Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran?
For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war.
* Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq.
* The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Iran is making progress in the enrichment of uranium and denying it access to Iran’s nuclear sites.
* Bush is calling on Russia and China to toughen sanctions.
Congressman Ron Paul and Dr. Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, held a press conference on Thursday, May 24, 2007 at the National Press Club to educate Rudy Giuliani on American foreign policy in the Middle East. Dr. Paul gave Mr. Giuliani a reading assignment which is at the end of the 13-minute video clip.
Add to the frustration of the GOP faithful the fact that the popular frontrunners for next year’s elections are all conservative misfits….
Those of you who heard my radio program back in 2001 know that I predicted then that George W. Bush would do to the Republican Party much the same thing that Bill Clinton did to the Democratic Party. However, I must confess, I could not then realize the magnitude of that prediction.
The anti-war Democrats are crying betrayal – and justifiably so.
For a Democratic Congress is now voting to fully fund the war in Iraq, as demanded by President Bush, and without any timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Bush got his $100 billion, then magnanimously agreed to let Democrats keep the $20 billion in pork they stuffed into the bill – to soothe the pain of their sellout of the party base.
Remarkable. If the Republican rout of 2006 said anything, it was that America had lost faith in the Bush-Rumsfeld conduct of the war and wanted Democrats to lead the country out.
By John Solomon and Matthew Mosk
The Washington Post
In Private Sector, Giuliani Parlayed Fame Into Wealth
Candidate’s Firm Has Taken On Controversial Executives, Clients
On Dec. 7, 2001, nearly three months after the terrorist attack that had made him a national hero and a little over three weeks before he would leave office, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took the first official step toward making himself rich.
The letter he dispatched to the city Conflicts of Interest Board that day asked permission to begin forming a consulting firm with three members of his outgoing administration. The company, Giuliani said, would provide “management consulting service to governments and business” and would seek out partners for a “wide-range of possible business, management and financial services” projects.
As everyone except for a dwindling band of Bush supporters now knows, the US is in a terrible situation in Iraq from which it cannot extract itself. For Bush and Cheney, their own pride and delusion are more compelling than US casualties, the destruction of Iraq and its people, and the inflaming of sectarian strife and anti-American violence throughout the Middle East.
Congress is complicit in the great strategic blunder. Republican flag-wavers led Americans like lemmings into the abyss. The Democrats have already abandoned the electorate that gave them Control of Congress six months ago in the false hope that the Democrats would corral the White House Moron and lead America out of the abyss.
“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?
“I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
So said Abe Lincoln to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Observing the Senate last week, and looking over the latest figures from the Census Bureau, America is now risking national suicide.
There comes a time in any political campaign that a spade must be called a spade. Just as a tank ride exposed Michael Dukakis for the poindexter that he was and a microphone in New Hampshire showed the American people that Ronald Reagan was the right leader at the right time, last Tuesday’s GOP presidential debates in South Carolina demonstrated that Rudy Giuliani is as conservative as Paris Hilton is responsible.
Yes, Giuliani was, and some say is, America’s mayor and, yes, he was the man that rallied a nation around a battered city when the Twin Towers came crashing down. Such facts are indisputable.
Ron Paul’s response to Giuliani, if he had been able to read an Associated Press news story that day on Giuliani’s lucrative clientele, could have been that the former New York City mayor had some explaining of his own to do. Why, after rallying the city and nation after 9/11 and rejecting a financial contribution for the victim’s families from a Saudi billionaire prince, did he turn around and decide to represent the Saudis in order to make himself rich?Why has this not been transformed into the “Big Story” by John Gibson?…
The exchange with Paul over 9/11 might have been seen in a different light if Hannity had asked Giuliani about why, according to the AP report, his firm represented Saudi Arabia.
Rudy Giuliani’s much-publicized but misleading put-down of Ron Paul during Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate should have been tempered by a report that Saudi Arabia, the country that spawned most of the 9/11 hijackers, has been one of Giuliani’s lucrative foreign clients. However, Fox News questioners Chris Wallace and Wendell Goler did not bring it up.
It was the decisive moment of the South Carolina debate.
Hearing Rep. Ron Paul recite the reasons for Arab and Islamic resentment of the United States, including 10 years of bombing and sanctions that brought death to thousands of Iraqis after the Gulf War, Rudy Giuliani broke format and exploded:
“That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of 9-11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before, and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11.
Questions are being raised over Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s policy on terrorism, after a report revealed he has strong ties to two foreign investment consortia working to own or lease U.S. toll roads, including the Trans-Texas Corridor 35, which is identified as part of the I-35 “NAFTA Superhighway.”
