestinian state ruled by a successor of Yasser Arafat. And as Bibi fought Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of the 8,000 Jєωιѕн settlers from Gaza, he is not going to order the removal of tens of thousands of Jєωιѕн settlers from homes on the West Bank.
Indeed, on the eve of his reelection Tuesday, Bibi promised Israelis he would begin the annexation of Jєωιѕн settlements on the West Bank.
As for Trump, he is the most popular man in Israel. And he is not going to force Bibi to do what Bibi does not want to do and thereby imperil his major political gains in the U.S. Jєωιѕн community.
Given the indulgence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party for BDS, the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, and the divisions among Democrats over Netanyahu’s expansionism, the president’s pro-Israel stance has proven a political winner for the GOP.
But while a U.S. war with Iran may be what Bibi wants, it is not what America wants or needs.
Consider what 20 years of U.S. wars in the Mideast have cost this country, as China has stayed out of the region and pushed its power and influence into Asia, Africa and Europe.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have regained control of more territory than they have held since 2001, and they are negotiating with the Americans for a withdrawal of our remaining 14,000 troops.
Cost of the Afghan war: 2,400 U.S. dead, 32,000 wounded, $1 trillion sunk, and the U.S. on the precipice of a potential strategic defeat.
So dreadful has become the five-year Yemeni cινιℓ ωαr between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed regime they ousted that the U.S. House and Senate have invoked the War Powers Act and directed Trump to terminate U.S. assistance for the Saudi intervention.
In Libya, where a U.S.-led NATO intervention overthrew Colonel Gadhafi in 2011, a renegade general now controls two-thirds of the country and is mounting an assault on Tripoli. U.S. soldiers and diplomats fled the capital last week.
In Syria, President Bashar Assad, with the support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, defeated the U.S. backed-rebels years ago.
The Syrian Kurdish militia we partnered with to crush ISIS have been designated as terrorists by the Turks, who promise to annihilate the Kurds if they try to return to homes along the Turkish border.
As for Turkey itself, President Erdogan says he will take delivery this summer of a Russian-made S-400 air and missile defense system.
Go through with that, says the U.S., and we cancel your order for 100 F-35s. The justified U.S. fear: Russia’s S-400 system will be tested against America’s most advanced fifth-generation fighter, the F-35.
If Turkey does not cancel the S-400, a NATO crisis appears imminent.
In Iraq, where 5,000 U.S. troops remain, the government has both pro-U.S. and pro-Iran elements in Baghdad, and mutual designation of the IRGC and CENT-COM as terrorist organizations can only present hellish problems for America’s soldiers and diplomats still in that country.
Bottom line: Though Bibi and John Bolton may want war with Iran, U.S. national interests, based on the awful experience of two decades, and Trump’s political interests, dictate that he not start any more wars.
Not a single Middle East war this century has gone as we planned or hoped.

https://buchanan.org/blog/where-trumps-and-bibis-interests-clash-136842
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 12, 2019, 10:32:28 AM
One statistic that Buchanan fails to mentioned is the the returning U.S Troops from the wars in the middle east
are the ѕυιcιdєs:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/29/ѕυιcιdє-kills-more-us-troops-than-isil-middle-east/95961038/

https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/10/veterans-day-ѕυιcιdє-has-caused-more-american-casualties-than-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 16, 2019, 10:24:18 AM
(https://i1.wp.com/buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-church-ruin-pb-434-760h.jpg?fit=1920%2C760&ssl=1)


Mayor Pete and the Crackup of Christianity
April 15, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)

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Quote
Buttigieg declared his candidacy Sunday, and his bid ensures that America’s deepening moral divide will be front and center (https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#) in 2020…
“(T)here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, who thereby raised some crucial questions:
Is moral truth subjective? Does it change with changing times and changing attitudes? Or is there a higher law, a permanent law, God’s law, immutable and eternal, to which man’s law should conform?
Are, for example, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, Christian teaching and natural law unchangeable and applicable to all men at all times? Or can some of the 10 be consigned to the dumpster of antiquated moral prohibitions?
This question has been brought straight into the presidential primaries by Pete Buttigieg, breakout star of the spring of 2019.
“Mayor Pete” is proudly gαy and living happily with his husband.
He says God made him the way he is, and he is living the life God intended for him. Raising the same-sex marriage issue himself, the mayor defiantly taunted Mike Pence:
“Yes, Mr. Vice President … it has moved me closer to God. … That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: That if you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me. …Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Buttigieg declared his candidacy Sunday, and his bid ensures that America’s deepening moral divide will be front and center in 2020.
Our culture wars will not be ending anytime soon.
This weekend, General Social Survey data (https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#) revealed that Americans who profess to have “no religion,” 23.1%, now exceed Catholics, our largest religion with 23%, and Evangelicals at 22.5%. And the “nones” have grown by 266% since 1991.
As for the mainstream Protestant congregations, together, they are not half as numerous as those Americans who profess no religion.
Added to our racial and ethnic diversity, America is growing more diverse religiously, de-Christianizing with all deliberate speed.

We are becoming another people, and a post-Christian America appears to be our destiny well before the end of this century.
Consider what has changed already.
In the 19th century, blasphemy was a crime.
In the Roaring ’20s the “vices” of booze and gambling were outlawed. Now they are major sources of state revenue.
Divorce was a rarity. Now half of all marriages are dissolved.
After the sɛҳuąƖ revolution of the ’60s, births out of wedlock rocketed to where 40 percent of all children are born without a father in the home (https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#), as are half of Hispanics and 70 percent of all black children.
Pornography, which used to bring a prison term, today dominates cable TV (https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#). Marijuana, once a social scourge, is the hot new product. And Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs wants prostitution legalized.
In the lifetime of many Americans, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity and abortion were still scandalous crimes. They are now cherished constitutional rights.
Yet, Mayor Pete’s assertion — that God made him gαy, and God intended that he live his life this way, and that this life is moral and good — is another milestone on the road to a new America.
For what Buttigieg is saying is that either God changes his moral law to conform to the changing behavior of mankind or that, for 2,000 years, Christian preaching and practice toward ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs has been bigoted, injurious and morally indefensible.
If Pete is right, since the time of Christ, Christians have ostracized and persecuted gαys simply for being and behaving as God intended.
And if that is true, what is the defense of Christianity?
Already, among a good slice of America, especially the young, the West is guilty of centuries of racism, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, sexism, ethnic cleansing, religious persecution and cultural genocide against indigenous peoples.
Now, according to Mayor Pete’s logic, the West is also guilty of centuries of hateful homophobia toward people living as God made them and intended them to live.
What does this portend for 2020?
While Democrats defend Mayor Pete’s same-sex marriage as moral, they will also insist that women’s “reproductive rights” remain sacrosanct, and that unborn infants, 60 million of whom have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade in 1973, still have no rights at all, not even the right to life.
How does a nation so divided ever come together again?
How can a nation, many of whose elites are so ashamed of its history and heritage and deplorable other half — as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … and bigoted” — credibly claim to be a shining city on a hill or a light unto the nations?
America is today as powerful, prosperous and free as any nation the world has ever seen. And we have used that wealth and freedom to create (https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#) a culture and a society many of our own people and much of the world now see as dissolute and decadent.
Post-Christian America, in many ways, is beginning to mirror what we were once taught that the pre-Christian Roman Empire looked like.
Indeed, if the mayor’s lifestyle is moral, Christianity got it wrong for 20 centuries.

https://buchanan.org/blog/mayor-pete-and-the-crackup-of-christianity-136855#more-136855
(https://paypal.me/lindamuller)
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 19, 2019, 05:43:28 PM
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Is Bernie Stealing Trump’s ‘No More Wars’ Issue?
April 19, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernie-stealing-trumps-no-more-wars-issue-136901) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)



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Quote
The center of gravity of U.S. politics is shifting toward the Trump position of 2016.
“The president has said that he does not want to see this country involved in endless wars… I agree (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernie-stealing-trumps-no-more-wars-issue-136901#) with that,” Bernie Sanders told the Fox News audience at Monday’s town hall meeting in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Then turning and staring straight into the camera, Bernie added:
“Mr. President, tonight you have the opportunity to do something extraordinary: Sign that resolution. Saudi Arabia should not be determining the military or foreign policy of this country.”
Sanders was talking about a War Powers Act resolution that would have ended U.S. involvement in the five-year cινιℓ ωαr in Yemen that has created one of the great humanitarian crises of our time, with thousands of dead children amidst an epidemic of cholera and a famine.
Supported by a united Democratic Party on the Hill, and an anti-interventionist faction of the GOP led by Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee of Utah, the War Powers resolution had passed both houses of Congress.
But 24 hours after Sanders urged him to sign it, Trump, heeding the hawks in his Cabinet and National Security (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernie-stealing-trumps-no-more-wars-issue-136901#) Council, vetoed S.J.Res.7, calling it a “dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities.”
With sufficient Republican votes in both houses to sustain Trump’s veto, that should be the end of the matter.
It is not: Trump may have just ceded the peace issue in 2020 to the Democrats. If Sanders emerges as the nominee, we will have an election with a Democrat running on the “no-more-wars” theme Trump touted in 2016. And Trump will be left defending the bombing of Yemeni rebels and civilians by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Does Trump really want to go into 2020 as a war party president?
Does he want to go into 2020 with Democrats denouncing “Trump’s endless wars” in the Middle East? Because that is where he is headed.
In 2008, John McCain, leading hawk in the Senate, was routed by a left-wing first-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who had won his nomination by defeating the more hawkish Hillary Clinton, who had voted to authorize the war in Iraq.
In 2012, the Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who was far more hawkish than Obama on Russia, lost.
Yet, in 2016, Trump ran as a different kind of Republican, an opponent of the Iraq War and an anti-interventionist who wanted to get along with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and get out of these Middle East wars.
Looking closely at the front-running candidates for the Democratic nomination of 2020 — Joe Biden, Sanders, Kamala hαɾɾιs, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker — not one appears to be as hawkish as Trump has become.
Trump pulled us out of the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and reimposed severe sanctions.
He declared Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, to which Iran has responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist organization. Ominously, the IRGC and its trained Shiite militias in Iraq are in close proximity to U.S. troops.
Trump has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the U.S. Embassy there, closed the consulate that dealt with Palestinian affairs, cut off aid to the Palestinians, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights seized from Syria in 1967, and gone silent on Bibi Netanyahu’s threat to annex Jєωιѕн settlements on the West Bank.
Sanders, however, though he stands by Israel, is supporting a two-state solution and castigating the “right-wing” Netanyahu regime.
Trump has talked of pulling all U.S. troops out of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the troops are still there.
Though Trump came into office promising to get along with the Russians, he sent Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine and announced a pullout from Ronald Reagan’s 1987 INF treaty that outlawed all land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
When Putin provocatively sent 100 Russian troops to Caracas — ostensibly to repair (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernie-stealing-trumps-no-more-wars-issue-136901#) the S-400 anti-aircraft and anti-missile system that was damaged in recent blackouts — Trump, drawing a red line, ordered the Russians to “get out.”
Biden is expected to announce next week. If the stands he takes on Russia, China, Israel and the Middle East are more hawkish than the rest of the field, he will be challenged by the left wing of his party, and by Sanders, who voted “no” on the Iraq War that Biden supported.
The center of gravity (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernie-stealing-trumps-no-more-wars-issue-136901#) of U.S. politics is shifting toward the Trump position of 2016. And the anti-interventionist wing of the GOP is growing.
And when added to the anti-interventionist and anti-war wing of the Democratic Party on the Hill, together, they are able, as on the Yemen War Powers resolution, to produce a new bipartisan majority.
Prediction: By the primaries of 2020, foreign policy will be front and center, and the Democratic Party will have captured the “no-more-wars” political high ground that Candidate Donald Trump occupied in 2016.
https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bernie-stealing-trumps-no-more-wars-issue-136901#more-136901

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 23, 2019, 05:26:00 PM
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The Democrats Divide on Impeachment
April 23, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/the-democrats-divide-on-impeachment-136914) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)

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The credibility of the Democratic Party is now at issue… If Mueller could not find collusion, what reason is there to believe Rep. Jerry Nadler’s judiciary committee will find it, and then convince the country that they have discovered what ex-FBI Director Mueller could not.


The release of the Mueller report has left Democrats in a dilemma. For consider what Robert Mueller concluded after two years of investigation.
Candidate Donald Trump did not conspire or collude with the Russians to hack the emails of the DNC or John Podesta. Trump did not distribute the fruits of those crimes. Nor did anyone in his campaign (https://buchanan.org/blog/the-democrats-divide-on-impeachment-136914#). On collusion and conspiracy, said Mueller, Trump is innocent.
Mueller did not say Trump did not consider interfering with his investigation. But the investigation went on unimpeded. Mueller’s docuмent (https://buchanan.org/blog/the-democrats-divide-on-impeachment-136914#) demands were all met. And Mueller did not conclude that Trump obstructed justice.
On obstruction, then, not guilty, by reason of no indictment.
We are told Trump ranted to subordinates about firing Mueller.
Yet, as Attorney General Bill Barr pointed out, Trump had excellent reasons to be enraged. He was being pilloried for 2 1/2 years for a crime he not only did not commit but a crime that had never taken place.
From the fall of 2016 to the spring of 2019, Trump was subjected to scurrilous attacks. It was alleged that his victory had been stolen for him by Russians, that he was an illegitimate president guilty of treason, and an agent of the Kremlin, that he was being blackmailed and that he rewrote the Republican platform on Vladimir Putin’s instructions.

All bull hockey, and Mueller all but said so.
Yet the false charges did serious damage to his presidency and the nation.
Answering them has consumed much of Trump’s tenure and ruined his plans to repair (https://buchanan.org/blog/the-democrats-divide-on-impeachment-136914#) our dangerously damaged relations with the world’s other great nuclear power.
Yet, it is the Trump haters who are now in something of a box.
Their goal had been to use “Russiagate” to bring down their detested antagonist, overturn his 2016 election, and put Trump in the history books as a stooge of Putin who, had the truth be known, would never have won the White House.

Mueller failed to sustain their indictment. Indeed, Mueller all but threw it out.
Yet Trump’s enemies will not quit now. To do so would be to concede that Trump’s defenders had been right all along, and that they had not only done a grave injustice to Trump but damaged their country with their manic pursuit. And they owe America an apology.
And admitting they were wrong would instantly raise follow-up questions.
If two years of investigation by Mueller, his lawyers and his FBI agents could not unearth hard evidence to prove that Trump and his campaign conspired with the Russians, what was the original evidence that justified launching this historic and massive assault on a U.S. presidential campaign and the presidency of the United States.
If there was no collusion, when did Mueller learn this? Did it take 2 1/2 years to discover there was no conspiracy?
The names tossed out as justifying the original investigation are George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, with the latter subjected to four consecutive secret FISA court surveillance warrants.
Yet neither man was ever charged with conspiring with Russia.

Was “Russiagate” a nothingburger to begin with, a concocted excuse for “deep state” agencies to rampage through the campaign and personal history of Trump to destroy him and his presidency?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate, has called for impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee. But her call seems less tied to evidence of high crimes in the Mueller report than her own anemic poll ratings and fundraising performance in the first quarter.
It is difficult to see how those Democrats and their media allies, who have invested so much prestige and so many hopes in the Mueller report, can now pack it in and concede that they were wrong. Their interests will not permit it; their reputations could not sustain it.
So where are we headed?
The anti-Trump media and second-tier candidates for the Democratic nomination will press the front-runners to join (https://buchanan.org/blog/the-democrats-divide-on-impeachment-136914#) their call for impeachment. Some will capitulate to the clamor.
But can Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg or Kamala hαɾɾιs, who have agendas they wish to advance, accept becoming just another voice crying out for Trump’s impeachment?
The credibility of the Democratic Party is now at issue.

If Mueller could not find collusion, what reason is there to believe Rep. Jerry Nadler’s judiciary committee will find it, and then convince the country that they have discovered what ex-FBI Director Mueller could not.
With conspiracy and collusion off the table, and Mueller saying the case for obstruction is unproven, the renewed attack on Trump takes on the aspect of a naked and desperate “deep state”-media coup against a president they fear they cannot defeat at the ballot box.

https://buchanan.org/blog/the-democrats-divide-on-impeachment-136914

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 26, 2019, 10:56:44 AM
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A Nation at War With Itself
April 26, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/a-nation-at-war-with-itself-136921) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)

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The media are already salivating over the possible removal of a president they have come to loathe more than their great nemeses of the 20th century — Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. And the media will reward (https://buchanan.org/blog/a-nation-at-war-with-itself-136921#) those who echo the call for impeachment…


President Donald Trump has decided to cease cooperating with what he sees, not incorrectly, as a Beltway conspiracy that is out to destroy him.
“We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump said Wednesday. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are out to win (https://buchanan.org/blog/a-nation-at-war-with-itself-136921#) in 2020.”
Thus the Treasury Department just breezed by a deadline from the House Ways and Means Committee to deliver Trump’s tax returns.
Thus the White House will invoke executive privilege to deny the House Judiciary Committee access to ex-White House counsel Don McGahn, who spent 30 hours being interrogated by Robert Mueller’s team.
Thus the Justice Department is withholding from the Oversight Committee subpoenaed docuмents dealing with the decision to include a question on the 2020 Census about citizenship status.
Across the capital, the barricades are going up figuratively as they did physically in the 1960s and ’70s. Once more, it’s us against them.
Cognizant of the new reality, Trump seems to be saying:
These House investigations constitute a massive political assault, in collusion with a hostile media, to destroy my presidency.

We do not intend to cooperate in our own destruction. We are not going to play our assigned role in this scripted farce. We will resist their subpoenas all the way to November 2020. Let the people then decide the fate and future of the Trump presidency — and that of Nancy Peℓσѕι’s House.
In response to Trump’s resort to massive resistance, Rep. Gerald Connolly said: “A respect for the limits of your branch of government, a respect for the role of other branches of government, is sort of the oil that makes the machinery work. … Absent that this breaks down. And I think we’re definitely seeing that.”
Connolly is not wrong. But the requisite mutual respect between the Democratic House and the Republican White House simply does not exist. It broke down a long time ago.
The campaign of 2020 is on. And the stakes are huge. Not only are the first and second branches of government in play, so, too, is the third, the Supreme Court. Many Democrats, refusing to accept the success of the 50-year conservative long march to capture the court, are determined to pack an expanded court with liberal justices to overturn the conservatives’ victory.

With Republicans having won two presidential elections in 20 years, with fewer popular votes, Democrats are also resolved to rewrite the Constitution and abolish the Electoral College.
Not only ex-convicts but felons in prison must now be allowed to vote, says Bernie Sanders, even if that means the Boston Marathon bomber.

Under the Sanders reform, if someone murders you, he is still entitled to an absentee ballot. The right to vote is apparently more sacred than the right to life. Truly, this is the divination of democracy.
Trump’s defiance of House subpoenas will fire up his base, which sees the world as he does and has never cottoned to what President Gerald Ford cherished as “the politics of compromise and consensus.”
Whatever may be said about the “deplorables,” they are not obtuse. They do not believe that people who call them racists, sexists, nativists and bigots are friends and merely colleagues of another party or persuasion.
Trump’s defiance of subpoenas, however, will force the more moderate Democrats to join (https://buchanan.org/blog/a-nation-at-war-with-itself-136921#) the militants in calling for hearings on impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee, which is where we are headed.
The media are already salivating over the possible removal of a president they have come to loathe more than their great nemeses of the 20th century — Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon.
And the media will reward those who echo the call for impeachment.
This week, two more Democrats running for president, including Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs, came aboard. Soon, the House will capitulate to the clamor and the stampede will be on.
The problem for Democrats?

Attempting to overturn the election of 2016 and remove a president who has the passionate support of a third of the nation will sunder the Democratic Party base as surely as it will unite the Republicans.
Should impeachment succeed, a wound would be inflicted on the American body politic that would take years to heal.
In the longer run, however, the question being raised today goes to the long-term health of the republic itself.
America surely does not lack for diversity. Its diversity — racial, religious, cultural, ethnic, ideological, political — is visible and ever-growing. What is missing is the concomitant of unity.
Moreover, it is the more racially, culturally, religiously, ethnically, and ideologically diverse of the parties, the Democrats, that seems the more splintered than a Republican Party that is supposed to be afflicted with the incurable and fatal disease (https://buchanan.org/blog/a-nation-at-war-with-itself-136921#) of Trumpism.
The questions raised by the present state of our politics, which might fairly be described as an American cινιℓ ωαr without arms, are these: How does a nation so divided stand united in the world?
And if it cannot stand united in the world, how long does it remain a great nation?

https://buchanan.org/blog/a-nation-at-war-with-itself-136921

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on April 30, 2019, 10:36:01 AM
Quote
(https://i2.wp.com/buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/001-dems-cards-pb-345.jpg?fit=1500%2C963&ssl=1)


Biden Plays the Race Card
 April 30, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/biden-plays-the-race-card-136931) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif)(https://buchanan.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/images/stars_crystal/rating_on.gif) Votes: 5.00 Stars!
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With the economy firing on all eight cylinders, and the drive for impeachment losing steam, a new strategy is emerging — to take Trump down by stuffing him in a box with white supremacists.
As he debated with himself whether to enter (https://buchanan.org/blog/biden-plays-the-race-card-136931#) the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Joe Biden knew he had a problem.
As a senator from Delaware in the ’70s, he had bashed busing to achieve racial balance in public schools as stupid and racist.
As chairman of Senate Judiciary in the hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas in 1991, Biden had been dismissive of the charges by Anita Hill that the future justice had sɛҳuąƖly harassed her.
In 1994, Biden had steered to passage a tough anti-crime bill that led to a dramatic increase in the prison population.
Crime (https://buchanan.org/blog/biden-plays-the-race-card-136931#) went down as U.S. prisons filled up, but Biden’s bill came to be seen by many African Americans as discriminatory.
What to do? Acting on the adage that your best defense is a good offense, Biden decided to tear into President Donald Trump — for giving aid and comfort to white racists.
His announcement video began with footage of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, highlighting Trump’s remark, after the brawl that left a female protestor dead, that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
“With those words,” said Biden, “the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I realized that the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.”
Cut it out, Joe. This is just not credible. Even he cannot believe Trump had in mind the neo-nαzιs and Klansman chanting, “Jєωs will not replace us!” when Trump said there were “fine people” on both sides.
If this were truly a road-to-Damascus moment for Biden, calling forth a new resolve to remove so morally obtuse a resident of the Oval Office, why did he have to agonize so long before getting in the race?
And was Charlottesville, a riot involving Klansmen, neo-nαzιs and radicals, really a “threat to this nation” unlike any Biden had seen in a lifetime that covers the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, the riots in 100 cities after Martin Luther King’s assassination and Sept. 11?
(https://www.facebook.com/PatrickJosephBuchanan)
Even the anti-Trump media seemed skeptical. Their first interviews after Biden’s announcement were not about Charlottesville but why it took so long to call Anita Hill to apologize.
Yet there is an unstated message in the Biden video. It is this:
With the economy firing on all eight cylinders, and the drive for impeachment losing steam, a new strategy is emerging — to take Trump down by stuffing him in a box with white supremacists.
The strategy is not original. It was tried, but backfired on Hillary Clinton when she called Trump supporters “deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots.”
This didn’t sit well with some white folks in Wisconsin, Michigan and Middle Pennsylvania.
Yet the never-Trumpers seem to think it could work this time.
After Saturday’s attack on the Passover service in Poway, California, which took a woman’s life, Trump denounced the atrocity, expressed his condolences, called Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who had been wounded, and consoled him for 15 minutes.
“Nevertheless,” wrote The Washington Post Monday in a front-page headline, “President’s words push race to fore of campaign.”
“The rise of white nationalist violence during Trump’s tenure is emerging as an issue,” said the Post, because Trump “previously played down the threat posed by white nationalism (and) … also has a long history (https://buchanan.org/blog/biden-plays-the-race-card-136931#) of anti-Muslim remarks.”
The article should be taken seriously. For the Post is not only an enemy of Trump but a powerful institutional ally of the left. And during presidential campaigns, it doubles as an oppo research and attack arm of the Democratic Party.
“Violence, Hate Crimes Emerge as 2020 Issues” declared the inside headline on the Post story. The Post is not talking about customary crimes of violence in America or D.C. — robbery, rape, assault, battery, murder — a disproportionate share of which are committed by minorities of color.
The crimes that interest the Post are those committed by white males against minorities, which can be used to flesh out the picture of America that preexists in the mind of the left, if not in the real world.
Yet it does appear that issues of race, tribe and identity are becoming an obsession in our politics. This weekend, The New York Times faced charges of anti-Semitism for a cartoon of a blind Trump in a skullcap being led by a seeing-eye dog with the face of “Bibi” Netanyahu, who had a Star of David on his collar.
Recoiling under fire, the Times pulled the cartoon and apologized.
On Monday, Rev. Al Sharpton met with “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg. Subject of discussion: Reparations for slavery, which ended more than a century before the mayor was born.
“All is race,” wrote Disraeli in his novel “Tancred.” “There is no other truth.”

https://buchanan.org/blog/biden-plays-the-race-card-136931
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 07, 2019, 07:12:00 AM
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Is Bolton Steering Trump Into War with Iran?
May 6, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bolton-steering-trump-into-war-with-iran-2-136946) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Did President Donald Trump approve of this? …If it is not Trump pushing for confrontation and war with Iran, who is?
Last week, it was Venezuela in America’s gun sights.
“While a peaceful solution is desirable, military action is possible,” thundered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “If that’s what is required, that’s what the United States will do.”
John Bolton tutored Vladimir Putin on the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine: “This is our hemisphere. It’s not where the Russians ought to be interfering.”
After Venezuela’s army decided not to rise up and overthrow Nicholas Maduro, by Sunday night, it was Iran that was in our gun sights.
Bolton ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln, its carrier battle group and a bomber force to the Mideast “to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.”
What “attack” was Bolton talking about?
According to Axios, Israel had alerted Bolton that an Iranian strike on U.S. interests in Iraq was imminent.
Flying to Finland, Pompeo echoed Bolton’s warning:
“We’ve seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and … we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests. … (If) these actions take place, if they do by some third-party proxy, whether that’s a Shia militia group or the Houthis or Hezbollah, we will hold the … Iranian leadership directly accountable for that.”
Taken together, the Bolton-Pompeo threats add up to an ultimatum that any attack by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, or Iran-backed militias — on Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria or the Gulf states — will bring a U.S. retaliatory response on Iran itself.
Did President Donald Trump approve of this? For he appears to be going along. He has pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions. Last week, he canceled waivers he had given eight nations to let them continue buying Iranian oil.
Purpose: Reduce Iran’s oil exports, 40% of GDP, to zero, to deepen an economic crisis that is already expected to cut Iran’s GDP this year by 6%.
Trump has also designated Iran a terrorist state and the Republican Guard a terrorist organization, the first time we have done that with the armed forces of a foreign nation. We don’t even do that with North Korea.
Iran responded last Tuesday by naming the U.S. a state sponsor of terror and designating U.S. forces in the Middle East as terrorists.

