The Japan Times OnLine, Hiroaki Sato, offers a Japanese perspective on Pearl Harbor and he claims non-interventionism is right on most cases. He summarizes Buchanan’s piece:
Patrick Buchanan, the presidential candidate in 2000, has been dismissed as a credible polemicist and politician for some years now largely because of his “anti-interventionist” or isolationist stance. But I do not see much harm in nonintervention in most instances. Do you?
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So let me see if I understand what the media is telling me I am supposed to believe these days:
1. If Ron Paul wins Iowa, it doesn’t matter, nor does the Iowa caucus, but who gets 2nd and 3rd matters a great deal.
2. Ron Paul is a racist, even though among blacks, he is polling HIGHER than all the other candidates.
3. No true patriot should support Ron Paul, even though our military men and women support him more than all other candidates combined.
4. Ron Paul can’t win a general election even though he polls highest against Obama in many polls, provides a true alternative to the status quo, and has more independents, young people, democrats, and other groups supporting him than all the other candidates.
5. Not wanting to get into a war with Iran is a ‘radical’ idea that disqualified him from consideration, while the majority of Americans agree with him, and while political analysts with integrity warn of WW3 if we do.
Dear Main Stream Media: It’s not working. We’re not ALL that stupid. {Thanks to Brian Nolder and Matt Bianco}<>
Hasan assesses the current president:
I now regret saying Obama was similar to Bush. When it comes to civil liberties, once he signs the NDAA into law, he will be worse.
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Hasan concludes:
Over the past three years, the former constitutional law professor has failed to close Guantánamo Bay, expanded the detention facility at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, defended the use of warrantless surveillance and military tribunals, and – shockingly – asserted the right to assassinate, via drone strike and without due process, US citizens he deems to be terrorists. As the leading US legal scholar Jonathan Turley has argued, “the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties”.
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Medhi Hasan offers an overview of how the NDAA was passed:
Obama and the Democrats have a great deal to answer for. This brazen militarisation of US civilian justice and law enforcement cannot just be laid at the door of dastardly Republicans in Congress. In the Senate, the bill was co-sponsored by a Democratic senator, Carl Levin; in the House of Representatives, it sailed through with the support of 93 Democrats, including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi (despite being opposed by, among others, the directors of the FBI and the CIA, the attorney general and the defence secretary).
The president has the power to veto the bill and, initially, his aides had suggested he would do so. However, citing vague “changes” to the language of the bill, Obama – the most veto-shy president since James Garfield in the 1880s – made a U-turn this month and withdrew his veto threat in what a New York Times editorial called “a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency”.
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Mills, again, raises a healthy question in his lengthy article: What outcome does the U.S. see in imposing certain sanctions on Iran:
So, is Washington trying to delay Tehran’s obtaining nuclear weapons for long enough for the situation to change in some undefined but favorable way? That would fit with the covert campaign of sabotage and assassination currently taking place. Does it hope that economic pressure will bring about the ascendancy of pragmatic conservatives such as former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani or Ahmadinejad opponent Ali Larijani? Or is it gambling on a total collapse of the regime?
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Robin Mills describes the effects of the sanctions imposed on Iran. In the end, the sanctions do not help anyone.
The geopolitics of the proposed sanctions make even less sense. In the United States’ interminable confrontation with Iran, a country with 2 percent of its GDP and 1.5 percent of its military budget, it is handing gifts to two real rivals: China and Russia. China benefits, as noted, from discounts on its oil purchases. If the Central Bank sanctions work as intended, a China hooked on cheap Iranian oil is hardly going to work for any resolution to the standoff.
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This is the title of a new piece by Jeremy Hammond. I will say that this is a piece worth passing around. People simply have never heard the facts and they need to be exposed to it soon before the MSM–liberal and conservative–perpetuate fiction.
Ron Paul is “the best-known American propagandist for our enemies”, writes Dorothy Rabinowitz in a recent Wall Street Journal hit piece. To support the charge, she writes that Dr. Paul “assures audiences” that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 “took place only because of U.S. aggression and military actions”. It’s “True,” she writes, that “we’ve heard the assertions before”, but only “rarely have we heard in any American political figure such exclusive concern for, and appreciation of, the motives of those who attacked us”—and, she adds, he doesn’t care about the victims of the attacks.
The vindictive rhetoric aside, what is it, exactly, that Ron Paul is guilty of here? It is completely uncontroversial that the 9/11 attacks were a consequence of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The 9/11 Commission Report, for instance, points out that Osama bin Laden “stresses grievances against the United States widely shared in the Muslim world. He inveighed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites. He spoke of the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions imposed after the Gulf War, and he protested U.S. support of Israel.”
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Listen to this powerful argument by Napp Nazworth:
Could He Beat Obama?
Winning the nomination does not ensure, of course, that Paul would win the general election. It would certainly throw the Republican Party into chaos and may inspire a third-party candidacy.
A Ron Paul candidacy would also, however, cause chaos in the Democratic Party. What would the anti-war left do if the choice were between Paul and Obama, for instance? Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan and has continued drone strikes in Pakistan, while Paul wants a complete troop withdrawal from the region.
What would the Occupy Wall Street Movement do if the choice were between Paul and Obama? Obama received more campaign money from Wall Street executives than any other candidate in the 2008 race. Plus, he backed the bank bailouts that the Occupy Wall Street Movement has railed against.
Though still a long-shot, Ron Paul’s path to the presidency is more within the realm of possibility than many suggest.
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Kuyperian Commentary Podcast
