March 22, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Billy Graham and the End of the Dream of American Unity

https://www.unz.com/article/billy-graham-and-the-end-of-the-dream-of-american-unity/

The Reverend Billy Graham passed away a month ago, on February 21, and like many Americans I watched much of the televised funeral ceremonies when they were held for him in Charlotte. Although I come from a different branch of Christianity where Gregorian chant and a millennia-old liturgy form the major mode of religious communication and the expression of prayer, I was impressed by the transparency and simplicity of the Graham service. Here, truly, was a man of God, motivated by the sincere desire to see the Message of the Gospel spread to every corner of the world.

But there seemed to be a deeper symbolism manifested in the funeral service for this towering historical and religious figure. For seventy years Billy Graham represented in all the best ways a certain unity of Americans and of America. Although assuredly a conservative in his Evangelical theology, and, therefore, arguably a conservative when it came to eventual and inevitable political implications and manifestations that his beliefs would have, he maintained throughout his life a strict (or as strict as possible) non-partisanship that stretched across the American political spectrum, just as it did across the racial spectrum. Thus, he counseled both Republican and Democrat presidents, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to Bill Clinton.

And his evangelism was not sectarian. Although nominally a Southern Baptist, Graham never pushed one denomination over another; his emphasis was strictly to reach unbelievers or those weak in belief, and to encourage them, give them support for their own acceptance of the grace of Our Savior.

On that first Friday in March, then, there in Charlotte both the powerful and the less powerful gathered to honor a man who symbolized what America and most Americans once aspired to. And in that sense, his passing is extremely significant.

For just as the Reverend Billy Graham epitomized an historic American unity, a unity that enabled Americans to speak more or less the same language and posit common goals, even if they disagreed on how to define those goals or how to present specific issues, his passing symbolizes the final, bitter end of that unity.

That crashing, noisy decline and fractious dissolution of American unity had been in the making for years, for decades. It was clearly evident for those who were perceptive observers back in the 1960s; but it pre-dates that turbulent decade. Indeed, its roots go much further back in our history. Premonitions and hints of its consequences on different levels may be traced to the violent end of the older American constitutionalism on the battlefield with the defeat of the Southern Confederacy in 1865—and to the triumph of the various “suffrage movements” and Progressivist reform initiatives—and to the advent of the globalist “managerial state” (to use the terminology of writers James Burnham and Sam Francis)—and to the historic triumph of cultural Marxism (and worse) in our schools and colleges and in our entertainment industry—and finally, to the very perversion of the language and forms of communication we employ to express our thinking and exchange ideas with fellow citizens.

Since the end of World War II and more particularly since the 1960s an emerging “counter-reality” has increasingly asserted its position of dominance in our culture. That counter-reality is a “rough beast” (to use Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ chiliastic language), an incubus born in the fevered philosophy of early 20^th century Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, whose designs involved a “long march” through Western Christian institutions, that is, through Western culture. Understanding the failure of “war Communism” to defeat the Christian West immediately after the conclusion of World War I, Gramsci and his epigones postulated a program of multilevel, gradual subversion over decades.

As Robert Royal has described this process:

They didn’t just seek to sway leaders, in Church or state. Those gains could easily disappear if different leaders came to power. No, said Gramsci, their genius was to create una cultura capillare, a fine network of institutions and opinion that, like the capillaries in our bodies, reach every nook and cranny. Wonder why religious liberty or marriage hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court? The counterculture has burrowed away in education, law schools, media, and culture. [“1968 at 50,” The Catholic Thing, February 12, 2018, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/02/12/1968-at-50/ ]

And in this project they have been singularly successful. They have, indeed, created a kind of “counter-reality,” replete with its own standards of what is “good” and what is “evil.” From its incredibly significant pupils among the Frankfort School intellectuals (leftist Jewish academics who left Germany and took refuge in New York in the 1930s), what we term cultural Marxism soon exercised critical influence and eventual control in how the “establishment” viewed major issues of race and gender. Through what is termed Critical Race Theory, it imposed a new and dogmatic template on studies of race and racial relations, positing the existence of historic “white racist oppression” (which must be defeated and destroyed, and also compensated for) and the imposition of a rigid and increasingly severe political correctness.

In the newly-established realm of “gender studies,” it openly denied and attempted to proscribe the historic and natural roles of men and women, replacing them with a so-called “sexual equality,” which in fact entails the destruction of historic masculinity and the politicization of sexual functionality.

In this revolutionary Progressivist project, the cultural Marxists have over the years moved to secure the major guard posts of and in our culture—in the media, in academia, in Hollywood, and in the political and managerial government establishment. The supposed election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 would have cemented their de facto control and extended its domination—a kind of mopping up operation—for eight additional years, time to facilitate a complete change-out of the American judiciary and strengthen their stranglehold on nearly every segment of American society.

In this they had the good fortune to be opposed by a thoroughly nugatory “opposition,” a Republican Party and self-satisfied “conservative movement,” that actually did more to enable and canonize Leftist advances and gains than thwart them. There are endless examples of this “conservative” collaborationism; one only need examine the feckless collapse of establishment “conservatism” in the face of the same sex lobby, and the “defense of same sex marriage” as “conservative” by the likes of Jonah Goldberg and George Will, who despite their views continue to enjoy the reputation as respected conservatives among the movement’s elite. Indeed, on the death of Graham the supercilious Will, an intransigent Never Trumper defender of the Establishment “Swamp,” authored a snarky and condescending column on the evangelist, calling him “vain” and “naïve,” even “anti-semitic.” His column appeared in the equally condescending National Review. [“Billy Graham: Neither Prophet nor Theologian,” February 21, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/billy-graham-legacy-neither-prophet-nor-theologian/] What, if anything, distinguishes Will’s ravings from those of his buddies on the Far Left?