Iran has also warned that if we choke off its oil exports that exit the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait could be closed to other nations. As 30% of the world’s oil shipments transit the Strait, closing it could cause a global crash.
In 1973, when President Nixon rescued Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the OPEC Arabs imposed an oil embargo. Gas prices spiked so high Nixon considered taking a train to Florida for Christmas vacation.
The gas price surge so damaged Nixon’s standing with the public that it became a contributing factor in the drive for impeachment.
Today, Trump’s approval rating in the Gallup Poll has reached an all-time high, 46%, a level surely related to the astonishing performance of the U.S. economy following Trump’s tax cuts and sweeping deregulation.
While a Gulf war with Iran might be popular at the outset, what would it do for the U.S. economy or our ability to exit the forever war of the Middle East, as Trump has pledged to do?
In late April, in an interview with Fox News, Iran’s foreign minister identified those he believes truly want a U.S.-Iranian war.
Asked if Trump was seeking the confrontation and the “regime change” that Bolton championed before becoming his national security adviser, Mohammad Javad Zarif said no. “I do not believe President Trump wants to do that. I believe President Trump ran on a campaign promise of not bringing the United States into another war.
“President Trump himself has said that the U.S. spent $7 trillion in our region … and the only outcome of that was that we have more terror, we have more insecurity, and we have more instability.
“People in our region are making the determination that the presence of the United States is inherently destabilizing. I think President Trump agrees with that.”
But if it is not Trump pushing for confrontation and war with Iran, who is?
Said Zarif, “I believe ‘the B-team’ wants to actually push the United States, lure President Trump, into a confrontation that he doesn’t want.”
And who makes up “the B-team”?
Zarif identifies them: Bolton, Benjamin Netanyahu, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.
Should the B-team succeed in its ambitions — it will be Trump’s war, and Trump’s presidency will pay the price.

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https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bolton-steering-trump-into-war-with-iran-2-136946
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 10, 2019, 08:54:38 AM
Are All the World’s Problems Ours?
May 10, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/are-all-the-worlds-problems-ours-136977) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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After an exhausting two weeks, one is tempted to ask: How many quarrels, clashes and conflicts can even a superpower manage at one time?
In 2003, George W. Bush took us to war to liberate Iraq from the despotism of Saddam Hussein and convert that nation into a beacon of freedom and prosperity in the Middle East.
Tuesday, Mike Pompeo flew clandestinely into Baghdad, met with the prime minister and flew out in four hours. The visit was kept secret, to prevent an attack on the Americans or the secretary of state.
Query: How successful was Operation Iraqi Freedom, which cost 4,500 U.S. lives, 40,000 wounded and $1 trillion, if, 15 years after our victory, our secretary of state must, for his own security, sneak into the Iraqi capital?
Topic of discussion between Pompeo and the prime minister:
In the event of a U.S. war with Iran, Iraqis would ensure the protection of the 5,000 U.S. troops in country, from the scores of thousands of Iranian-trained and Iranian-armed Shiite militia.
That prospect, of war between the U.S. and Iran, had been raised by Pompeo and John Bolton on Sunday, when the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and a squadron of U.S. bombers were ordered into the Middle East after we received reports Iran was about to attack U.S. forces.
The attack did not happen. But on Thursday, Tehran gave 60 days’ notice that if it does not get relief from severe U.S. sanctions, it may walk out of the nuclear deal it signed in 2015 and start enriching uranium again to a level closer to weapons grade.
The countdown to a June confrontation with Iran has begun.
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Wednesday, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, for the second time in a week, test-fired two missiles, 260 miles, into the Sea of Japan. Purpose: To signal Washington that Kim’s patience is running out.
Kim rejects the U.S. demand that he surrender all nuclear weapons and dismantle the facilities that produce them before any sanctions are lifted. He wants sanctions relief to go hand in hand with disposal of his arsenal. Few believe Kim will surrender all of his nukes or his ability to replicate them.
The clash with Kim comes days after the failed U.S.-backed coup in Caracas, which was followed by Pompeo-Bolton threats of military intervention in Venezuela, a country 100 times the size of Puerto Rico with 10 times the population and a large well-equipped army.
This week also, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford told Congress that the U.S. will have to keep counter-terrorism forces in Afghanistan “until there is no insurgency left in the country.”
Which sounds like forever, as in “forever war.”
Before flying to Baghdad, Pompeo was in Finland. There, he warned the eight-nation Arctic Council about Russian aggression in the region, suggested China’s claim to be a “near-Arctic” nation was absurd, and told Canada’s its claim to the Northwest Passage was “illegitimate.”
Our Canadian friends were stunned. “Those waterways are part of the internal waters of Canada,” said the government in Ottawa.
After an exhausting two weeks, one is tempted to ask: How many quarrels, clashes and conflicts can even a superpower manage at one time? And is it not time for the United States, preoccupied with so many crises, to begin asking, “Why is this our problem?”
Perhaps the most serious issue is North Korea’s quest for nuclear-armed missiles that can reach the United States. But the reason Kim is developing missiles that can strike Seattle or LA is that 28,000 U.S. troops are in South Korea, committed to attack the North should war break out. That treaty commitment dates to a Korean War that ended in an armed truce 66 years ago.
If we cannot persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons in return for a lifting of sanctions, perhaps we should pull U.S. forces off the peninsula and let China deal with the possible acquisition of their own nuclear weapons by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Iran has no nukes or ICBMs. It wants no war with us. It does not threaten us. Why is Iran then our problem to solve rather than a problem for Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the Sunni Arabs?
Nor does Russia’s annexation of Crimea threaten us. When Ronald Reagan strolled through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988, all of Ukraine was ruled by Moscow.
The Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro was established decades ago by his mentor, Hugo Chavez. When did that regime become so grave a threat that the U.S. should consider an invasion to remove it?
During the uprising in Caracas, Bolton cited the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. But according to President James Monroe, and Mike Pompeo’s predecessor John Quincy Adams, who wrote the message to Congress, under the Doctrine, while European powers were to keep their hands off our hemisphere — we would reciprocate and stay out of Europe’s quarrels and wars.
Wise folks, those Founding Fathers.
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https://buchanan.org/blog/are-all-the-worlds-problems-ours-136977
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 14, 2019, 09:24:42 PM


Tariffs: The Taxes That Made America Great
May 13, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/tariffs-the-taxes-that-made-america-great-136986) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)

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That the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Depression of the 1930s is a New Deal myth in which America’s schoolchildren have been indoctrinated for decades. The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: The Federal Reserve…
As his limo carried him to work at the White House Monday, Larry Kudlow could not have been pleased with the headline in The Washington Post: “Kudlow Contradicts Trump on Tariffs.”
The story began: “National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow acknowledged Sunday that American consumers end up paying for the administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, contradicting President Trump’s repeated inaccurate claim that the Chinese foot the bill.”
A free trade evangelical, Kudlow had conceded on Fox News that consumers pay the tariffs on products made abroad that they purchase here in the U.S. Yet that is by no means the whole story.
A tariff may be described as a sales or consumption tax the consumer pays, but tariffs are also a discretionary and an optional tax.
If you choose not to purchase Chinese goods and instead buy comparable goods made in other nations or the USA, then you do not pay the tariff.
China loses the sale. This is why Beijing, which runs $350 billion to $400 billion in annual trade surpluses at our expense is howling loudest. Should Donald Trump impose that 25% tariff on all $500 billion in Chinese exports to the USA, it would cripple China’s economy. Factories seeking assured access to the U.S. market would flee in panic from the Middle Kingdom.
Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
Tariffs, to protect manufacturers and jobs, were the Republican Party’s path to power and prosperity in the 19th and 20th centuries, before the rise of the Rockefeller Eastern liberal establishment and its embrace of the British-bred heresy of unfettered free trade.
The Tariff Act of 1789 was enacted with the declared purpose, “the encouragement and protection of manufactures.” It was the second act passed by the first Congress led by Speaker James Madison. It was crafted by Alexander Hamilton and signed by President Washington.
After the War of 1812, President Madison, backed by Henry Clay and John Calhoun and ex-Presidents Jefferson and Adams, enacted the Tariff of 1816 to price British textiles out of competition, so Americans would build the new factories and capture the booming U.S. market. It worked.
Tariffs financed Mr. Lincoln’s War. The Tariff of 1890 bears the name of Ohio Congressman and future President William McKinley, who said that a foreign manufacturer “has no right or claim to equality with our own. … He pays no taxes. He performs no civil duties.”
That is economic patriotism, putting America and Americans first.
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The Fordney-Mccuмber Tariff gave Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge the revenue to offset the slashing of Wilson’s income taxes, igniting that most dynamic of decades — the Roaring ’20s.
That the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Depression of the 1930s is a New Deal myth in which America’s schoolchildren have been indoctrinated for decades.
The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: The Federal Reserve, which failed to replenish that third of the money supply that had been wiped out by thousands of bank failures.
Milton Friedman taught us that.
A tariff is a tax, but its purpose is not just to raise revenue but to make a nation economically independent of others, and to bring its citizens to rely upon each other rather than foreign entities.
The principle involved in a tariff is the same as that used by U.S. colleges and universities that charge foreign students higher tuition than their American counterparts.
What patriot would consign the economic independence of his country to the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith in a system crafted by intellectuals whose allegiance is to an ideology, not a people?
What great nation did free traders ever build?
Free trade is the policy of fading and failing powers, past their prime. In the half-century following passage of the Corn Laws, the British showed the folly of free trade.
They began the second half of the 19th century with an economy twice that of the USA and ended it with an economy half of ours, and equaled by a Germany, which had, under Bismarck, adopted what was known as the American System.
Of the nations that have risen to economic preeminence in recent centuries — the British before 1850, the United States between 1789 and 1914, post-war Japan, China in recent decades — how many did so through free trade? None. All practiced economic nationalism.
The problem for President Trump?
Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free. The loss of its economic independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.
Brexit was the strangled cry of a British people that had lost its independence and desperately wanted it back.

https://buchanan.org/blog/tariffs-the-taxes-that-made-america-great-136986
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 17, 2019, 11:06:09 AM

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Who Wants This War with Iran?
May 17, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/who-wants-this-war-with-iran-137040) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Outside a few precincts, America has no enthusiasm for a new Mideast war, no stomach for any occupation of Iran.
Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea.
“There won’t be any war. … We don’t seek a war, and (the Americans) don’t either. They know it’s not in their interests.”
The ayatollah’s analysis — a war is in neither nation’s interest — is correct. Consider the consequences of a war with the United States for his own country.
Iran’s hundreds of swift boats and handful of submarines would be sunk. Its ports would be mined or blockaded. Oil exports and oil revenue would halt. Air fields and missile bases would be bombed. The Iranian economy would crash. Iran would need years to recover.
And though Iran’s nuclear sites are under constant observation and regular inspection, they would be destroyed.
Tehran knows this, which is why, despite 40 years of hostility, Iran has never sought war with the “Great Satan” and does not want this war to which we seem to be edging closer every day.
What would such a war mean for the United States?
It would not bring about “regime change” or bring down Iran’s government that survived eight years of ground war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
If we wish to impose a regime more to our liking in Tehran, we will have to do it the way we did it with Germany and Japan after 1945, or with Iraq in 2003. We would have to invade and occupy Iran.
But in World War II, we had 12 million men under arms. And unlike Iraq in 2003, which is one-third the size and population of Iran, we do not have the hundreds of thousands of troops to call up and send to the Gulf.
Nor would Americans support such an invasion, as President Donald Trump knows from his 2016 campaign. Outside a few precincts, America has no enthusiasm for a new Mideast war, no stomach for any occupation of Iran.
Moreover, war with Iran would involve firefights in the Gulf that would cause at least a temporary shutdown in oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — and a worldwide recession.
How would that help the world? Or Trump in 2020?

How many allies would we have in such a war?
Spain has pulled its lone frigate out of John Bolton’s flotilla headed for the Gulf. Britain, France and Germany are staying with the nuclear pact, continuing to trade with Iran, throwing ice water on our intelligence reports that Iran is preparing to attack us.
Turkey regards Iran as a cultural and economic partner. Russia was a de facto ally in Syria’s cινιℓ ωαr. China continues to buy Iranian oil. India just hosted Iran’s foreign minister.
So, again, Cicero’s question: “Cui bono?”
Who really wants this war? How did we reach this precipice?
A year ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a MacArthurian ultimatum, making 12 demands on the Tehran regime.
Iran must abandon all its allies in the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza — pull all forces under Iranian command out of Syria, and then disarm all its Shiite militia in Iraq.
Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it never had a secret nuclear program and stop testing missiles. And unless she submits, Iran will be strangled with sanctions.
Pompeo’s speech at the Heritage Foundation read like the terms of some conquering Caesar dictating to some defeated tribe in Gaul, though we had yet to fight and win the war, usually a precondition for dictating terms.
Iran’s response was to disregard Pompeo’s demands.
And crushing U.S. sanctions were imposed, to brutal effect.
Yet, as one looks again at the places where Pompeo ordered Iran out — Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Syria, Iraq — no vital interest of ours was imperiled by any Iranian presence.
The people who have a problem with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are the Israelis whose occupations spawned those movements.
As for Yemen, the Houthis overthrew a Saudi puppet.
Syria’s Bashar Assad never threatened us, though we armed rebels to overthrow him. In Iraq, Iranian-backed Shiite militia helped us to defend Baghdad from the southerly advance of ISIS, which had taken Mosul.
Who wants us to plunge back into the Middle East, to fight a new and wider war than the ones we fought already this century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen?
Answer: Pompeo and Bolton, Bibi Netanyahu, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Sunni kings, princes, emirs, sultans and the other assorted Jeffersonian democrats on the south shore of the Persian Gulf.
And lest we forget, the never-Trumpers and neocons in exile nursing their bruised egos, whose idea of sweet revenge is a U.S. return to the Mideast in a war with Iran, which then brings an end to the Trump presidency.

https://buchanan.org/blog/who-wants-this-war-with-iran-137040 (https://buchanan.org/blog/who-wants-this-war-with-iran-137040)
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 21, 2019, 09:32:39 AM
Has the Day of the Nationalists Come?
May 20, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/has-the-day-of-the-nationalists-come-137052) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“If one could identify a cry common to populists, it might be: “We want our country back!”
A week from today, Europeans may be able to gauge how high the tide of populism and nationalism has risen within their countries and on their continent.
For all the returns will be in from three days of elections in the 28 nations represented in the European Parliament.
Expectation: Nationalists and populists will turn in their strongest performance since the EU was established, and their parliamentary group — Europe of Nations and Freedom — could sweep a fourth of the seats in Strasbourg.
Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party is predicted to run first in the British elections, winning two to three times the votes of the ruling Tory Party of Prime Minister Theresa May.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is running even with the party of President Emmanuel Macron, who pleads for “more Europe.”
Matteo Salvini, interior minister and leader of the League, predicts his party will finish first in Italy and first in Europe.
At Salvini’s invitation, a dozen nationalist parties gathered in Milan this weekend. A week from now, they could be the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament. If so, their gains will come at the expense of the center-left and center-right parties that have dominated European politics since World War II.
Speaking before tens of thousands in front of Duomo Cathedral in Milan, Salvini threw back in the faces of his enemies the taunt that these new parties are rooted in the old ugly politics of the 1930s.
“In this piazza, there are no extremists. There are no racists. There are no fascists. … In Italy and in Europe, the difference is between … those who speak of the future instead of making trials of the past.”
Tomorrow versus yesterday, says Salvini.
While the European establishment draws parallels between the populist parties of the present and what happened in the 1930s, it fails to recognize its own indispensable role in generating the mass defections to the populist right that now imperil its political hegemony.
The populist-nationalist parties are energized and united by both what they detest and what the EU has produced.

And what is that?
They resent the inequities of the new economy, where the wages of the working and middle class, the core of the nation, have fallen far behind the managerial class and the corporate and financial elites.
People who work with their hands, tools and machines have seen their wages arrested and jobs disappear, as salaries have surged for those who move numbers on computers.
The disparities have grown too great, as has the distance between national capitals and national heartlands.
Then there is immigration. Native-born Europeans do not welcome the new ethnic groups that have come uninvited in considerable numbers in recent decades, failed to assimilate and created enclaves that replicate the Third World places whence they came.
If one could identify a cry common to populists, it might be: “We want our country back!”
Whatever may be said of populists and nationalists, they are people of the heart. They love their countries. They cherish the cultures in which they grew up. They want to retain their own unique national identities.
What is wrong with that?
Patriotism is central to nationalist and populist movements. Globalism is alien to them. They believe in De Gaulle’s Europe of nation-states “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” not in the abstract Europe of Jean Monnet, and surely not in the Brussels bureaucracy of today.
The nation, the patria, is the largest entity to which one can give loyalty and love. Who would march into no man’s land for the EU?
Europe’s nationalists are not all the same. The ruling Polish Law and Justice Party disagrees on Putin’s Russia with the ruling Fidesz Party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary.
While the EU Parliament does not possess great power, these elections are not without great meaning.
Consider Farage. Should his Brexit Party run first in Britain, how can the Tory Party not carry through on the 2016 vote to withdraw from the EU, without betraying its most loyal constituency on its most critical issue?
Nationalism in Europe is spreading, even deepening rifts between the premier powers in the NATO alliance.
Germany will not be reaching the promised 2 percent of GDP for defense President Donald Trump has demanded. And Berlin is going ahead with a second natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany from Russia, Nord Stream 2.
Turkey is taking possession of a Russian-built S-400 air defense system this summer, despite a U.S. warning that our sale of 100 F-35s will not go through if the Turks go forward with the Russian system.
Have the nationalists of Europe caught the wave of the future?
Or will the future see the revival of the idea of One Europe, a political and economic union that inspired the dreamers of yesteryear?
From here it looks like Matteo, not Macron.


Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 30, 2019, 10:27:20 AM
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Is the Liberal Hour Ending in the West?
May 30, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-liberal-hour-ending-in-the-west-137090) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“The first Brexit, after all, was in 1776, when the 13 colonies of North America severed all ties to the British crown and set out alone on the path to independence. It did not turn out all that badly.”
Hillary Clinton called them “the deplorables.” Barack Obama (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-liberal-hour-ending-in-the-west-137090#) called them losers who “cling” to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.
To President Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission, they are “these populist, nationalists, stupid nationalists… in love with their own countries.”
Well, “stupid” they may be, and, yes, they do love their countries, but last week they gave Juncker a thrashing, as they shook up the West and the world.
Elections in the world’s largest electoral blocs — the 28-nation EU, and an India of 1.3 billion people — showed that the tide of nationalism continues to rise and spread across Europe and Asia.
In India, the Hindu Nationalist BJP party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a smashing victory. So strong was Modi’s showing that he rushed to reassure non-Hindus, especially India’s 200 million Muslims, that they remain equal citizens. But in India the Hindu hour is at hand.
Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, formed just months ago, ran first in Britain with 31%. No other party came close. Labor won 14% and Prime Minister Theresa May’s Tories ran 5th with 9%, a historic humiliation.
In the French elections, Emmanuel Macron’s party lost to the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, whom he had defeated 2-1 in the last presidential election.
Matteo Salvini’s populist-nationalist League, with 34%, ran first in Italy in a showing that could lead to national elections that could make him prime minister.
The nationalist Law and Justice Party in Poland and the populist Fidesz Party of Viktor Orban in Hungary were easily victorious.
In Germany, however, the conservative-socialist coalition of Angela Merkel bled support. Both the CDU and SPD lost strength in defeats that could shake the Berlin government.
What do these elections tell us?

If the Conservatives wish to remain in power in Parliament, they will have to leave the European Union and, if necessary, crash out without a divorce settlement with Brussels.
The Tories cannot defy the will of their own majority on the most critical issue in 50 years — a nationalist demand to be free of Brussels — and still survive as Britain’s first party.
Whoever wins the Tory competition to succeed May will almost surely become the prime minister who leads Britain out of the EU.
Nor is that such a tragedy.
The first Brexit, after all, was in 1776, when the 13 colonies of North America severed all ties to the British crown and set out alone on the path to independence. It did not turn out all that badly.
Last week’s election also saw major gains for the Green parties across Europe. Laser-focused on climate change, these parties will be entering coalitions to provide center-left and center-right regimes the necessary votes to create (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-liberal-hour-ending-in-the-west-137090#) parliamentary majorities.
The environment is now likely to rival Third World immigration as an issue in all elections in Europe.
While nationalist and populists control a fourth of the seats in the EU Parliament, they are isolated. They may have the power to block or veto EU actions by Brussels, but they cannot impose their own agenda.
Yet even larger lessons emerge from these two elections.
Liberalism appears to be losing its appeal. A majority in the world’s largest democracy, India, consciously used their democratic right to vote — to advance sectarian and nationalist ends.
Why is liberalism fading away, and nationalism ascendant?
The former is an idea that appeals to the intellect; the latter, rooted in love of family, faith, tribe and nation, is of the heart. In its potency to motivate men, liberalism is to nationalism what near beer is to Bombay gin.
To be a proud Pole, Hungarian, Italian or Scotsman has a greater grip on men’s love, loyalty and allegiance than to be a citizen of Europe.
“Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong,” said Bismarck. Europe is but “a geographical expression.”
Identity politics, people identifying themselves by their ethnicity, nationality, race, culture and faith, appears to be the world’s future.
Even leftists are bowing to the new reality.
“Identity politics is exactly who we are and it’s exactly how we won,” says Stacy Abrams, the African American Democrat who almost won the Georgia governor’s race. “By centering communities in Georgia, we… increased voter participation, we brought new folks to the process.”
The Democratic Party is now a coalition easily identifiable by race, ethnicity, ideology and gender — African American, Hispanic, Asian, LGBTQ, feminist and Green.
Our Founding Fathers believed we Americans were a new people, a separate, unique, identifiable people, a band of brothers, who had risked their lives and shed their blood. Liberals believe we are held together by abstract ideas and ideals, such as democracy, equality and diversity.
But did Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Calhoun, Clay, Jackson, Sam Houston, Tyler and Polk really believe in equality and diversity as they drove Indians, French, British, Spanish and Mexicans out of this land to create a continentwide nation of their own?
Or was Manifest Destiny really all about us, and not them?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 31, 2019, 07:47:30 AM
What a Hash Mueller Made of It
May 30, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/what-a-hash-mueller-made-of-it-137096) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Republicans should not let Mueller skate on this. For the James Comey-Mueller investigation is itself in need of investigation.
What is it about special counsel Robert Mueller that he cannot say clearly and concisely what he means?
His nine-minute summary of the findings of his office, after two years of investigation, was a mess. It guarantees that the internecine warfare that has poisoned our politics continues into 2020.
If it was the intention of the Russian hackers and trolls of 2016 to sow discord within their great power rival, they have succeeded beyond their dreams.
Consider. Of the charge of conspiracy to collude with the Russians to hack the emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Mueller said, “there was insufficient evidence to charge a larger conspiracy.”
This suggests that there was at least some evidence to conclude that Donald Trump’s campaign did conspire with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to fix (https://buchanan.org/blog/what-a-hash-mueller-made-of-it-137096#) the 2016 election, just not enough evidence to sustain a charge of treason.
Didn’t they use to call this McCarthyism?
On obstruction of justice, Trump attempting to impede his investigation, Mueller said: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
“Mueller Declines to Absolve Trump” was The New York Times headline.
That tells us that Mueller would not give Trump absolution. But why would Trump need absolution, if he did not commit the crime?
Mueller implied that his refusal to charge Trump publicly was based on a Justice Department ruling that presidents cannot be indicted.
But if the special counsel cannot indict a sitting president, and ought not charge him, as, said Mueller, it is “unfair to accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge,” then what was the point of naming a special counsel?
If Mueller actually believes Trump was guilty of obstruction, why did he not forthrightly declare: “While the Justice Department’s interpretation (https://buchanan.org/blog/what-a-hash-mueller-made-of-it-137096#) of the Constitution precludes my office us from indicting President Trump, we believe his actions during the course of our investigation constituted an obstruction of justice.”
At least we would have clarity. Now we have Mueller walking out, without taking questions, and leaving us with this toxic mush.
Republicans should not let Mueller skate on this. For the James Comey-Mueller investigation is itself in need of investigation.
Among the questions that need answering:

If, after two years, Mueller found “insufficient evidence” of collusion by Trump, what was the compelling evidence that justified launching the investigation of collusion during the Obama era?
Did that earlier “evidence” turn out to be false allegations and lies?
When did Mueller discover that George Papadopoulos and Carter Page were not agents of the GRU or KGB?
When did Mueller decide there was no collusion or conspiracy?
Was it not until this spring? Or has Mueller known for a good while there was no conspiracy?
Why are these questions important? Because the investigation itself, leaving as it did a cloud over the legitimacy of the president, was damaging not only to Trump but also to the nation. As long as half the country believed Trump was an agent or asset or blackmail victim of Putin, the nation could not come together.
Did Mueller feel no obligation to clear up that false impression as swiftly and fully as possible, if, indeed, he believes it is false?
When did Mueller discover the Steele dossier was the product of a dirt-diving operation, financed by the Clinton campaign and fabricated by a Trump-hating ex-chief of British intelligence with long ties both to former agents of Russia’s FSB and James Comey’s FBI?
Did Mueller ever suspect that the investigation he inherited was a takedown operation, instigated by enemies of Trump who were determined that he never become president or, if he did, that his tenure would be short?
Mueller’s performance Wednesday has reinvigorated the impeach-Trump caucus. But it has disserved the Democratic Party as much as it has the country.
The progressive left and its media auxiliaries, rabid on the subject, are egging on and cheering for candidates who call for impeachment. As of now, at least eight Democratic presidential candidates favor hearings.
The Democratic left is out to break Nancy Peℓσѕι’s resistance.
If they succeed and this city and the nation turn their attention to a titanic battle to see if the Democratic Party can remove the Republican president, it will be bad news for the republic.
The real business of the nation will be put off until 2021.
Meanwhile, the Venezuela crisis is smoldering, and Sen. Lindsey Graham is urging an ultimatum to Cuba to get its forces out.
North Korea is testing missiles again, with few believing Kim Jong Un will give up the security provided by his nuclear weapons.
And John Bolton is in the Middle East accusing Iran of acts of sabotage and war in Yemen and the Gulf, and of threats to American forces in Iraq.
Mueller’s assignment was to give us answers. After two years, he gave us options.
The nation will pay a price for Mueller’s muddling indecisiveness.

https://buchanan.org/blog/what-a-hash-mueller-made-of-it-137096
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 04, 2019, 05:23:23 PM
Do Trump’s Hawks Speak for Trump?
June 3, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/do-trumps-hawks-speak-for-trump-137106) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Quote
As for war in our hemisphere, which Pence said was possible, that could come sooner than the graduating cadets expect, if Trump’s confidant Sen. Lindsey Graham has his way.
For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point.
If foreign policy were decided by my security adviser John Bolton, the president confided recently, “We’d be in four wars by now.”
It was Bolton who ordered the Abraham Lincoln carrier group and B-52s to the Gulf and told the Pentagon to draw up plans to send 120,000 U.S. troops. It is Bolton who is charging Iran with using mines to sabotage four oil tankers outside the Strait of Hormuz.
Asked for evidence, Bolton barked back at reporters: “Who else would you think is doing it? Somebody from Nepal?”
But if Bolton is first hawk, he is not without rivals in the inner circle of the commander in chief.
At West Point last week, Vice President Mike Pence, after hailing the diversity of a class with the highest number of Hispanic and black women graduates ever, laid out what the future holds in store for them.
“You will fight on a battlefield for America … You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.
“Some of you will join (https://buchanan.org/blog/do-trumps-hawks-speak-for-trump-137106#) the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence.
“Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.
“And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns … and you will fight, and you will win.
“Put your armor on,” Pence admonished the warriors, “so that when — not if — that day comes, you’ll be able to stand your ground.”
A question: Did not candidate Trump say he would be ending wars and bringing troops home (https://buchanan.org/blog/do-trumps-hawks-speak-for-trump-137106#), not plunging into new conflicts in the Mideast, Asia, Europe, the Western Hemisphere and “the Indo-Pacific”?

