To listen to Joel and Dr. Stanley Monteith discuss these topics,
click on the Radio Liberty 12/23/11 (hour 2) archived broadcast HERE.
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World Affairs Brief, December 23, 2011 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com)
THIS WEEK’S ANALYSIS:
Attacks on Ron Paul Go into High Gear
Sharing Secrets with China – Again
North Korean Coup?
US Military Ready for War with Iran
Pakistan has Nominal Democracy Only
Shuffling US Troops – Keeping Iraq Surrounded
Syria Attack Closer
Battle Against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpiao
Economy: Scramble for Cash
Celente’s Economic Collapse Prediction
ATTACKS ON RON PAUL GO INTO HIGH GEAR
Ron Paul is suddenly the man to beat. With polls showing support for Newt Gingrich collapsing in Iowa the kingmakers are facing a very real problem: how to stop this growing anti-government, anti-war movement backing Ron Paul that draws from conservatives, libertarians and honest liberals alike. Despite media attempts to play like he doesn’t exist, he keeps growing in strength. Now both the liberal and faux-conservative media (Fox) is moving into outright attack mode. Establishment figures like former president George H W Bush have even condescended to endorse Romney—the very man the PTB have been trying to defeat with a succession of phony conservative candidates since the beginning. Nothing has worked so far. As a “final solution” they have only one option left to keep a puppet in the White House—engineer the reelection of Obama.
Philip Gourevitch of the very establishment New Yorker Magazine is enjoying the spectacle of the establishment powers failing time after time to stop Romney, and now to stop even Paul:
“True or false: there is nothing that Republicans want more than to drive Barack Obama out of the White House. But what we have instead is a whack-a-mole primary campaign, with a new frontrunner popping up every few weeks, only to be beaten back by the public recognition of his or her own haplessness: It’s Bachmann! No, it’s Perry! Sorry, it’s Cain! Wait a minute—what?!—it’s Gingrich!?!
“Disgraced, discredited, distrusted, despised by his party’s establishment, Newt Gingrich [is/was] the frontrunner, while the only non-preposterous Republican prospect for the general election, Mitt Romney, is shunned. Never mind that Gingrich was running behind Ron Paul in national polls from May to October…[that was before they artificially boosted his polling numbers, which now can’t be sustained and still be credible]… Wait again, yes, here are the latest poll numbers, showing Newt leveling out, maybe slipping a bit, and, rising hot on his heels in pre-Iowa caucus polls and New Hampshire town-hall rallies, here comes Paul!
“A new poll, out early in the week, shows Paul running almost neck-and-neck with Gingrich in Iowa. To be sure, in the relentless program of Republican debates this year, Paul—the Ayn Rand-loving, federal-government hating, practically (if not, as I earlier wrote, rabidly) isolationist Texas congressman—often seemed like the only candidate who was making any sense.
‘That was not a measure of Paul’s reasonableness or appeal, however, but of the disarray of the rest of the field. Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, return to the gold standard, and do away with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which he considers unconstitutional… But Paul calls the other candidates out on their serial hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and incoherencies.
“Paul’s critique of the control of politics by corporate interests, and of America’s imperial foreign policy and permanent war-footing around the world, strikes a chord more broadly with disaffected voters on both the political right and the left.”
Since the New Yorker piece, the numbers have gotten even worse for Gingrich. Here’s the Atlantic Wire: “A new poll from Public Policy Polling shows that Ron Paul has taken the lead in the Iowa caucus race, while Newt Gingrich’s support is fading fast. A different Gallup poll shows Gringrich still holding the lead [Gallop is a prime manipulator], but slipping, while The New York Times has Paul in the lead as well.
“Gingrich has seen his numbers in the PPP poll drop from 27 percent to 14 percent in just three weeks, while his favorability rating is now split at 46 percent for to 47 percent against, the worst of any candidate not named Jon Huntsman. That’s quite a fall for someone who looked to be running away with the state and taking charge on the national level.”
In each of these cases where the establishment has promoted one candidate after another, the polling numbers were manipulated upward in the most unbelievable ways. I’ve been in political analysis since high school and I’ve never seen these kinds of rapid changes. Why? Because people don’t change their minds that fast, especially upward. Besides, it is relatively easy now to fudge the polling results. They used to work hard to tilt the questions, but now they simply use computers to call people they have polled before who have predictable opinions. It’s called “dial a vote.”
The polls go down rapidly only when the kingmakers realize that the artificial support isn’t working. They are doing real polling behind the scenes that they never tell you about. In the case of Iowa, reality comes in two weeks when the caucuses actually vote. The pollsters have to stop fudging the polls early enough to avoid the embarrassment of being so wrong when the vote comes in.
The beauty of the caucus system is that they don’t use electronic voting and it’s done in open meetings, so it is almost impossible to rig the vote. In a caucus system, groups of voters in little sub districts elect delegates to go to the big caucus meeting where the candidates for office in each party are selected. Typically, only people who are activists in politics get chosen to be delegates. Normal apathetic voters don’t even show up at the neighborhood meetings to select delegates. Thus, groups that are better organized and passionate about voting are much better represented at caucus meetings. As a result, you normally get better results in a caucus than with a primary system, where people are easily influenced by media propaganda and distortions.
