Category Archives: Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

NEW COLUMN: King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational

Celebrity, Conservatism, Free Speech, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics, Populism, Republicans, The Establishment

King Tuck clearly carried the Fox News network and its nits ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational.” It is up and ready to read on WND.COM, The New American and The Unz Review.

On the week-end, you’ll be able to read it on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

Whether full of spleen or in support of Tucker Carlson, the commentariat, as usual, was dead wrong about the effects of his firing on the Fox News network.

The disposable clowns at The Dispatch echoed the gleeful sentiment, coming from the left and the pseudo-right. Posted on Nick Catoggio’s crudely (and cruelly) titled “Boiling Frogs” blog was a number titled “Tuckered Out: Be careful what you wish for.”

Catoggio, formerly of Allahpundit, belched, May 9, that, “On the day Fox News parted ways with Tucker Carlson,” he “doubted …the network would suffer much, if at all, in the 8 p.m. hour. ‘For all the hype about Carlson’s ratings, the truth is that any dogmatic right-wing figure airing at 8 p.m. on Fox News will attract an enormous audience.’”

This reflexive, Freudian “Wish fulfillment”—“the satisfaction of a desire (for Tucker’s demise) through an involuntary thought process”—encapsulates the cowardly gloating Tucker received following his professional garroting by Fox News.

From her self- referential and reverential perch, Megyn Kelly insisted that, just as in her case, the perch (Fox News) would always outlive the anchor (Tucker Carlson). Well, of course. Ms. Kelly would say so. She has plenty cognitive dissonance to reconcile: She is not Tucker Carlson. No sooner had she fled Fox News for more progressive media climes than Tucker stepped into her stilettos—and nobody remembered Kelly.

Before she abandoned her “Kelly File” Fox News show, Ms. Kelly had firmly aligned with members of the Murdoch Media for a Marco Rubio victory. Side by side with lightweights like Dana Perinno, and other egos in the anchor’s chair, Ms. Kelly had made manifest, in February of 2016, that she was hoping someone like Rubio would slay The Donald dragon.

Kelly is a lot smarter than Kayleigh McEnany (whose hard-to-spell names one has always to cut-‘n-paste) and simpleton Lawrence Jones, both of whom have attempted to fill-in on Fox at 8 p.m. Neither, however, is in Tucker’s league. Kelly was also more politically independent than these two tools and others considered for the peerless Tucker’s slot.

Most all at Fox New are party operatives, certainly not one is as nimble intellectually, or has the elemental intellectual curiosity of a Tucker Carlson. …

…READ THE REST… “King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational” is up and ready to read on WND.COM, The New American and The Unz Review

Twenty Years Ago: Dissident From Day One

Bush, Democrats, Elections, Iraq, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Republicans, The Establishment, War

To be branded Dissident from Day one and cancelled is untenable. Destructive. A career killer

LOOKING FOR mention in my own works of the remarkable Dennis Kucinich, I came across “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE” (July 16, 2003), one of many antiwar columns written at the time.

It still haunts. What passion (as Hillel, Jewish sage and genius, said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”). I believed in the power of pellucid prose and reason to persuade. Instead, I got cancelled from day one.

It’s easy to become a dissident when such a pose is trendy, and is struck once one has enjoyed 20 years of work in the Establishment.  To be branded Dissident from Day One and cancelled is untenable. Destructive. A career killer.

But then I did liken the “bring ’em on” grin on the face of Bush, beloved of most rightists back then, to the grin “on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.” LOL. Totally worth it. I think.

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized. But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you?

Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals’ which James Madison warned war would bringthe same ‘bring ’em on’ grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of ‘war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,’ he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

AND

…. Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next-door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say? … “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE” (July 16, 2003)

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/page/2/
https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/

Dennis Kucinich was always there, along for the lost battle ….

THUS, it’s a bad idea for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to tout Mr. Kucinich, his newly nominated campaign manager, as progressive.

Kucinich, like the great Southern senator and gentleman Robert Byrd, RIP (who also greatly opposed Obama’s constitutional usurpations), is noted for voting AGAINST the detestable Democrats and the GOP in opposing the US war machine and the executive dictatorship.

 

Boyd Cathey: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: In Ukraine

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Russia, UN, War

America’s habitual manner of dealing with ‘foreign nations, whether friend or foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable’ ~ H.L. Mencken

BY BOYD CATHEY

Four critical forces stand behind and vigorously motivate American and NATO policies in Ukraine. These forces support without apparent limitation the globalist-controlled and corrupt  Zelensky government in Kiev in its never-ending war against Russia. And like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the last book of the New Testament, these Armies of the Night propel us, ineluctably and seemingly without concern for what lies ahead, towards nuclear Armageddon.

