World Affairs Brief, November 25, 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:
No Fly Zone Proposal in Syria a Sign of War Coming
Super Committee Failure: No One Has the Courage to Stop Spending
GOP Warmongers Emerge in CNBC Debate
Ron Paul’s Finest Hour Defending Civil Liberties
Failure of US-Russia Arms Control Talks
Europe’s Rush to Liquidity
Official List: Too Big to Fail Banks
[…]
GOP WARMONGERS EMERGE IN CNBC DEBATES
This week’s Republican debate sponsored by Wolf Blitzer of CNBC showcased how far Republican candidates (excepting Ron Paul and sometimes Michelle Bachman) have descended into the control of neocons. I never saw so much warmongering in the past 4 years. It seems they were all intent on using the war drums of terrorism to increase rather than abolish the Patriot Act and increase war rather than stop these invasions and occupations of foreign nations. The hatred against the US is building and that’s just what these wars are intended to do in the globalist playbook.
Spencer Akerman noted that no one except Ron Paul offers a significantly different point of view than the Obama adminstration: “Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich pretty much agree with Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ex-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, saying that he backed the ‘commanders on the ground,’ [who are mostly yes-men to the politicians] endorsed Obama’s current approach: ending the Afghanistan troop surge in 2012 and withdrawing most troops by the end of 2014.
“Romney’s challenger-of-the-week, ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was more concerned with the other side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He said he’d tell Pakistanis to ‘get out of the way’ of U.S. troops conducting hot pursuit of terrorists running out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan. And it also sounded like he’d up the covert raids: ‘Don’t complain if we kill people you’re not willing to go after on your territory where you have been protecting them,’ Gingrich said [incredibly calloused].
“That’s a departure from Obama’s approach — but it’s a change in degree, not kind. NATO helicopters currently pursue terrorists fleeing into Pakistan, and U.S. troops on the border fire artillery at Pakistani positions where insurgents attack them. Then there are special-operations raids like the one deep into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. But those are still exceptional circumstances; Gingrich sounded like he’d turn them into something closer into the rule [they already are].
“Romney wants to get rid of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Perry recently called for a no-fly zone over Syria. Romney ripped him apart: ‘You’d need a no-drive zone’ instead, since Assad’s military isn’t attacking Syrian dissidents from the air. But even if Romney wouldn’t launch a Libya war redux in Syria, he endorsed more sanctions, ‘covert action’ (without explaining), and backing Turkish and Arab League diplomacy to get Assad out, while ‘meeting with the Alawites so they understand they have a future after Assad [under US and NATO control].’ It was a much deeper policy answer than most on display tonight, and evidence that Romney’s thought through what his stated support of the Arab Spring would require [nonsense. He’s just parroting what his highly paid CFR advisors tell him—it’s the standard line].
“Practically everything else is up for grabs. Debate moderator CNN deserves its share of blame for this. In two hours, there were no questions about China [or Russia], no questions about the Eurozone financial meltdown, no questions about the Mexican drug cartels. Nine Republican candidates said practically nothing about whether they’d acquiesce to huge defense cuts or roll them back.” That is how the media frames the debates to evade many issues.
Think Progress criticized neocon and presidential hopeful Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) for his “wildly conflicting positions on Iran. Last month, Santorum defended Ronald Reagan’s decision to negotiate with Iran but contradicted himself a day later by asserting that the Iranian government ‘cannot be negotiated with.’ But in comments made on Friday at a campaign stop in Iowa, Santorum took a more extreme position than any other candidate, claiming Iranian nuclear scientists are ‘enemy combatants’ and could be targeted for assassination.”
Santorum completely ignores the fact that our assassination work by drones and its collateral damage to civilians is enraging the non-western world. But Newt Gingrich was the worst calling [for] more use of the warrantless surveillance and heavy handed tactics permitted by the misnamed PATRIOT ACT. You get the feeling from watching Newt’s smug looks while listening to Ron Paul’s impassioned response for preserving civil rights that Gingrich would welcome a 1984 style society. He’s a totally unprincipled man.
But what will really hurt the establishment chances of selling Republicans on Gingrich is his defense of amnesty for illegals that have been here for years (thanks to little enforcement by the federal government). “Newt adopted the ‘heart position,’ arguing that long-rooted families, even if illegal, ought to be given a path to citizenship. ‘The party that says it’s the party of the family is going to destroy families that have been here for a quarter of a century?’” This quote is already coming back to haunt him. “Along with Santorum, Gingrich also endorsed profiling, saying that ‘you need to use every tool you can possibly use to gather the intelligence.” Every tool? Scary.
Gingrich takes a hard line on expanding foreign policy in line with his globalist background and policy advisors. As pointed out on Jim Lobe’s blog, “Former House Speaker and GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich announced his national security team last night, ahead of tonight’s CNN national security debate. David Wurmser: a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute [a neocon think tank where Gingrich is a former senior fellow], Wurmser served on the staffs of two top Bush administration hawks, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and Vice President Dick Cheney (where Stephen Yates, another Gingrich adviser, also served). In 2007, a U.N. official called Wurmser one of the ‘new crazies’ who wanted to attack Iran. In 1996, Wurmser co-authored a paper from a right-wing pro-Israel group advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.
“Ilan Berman: Berman, the vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council (which also gave the Gingrich campaign Herman Pirchner and Yates) and editor of the Jewish Institute For National Security Affairs journal, has advocated U.S.-led regime change in Iran and wrote that military action against Iran should be a ‘last resort.’ But he’s also attempted to minimize negative effects of an attack and, in 2005 at a Middle East Forum briefing, said Iran is a ‘prime candidate’ for Iraq-style pre-emption.