As for war in our hemisphere, which Pence said was possible, that could come sooner than the graduating cadets expect, if Trump’s confidant Sen. Lindsey Graham has his way.
All last week, Graham beat the drums for an ultimatum to Cuba to get any and all of its troops out of Venezuela. Should Havana refuse, said Graham, Trump ought to “do in Venezuela what Reagan did in Grenada.”
In 1983, Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada to prevent U.S. medical students from being taken hostage by Marxist thugs who had just αssαssιnαtҽd their leader and seized power.
But Grenada is a tiny island roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C., with a population of 100,000, while Venezuela is the size of Texas, with 30 million people and an army of more soldiers than Grenada has citizens.
“I would let the Venezuelan military know, you’ve got to choose between democracy and Maduro,” thundered Graham. “And if you choose Maduro and Cuba, we’re coming after you. This is our backyard.”
Trump may have run as anti-interventionist, but his secretary of state was apparently not closely following his campaign.
Speaking at the West Coast neocon lamasery Claremont Institute last week, Secretary Mike Pompeo said the Founding Fathers “knew peace wasn’t the norm” and “conflict is the normative experience for nations.”
He ripped into the Russians.
Thirty years after the Cold War, said Pompeo, “The Putin regime slays dissidents in cold blood and invades its neighbors,” and, along with China, conducts a foreign policy “intent on eroding American power.”
“We Americans have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and our values.”
As for “America First!” Pompeo explained Trump’s signature phrase thus:
The president “believes America is exceptional — a place and history apart from normal human experience.” This recalls Madeline Albright’s famous formulation: “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further … into the future.”
President George Washington would approve of our policies, said Pompeo. Though the Father of our Country may have warned in his Farewell Address against “permanent alliances,” we are “banding together with the like-minded nations like Australia, India, Japan and South Korea to make sure that each Indo-Pacific nation can protect its sovereignty from coercion.”
“American exceptionalism … will remain alive and well in the 21st century,” concluded Pompeo. “What’s good for the United States is good for the world.”
One wonders: Do the hawks in his inner councils speak for Trump? For they surely do not speak for a nation whose weariness with wars put him into the White House.
On the first day of Trump’s visit to London, Pompeo, who last year issued his 12 demands on Iran, was quoted as saying the U.S. is now prepared to negotiate with Tehran with “no preconditions.”
For now, Trump’s hawks appeared contained for how long.

https://buchanan.org/blog/do-trumps-hawks-speak-for-trump-137106
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 06, 2019, 10:36:53 PM
Bernie & Joe: Two Old White Males Take the Lead
June 6, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-joe-two-old-white-males-take-the-lead-137118) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Quote
Biden and Bernie may be wheezing, but the old white boys are out in front of the pack.
In 2018, a record turnout of women, minorities and young added 40 House (https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-joe-two-old-white-males-take-the-lead-137118#) seats to Democratic ranks and made Nancy Peℓσѕι speaker.
This, we were told, is the new diversity coalition — women, people of color, millennials — that will take down The Donald in 2020.
So, how has the Democratic field sorted itself out half a year later?
According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html), two old white guys, Joe Biden, 76, and Bernie Sanders, 77, are setting the pace and have together corralled more than half of all Democrats.
There is a good chance (https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-joe-two-old-white-males-take-the-lead-137118#) the party of minorities, millennials and women will be led in 2020 by a white man who would be the oldest candidate ever nominated by a major party.
Biden and Bernie may be wheezing, but the old white boys are out in front of the pack.
Add Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, running fifth and sixth, and 60 percent of Democrats favor white men for the nomination. Only 20 percent favor one of five women: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala hαɾɾιs, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand or Tulsi Gabbard.
The African American candidates, hαɾɾιs and Cory Booker, are backed by only 1 in 10 Democrats. Julian Castro, the lone Hispanic, is at 1 percent, as is the Asian American Andrew Yang.
While the first primaries are half a year off, the odds today favor — after nominating Barack Obama twice and then Hillary Clinton — Democrats returning to the 20th-century traditional candidate — a seasoned white man.
Frontrunner Biden is benefitting from the fact that his closest rival, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with a large and loyal following from his 2016 campaign. For Bernie sits on a huge pile of votes Biden may not be able to win, but which Bernie is denying to any other challenger.
Indeed, Bernie is becoming a problem for a whole host of Democrats.

If he defeats Biden for the nomination, he pulls Democrats a long way to becoming a U.S. replica of the British Labor Party of Jeremy Corbyn. Many moderate Democrats will not vote for a lifelong socialist who chose to spend his honeymoon during the Cold War in the Soviet Union.
Yet, as long as Bernie holds onto the votes he has, he prevents any candidate of color, any woman, or any new and fresh face from amassing enough strength in the polls to get within striking distance of Biden.
Bernie is thus today a de facto ally of Biden. He holds too few votes to take the nomination from Joe, but sufficient votes to stay in the race through the early primaries and deny any other Democrat a clean shot at Biden.
As of now, there are two lanes to the Democratic nomination — the centrist-moderate lane Biden occupies almost exclusively, and the left lane where Bernie leads but is being challenged by Elizabeth Warren.
Where does the Democratic race, with the largest number of entries in political history, almost two dozen, stand at the first turn?
Though Biden has more than a third of all Democrats behind him, he has slipped from his highest ratings and is under attack from his many rivals who believe a new day has come and who want old white men to go into retirement and get out of the way.
Biden is being hit for a variety of sins over a career that began in 1972. He voted to authorize George W. Bush to take us to war in Iraq. He led the fight for the 1994 anti-crime bill now viewed as tough on minorities. He left Anita Hill twisting in the wind when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas hearings. He denounced busing for racial balance back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now the old plagiarism charges from his law school days and his presidential campaign of 1988 are being resurrected, since the Biden campaign distributed materials to back up his plan for combatting climate change with lines plagiarized from other sources.
This week, Biden’s support of the Hyde Amendment which, for decades, has blocked federal tax funding (https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-joe-two-old-white-males-take-the-lead-137118#) for almost all abortions, is calling down the wrath of pro-choice Democrats who are both militant and many.
Another noteworthy development of recent weeks is the progress of Elizabeth Warren, due to the sheer number and appeal of her ideas for soaking the rich and using the revenue to create new entitlements in the name of “economic patriotism.” Say what you will, she is talking issues.
Mayor Pete seems to have eased back from his earlier highs, and stalled. As for Beto, he may be flailing those arms around like a drowning man — because he is one. The bloom is off the rose. Beto seems frozen at 4 percent. There is truth in what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of Tom Dewey’s re-nomination in 1948 after having lost to FDR in 1944.
You can’t make a souffle rise a second time.

https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-joe-two-old-white-males-take-the-lead-137118
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 11, 2019, 07:19:40 PM






Are Abortion & gαy Rights American Values?
June 10, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan   
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars Votes: 4.88 Stars!
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    What are these “values” of which politicians incessantly talk? Are they immutable? Or do they change with the changing times?

https://buchanan.org/blog/are-abortion-gαy-rights-american-values-137136

“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as … doctrine. Life begins at conception. … I just refuse to impose that on others.”

For four decades, Biden backed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of the tax dollars of Joe’s fellow Catholics to pay for what they view as the killing of the innocent unborn.

Last week, Joe flipped. He now backs the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America welcomed home the prodigal son: “We’re pleased that Joe Biden has joined the rest of the 2020 Democratic field in coalescing around the Party’s core values — support for abortion rights.”

But when did the right to an abortion — a crime in many states before 1973 — become a “core value” of the Democratic Party?

And what are these “values” of which politicians incessantly talk?

Are they immutable? Or do they change with the changing times?

Last month, Disney CEO Bob Iger said his company may cease filming in Georgia if its new anti-abortion law takes effect: “If (the bill) becomes law, I don’t see how it’s practical for us to continue to shoot there.”

The Georgia law outlaws almost all abortions, once a heartbeat is detected, some six to eight weeks into pregnancy. It reflects the Christian conservative values of millions of Georgians.

To Iger and Hollywood, however, Georgia’s law radically restricts the “reproductive rights” of women, and is a moral outrage.

What we have here is a clash of values.

What one side believes is preserving the God-given right to life for the unborn, the other regards as an assault on the rights of women.

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The clash raises questions that go beyond our culture war to what America should stand for in the world.

“American interests and American values are inseparable,” Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Claremont Institute: “We have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and our values.”

Are Pompeo and Mayor Pete talking about the same values?

The mayor is proudly gαy and in a same-sex marriage. Yet the right to same-sex marriage did not even exist in this country until the Supreme Court discovered it a few years ago.

In a 2011 speech to the U.N., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “gαy rights are human rights,” and she approved of U.S. embassies flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.

This year, Mike Pompeo told the U.S. embassy in Brazil not to fly the rainbow flag. He explained his concept of his moral duty to the Christian Broadcasting Network, “The task I have is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior.”

The Christian values Pompeo espouses on abortion and gαy rights are in conflict with what progressives now call human rights.

And the world mirrors the American divide.

There are gαy pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but none in Riyadh and Mecca. In Brunei, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity can get you killed.

To many Americans, diversity — racial, ethnic, cultural, religious — is our greatest strength.

Yet Poland and Hungary are proudly ethnonationalist. South Korea and Japan fiercely resist the racial and ethnic diversity immigration would bring. Catalans and Scots in this century, like Quebecois in the last, seek to secede from nations to which they have belonged for centuries.

Are ethnonationalist nations less righteous than diverse nations likes ours? And if diversity is an American value, is it really a universal value?

Consider the treasured rights of our First Amendment — freedom of speech, religion and the press.

Saudi Arabia does not permit Christian preachers. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, converts to Christianity face savage reprisals. In Buddhist Myanmar, Muslims are ethnically cleansed.

These nations reject an equality of all faiths, believing instead in the primacy of their own majority faith. They reject our wall of separation between religion and state. Our values and their values conflict.

What makes ours right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail in what are, after all, their countries?

Under our Constitution, many practices are protected — abortion, blasphemy, pornography, flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs — that other nations regard as symptoms of a disintegrating society.

When Hillary Clinton said half of all Trump supporters could be put into a “basket of deplorables” for being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” she was conceding that many Trump’s supporters detest many progressive values.

True, but in the era of Trump, why should her liberal values be the values America champions abroad?

With secularism’s triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral.

Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable.

Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?



Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 14, 2019, 10:09:25 AM
 




Russiagate Is No Watergate
June 14, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
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   If the impeachment hearings come, they will be seen for what they are: An attempted coup to overthrow a president by the losers of 2016 who are fearful they could lose again in 2020 and be out of power for four more years.

“History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance,” John Dean told the judiciary committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and “Russiagate” which has bedeviled Donald Trump.

But what strikes this veteran of Nixon’s White House is not the similarities but the stark differences.

Watergate began with an actual crime, a midnight break-in at the offices of the DNC in June 1972 to wiretap phones and filch files, followed by a cover-up that spread into the inner circles of the White House.

Three years after FBI Director James Comey began the investigation of Trump, however, the final report of his successor, Robert Mueller, found there had been no conspiracy, no collusion and no underlying crime.

How can Trump be guilty of covering up a crime the special counsel says he did not commit?

And the balance of power today in D.C. is not as lopsided as it was in 1973-1974.

During Watergate, Nixon had little support in a city where the elites, the press, the Democratic Congress and the liberal bureaucracy labored in earnest to destroy him. Nixon had few of what Pat Moynihan called “second and third echelons of advocacy.”

Contrast this with Trump, a massive presence on social media, whose tweets, daily interactions with the national press and rallies keep his enemies constantly responding to his attacks rather than making their case.

Trump interrupts their storytelling. And behind Trump is a host of defenders at Fox News and some of the top radio talk show hosts in America.

There are pro-Trump websites that did not exist in Nixon’s time, home to populist and conservative columnists and commentators full of fight.



Leftists may still dominate mainstream media. But their unconcealed hatred of Trump and the one-sided character of their coverage has cost them much of the credibility they had half a century ago.

The media are seen as militant partisans masquerading as journalists.

Consider the respective calendars.

Two years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon was near the end, about to be impeached by the House with conviction possible in the Senate.

Three years into Russiagate, 3 in 4 House Democrats do not want their caucus to take up impeachment. Many of these Democrats, especially moderates from swing districts, do not want to cast a vote to either bring down or exonerate the president.

Assume the House did take up impeachment. Would all the Democrats vote aye? Does anyone think a Republican Senate would deliver the needed 20 votes to provide a two-thirds majority to convict and remove him?

For a Republican Senate to split asunder and vote to expel its own Republican president who is supported by the vast majority of the party would be suicidal. It could cost the GOP both houses of Congress and the White House in 2020. Why would Republicans not prefer to unite and fight to the end, just as Senate Democrats did during the Clinton impeachment?

Trump’s support in the Republican caucus in the Senate today is rock solid. Speaker Nancy Peℓσѕι is herself opposed to impeachment hearings in the House, considering them ruinous to her party’s hopes of maintaining control in 2020.

When Dean went before the Watergate committee of Sen. Sam Ervin in 1973, all five days of his testimony were carried live on ABC, CBS and NBC.

When Dean appeared Monday, the three cable news networks swiftly dropped coverage of the judiciary committee hearings to report on a helicopter crash in mid-Manhattan. Dean’s testimony could be seen on C-SPAN3.

Much of America is bored by the repetitive, nonstop media attacks on Trump, and look on the back-and-forth between left and right not as a “constitutional crisis” but as a savage battle between parties and partisans.

The impeachers who seek to bring down Trump face other problems.

Now that Mueller has spent two years and found no evidence of a Trump-Putin conspiracy to hack the emails of the DNC and Clinton campaign, questions have arisen as to what the evidence was that caused the FBI to launch its unprecedented investigation of a presidential campaign and a newly elected president.

Did an anti-Trump cabal at the apex of the FBI and U.S. security agencies work with foreign intelligence, including former British spy Christopher Steele, to destroy Trump?

The political dynamic of Trump’s taunts and defiance of the demands of committee chairs in a Democratic House, and the clamor for impeachment from the Democratic and media left are certain to produce more calls for hearings.

But if the impeachment hearings come, they will be seen for what they are: An attempted coup to overthrow a president by the losers of 2016 who are fearful they could lose again in 2020 and be out of power for four more years.

Russiagate is not Watergate, but there is this similarity:

Nixon and Trump are both the objects of a truly great hatred.

https://buchanan.org/blog/russiagate-is-no-watergate-13715
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 18, 2019, 09:46:13 AM
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War With Iran Would Become ‘Trump’s War’
June 18, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/war-with-iran-would-become-trumps-war-137168) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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“Who wants a U.S. war with Iran? Primarily the same people who goaded us into wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and who oppose every effort of Trump’s to extricate us from those wars…”
President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran.
Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump’s reelection.
It would widen the “forever war,” which Trump said he would end, to a nation of 80 million people, three times as large as Iraq. It would become the defining issue of his presidency, as the Iraq War became the defining issue of George W. Bush’s presidency.
And if war comes now, it would be known as “Trump’s War.”
For it was Trump who pulled us out of the Iran nuclear deal, though, according to U.N. inspectors and the other signatories — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China — Tehran was complying with its terms.
Trump’s repudiation of the treaty was followed by his reimposition of sanctions and a policy of maximum pressure. This was followed by the designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a “terrorist” organization.
Then came the threats of U.S. secondary sanctions on nations, some of them friends and allies, that continued to buy oil from Iran.
U.S. policy has been to squeeze Iran’s economy until the regime buckles to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 12 demands, including an end to Tehran’s support of its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Sunday, Pompeo said Iran was behind the attacks on the tankers in the Gulf of Oman and that Tehran instigated an attack that injured four U.S. soldiers in Kabul though the Taliban claimed responsibility.
The war hawks are back.

“This unprovoked attack on commercial shipping warrants retaliatory military strikes,” said Senator Tom Cotton on Sunday.
But as Trump does not want war with Iran, Iran does not want war with us. Tehran has denied any role in the tanker attacks, helped put (https://buchanan.org/blog/war-with-iran-would-become-trumps-war-137168#) out the fire on one tanker, and accused its enemies of “fαℓѕє fℓαg” attacks to instigate a war.
If the Revolutionary Guard, which answers to the ayatollah, did attach explosives to the hull of the tankers, it was most likely to send a direct message: If our exports are halted by U.S. sanctions, the oil exports of the Saudis and Gulf Arabs can be made to experience similar problems.
Yet if the president and the ayatollah do not want war, who does?
Not the Germans or Japanese, both of whom are asking for more proof that Iran instigated the tanker attacks. Japan’s prime minster was meeting (https://buchanan.org/blog/war-with-iran-would-become-trumps-war-137168#) with the ayatollah when the attacks occurred, and one of the tankers was a Japanese vessel.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal Monday were Ray Takeyh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neocon nest funded by Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson.
In a piece titled, “America Can Face Down a Fragile Iran,” the pair make the case that Trump should squeeze the Iranian regime relentlessly and not fear a military clash, and a war with Iran would be a cakewalk.
“Iran is in no shape for a prolonged confrontation with the U.S. The regime is in a politically precarious position. The sullen Iranian middle class has given up on the possibility of reform or prosperity. The lower classes, once tethered to the regime by the expansive welfare (https://buchanan.org/blog/war-with-iran-would-become-trumps-war-137168#) state, have also grown disloyal. The intelligentsia no longer believes that faith and freedom can be harmonized. And the youth have become the regime’s most unrelenting critics.
“Iran’s fragile theocracy can’t absorb a massive external shock. That’s why Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has, for the most part, adhered to the JCPOA (the nuclear pact) and why he is likely angling for negotiation over confrontation with the Great Satan.”
This depiction of Iran’s political crisis and economic decline invites a question: If the Tehran regime is so fragile and the Iranian people are so alienated, why not avoid a war and wait for the regime’s collapse?
Trump seems to have several options:
—Negotiate with the Tehran regime for some tolerable detente.
—Refuse to negotiate and await the regime’s collapse, in which case the president must be prepared for Iranian actions that raise the cost of choking that nation to death.
—Strike militarily, as Cotton urges, and accept the war that follows, if Iran chooses to fight rather than be humiliated and capitulate to Pompeo’s demands.
One recalls: Saddam Hussein accepted war with the United States in 1991 rather than yield to Bush I’s demand he get his army out of Kuwait.
Who wants a U.S. war with Iran?
Primarily the same people who goaded us into wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and who oppose every effort of Trump’s to extricate us from those wars.
Should they succeed in Iran, it is hard to see how we will ever be able to extricate our country from this blood-soaked region that holds no vital strategic interest (https://buchanan.org/blog/war-with-iran-would-become-trumps-war-137168#) save oil, and America, thanks to fracking, has become independent of that.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on June 25, 2019, 06:14:33 PM
 Trump: War President or Anti-Interventionist?




Trump: War President or Anti-Interventionist?
June 24, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan

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    Where is the evidence that any such secret program exists? And if it does, why does America not tell the world where Iran’s secret nuclear facilities are located and demand immediate inspections?…

Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran’s shootdown of a U.S. Global Hawk spy plane over the Gulf of Oman.

The U.S. claims the drone was over international waters. Tehran says it was in Iranian territory. But while the loss of a $100 million drone is no small matter, no American pilot was lost, and retaliating by killing 150 Iranians would appear to be a disproportionate response.

Good for Trump. Yet, all weekend, he was berated for chickening out and imitating President Barack Obama. U.S. credibility, it was said, has taken a big hit and must be restored with military action.

By canceling the strike, the president also sent a message to Iran: We’re ready to negotiate. Yet, given the irreconcilable character of our clashing demands, it is hard to see how the U.S. and Iran get off this road we are on, at the end of which a military collision seems almost certain.

Consider the respective demands.

Monday, the president tweeted: “The U.S. request for Iran is very simple — No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!”

But Iran has no nuclear weapons, has never had nuclear weapons, and has never even produced bomb-grade uranium.

According to our own intelligence agencies in 2007 and 2011, Tehran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, the only way Iran could have a nuclear weapons program would be in secret, outside its known nuclear facilities, all of which are under constant U.N. inspection.

Where is the evidence that any such secret program exists?


And if it does, why does America not tell the world where Iran’s secret nuclear facilities are located and demand immediate inspections?

“No further sponsoring of terror,” Trump says.

But what does that mean?

As the major Shiite power in a Middle East divided between Sunni and Shiite, Iran backs the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s cινιℓ ωαr, Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Alawite Bashar Assad in Syria, and the Shiite militias in Iraq who helped us stop ISIS’s drive to Baghdad.

In his 12 demands, Pompeo virtually insisted that Iran abandon these allies and capitulate to their Sunni adversaries and rivals.

Not going to happen. Yet, if these demands are nonnegotiable, to be backed up by sanctions severe enough to choke Iran’s economy to death, we will be headed for war.

No more than North Korea is Iran going to yield to U.S. demands that it abandon what Iran sees as vital national interests.

As for the U.S. charge that Iran is “destabilizing” the Middle East, it was not Iran that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrew the Gadhafi regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Assad in Syria, or aided and abetted the Saudis’ intervention in Yemen’s cινιℓ ωαr.

Iran, pushed to the wall, its economy shrinking as inflation and unemployment are rising, is approaching the limits of its tolerance.

And as Iran suffers pain, it is saying, other nations in the Gulf will endure similar pain, as will the USA. At some point, collisions will produce casualties and we will be on the up escalator to war.

Yet, what vital interest of ours does Iran today threaten?

Trump, with his order to stand down on the missile strike on Iran, signaled that he wanted a pause in the confrontation.

Still, it needs to be said: The president himself authorized the steps that have brought us to this peril point.

Trump pulled out of and trashed Obama’s nuclear deal. He imposed the sanctions that are now inflicting something close to unacceptable if not intolerable pain on Iran. He had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard declared a terrorist organization. He sent the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and B-52s to the Gulf region.

If war is to be avoided, either Iran is going to have to capitulate, or the U.S. is going to have to walk back its maximalist position.

And who would Trump name to negotiate with Tehran for the United States?

The longer the sanctions remain in place and the deeper they bite, the greater the likelihood Iran will respond to our economic warfare with its own asymmetric warfare. Has the president decided to take that risk?

We appear to be at a turning point in the Trump presidency.

Does he want to run in 2020 as the president who led us into war with Iran, or as the anti-interventionist president who began to bring U.S. troops home from that region that has produced so many wars?