How has this been possible? How is it that the American citizenry, indeed, the citizenry in most European countries have, for the most part, supinely accepted this state of affairs?

Rationally and geopolitically, the conflict in Ukraine really should be of minor concern to us. It is not our role to be the world’s policeman and to intervene in every conflict, in every distant corner of the world. We have, I would suggest, no actual strategic interest there, except maybe to encourage a peaceful settlement. The Russians were not threatening us or NATO in any discernible or major way. Ukraine is in their backyard, not ours. And yet, we find ourselves mired in an ever-expanding, ever-widening conflict in a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map that may well result in World War III.

Most of the responsibility for what has happened we must bear. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would never expand to the borders of Russia (in return for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR). Yet, that is exactly what occurred. Then followed the “color revolutions”/coups d’etats in Tbilisi, Kiev, etc., with the instrumentality and complicity of American international finance and agents on the ground (read Victoria Nuland, etc.) which only intensified legitimate Russian mistrust and hostility.

The watershed moment for Russia was the ouster of a legitimately-elected Russia-friendly Ukrainian president by an American-fomented coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014 and his replacement by a hand-picked American minion, followed by the intensification of widespread Ukrainian government persecution of the Russian majority in the Donbas eastern regions…followed by a dramatic uptick in that anti-Russian persecution in the Donbas in late 2021 and early 2022.

Author Ben Abelow has succinctly outlined what followed in his excellent primer, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. That brief volume is strongly endorsed by such authorities as Profs. John Mearsheimer and Paul Robinson, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and others, and remains a superb text on the conflict.

Certainly, a case can be made that the Russian incursion into Ukraine was a strategic mistake, ironically, because it was exactly what our foreign policy elites desired…an opportunity to take on the Russians directly by military means, using Ukraine as a helpless proxy, and perhaps effecting regime change in Moscow, or at least eliminating Russia as an obstacle to American global suzerainty. Still, President Putin believed, arguably, he had no other option. Nevertheless, it played into the hands of the War Party.

Over the past two decades our nation has shown an almost complete unwillingness to pursue any kind of negotiations with Russia about peace in Ukraine (e.g., the repeated torpedoing by the US of Minsk I and II). War serves OUR foreign policy purposes, and we managed to maneuver the Russians into making the first major offensive action.

Who, then, are these four forces that have pushed us dangerously into a conflict we should have never engaged in? What are the real reasons behind their hysterical and limitless advocacy, such that dozens of media outlets and most of our political leaders appear to have lost any scintilla of rational judgment?

First, perhaps the least visible but most effective force is what President Dwight Eisenhower termed more than sixty years ago “the military/industrial complex,” that is, the immensely powerful and influential military contractors and their complex web of control and influence, both in and out of the halls of power in DC, in our armed services, and in our politics. Each year billions of dollars in profits are generated for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Goldman Sachs, and other supra-nationals. War in Ukraine has been an incredible financial boon for them—missiles, tanks, armaments and equipment of all kinds. They must be built and purchased (usually at inflated and exorbitant prices). And the pockets of our politicians are always ready for a fat share, not to mention the opened pockets of the corrupt thuggery who currently run Ukraine (and dozens of other American client states).

Then there is the zealous opposition of the fanatical Left to what they perceive is the rise of a Neo-Tsarist Christian populism and neo-fascism (anti-LGBTQ, etc.) in Moscow. Russia under Putin has become for them the locus of opposition to their universalist program of a New World Order, opposition to a global world reset, involving NATO, the USA, the EU, and the World Economic Forum. In a moment of candor Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) summarized (October 25, 2022) the official (if unspoken) American and globalist stance on the conflict and the real issues involved:

“Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes. It is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export. In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism.”

Raskin is a far Leftist and Jewish, and his message is often just as frenzied and fanatical as that of any member of the Squad in Congress.  With one major difference: he’s highly placed and well connected, a part of the Democrat leadership establishment. So when he speaks, he speaks with some authority for the party and its leadership. But not only for the Democratic Party, but for those forces internationally who understand fully that Russia and its president stand athwart their path to a form of post-Marxist global hegemony, far worse than anything Joseph Stalin ever dreamed up.

