April 5, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Pat Buchanan Writes: On Nationalism, Globalism, Economic Independence,
Russia, Donald Trump and the Prospects for American Recovery
Friends,
For
several weeks I’ve been saving some recent columns by national columnist and
author Pat Buchanan. These short essays represent an excellent summation of
what we could call “America First” thinking and views on both domestic issues
and foreign policy, and major reasons why Donald Trump, who seemed to enunciate
these positions in 2016, won the last presidential election.
Pat
began to write about these topics in the late 1980s. In a real sense, in his several
books and many columns he was “going back to the sources,” that is, retrieving
an older “conservative tradition” that predated the triumph of globalism and the
success of the Marxist-descended Neoconservatives who had begun their
pilgrimage into the older conservative movement in the late 1970s into the
1980s (and who soon dominated the movement, controlled its publications and its
foundations, and set its ironclad “new orthodoxy”).
I
got to know Pat in the late 1980s and chaired his presidential campaign in
North Carolina in 1992. His vision of the old America—of an American
conservatism which my mentor Russell Kirk had chronicled in his seminal volume The Conservative Mind back in 1953—was
distinctly different from the warmed-over Trotskyite internationalism,
egalitarianism, and zealous vision of imposed liberal globalist democracy
propounded by the Neocons. Like Russell Kirk, Pat understood that the
fundamental premises of the Neocons, their basic philosophy—many of those
positions that they brought with them in their pilgrimage towards
conservatism—were positions shared by the Left. And because of that, any
opposition they would offer to the Left would be severely flawed and fatally
weakened…and in too many cases they would end up only confirming and normalizing
Progressivist advances.
Thus,
the Neocon commitment to the imagined American ideal of equality and the
resulting acceptance, at least implicitly, that racism and sexism have been the
critical factors in shaping American history, have negated real opposition to
the onrushing Progressivism that threatens to overwhelm the country and its
institutions. And the zealous belief in a kind of divine American destiny and
responsibility to impose liberal democracy and equality globally, on every
remote desert oasis or jungle, has involved this country in needless conflicts
and internal civil wars that in no way serve real American national interests. Indeed,
such involvement represents the pseudo-religious zeal to create a New World
Order, a dream (or rather, nightmare) that Trotsky and his minions also
envisaged.
But
these ideas, this vision, is antithetical to the older American conservatism,
as Pat Buchanan began to notice in the late 1980s (and as did Russell Kirk, Mel
Bradford, Paul Gottfried and other acute observers).
I offer, then, six short columns by
Pat—columns which I think offer excellent commentary on this process, and on
the opportunities and challenges facing President Trump and those of us who
wish to see his America First counter-revolution succeed.
Fatal Delusions of Western Man
By Patrick J. Buchanan Thursday - March 1,
2018 at 10:32 pm
“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 circumnavigate 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?
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?
The Eternal Lure of
Nationalism
By Patrick J. Buchanan Tuesday - February 27, 2018
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 jewel 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 new world order 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?
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 jewel 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 new world order 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?
Time to Get Over
the Russophobia
By Patrick J. Buchanan Friday - March 9, 2018
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought to do in Cold War I.
For our present conflict, Vladimir Putin is not alone at fault. His actions have often been reactions to America's unilateral moves. After the Soviet Union collapsed, we brought all of the Warsaw Pact members and three former republics of the USSR into our military alliance, NATO, to corral Russia. How friendly was that? Putin responded with his military buildup in the Baltic.
George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Richard Nixon had negotiated, Putin responded with a buildup of the offensive missiles he put on display last week.
The U.S. helped to instigate the Maidan Square coup that dumped over the elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine. To prevent the loss of his Sebastopol naval base on the Black Sea, Putin countered by annexing the Crimean Peninsula.
After peaceful protests in Syria were put down by Bashar Assad, we sent arms to Syrian rebels to overthrow the Damascus regime. Seeing his last naval base in the Med, Tartus, imperiled, Putin came to Assad's aid and helped him win the civil war.
The Boris Yeltsin years are over.
Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as a nation that slapped away her hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, and then humiliated her by planting NATO on her front porch.
Yet, what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States.
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought to do in Cold War I.
For our present conflict, Vladimir Putin is not alone at fault. His actions have often been reactions to America's unilateral moves. After the Soviet Union collapsed, we brought all of the Warsaw Pact members and three former republics of the USSR into our military alliance, NATO, to corral Russia. How friendly was that? Putin responded with his military buildup in the Baltic.