“James Woolsey: Woolsey served as honorary co-chair of Islamophobe Frank Gaffney‘s Center For Security Policy and is a current leadership board and executive team member at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Woolsey advocated for the Iraq war, supports illegal Israeli West Bank settlement construction, and now pushes a confrontational stance on Iran. In 1998, Woolsey signed onto a Project For a New American Century letter urging the military removal of Saddam Hussein.”
Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg, along with various other pundits has begun to notice the “new front runner of the month” syndrome affecting the Republican Party. Carlson blames it on lack of intellect within the Republican party: “Gripped by anti-intellectualism, the party has successively swooned over Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Herman Cain.”
Unthinking though the majority may be, this alone isn’t the reason for this too good to be true rise and fall of challengers to Romney. It’s the controlled media and their pollster whores that are outright forging the data in order to make it appear as if these new challengers are suddenly in first place. When the public fails to rally in support of each failed puppet candidate, the polling numbers are allowed to drop to their real level.
Carlson then engages in a fairly cogent analysis of “The Newt:” “In Gingrich, Republicans at least have a candidate who, unlike Cain, understands that the Taliban aren’t threatening to take over Libya (although Gingrich was for President Barack Obama’s intervention there before he was against it). Republicans can be certain that Gingrich’s overactive brain won’t freeze when confronted with rudimentary questions. It may, however, overheat.
“Gingrich has a hundred ideas, many of them half-baked, when a single consistent theme would suffice. He loves listening to his own voice and is so dazzled by his rhetorical skills that he believes he can wriggle out of the very tight spots in which he invariably wedges himself. The most recent example was his claim that he was paid by Freddie Mac not as an influence peddler, but for his advice as a ‘historian.’ Bloomberg News subsequently revealed that his fees had totaled more than $1.6 million, which is a whole lot of history.”
But Gingrich, a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations since 1990, is a lousy historian when it comes to remembering his own unprincipled past. “In giving Gingrich a second look, conservatives are bound to see some ugly things. Before reversing his position under a barrage of conservative criticism, Gingrich called the Medicare reform championed by Republican Representative Paul Ryan ‘right- wing social engineering.’ Earlier this year, his campaign imploded as Gingrich decamped with his wife for a cruise of the Greek isles (which he now characterizes, incredibly, as a prescient fact-finding mission to study Greece’s debt problem). When he returned, his staff quit.
“In addition to a longstanding credibility problem, Gingrich has committed multiple heresies against the conservative faith. He made an advertisement with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in which together they promoted global-warming awareness. Gingrich called it ‘probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years,’ an admission that won’t necessarily appease a Republican base convinced that global warming is a fraud perpetrated by scientists.
“In 1986, Gingrich backed amnesty for illegal aliens and, as former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has gleefully pointed out, Gingrich was one of the many Republicans who expressed support for an individual mandate to buy health insurance before that idea was adopted by Obama.
“Gingrich, who recently converted to Catholicism and says he’s pro-life, didn’t do much for the pro- life cause in the 1990s when he was the second-most-powerful person in Washington. He did not defund Planned Parenthood or pass the human-life amendment. In a high-profile Republican primary in a New York special election in 2009, he endorsed the pro-choice candidate before she dropped out of the race.
“Influence Peddling in Gingrich’s post- congressional life: For more than a decade he has exploited his insider credentials to embed himself in the interlocking and lucrative system of special interests and influence peddling. For one paying client, Gingrich said that Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year if it were to encourage patients to sign ‘advance directives’ to limit end-of-life care, a policy that Sarah Palin has since relabeled ‘death panels.’ As historian Gingrich tries to explain away his work for Freddie Mac without actually disclosing what he did, he risks digging himself deeper into the Washington muck that the Tea Party abhors.
“Gingrich has so many missteps to explain, he has set up a website featuring his own negatives (well, some of them) and respective explanations. Lots of luck there. It took a surge in the polls for his daughter to explain that Gingrich’s visit to his wife’s hospital bedside as she recovered from cancer surgery was not, as widely reported, to tell her that he wanted a divorce. He just wanted to visit.
“For Republicans, Gingrich’s rise and eventual collapse may prove more embarrassing than the boom-and-bust cycles of previous candidates who claimed to be the One Who Can Stop Romney from gaining the nomination. Conservatives have to forgo so many principles — three marriages? — to elevate Newt, that there’s almost nothing left.”
I had a subscriber quit last week over her feelings that I was being “too hard on Gingrich.” In reality, I haven’t even begun to tell of the skeletons in this man’s closets. Some are too unsavory to tell in detail, but here’s an edited version from the 1995 Vanity Faire article about Gingrich:
“In the spring of 1977, [Anne Manning, who admitted to a relationship with Gingrich that started during his 1976 campaign] was in Washington to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. He met her back at her modest hotel room. ‘We had [a form of sex without getting in bed],’ she says. ‘He prefers that… because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’ Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened her: ‘If you ever tell anybody about this, I’ll say you’re lying.’” During that same period one of Newt Gingrich’s neighbors Kip Carter, who lived a few doors down from the couple, saw Gingrich have an aberrational form of sex with one of his house guest’s wives in the car. Carter described Gingrich’s reaction upon discovery as a boyish smirk. That’s what kind of amoral man this is.
