World Affairs Brief, January 18, 2008. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief

ELECTION CENTRAL: ROMNEY–THE ONE TO STOP

With a solid win in the Michigan primary, supposedly a “make it or break it” contest for Romney, the establishment is now going to have it’s hands full trying to stop the surge for Romney. The media claimed Romney’s grasp of the economy was what propelled him to victory in Michigan. Not so. It was just bad, old-fashioned pandering to a depressed economic area, promising federal help-though avoiding the word “bailout.” Romney is not taking the high road of a Ron Paul, who would never stoop to promising benefits. This, sadly, makes Ron Paul less electable and easier for the establishment to dismiss. But Romney is playing the establishment game with the best, and that is the establishment’s problem. As Romney tries to appeal to a wide audience, the election insiders are having to promote 3 different candidates, in different ways and at different times, in order to stop various aspects of the Romney appeal.

First, they are continuing to use Governor/Pastor Mike Huckabee’s pull with Evangelical Christians to undercut Romney’s support among conservative Christians. This, however, will only be viable during the primaries of Southern states. It won’t work once the Christian voters have to choose between Romney and McCain, or Romney vs. Giuliani. They’ll go for Romney, just because the others are worse–how much worse only the far right really knows. Huckabee probably can’t win against Clinton anyway because independents and liberals fear his “changing the constitution to match God’s law.” Even though this is just campaign rhetoric telling his people what they want to hear, the PTB don’t want any more God in American life–even if only verbally acknowledged. So they have to dump Huckabee as soon as he has done his job undercutting Romney.

Second, the media manipulators organized a phony bandwagon surge of newspaper endorsements on behalf of Sen. John McCain in order to compete against Romney’s attraction to the liberal/moderate wing of the Republican Party. That failed in Iowa, but succeeded in New Hampshire–and there only because Democrats and Independents crossed over and voted in the Republican primary. Among Republicans, Romney polled higher. In Michigan, which was a test of McCain’s appeal to Republicans, McCain failed, despite the endorsement of a former Michigan governor. Republicans know all too well that McCain is a social liberal.

Third, the establishment is waiting for Florida and Super Tuesday to see if their top choice, Rudy Giuliani can get back into the race. The larger states have a much higher degree of corruption built into the voting machinery, so they may just be able to pull off a “miracle” for Rudy. But that’s a big if and a big risk. Exit polls are growing nemesis of vote fraud, essentially limiting fraud to 10-15% –so it can be explained away. But, that percentage of fraud is usually enough to change the overall result.

What the establishment can’t explain away are Giuliani’s very low vote numbers –which make earlier pre-election polls of nearly 50% support look like outright lies. The word is out: Giuliani is corrupt, a cross dresser, a womanizer (at government security expense) and pro-abortion. And no amount of media downplay can stuff that cat back into the bag. Even Ron Paul, the establishment’s arch enemy, the hero of the anti-war and pro-constitution movement, out-polled Giuliani in both Iowa and Michigan, and came close in NH. In Michigan “Dr. No” got more than 52,000 votes or 6.3% of the total Republican ballots–double Giuliani’s numbers. Giuliani’s campaign is broke and his staff is working without salary. This can’t go on for long.

Paul also beat former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee. If Thompson doesn’t pull off a win in South Carolina (unlikely due to the media push for Huckabee) he will have to bow out of the race soon. My old boss at Conservative Digest Richard Viguerie (the conservative fundraising wizard) has launched a new website to support Ron Paul. Good for him. He called Paul “a truly principled conservative in the grand tradition of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan….Paul just keeps picking up his 6% to 10% each time there’s a vote.”

That won’t be enough to win, but it will give Congressman Paul some negotiating power at the convention over who is finally picked. It might also translate into a third party run which his ardent supporters will surely demand. Being able to pull 5-10% of the votes nationally could deny a win to the Republican in the general election. While most conservatives are used to voting for the “lesser of two evils,” they don’t realize the movement would be better to have even Hillary Clinton as president than another globalist Republican. At least conservatives would fight against the legislative and globalist agenda she would pursue. I repeat that the only reason I think the PTB want Hillary as the Democratic nominee is to create sufficient backlash within the “hate Hillary” movement to elect another globalist Republican. A Ron Paul independent candidacy could put a monkey wrench into that plan.

Romney is being careful to play where he can win. He is basically conceding the South Carolina primary, with its high concentration of Evangelicals, and is concentrating on Nevada which has nearly as many Republican delegates at stake, but is much more friendly to him. Few are aware that Nevada, despite its corrupt night life reputation, has a high concentration of average people with normal day jobs including thousands of Mormons–who are supporting Romney in high numbers (except for the minority of Nevada Mormons who are followers of constitutional scholar W. Cleon Skousen (my uncle). These are almost all backing Ron Paul–so we could see a Romney/Paul one-two punch in that state. The big casino operators are, naturally, backing the democrats. No surprise there.

Breaking news: The Nevada State GOP has thrown a huge monkey wrench into Saturday’s caucuses by posting dozens of incorrect caucus meeting locations on its website–that contradict what the county GOP is posting. Despite the Ron Paul campaign’s attempt to get an immediate clarification and fix, the GOP seems to be stalling until the last minute. This smells fishy–could be a brazen attempt to keep thousands of GOP caucus goers driving around Nevada in a vain attempt to find out where to meet and vote.

MORE MEDIA EVIDENCE OF THE PLOT AGAINST ROMNEY

I don’t usually quote neocon/Bush cheerleader Ann Coulter, but this week on Worldnetdaily.com she did write an excellent summary of the obvious media attack on Romney [my comments in brackets]:

“The candidate Republicans should be clamoring for the one liberals are feverishly denouncing [I don’t subscribe to that, as that is no guarantee the person is principled. In this case, it is because Romney is not an insider and may not be controllable.] That is Mitt Romney by a landslide. New York Times columnist Frank Rich says Romney ‘is trying to sell himself as a leader,’ but he ‘is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.’ [The flip flops are true, but they happen to be in the right direction. Romney is anything but a follower, though he acts like it sometimes because he is too hungry for votes from people already corrupted by government promises and benefits. Pat Buchanan points out the flip flops of McCain and Giuliani on immigration: “Before the race began, Giuliani was a sanctuary city mayor, McCain an amnesty man and Huckabee favored letting illegal aliens compete for state scholarships. Now, after being battered at a thousand town meetings and on a thousand talk shows, all of them sound like Tom Tancredo.”]

“But Rich is in a swoon over Huckabee. I haven’t seen Rich this excited since they announced ‘Hairspray’ was coming to Broadway. Rich has continued to hyperventilate over ‘populist’ charmer Huckabee even after it came to light that Huckabee had called homosexuality an ‘abomination.’ Normally, any aspersions on sodomy or any favorable mentions of Christianity would lead to at least a dozen hysterical columns by Frank Rich. [This is very true, and indicates that this push for Huckabee by liberal columnists is very much done for ulterior motives.]

“At worst, Romney will turn out to be a moderate Republican [actually, much worse if he continues down the path to globalist intervention and torture–that will take us into WWIII] – a high-IQ, articulate, moral, wildly successful, moderate Republican. Of the top five Republican candidates for president, Romney is the only one who hasn’t dumped his first wife (as well as the second, in the case of Giuliani) – except Huckabee. And unlike Huckabee, Romney doesn’t have a son who hanged a dog at summer camp. So there won’t be any intern issues and there won’t be any Billy Carter issues.”