George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Richard Nixon had negotiated, Putin responded with a buildup of the offensive missiles he put on display last week.
The U.S. helped to instigate the Maidan Square coup that dumped over the elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine. To prevent the loss of his Sebastopol naval base on the Black Sea, Putin countered by annexing the Crimean Peninsula.
After peaceful protests in Syria were put down by Bashar Assad, we sent arms to Syrian rebels to overthrow the Damascus regime. Seeing his last naval base in the Med, Tartus, imperiled, Putin came to Assad's aid and helped him win the civil war.
The Boris Yeltsin years are over.
Russia is acting again as a great power. And she sees us as a nation that slapped away her hand, extended in friendship in the 1990s, and then humiliated her by planting NATO on her front porch.
Yet, what is also clear is that Putin hoped and believed that, with the election of Trump, Russia might be able to restore respectful if not friendly relations with the United States.
Clearly, Putin wanted
that, as did Trump.
Yet, with the Beltway hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in this capital, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia. The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, "has been eating itself up." Is his depiction that wide of the mark?
What is the matter with us?
Three years after Nikita Khrushchev sent tanks into Budapest to drown the Hungarian revolution in blood, Eisenhower was hosting him on a 10-day visit to the USA. Two years after the Berlin Wall went up, and eight months after Khrushchev installed missiles in Cuba, Kennedy reached out to the Soviet dictator in his widely praised American University speech. Lyndon Johnson met with Russian President Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, just weeks after we almost clashed over Moscow's threat to intervene in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Six months after Leonid Brezhnev sent tank armies to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968, an inaugurated Nixon was seeking detente.
In those years, no matter who was in the White House or Kremlin, the U.S. establishment favored engagement with Moscow. It was the right that was skeptical or hostile.
Again, what is the matter with this generation?
True, Vladimir Putin is an autocrat seeking a fourth term, like FDR. But what Russian leader, save Yeltsin, has not been an autocrat? And Russians today enjoy freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, travel, politics, and the press that the generations before 1989 never knew.
China, not Russia, has the more repressive single-party Communist state. Indeed, which of these U.S. allies shows greater tolerance than Putin's Russia? The Philippines of Rodrigo Duterte, the Egypt of Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Turkey of President Erdogan, or the Saudi Arabia of Prince Mohammad bin Salman?
Russia is nowhere near the strategic or global threat the Soviet Union presented. As Putin conceded this week, with the breakup of the USSR, his nation "lost 23.8 percent of its national territory, 48.5 percent of its population, 41 percent of its gross domestic product and 44.6 percent of its military capacity."
How would Civil War Unionists have reacted if the South had won independence and then, to secure the Confederacy against a new invasion, Dixie entered into an alliance with Great Britain, gave the Royal Navy bases in New Orleans and Charleston, and allowed battalions of British troops to deploy in Virginia?
Japan negotiates with Putin's Russia over the southern Kuril Islands lost at the end of World War II. Bibi Netanyahu has met many times with Putin, though he is an ally of Assad, whom Bibi would like to see ousted, and has a naval and air base not far from Israel's border.
We Americans have far more fish to fry with Russia than Bibi. Strategic arms control. De-escalation in the Baltic, Ukraine and the Black Sea. Ending the war in Syria. North Korea. Space. Afghanistan. The Arctic. The war on terror.
Yet all we seem to hear from our elite is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for desecrating "our democracy."
Get over it.
Yet, with the Beltway hysteria over hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, and the Russophobia raging in this capital, we appear to be paralyzed when it comes to engaging with Russia. The U.S. political system, said Putin this week, "has been eating itself up." Is his depiction that wide of the mark?
What is the matter with us?
Three years after Nikita Khrushchev sent tanks into Budapest to drown the Hungarian revolution in blood, Eisenhower was hosting him on a 10-day visit to the USA. Two years after the Berlin Wall went up, and eight months after Khrushchev installed missiles in Cuba, Kennedy reached out to the Soviet dictator in his widely praised American University speech. Lyndon Johnson met with Russian President Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, just weeks after we almost clashed over Moscow's threat to intervene in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Six months after Leonid Brezhnev sent tank armies to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968, an inaugurated Nixon was seeking detente.
In those years, no matter who was in the White House or Kremlin, the U.S. establishment favored engagement with Moscow. It was the right that was skeptical or hostile.
