Category Archives: Republicans

UPDATED: Mitt Romney: Elements Of A Tragic Figure

History, Literature, Morality, Nationhood, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Mitt Romney embodies some, not all, the elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure:

* Character must be a person of stature. (Check)
* Character must neither be totally good or totally evil
* An error of judge or a weakness in character causes the misfortune. (Check)
* The character must be responsible for tragic events.
* Action involves a change in fortune from happiness to misery. (Check)
* Subject is serious. (Check)
* Tragic hero is of noble birth and displays a nobility of spirit. (Check)
* Protagonists pitted against forces beyond their control. (Check)
* Struggles courageously until his fall. (Check)
* Though defeated, gains a measure of increased wisdom.

Mr. Romney’s election concession speech speaks to these tragic elements, especially this man’s abiding faith in “this great nation.”

I so wish — I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.

UPDATE (11/7): We “left everything on the field,” Romney said, adding “we have given our all to this campaign.”

This comports with the prototypical Greek tragic figure who “struggles courageously until his fall.” Meantime, the snake in the grass coiled and hissed and spat venom, all the way to a victory.

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATED: Benghazigate And The Media (Who Are Seasonal Defenders Of D.C. )

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Journalism, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Republicans, War

“Barack Obama is a despicable man.” These are the words of the always outspoken and interesting Michael Scheuer (a staunch, pro-military Old Rightist, whose patriotism often leads him to conspiratorial anti-Israelism).

Scheuer was on Fox Business discussing Benghazigate.

Fox News is covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all.

This reportorial bifurcation is pretty typical of mainstream media, which includes Fox, of course. In the ramp-up to a Republican president’s unjust war on Iraq, Fox gave the Shrub and his administration a complete pass, while The Other Cable TV stations exposed the corrupt Republicans quite well.

“Reporters who slept with their sources,” “PRESSTITUTES,“ bobble-heads who were “TUNED-OUT, TURNED-ON, AND HOT FOR WAR”: These were some of the terms I used in 2003 and onward for Fox News:

“… to watch these women doing the Countdown to Obliterating Iraq segments was like watching bitches on heat. One anchorwoman’s memorable Freudian slip was to express disappointment that there was as yet no “evidence that’ll give us an excuse [her words] to attack Iraq.” On and on. (Collated in Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture.)

Most of my information about Iraqi civilian casualties came from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. American mainstream media was generally missing in action on that front.

“ON PIMPS AND ‘PRESSTITUTES’” encapsulates the US media’s reporting during the invasion of Iraq, RIP:

…The monolithic quality of the reporting/cheerleading coming from the networks was and still is proof of the slutty sell-out. Practically all network embeds focused exclusively on the pentagon’s version of who did what, when, and how. Logistics usurped real issues; spectacle replaced substance, as the viewer was subjected to a perspective as monochromatic as the green of the night vision optics. …
…Reporting hearsay as truth and failing to verify stories has also been part of the networks’ war effort. A Geiger counter that went off in the inexpert hands of a marine was broadcast as possible evidence of weapons-grade plutonium. Every bottle of Cipro tablets became a likely precursor to an anthrax factory. Anchormen and women somberly seconded these “finds,” seldom bothering to issue retractions for misinforming the viewing public.

Then the guard changed. To American pundits (libertarians excepted), the changing of the guard in D.C. simply means a change of positions. Whereas MSNBC and CNN were more likely to expose the Bush Administration, they quickly assumed the position previously occupied by the Fox News network during the Bush years: defenders of D.C.

The pundits you follow, libertarains excepted, are all seasonal defenders of D.C.

To sum, Benghazi is a scandal. Fox News has been reporting (diligently, since their guy is NOT in D.C.) that: “…an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command — who also told the CIA operators twice to “stand down” rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”

Try to remember: The White House Situation Room, the State Department, CIA and Pentagon were just as good at forsaking Americans during the other bastard’s reign of terror.

For example, “Under ‘W,’ ordinary Americans were regularly beheaded in the theaters of war Genghis Bush launched. None of their representatives stateside bargained for their lives or staged showy Congressional hearings to probe their forsaken security.”

My hope is that the same readers who tried to have me dismissed from WND, during the Republican occupation of America, will elevate themselves above their current political preference and see the thing for what it is.

UPDATE (Oct. 27): If not for RT, we’d be as deaf and dumb (as ex-Facebook Friend, HJ) about the humanitarian disaster unfolding, a la Iraq, in Lebanon. Another Syria. Or rather, another Iraq. Read about the “Siege of Bani Walid.” Watch the visuals of the maimed and dead. Babies too.

UPDATE II: Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment (& The Killing Continues)

Founding Fathers, Labor, Old Right, Political Economy, Republicans, Russia, Socialism, South-Africa

Excerpted from “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” now on WND:

“During the final presidential debate, Republican contender Mitt Romney got my hackles up (unnecessarily) with the following invocation of apartheid:

‘I would also make sure that [Iran’s] diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world. The same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.’

Why unnecessarily? Romney is unremarkable among Republicans. Pushing revolutionary radicalism on the Old South Africa was the goal not only in high diplomatic circles, but among most Republicans.

With a few exceptions.

As I document in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ ‘For advocating ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, members of his Republican Party issued a coruscating attack on Ronald Reagan.’

Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans. In 1986, the Soviet Union, which had until the 1980s supported a revolutionary takeover of white-ruled South Africa by its ANC protégés, suddenly changed its tune and denounced the idea. Once again, the US and the USSR were on the same side—that of ‘a negotiated settlement between Pretoria and its opponents.’

Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, President Reagan has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’

South Africa was just one more issue on which Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left. Today they are as eager as the next drug-addled supermodel to press flesh with Saint Nelson Mandela and the functionaries who run the dominant-party state of South Africa. That is, run it into the ground. … ”

The complete column is “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment.” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

• Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATE I (Oct. 27): IT’S ALL ABOUT FACTION. As was noted in “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” “…the ANC … is powerless to stop intimidation. In South Africa, the sacked workers are in the habit of killing scabs who want to work.”

Reports RT:

South African police fired stun grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse striking miners who tried to foil a rally of the nation’s largest union. The miners say the union reached an unfavorable deal with Amplants mine without their consent.
­The Anglo American Platinum mine in Rustenburg has announced an agreement to reinstate 12,000 miners fired earlier this month for staging illegal strikes and failing to appear at a disciplinary hearing. The credit for the deal was taken by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
“[Amplants] agreed to reinstate all the dismissed workers on the provision that they return to work by Tuesday,” the NUM announced Saturday, a day after the breakthrough in talks.
But the Amplants workers said they were neither aware of nor happy with the deal.
“We know nothing about it. We were not consulted, we only heard about it on the radio,” Ampants miner Reuben Lerebolo told AFP.

UPDATE II (Oct. 27): The indefatigable Adriana Stuijt (@AdrianaStuijt) tweets out:

“Oxford-educated SA investment company owner Alexander Theo Otten murdered at #Velddrift http://bit.ly/ThZFld”