I can guarantee you that if Ron Paul wins the Iowa Caucus meetings, the entire media, in lock step, will claim it’s irrelevant and “not representative” of a real primary vote. Then you’ll see a concerted movement to force states that use the caucus system to abandon it in favor of a primary. The establishment has long wanted to get rid of the caucuses simply because they are resistant to external control. They will use Ron Paul’s win to decry the caucus system.
In fact it is starting even before the vote: Liberal USA Today made the incongruous claim that “ ‘Despite money and support [and leading in the polls], Ron Paul still not in lead‘. What the author Jackie Kucinich is saying is that because “mainstream Republicans” say he shouldn’t be leading, that means the voters are irrelevant and that Paul is not in the lead. Go figure.
The reason a Ron Paul win in Iowa worries the establishment is because New Hampshire is next where independent voters outnumber the two major political parties. The establishment has been crowing to the world that Ron Paul can’t win, and suddenly he wins a state primary. That could translate into votes in New Hampshire, and the PTB can’t let Paul win two in a row lest people really begin to see him as a potential winner.
So, there is now a flood of media coverage being directed at Ron Paul. Why, after so much effort evading even mentioning his name? Because they have to attack him and destroy him, concentrating on every little thing they can dig up. They don’t have much, but they are capitalizing on it in spades.
The New York Daily News talks about the latest common attack scheme: “The Republican presidential candidate walked out on a CNN interview Wednesday following a heated discussion over racist newsletters that were sent out in his name more than two decades ago. The usually mild-mannered, Texas congressman – who’s leading in some Iowa polls – became irked when network reporter Gloria Borger pressed Paul about the newsletters.
“Paul said he was sick of being ‘pestered’ by reporters about the issue. The newsletters, called Ron Paul’s Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report went out under his name in the late 1980s and early 1990s during his time in office. They contain a series of offensive statements, including ‘We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational.’ During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, another read ‘Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.’
“When Borger asked Paul if he ever read the newsletters, the politician quipped, ‘Why don’t you go back and look at what I said yesterday on CNN and what I’ve said for 20 something years…I didn’t write them. I disavow them.’”
It was a typical attack setup and “the two went back and forth until Paul became so annoyed that he took off his mic and walked out.. Paul told Borger the issue had become incendiary ‘because of people like you.’[Absolutely true. The media makes a drum beat and people take notice. When they choose to carefully bury a topic, the public remains ignorant.]
“The controversy over the newsletters is not new and has come up before, including his 2008 presidential run. Paul has argued that while the newsletters went out under his name, others did the writing.” That won’t stop the media from making an issue of it, plus his positions in favor of getting the federal government out of prosecuting for marijuana possession, raw milk and all other personal freedoms when not violating the rights of others.
It is interesting that this latest attack wave based upon these twenty-year old statements surfaced only after the Weekly Standard wrote about them in their latest issue. The Weekly Standard is Irving Kristol’s premier neo-con, pro-war publication in the US—the epitome of the establishment desire to defeat the only anti-war candidate in the Republican stable.
The Weekly Standard also figured prominently in attacking Pat Buchanan when he upset the establishment election plans. Here’s Timothy P. Carney, Senior Political Columnist for the Washington Examiner predicting that the establishment will take the gloves off in attacking Ron Paul:
“The Republican presidential primary has become a bit feisty, but it will get downright ugly if Ron Paul wins the Iowa caucuses. The principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating, libertarian Republican congressman from Texas stands firmly outside the bounds of permissible dissent as drawn by either the Republican establishment or the mainstream media.
“But in a crowded GOP field currently led by a collapsing Newt Gingrich and an uninspiring Mitt Romney, Paul could carry the Iowa caucuses, where supporter enthusiasm has so much value. If Paul wins, how will the media and the GOP react? Much of the media will ignore him (expect headlines like ‘Romney Beats out Gingrich for Second Place in Iowa’). Some in the Republican establishment and the conservative media will panic. Others will calmly move to crush him, with the full cooperation of the liberal mainstream media.
“For a historical analogy, study the aftermath of Pat Buchanan’s 1996 victory in the New Hampshire primary. ‘It was awful,’ Buchanan told me this week when I asked him about his few days as the nominal GOP front-runner. ‘They come down on you with both feet.’
“The GOP establishment that week rallied to squash Buchanan. Just after New Hampshire, Gingrich’s hand-picked group of GOP leaders, known as the Speaker’s Advisory Group, met with one thing on their minds, according to a contemporaneous Newsweek report: ‘How to deal with Buchanan.’
“While many Republicans dismissed Buchanan’s New Hampshire win as irrelevant, arguing his support was too narrow to ever win the nomination, the neoconservative wing of the GOP darkly warned of a Buchanan menace. ‘People are panicked,’ Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard told Newsweek. ‘If they’re not, it’s only because they don’t know what’s going on.’