The totally unexpected election of Donald Trump in November 2016 upset the apple cart—the time table—of the Deep State managers and their cultural Marxist circulatory system that feeds the Progressivist revolution. Indeed, the one now clearly palpable error of the historic cultural Marxist long-march has been that in their calculated invasion and subversion of our society’s major cultural and political institutions, they had, in many respects, left behind and neglected millions of “normal” citizens, the “deplorables” (those Obama called “bitter clingers”).

The strategic theory was that by capturing the major institutions, in particular academia and entertainment, and by dominating and utilizing the Mainstream Media, the Progressivist revolution could easily survive a few minor electoral defeats at the hands of milquetoast, “flee-to-the-tall-grass” spineless Republicans and collaborationist “conservatives,” who, after all, would not actually challenge the template or attempt to alter the Progressivist narrative. And that eventually, with the powerful means of communication secure in the hands of the Left working full time to spread their ideological poison—and with the very language we all use to communicate radically altered and shaped to reflect that narrative—those reactionary citizens would, eventually, follow along (or at least their brainwashed children would).

Well beyond just the practical and political effects of the election of Donald Trump in policy and politics, November 2016 brought out into the open the demonic face of the Deep State and cultural Marxism. Once content to quietly continue their seemingly unstoppable and multifaceted advance, with no real effective opposition to their designs, the 2016 election tore away the mask, forced the minions of globalism and the New World Order to emerge from their dark and secure offices in Manhattan, in Hollywood, and along the Potomac—and from their safe sinecures in America’s most prestigious universities—to mount a frenzied and at times hysterical counter-attack to recover their momentum and repair the breach that appeared to threaten their power and authority.

Thus, the fake “Russians Did It!” investigation—thus what can only be termed a real and unquenchable madness, a lunacy on the part of the partisans of the Deep State which is fatal to the American republic, itself.

The passing of Billy Graham as symbol of an older America—and arguably a much better America—is, then, in a very sobering and agonizing way, the symbol of an irrevocably divided America. It is a broken America in which a once more or less somnolent and trusting citizenry, that is, Sam Francis’ Middle American Radicals—the Deplorables—mostly living in the South and in the great areas of the country between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (“fly-over” country), have begun to awaken and have begun to comprehend, if only obliquely, what has been happening.

And the Deep State and its cultural Marxist commissars in our schools and universities, among the Hollywood and entertainment elites, and populating and dominating our politics in both political parties, will not relent in their attacks until the true opposition to their schemes is either forced back into the genie’s lamp, or they (or we) are slaughtered on the bloody battlefield.

The symbol of Billy Graham, the ability of Americans of all stripes to talk with one another—indeed, to get along with and pray with one another—was a noble dream. But as reality, it has been under attack almost since the country’s inception. The moving and quiet tribute to Graham was, in fact, a tribute and final interment of that dream which now appears an impossibility.

March 15, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Bizarre Case of the British Spy Poisoning: Another “False Flag” Action aimed at Russia and to Further Globalism and the New World Order?

Friends,

Once again the virulently Russophobic Neoconservative pundits at Fox News (with the notable exception of Tucker Carlson), plus the leading scribblers at The Weekly Standard  (e.g., editor Steve Hayes) and National Review, and Establishment GOP solons in Washington, are miraculously joined at the hip with the newly-converted Russophobic ideological far Left Democrats and Leftist Mainstream Media, in the latest attack on Russia—this time for claimed chemical attacks on a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

I have written in the past about this ironic and fascinating de facto alliance, and I have explained that both the extreme Left and the slightly less left Neocons (who pretend to lead the “conservative movement”), although proceeding from somewhat different premises, have involved interests and profound reasons for this zealous and unbridled hatred of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

For the far Left, it is largely the narrative they developed leading up to and following the November 2016 election season. It appeared as a set-out plan in print in the detailed, inside view of the Hillary campaign, the book Shattered. But it was a viewpoint that had been in the making for a decade. The far Left that hitherto during the depths of the Cold War had manifested pro-Soviet Union views when the Kremlin was Communist, or at the least, defended Soviet postures and pushed for “peaceful co-existence,” found the new post-Communist and increasingly rightwing, nationalist and anti-globalist Russia a perfect target to blame for everything from Hillary’s unexpected loss to purported “election meddling” that would have caused that loss. For them “collusion between [a nationalist populist] Trump and [a nationalist populist] Putin” seemed logical and a major occasion for their frenzied actions.

For the Neoconservatives, those pilgrims from the Trotskyite Left who found their way into the “conservative movement” beginning in the 1970s, and soon dominated the movement, controlled its publications, and ruled with an iron hand its foundations and think tanks, anti-Russian sentiment was basically ingrained in their DNA. Most of the prominent leaders of Neoconservatism were of Jewish descent, and for them the memory of historic Russian anti-semitism, persecution and the pogroms, was still vivid in their historic memory. It was not just the pre-revolution tsars, but Stalin’s post-war persecution of Russian Communists who were Jewish, the infamous “doctors’ plot,” and other instances of anti-semitic activity that remained fresh and continue to motivate very pointedly their foreign policy positions.