Again, what is the matter with this generation?
True, Vladimir Putin is an autocrat seeking a fourth term, like FDR. But what Russian leader, save Yeltsin, has not been an autocrat? And Russians today enjoy freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, travel, politics, and the press that the generations before 1989 never knew.
China, not Russia, has the more repressive single-party Communist state. Indeed, which of these U.S. allies shows greater tolerance than Putin's Russia? The Philippines of Rodrigo Duterte, the Egypt of Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Turkey of President Erdogan, or the Saudi Arabia of Prince Mohammad bin Salman?
Russia is nowhere near the strategic or global threat the Soviet Union presented. As Putin conceded this week, with the breakup of the USSR, his nation "lost 23.8 percent of its national territory, 48.5 percent of its population, 41 percent of its gross domestic product and 44.6 percent of its military capacity."
How would Civil War Unionists have reacted if the South had won independence and then, to secure the Confederacy against a new invasion, Dixie entered into an alliance with Great Britain, gave the Royal Navy bases in New Orleans and Charleston, and allowed battalions of British troops to deploy in Virginia?
Japan negotiates with Putin's Russia over the southern Kuril Islands lost at the end of World War II. Bibi Netanyahu has met many times with Putin, though he is an ally of Assad, whom Bibi would like to see ousted, and has a naval and air base not far from Israel's border.
We Americans have far more fish to fry with Russia than Bibi. Strategic arms control. De-escalation in the Baltic, Ukraine and the Black Sea. Ending the war in Syria. North Korea. Space. Afghanistan. The Arctic. The war on terror.
Yet all we seem to hear from our elite is endless whining that Putin has not been sanctioned enough for desecrating "our democracy."
Get over it.
Will the Deep
State Break Trump?
By
Patrick J. Buchanan Friday - March
23, 2018
"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.
"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.
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.
Is Trump Assembling
a War Cabinet?
By Patrick J. Buchanan Tuesday - March 27, 2018
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.
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.
How Trump's Presidency Will Be Judged
By Patrick J.
Buchanan Tuesday - April 3, 2018
On many issues — naming Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts — President Trump is a conventional Republican.
Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first — from which the Bush Republicans recoiled.
Trump alone pledged to kill amnesty and secure the border with a 30-foot wall to halt the invasion of our country.
Trump alone pledged to end the de-industrialization of America and bring back our lost factories and lost jobs. Trump alone pledged to end the democracy-crusading and extricate us from the endless Mideast wars into which George Bush, Barack Obama and the War Party had plunged the nation. And, upon how he delivers on these three uniquely Trumpian issues will hang his political fate and history's assessment of whether he was a good, great or failed president.
On many issues — naming Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts — President Trump is a conventional Republican.
Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first — from which the Bush Republicans recoiled.
Trump alone pledged to kill amnesty and secure the border with a 30-foot wall to halt the invasion of our country.
Trump alone pledged to end the de-industrialization of America and bring back our lost factories and lost jobs. Trump alone pledged to end the democracy-crusading and extricate us from the endless Mideast wars into which George Bush, Barack Obama and the War Party had plunged the nation. And, upon how he delivers on these three uniquely Trumpian issues will hang his political fate and history's assessment of whether he was a good, great or failed president.
Where this city stands is not in doubt. It is salivating to see
Trump's presidency broken, his agenda trashed, and him impeached. This city
looks to Robert Mueller as the Moses of its deliverance from the tyrant whom an
uncomprehending electorate imposed upon it. While Trump's support among his
deplorables is holding — indeed, he is creeping back up in the polls — the
outcome of the battle to bring him down remains in doubt.
Consider. Trump's border wall was treated like a disposable bauble in the GOP Congress' $1.6 trillion budget deal. Cities and whole states are declaring themselves sanctuaries for people here illegally and defying U.S. authorities' requests for help in deporting accused criminals.
A "caravan" of a thousand Central Americans is passing through Mexico, aided by the authorities, and headed for the U.S. border. When they arrive, rely upon it, the anti-Trump media will be there to bewail any transgressions by the Border Patrol.
The hysterical reaction to news that the 2020 census will include a question, "Are you a U.S. citizen?" testifies to what this is all about.
America's elites are adamant that our country should vanish inside a new Third World nation that resembles in its racial, religious and ethnic composition the U.N. General Assembly. The old God-and-country America the people loved they detest.