Next, there are the Neoconservatives and their frenzied hatred for Russia (many of the Neocons have a Trotskyite and Labor Zionist genealogy which recalls the anti-semitism of Imperial Russia in the Pale of Settlement). It is the Neocons who have advocated never-ending war whether in Ukraine, or Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Bosnia, etc., in their zealous quest to impose what they conceive of as “liberal democracy” worldwide (what my mentor Russell Kirk once called disdainfully a “pax Americana”). It is not uncommon to see a Brian Kilmeade on Fox or read a Rich Lowry in the pages of the once-admirable National Review, espouse this viewpoint expressed with unrestrained vigor.

Joined to these forces are what we could call the “ground troops”—the vast majority of those who support American policies in Ukraine: those not-too-well-read, or simply dependent on the establishment media, which is completely one-sided on the conflict, for their information. Their views may well be based on a receptivity to continuing “anti-Russian” sentiment left over from the Cold War (similar to the anti-German sentiment which survived WW II) which many Americans partake of.

These forces have fueled an extremely dangerous cocktail. If someone opposes it, he is immediately shouted down as a “Putin apologist” or a supporter of “the new Hitler”: all of which is rubbish. But, sad to say, it seems to be working. I asked in my columns more than once, “Are there no grown-ups in the room? Or, are we fated to drift onward to a conflagration of terrible proportions?”

In St. John of Patmos’s Book of the Apocalypse he recounts that in a dream the Lamb of God summons and reveals to him four creatures that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Over the centuries these Four Horsemen have been variously identified in Christian eschatology as harbingers of the Last Judgment and End Times. The first horseman in St. John’s revelation, riding a white horse and carrying a bow, has been seen to symbolize and invoke conquest, pestilence or perhaps even the coming of the Antichrist. The second horseman, riding upon a blood red horse, carries a sword and is seen to be creator of war, conflict, and anarchy. The rider on the third horse is viewed as a merchant and rides a black horse symbolizing famine. Lastly, the final rider upon the pale horse represents Death and the powers of Hell. And as the Evangelist tells us:  “They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.”

The Military/Industrial complex, with its extensive and foul tentacles, may be seen symbolically to ride the black horse of greed, financial domination, and famine. The Neocons and their epigones can be represented by a rider seated on a red horse, zealously advancing conflict, anarchy, and fratricidal war.

The pale horse, whose rider symbolizes death and enthrallment by the powers of Hell, could well represent the mass of humanity, beguiled and woefully misled by the first three horsemen, and whose headlong movement like lemmings will result in the destruction and the collapse of the world—and of civilization—as we have known it. It is not hard to visualize such figures as Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell prominent in this group.

Finally, the unleashed and fanatical Left rides the white horse of conquest, pestilence, and heralding of the Antichrist, proclaiming the end of Christian civilization and the triumph of what Irish poet William Butler Yeats calls the “Rough Beast” (in his eschatological poem from 1919, “The Second Coming”): the return of a triumphant Satan, once held in check for twenty centuries by a “Rocking Cradle” but now loosed upon the world.

It is not too esoteric to suggest that the USA and the world now find themselves in a situation where, to follow Yeats again,

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….”

Are there voices yet who would sound the clarion call and their warnings be heeded? Indeed, are there any grand figures like the prophets of the Old Testament who could plead successfully for us to turn away from war, criminality, and evil? Or, has our civilization become so infected and decayed that it has run its course?

That question, for the moment, remains unanswered.

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview. Boyd blogs at My Corner.

Code Pink (Medea Benjamin): Philosophically Solid, Antiwar Pioneer Of The Old Left

Iraq, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Old Right, Russia, War

Ukraine is a proxy for NATO. NATO is surrogate for Uncle Sam. These Dis-United States of America are waging a proxy, regime-change-war on Russia.

The formidable Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, founded in 2002, is hip to all this.

I’ve admired her since she, on the Old Left, stood with us of the Old Right against the destruction of Iraq.

Now, Medea is exactly where she needs to be on the Ukraine proxy-war outrage. With the same principles and depth.

Of course, you don’t see her on TV, on account that she’s brighter than the egos in the anchor chairs—by which I mean Ms. Benjamin has had the philosophical integrity and smarts to be on the right side from the onset.

In other words, Medea hasn’t just recently had a conversion—i.e., “I’ve learned something from Tucker Carlson, and now wanna be on his show.” Concepts like “NATO expansion” and the “events of 2014,” where America fomented a Color Revolution in Ukraine, have been as part of her vocabulary as they have been mine for a long, long time.

At the time “Why So Many Americans Don’t Support Attacking Iraq” (2002) was published in one of Canada’s two national newspapers—it was common for those on the Old Left to find commonalities with the Old Right. Like on matters antiwar.

Code Pink are still my pepes, but they get no backing from the war-loving Woke Left or from dopey ConInc., aka the UniParty.