While now professing to be “conservatives,” the Neocons never discarded their basic and essentially Trotskyite internationalism. On the ostensibly “conservative”  NationalReviewOnline, a few years back, Neoconservative writer Stephen Schwartz let the cat out of the bag:

“To my last breath, I will defend Trotsky who alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling to Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.” [see Paul Gottfried's commentary on Takimag.com, April 17, 2007]

And a vivid and recent example: in a two hour long interview with Megyn Kelly, held March 1-2 (of which NBC only aired about ten minutes), President Putin, asked about Russian cyberspace meddling in the 2016 election, after answering repeatedly the same question posed by Kelly, in utter frustration finally responded, with palpable sarcasm: “I am telling you for the third time: we have proposed working together on cyberspace issues. But the US refuses to work like this and instead throws 13 Russians to the media. Maybe they are not even Russians, but Ukrainians, Tatars or Jews, but with Russian citizenship, which should also be checked: maybe they have dual citizenship or a Green Card; maybe, the US paid them for this. How can you know that?” [https://russia-insider.com/en/kremlin-publishes-full-megan-kelly-putin-interview-nbc-cut-best-parts-video-transcript/ri22747?ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=4406b8e695&mc_eid=4e31a191e0] (The entire interview should be read and digested).

According to the Western press, you would have thought the Russian leader had donned an SS uniform and had re-opened the doors to the gas chambers at Auschwitz! The “conservative” Newsmax headlined the story: “Putin: ‘Maybe Jews,” Others, Behind 2016 Election Meddling.” [https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/russian-president-vladimir-putin-2016-us-presidential-election-election-meddling/2018/03/10/id/847933/?ns_mail_uid=61377180&ns_mail_job=1783208_03102018&s=al&dkt_nbr=01013574eep7] And The Washington Post and leftist Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) immediately swung into action: “It is deeply disturbing to see the Russian president giving new life to classic anti-Semitic stereotypes that have plagued his country for hundreds of years." [http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/ADL-condemns-Putins-suggestion-that-Jews-may-have-meddled-in-US-election-544813]

But it is not just that, not just the memory of historic anti-semitism and its continued power and imagery in Neoconservative thinking. For the Neocons brought with them the zealous internationalism and globalism from their Trotskyite days. And it was a globalism that now infects and shapes modern conservative thinking: instead of old-fashioned America First nationalism, the Neocons, it seemed, never saw a war they did not want to involve American boys in—they zealously pushed international trade and commercial organizations and treaties that potentially compromised American sovereignty—they pushed global “democracy” and “equality” as the dogmatic and undebatable templates everywhere, in every forlorn desert oasis or every faraway jungle across the globe—and at home, they adopted the twin narratives proposed by the farther Left on race and gender, even if they kept up the pretense of debating the more extreme manifestations and consequences of  such theories. And lastly, they proceeded to expel and demonize older traditional conservatives who dissented, those who refused to go along with their ideas of internationalism and equality…and sex same marriage and racial pandering.

It is the Neocons, then, who now dominate the punditry on Fox News and whatever intellectual meandering occurs among most Republican lawmakers (and the brain dead utterances of Nikki Haley). And it is the Neocons—joined at the hip with their supposed “shadow boxing” opponents on the far Left—who are frenetically pushing the latest “Russians Did It!” narrative, specifically concerning the supposed chemical poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

But what of this latest incident that has brought the foreign policy, pro-globalist Establishments—both leftist and pseudo-right—in London, Paris, Bonn…and Washington…together to condemn President Putin and Russia? What is the real truth here, and what are the deeper reasons for this most recent attempt to malign the Russians and their president? And, lastly, how does the continued and fevered Russophobic campaign figure in the current debate over the Christopher Steele “dossier” and the effort to prevent the implementation of an America First, nationalist conservative and populist agenda here in the United States and in Europe (where rightwing nationalist—and anti-European Union—political movements are on the rise and are becoming major players and dangers to the Progressivist globalists)?

Strangely, the Brits have refused to allow the accused Russians to see any of the evidence they profess to possess in the Skripal case. In normal cases affecting more than one nation, the accused party is, at the very least, given an opportunity to view and examine the evidence being used to indict it. Prime Minister Theresa May—a full-fledged globalist—has refused to allow Russian authorities to see even the barest “facts” that the Brits say they have. May’s government states that they have consulted “international experts” who have verified the identity of the chemical that was used. However, we have no word of who these experts are or what were the criteria used for their selection, and their reports have not been made public.

In other words, the Russians are being told that they must prove the negative, prove their innocence, but without knowing the details involved in the charges lodged against them…other than a nerve agent—purportedly Novichok—was administered as the poison. Novichok is a nerve agent that Russia produced from 1973 until the early 1980s. And since then, as verified internationally, Russian chemical stores were destroyed. Samples of Novichok continue to exist, however, in Western repositories.

In such cases as the Skripal case, the fundamental question that must be asked is always: Cui bono? To whose benefit is the action? And in this case, even the most obtuse international observer must—or should—acknowledge that the Russians and their president had absolutely nothing to gain from attempting to assassinate Skripal.

