Category Archives: Founding Fathers

Update II: Beck: 'I'm With Ron Paul' (Breaking From The Pack)

Debt, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, Homeland Security, libertarianism, Ron Paul, War

A good few posts ago, I observed that “in his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck, previously an unambiguously pro-war military-booster, was inching towards examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via warfare) the founders would have abhorred.

Glenn made the final leap today to a non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing American interests and self-defense and no nation building. He said the words, “I am with Ron Paul.” This could be good for the country—unless Beck is forced by his backers (FoxNews) to back down.

For example, this reasonable remark of Obama’s is drawing FoxNews ire:

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

I will post the Beck YouTube feature as soon as it’s up (readers are welcome to beat me to it).

Update: “America Is a Republic, Not an Empire” by Glenn Beck:

“The example we set now is what pisses everyone off: We say we’re going to spread democracy, but we bed dictators, we bow to Saudi princes, when it’s to our advantage. George Washington wanted us to be like the Swiss: Enemy of none, friend to all. Places like Germany — hey, we’re glad you are all straightened out, but we’re pulling out, you’re on your own. We’re not staying. We need to get out of the Korean Peninsula and Japan. No longer will we be the world’s loiterers.

The United States spends approximately $102 billion annually to maintain troops, equipment, fleets and bases overseas — if you count Iraq and Afghanistan it jumps to $250 billion. Well, I’m tired of being the world’s policeman. And in many cases we are the world’s loiterers. We need to have a “no loitering” policy.

That policy comes from the progressives. The Republicans say we’ll send in the “green helmets” and just nation build our way to global security. The liberals want to do it through the United Nations; they want to send in the “blue helmets” — which we pay for.

This doesn’t work. I don’t want to nation build. I don’t want a global government or military force.

And for all the Don Rumsfelds out there watching who are cursing me out right now because they think no time is a good time to cut defense spending. Well, maybe this will help. This chart shows who accounts for all military spending in the world.

Almost half of all military spending in the world — 47 percent — is America. The next biggest spender is Europe — that’s not even a country, they spent $289 billion on military-related expenses. We almost spent that much outside our country for our own defense!

So don’t tell me we can’t afford to cut back. Clearly we can.

And when we are in a situation like Afghanistan, we fight to win it. With all of our technology today, why can’t we get in and out of Afghanistan in a couple of years? Because the politicians have their grimy little fingers on everything. Take the military off the leash; if you decide to go to war, unhook those dogs and get the hell out of the way.”

Update II (April 16): Together with the Cato Institute, the author of the blog Downsizing the Federal Government in particular, Beck has been running pragmatic, hour-long workshops on where and how much to slash. Pretty much everything. The man is a force of nature.

Back to the matter of Beck’s “I’m with Ron Paul on foreign policy” statement: This too is a very important development. Beck is pulling away from the neoconservative pack at Fox. By declaring war on their gratuitous wars he has driven a wedge between himself and the likes of Hannity, O’Reilly, Krauthammer, Kristol, and all the followers (I don’t know a Republican ditto head who doesn’t go along with the war-all-the-time = a strong national defense formula). The unity of the ditto heads on war policy was unshakable.

Again: By denouncing the war talisman, Beck, a major star on the Right, has created oscillation in the ossifying GOP. He has broken a united front which—thanks to the likes of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, O’Reilly; National Review, Weekly Standards—seemed unchallenged.

Updated: The Law Of Medina (Debra)

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Elections, Founding Fathers, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Liberty

She bears the name of another extraordinary woman, the Prophet Deborah, who was judge and leader of Israel in antiquity. Debra Medina is in the race against the incumbent, Rick Perry, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to “capture the government of the second biggest state in America,” Texas.

They, the far-gone establishment, have branded candidates like her “extreme candidates.” JD Hayworth, who is poised to whip McMussolini, is receiving the same treatment.

The Guardian:

Medina is no Sarah Palin. She has no need to write on her hand to remember her talking points. Instead her speech was a complex walk through her extreme anti-government philosophy, citing sources as varied as the Austrian school of economics, St Augustine and modern French philosophers. She said she wanted to get rid of property taxes and allow Texans to do whatever they wanted with anything they owned, whether that was dig for oil or build an extension. There was, she said, no constitutional basis for a federal Department of Education or an Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Reserve. Texas should assert its rights almost as a nation-state, controlling over its own National Guard units. The disdain for government was visceral. The American way, she said, was simple. “There are two rights essential to freedom: private property and gun ownership.”

What I’d like to know is this: Why would Glenn Beck try to trip up this terrific candidate with a question about her supposed “Truther” proclivities?

Only once has Medina slipped up – in an interview she gave to the conservative radio host Glenn Beck. On his show Medina was asked if she thought the US government might have had a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She replied: “I don’t.” She then went on to expand disastrously upon that answer. “I don’t have all the evidence there… I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There are some very good arguments and I think the American people have not seen all the evidence there, so I have not taken a position on that,” she said.

I heard Beck proudly re-run the interview; he seemed flabbergasted that the woman had dared to doubt the integrity of the American state.

Not being a conspiracy theorist myself, it is my view that such a bent far from disqualifies a candidate. In the context of Medina, a hardcore, life-long advocate for natural liberty—a proclivity for conspiracy simply signifies a deep distrust of the Federal Frankenstein.

And that is a good thing.

