Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Angie’s Activism

Art, Celebrity, Foreign Policy, History, Hollywood

Angie’s at it again with a film that is likely to bring as much joy to moviegoers as did “A Mighty Heart”:

The film was Mariane Pearl’s attempts at self-beatification. Her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who accused Pearl of being a spy and agent of the Mossad and made him recite a humiliating confession to that effect, before lopping his head off. The jihadis released a video of Pearl’s butchering titled, “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”
Mariane, upon whose memoir the film was based, did not seem to comprehended the role vintage, Islamic Jew hatred played in her husband’s “slaughtering.” At the time, she responded to the barbarism by declaring superciliously that “revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable … to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism.”
So as to aggrandize themselves, Angelina and Mariane had diminished Daniel in the film. The dashing Daniel was played by the unknown Dan Futterman, whom Salon.com’s no-doubt feminist reviewer described approvingly as “grave and elfin.” That’s a good thing only if you are a garden gnome. Mariane did, however, have the mark of a member of the media: she celebrates both herself and the Islamic hajj.

That was then. Our expert on the Balkans watched the trailer of “In the Land of Blood and Honey” (people being lined up and robbed, then shot next to a waiting earthmover). Nebojsa Malic thinks “Angie has watched too much Spielberg. Bosnia was no picnic, but any comparison with the Shoah is just plain insulting to the actual victims thereof. Especially since the Bosnian Muslims (along with the Croats) were eager accomplices in the Shoah. Israel’s Ramathkal in the Yom Kippur war, Elazar, was a Bosnian Jew. He didn’t leave Bosnia because of loud music, you know? :)”

Meantime, the question of plagiarism has been raised. It’s quite possible. Those who possess power and money, but not much by way of original ideas, do often rip off the marginalized.

MORE at Nebojsa’s

Rotten Rubio

Foreign Policy, John McCain, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Russia

“Marco Rubio vs. Rand Paul” is a column only Pat Buchanan could have written—the writing is “muscular” and spare and the analysis rooted in a deep understanding of history and Old-Right tradition (“… one of the great patriots of our time,” I had called Buchanan).

(See my take on the “We are all Georgians” McCain-coined mantra, mentioned in the “Marco Rubio vs. Rand Paul” column.)

Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio, rising star of the Republican right, on everyone’s short list for VP, called for a unanimous vote, without debate, on a resolution directing President Obama to accept Georgia’s plan for membership in NATO at the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago.
Rubio was pushing to have the U.S. Senate pressure Obama into fast-tracking Georgia into NATO, making Tbilisi an ally the United States would be obligated by treaty to go to war to defend.
Now it is impossible to believe a senator, not a year in office, dreamed this up himself. Some foreign agent of Scheunemann’s ilk had to have had a role in drafting it.
And for whose benefit is Rubio pushing to have his own countrymen committed to fight for a Georgia that, three years ago, started an unprovoked war with Russia? Who cooked up this scheme to involve Americans in future wars in the Caucasus that are none of our business?
The answer is unknown. What is known is the name of the senator who blocked it – Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, who alone stepped in and objected, defeating Rubio’s effort to get a unanimous vote.
The resolution was pulled. But these people will be back. They are indefatigable when it comes to finding ways to commit the blood of U.S. soldiers to their client regimes and ideological bedfellows.

A while back I had warned about Rubio, in “Neoconservative Kingpin Taps Ryan/Rubio.”

William Kristol was touting Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio as a 2012 presidential item. “If Kristol is this excited, it mus be at the promise of killing and carnage.

UPDATE II: Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2? (‘Nut Gingrich’)

Elections, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans, Socialism, The State, War, Welfare

The excerpt is from “Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2?” now on WND.COM:

“What are the odds that a Democratic commander-in-chief and his chief Republican rival declare their philosophical fidelity to the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt on the same day?