In the early 1990s Skripal was recruited by the British as an agent and worked for them until arrested by the Russians in 2004. After serving a prison term in Russia from 2006 until 2010 for his spying, he was exchanged and moved to England where he lived peacefully and without publicity until this year. Why would the Russians—eight years after the end of his prison punishment and eight years after his exchange—wish to employ such an obvious poison, in public view, to take out someone who had ceased to be of any importance or threat to them?

On the other hand, there is very solid and intriguing data—not broadcast, of course, by the hysterical Russophobes on Fox or MSNBC—which can be adduced that Skripal’s attempted assassination had something to do with the Steele Dossier, and, yes, the ongoing campaign to malign and isolate Russia because of its opposition to and disruption of the globalist goals of an evolving international New World Order.

Just as in the case of another “false flag” operation, in Syria back in 2017, where the detailed and comprehensive scientific examination (April 17, 2017) by Theodore A. Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT [https://www.globalresearch.ca/assessment-of-white-house-intelligence-report-about-nerve-agent-attack-in-khan-shaykhun-syria/5584867] totally disproved the assertion that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad (with Russian support) had gassed the village of Khan Shaykun, this poisoning near Salisbury, England, has all the earmarks of an ideologically sharpened attack, using massaged and incomplete (and potentially compromising) details that might place in doubt, if fully revealed, the accusations.

Again, notice the symmetry: the unhinged Neoconservatives, the Russophobic denizens of the Deep State, the far Left and Democratic Party fanatics all stand united and together. And the Fox pundits now praise…Robert Mueller and his investigation, at least on the “identified culprits”! Even the obscure Democratic candidate for North Carolina’s 2^nd congressional district, black activist Linda Coleman, who claims “the Russians stole my web site,” partakes in this mass hysteria.

There is a diabolical method in this madness: Russia has become the object of their collective hatred. For the dominant Neocons, it’s the fact that Russia will not bow to their demands for liberal democracy and economic subinfeudation, that Russia refuses to sacrifice its national sovereignty to the globalists and their objectives. And thus Fox is featuring—are you prepared for this?—such “experts” as far Leftist journalist Michael Issikoff and staunch Democrat publicist, Doug Schoen, to confirm and bolster their vitriol. And in this they embrace fully the similar aims of the farther Left—to bring down at any cost, including military means, the renaissance of a nationalist and anti-globalist Russia where tradition and religion are far more important today than they are in the decaying West.

British attorney and researcher, James O’Neil, has authored an excellently prepared essay on this topic, exploring the connections between the Skripal case and Christopher Steele, and to whose advantage an assassination would be.  You will not see this information reported by the “united front” of Fox News-MSNBC-CNN-The Washington Post-The New York Times. You will not see or read these potentially incriminating questions raised…questions that should be raised and aired for the future of the American nation.

The Strange Case of the Russian Spy Poisoning

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/03/13/the-strange-case-of-the-russian-spy-poisoning/

By James O’Neill     March 13, 2018

Applying the principle of cui bono – who benefits? – to the case of Sergei Skripal might lead investigators away from the Kremlin as the prime suspect and towards Western intelligence agencies, argues James O’Neill.

The suspected nerve agent attack upon former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, which also affected his daughter in the English city of Salisbury last Sunday, has given rise to too much speculation, too much hysteria, and too little analysis or insight. It has provided ammunition for the Russophobic Western media to make accusations that it was another example of Russia in general and Vladimir Putin in particular disposing of a supposed enemy of the Kremlin.

As with the Mueller investigation into the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election there are accusations with varying degrees of wildness, but little or no actual evidence that would get past first base in any independent court of law.

First, what are the known facts, only some of which have been accurately reported in the western mainstream media? The victim (assuming it was a deliberate attack upon him and his daughter) was formerly a Colonel in the Russian military intelligence service (the GRU). This is the largest of the Russian intelligence agencies and, as with its western equivalents, has a wide variety of functions, of which “spying” is only one.

In the early 1990s Skripal was recruited by an MI6 agent Pablo Miller, whom the British media declined to name. Miller was an MI6 agent in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Miller’s main task was recruiting Russians to provide information about their country to the British. An interesting fact, possibly coincidental, was that the MI6 officer under diplomatic cover in Moscow at this time was Christopher Steele. Steele was later to become better known as the principal author of the infamous Trump dossier.

When Steele returned to London, he ran MI6’s Russia desk between the 2006 and 2009. The information that Skripal disclosed would have been given to Steele, first in Moscow and later in London.

Skripal was arrested in 2004. In 2006 he was convicted of treason and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment. In 2010 he was released as part of a prisoner exchange deal with Russian spies in U.S. jails. He went to live in the United Kingdom where he has lived in supposed retirement ever since. Another interesting fact, although again possibly coincidental, is that Salisbury, where Skripal lived, is only about 12 kilometres from Porton Down, the U.K.’s principal research centre for nerve agents.

If the Russians had wanted to kill him, they had ample opportunity to do so during the years when he was imprisoned or the eight years he lived in retirement in Salisbury. If they did wish to kill him, it is not a very credible that they would do so very publicly and by a means that could not be bought off the shelf in the local pharmacy. The handling and the administering of these very dangerous substances require professional expertise. The obvious candidates for the attempted murder are therefore government agencies, but which government is the unanswered question.