Incidentally, in a previous post I alerted you to the theft of Jewish history. I see that the looting of the Hebrew language is proceeding apace too. The word Medina has a Hebrew root. Yet the freedictionary.com gives the word an Arabic origin. False.

“The root of Aramaic-Hebrew medina is din, ‘law,‘ and medina in both languages denotes a place in which a given body of law or legal system is applied, i.e., an area of political jurisdiction.”

In any event, here are 50 facts about Debra Medina. (“She was a high-level volunteer for Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. She describes her relationship with Paul as “good,” but frames it more as the typical interaction a constituent might have with a congressman.”)

Update (March 3): “Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Democratic former Houston Mayor Bill White clinched their parties’ nominations for governor Tuesday. … Medina declined to concede. Her campaign claimed that if Perry fell below 50 percent in the final vote count that she would be in a runoff with him because Hutchison had conceded. … ” [Houston Chronicle]

The reporting is so shoddy that, other than in Dan’s comment, I have not found a vote count for Medina. If it is 17 percent, Medina did terrifically. I’ve said it before: The fight for liberty is slow. Since the economy will not be getting better, inflated as it is by paper, Medina will win the next elections.

Chris Cretin (Matthews) Slanders Secessionists

Celebrity, Federalism, Founding Fathers, John McCain, Media, Neoconservatism, Pseudo-history, States' Rights

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews regularly mocks patriots who mention secession or nullification, both essential ingredients in American founding philosophy.

As I’ve written, “Restoring the people’s ‘unalienable rights’ may well lie in Jeffersonian interposition and nullification, whereby states beat back the federal occupier by voiding unconstitutional federal laws.”

In August of 2009, Matthews targeted Texas Governor Rick Perry for invoking secession. Now, the newsman (who boasted about getting a thrill, or was it a trickle, up or down his leg on thinking about Obama’s presidential victory) is pillorying Palin for secession talk.

He barked: “Palin got cheers this weekend when she mentioned secession at a rally in Texas. Is it really patriotic to advocate leaving your country? What’s going on in Texas?” Mathews further hissed hysterically that “such talk” brought about the slaughter of 600,000 in the War Between the States. Don’t these ignoramuses know the history of our country and how such talk ends-up, he wailed.

As though talk of secession, to which Lincoln responded with fratricidal Total War, wrought the destruction of that war; as though the central lesson to be had from that unwarranted Northern aggression is the necessity of forever submerging these fundamental freedoms, because bullies and bigots are allergic to them.

“The moral and intellectual nurturers of Lincoln’s legacy have carved careers out of denying that the soul of the American federal system is state sovereignty. And state sovereignty, as author Thomas J. DiLorenzo points out, is gutless in its power to check the federal government without the right of secession.”

The standard response from neoconservatives is to deny the content or context of the “offensive” speech of which their camp is accused, as they too reject secession and nullification.

All in all, Matthews has been extremely rude about Palin, repeatedly referring to her as an empty vessel, and worse.

But in the Battle of the Pygmies, Meghan McCain is an uncontested winner. Meghan McCain is, indisputably, vacuous, narcissistic, and pig-ignorant. Yet the Left (and some on the “Right”) treat her with great respect.

How about some equality in the treatment of disputed and indisputable idiots?

Beck Breakthrough?

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Republicans

In his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck touched today on the differences between Republican and Democrat progressives vis-a-vis foreign policy. This was the closest Beck, the unambiguously pro-war, military-booster came to examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via war) the founders would have abhorred.

“The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.”

Militias are what the founders bequeathed, not mammoth standing armies.

Beck came close to articulating what readers of this space have been reading and imbibing for years. Warring for Democracy is the Republicans’ homage to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism; nation-building abroad is how the Democrats prefer to honor his “legacy.”

Beck quotes Thomas Jefferson a lot, as he should. But ideological wars like Iraq, unequivocally backed by Beck, belong to the Jacobin—not Jeffersonian—tradition.

I thought I heard Beck quote the 1821 words of secretary of state John Quincy Adams (the 2nd part of the program is not yet on YouTube): “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

If not Adams, Beck recited another founder’s exhortation against empire.

The next step for Beck is to reject the recreational wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan with the support of his ilk, and espouse a foreign policy compatible with limited authority and republican virtues. You can’t embrace small government at home and big government abroad. The last Republicans are in the habit of euphemizing as a “strong national defense.”

The beauty of Beck is in his goodness. The fact that at times he says remarkably confused things doesn’t change this.

Here are some glaring mistakes Beck made in today’s program. (Continued below.)

He declared that if Americans knew about the Progressives and their creeping, clandestine agenda, they’d reject it.

It all goes back to immigration, mis-education; the changing face of America, and general rot. A few guns and G-d types may reject the “conservative socialism” (progressivism) in which we are mired based on a visceral feel for the principles of the founding. But most Americans I talk to are clueless—and even hostile to the founding ideas. So let Glenn not presume that progressivism is not in the DNA of a changing America. Once the country is 50 percent Third World, Glenn might as well be talking to the hand.

LOST IN TRANSLATION. After bemoaning how Progressives, having infiltrated America’s institutions, have toiled to alter the meaning of the Constitution, Glenn proposed his own revisionism: rewrite the Federalist Papers so that Americans, whom Glenn insist are never dumb, can understand these brilliant, but difficult, debates.

“Writing In The Age Of The Idiot”:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’ That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be ‘a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.'”