Perhaps Congress, the branch of government designated by the Constitution to decide on war, should instruct President Trump as to the conditions under which he is authorized to take us to war with Iran.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 05, 2019, 06:14:24 PM
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Trump’s Patriotism Vs. The New Anti-Americanism
July 5, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-patriotism-vs-the-new-anti-americanism-137266) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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One wonders: Where is all this negativity, this constant griping and grousing by the left, going to lead? Do these people think America will turn with hope to a party that reflexively recoils at patriotic displays?
Despite all the grousing and griping about his “politicizing” of the Fourth of July and “militarizing” America’s birthday, President (https://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-patriotism-vs-the-new-anti-americanism-137266#) Donald Trump turned the tables on his antagonists, and pulled it off.
As master of ceremonies and keynote speaker at his “Salute to America” Independence Day event, Trump was a manifest success.
A president acting as president is almost always a more effective campaigner than a president acting as campaigner. And Trump, in what he said and did not say, played the president Thursday night.
The crowd on the Mall was huge and friendly, extending from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. The TV coverage was excellent. Friday, virtually every major newspaper had front-page stories and photos.
Earlier, former Vice President Joe Biden had snidely asked, “What, I wonder, will Donald Trump say this evening when he speaks to the nation at an event designed more to stroke his ego than celebrate American ideals?”
Thursday evening, Joe got his answer.
Despite predictions he would use “Salute to America” for a rally speech, the president shelved partisan politics to recite and celebrate the good things Americans of all colors and creeds are doing, and the great things Americans have done since 1776.
“Together, we are part of one of the greatest stories ever told — the story of America,” said Trump. “It is the epic tale of a great nation whose people have risked everything for what they know is right and what they know is true.”
It was not a celebration of Trump but of America.
“What a great country!” declared the president. “(F)or Americans nothing is impossible.” Ours is “the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”
The second half of Trump’s speech was given over to tributes to the five branches of the armed forces — Coast Guard, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army — with each tribute ending in a display of air power.
The flexing of America’s military muscle had evoked early howls of protest. But the flyovers of F-22s and F-35s, the B-2 stealth bomber and the Ospreys, and the culmination of the aerobatics with the Navy’s Blue Angels, as the Marine Corps band played and all sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was exhilarating, even moving.
It was positive, uplifting, patriotic. And one imagines that not only Trump’s “deplorables” standing on the Mall loved i
Still, one wonders: Where is all this negativity, this constant griping and grousing by the left, going to lead? Do these people think America will turn with hope to a party that reflexively recoils at patriotic displays?
Everywhere it seems the left is attacking America’s history and her flawed heroes. Monday, the Charlottesville City Council voted 4-1 to remove April 13, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, as a paid holiday.
Why? Because our third president was a slave owner. The council’s public comment period featured demonstrators accusing the author of America’s Declaration of Independence with having been a racist and a rapist.
Last week, too, ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick urged his sponsor, Nike, to pull off the market its new Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July sneakers featuring Betsy’s Ross’s first American flag on the heel. Says Nike, Kaepernick told the company he finds the colonial flag offensive, as it was flown when slavery was still legal.
Just how far and fast the Democratic Party is moving left became clear last week with some startling findings of a new poll.
According to Gallup, while 76 percent of Republicans say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, only 22 percent of Democrats say the same, a sharp drop from last year. In 2013, the beginning of Obama’s second term, 56% of Democrats said they were “extremely proud” to be Americans.
Another jolting note: While huge majorities of Americans — 9 in 10 — are extremely proud of the U.S. military and America’s scientific achievements, more than two-thirds of all Americans now say that our political system no longer makes them proud.
This is especially true of Democrats. Only 25 percent, 1 in 4 Democrats, professes to be proud of our political system, our democracy.
A specter of anti-Americanism appears to be rising on the left.
Listening to the Democratic debates, and the depiction of the nation and its economy by the candidates, one would think we were living in the Paris of “Les Miserables” or the London of Charles Dickens.
Demography undeniably favors a millennial-dominant Democratic Party over the middle-aged and seniors (https://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-patriotism-vs-the-new-anti-americanism-137266#) party that is the GOP.
Yet how does a party, 3 of 4 of whose adherents profess no pride in its political system, persuade the nation to put it in charge of that system? How does a party, not one-fourth of whom are “extremely proud” to be an American, persuade a majority of Americans to entrust it with the leadership of their nation?
From liberals and progressives, we constantly hear griping, grousing and grievances. When do we hear the gratitude — for America?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: Last Tradhican on July 06, 2019, 02:21:18 AM
Everywhere it seems the left is attacking America’s history and her flawed heroes. Monday, the Charlottesville City Council voted 4-1 to remove April 13, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, as a paid holiday.
Why? Because our third president was a slave owner. The council’s public comment period featured demonstrators accusing the author of America’s Declaration of Independence with having been a racist and a rapist.
Last week, too, ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick urged his sponsor, Nike, to pull off the market its new Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July sneakers featuring Betsy’s Ross’s first American flag on the heel. Says Nike, Kaepernick told the company he finds the colonial flag offensive, as it was flown when slavery was still legal.
Just how far and fast the Democratic Party is moving left became clear last week with some startling findings of a new poll.
According to Gallup, while 76 percent of Republicans say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, only 22 percent of Democrats say the same, a sharp drop from last year. In 2013, the beginning of Obama’s second term, 56% of Democrats said they were “extremely proud” to be Americans.
This is especially true of Democrats. Only 25 percent, 1 in 4 Democrats, professes to be proud of our political system, our democracy.
A specter of anti-Americanism appears to be rising on the left.
Demography undeniably favors a millennial-dominant Democratic Party over the middle-aged and seniors (https://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-patriotism-vs-the-new-anti-americanism-137266#) party that is the GOP.
Yet how does a party, 3 of 4 of whose adherents profess no pride in its political system, ...How does a party, not one-fourth of whom are “extremely proud” to be an American, persuade a majority of Americans to entrust it with the leadership of their nation?
They think as liberals, immorally, as socialist/communist/Marxists because this is what they have been taught in the schools, and every year there are more of them coming out into adulthood. It is a punishment from God, it is the end of the road that started with Martin Luther. Protestantism is an inclined plain to the abyss of total unbelief. You can't fight Satan with Protestantism, so America's path will continue down to the abyss. Satan invented Protestantism, liberalism, communism, and the Novus Ordo religion, you can't fight Satan with Satan's tools.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 12, 2019, 10:34:16 AM
Are Yanks and Brits Going Their Separate Ways?
July 12, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/are-yanks-and-brits-going-their-separate-ways-137302) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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When Sir Kim Darroch’s secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration “dysfunctional … unpredictable … faction-riven … diplomatically clumsy and inept,” the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted.
When President Donald Trump’s tweeted retort called Darroch “wacky,” a “stupid guy” and “pompous fool” who had been “foisted on the US,” the countdown to the end began.
The fatal blow came when, in a debate with his rival for prime minister, Boris Johnson, who will likely replace Theresa May before the end of July, left Darroch twisting in the wind.
All in all, a bad week for the British Foreign Office when one of its principle diplomats is virtually declared persona non grata in country that is Great Britain’s foremost ally. All the goodwill from Trump’s state visit in June was torched in 72 hours.
Still, Darroch’s departure is far from the most egregious or grave episode of a leaked missive in U.S. diplomatic history.
In December 1897, Spanish ambassador Enrique Dupuy de Lome sent a letter to a friend in Cuba describing President (https://buchanan.org/blog/are-yanks-and-brits-going-their-separate-ways-137302#) William McKinley as “weak and catering to the rabble … a low politician who desires … to stand well with the jingos of his party.”
The De Lome letter fell into the hands of Cuban rebels who ensured that it was leaked to the U.S. Secretary of State. New York Journal owner William Randolph Hearst published the letter, Feb. 9, 1898, under the flaming headline: “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”
Americans were outraged, McKinley demanded an apology, the Spanish ambassador resigned. Coming six days before the battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor, the De Lome letter helped to push America into a war with Spain that McKinley had not wanted.
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On March 1, 1917, U.S. headlines erupted with news of a secret cable from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to his minister in Mexico City. The minister was instructed to offer Mexico a return of “lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona,” should war break out with the United States and Mexico enter (https://buchanan.org/blog/are-yanks-and-brits-going-their-separate-ways-137302#) the war on the side of Germany.
British intelligence had intercepted the “Zimmermann telegram” and helpfully made it public. Americans were enraged. Six weeks later, we were at war with the Kaiser’s Germany.
Sir Kim’s cable, which caused his resignation, was not of that caliber. Yet the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain is no longer what it was during the 20th century.
Back in the 19th century, there was no special relationship, but almost a special hostility. The U.S. declared war on Great Britain in 1812, and the British arrived in 1814 to burn down the Capitol and the White House and all the major public buildings in the city.
Gen. Andrew Jackson settled accounts in New Orleans in 1815.
During the war of 1861-1865, the British tilted to the Confederacy and built the legendary raider CSS Alabama that wrought devastation on Union shipping before being sunk off Cherbourg in 1864.
We almost went to war with Britain in 1895, when Grover Cleveland and Secretary of State Richard Olney brashly intruded in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela, and Lord Salisbury told us to butt out. “I rather hope that the fight will come soon,” yelped Theodore Roosevelt.
Cooler heads prevailed and Britain’s Arthur Balfour said the time would come when a statesman even greater than Monroe “will lay down the doctrine that between English-speaking peoples, war is impossible.”
So it came to be in the 20th century.
In 1917 and 1941, America came to the rescue of a Britain which had declared war, first on the Kaiser’s Germany, and then on Hitler’s. During 45 years of the Cold War, America had no stronger or more reliable ally.
But the world has changed in the post-Cold War era, and even more for Britain than for the United States.
Among London’s elites today, many see their future in the EU. U.S. trade with Britain is far less than U.S. trade with Canada, Mexico, China or Japan. Britain’s economy is a diminished share of the world economy (https://buchanan.org/blog/are-yanks-and-brits-going-their-separate-ways-137302#). The British Empire upon which the sun never set, holding a fifth of the world’s territory and people, has been history for over half a century. The U.S. population is now five times that of Great Britain. And London is as much a Third World city as it is an English city.
Scores of thousands of Americans and Brits are no longer standing together on the Elbe river across from the Red Army, an army that no longer exists, as the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union no longer exist.
Yet, in terms of language, culture, ethnicity, history, geography, America has no more natural ally across the sea. And the unfortunate circuмstances of Sir Kim’s departure do not cancel out that American interest.

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 16, 2019, 10:19:54 AM
Trump Fuels a Tribal War in Nancy’s House
July 16, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-fuels-a-tribal-war-in-nancys-house-137314) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Trump is driving a wedge right through the Democratic Party, between its moderate and militant wings. With his attacks over the last 48 hours, Trump has signaled whom he prefers as his opponent in 2020. It is not Biden; it is “the Squad.”
President Donald Trump’s playground (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-fuels-a-tribal-war-in-nancys-house-137314#) taunt Sunday that “the Squad” of four new radical liberal House Democrats, all women of color, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” dominated Monday morning’s headlines.
Yet those headlines smothered the deeper story.
The Democrats are today using language to describe their own leaders that is similar to the language of the 1960s radicals who denounced Democratic segregationist governors like Ross Barnett and George Wallace.
Consider what the four women have been saying.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Speaker Nancy Peℓσѕι of attacking “newly elected women of color.” Was she calling Peℓσѕι a “racist”?
“No!” protested AOC. But it sure sounded like it.
AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti attacked Native American Rep. Sharice Davids for her vote on a Peℓσѕι-backed bill that sent $4.6 billion in aid to the border but lacked the restrictions on Trump policies progressives had demanded.
Chakrabarti described Davids’ vote as “showing her … enable a racist system,” adding that some Democrats “seem hell bent to do to black and brown people what the old Southern Democrats did in the ’40s.”
The House Democratic Caucus ripped Chakrabarti, “Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color?”
At a Netroots Nation conference this weekend, African American Rep. Ayanna Pressley declared: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. … We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
This comes close to calling members of the Black Caucus “Uncle Toms.”
Monday, the president doubled down, tweeting:
“We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of Communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own Country, they’re calling the guards along our Border (the Border Patrol Agents) cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρ Guards, they accuse people who support Israel as doing it for the Benjamin’s”
The “Benjamins” recalls the accusation of Somali-born Ilhan Omar of Minnesota that the Israel Lobby buys the votes of members of Congress. “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.”
Rashida Tlaib of Michigan is the other congresswoman in Trump’s sights. Together, the four have achieved a prominence that almost exceeds that of Majority Leader Steny Hoyer or Majority Whip James Clyburn.
The four — AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar — have no clout in the Democratic caucus. But because of the confrontations they have caused and the controversy they have created, they have a massive media following.
Paradoxically, their interests in winning cheers as the fighting arm of the Democratic Party coincide with the interests of Donald Trump (https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-fuels-a-tribal-war-in-nancys-house-137314#). He entertains and energizes his base by answering in kind their attacks on him and by adopting incendiary rhetoric of his own. He is now assuming the old “America! Love it or Leave it!” stance in going after the four women as anti-American ingrates.
They, by calling Trump a criminal, racist and fascist for whom impeachment proceedings should have begun months ago, elate and energize the outraged left of their party.
Among the presidential candidates, some have begun to side with the four, with Bernie Sanders saying Peℓσѕι has been “a little” too tough on them.
On “Meet the Press,” Bernie added: “You cannot ignore the young people of this country who are passionate about economic and racial and social and environmental justice. You’ve got to bring them in, not alienate them.”
Trump’s Sunday attack forced Peℓσѕι to stand with her severest critics, and she re-elevated the race issue with this tweet: “When Trump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”
Do Democrats believe that refighting the racial battles of the 1960s that were thought to have been resolved is a winning hand in 2020?
Does Peℓσѕι think that demeaning white America is going to rally white or minority Americans to Democratic banners?
The race issue had already arisen in the first debate when Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs called out front-runner Joe Biden for befriending segregationist Senate colleagues in the ’70s and ’80s, and for colluding with them to block court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in the public schools.
Observing the clash between Trump and these women, the rank and file of the Democratic Party are being forced to take sides. Many will inevitably side with the fighters, as Democratic moderates appear timid and tepid.
Trump is driving a wedge right through the Democratic Party, between its moderate and militant wings. With his attacks over the last 48 hours, Trump has signaled whom he prefers as his opponent in 2020. It is not Biden; it is “the Squad.”
Sunday, Peℓσѕι recited again her mantra, “Diversity is our strength; unity is our power.” It sounded less like a proclamation than a plea.
We see the diversity. Where is the unity?

https://buchanan.org/blog/trump-fuels-a-tribal-war-in-nancys-house-137314
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 23, 2019, 06:20:56 AM
America: An Us vs. Them Country
July 22, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/america-an-us-vs-them-country-137335) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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But what is racism? …Republicans and conservatives believe “racist” is a term the left employs to stigmatize, smear and silence adversaries. As one wag put it, a racist is a conservative who is winning an argument with a liberal.
“Send her back! Send her back!”
The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump’s recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven.
This phrase will have a long shelf life. T-shirts emblazoned with “Send Her Back!” and Old Glory are already on sale on eBay.
Look for the chant at future Trump rallies, as his followers now realize that the chant drives the elites straight up the wall.
That 13-second chant and Trump’s earlier tweet to the four radical congresswomen of “the Squad” to “go back” to where they came from is being taken as the smoking gun that convicts Trump as an irredeemable racist whose “base” is poisoned by the same hate.
Writes The New York Times’ Charles Blow in a column that uses “racist” or “racism” more than 30 times: Americans who do not concede that Trump is a racist — are themselves racists: “Make no mistake. Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist.”
But what is racism?
Is it not a manifest dislike or hatred of people of color because of their color? Trump was not denouncing the ethnicity or race of Ilhan Omar in his rally speech. He was reciting and denouncing what Omar said, just as Nancy Peℓσѕι was denouncing what Omar and the Squad were saying and doing when she mocked their posturing and green agenda.
Clearly, Americans disagree on what racism is. Writes Blow:

“A USA Today/Ipsos poll published on July 17 found that more than twice as many Americans believe that people who call others racists do so ‘in bad faith’ compared with those who do not believe it.”
Republicans and conservatives believe “racist” is a term the left employs to stigmatize, smear and silence adversaries. As one wag put it, a racist is a conservative who is winning an argument with a liberal.
In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton famously said of Trump’s populist base, “You could put half of them into what I call the basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”
More than that, “Some … are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” To Hillary, Trump supporters were not part of the good America, the enlightened America.
Her defamation of Trump’s followers meshes with the media’s depiction of the folks laughing, hooting and chanting in North Carolina.
Trump supporters know what the media think of them, which is why in Middle America the media have a crisis of credibility and moral authority. Trump’s true believers do not believe them, trust them, like them or respect them. And the feeling is obviously mutual.
While raw and rough, how does the 13-second chant, “Send her back!” compare in viciousness to the chant of 1960s students on Ivy League and other campuses: “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is going to win!” This was chanted at demonstrations when the NLF, the Viet Cong, was killing hundreds of American soldiers every week.
How does 13 seconds of “Send her back!” compare with the chant of the mob that shut down midtown Manhattan in December 2014: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!”
This past week revealed anew what we Americans think of each other, which portends trouble ahead for the republic.
For a democracy to endure, there has to be an assumption that the loser in an election holds a promissory note that new elections are only a few years off. And if the losers can persuade a majority to support them, they can reassume positions of authority and realize their agenda.
Trump’s 40-45 percent of the nation is not only being constantly castigated and demonized by the establishment media but it is also being told that, in the not far distant future, it will be demographically swamped by the rising numbers of new migrants pouring into the country.
Your time is about up, it hears.
And most of the Democratic candidates have admitted that, if elected, the border wall will never be built, breaking into the country will cease to be a crime, ICE will be abolished, sanctuary cities will be expanded, illegal immigrants will be eligible for free health care (https://buchanan.org/blog/america-an-us-vs-them-country-137335#) and, for millions of people hiding here illegally, amnesty and a path to citizenship will be granted.
America, they are saying, will be so unalterably changed in a few years, your kind will never realize political power again, and your America will vanish in a different America where the Squad and like-minded leftists set the agenda.
Will the deplorables, who number in the scores of millions, accept a future where they and their children and children’s children are to submit to permanent rule by people who visibly detest them and see them as racists, sexists and fascists?
Will Middle America go gentle into that good night?

https://buchanan.org/blog/america-an-us-vs-them-country-137335
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on July 30, 2019, 10:00:48 AM
Is Trump Capturing the ‘Law and Order’ Issue?
July 30, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-capturing-the-law-and-order-issue-137355) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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A prediction: The incidence of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults in urban America, which saw a steep decline in the last three decades, is about to rise again.
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah cuмmings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black?
Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus?
Or did Trump go after cuмmings after a Saturday Fox News report  (https://buchanan.org/blog/video-how-do-living-conditions-in-rep-cuмmings-baltimore-district-compare-to-those-at-the-border-137359)that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border area for which cuмmings had demagogically berated Border Patrol agents?
Here are Trump’s crucial tweets:
“Elijah cuмmings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…
“…the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. (cuмmings’) District is a disgusting, rat (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-capturing-the-law-and-order-issue-137355#) and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
The Fox News report that triggered Trump’s tweets (https://buchanan.org/blog/video-how-do-living-conditions-in-rep-cuмmings-baltimore-district-compare-to-those-at-the-border-137359) featured a Maryland Republican strategist, Kimberly Klacik, whose videos showed piles of trash and abandoned homes (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-capturing-the-law-and-order-issue-137355#) in Baltimore. “A lot of people said he (cuмmings) hasn’t even been there in a while,” Klacik claimed.
And Trump, it appears, has more ammunition than that.
Baltimore in 2018 was the murder capital of America and ranked second among her most violent major cities. With St. Louis and Detroit, Baltimore is always at or near the top of the list of the most dangerous American cities.
And what has cuмmings, in office 28 years, done to alter that awful reputation?
As for the presence of rats and rodents, Baltimore has competitors.
There have lately been news reports of the homeless in LA and San Francisco living on city sidewalks, defecating where they sleep (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-capturing-the-law-and-order-issue-137355#), attracting rodents and vermin, with little or nothing done about it.
Is it racist to call attention to the decline of so many of America’s great cities that have long been under liberal Democratic rule?

Over this weekend, while Trump was tweeting, nine people were shot dead in Chicago and 39 wounded. Sounds like Baghdad or Kabul.
Is this the new normal that Americans must accept (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-capturing-the-law-and-order-issue-137355#)?
A prediction: The incidence of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults in urban America, which saw a steep decline in the last three decades, is about to rise again.
Why? Because the attitudes and policies that produced these sinking rates of crime and violence — especially the dramatic increase in the incarceration of criminals in America — are changing.
In 1980, some 500,000 criminals were in federal and state prisons and jails. By 2016, some 2.2 million inmates were in jails and prisons and another 4.5 million convicts were on parole or probation, being monitored.
As violent criminals were taken off the streets and put behind bars for years, crime fell, and most dramatically in cities like New York, where the backing of cops and intolerance of criminals by mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg was the most pronounced.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were not victimized by crimes in the last three decades because their would-be perpetrators were behind bars. But today, a campaign is afoot to reduce prison populations and use more progressive methods to deal with crime.
Ex-Vice President Joe Biden, who, as a senator and a chairman of the Judiciary Committee, played a role in taking criminals off the streets, seems almost apologetic about what he and the “law and order” Republicans of those decades accomplished.
And the mindset that put first the right of the innocent to be free from domestic violence is vanishing. A recent video of NYPD cops being doused with pails of water as they made their rounds in Harlem has gone viral. The number of applicants for police training programs is dropping. Verbal assaults on “white racist cops” have taken a toll on police morale.
We seem to be drifting back to the 1960s, when crime began to soar and “law and order” began to surge as a national issue.
That issue helped Barry Goldwater capture the nomination from a Republican establishment that had controlled his party for decades.
In 1966, Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan ran as a law and order (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-capturing-the-law-and-order-issue-137355#) candidate for governor and routed the liberal incuмbent by a million votes.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran as the law and order candidate, which helped him to stave off George Wallace and defeat Hubert Humphrey, whose Democratic Party was almost twice the size as the GOP.
In 1988, Democratic nominee Gov. Michael Dukakis’ prospects for the presidency vanished when he indicated he would not impose capital punishment, even on a criminal who had raped and murdered his wife.
Calling out the urban liberals who run most of America’s cities, for their failure to make those cities more livable and safe, might be a winning issue for Trump in 2020.
Is this where Trump is headed? Is it a coincidence that Attorney General Bill Barr just said he will begin imposing the death penalty?

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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 06, 2019, 09:42:21 AM
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Exploiting Massacres to Raise Poll Ratings
August 6, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/exploiting-massacres-to-raise-poll-ratings-137381) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Never let a crisis go to waste is an old political adage. And this crowd of candidates was not going to let that happen.
It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019.
In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera — police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials — were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead and wounded.
But for the Democratic presidential candidates, the El Paso atrocity was like a loose football in the Super Bowl.
A mad scramble broke out over who would be first and most savage in indicting President Donald Trump for moral complicity in mass murder.
Never let a crisis go to waste is an old political adage.
And this crowd of candidates was not going to let that happen. Yet the naked political exploitation of these horrific acts, before the bodies of many had been removed from the crime scene, was appalling to behold.
Learning in Las Vegas of the slaughter at the Walmart in El Paso, his hometown, Beto O’Rourke flew back that same day and sped to the scene.
Railed Beto, Trump “is a racist and he stokes racism in this country … and it leads to violence. … We have a president (https://buchanan.org/blog/exploiting-massacres-to-raise-poll-ratings-137381#) with white nationalist views in the United States today.” He called Trump’s language about Mexican immigrants “reminiscent of something you might hear in the Third Reich.”
Asked on Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he believes the president is a “white nationalist,” Beto eagerly assented: “Yes, I do.”
Bernie Sanders, asked by Tapper if he agreed with Beto, replied:
“I do. It gives me no pleasure to say this … all of the evidence out there suggests that we have a president who is a racist, who is a xenophobe, who appeals, and is trying to appeal, to white nationalism.”
On the same CNN show, Sen. Cory Booker almost outdid Beto, “I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this … (mass murder in El Paso) because he is stoking fear and hatred and bigotry.”
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Booker went on: “We have a president of the United States who is savagely fraying the bonds (https://buchanan.org/blog/exploiting-massacres-to-raise-poll-ratings-137381#) of our nation by speaking consistently words of hatred, words of division, words of demonization and demagoguery. … He is fueling an environment where white supremacists … are finding more and more license to strike out against the vulnerable, to strike out against the immigrant, to strike out against ‘the other.'”
Booker is saying Trump is rendering moral license to race conflict.
Elizabeth Warren issued a statement: “We need to call out white nationalism for what it is — domestic terrorism. It is a threat to the United States, and we’ve seen its devastating toll this weekend. And we need to call out the president himself for advancing racism and white supremacy.”
Ironically, The Washington Times reports that the Dayton shooter, who killed his sister and eight others, “described himself on social media as a pro-Satan ‘leftist,’ who wanted Joe Biden’s generation to die off, hated Trump, and hoped to vote for Sen. Elizabeth Warren for president.”
“I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding,” Connor Betts, the killer, reportedly tweeted.
Not to be left behind, Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs said of the president after the slaughter, he’s “a racist, there’s no question in my mind.”
These attacks, unprecedented in their savagery, testify to a hatred of Trump that is broad, deep and implacable, and unlikely to be constrained before November 2020.
Folks still speak wistfully of a return of the unity America once knew and of a coming together to stand again on common ground.
But where is the evidence for that hope?
If Trump’s fabled base is to going to stand loyally by him, and the Democratic candidates are going to unleash this kind of bile against him, whoever wins in 2020 will be not be able to unite us, absent a Pearl Harbor-style attack on this country.
Clearly the issue in the 2020 campaign is going to be Trump.
Is impeachment now back on the table? How can it not be?
Though Robert Mueller found no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, support for impeachment hearings passed the midway mark inside the Democratic caucus in the House last week, even before the horrible weekend.
And if Democrats believe about Trump what their candidates say about him — that he is a white nationalist racist and xenophobe deliberately stoking fear, hatred and violence, whose words and actions call to mind the fascist Italy of Benito Mussolini and Third Reich of nαzι Germany — how can the Democratic leadership credibly not try to impeach him?
Yet, blaming the massacre in El Paso on the rhetoric of Donald Trump is a charge that can come back to bite his attackers. Neither the right nor left has a monopoly on political extremism or violence. And the hate-filled rhetoric of the left this last weekend exceeds anything used by Trump.
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https://buchanan.org/blog/exploiting-massacres-to-raise-poll-ratings-137381
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 09, 2019, 09:10:11 AM

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Biden Goes All In on the Race Issue
August 9, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan

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   Migrants have been crossing the Mexican border at a rate of 100,000 a month. If one had to choose a word to describe graphically what is going on, would it not be invasion?

Those who believed America’s racial divide would begin to close with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the election of a black president in this century appear to have been overly optimistic.