“The liberal mainstream media dutifully filled out Kristol’s picture of ‘what’s going on.’ Newsweek put an ominously lit picture of Buchanan on the cover under the words ‘Preaching Fear.’ The article stretched itself into contortions to paint Buchanan as a white racist. (Buchanan was campaigning in South Carolina, which still flew the Confederate flag over its capitol.)
“Insinuations of racism and anti-Semitism were the weapons of the mainstream media, but Buchanan’s sins in the eyes of the GOP establishment were different. They feared Pat because he rejected a rare inviolable article of faith among the party elites: free trade. Also, in the post-Cold War era, Buchanan’s foreign policy had become far less interventionist than that of the establishment.
“It’s similar with Paul. There are many reasons he is unacceptable to the Republican elite. Some of these transgressions reflect badly on Paul. Others reflect badly on the party. In Paul’s favor, he holds to the professed principles of his party. He makes Republicans look bad by firmly opposing overspending and the unconstitutional expansion of federal power. He correctly predicted the troubles that would be caused by housing subsidies and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
“Paul is also disliked for his foreign policy. His non-interventionism [always billed as isolationism just as with Robert Taft] has provoked clashes with the party elites, but it resonates with a growing number of Republicans who have grown tired of endless war and nation building that doesn’t seem to serve American interests. But Paul regularly goes too far for even these voters, criticizing the killing of al Qaeda leaders and at times sounding like he agrees with Iran’s grievances against the United States.
“But neither his establishment-irritating adherence to principle, nor his hawk-angering foreign policy, will be the focus of the anti-Paul attacks should he carry Iowa. His conservative critics and the mainstream media will imply that he is a racist, a kook, and a conspiracy theorist.
“Paul’s indiscretions — such as abiding 9/11 conspiracy theorists [a carefully worded charge (abide) meant to penalize anyone who doesn’t openly condemn conspiracies like everyone else] and allowing racist material in a newsletter published under his name — will be blown up to paint a scary caricature. His belief in state’s rights and property rights will be distorted into support for Jim Crow and racism.
“Many of Paul opponents will take heart in concluding that Paul cannot get more than 25 percent in any state, and so he can be dismissed as a spoiler. But for the enforcers of Republican orthodoxy, a Paul victory in Iowa will be an act of impudence that must be punished.” Indeed!
I believe the PTB will be able to derail Paul’s candidacy, not only in the primaries past New Hampshire, but at the convention as well. You will see Paul shunned and slighted at the Republican National Convention and given a speaking slot (if at all) not in prime time. All of this will anger and energize his passionate followers and they’ll vow revenge during the election. The anger at all the establishment betrayal during all of 2012 will be palpable among those that are forming a large minority in the nation demanding real change and a return to the Constitution.
Not only will they demand Paul not support Romney if Romney wins, but they will instigate a draft Paul movement to get him to run as an independent. Ron is considering such a move for several reasons:
1) He won’t owe anything to the Republican Party after this election cycle. He’s not running for reelection to Congress. That kept him from bolting during the 2008 election cycle, and time has proved his then strategy correct.
2) This is his last foray into politics. He hasn’t got anything to lose by going for broke.
3) His political star is still rising and his support is at a crescendo—greater than ever before, and his supporters don’t want him to compromise or go away.
4) There is no one in the wings to succeed him, except perhaps his son Rand, so he’ll be expected to make his influence felt as far as he can.
5) Splitting off the Republican vote is not a consequence he fears. He knows that a RINO Republican will do just as much damage to the nation in the next 4 years as Obama. He won’t be persuaded to support the lesser of two evils.
Lastly, the PTB for the first time since Ross Perot may want to promote an independent candidacy. Historically they ONLY do this when they want to split the vote and this time they want to split votes away from Romney. Of course the kingmakers are dead set against a Ron Paul being in the White House since he would actively work to undo all the illicit acts they have enshrined for generations.
But they also don’t want Romney. Despite successfully infiltrating his campaign with every neocon and establishment advisor they can muster, in spite of Romney’s excessive ambition which leads him to flip-flopping and compromise and in spite of his desperate wishes to be accepted by the establishment. To them that is not enough. As I said before, I think the PTB have grown so accustomed to having virtual puppets in the presidency since after Ronald Reagan, that they fear a non-insider as President. They know that he wouldn’t stomach many of the illegal things going on and turn against his establishment handlers.
So, if Romney gets the nomination, the PTB will engineer Obama’s reelection. 1) They will encourage a Ron Paul independent run. 2) They will allow Ron into the debates. 3) They will give him media coverage and make a big deal out of a Paul independent candidacy. Those are the signs.
They will also give us the long expected war with Iran, most likely close to the election. It’s the one sure way to get a president reelected—create a patriotic appearing war. If they were to pull off the war on Iran early in 2012, it would probably accrue to Ron Paul’s favor as more war is particularly unpopular now. But if it occurs in the fall, it will accrue to Obama’s favor, if accompanied with the expected media drumming about supporting our troops.
Thus, although I’m pessimistic about the chances the establishment will permit Ron Paul to win, he is building the constitutional reform movement more than anyone else in this or the past century. For that alone we owe Ron Paul our support. Give generously to his campaign to make sure he has the ammunition to make a difference.
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