Although he opposed NAFTA in 1993, Giuliani recently declined to call for building a fence on the United States border with Mexico, and he has supported a guest-worker program.
A federal program, Ronald Reagan used to say, is the closest thing to eternal life here on earth. Even the Gipper conceded he failed to get control of the federal behemoth.
At least he tried. But what can be said for the conservative movement today, as one witnesses the Wall Street Journal battle to save the $400,000-a-year tax-free sinecure of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, imperiled because Wolfie parked his World Bank squeeze over at State at a fatter salary than Condi Rice’s?
“After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in coming days,” writes the New York Times.
If true, it marks either the beginning of the end of the Giuliani campaign – or the beginning of the end of the Party of Ronald Reagan.
“Rep. Ron Paul, who has always opposed the Iraq war, stands out in the crowd of Republican aspirants to the Oval Office… John McLaughlin and Pat Buchanan have both practically endorsed him….”
There are rumblings in the GOP that, if they get much louder, threaten to split the Republican Party over the war issue – and I don’t think anything could be much louder (in a good way) than Victor Gold’s colorful dissent from the pro-war neocon orthodoxy. As deputy press secretary to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign, Spiro Agnew’s press secretary in the early ’70s, and a senior adviser to Bush père in the ’80s, Gold is a self-described “Goldwater conservative” whose new book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and the Neocons Destroyed the GOP, is a shot across the bow at the Coulterized, Kristolized “conservative” movement. As Gold puts it,
On the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement, Queen Elizabeth II arrived to commemorate the great occasion. And it took some fancy footwork for Her Majesty to run the Powhatan gauntlet.
For Her Majesty had been to Jamestown before, 50 years ago, in a less progressive era. As the Associated Press reported, “The last time the queen helped Virginia mark the anniversary of its colonial founding, it was an all-white affair in a state whose government was in open defiance of a 1954 Supreme Court order to desegregate public schools.”
Contrary to Mr. Kenneth Timmerman’s commentary on the French election, “French Elect Thatcherite as President,” Nicolas Sarkozy’s core issues were not “free trade” and getting along with the U.S. or cutting taxes and ending welfare.
Those things might be in his agenda somewhere, but they are not what got him elected. Mr. Timmerman barely referred to the real reasons right of center Sarkozy won the presidency of France this weekend.
Luckily Mr. Sarkozy is not mealy mouthed wishy washy on immigration as are the majority of American politicians. Nor is he an open borders, amnesty, guest-worker program activist as is George W. Bush and his administration.
Walter Kehowski, a math professor at Glendale Community College in Arizona’s Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD), wishes he’d never e-mailed his fellow employees Thanksgiving greetings last November.
While reading a Web log, Kehowski found George Washington’s “Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1789″ and decided to send it along to the Maricopa community the day before Thanksgiving, 2006. Using an e-mail address commonly used to send out announcements, Kehowski e-mailed the text of the proclamation – and a link to the Web page on which he’d found it . . . on Pat Buchanan’s site.
Oberman: Of the serious contenders this evening Pat, is there one who adheres closest to your conception of classic conservatism?
PJB: I think the closest is Ron Paul who is a pro-life libertarian, who does not vote for big spending, who opposed the Medicare expansion, who opposed “no child left behind,” who opposed the war in Iraq…
All week, young toughs in Moscow have besieged the Estonian embassy to harass Ambassador Marina Kaljurand. Her bodyguards had to use a mace-like spray to drive back the thugs, who call Estonia a “fascist country.” Estonian diplomats and their families are being pulled out of Moscow and sent home.
Relations between the countries are about to rupture, if the Kremlin does not reign in the bully-boys.
I am exploring various Forum software programs for the website. As this is costly and time consuming to set up I will poll our Buchanan Brigade email list within the next few days to make sure it is worth while. To participate, you can subscribe here...
For the Cause -- Linda
As everyone except for a dwindling band of Bush supporters now knows, the US is in a terrible situation in Iraq from which it cannot extract itself. For Bush and Cheney, their own pride and delusion are more compelling than US casualties, the destruction of Iraq and its people, and the inflaming of sectarian strife and anti-American violence throughout the Middle East.
Questions are being raised over Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s policy on terrorism, after a report revealed he has strong ties to two foreign investment consortia working to own or lease U.S. toll roads, including the Trans-Texas Corridor 35, which is identified as part of the I-35 “NAFTA Superhighway.”
“Rep. Ron Paul, who has always opposed the Iraq war, stands out in the crowd of Republican aspirants to the Oval Office… John McLaughlin and Pat Buchanan have both practically endorsed him….”
Lou Dobbs, Patrick Buchanan, Jerome Corsi and many of their readers have repeatedly accused me of:
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