The race divide seems deeper and wider than at any time in our lifetimes. Most of the aspiring leaders of the Democratic Party have apparently concluded that branding the president a “racist” and “white supremacist” is the strategy to pursue to win the nomination and the White House.

Here is Joe Biden, speaking in Iowa as President Donald Trump was visiting the wounded communities of Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas: “This president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation. … The energetic embrace of this president by the darkest hearts and the most hate-filled minds in this country says it all.

“We have a problem with this rising tide of … white supremacy in America. And we have a president who encourages and emboldens it.”

What had Trump done to invite such a charge?

The key piece of evidence linking Trump to the mass murderer of El Paso, is a single phrase out of a 2,000-word screed posted on social media, allegedly by the gunman minutes before carrying out his atrocity.

Patrick Crusius said he was striking this blow against the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” And Donald Trump has often used that term, invasion, to describe the crisis on the border.

Yet the word “invasion” to label what is happening on America’s Southern border long predated Trump, and, moreover, is both an accurate and valid description.

Consider. There are, by most estimates, at least 11 million migrants in the United States illegally, the equivalent of the entire population of Cuba. Lately, migrants have been crossing the Mexican border at a rate of 100,000 a month. If one had to choose a word to describe graphically what is going on, would it not be invasion?

What a panicked establishment, and its stable of candidates, is doing is transparent. By declaring “invasion” — a legitimate description of what is transpiring on the Southern border — to be inherently racist, it is conceding the word has power and is an effective weapon in the political arsenal of those the establishment seeks to censor, stigmatize and silence.

Trump’s adversaries want to stop him from using his most powerful and compelling arguments and images, the ones that enabled him to win the presidency and oust them from power. The left is now using “white supremacy” as its new hate term, because “racist” has all but lost its sting from overuse.

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But Biden’s raising of the race issue is going to come back and bite him.

Said Joe in Iowa: “Our president has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington.”

Yet, that greatest of the Founding Fathers, George Washington, whom Biden invoked as his beau ideal of a leader, was a slave owner and demonstrably more of a white supremacist than Trump.

And Biden is likely to be reminded of this by Sen. Cory Booker, his rival for the crucial black vote in the primaries, who, as Joe was speaking in Iowa, was at Emanuel AME Zion church in Charleston, South Carolina, tearing into the founding generation of Washington, Jefferson and Madison:

“Bigotry was written into our founding docuмents,” said Booker. “White supremacy has always been a problem in our American story.”

“Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny — these tactics aren’t a new perversion,” Booker went on. “They’ve been ingrained in our politics since our foundation.”

Are American voters supposed to respond warmly to this?

Biden’s words in Iowa — “We have a president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation” — appear to be a lift from Robert Kennedy’s attack on LBJ when Bobby announced for president just days after Lyndon Johnson was badly wounded in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

Said Bobby of the father of the Civil Right Act of 1964: “Our national leadership is calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”

LBJ and his associates, Bobby went on, “have removed themselves from the American tradition, from the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.”

“We are fighting for the soul of America,” echoed Biden in Iowa.

As for Wallace, whom Biden disparages, he was a segregationist, much like Biden’s patron, Sen. Jim Eastland of Mississippi, who called Joe “son,” and Strom Thurmond, whom Biden eulogized and who conducted the longest filibuster in history — against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

In George Wallace’s salad days, Joe sang a different tune, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer on Oct. 12, 1975:

“I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace — someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who wouldn’t pander but would say what the American people know in their gut is right.”

Perhaps Joe can become such a fearless leader in 2020.

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https://buchanan.org/blog/biden-goes-all-in-on-the-race-issue-137393
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 13, 2019, 10:29:04 AM




China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat
August 13, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/china-not-russia-the-greater-threat-137403) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Quote
Only Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom. If the American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept (https://buchanan.org/blog/china-not-russia-the-greater-threat-137403#) sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the course, will not be the USA.
Ten weeks of protests, some huge, a few violent, culminated Monday with a shutdown of the Hong Kong airport.
Ominously, Beijing described the violent weekend demonstrations as “deranged” acts that are “the first signs of terrorism,” and vowed a merciless crackdown on the perpetrators.
China is being pushed toward a decision it does not want to make: to use military force, as in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, to crush the uprising. For that would reveal the character of President Xi Jinping’s Communist dictatorship, as well as Beijing’s long-term plans for this semi-autonomous city of almost 7.5 million.
Yet this is not the only internal or border concern of Xi’s regime.
Millions of Muslim Uighurs in China’s west are in cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs undergoing “re-education” to change their way of thinking on loyalty, secession and the creation of a new East Turkestan.
In June, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Philippine fishing boat, leaving its 22 crewmen to drown. The fishermen were rescued by a Vietnamese boat.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s reluctance to resist China’s fortification in the South China Sea of the rocks and reefs Manila claims are within its own territorial waters has turned Philippine nationalism anti-China.
China’s claim to Taiwan is being defied by Taipei, which just bought $2.2 billion in U.S. military equipment including Abrams tanks and Stinger missiles.
Any Taiwanese declaration of independence, China has warned, means war.
While Taiwan’s request to buy U.S. F-16s has not yet been approved, in a rare visit, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen stopped over in the U.S. recently, before traveling on to Caribbean countries that retain diplomatic relations with Taipei. Beijing has expressed its outrage at the U.S. arms sales and Tsai’s unofficial visit.
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The vaunted Chinese economy is growing, at best, at half the double-digit rate of a decade ago, not enough to create (https://buchanan.org/blog/china-not-russia-the-greater-threat-137403#) the jobs needed for hundreds of millions in the countryside seeking work.
And talks have been suspended in the U.S.-China trade dispute, at the heart of which, says White House aide Peter Navarro, are Beijing’s “seven deadly sins” in dealing with the United States:
China steals our intellectual property via cyber-theft, forces U.S. companies in China to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S. companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans.
Such practices have enabled China to run up annual trade surpluses of $300 billion to $400 billion at our expense, and, says Navarro, have caused the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs in (https://buchanan.org/blog/china-not-russia-the-greater-threat-137403#) the U.S.
Moreover, China has used the accuмulated wealth of its huge trade surpluses to finance its drive for hegemony in Asia and beyond.
With President Donald Trump threatening 10% tariffs on $300 billion more in Chinese exports to the U.S., Xi must decide if he is willing to end his trade-war tactics against the U.S., which have gone on during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. If he refuses, will he accept the de-coupling of our two economies?
Only Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom.
If the American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the course, will not be the USA.
For three years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia’s theft of emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.
Yet the greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing’s theft in 2014 of the personnel files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of them holding top-secret clearances.
Compromised by this theft, said then FBI Director James Comey, was a “treasure trove of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works for the United States government.”
“A very big deal from a national security … and counterintelligence (https://buchanan.org/blog/china-not-russia-the-greater-threat-137403#) perspective,” said Comey. And Xi’s China, not Putin’s Russia, committed the crime. Yet America’s elites appear to have forgotten this far graver act of cyberaggresion.
Undeniably, Russia is a rival. But Putin’s economy is the size of Italy’s while China’s economy challenges our own. And China’s population is 10 times that of Russia, and four times that of the USA.
Manifestly, China is the greater menace.
Are Americans willing to make the necessary sacrifices to force China to abide by the rules of reciprocal trade?
Or will Trump be forced by political realities to accept the long-term and ruinous relationship we have followed since granting China permanent MFN status in 2001?
This issue is likely to decide the destiny of our relations and the future of Asia, if not the world.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 20, 2019, 07:20:10 AM
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When, If Ever, Can We Lay This Burden Down?
August 20, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/when-if-ever-can-we-lay-this-burden-down-137418) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Is it too soon to ask: What have we gained from our longest war? Was all the blood and treasure invested worth it? And what does the future hold?
Friday, President Donald Trump (https://buchanan.org/blog/when-if-ever-can-we-lay-this-burden-down-137418#) met in New Jersey with his national security advisers and envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who is negotiating with the Taliban to bring about peace, and a U.S. withdrawal from America’s longest war.
U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, in a war that has cost 2,400 American lives.
Following the meeting, Trump tweeted, “Many on the opposite sides of this 19 year war, and us, are looking to make (https://buchanan.org/blog/when-if-ever-can-we-lay-this-burden-down-137418#) a deal — if possible!”
Some, however, want no deal; they are fighting for absolute power.
Saturday, a wedding in Kabul with a thousand guests was hit by a ѕυιcιdє bomber who, igniting his vest, massacred 63 people and wounded 200 in one of the greatest atrocities of the war. ISIS claimed responsibility.
Monday, 10 bombs exploded in restaurants and public squares in the eastern city of Jalalabad, wounding 66.
Trump is pressing Khalilzad to negotiate drawdowns of U.S. troop levels from the present 14,000, and to bring about a near-term end to U.S. involvement in a war that began after we overthrew the old Taliban regime for giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.
Is it too soon to ask: What have we gained from our longest war? Was all the blood and treasure invested worth it? And what does the future hold?
If the Taliban could not be defeated by an Afghan army, built up by the U.S. for a decade and backed by 100,000 U.S. troops in 2010-2011, then are the Taliban likely to give up the struggle when the U.S. is drawing down the last 14,000 troops and heading home?
The Taliban control more of the country than they have at any time since being overthrown in 2001. And time now seems to be on their side.
Why have they persevered, and prevailed in parts of the country?

Motivated by a fanatic faith, tribalism and nationalism, they have shown a willingness to die for a cause that seems more compelling to them than what the U.S.-backed Afghan government has on offer.
They also have the guerrillas’ advantage of being able to attack at times and places of their own choosing, without the government’s burden of having to defend towns and cities.
Will these Taliban, who have lost many battles but not the war, retire (https://buchanan.org/blog/when-if-ever-can-we-lay-this-burden-down-137418#) from the field and abide by democratic elections once the Americans go home? Why should they?
The probability: When the Americans depart, the war breaks out anew, and the Taliban ultimately prevail.
And Afghanistan is but one of the clashes and conflicts in which America is engaged.
Severe U.S. sanctions on Venezuela have failed to bring down the Nicholas Maduro regime in Caracas but have contributed to the immiseration of that people, 10% of whom have left the country. Trump now says he is considering a quarantine or blockade to force Maduro out.
Eight years after we helped to overthrow Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Libya is still mired in cινιℓ ωαr, with its capital, Tripoli, under siege.
Yemen, among the world’s humanitarian disasters, has seen the UAE break with its Saudi interventionist allies, and secessionists split off southern Yemen from the Houthi-dominated north. Yet, still, Congress has been unable to force the Trump administration to end all support of the Saudi war.
Two thousand U.S. troops remain in Syria. The northern unit is deployed between our Syrian Kurd allies and the Turkish army. In the south, they are positioned to prevent Iran and Iranian-backed militias from creating a secure land bridge from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut.
In our confrontation with Iran, we have few allies.
The Brits released the Iranian tanker they seized at Gibraltar, which had been carrying oil to Syria. But when the Americans sought to prevent its departure, a Gibraltar court ruled against the United States.
Iran presents no clear or present danger to U.S. vital interests, but the Saudis and Israelis see Iran as a mortal enemy, and want the U.S. military rid them of the menace.
Hong Kong protesters wave American flags and seek U.S. support of their demands for greater autonomy and freedom in their clash with their Beijing-backed authorities. The Taiwanese want us to support them and sell them the weapons to maintain their independence. The Philippines wants us to take their side in the dispute with China over tiny islets in the South China Sea.
We are still committed to go to war to defend South Korea. And the North has lately test-fired a series of ballistic missiles, none of which could hit the USA, but all of which could hit South Korea.
Around the world, America is involved in quarrels, clashes and confrontations with almost too many nations to count.
In how many of these are U.S. vital interests imperiled? And in how many are we facing potential wars on behalf of other nations, while they hold our coat and egg us on?

https://buchanan.org/blog/when-if-ever-can-we-lay-this-burden-down-137418
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 23, 2019, 07:55:58 AM
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Greenland: Trump’s MAGA Idea!
August 23, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
 Votes: 5.00 Stars!
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   To those of us of who learned our U.S. history from texts in the 1940s and ’50s, President Donald Trump’s brainstorm of acquiring Greenland fits into a venerable tradition of American expansionism.

To those of us of who learned our U.S. history from texts in the 1940s and ’50s, President Donald Trump’s brainstorm of acquiring Greenland fits into a venerable tradition of American expansionism.

The story begins with colonial officer George Washington’s march out toward Fort Duquesne in 1754 and crushing defeat and near death at Fort Necessity, where, according to myth, he fired the first shot of what would become the French and Indian War.

With the British victory, Washington went home to Virginia, only to be called back in 1775 to lead the Continental Army in America’s War of Independence, which lasted six years, until the victory at Yorktown.

With the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Americans won title to all the land between the Atlantic and Mississippi, from Canada to Florida.

Twenty years later, in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison seized Napoleon’s offer and bought for $15 million the vast Louisiana Territory extending from New Orleans into Canada and so far west it virtually doubled the size of the United States.

In 1818, Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, was ordered by President James Monroe to march south to repel the murderous forays by Seminole Indians from Florida into Georgia.

Exceeding his orders, Jackson stormed into Florida, crushed the Seminoles, hanged two British “spies” he found there, put the Spanish governor on a boat to Cuba and came home, a national hero again, after almost igniting another war with the British.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams now coolly confronted the Spanish. If they could not control the Indians, Adams told the Spanish ambassador, we would. And to avoid more visits by General Jackson, the best solution for Madrid was to cede this derelict province to the United States.


Spain capitulated. Florida was ours.

In 1835, American settlers in the Mexican province of Texas, under the leadership of Jackson’s old lieutenant and fellow Indian fighter Sam Houston, seceded. At San Jacinto, they forced General Santa Anna to accept the independence of a new Lone Star Republic.

In his last days in office in 1845, President John Tyler brought Texas into the Union, and his successor, James Polk, sent an army to Texas to ensure that the U.S. border was now the Rio Grande, much farther south than the Mexicans claimed it to be.

In the subsequent 1846-48 war, the U.S. army invaded Mexico and marched to the capital, where Nicholas Trist of the State Department negotiated a peace whereby Mexico ceded half of its country — what became the American Southwest, plus California.

President Ulysses S. Grant, a veteran of that war, would call it the “most unjust war ever fought.” Yet, Mexico would, in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, sell an area twice the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. It would become part of the states of New Mexico and Arizona.

The Mexicans even offered to sell Baja California for $10 million. Congress declined the offer, saying we now had quite enough land.

When the cινιℓ ωαr ended, Secretary of State William Seward — who narrowly survived an assassination attempt the night John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln — sought to buy the islands of Greenland, Iceland, St. Thomas and the Dominican Republic. He failed, but he bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, putting himself in the history books.

Thus, from the day President John Adams left office, in just 67 years, America had grown to become the world’s second- or third-largest nation.

After the Spanish-American War of 1898, William McKinley would make us an imperial power by annexing Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines, the last in a brutal war that cost 200,000 Filipino lives.

McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, would engineer the secession of Panama from Colombia and America’s acquisition of the Canal Zone.

“I took Panama!” boasted T.R.

Ronald Reagan’s opposition to Jimmy Carter’s transfer of the Canal Zone and the canal itself to Panama would prove crucial to Reagan’s 1980 nomination and rout of Carter in a 44-state landslide.

Harry Truman also wanted to acquire Greenland, and in 1946, he offered Denmark $100 million in gold. The Danes declined, though they had sold the Virgin Islands to Woodrow Wilson in 1917.

How, then, did America acquire her vast territory?

By revolution, purchase, invasions, annexations, war, theft and expulsions — of French, British, Mexicans, Spanish and Native Americans. Quite a record.

While Trump’s diplomacy in the Greenland matter was not as deft as Seward’s in acquiring Alaska, the attitude exhibited would not be unfamiliar to many of the great men in our history.

And the cancellation of Trump’s state visit to Copenhagen aside, this issue of Greenland’s future has been tabled. It is not going away.

After all, China, the aspiring superpower of the 21st century, has exhibited an interest in this largest island on Earth, strategically located between Europe and America, amid the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

Methinks the Danes are headed for interesting times.
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on August 30, 2019, 06:08:08 PM
Let Them Howl, Boris!
August 30, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/let-them-howl-boris-137447) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Quote
Whatever may be said of him, Johnson has shown himself as a man of action, a risk-taker, a doer, like Trump, who has hailed Johnson for the suspension. And leaders like Johnson are today shouldering aside the cookie-cutter politicians to dominate the world stage.
Facing a Parliamentary majority opposed to a hard Brexit — a crashing out of the EU if Britain is not offered a deal she can live with — Boris Johnson took matters into his own hands.
He went to the Queen at Balmoral and got Parliament “prorogued,” suspended, from Sept. 12 to Oct. 14. That’s two weeks before the Oct. 31 deadline (https://buchanan.org/blog/let-them-howl-boris-137447#) Johnson has set for Britain’s departure.
The time his opposition in Parliament has to prevent a crash out of the European Union has just been sliced in half. His adversaries are incensed.
The speaker of the House of Commons called Johnson’s action “a constitutional outrage.” Johnson’s Tory Party leader in Scotland resigned. Labor Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn said Parliament will start (https://buchanan.org/blog/let-them-howl-boris-137447#) legislating Tuesday to block Johnson. There is talk of a no-confidence vote in the Tory government.
One recalls the counsel Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, gave his students: Never retract, never explain, just do it and let them howl! For Johnson has done what he was chosen, and pledged, to do.
Though he lacks a majority for a “no-deal Brexit,” his suspension of Parliament keeps faith with the hardline Tories who put their trust in him — that he would honor his commitment to get done by October’s end what the British people voted to do in 2016.
Whatever may be said of him, Johnson has shown himself as a man of action, a risk-taker, a doer, like Trump, who has hailed Johnson for the suspension. And leaders like Johnson are today shouldering aside the cookie-cutter politicians to dominate the world stage.

Matteo Salvini, interior minister, leader of the League party, and the most popular political figure in Italy, brought down his own government to force new elections he felt he would win. His ambition is to take the leadership not only of Italy but of the European populist right.
Salvini’s boldness backfired when the League’s ex-partner in the government, the leftist Five Star Movement, joined the Democratic Party to form a new government from which the League is excluded.
Yet Salvini, too, is in the mold of Trump and Vladimir Putin, who, when he saw a U.S.-backed coup take down the pro-Russian president in Ukraine, seized Crimea, home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet since the 18th century.
These leaders are men of action not words. And their countrymen are cheering their decisiveness.
India’s Narendra Modi is in the mold. After reelection, he revoked Article 370 of India’s constitution that guaranteed special rights to the Muslim-majority in Kashmir, a state over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars. To effect the annexation of Kashmir, Modi sent thousands of troops into the disputed territory, imposed a curfew, shut down the internet and arrested political leaders.
When Prime Minister Imran Khan asked Trump to intervene on Pakistan’s behalf, Trump, meeting with Modi at the G-7, called it a matter between the two countries.
While autocrats appear ascendant, there is another phenomenon of our time: popular uprisings and mass demonstrations as shortcuts to political change.
These began to flourish with the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, the latter of which brought down President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power. The Cairo revolution and subsequent election brought to power Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was intolerable to the Egyptian army, which executed a coup that led to new elections and the installation of the present ruler and former general Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
In 2014 came the protests in Maidan Square that led to the ouster of the pro-Russian government in Kiev and loss of Crimea.
This year saw mass demonstrations in Puerto Rico bring down the government in San Juan. In France, the Yellow Vest movement, rebelling against a fuel tax Emmanuel Macron imposed to cut carbon emissions, flooded the streets for months, demonstrating, rioting, even vandalizing the heart of Paris to get it repealed.
Then there is Hong Kong, a city of 7 million claimed by a China of 1.4 billion, where scores of thousands, even millions, have protested, blocked streets, shut down businesses and closed the airport.
The Hong Kong demonstrators are demanding what the 13 colonies demanded: freedom, liberty, independence. But as Xi Jinping is very much an authoritarian autocrat, the protesters are pushing their luck (https://buchanan.org/blog/let-them-howl-boris-137447#).
What motivates the democratic protesters and what propels the rise and welcome reception of the autocrats, the men of action, is not all that dissimilar.
It is impatience, a sense that the regime is out of touch, that it does not reflect or respond to what people want, that it is torpid and cannot act decisively, that it does not “get things done,” that it is tedious and boring.
Part of Trump’s appeal to his base is that people sense he feels exactly as they do. And they readily understand why Trump would not want to sit down at a G-7 gathering and gas endlessly about climate change.
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 06, 2019, 10:00:29 AM
Can Joe Biden Run This Marathon?
September 6, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/can-joe-biden-run-this-marathon-137470) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Given months of campaigning in which the principal feature has been his gaffes, why is Joe still the front-runner?
Thursday, Sept. 14, looks to be a fateful day in the half-century-long political career of Joe Biden.
That night, a three-hour debate will be held, a marathon in politics.
Biden will be on stage, taking incoming missiles for 180 minutes from nine rivals, each of whom is hungry for the Democratic nomination and has a huge investment in seeing him stumble and fall.
A solid showing by Biden that night, marked by wit and a mastery of the issues, would cause a storm surge of relief in the Democratic Party.
It would provide desperately needed reassurance to millions of Democrats who have a gnawing fear Biden’s time has come and gone, that he is losing it, that his memory is failing, and that, at any moment, from some egregious gaffe, his campaign could crater and crash.
If he stumbles that night, misremembers or misspeaks repeatedly in the three hours, the apprehension about his nomination, already widespread among the party elite, could turn into panic.
Why is the Democratic Party apprehensive about Joe Biden?
Though every poll has him running well ahead of his competitors, the Biden campaign has ranged from dull to embarrassing.
Biden began by speaking nostalgically of his days as a young senator and the warm friendships he formed with segregationist senators Herman Talmadge and Jim Eastland, the latter a Mississippi pillar of “massive resistance” to civil rights legislation.
In the first debate, Biden was skewered by Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs for having boasted of opposing the court-ordered busing that, hαɾɾιs claims, enabled her to get an integrated education in California.
Asked, in Keene, New Hampshire, how it felt to be in the lovely town, Biden volunteered, “Look, what’s not to like about Vermont.”
Biden spoke of meeting in his vice president’s office with students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the scene of a horrific school shooting. Only the Parkland massacre did not occur until after he left the vice presidency.

Speaking in the aftermath of shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Biden talked of the recent “tragic events in Houston and also in Michigan the day before.” After the shootings in Odessa, Texas, done with an assault rifle, an outraged Joe said it was “absolutely mindless” not to ban all firearm magazines that carry more than a single bullet.
“We choose unity over division. We choose science over fiction. We choose truth over facts,” Biden thundered in Des Moines.
Given months of campaigning in which the principal feature has been his gaffes, why is Joe still the front-runner?
Because he has been around so long as a senator and vice president, from 1973 to 2017, is well-known and well-liked, is the most acceptable of the candidates to moderates fearful of the rising radicalism in the party — and, above all, because every poll shows Biden has the best shot at beating Donald Trump.
Biden has undeniable assets. He was Barack Obama’s loyal subaltern. He is seen, even by opponents, as a nice guy, a politician without malice and a pragmatist unencuмbered by principle who can slide leftward at the same speed as his party on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.
Biden is a believer in the maxim of Sen. Henry Ashurst of Arizona that the “clammy hand of consistency should never rest for long upon the shoulder of a statesman.”
Also, Biden’s rivals have proven unimpressive, with the exception of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has steadily plodded upward to challenge the socialist Bernie Sanders for the second position.
Biden’s crowds are anemic compared to Warren’s. His speeches range from the unexciting to the boring. He has no enticing policy agenda, no inspiring message, no captivating slogan. As a political athlete, he is not even in the same league as Obama or JFK.
He does not excite the Democratic youth. And if he won in 2020, he would be, at 78, our oldest president. Jill Biden, his wife, made the case for Joe well: “You may like another candidate better, but you have to look at who’s going to win… Joe is that person.”
Like Warren Harding a century ago, Biden holds out to the nation the promise of a “return to normalcy.”
In his days in the Senate, he was famous for his tough-on-crime stand and his vote to authorize the war in Iraq — a blunder of historic proportions.
If elected, at the end of his first term, Biden would be 82. If he sought and served the two terms every president seems to seek, he would, in 2028, be 86 years old on leaving office.
Does the Joe Biden of the summer of 2019 look like he could be, a decade from now, the dynamic leader America could rely on to face down the successors to China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin?
Prediction: At some point in this campaign, Joe Biden will declare that, if elected, he will only serve one term.


https://buchanan.org/blog/
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 12, 2019, 07:01:33 PM
After Bolton, Trump Goals Remain Unrealized
September 12, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/after-bolton-trump-goals-remain-unrealized-137495) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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It is only among foreign policy elites in Beltway think tanks, the generals who ran the national security state, liberal interventionists in the media and the hierarchy of the GOP that we find echoes of Bolton. The rest of the country has moved on. They want an end to the endless wars and to put America first again.
The sudden and bitter departure of John Bolton from the White House was baked in the cake from the day he arrived there.
For Bolton’s worldview, formed and fixed in a Cold War that ended in 1991, was irreconcilable with the policies Donald Trump promised in his 2016 campaign. Indeed, Trump was elected because he offered a foreign policy that represented a repudiation of what John Bolton had advocated since the end of the Cold War.
Trump wanted to call off Cold War II with Russia, to engage with Vladimir Putin, and to extricate us from the Middle East wars into which Bolton and the neocons did so much to plunge the United States.
Where Trump demanded that NATO nations and allies like South Korea and Japan start (https://buchanan.org/blog/after-bolton-trump-goals-remain-unrealized-137495#) paying the cost of their own defense, Bolton is an empire (https://buchanan.org/blog/after-bolton-trump-goals-remain-unrealized-137495#) man who relishes the global role and responsibilities of America as the last superpower and custodian of the New World Order (https://buchanan.org/blog/after-bolton-trump-goals-remain-unrealized-137495#).
Trump saw in the hermit kingdom of North Korea an opportunity to end its isolation and bring Kim Jong Un into talks to persuade him to give up his nuclear weapons, in return for a full readmission and welcome into the world that Pyongyang turned its back on after World War II.
In Trump’s passive acceptance of Kim’s resumption of short-range missile tests last August, Bolton surely saw signs of appeasement.
To Bolton, Trump’s trashing of Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal was the first step toward a confrontation and clash to smash the Tehran regime. To Trump, it was a first step to a Trump-negotiated better bargain with Iran.
Bolton’s hawkish stance of confrontation, and conflict if necessary to impose our will, from the Eastern Baltic, to Ukraine and the Black Sea, to the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, the Korean Peninsula, today finds almost no broad support among the American electorate.
It is only among foreign policy elites in Beltway think tanks, the generals who ran the national security (https://buchanan.org/blog/after-bolton-trump-goals-remain-unrealized-137495#) state, liberal interventionists in the media and the hierarchy of the GOP that we find echoes of Bolton.
The rest of the country has moved on. They want an end to the endless wars and to put America first again.
In the Democratic debates, climate change — the melting ice caps of the Arctic and Greenland — represents the real “existential threat.”
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Only Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has made foreign policy her focus. But she is the antithesis of Bolton, an anti-interventionist who wants to end the wars and bring the troops home.
Yet, after Bolton’s departure, Trump’s problem is this: What he promised in 2016 he has been unable to deliver.
Rather than summits with Putin, the U.S. and NATO under Trump have sent additional forces to the eastern Baltic. We have let the U.S.-Russian strategic arms agreements lapse. We have sent lethal military aid to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass.
Bibi Netanyahu, not Trump, holds the meetings with the Russian president, is in Moscow again this week, and has plastered a huge poster of himself and Putin at his Likud Party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv.
We blacklist Putin, while Bibi relies on Vlad to help bring home the Russian-Jєωιѕн vote in Israel’s election next week.
We still have troops in Syria and Iraq and are closer to war with Iran than the day Trump took office. Such a war would become the defining event of Trump’s presidency and leave this country tied down in virtual perpetuity in the Middle East.
Trump’s hopes for a negotiated withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of his first term has been dealt a crippling blow with the cancellation of his Camp David summit with the Taliban.
Indeed, ex-Defense Secretary James Mattis threw cold water this week on the very idea of bringing our troops home. We must keep “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan, said Mattis, we cannot leave the Afghan forces alone to fight the terrorists and hold the country together:
“We’re going to have to stick with those countries that are not yet ready to do it on their own and keep … enough boots on the ground not to … turn the ground back over to the very enemy that attacked us before.”
What Mattis is saying is that Trump’s goal of extracting us from the “forever war” entails too great a risk, and U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan will have to soldier on, indefinitely.
North Korea continues to test missiles that may not be able to hit the U.S. homeland, but they could hit U.S. troops and bases in South Korea and Japan.
If, by 2020, Kim Jong Un still refuses to give up his nuclear weapons, Iran is back to enriching uranium, the Taliban atrocities continue unabated, and U.S. troops remain in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in the same numbers they are today, what does Trump do? What does Trump say?

https://buchanan.org/blog/after-bolton-trump-goals-remain-unrealized-137495
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 17, 2019, 08:49:50 AM
  



‘Locked and Loaded’ for War on Iran?
September 16, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
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   The War Party is giddy with excitement over the prospect of war with Iran, while the nation does not want another war.