This is where the facts become thinner, but the interesting connections of Skripal offer scope for some tentative hypotheses. While living in Salisbury, Skripal became friendly, according to a report in the UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph, with none other than the aforementioned Pablo Miller – whom the Telegraph declined to name but has since been identified on the web.

Miller is now working with a British security consultancy named Orbis Business Intelligence. Again according to the Telegraph, Miller’s association with this company has now been removed from Miller’s LinkedIn profile.

The obvious question again is: why do so now?

Orbis is the same private intelligence agency as that of Christopher Steele. It seems more than a mere coincidence that the same three men who had personal and professional links going back to the 1990s should have a continuing association at the same time as the Steele dossier was being compiled and later as the so-called Russiagate inquiry was imploding. Former FBI Director James Comey described the Steele dossier as “salacious and unverified” in a Senate hearing.

The former British ambassador Craig Murray has suggested on his blog that a motive for the attempted murder of Skripal and his daughter was to further promote the anti-Russian hysteria that inflicts the Western media and the body politic.

That is certainly plausible, and it has certainly been one of the consequences, as the abysmal coverage of the ABC among other outlets makes clear. But an alternative hypothesis presents itself in the light of the above facts, and this hypothesis has not even been mentioned, let alone discussed by our major media.

My admittedly speculative hypothesis (but I would argue, not an unreasonable one) is that Skripal was likely involved in the production of the Steele dossier. He was therefore in a position to offer potentially very damaging information into the circumstances of the Steele dossier. As noted above, that particular narrative has not only spectacularly collapsed, but the revelations reflect very badly on, among others, the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama White House and the Clinton campaign.

In any major criminal enquiry one of the basic questions the investigation asks is: who had the means, the motive and the opportunity? Framed in that light, the Russians come a distant fourth behind the other prime suspects; the U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies themselves, and those elements of the deep state that sought to prevent Trump winning, and subsequently to undermine his presidency. The primary motive being ascribed to the Russians is revenge for Skripal’s treachery more than a decade ago.

A second major question asked in any criminal investigation is cui bono – who benefits? It is difficult to perceive a credible argument that Russia is a beneficiary of Skripal’s poisoning.

Further support for the hypothesis that this was a false flag operation comes in this statement that British Prime Minister to Theresa May made to the UK Parliament. The statement was frankly absurd and could only have been made when the intention was to further demonize and punish Russia, rather than any attempt to establish the truth and apply ordinary principles of evidence and factual analysis.

May’s argument is thoroughly deconstructed on the Moon of Alabama website, which pointed out that Russia had destroyed all left over stocks from the Soviet Union’s chemical weapon program and does not currently produce chemical weapons. Further, there are any number of governments capable of carrying out the Salisbury attack. “If someone is run-over by a BMW is it ‘highly likely’ that the German government is responsible for it?” the Moon of Alabama asks.

The obfuscations of the British reinforce in the view that Skripal was dangerous to the anti-Trump forces and the authorities therefore sought to have them removed. There is ample precedent for such actions and those familiar with the “suicide” of Dr. David Kelly will recognize the parallels.

The chances of the truth emerging have become vanishingly small at the same time as a serious conflict with Russia becomes correspondingly greater.

James O’Neill is a Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst. 

 

March 10, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Stormy Daniels and the Feminist Assault on Donald Trump…And on the Nation

Friends,

Like ravenous wolves who’ve been rebuffed in various attempts to corner prey, the malicious minions of the Deep State, the managerial establishmentarians along the Potomac, the devilish denizens of academia and hellish Hollywood whores, speaking as it were with one voice through the Mainstream Media, are once more lapping at the heels of President Trump.

Sent scurrying in some disarray by their year-long and utterly futile attempts to incriminate the president for collusion with Russia—although they continue furiously and feverishly to use that line of attack, this past week they resurrected another front, another line of attack, one that hitherto has not been that successful with Trump voters or a majority of the American public.

But anything—any weapon, even the most sordid or the most remote—is employable in their multifaceted effort to “get Trump,” to rid them of the hated usurper who wasn’t supposed to get elected back in 2016. Very simply they must, simply must, put that genie back in the magic lamp and get the Progressivist revolutionary trajectory and agenda back on track.

Thus the re-emergence of Stormy Daniels, the one-time actress and porn star, who would have had an encounter with Donald Trump back twelve years ago, and to whom Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 out of his own account during the 2016 campaign. A Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) was prepared by Cohen by which Daniels would have remained silent—turning over any prejudicial “intellectual property” to Cohen.

But now Daniels—motivated by what? Greed? Democratic feminist operatives?—declares that Trump never signed the NDA, so she has decided to go public.

This was enough for The Washington Post, The New York Times, the leftwing “watch-dog” group Common Cause (the Times, laughably, calls them, “non-partisan”) and other leftist anti-Trump (and NeverTrump) zealots to swing back into full attack mode.

And, what do you know? The Times immediately found—you guessed it—a “Russian connection”!  And one more cog in the recent effort to “rehabilitate” Christopher Steele, the virulent British anti-Trump shyster and paid-by-the-Democrats creator of the infamous “dossier” on which much of the Mueller investigation is based.