In an effort to better conjure Roosevelt, the shameless Barack Obama had flown to Osawatomie in Kansas, where, in 1910, Teddy delivered his “New Nationalism Address.” So radical was the Roosevelt political program that its author was condemned as “‘Communistic,’ ‘Socialistic,’ and ‘Anarchistic’ in various quarters.”

On the day of this staged affair—in eerie synchronicity—Newt Gingrich, whose favorability among Republican “caucus goers” is at 33 percent and rising, described himself to broadcaster Glenn Beck as “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.”

Back in the day, “the Eastern United States denounced [Roosevelt] as a ‘communist agitator.’” This was “the most radical speech ever given by an ex-President,” writes Robert S. La Forte in The Kansas Historical Quarterly:

“[Roosevelt’s] concepts of the extent to which a powerful federal government could regulate and use private property in the interest of the whole and his declarations about labor … were nothing short of revolutionary.”

As La Forte chronicles, “Roosevelt had no interest in retaining the ideals of Jeffersonian ‘state’s right’ demagogues, as he called them. He was interested in a Hamiltonian concept of power which he described as the ‘New Nationalism.’”

Roosevelt’s speech, seconded White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “Really set the course for the 20th century.” Yet to listen to the president in Kansas, a vote for “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican” is a vote for a Mad-Max dystopia, where “everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Don’t look for a “square deal” from the characters on the other side of the aisle. “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states” is the stock phrase we get from GOP pointy heads. Truth is not their stock-in-trade. As they tell it, America has a long way to go before it turns as Rooseveltian as Europe. …”

The complete column is “Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2?” Read it now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE I (Dec. 8): Nut Gingrich is what a a LRC.COM blogger has christened You Know Who, pointing out Nut’s support for “two governments in the United States: one that follows the Bill of Rights and one that doesn’t (for our “security,” of course).” MORE.

UPDATE II: More explosive details about “Newt’s grand schemes for a small, unintrusive federal government”: “NEWT PRESENTS A FRESH NEW VIRTUAL FACE” by Ann Coulter.

Save the People; Fail the EU

Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Iran, Political Economy, Propaganda, Trade

“The EU is our biggest trading partner. We cannot afford to let it fail. We send much of our goods and services to Europe. We share their values. We want to crush Iran with our European pals. They bomb and regulate the world with us. If the Eurozone goes down in flames; if we let them—we’ll be next.” So said President Barack Obama on November 28. Well, sort of. (Okay, I’ve ad-libbed a LOT, but I think I know my president by now.)

Obama was entertaining leaders of the European Union. He promised them that America would stand ready to do its part to help them withstand the Eurozone crisis.

The stakes are too high, you say? For whom, Mr. President? Cui Bono? Who Benefits, Barack?

Ask yourself that question each time you hear a reporter/pundit/analyst/politician insist that the EU and the Euro zone cannot be allowed to fail.

In reply to the question as to what will happen if this colossus collapses, the stakeholders above parrot a bunch of non sequiturs or circular arguments. In the tradition of “a statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it,” these reasons don’t necessarily obtain:

We can’t allow the thing to fail because the stakes are too high. Again: For whom?

David Böcking of Spiegel Online (a most intelligent newspaper; the Germans are impressive) advances the arguments against the break-up of the Eurozone. These are mostly legalistic, and are not rooted in real economic realities. The treaties, observes Böcking, don’t allow for easy disengagement. Legal disputes could arise over debt owed if the seceding country had borrowed money. And, mostly, sinecured EU official would lose sway on the world stage.

Brace for impact, if you believed these bastards, but here are the economic realities:

We flesh-and-blood Americans trade not with Barack or with Brussels, the seat of the European central government, but rather with the people of Belgium, the Netherland, Germany, France. If the financial institutions into which Europeans and Americans have been herded by bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic collapse, well then, individual producers and traders will find a way to make a living without these artificial, inorganic structures.

This is a failure of government, not of all the people, although some of the governed, maybe even the majority, have failed. The people who’ve failed are those who have eaten the state’s forbidden fruit.