“Iran has launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply,” declared Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Putting America’s credibility on the line, Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out the devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities that halted half of the kingdom’s oil production, 5.7 million barrels a day.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump did not identify Iran as the attacking nation, but did appear, in a tweet, to back up the secretary of state:

“There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom (of Saudi Arabia) as to who they believe was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed!”

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have been fighting Saudi Arabia for four years and have used drones to strike Saudi airport and oil facilities, claim they fired 10 drones from 500 kilometers away to carry out the strikes in retaliation for Saudi air and missile attacks.

Pompeo dismissed their claim, “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”

But while the Houthis claim credit, Iran denies all responsibility.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif says of Pompeo’s charge, that the U.S. has simply replaced a policy of “maximum pressure” with a policy of “maximum deceit.” Tehran is calling us liars.

And, indeed, a direct assault on Saudi Arabia by Iran, a Pearl Harbor-type surprise attack on the Saudis’ crucial oil production facility, would be an act of war requiring Saudi retaliation, leading to a Persian Gulf war in which the United States could be forced to participate.

Tehran being behind Saturday’s strike would contradict Iranian policy since the U.S. pulled out of the nuclear deal. That policy has been to avoid a military clash with the United States and pursue a measured response to tightening American sanctions.

U.S. and Saudi officials are investigating the sites of the attacks, the oil production facility at Abqaiq and the Khurais oil field.



According to U.S. sources, 17 missiles or drones were fired, not the 10 the Houthis claim, and cruise missiles may have been used. Some targets were hit on the west-northwest facing sides, which suggests they were fired from the north, from Iran or Iraq.

But according to The New York Times, some targets were hit on the west side, pointing away from Iraq or Iraq as the source. But as some projectiles did not explode and fragments of those that did explode are identifiable, establishing the likely source of the attacks should be only a matter of time. It is here that the rubber meets the road.

Given Pompeo’s public accusation that Iran was behind the attack, a Trump meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the U.N. General Assembly’s annual gathering next week may be a dead letter.

The real question now is what do the Americans do when the source of the attack is known and the call for a commensurate response is put directly to our “locked-and-loaded” president.

If the perpetrators were the Houthis, how would Trump respond?

For the Houthis, who are native to Yemen and whose country has been attacked by the Saudis for four years, would, under the rules of war, seem to be entitled to launch attacks on the country attacking them.

Indeed, Congress has repeatedly sought to have Trump terminate U.S. support of the Saudi war in Yemen.

If the attack on the Saudi oil field and oil facility at Abqaiq proves to be the work of Shiite militia from inside Iraq, would the United States attack that militia whose numbers in Iraq have been estimated as high as 150,000 fighters, as compared with our 5,000 troops in-country?

What about Iran itself?

If a dozen drones or missiles can do the kind of damage to the world economy as did those fired on Saturday — shutting down about 6% of world oil production — imagine what a U.S.-Iran-Saudi war would do to the world economy.

In recent decades, the U.S. has sold the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment. Did our weapons sales carry a guarantee that we will also come and fight alongside the kingdom if it gets into a war with its neighbors?

Before Trump orders any strike on Iran, would he go to Congress for authorization for his act of war?

Sen. Lindsey Graham is already urging an attack on Iran’s oil refineries to “break the regime’s back,” while Sen. Rand Paul contends that “there’s no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran.”

Divided again: The War Party is giddy with excitement over the prospect of war with Iran, while the nation does not want another war.

How we avoid it, however, is becoming difficult to see.

John Bolton may be gone from the West Wing, but his soul is marching on.

https://buchanan.org/blog/locked-and-loaded-for-war-on-iran-137502
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on September 27, 2019, 07:34:28 AM
 



Joe Biden: Impeachment’s First Casualty
September 27, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan

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    By making Ukraine the focus of the impeachment drive in the House, Peℓσѕι has also assured that the questionable conduct of Biden and son Hunter Biden will be front and center for the next four months before Iowa votes.

Even before seeing the transcript of the July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Nancy Peℓσѕι threw the door wide open to the impeachment of Donald Trump by the Democratic House.

Though the transcript did not remotely justify the advanced billing of a “quid pro quo,” Peℓσѕι set in motion a process that is already producing a sea change in the politics of 2020.

The great Beltway battle for the balance of this year, and perhaps next, will be over whether the Democrats can effect a coup against a president many of them have never recognized as legitimate and have sought to bring down since before he took the oath of office.

Peℓσѕι on Tuesday started this rock rolling down the hill.

She has made impeachment, which did not even come up in the last Democratic debate, the issue of 2020. She has foreclosed bipartisan compromise on gun control, the cost of prescription drugs and infrastructure. She has just put her own and her party’s fate and future on the line.

With Peℓσѕι’s assent that she is now open to impeachment, she turned what was becoming a cold case into a blazing issue. If the Democrats march up impeachment hill, fail and fall back, or if they vote impeachment only to see the Senate exonerate the president, that will be the climactic moment of Peℓσѕι’s career. She is betting the future of the House, and her party’s hopes of capturing the presidency, on the belief she and her colleagues can persuade the country to support the indictment of a president for high crimes.



One wonders: Do Democrats blinded by hatred of Trump ever wonder how that 40% of the nation that sees him as the repository of their hopes will react if, rather than beat him at the ballot box, they remove him in this way?

The first casualty of Peℓσѕι’s cause is almost certain to be the front-runner for the party nomination. Joe Biden has already, this past week, fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Iowa, New Hampshire and California. The Quinnipiac poll has her taking the lead nationally for the nomination, with Biden dropping into second place for the first time since he announced his candidacy.

By making Ukraine the focus of the impeachment drive in the House, Peℓσѕι has also assured that the questionable conduct of Biden and son Hunter Biden will be front and center for the next four months before Iowa votes.

What did Joe do? By his own admission, indeed his boast, as vice president he ordered then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to either fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden for $50,000 a month or forgo a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee that Kiev needed to stay current on its debts.

Biden insists the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, that Hunter had done no wrong, that he himself was unaware of his son’s business ties.

All these assertions have been contradicted or challenged.

There is another question raised by Biden’s ultimatum to Kiev to fire the corrupt prosecutor or forgo the loan guarantee. Why was the U.S. guaranteeing loans to a Kiev regime that had to be threatened by the U.S. with bankruptcy to get it to rid itself of a prosecutor whom all of Europe supposedly knew to be corrupt?

Whatever the truth of the charges, the problem here is that any investigation of potential corruption of Hunter Biden, and of the role of his father, the former vice president, in facilitating it, will be front and center in presidential politics between now and New Hampshire.

This is bad news for the Biden campaign. And the principal beneficiary of Peℓσѕι’s decision that put Joe and Hunter Biden at the center of an impeachment inquiry is, again, Warren.

Warren already appears to have emerged victorious in her battle with Bernie Sanders to become the progressives’ first choice in 2020. And consider how, as she is rising, her remaining opposition is fast fading.

Sen. Kamala hαɾɾιs has said she is moving her campaign to Iowa for a do-or-die stand in the first battleground state. Sen. Cory Booker has called on donors to raise $1.7 million in 10 days, or he will have to pack it in. As Biden, Sanders, hαɾɾιs and Booker fade, and “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg hovers at 5 or 6% in national and state polls, Warren steadily emerges as the probable nominee.

One measure of how deeply Biden is in trouble, whether he is beginning to be seen as too risky, given the allegations against him and his son, will be the new endorsements his candidacy receives after this week of charges and countercharges.

If there is a significant falling off, it could be fatal.

https://buchanan.org/blog/joe-biden-impeachments-first-casualty-137542


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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 01, 2019, 09:46:54 AM
‘Heartbroken’ Peℓσѕι Fast-Tracks Impeachment
October 1, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/heartbroken-Peℓσѕι-fast-tracks-impeachment-137553) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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For three years, the media-deep state axis has sought to overturn the election of 2016 and bring down Trump, starting with Russia-gate. Now it appears to have tailored and weaponized the impeachment process… This is what the deep state does to outsiders Middle America sends to Washington to challenge or dispossess it.
“This is a very sad time for our country. There is no joy in this,” said Nancy Peℓσѕι Saturday. “We must be somber. We must be prayerful. … I’m heartbroken about it.”
Thus did the speaker profess her anguish — just four days after announcing that her Democratic House would conduct an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.
But is this how it really went down? Is this how Peℓσѕι came to authorize an impeachment inquiry before she read the transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky?
Another explanation, based on the actual events, suggests itself.
By late September, Peℓσѕι was under constant fire from the House “resistance” that wanted Trump impeached and whose numbers were slowly growing. What was the speaker to do?
The judiciary committee is the body historically authorized by a vote of the full House to conduct impeachment inquiries. But to Peℓσѕι this was looking like a loser, a dead end, a formula for failure followed by a backlash against House Democrats and her own removal as speaker in January 2021, if not before.
How so? Her judiciary committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, in his investigation of Trump, had presided over a debacle of a hearing where Trump ally Corey Lewandowski mocked the members. House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth called the hearing a “fiasco.”
Thus, when news broke of a July 25 conversation between Trump and the president of Ukraine, during which Trump allegedly urged Zelensky “eight times” to investigate Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden’s connections to corrupt oligarchs, Peℓσѕι seized upon it to solve all her problems.
To satisfy the red-hots in her Democratic caucus, she announced an impeachment inquiry on her own. To spare her moderates the pain of having to vote for or against an inquiry, she skipped the floor vote.
To ensure the investigation was done swiftly, she took the franchise from Nadler and his judiciary committee and handed it to Adam Schiff and the intelligence committee. Now she is urging a narrowing of the articles of impeachment to just one — Trump’s request of Ukraine’s president to look into the Bidens.

Peℓσѕι’s hope: Have one House vote on a single article of impeachment by year end; then send it on to the Senate for trial and be done with it. This is Nancy Peℓσѕι’s fast track to impeachment of Trump and ruination of his presidency. But, to be sure, she is “heartbroken” about all this.
For three years, the media-deep state axis has sought to overturn the election of 2016 and bring down Trump, starting with Russia-gate. Now it appears to have tailored and weaponized the impeachment process.
That is what this is all about. It always is. Then-editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, when it looked like the Iran-Contra matter might break Ronald Reagan’s presidency, after his 49-state landslide, chortled, “We haven’t had this much fun since Watergate.”
This is what the deep state does to outsiders Middle America sends to Washington to challenge or dispossess it.
How should the Republican Party and Trump’s base respond?
Recognize reality. Whether or not Trump was ill-advised to suggest to the president of Ukraine that passing on the fruits of the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, the end game is bringing down Trump, democracy’s equivalent of regicide.
While the “whistleblower,” whose memo is the basis of these impeachment hearings, is well on his way to Beltway beatification, no campaign to depose the president can be allowed to cloak itself in anonymity indefinitely, for one man’s whistleblower is another man’s ѕєdιтισnist.
Whom did the whistleblower collaborate with to produce his memo? What is his background? What are his biases? The people have a right to know. And democracy dies in darkness, does it not?
Not until 30 years after Watergate did we learn the “whistleblower” known as “Deep Throat” was a corrupt FBI veteran agent who leaked grand jury secrets to The Washington Post to discredit acting Director Pat Gray and thereby become FBI director himself.
His identity was sheltered for three decades. For whose benefit (https://buchanan.org/blog/heartbroken-Peℓσѕι-fast-tracks-impeachment-137553#)?
Republicans should not allow Democrats to fast-track this process but should give their troops time to recognize the stakes involved, organize a defense and repel this latest establishment attempt to overthrow a president elected to come to the capital to corral that establishment.
Force all the Democratic candidates for president to take a stand on removing Trump for high crimes — over a nebulous phone (https://buchanan.org/blog/heartbroken-Peℓσѕι-fast-tracks-impeachment-137553#) call to Kiev.
And the U.S. Senate should refuse to take up and should return to the House any bill of impeachment done in a short-circuited and savagely partisan manner, as this one is being done. There should be no rush to judgment.
If the election of 2020 is going to be about President Trump, tell the nation that the people will decide his political fate in November 2020, and that of Joe Biden if Democrats believe he is as pure as the driven snow and choose (https://buchanan.org/blog/heartbroken-Peℓσѕι-fast-tracks-impeachment-137553#) to nominate him.

https://buchanan.org/blog/heartbroken-Peℓσѕι-fast-tracks-impeachment-137553
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 04, 2019, 08:26:28 AM
Is China the Country of the Future?
October 4, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Under Xi Jinping, the mask (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564#) of benign giant has slipped and the menacing face of 21st-century China is being revealed, for its people, its neighbors, and the world to see.
With the fall of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, the defeat of his armies and the flight to Formosa, that was the question of the hour in 1949. And no one demanded to know more insistently than the anti-Communist Congressman John F. Kennedy:
“Whatever share of the responsibility was Roosevelt’s and whatever share was (General George) Marshall’s, the vital interest of the United States in the independent integrity of China was sacrificed, and the foundation was laid for the present tragic situation in the Far East.”
Tragic indeed was the situation. The most populous nation on earth, for which America had risked and fought a war with the Japanese Empire, had been lost to Stalin’s empire.
A year after Peking fell to Mao Zedong, Chinese armies stormed into Korea to drive the Americans back from the Yalu River and back across the 38th parallel, threatening to throw them off the Peninsula.
In the seven decades since October 1949, millions of Chinese have perished in ideological pogroms like the “Great Leap Forward” of the ’50s, and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” during which President Nixon came to China.
Yet in terms of national and state power over those 70 years, and especially in the last 30 when America threw open her markets to Chinese goods and Beijing ran up $4 trillion to $5 trillion in trade surpluses with the U.S., a new China arose. It was on display this week in Tiananmen Square.
The China of Xi Jinping boasts land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers that provide a strategic deterrent against the United States. Beijing’s conventional forces on land, sea, and in air and space rival any on earth.
Since Y2K, its economy has swept past that of Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Japan to become the world’s second largest. China is now the world’s premier manufacturing power.
Yet, under Xi Jinping, the mask of benign giant has slipped and the menacing face of 21st-century China is being revealed, for its people, its neighbors, and the world to see.

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The Uighurs of west China are being forced into re-education camps to be cured of their tribalist, nationalist and Islamic beliefs. Christians are being persecuted. Tibetans are being replaced in their homeland by Han Chinese. The Communist Party’s role and rule as the font of ideological, political and moral truth is being elevated and imposed.
The Chinese still hold land seized from India 50 years ago. China now claims as sovereign territory virtually all of a South China Sea, which encompasses territorial waters of six nations. It has begun building air, naval and military bases on rocks and reefs belonging to Manila.
China has warned foreign warships to stay out of the Taiwan Strait and has built up its force on the mainland opposite the island, warning that any move by Taiwan to declare independence would be regarded as an act of war. It claims the Japanese-held Senkaku Islands.
In its Belt and Road projects to tie China to Central and South Asia and Europe, China has lent billions to build ports, only to take possession of the facilities when local regimes default on their loans (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564#).
But not all is going well for the regime on its 70th birthday.
The people of Hong Kong, who are surely being cheered by many on the mainland of China, have been protesting for months, demanding the liberty and independence for which American patriots fought in our Revolution, not Mao’s revolution.
Nor are the newly prosperous Chinese people fools. They relish the rising power of China and the respect their country commands in the world, but they know it was not Marx, Lenin or Mao who produced their prosperity. It was capitalism. They cannot but be uneasy seeing the freedoms and benefits (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564#) they enjoy being dissipated in a trade war with the Americans and the new repression issuing from Beijing.
Among the epochal blunders America has committed since the end of the Cold War, three stand out.
The first was our disastrous plunge into the Middle East to create (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564#) regimes oriented to the West. The second was the expansion of NATO to the front porch of Russia, driving the largest nation on earth, and one of its most formidable nuclear powers, into the arms of China.
The third was to throw open America’s markets to Chinese goods on favorable terms, which led to the enrichment and empowerment of a regime whose long-term threat to U.S. interests and American values is as great as was that of the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The question for America’s statesmen is how to cope with the rising challenge of China while avoiding a war that would be a calamity for all mankind. Patience, prudence and perseverance commend themselves.
But the first necessity is to toss out the ideological liberalism which proclaims that David Ricardo’s free trade dogmatism is truth for all nations at all times and that John Locke’s ideas apply to all cultures and countries.
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https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 08, 2019, 10:45:36 AM
Is Trump At Last Ending Our ‘Endless Wars’?
October 8, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-at-last-ending-our-endless-wars-137583) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Among those objecting most loudly to an American withdrawal from the forever wars of the Middle East are those who were the most enthusiastic about plunging us in.
The backstage struggle between the Bush interventionists and the America-firsters who first backed Donald Trump for president just exploded into open warfare, which could sunder the Republican Party.
At issue is Trump’s decision to let the Turkish army enter Northern Syria, to create a corridor between Syrian Kurds and the Turkish Kurds of the PKK, which the U.S. and Turkey regard as a terrorist organization.
“A disaster in the making,” says Lindsey Graham. “To abandon the Kurds” would be a “stain on America’s honor.”
“A catastrophic mistake,” said Rep. Liz Cheney.
“If reports about US retreat in Syria are accurate,” tweeted Marco Rubio, Trump will have “made a grave mistake.”
“The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake,” said ex-U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, “we must always have the backs of our allies. ” But of our NATO ally of almost 70 years, Haley said, “Turkey is not our friend.”
Sen. Mitt Romney called it a “betrayal”:
“The President’s decision to abandon our Kurd allies in the face of an assault by Turkey is a betrayal. It says that America is an unreliable ally; it facilitates ISIS resurgence; and it presages another humanitarian disaster.”
Trump tweeted this defense of his order to U.S. forces not to resist Turkish intervention and the creation of a Turkish corridor in Syria from the eastern bank of the Euphrates to Iraq:
“The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades. … I held off this fight for … almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”
When, in December, Trump considered ordering all U.S. troops home from Syria, Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned in protest.
Behind this decision is Trump’s exasperation at our NATO allies’ refusal to take back for trial their own citizens whom we and the Kurds captured fighting for ISIS.
The U.S. has “pressed France, Germany, and other European nations, from which many captured ISIS fighters came, to take them back, but they … refused,” said a Sunday White House statement. “The United States will not hold them for what could be many years and great cost. … Turkey will now be responsible for all ISIS fighters in the area captured over the past two years.”
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What are the arguments interventionists are using to insist that U.S. forces remain in Syria indefinitely?
If we pull out, says Graham, the Kurds will be forced, for survival, to ally themselves with Bashar Assad.
True, but the Kurds now occupy a fourth of Syria, and this is not sustainable. We have to consider reality. Assad, the Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah have won the war against the Sunni rebels we and our Arab friends armed and equipped.
We are told that the Kurds will be massacred by Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, who sees them as terrorist allies of the PKK.
But the Turks occupied the Syrian border west of the Euphrates and the Kurds withdrew without massacres. And how long must we stay in Syria to defend the Kurds against the Turks? Forever?
If we depart, ISIS will come back, says Cheney: “Terrorists thousands of miles away can and will use their safe-havens to launch attacks against America.”
But al-Qaida and ISIS are in many more places today than they were when we intervened in the Middle East. Must we fight forever over there — to be secure over here? Why cannot Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States deal with ISIS and al-Qaida in their own backyard?
Why are ISIS and al-Qaida over there our problem over here?
“This will throw the region into further chaos,” says Graham.
But if Trump’s decision risks throwing the region into “further chaos,” what, if not wholesale U.S. intervention, created the “present chaos”?
Consider. Today, the Taliban conduct more attacks and control much more territory than they did in all the years since we first intervened in 2001.
Sixteen years after we marched to Baghdad, protests against the Iraqi regime took hundreds of lives last week, and a spreading revolt threatens the regime.
Saudi Arabia is tied down and arguably losing the war it launched against the Houthi rebels in 2015. Iran or its surrogates, with a handful of cruise missiles and drones, just shut down half of the Saudi oil production.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is awakening to his nation’s vulnerability and may be looking to negotiate with Tehran.
Among those objecting most loudly to an American withdrawal from the forever wars of the Middle East are those who were the most enthusiastic about plunging us in.
And, yes, there is a price to be paid for letting go of an empire, but it is almost always less than the price of holding on.
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https://buchanan.org/blog/is-trump-at-last-ending-our-endless-wars-137583
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 10, 2019, 08:41:48 PM
Is Impeachment Now Inevitable?
October 10, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-impeachment-now-inevitable-137603) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Declaring for impeachment also gives Biden a way to deflect questions about what son Hunter did for that $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company, while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point man battling corruption in Ukraine.
“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848.
Joe Biden’s Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment in the party he professes to lead.
Several factors surely influenced Biden’s change of mind.
Beset by gaffes and mental lapses while campaigning, which rivals like Cory Booker have seized upon to imply that Biden, at 76, is losing it and may not be up to the demands of the presidency, the former vice president has been on a steady slide in the polls.
This week, he was displaced as Democratic front-runner by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And the $15 million Biden boasts of raising in the third quarter was eclipsed by the $25 million raised by Warren.
Moreover, with Bernie Sanders hospitalized after a heart attack, the possibility of a stampede to Warren as the socialist-progressive flag-bearer of the party has become real.
Biden concluded that he could not remain ambivalent and allow his rivals to appear tougher on Trump, especially when the cause of impeachment unites and animates the party and media establishment as powerfully as it does.
By taking his stand, Biden has made the question — Where do you stand on impeaching Trump? — the big issue in Tuesday’s Democratic debate.
Declaring for impeachment also gives Biden a way to deflect questions about what son Hunter did for that $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company, while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point man battling corruption in Ukraine.
So it was that Biden came to tell a rally in New Hampshire:

“To preserve our constitution, our democracy, our basic integrity, he should be impeached. … He’s shooting holes in the constitution … we cannot let him get away with it.”
With polls showing a majority of Americans favoring an inquiry, and a Fox News poll showing a majority favoring Trump’s conviction and removal, impeachment appears inevitable.
What is Trump’s defense strategy?
Earlier this week, with a defiant letter from White House counsel Pat Cipollone dismissing the House inquiry as a fraud and a farce, Trump seemed to signal a strategy of massive resistance.
Wrote Cipollone: “Your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections. … The Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it.”
By Wednesday, however, Trump had backed away from Armageddon.
His new position: If the full House votes to open an impeachment inquiry, and he is given the same rights and protections Richard Nixon was given in 1974, he, Trump, would respect House subpoenas, while retaining the right to challenge them in the Supreme Court.
Thus, as Nancy Peℓσѕι and House Democrats seek to ram through a bill of impeachment by Thanksgiving, based on Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s president, Trump is preparing for siege warfare.
As Trump has himself conceded, impeachment is probable, even if the outcome of this historic collision between the president and Congress, which will decide the fates of Peℓσѕι, Trump and Biden alike, is, as of yet, undetermined.
Yet in this struggle, Trump is not without assets.
The first is Adam Schiff, who has become the prosecution’s face in the impeachment battle. This is good news for the White House. For Schiff’s visceral hatred of Trump and desire to see him impeached, convicted, deposed, disgraced and imprisoned is a matter of record.
As long as Schiff heads up the impeachment inquiry, many will see it as simply a savage, partisan and vindictive exercise.
Then are also two potentially explosive inquiries into the roots of the Mueller investigation that are well-advanced. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been looking into allegations that the FBI and DOJ abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to launch the probe and kick-start the Russia investigation.
The Horowitz report is expected to be released within weeks.
U.S. Attorney John Durham has also spent months investigating the origins of the counter-intelligence investigation of Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.
Among Durham’s questions: Were intel agents of Britain, Italy and Australia enlisted to spy on Americans by U.S. intelligence agencies? For any counterintelligence operation against a presidential campaign would have required a signoff by then-President Obama.
Administration officials have also told Fox News that when Robert Mueller met with Trump in May 2017, Mueller was pursuing the open post as director of the FBI, something the former special counsel denied under oath during his congressional testimony.
Emails released this month through a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch indicate Mueller knew he could be named as special counsel if he wasn’t chosen as FBI director.
Russiagate consumed the first three years of Trump’s presidency. “Ukrainegate” and impeachment give promise of dominating the fourth.