Here is how the tendentious Times creates the link to the outrageous and discredited Steele Dossier:

…the Daniels story is germane to the overriding scandal of the Trump administration, the one involving Trump’s relationship with Russia. Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled an infamous dossier of opposition research on Trump, wrote that Russia could blackmail Trump with evidence of his “sexual perversion.” Nothing we know of Daniels confirms the dossier’s outré claims about what such perversion entailed. The NDA does, however, show that Trump was susceptible to blackmail.      [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/stormy-daniels-trump-cohen.html]

I have Italicized one sentence in this paragraph attempting to link Trump to the Dossier and thus to supposed Russian collusion, because even the Times is forced to admit that there simply aren’t any real links with the Daniels business.

Further, spokesmen for the leftwing Common Cause are charging that the financial payment violated campaign finance law since it was not reported as a contribution by the Trump campaign, despite Cohen having paid it from his personal funds and despite a recent arbitration proceeding that went in favor of the Trump campaign.

Daniels, of course, would stand to gain millions of dollars in any resulting publicity: think of the book contracts…the guest appearances…possible future movies!  And, no doubt, she would be embraced by the #MeToo and feminist movement as one more example of (white) male abuse of innocent women (only in this case she wasn’t and isn’t very “innocent”).

We can recall that towards the end of the 2016 campaign a whole bevy of “innocent" and
“abused” women all of a sudden “appeared” to accuse Donald Trump of various sexual infractions over the past twenty-five years. And just like what happened with Judge Roy Moore in Alabama this past fall, they were greeted by the leftwing Mainstream Media like a phalanx of sainted Mary Magdalenes, cleansed of their faults, demanding “justice” from “the Man” who took advantage of them and ruined them, that is, until the likes of feminist ambulance-chasing attorney Gloria Allred caught up with them, casting glittering visions of fame and money—mostly money—before their eyes.

Back in 2016 a majority of American voters were able to sort this sordid business out to the point that, despite its fetid swirl, they—we—voted for Donald Trump. The miraculously timed appearance of those poor abused women was just too convenient, too political, and their stories—which had been repeated in various venues previously—seemed suspicious at best.

It’s not the we discounted that Donald Trump might well have engaged in a bit of hanky-panky years back—indeed, he had as much admitted that he had been a lady’s man a decade and more ago. And he admitted to salty and—how shall we call it?—“descriptive” language, language that many of us men might well have used in a locker room at one time or another.

But he had finally—after a couple of failed marriages—settled down with Melania Knavs, a very beautiful and intelligent model from Slovenia, with a son, Barron, to show for it, and from every appearance real marital bliss. Which man among us could do better?

We understood from the “get go” that the brash billionaire from New York had a history. But we were not voting for “Saint of the United States”; we were desperate for someone, a bull-in-the-china-shop, a man of direct action, who would march down to Washington DC, down to those stinking bureaucratic pigsties, those managerial Deep State bastions along the Potomac, and “drain the swamp.” No ordinary politician—no establishment Republican, no establishment conservative, not even a Ted Cruz—would be capable for the task. None of the GOP dwarfs opposing Trump would be capable, despite best intentions or all the campaign promises they could muster, of meeting that challenge.

And the hour was late—the very fate of what was left of our once-constitutional republic—was at stake. The forces of the Deep State establishment completely dominated the Democrats and, if not also controlling the GOP and conservative elites, at least enforced an enabling silence on them in the face of ongoing Progressivist revolution.

The admittedly imperfect Trump said “no.” Summoning the latent forces of an older, and more nationalist and populist grass roots conservatism, ironically, he garnered the support of a strong majority of America’s Evangelical voters and traditional Christians, who, unlike the officious and condescending Mainstream Media mavens and Hollywood types, truly understood the powerful image of Balaam’s ass [cf. Numbers 22: 21-39, in particular vss. 27-28], in which God, Who is omnipotent and chooses His own vehicle to communicate, spoke through the donkey to Balaam.

Donald Trump enunciated issues that gained for him the election; but it was not the ritual murmuring of the same old tired “conservative narrative” trotted out around election time by establishment members of “conservativism inc.,” but a revivified reaching back to an older and more traditional “conservatism”—on foreign entanglements, on trade and protecting American industry from unfair foreign competition, on border security and immigration and the Wall, in support of a pro-life judiciary and a defense of the country’s religious rights and family heritage, in short, to “make America great again.” And it wasn’t just campaign rhetoric—it was real, it was felt by millions of “deplorables,” by out-of-work coal miners and steelworkers, by millions of families at the mercy of Big Brother-style regulations and faceless bureaucrats in government and in our schools, but also sensed fearfully by fat cat bureaucrats safely secured in their managerial sinecures in the “swamp.”

So, those millions of Americans intuitively understood what was at stake, that indeed what was needed was not another flaccid collaborator with the Deep State, like George W. Bush, who accepted the precepts of globalism and American subinfeudation to the New World Order, and the resultant commitment of American boys inserted into every faraway conflict in every forlorn desert or remote oasis in the world to satisfy the ravings of Max Boot (who had been John McCain’s foreign policy advisor) or the intransigent NeverTrump Bill Kristol, whose “Neoconservatism” makes the old Soviets of thirty years ago seem ultra-conservative.

Those Trump voters knew that “the Donald” had been a “man about town” in earlier years.  But they also realized that with few exceptions too many American presidents had had their dalliances, some previous to becoming our chief executives (e.g., Dwight Eisenhower, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland), but others, more flagrantly, while serving as president (e.g., Bill Clinton, John Kennedy).