Trump is likely the last president who will try to preserve
that country. If he leaves office with the border unsecured, it is hard to see
what stops the Third World invasion, even as it is also coming across the
Mediterranean into Europe. "The
Camp of the Saints" is no longer a dystopian
novel. Enoch Powell's warning, 50 years
ago, about mass migration into Europe, "Et thybrim multo spumantem
sanguine cerno," "I see the River Tiber foaming with much
blood," is now seen as prophecy.
And Trump's agenda of economic nationalism — restoring the industrial dynamism and self-sufficiency America knew from Lincoln to Reagan — faces relentless hostility from institutionalized power. Against Trump stand corporate elites, whose profits and stock options depend on producing outside America, and the managerial class of a New World Order that runs the EU, U.N., IMF, World Bank and WTO.
Yet if global elites are hoarding the largest slice of the wealth of nations and a goodly slice of their political power, one senses that they are an unloved crowd, and they are sitting on a volcano.
The third unique Trump issue was his commitment to extricate us from the Middle East wars into which Bush and Obama had entrenched us, and to keep us out of any new wars. Trump also pledged to reach out to Vladimir Putin and to Russia to avoid a second Cold War. Those who voted for him voted for that foreign policy.
And if Trump is drawn into new wars with Iran or North Korea, or reaches 2020 with U.S. forces still fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, he will be perceived as having failed.
Yet the resistance of this city to giving up its vision of U.S. global hegemony is broad and deep, for that vision is almost a defining mark of our foreign policy elites. For them to give it up would be like death itself.
The stunned reaction to Trump's suggestion last week that we will be leaving Syria after ISIS's caliphate is destroyed, testifies to how much their identify is tied up in this vision.
That Trump would accept an end to Syria's civil war, with Bashar Assad still in power, is intolerable. Yet how we can reverse that reality without putting thousands of U.S. combat troops into Syria is unexplained. In the last analysis, then, it is upon three questions that the Trump presidency will be judged:
Did he secure America's borders? Did he restore the industrial might of America? Did he take us out of and keep us out of any more neocon wars?
Consider. Trump's border wall was treated like a disposable bauble in the GOP Congress' $1.6 trillion budget deal. Cities and whole states are declaring themselves sanctuaries for people here illegally and defying U.S. authorities' requests for help in deporting accused criminals.
A "caravan" of a thousand Central Americans is passing through Mexico, aided by the authorities, and headed for the U.S. border. When they arrive, rely upon it, the anti-Trump media will be there to bewail any transgressions by the Border Patrol.
The hysterical reaction to news that the 2020 census will include a question, "Are you a U.S. citizen?" testifies to what this is all about.
America's elites are adamant that our country should vanish inside a new Third World nation that resembles in its racial, religious and ethnic composition the U.N. General Assembly. The old God-and-country America the people loved they detest.
And Trump's agenda of economic nationalism — restoring the industrial dynamism and self-sufficiency America knew from Lincoln to Reagan — faces relentless hostility from institutionalized power. Against Trump stand corporate elites, whose profits and stock options depend on producing outside America, and the managerial class of a New World Order that runs the EU, U.N., IMF, World Bank and WTO.
Yet if global elites are hoarding the largest slice of the wealth of nations and a goodly slice of their political power, one senses that they are an unloved crowd, and they are sitting on a volcano.
The third unique Trump issue was his commitment to extricate us from the Middle East wars into which Bush and Obama had entrenched us, and to keep us out of any new wars. Trump also pledged to reach out to Vladimir Putin and to Russia to avoid a second Cold War. Those who voted for him voted for that foreign policy.
And if Trump is drawn into new wars with Iran or North Korea, or reaches 2020 with U.S. forces still fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, he will be perceived as having failed.
Yet the resistance of this city to giving up its vision of U.S. global hegemony is broad and deep, for that vision is almost a defining mark of our foreign policy elites. For them to give it up would be like death itself.
The stunned reaction to Trump's suggestion last week that we will be leaving Syria after ISIS's caliphate is destroyed, testifies to how much their identify is tied up in this vision.
That Trump would accept an end to Syria's civil war, with Bashar Assad still in power, is intolerable. Yet how we can reverse that reality without putting thousands of U.S. combat troops into Syria is unexplained. In the last analysis, then, it is upon three questions that the Trump presidency will be judged:
Did he secure America's borders? Did he restore the industrial might of America? Did he take us out of and keep us out of any more neocon wars?
No comments:
Post a Comment