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-impeachment-now-inevitable-137603
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 15, 2019, 05:26:59 AM
Is the Interventionists’ Era Over for Good?
October 15, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-interventionists-era-over-for-good-137617) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Denunciation of Erdogan for invading Syria is almost universal. Congress is clamoring for sanctions. NATO allies are cutting off weapons sales. But before we act, some history should be revisited.
President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria.
Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences.
A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria against the will of the Damascus regime and army.
Had the U.S. refused to vacate Syrian lands on Turkey’s demand, a fight would be inevitable, whether with Turkey, Damascus or both. And this nation would neither support nor sustain a new war with Turks or Syrians.
And whenever the Americans did leave, the Kurds, facing a far more powerful Turkey, were going to have to negotiate the best deal they could with Syria’s Bashar Assad.
Nor was President Recep Erdogan of Turkey going to allow Syrian Kurds to roost indefinitely just across his southern border, cheek by jowl with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK that Erdogan regards as a terrorist threat to the unity and survival of his country.
It was Russia that stepped in to broker the deal whereby the Kurds stood down and let the Syrian army take over their positions and defend Syria’s border regions against the Turks.
Some ISIS prisoners under Kurdish control have escaped.
But if the Syrian army takes custody of these prisoners from their Kurdish guards, those ISIS fighters and their families will suffer fates that these terrorists have invited.
Denunciation of Erdogan for invading Syria is almost universal. Congress is clamoring for sanctions. NATO allies are cutting off weapons sales. But before we act, some history should be revisited.
Turkey has been a NATO ally, a treaty ally, for almost seven decades. The Kurds are not. Turkish troops fought alongside us in Korea. Turkey hosted Jupiter missiles targeted on Russia in the Cold War, nuclear missiles we withdrew as our concession in the secret JFK-Khrushchev deal that ended the Cuban missile crisis.
The Turks accepted the U.S. weapons, and then accepted their removal.

The Turks have the second-largest army in NATO. They are a nation of 80 million, a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. They dominate the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea for all U.S. and Russian warships.
U.S. warplanes are based at Turkey’s Incirlik air base, as are 50 U.S. nuclear weapons. And Turkey harbors millions of refugees from the Syrian cινιℓ ωαr, whom Erdogan keeps from crossing into Europe.
Moreover, Erdogan’s concern over the Syrian Kurdish combat veterans on his border should be understood by us. When Pancho Villa launched his murderous 1916 raid into Columbus, New Mexico, we sent General “Black Jack” Pershing with an army deep into Mexico to run him down.
With no allies left fighting on our side in Syria, the small U.S. military force there is likely to be withdrawn swiftly and fully.
Today, the Middle East and world have been awakened to the reality that when Trump said he was ending everlasting commitments and bringing U.S. troops home from “endless wars,” he was not bluffing.
The Saudis got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh’s oil production, did nothing.
Said Washington, this is between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Hence, it was stunning that the administration, at the end of last week, under fire from both parties in the House and Senate for “abandoning” the Kurds, announced the deployment of 1,500 to 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia to bolster the kingdom’s defense against missile attacks.
The only explanation for the contradiction is Sen. Henry Ashurst’s maxim: “The clammy hand of consistency should never rest for long upon the shoulder of a statesman.”
Yet, this latest U.S. deployment notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia has got the message: Trump will sell them all the weapons they can buy, but no Saudi purchase ensures that the Yanks will come and fight their wars.
Thus, the Saudis have begun negotiating with the Houthi rebels, with whom they have been at war in Yemen since 2015. And they are seeking talks with Iran. A diplomatic resolution of quarrels seems to have come to commend itself to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, once he learned that the Americans do not regard Saudis as we do NATO allies.
Undeniably, the decisions — not to retaliate against Iran for the attack on Riyadh’s oil facilities, and the decision to terminate abruptly the alliance with Syria’s Kurds — sent shock waves to the world.
Where the Americans spent much of the Cold War ruminating about an “agonizing reappraisal” of commitments to malingering allies, this time the Yanks may be deadly serious.
This time, the Americans may really be going home.
Every nation that today believes it has an implied or a treaty guarantee that the U.S. will fight on its behalf should probably recheck its hole card.

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-the-interventionists-era-over-for-good-137617
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 18, 2019, 09:02:14 AM
Is Putin the New King of the Middle East?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

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Friday - October 18, 2019

"If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United States of America, 6,000 miles away?"


"Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East," proclaimed Britain's Telegraph. The article began:

"Russia's status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the US."

"Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate" was the title of a Telegraph column. "Putin Seizes on Trump's Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role," said the Financial Times.

The U.S. press parroted the British: Putin is now the new master of the Mideast. And woe is us.

Before concluding that Trump's pullout of the last 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria is America's Dunkirk, some reflection is needed.
 

Yes, Putin has played his hand skillfully. Diplomatically, as the Brits say, the Russian president is "punching above his weight."

He gets on with everyone. He is welcomed in Iran by the Ayatollah, meets regularly with Bibi Netanyahu, is a cherished ally of Syria's Bashar Assad, and this week was being hosted by the King of Saudi Arabia and the royal rulers of the UAE. October 2019 has been a triumphal month.

Yet, consider what Putin has inherited and what his capabilities are for playing power broker of the Middle East.

He has a single naval base on the Med, Tartus, in Syria, which dates to the 1970s, and a new air base, Khmeimim, also in Syria.

The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med — Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania, Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf.

We have the world's largest economy. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's, and not a tenth the size of ours.

And now that we are out of Syria's cινιℓ ωαr and the Kurds have cut their deal with Damascus, consider what we have just dumped into Vladimir Putin's lap. He is now the man in the middle between Turkey and Syria.

He must bring together dictators who detest each other. There is first President Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles, from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq.

Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year cινιℓ ωαr, who is unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish troops.

Reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable Syrian and Turkish demands is now Putin's problem. If he can work this out, he ought to get the Nobel Prize.

"Putin is the New King of Syria," ran the op-ed headline in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred thousand Syrians are dead from the cινιℓ ωαr. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted, and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe.

If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United States of America, 6,000 miles away?

Wednesday, two-thirds of the House Republicans joined Nancy Peℓσѕι's Democrats to denounce Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and dissolve our alliance with the Kurds. And Republican rage over the sudden abandonment of the Kurds is understandable.

But how long does the GOP believe we should keep troops in Syria and control the northeastern quadrant of that country? If the Syrian army sought to push us out, under what authority would we wage war against a Syrian army inside Syria?

And if the Turks are determined to secure their border, should we wage war on that NATO ally to stop them? Would U.S. planes fly out of Turkey's Incirlik air base to attack Turkish soldiers fighting in Syria?

If Congress believes we have interests in Syria so vital we should be willing to go to war for them — against Syria, Turkey, Russia or Iran — why does Congress not declare those interests and authorize war to secure them?

Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining American values.

If Putin is king of Syria, it is because he was willing to pay the price in blood and treasure to keep his Russia's toehold on the Med and save his ally Bashar Assad, who would have gone under without him.

Who dares wins. Now let's see how Putin likes his prize.
 

Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 22, 2019, 08:33:59 AM
Is Democracy a Dying Species?
October 22, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-democracy-a-dying-species-137638) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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How does a democracy that has spawned within itself a powerful and implacable enemy deal with it?
What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy?
What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands?
Our world may be about to find out.
Chile is the most stable and prosperous country in Latin America.

Yet when its capital, Santiago, recently raised subway fares by 5%, thousands poured into the streets. Rioting, looting, arson followed. The Metro system was utterly trashed. Police were assaulted. People died. The rioting spread to six other cities. Troops were called out.
President a Sebastian Pinera repealed the fare hike and declared a national emergency, stating, “Chile is at war against a powerful, implacable enemy who does not respect anything or anyone and is willing to use violence and crime without any limits.”
How does a democracy that has spawned within itself a powerful and implacable enemy deal with it?
Last week, tens of thousands of Lebanese of all faiths and political associations rioted in Beirut and Tripoli to demand the overthrow of the regime and the ouster of its president, speaker of parliament and Prime Minister Saad Hariri. All must go, the masses demand.
In Barcelona, Friday, half a million people surged into the streets in protest after the sentencing in Madrid of the secessionists who sought to bring about the independence of Catalonia from Spain in 2017.
In all of China, few enjoy the freedoms of the 7 million in Hong Kong. Yet, for five months, these fortunate and free Chinese, to protest a proposal that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China, stormed into the streets to defy the regime and denounce the conditions under which they live.
These protests have been marked by riots, vandalism, arson and clashes with police. “Hong Kong streets descended into chaos following an unauthorized pro-democracy rally Sunday,” writes the Associated Press. Protesters “set up roadblocks and torched businesses, and police responded with tear gas and a water cannon. Protesters tossed firebombs and took their anger out on shops with mainland Chinese ties.”
What are the Hong Kong residents denouncing and demanding?
They are protesting both present and future limitations on their freedom. The appearance of American flags in the protests suggests that what they seek is what the agitators behind the Boston Tea Party and the boys and men at Concord Bridge sought — independence, liberty and a severing of the ties to the mother country.
Yet, because the Communist regime of Xi Jinping could not survive such an amputation, the liberation of Hong Kong is not in the cards. The end to these months of protest will likely be frustration, futility and failure.
Perhaps it is that realization that explains the vehemence and violence. But the rage is also what kills the support they initially received.
In 1960s America, the first civil rights demonstrations attracted widespread sympathy. But the outburst of urban riots that followed in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and 100 cities after Martin Luther King’s assassination sent millions streaming to the banners of Gov. George Wallace in the campaigns of 1968 and 1972.
When the “yellow vest” protests broke out in 2018 in Paris, over a fuel tax, the demonstrators had the support of millions of Frenchmen.
But that support dissipated when protesters began smashing windows of boutique shops on the Champs-Elysee, assaulting police and desecrating monuments and memorials.
This reversion to violence, ransacking of stores and showering of police with bricks, bottles and debris, is costing the protesters much of the backing they enjoyed. In the trade-off between freedom and order, people will ultimately opt for order.
Yet, one wonders: Why are these outbursts of violent protests and rioting taking place in stable, free and prosperous societies?
Chile is the most stable and wealthy country in South America. Catalonia is the most prosperous part of Spain. Paris is hardly a hellhole of repression. And Hong Kong is the freest city of China.
If the beneficiaries of freedoms and democratic rights come to regard them as insufficient to produce the political, economic and social results they demand, what does that portend for democracy’s future?
For, despite the looting, arson and attacks on cops in Hong Kong, Xi Jinping is not going to order his satraps to yield to popular demands for autonomy or independence. Nor is Madrid going to accept the loss of Barcelona and secession of Catalonia. Nor is the conservative Chilean government going to yield to the street rebels and revolutionaries. Nor is Paris going to back down to the “yellow vests.”
Yet, one wonders: If the “end of history” and worldwide triumph of democratic capitalism thesis has, as most agree, been disproven, is it possible that the Age of Democracy is itself a passing phase in the history of the West and the world?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on October 25, 2019, 09:03:57 AM




Imperial Capital but America-First Nation
October 25, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/imperial-capital-but-america-first-nation-137653) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Is America still the world’s last superpower with global policing obligations? Or should we shuck off this imperial role and make America, again, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, “a normal country in a normal time”?
“Let someone else fight over this long blood-stained sand,” said President Donald Trump in an impassioned defense of his decision to cut ties to the Syrian Kurds, withdraw and end these “endless wars.”
Are our troops in Syria, then, on their way home? Well, not exactly.
Those leaving northern Syria went into Iraq. Other U.S. soldiers will stay in Syria to guard oil wells that we and the Kurds captured in the war with ISIS. Another 150 U.S. troops will remain in al-Tanf to guard Syria’s border with Iraq, at the request of Jordan and Israel.
And 2,000 more U.S. troops are being sent to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom from Iran, which raises a question: Are we coming or going?
In his conflicting statements and actions, Trump seemingly seeks to mollify both sides of our national quarrel:
Is America still the world’s last superpower with global policing obligations? Or should we shuck off this imperial role and make America, again, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, “a normal country in a normal time”?
In Middle America, anti-interventionism has carried the day. As Trump says, no declaration at his rallies is more wildly welcomed than his pledge to end our Middle East wars and bring the troops home.
But in this imperial capital, the voice of the interventionist yet prevails. The media, the foreign policy elite, the think tanks, the ethnic lobbies, the Pentagon, the State Department, Capitol Hill, are almost all interventionist, opposed to Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds. Rand Paul may echo Middle America, but Lindsey Graham speaks for the Republican establishment.
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Yet the evidence seems compelling that anti-interventionism is where the country is at, and the Congress knows it.
For though the denunciations of Trump’s pullout from Syria have not ceased, one detects no campaign on Capitol Hill to authorize sending U.S. troops back to Syria, in whatever numbers are needed, to enable the Kurds to keep control of their occupied quadrant of that country.
Love of the Kurds, so audible on the Hill, does not go that far.
While surely loud, the neocons and liberal interventionists who drown out dissent in D.C. appear to lack the courage of their nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr convictions.
In 1940-41, the anti-interventionists of “America First” succeeded in keeping us out of the world war (after Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September of 1939 and Britain and France went to war). Pearl Harbor united the nation, but not until Dec. 7, 1941, two years later — when America First folded its tents and enlisted.
Today, because both sides of our foreign policy quarrel have powerful constituencies, we have paralysis anew, reflected in policy.
We have enough troops in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from overrunning Kabul and the big cities, but not enough to win the war.
In Iraq, which we invaded in 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein and install a democracy, we brought to power the Shia and their Iranian sponsors. Now we battle Iran for political influence in Baghdad.
Across the Middle East, we have enough troops, planes and ships to prevent our expulsion, but not enough to win the wars from Syria to Yemen to Afghanistan.
Bahrain in the Persian Gulf is the home base of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. We have 13,000 troops and a major air base at Al Udeid in Qatar. U.S. Army Central Command and 13,000 U.S. troops are in Kuwait. Trump has sent more troops to Saudi Arabia, but it was the “infidel” troops’ presence on sacred Saudi soil that was among the reasons Osama bin Laden launched 9/11.
To the question, “Are we going deeper into the Middle East or coming out?” the answer is almost surely the latter.
Among the candidates who could be president in 2021 — Trump, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders — none is an interventionist of the Lindsey Graham school. Three are anti-interventionist and anti-war, which may help explain why Democrats are taking a second look at Hillary Clinton.
According to polls, Iran is first among the nations that Americans regard as an enemy. Still, there is no stomach for war with Iran. When Trump declined to order a strike on Iran — after an air and cruise missile attack shut down half of Saudi oil production — Americans, by their silent acquiescence, seemed to support our staying out.
Yet if there is no stomach in Middle America for war with Iran and a manifest desire to pull the troops out and come home, there is ferocious establishment resistance to any withdrawal of U.S. forces. This has bedeviled Trump through the three years of his presidency.
Again, it seems a stalemate is in the cards — until there is some new explosion in the Mideast, after which the final withdrawal for America will begin, as it did for the exhausted British and French empires after World War II.
That we are leaving the Middle East seems certain. Only the departure date is as yet undetermined.

https://buchanan.org/blog/imperial-capital-but-america-first-nation-137653
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 01, 2019, 07:11:47 PM

50 Years Ago: The Day Nixon Routed the Establishment
November 1, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
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    Ten days after the “silent majority” speech, Vice President Spiro Agnew, in Des Moines, launched an assault on the unholy matrimony of media power and liberal bias. Agnew questioned whether the networks near-monopoly over the primary source of information for the American people should be permanently ceded to so tiny and unrepresentative an elite.

[Note: Agnew speech video included below]

What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation?

Who started the fire?

Many trace the roots of our uncivil social conflict to the 1960s and the Johnson years when LBJ, victorious in a 61% landslide in 1964, could not, by 1968, visit a college campus without triggering a violent protest.

The morning after his narrow presidential victory in 1968, Richard Nixon said his goal would be to “bring us together.” And in early 1969, he seemed to be succeeding.

His inaugural address extended a hand of friendship to old enemies. He withdrew 60,000 troops from Vietnam. He left the Great Society largely untouched and proposed a Family Assistance Plan for the poor and working class. He created a Western White House in San Clemente, California.

In July, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

America approved. Yet the elites seethed. For no political figure of his time was so reviled and hated by the establishment as was Richard Nixon.

By the fall of 1969, that establishment, which had led us into Vietnam and left 500,000 U.S. troops there as of January 1969, had turned against their own war, declared it “an unwinnable war” and “Nixon’s war,” and begun to cheer the huge anti-war protests scheduled for October and November.

David Broder of The Washington Post was one who saw clearly what was happening: “It is becoming more obvious with every passing day that the men and movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon in 1969. The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.”

In a cover story titled “Nixon in Trouble,” Newsweek echoed Broder:

“From almost every quarter last week the nine-month-old Administration of Richard M. Nixon was under sustained attack and angry fire, and increasingly the target of the attacks was Mr. Nixon himself and his conduct of the Presidency.”

On Oct. 15, some 250,000 descended on the capital for the largest demonstration in history. A stunned Time declared that, instead of resisting its demands, Nixon should prepare “the country for the trauma of distasteful reversal.”

Time wanted Nixon to declare Vietnam a lost cause.

But by now, Nixon, realizing his presidency was in danger of being broken like LBJ’s — but believing he was reading the nation better than the establishment — had decided to wheel and fight.

On Nov. 3, 1969, Nixon delivered an Oval Office address that was carried live on every network. After reciting the case Ike, JFK and LBJ had all made for resisting a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, Nixon laid out his own policy, the rationale for it, and urged the “great silent majority” to stand by him for peace with honor.

The network commentators almost universally disparaged Nixon’s address as repetitive and unresponsive to the crisis of his presidency.

Washington’s elites, however, had misread the nation.


An instant poll found that 70% of the country supported Nixon’s declared policy. A coalition of 300 House members endorsed Nixon’s stand. Liberal Democrats in the Senate rejected Nixon’s policy, but Southern and conservative Democratic senators backed him.

Ten days after the “silent majority” speech, Vice President Spiro Agnew, in Des Moines, launched an assault on the unholy matrimony of media power and liberal bias. Agnew questioned whether the networks near-monopoly over the primary source of information for the American people should be permanently ceded to so tiny and unrepresentative an elite.

VIDEO: Spiro Agnew: Television News Coverage Speech – Des Moines, Iowa – Nov 13, 1969
Note: Audio version and full text of speech can be viewed here…]

All three networks carried Agnew’s speech live, but were rocked on their heels by the reaction. Scores of thousand of telegrams and letters poured into network offices and the White House, with the vast majority agreeing with the vice president.

The liberal establishment had sustained a historic defeat.

By December, Nixon was the most admired man in America. His approval rating in the Gallup Poll was 68%. Only 19% disapproved of how he was conducting his presidency. Dr. Billy Graham was the second-most admired man, and Agnew third.

Nor was this but a blip in the Nixon presidency. When, three years later, Democrats nominated the most impassioned and articulate of their anti-war senators, George McGovern, Nixon would crush him in a 49-state landslide.

In Watergate, the establishment would get its pound of flesh for its rout by Nixon in November 1969 and its humiliation in November 1972. But that establishment would never recover what it lost — the respect and regard of the American people in the ’60s and early ’70s.

JFK’s “best and brightest,” whose hour of power was “Camelot,” were broken on the wheel of Vietnam. After taking us into Southeast Asia, they had washed their hands of their own war and declared it immoral.

So great was the loss of esteem for the establishment among the silent majority, America’s elite would soon cease to call themselves liberals and change their names to “progressives.”

https://buchanan.org/blog/50-years-ago-the-day-nixon-routed-the-establishment-137693
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 08, 2019, 09:53:58 AM
Will ‘Sexist’ White Males Derail Warren?
November 8, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/will-sexist-white-males-derail-warren-137724) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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The three white males are denigrating and piling on the woman who is the front-runner with attacks on her personality for which conservatives, if they used such tactics, would be charged with “dog-whistling” the white working class.
After celebrating Tuesday’s takeover of Virginia’s legislature and the Kentucky governorship, the liberal establishment appears poised to crush its biggest threat: the surging candidacy of Elizabeth Warren.
From the tempo and tenor of the attacks, establishment fears of Warren’s success are real — and understandably so.
Two Wednesday polls show Warren running even with Joe Biden nationally. And a new Iowa poll shows Warren in front of the field with 20%, and Biden falling into fourth place with 15%.
The danger for Democrats: While Warren is now the party’s front-runner, they fear she’s a sure loser to Donald Trump in 2020.
And, again, with reason. A recent poll of six battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, showed Trump beating or tying Warren in all of them except for Arizona.
Nightmare scenario: Warren wins the nomination, but when her neo-Marxist agenda is exposed, Middle America recoils in horror.
The economic elite is already sounding the alarm.
Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase says Warren “vilifies successful people.” Microsoft founder Bill Gates says her proposals would imperil “innovation” and “capital formation.”
Writing in The New York Times, Obama adviser Steven Rattner describes a Warren presidency as “a terrifying prospect.”
Warren would “extend the reach and weight of the federal government far further into the economy than anything even Franklin Roosevelt dreamed of (and) … turn America’s uniquely successful public-private relationship into a dirigiste European-style system.”
“If you want to live in France” — where half the GDP is controlled by the regime — says Rattner, “Warren should be your candidate.”
What finally shocked anti-Warren liberals into action was her recent revelation of how she intends to pay for her “Medicare for all” plan.
Warren’s plan would require at least $23 trillion more in federal spending over a decade. Other experts say the added costs could run to $32 trillion, raising the U.S. government’s share of the GDP by one-half and abolishing the private health insurance plans of 156 million Americans.
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“Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered,” writes Rattner, “Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs.”
Beyond “Medicare for All,” Warren has other plans. Universal child care and free schooling from pre-kindergarten through college and the cancelation of student loans, plus a new look at reparations for slavery.
How would President Warren pay for all her “plans”?
She would raise the corporate rate to 35% from 21%, and slam a 40% tax on the profits of companies that try to flee the country.
She would raise the capital gains tax, impose new estate taxes, raise Social Security taxes on folks with higher incomes, and confiscate 2% of the wealth of those with $50 million in assets and 3% of the wealth of those with $1 billion, every year.
Writes Politifact: “All told, we counted $7 trillion in new spending over a 10-year period, and that’s without Medicare for All. On the flip side, Warren offered specific tax proposals that came to $4.55 trillion.”
Still, Warren’s socialism is not what her main rivals, all white men, are zeroing in on. They’ve decided to play hardball.
Thursday, under a headline, “Warren Faces Accusations that She’s ‘Angry,’ Which Supporters Say is Sexist,” The Washington Post reported:
“Two of the leading male candidates in the Democratic presidential primary race — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — have escalated separate lines of attack as they attempt to counter the field’s most prominent woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is antagonistic and angry.”
Warren has a “my way or the highway” approach, said Buttigieg, she is “so absorbed in the fighting that it is as though fighting were the purpose.”
Biden says Warren, who has a real shot at taking the nomination, reflects “an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.”
This is “treacherous,” warns the Post, “given that many Democrats remain upset over what they view as the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton, the party’s last nominee.”
The Democratic Party today defines itself as an inclusive party of women, gαys, Hispanics, African Americans and other people of color.
Yet three months out from the decisive early contests of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the party is going into the semifinals of its contest for a leader and future president without a single person of color in the final four.
Moreover, the three white males are denigrating and piling on the woman who is the front-runner with attacks on her personality for which conservatives, if they used such tactics, would be charged with “dog-whistling” the white working class.
When one looks at the approval-disapproval rating of the president, re-election appears problematic. When one looks at the Democrats’ agenda and field of candidates, the odds of Trump’s re-election seem a good deal better.
This thing is by no means over.

https://buchanan.org/blog/will-sexist-white-males-derail-warren-137724
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 12, 2019, 08:00:54 AM
Bernie Leads His Party to Open Borders
November 12, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-leads-his-party-to-open-borders-137743) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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With cartel battles escalating into a war that Mexico City has no stomach for fighting, and a record number of migrants from Central America crossing Mexico to flood into the USA, what is the Democratic Party’s policy for halting the rising tide?
Some 100 members of an American Mormon community in northern Mexico, nine of whom — women, children, toddlers — were massacred a week ago on a lonely stretch of highway, just crossed over into Arizona.
Other family members who have lived there for decades will follow.
The atrocity was the work of one of the cartels battling for control of the drug traffic into the United States.
In Mexico’s Sinaloa state in October, an arrest of Ovidio Guzman Lopez, son of “El Chapo,” who sits in a New York prison, brought a military-style cartel attack on the state capital, Culiacan, followed by a surrender to the cartel gunmen by national guard and army troops, and a release of the captive.
“Is Mexico a failed state?” asks The Washington Times. Its editorial describes “Another Blood-Soaked Year in Mexico” where 17,000 people were murdered by July and the 2019 death toll is expected to reach 32,000.
USA Today reports: “Through August of the current fiscal year, the Border Patrol apprehended 457,871 migrants arriving as ‘family units’ … a 406% increase compared to the 90,554 family unit apprehensions during the same period the previous year. Migrant families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador made up almost 92% of the total.”
With cartel battles escalating into a war that Mexico City has no stomach for fighting, and a record number of migrants from Central America crossing Mexico to flood into the USA, what is the Democratic Party’s policy for halting the rising tide?
Democrats are moving toward an “open door” policy on the U.S. border, an open borders embrace of any and all who wish to come.
America, apparently, does not belong to those who live here and love the country. America belongs to anyone who chooses to come. America belongs to the world.
Consider Bernie Sanders’ immigration proposal, outlined the week of the massacre of Mormon women and children.