Had we not just recently gone through the unattractive details of ten years and more of sordid Clinton “sexcapades,” some of which had taken place flagrantly in the White House, itself? Had we not been told repeatedly by a defensive Democratic Party and a sex-drenched Hollywood that Clinton’s “sin” was just about sex?  And was he not now the most admired and revered personage in the Democratic Party, kind of an elder statesman, invited to all those glittering and glitzy leftwing functions…despite the hypocritical (and obviously ideological) #MeToo” movement?

So, when the charges suddenly erupted in late 2016 against Donald Trump--and now re- appear with Stormy Daniels’ attempt to gain fame and fortune—we respond like the Democrat defenders of Grover Cleveland did after his successful campaign against Senator James G. Blaine in 1884.

The Republicans had surfaced the fact that Cleveland had had a child out of wedlock:

“Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” was their refrain.

To which the Democrats (arguably the “conservative” party back then) responded: “I voted for Maria, and I voted for the kid; I voted for Cleveland, and I’m damn glad I did!”

Thus, this rather smirky latest attempt to tie Trump to Russia by the Times and the Mainstream Media, this revived cudgel used to attack the president, will not shake the Deplorables who voted from him. They understand that vehicles of much needed change—in this case, radical change—are not always like the pure Chevalier Bayard, the “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” or the Franciscan “soldier saint,” St. John of Capistrano, who fought the Infidel Muslims at the Siege of Belgrade (1456), a cross in one hand, a sword in the other. But they did comprehend that Donald Trump was a fighter, unbought, willing to fight and, as Greek mythology tells us about Hercules,  to “cleanse the Augean stables” of their filth and excrement.

And to be blunt, that is what Washington is full of…and what needs cleaning up and draining.

So, Stormy will get her day in the sun, her interviews most likely on CNN and MSNBC and elsewhere, and her thousands of dollars. And the hypocritical Deep State functionaries will scratch their heads one more time and wonder why millions of believing Christians and church-goer don’t renounce the president and flock back to the Establishment.

In the deafening din of American politics, they haven’t been listening and they haven’t learned a thing.

March 6, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Tariffs, Trade, Trump and Conservatism

Friends,

Perhaps you will recall the television ad from a couple of years back, the one with an instructor in some Chinese university? The scene is set in the not-too-distant future, and the speaker is talking about the fact that China now basically controls—“owns”— most of major American business—Chinese exports to the United States have basically destroyed native American industry—the tag “Made in China” dominates everything, from textiles to steel imports to everyday household products. The fact is, implies the grinning instructor, “now we own them [us].”

And the immediate question that the viewer is encouraged to ask is this: can any nation that cannot control its borders, but also has seen its own native industries and major businesses disappear—can any nation that depends almost entirely on foreign imports that undercut and eventually destroy its own industrial and commercial infrastructure—can any such nation actually be counted sovereign, free and independent?

This question swirled around official Washington—and Wall Street—this past weekend, spilling over onto the Sunday talk shows, as President Donald Trump announced the imposition of steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. In the halls of Congress stalwart so-called “free trade” Republicans like Senators Ben Sasse, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake railed against the president and his plans. “Please reconsider…you’re making a huge mistake,” thundered Graham. The silver-tongued Sasse echoed Graham by asserting that the president’s action “violated conservative principles.”

Curious: all three of these GOP solons had been and—in large measure—continue to be NeverTrumpers. Graham, although more positive about the president now than during the Republican primary season (where he presented his own candidacy, but, embarrassingly could barely garner 1% of the vote), continues to have major—critical—differences with Donald Trump on a variety of issues, including essentially “open borders” and extreme foreign interventionism: Graham has, it seems, never seen an overseas conflict that he doesn’t want the US to get involved in and see American boys die in. “Bloodthirsty globalist” as a term of opprobrium really doesn’t do him justice.

Flake’s flamboyant and unrestrained hatred for the president is well-known, having been demonstrated in recent months, both on the air, and in print (he has a book out titled, Conscience of a Conservative—a title plagiarized from the late Senator Barry Goldwater, who must be turning over in his grave to be so “honored”). His announced decision to exit the US Senate can only be welcomed with “huzzahs” and the hope that such an insufferably small-minded faux “conservative” should find work elsewhere—perhaps pressing clothes in Chinese laundry someplace?

The photogenic Sasse from Nebraska has been a staunch and bitter opponent of the president since almost the beginning. Here is a portion of his “letter to constituents” on his Facebook page, February 28, 2016:

“I cannot support Donald Trump. I am a movement conservative…who I would support in a hypothetical match-up between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton is: Neither of them. But if Donald Trump ends up as the GOP nominee conservatives will need to find a third option.”[Italics mine] [https://www.facebook.com/sassefornebraska/posts/561073597391141]

He added that he would not support Trump because he was “dividing the nation” and “tearing down rather than building up,” and “he refuses to condemn the KKK.” And, he repeated his vow: “I will vote for some third candidate.”

Sasse is someone to watch: young and energetic, but woefully ignorant and obtuse when it comes to the history of what is termed “American conservatism” or, for that matter, the history of the Republican Party, he has been touted as a future presidential candidate. He claims not to be a member of the political Establishment—just like my elder cocker spaniel Robert pretends he hasn’t just soiled the carpet, but I know for a fact that he just has.

And like Flake, Sasse boasts continuously of his “conservatism.” Yet, as Phyllis Schlafly noted in her endorsement of Trump during the primary season in her posthumously published book The Conservative Case for Trump (2016), it was Donald Trump who far better incarnated traditional American conservatism—in trading policies (e.g., TPP, NAFTA, GATT, etc.), in foreign policy, in immigration proposals, in climate policy, and in domestic positions. Indeed, if Sasse (or Flake) would simply go back and familiarize himself with some of the significant traditional conservative writers, political leaders and historians of the past—think here of Dr. Russell Kirk or Senator Robert Taft—he might possibly understand the intellectual weakness of his position. But that probably is asking too much. [A history and time line of GOP trade policy is found at: https://criminalsandliars.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/protectionism-is-a-good-thing-and-has-been-the-historic-position-of-the-republican-party/]

Sasse, Graham, Flake—plus Neoconservative pundits on Fox and the Neocon scribblers at The Weekly Standard and National Review—all have something in common. In addition to having been Never (or at least Quasi-Never) Trumpers, they are inveterate “free traders,” who believe that protecting our native industries and commerce against unrestricted foreign imports and eventual control is wrong, economically and philosophically. For them tariffs—any tariffs—represent an infringement on globalism and international capitalism: if we can get cheap (and many times inferior) textile products from China and that destroys the American textile industry in North Carolina and results in the loss of hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable jobs, then that is just fine. If those textile workers—most with families to feed and educate and bills to pay—must lose $20 an hour jobs and be forced to flip burgers at Hardee’s for less than $8 per hour, that’s too bad, that’s the way globalist capitalism, usually subsidized by foreign governments, works.

During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump announced that his “Make America Great Again” campaign would attempt to redress the extreme imbalances in trade, the huge trade (and financial) deficit—nearly a trillion dollars with China alone—that our country is running, and, yes, save American jobs—bring jobs back from Mexico and China, and at least give some support to hard-working American workers. And his promises, repeated throughout the campaign, were significant reasons why he won in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin…and thus won the election.

Because a defense of American industry and American jobs is, in fact, a defense of America, itself. No nation that cannot control its own industry and commerce, no nation where its industrial infrastructure has been ravaged—raped—by foreign competition and placed under foreign control can claim to be sovereign and in possession of its own future and its own destiny.

The argument given against the president’s plans—that placing tariffs on steel and aluminum will increase prices that American citizens will have to pay for such items as cars or cans of beer—is basically specious. Of course, there may be some slight initial increases, but those will be offset by the gains in the income and employment of millions of taxpaying and job-secure workers and employees—like those textile workers—whose income and ability to purchase and pay taxes will compensate for those increases.

And more, we need to remember that President Trump is the master of “the art of the deal.” This gambit is, no doubt, the opening shot across the bow at our grasping trade “partners” in Europe, Asia and Latin America who have taken advantage of this situation and this hollowing out of America for years; it is a bold invitation, if you will, to sit down at the negotiating table and reaching a just accommodation concerning tariffs and imports and exports.

So, all those extreme free traders just need to sit still and be quiet and wait and listen. This is Donald Trump’s opening salvo in negotiating better and fairer deals for those folks who voted for him—after all, President Trump is the president and leader of American citizens. He has the solemn duty to protect their welfare, and not the welfare of the citizens in Nanking or Guadalajara or Dusseldorf…or their ruling elites.

That is why he was elected. And it is in reality the true manifestation of traditional American conservatism and policy for much of this nation’s history. Although it is true that the South and the Southern Confederacy were once supporters of “free trade,” the reasons for that are clear: the South was not at that time an industrial region, a region with business that needed protection—it depended on foreign imports. But most of American history has been characterized by the goal of “fair trade”: providing some protection for some of our native industries (and to those employed in those industries), while opening the door to imports—a balancing act which aimed at finding an agreeable means of preserving our own industry while insuring the importation of foreign goods at a reasonable price.

I fully recognize that there are anarcho-libertarians and some free traders who will strongly disagree with me, just as they disagree with the president. These disagreements are indeed fundamental differences not just about economics and trade policy, but about the kind of America we desire for us and for our children. This is about a free and economically independent country that has control over its own industry and commerce, which is not subinfeudated to international big bosses sitting in a boardroom in Beijing (with virtual slave labor responsible for the price differential) who have more in common with financiers in Geneva or Zurich than the steelworker in Pittsburgh or the coal miner in West Virginia. This about whether we are indeed a sovereign nation, or not.

Popular—“populist”—conservatism? You better damn well believe it: that’s what Donald Trump ran on and promised, and that’s what he’s proposing.

My long-time friend Pat Buchanan has, over the years, been a staunch defender of American sovereignty and “fair trade,” even if that meant that tariffs needed to be placed on certain imports to protect our native industries from rapacious, foreign government-supported competition. Back in 1998 he authored a superb statement of that belief, his book The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy. It remains an indispensable primer on the subject discussed currently.  And more recently, Pat has authored a column on that topic, which I pass along today.

Why Is the GOP Terrified of Tariffs?

http://buchanan.org/blog/gop-terrified-tariffs-128840

By Patrick J. Buchanan   Tuesday - March 6, 2018

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.