On Day One, President Sanders would declare a moratorium on deportations and offer a “swift pathway to citizenship” for all illegal migrants who have been here for five years.
Bernie would break up ICE. Border-jumping would cease to be a crime and become a civil offense like jaywalking. The “Muslim ban” would be abolished.
President Sanders would back sanctuary cities that refuse to work with U.S. law enforcement. Asylum seekers would not have to wait in Mexico as their claims were processed but would be welcomed into the USA.
Family separations would end. Trump’s wall, which Bernie calls “racist,” would be history. The administration’s treatment of illegal immigration “as a criminal and national security matter is inhuman, impractical and must end.”
Migrants who enter illegally would qualify for federal health care and the same social welfare benefits as U.S. citizens. Immigrant officials say Sanders’ proposals would create an irresistible magnet for millions of migrants from all over the world to stampede into the USA.
The Nation magazine calls Sanders’ plan “one of the boldest immigration plans any major politician has put forward in years, and comes amid a campaign season that has seen a major shift to the left among Democratic candidates on immigration.
“With calls for a total moratorium on deportations, abolishing ICE and providing a path to citizenship for undocuмented migration, the plan serves as a road map for what a fair and just immigration can be.”
From another standpoint, Sanders’ proposal is a surrender to the reality that a leftist regime lacks the conviction or will to stop an endless stream of people from migrating here.
Americans troubled over what is happening on the Syrian-Turkish border, or Ukrainian-Crimean border, might take a closer look at what will happen at our own border, and to our own country, if Democrats win the presidency and throw open the doors to unrestricted immigration.
The federal budget, already running trillion-dollar deficits, and state budgets, too, will see huge increases in the cost of social programs, without the commensurate income tax revenues to pay for them.
Even at present levels, illegal immigration is bringing in millions of people without the work, education or language skills to compete and assimilate rapidly in a first world, Western economy.
These migrants pay virtually no income taxes, yet, would qualify for the same benefits as U.S. citizens. The inevitable result: another run-up in an annual deficit already running $1 trillion in the red.
Politically, so massive a migration of peoples who, once they become citizens, vote 70%-90% Democratic means an end of the GOP as a truly national party.
If we open the borders, how do we stop the drugs from coming in? How do we stop the cartels from following MS-13, which is already here?
Socially, this country is as splintered as it has been since the 1960s.
Will a barrage of migrants add to its diversity, or deepen the ethnic, racial and cultural divides that are turning us into two, three, many Americas?
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https://buchanan.org/blog/bernie-leads-his-party-to-open-borders-137743
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 19, 2019, 03:13:47 PM
What’s Behind Our World on Fire?
November 19, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/whats-behind-our-world-on-fire-137777) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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The issues pulling continents, countries and capitals apart thus appear to be growing, enduring, and, indeed, perhaps insoluble.
When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given.
Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to handle.
So, too, there appears to be a multiplicity of causes igniting and fueling the protests and riots sweeping capital cities across our world.
The year-long yellow vest protests in Paris, set off by fuel price hikes that were swiftly rescinded, seemed to grind down this weekend to several thousand anarchic and violent die-hards.
The riots in Chile were started to oppose a small hike in train and subway fares in a country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America. Yet the protesters have succeeded in forcing the elected government to capitulate and write a new constitution.
Bolivia’s uprising was over an election stolen by longtime president Evo Morales, who fled to Mexico to be welcomed by the foreign minister.
Among the issues dividing Bolivians are economic inequality and tribalism — indigenous peoples living alongside a European-descended elite.
In Hong Kong, where protesters appear to be making a last stand in the city’s universities, the cause that first united them was a proposal to allow the city’s citizens to be extradited to China for trial.
While that proposal was withdrawn, the rioting has continued for half a year and now involves Molotov cocktails, slingshots, bows and arrows, and catapults to hurl bricks at police.
The latest demands include investigating and punishing police for excessive force, restoration of all liberties and freedoms Hong Kong enjoyed in the last years of British rule, and the right to elect their own leaders.
If Hong Kong can resist mighty China for half a year, imagine what Taiwan, with three times Hong Kong’s population, significant military forces, and 100 miles of water between the island and mainland, could do to resist the rule of the Party of Xi Jinping.

In Baghdad, the protests went violent early, and hundreds are now dead.
A primary cause of the rioters’ rage — Iranian influence in Iraqi politics that arose among the Shiite majority after George W. Bush overthrew the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein.
The Iranian-backed Shiite militia who helped stop the Islamic State group’s drive to Baghdad in the days of the caliphate are now less welcome. “Iranians, go home!” is a popular demand.
The recent violent protests inside Iran are rooted in both politics and economics. U.S. sanctions keep millions of barrels of Iran’s oil off world markets every day, causing surging deficits, exacerbating the plunging value of Iran’s currency and contributing to rising inflation.
The triggering event for the riots in Iran was a rise in the price of gas, which is still only a fraction of what Americans pay per gallon, but is deeply painful for working- and middle-class Iranians who are stretched to the limit.
The issues pulling continents, countries and capitals apart thus appear to be growing, enduring, and, indeed, perhaps insoluble.
Consider. The economic issues propelling workers into the streets to protest inequalities of wealth and income are occurring at a time when our world has never been more prosperous.
The ethnic and racial clashes within and between nations seem increasingly beyond the capacity of democratic regimes to resolve peacefully.
As for matters of fundamental belief — political, ideological, religious — the divides here, too, seem to be deepening and widening.
India’s Hindu majority of 1 billion seeks suppression of its Muslim minority. Secular Chinese put Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs in cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs by the thousands to root out their birth loyalties and convert them into Marxist nationalists. Han Chinese are moved into Tibet and Xinjiang to swamp indigenous populations.
In Hong Kong, the struggle is ideological and political, between believers in democracy and advocates of authoritarianism.
President Trump’s America wants to secure the Southern border against an ongoing invasion of Latin American and Third World people, who could soon create here a new majority that votes reliably Democratic.
Europe resists with growing alarm a decades-long invasion of the Old Continent by desperate people fleeing the failed states of Africa and the Mideast.
In Spain, a nationalist party, Vox, vaults to third place to resist a leftist regime in Madrid that is seen as too accommodating to Catalan secessionists and refugees from across the Mediterranean.
Americans are not at actual war with one another, but our divisions are as wide and deep as they have been since the 1960s, if not since the cινιℓ ωαr.
We have Republicans standing united against the impeachment and removal of a president they overwhelmingly elected — by a united Democratic Party dominated by implacable ideological adversaries.
Neither authoritarians nor the world’s democracies seem to have found a cure for the maladies that afflict our world’s unhappy citizens.

https://buchanan.org/blog/whats-behind-our-world-on-fire-137777
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on November 27, 2019, 08:17:12 AM
Is Macron Right? Is NATO, 70, Brain Dead?
November 26, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-macron-right-is-nato-70-brain-dead-137808) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.
A week from now, the 29 member states of “the most successful alliance in history” will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO.
Instead of a “summit,” the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda?
Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget.
French President Emanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered “brain death.” Macron now openly questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe and is talking about a “true European Army” with France’s nuclear deterrent able to “defend Europe alone.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation spends 1.4% of GDP on defense and has relied on the U.S. and NATO to keep Russia at bay since the Cold War began, is said to be enraged at the “disruptive politics” of the French president.
Also, early in December, Britain holds national elections. While the Labour Party remains committed to NATO, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is no Clement Attlee, who took Britain into NATO at its birth in 1949.
Corbyn has questioned NATO’s continued relevance in the post-Cold War era. A potential backer of a new Labour government, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, is demanding the closing of Britain’s Trident submarine base in Scotland as a precondition of her party’s support for Labour in Parliament.
Also present in London will be NATO ally Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan.

Following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has purged scores of thousands from his army and regime, jailed more journalists than any other authoritarian, purchased Vladimir Putin’s S-400 missile system as Turkey’s air defense, and ordered the U.S. forces out of his way as he invaded northern Syria, killing Kurdish fighters who did the bleeding and dying in the U.S.-led campaign to crush the ISIS caliphate.
During the Cold War, NATO enjoyed the widespread support of Americans and Europeans, and understandably so. The USSR had 20 divisions in Germany, surrounded West Berlin, and occupied the east bank of the Elbe, within striking distance of the Rhine.
But that Cold War is long over. Berlin is the united free capital of Germany. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved. Its member states have all joined NATO. The Soviet Union split apart into 15 nations. Communist Yugoslavia splintered into seven nations.
As a fighting faith, communism is dead in Europe. Why then are we Americans still over there?
Since the Cold War, we have doubled the size of NATO. We have brought in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but not Finland or Sweden. We have committed ourselves to fight for Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro but not Serbia, Bosnia or North Macedonia.
Romania and Bulgaria are NATO allies but not Moldova or Belarus.
George W. Bush kept us out of the 2008 Russia-Georgia clash over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And Barack Obama refused to send lethal aid to help Ukraine retrieve Crimea, Luhansk or Donetsk, though Sen. John McCain wanted the United States to jump into both fights.
In the House Intel Committee’s impeachment hearings, foreign service officers spoke of “Russian aggression” against our Ukrainian “ally” and our “national security” being in peril in this fight.
But when did Ukraine become an ally of the United States whose territorial wars we must sustain with military aid if not military intervention?
When did Kyiv’s control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on Germany. Would Justin Trudeau’s Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin’s Russia — for Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-macron-right-is-nato-70-brain-dead-137808
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 03, 2019, 10:12:16 AM




In Hong Kong, It’s US vs. China Now
December 3, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/in-hong-kong-its-us-vs-china-now-137822) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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Xi Jinping is no Mikhail Gorbachev. He is not going to let his people go. He is not going to risk a revolution to overturn the Maoist Revolution he has served his entire life.
At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph.
By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests — to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial — had been withdrawn.
And though the protesters’ demands escalated along with their tactics, from marches to mass civil disobedience, Molotov cocktails, riots and attacks on police, Chinese troops remained confined to their barracks.
Beijing wanted no reenactment of Tiananmen Square, the midnight massacre in the heart of Beijing that drowned in blood the 1989 uprising for democratic rights.
In Hong Kong, the police have not used lethal force. In five months of clashes, only a few have perished. And when elections came last month, Beijing was stunned by the landslide victory of the protesters.
Finally, last month, Congress passed by huge margins in both houses a Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that threatens sanctions on Hong Kong authorities should they crush the rebels.
When President Donald Trump signed the bills, the protesters now had the U.S. as an ally, and the Chinese reacted viscerally.
An enraged Foreign Ministry declared: “The US … openly backed violent criminals who rampantly smashed facilities, set fire, assaulted innocent civilians, trampled on the rule of law and jeopardized social order.
“This so-called bill will only make the Chinese people … further understand the sinister intentions and hegemonic nature of the United States. It will only make the Chinese people more united and make the American plot more doomed to failure.”
Thus do the Hong Kong protesters appear victorious, for now.
Sunday, black-clad masked protesters were back in the streets, waving American flags, erecting barricades, issuing new demands — for greater autonomy for Hong Kong, the release of jailed protesters and the punishment of police who used excessive force.


This confrontation is far from over.
Instead, it has escalated, and the U.S. government, having given up its posture of benevolent neutrality in favor of peaceful demonstrators for democracy, has become an open ally of often-violent people who are battling Chinese police inside a Chinese city.
On Monday, China retaliated, suspending visits to Hong Kong by U.S. military planes and Navy ships and declaring sanctions on the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and half a dozen other U.S. agencies that promote democracy for interfering in the internal affairs of China.
And there is another issue here — the matter of face.
China has just celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Revolution where Mao proclaimed, “China has stood up!” after a century of foreign humiliations and occupations.
Can Xi Jinping, already the object of a Maoist cult of personality, accept U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of his country or a city that belongs to China? Not likely. Nor is China likely to accede to demands for greater sovereignty, self-determination or independence for Hong Kong.
This would only raise hopes of the city’s eventual escape from its ordained destiny: direct rule by Beijing when the 50-year China-U.K. treaty regarding the transfer of Hong Kong expires in 2047.
For Xi to capitulate to the demands of Hong Kong’s demonstrators could cause an outbreak of protests in other Chinese cities and bring on a crisis of the regime.
Xi Jinping is no Mikhail Gorbachev. He is not going to let his people go. He is not going to risk a revolution to overturn the Maoist Revolution he has served his entire life.
A ruler committing the atrocities Xi is committing today in the cσncєnтrαтισn cαмρs in the Uighur regions of China is staying his hand in Hong Kong only so the world and the West cannot see the true face of the ideology in which this true believer believes.
In providing moral support for protesters in Hong Kong who desire the freedoms we enjoy, America is on the right side. But to align the U.S. with the protesters’ cause, and threaten sanctions if their demands are not met, is to lead these demonstrators to make demands that Hong Kong’s rulers cannot meet and China will not allow.
We should ask ourselves some questions before we declare our solidarity with the protesters engaging the Hong Kong police.
If the police crush them, or if China’s army moves in and crushes the demonstrators whose hopes were raised by America’s declared solidarity, then what are we prepared to do to save them and their cause?
Are we willing to impose sanctions on Beijing, such as we have on Venezuela, Iran and Vladimir Putin’s Russia?
Some of us yet recall how the Voice of America broadcast to the Hungarian rebels of 1956 that if they rose up and threw the Russians out, we would be at their side. The Hungarians rose up. We did nothing. And one of the great bloodbaths of the Cold War ensued.
Are we telling the protesters of Hong Kong, “We’ve got your back!” when we really don’t?
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Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 17, 2019, 09:48:41 AM
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Will the Secessionist Epidemic Ever End?
December 17, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/will-the-secessionist-epidemic-ever-end-137890) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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If the secessionism epidemic is to someday expire, then its causes will have to be addressed. And what are they?
Fresh from his triumphal “Get Brexit Done!” campaign, Prime Minister Boris Johnson anticipates a swift secession from the European Union.
But if Britain secedes from the EU, warns Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland will secede from the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland, which voted in 2016 to remain in the EU, could follow Scotland out of Britain, leaving her with “Little England” and Wales.
Not going to happen, says Boris. His government will not allow a second referendum on Scottish independence.
Yet the Scottish National Party won 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Parliament, and Sturgeon calls this a mandate for a new vote to secede:
“If (Boris) thinks … saying no is the end of the matter then he is going to find himself completely and utterly wrong. … You cannot hold Scotland in the union against its will.”
She has a point. If a majority of Scots wish to secede, how does a democratic Great Britain indefinitely deny them the right of self-determination?
Is Scotland fated to become for Britain what Catalonia is to Spain?
Where does this phenomenon, this continuing unraveling of old and proliferation of new nations, this epidemic of secessionism, end?
The most recent population explosion of new nations began three decades ago, when 15 republics of the USSR became independent nations. Soon, several of the 15 began to unravel further.
Transnistria seceded from Moldova. South Ossetia and Abkhazia seceded from Georgia. Chechnya sought to break free of Russia, only to be crushed. Since 2015, the Donbass has sought to secede from Ukraine.
When Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia collapsed, six “nations” seceded from Belgrade.
When did secessionism begin? The Americans started it all.
The first great secessionist cause was the Revolution, when the 13 American colonies declared and won independence from the British crown.

It is solemnly declared today that our Revolution was about ideas, such as the equality of all men. But the author of the Declaration did not believe in equality.
Jefferson was a Virginia plantation owner, some of whose slaves were with him in Philadelphia. He described Native Americans in the Declaration as “merciless Indian Savages.” The British are fraternally called “brethren” with whom we share “ties of a common kindred,” but who have been “deaf to the voice of consanguinity.”
I.e, our cousins have been deaf to the call of our common blood.
John Jay, in Federalist 2, before the Constitution was even ratified, spoke of the elements that formed the nation — “one connected country to one united people … descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion … similar in their manners and customs.”
A second secessionist movement, six decades later, created a second American nation. Texans under Sam Houston rose up and ripped that vast province away from its young mother country, Mexico.
The third secessionist movement united 11 states that sought to create a new confederated nation outside the Union, as the revolutionary generation had created a new nation outside of Britain.
In the 19th century, a dozen new nations were created by Latin American secessionists of the Spanish and Portuguese empires who emulated the example of the Americans of 1776.
After 1945, colonies of the British, French, Portuguese and Belgian empires seceded to produce a baby boom of new nations whose most common characteristic seems to be that all receive foreign aid and all have seats in the U.N. General Assembly.
If the secessionism epidemic is to someday expire, then its causes will have to be addressed. And what are they?
Secessionism appears rooted principally in issues of national identity — ethnicity, religion, race, language, culture and “the mystic chords of memory” — most of which Jay identified as both uniting Americans and separating us from our British “brethren.”
Yet these issues of identity appear not to be receding but rising in the Caucasus, Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
The Kurds, the Palestinians, the Baluch and many more seek their own nations. Taiwan’s secession is not recognized by China. The secession of Russian-speaking Donbass is not recognized by a U.S.-armed Ukraine, or by us.
As more and more people identify themselves by who they are, and are not, secessions of people from each other will continue.
These are not inconsequential matters. In 1939, the question of whether 300,000 Germans in a Polish-controlled city, Danzig, should be restored to German rule led to the worst war in the history of the world.
The peace of mankind in the 21st century may well depend upon our ability to accommodate this inexorable secessionist drive to some degree.
In June 1945, the U.N. had 50 members. It begins 2020 with 193.
Last week, Bougainville, a South Pacific island cluster of Papua New Guinea, voted 98%, in a nonbinding referendum for independence, to become the world’s newest nation. Papua New Guinea won its own independence from Australia when Gerald Ford was president.
And the beat goes on.

https://buchanan.org/blog/will-the-secessionist-epidemic-ever-end-137890
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 24, 2019, 07:54:22 AM



Today France, Tomorrow the USA?
December 23, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/today-france-tomorrow-the-usa-137917) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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It is worth looking more closely at France because she appears to be at a place where the rest of Europe and America are headed.
As that rail and subway strike continued to paralyze travel in Paris and across France into the third week, President Emmanuel Macron made a Christmas appeal to his dissatisfied countrymen:
“Strike action is justifiable and protected by the constitution, but I think there are moments in a nation’s life when it is good to observe a truce out of respect for families and family life.”
Macron’s appeal has gone largely unheeded.
“The public be damned!” seems to be the attitude of many of the workers who are tying up transit to protest Macron’s plan to reform a pension system that consumes 14% of GDP.
Macron wants to raise to 64 the age of eligibility for full retirement benefits. Not terribly high. And to set an example, he is surrendering his lifetime pension that is to begin when he becomes an ex-president.
Yet, it is worth looking more closely at France because she appears to be at a place where the rest of Europe and America are headed.
In France, the government collects 46% of the GDP in taxes and spends 56% of GDP, the highest figures in the Western world.
And Paris appears to be bumping up against the limits of what democratic voters will tolerate in higher taxes, or reductions in benefits, from the postwar welfare states the West has created.
A year ago, when Macron sought to raise fuel taxes to cut carbon emissions, the “yellow vests” came out in protests that degenerated into rioting, looting, arson, desecration of monuments and attacks on police.
Paris capitulated and canceled the tax.
How do we compare?

The U.S. national debt is now larger than the GDP. Only in 1946, the year after World War II, was U.S. debt a larger share of GDP than today.
In 2019, the U.S. ran a deficit just shy of $1 trillion, and the U.S. government projects trillion-dollar deficits through the decade, which begins next week. And we will be running these deficits not to stimulate an economy in recession, as President Obama did, but to pile them on top of an economy at full employment.
In short, we are beginning to run historic deficits in a time of prosperity. Whatever the economic theory behind this, it bears no resemblance to the limited government-balanced budget philosophy of the party of Ronald Reagan.
The questions the U.S. will inevitably face are the ones France faces: At what point does government consumption of the national wealth become too great a burden for the private sector to bear? At what point must cuts be made in government spending that will be seen by the people, as they are seen in France today, as intolerable?
While a Republican Congress ran surpluses in the 1990s, when defense spending fell following our Cold War victory, Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president to run surpluses.
Opposition to new or higher taxes appears to be the one piece of ground today on which Republicans will not yield. But if so, where are the cuts going to come from that will be virtually mandated if U.S. debt is not to grow beyond any sustainable level?
America’s long-term problem:
Deficits are projected to run regularly in the coming decade at nearly 5% of GDP while economic growth has fallen back to 2%.
With taxes off the table, where, when and how do we cut spending?
Or does each new administration kick the can down the road?
The five principal items in the federal budget are these:
Social Security, which consumes 25% of that budget. Yet, Social Security outlays will reach the point this year where payroll taxes no longer cover them. The “trust fund” will have to be raided. Translation: The feds will have to borrow money to cover the Social Security deficit.
Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare and other health programs account for another fourth of the budget. All will need more money to stay solvent.
Defense, which used to take 9% of GDP in JFK’s time and 6% in Ronald Reagan’s buildup, is now down to 3.2% of GDP.
Yet, while defense’s share of GDP is among the smallest since before World War II, U.S. commitments are as great as they were during the Cold War. We are now defending 28 NATO nations, containing Russia, and maintaining strategic parity. We have commitments in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and the global war on terror. We defend South Korea and Japan from a nuclear-armed North Korea and China.
Yet another major item in the budget is interest on the debt.
And as that U.S. debt surges with all the new deficits this decade, and interest rates inevitably begin to rise, interest on the debt will rise both in real terms and as a share of the budget.
Again, is France the future of the West?

https://buchanan.org/blog/today-france-tomorrow-the-usa-137917
Title: Re: Patrick J. Buchanans weekly columns
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on December 27, 2019, 06:10:10 PM
Is ‘Little Rocket Man’ Winning?
December 26, 2019 (https://buchanan.org/blog/is-little-rocket-man-winning-137932) by Patrick J. Buchanan (https://buchanan.org/blog/author/pat-buchanan)
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If U.S. sanctions are insufficient to force Kim to “denuclearize,” as seems apparent, is Trump prepared to force him to do so?
As of Dec. 26, Kim Jong Un’s “Christmas gift” to President Donald Trump had not arrived. Most foreign policy analysts predict it will be a missile test more impressive than any Pyongyang has yet carried off.
What is Kim’s game? What does Kim want?
He cannot want war with the United States, as this could result in the annihilation of the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea since World War II. Kim is all about self-preservation.
What he appears to want in his confrontation with Trump is a victory without war. In the near-term, Kim seeks three things: recognition of his regime as the legitimate government of North Korea and its acceptance in all the forums of the world, trade and an end to all U.S. and U.N. sanctions, and a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter a U.S. attack, including missiles that can strike U.S. bases in South Korea, Japan, Guam, and the Western Pacific. And he seeks the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead on the U.S. mainland.
Nor is this last goal unreasonable from Kim’s vantage point.
For he knows what became of the two other nations of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” that failed to develop nuclear weapons.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was invaded, and he was hanged and his sons hunted down and killed.
The Ayatollah’s Iran negotiated a 2015 nuclear deal with America and opened up its nuclear facilities to intrusive inspections to show that Tehran did not have a nuclear weapons program.
Trump came to power, trashed the deal, reimposed sanctions and is choking Iran to death.
Moammar Gadhafi surrendered his WMD in 2004 and opened up his production facilities. And in 2011, the U.S. attacked Libya and Gadhafi was lynched by a mob.
Contrast the fate of these regimes and rulers with the Kim family’s success. His father, Kim Jong Il, tested nuclear weapons and missiles in defiance of U.S. warnings, and now the son is invited to summits with the U.S. president in Singapore and Hanoi.
If Kim did not have nuclear weapons, would American presidents be courting him? Would U.S. secretaries of state be visiting Pyongyang? If Kim did not have nuclear weapons who would pay the least attention to the Hermit Kingdom?
Undeniably, with his promised “Christmas gift,” possibly a missile capable of hitting the U.S., Kim is pushing the envelope. He is taunting the Americans. We have told him what he must do. And he is telling us where we can go.
But by so doing, Kim has put the ball squarely in Trump’s court.
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The question Trump faces: Is he prepared to accept North Korea joining Russia and China as a third adversarial power with the ability to launch a nuclear strike on the continental United States?
And if U.S. sanctions are insufficient to force Kim to “denuclearize,” as seems apparent, is Trump prepared to force him to do so? Is Trump prepared to use “fire and fury” to remove Kim’s nukes?
With 28,500 U.S. troops and thousands of U.S. citizens in South Korea, many within artillery range of the DMZ, is Trump prepared to risk a clash that could ignite a second Korean War in the election year 2020?
Is the president prepared for whatever that might bring?
How does this confrontation play out?
A guess: The U.S. has lived with North Korea’s nuclear weapons for a decade, and Trump is not going to risk a second Korean conflict with a military attack on Kim’s nuclear and missile arsenals. Kim Jong Un and his father have created a new reality in Korea, and we are going to have to live with it.
Where does East Asia go from here?
South Korea has twice the population of the North and an economy 40 times as large. Japan has a population five times that of North Korea and an economy 100 times as large.
If the U.S. treaty guarantees, dating to the 1950s, to fight for these two nations come into question as a result of America’s reluctance to face down Pyongyang more forcibly on its nuclear arsenal, these nations are almost certain to start considering all options for their future security.
Among these are building their own nuclear arsenals and closer ties to the one nation that has shown it can discipline North Korea — China.
Much is on the line here.
Kim’s challenge is ultimately about the credibility of the United States, which has treaty commitments and issued war guarantees to scores of nations in NATO Europe, the Mideast and East Asia, but whose people have zero interest in any new war, especially a second Korean War.
If the world sees that America is reluctant to face down, or fight a North Korea that is threatening us, will they retain the old confidence that the United States will risk war for them?
What Kim is undermining is not just U.S. security but U.S. credibility

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-little-rocket-man-winning-137932