Category Archives: Republicans

Suleimani: America Is Judge, Jury And Executioner; Decides Who Lives, Who Dies

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“Suleimani deserved to die.” That’s the consensus on Fox News. It’s also how assorted commentators on the channel prefaced their “positions” on the killing of this Iranian.

Major General Qassim Suleimani was assassinated by a US drone air strike at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP).

Even the great Tucker Carlson—the only mainstream hope for us Old Right, America First, anti-war sorts—framed the taking out of Suleimani as the killing of a bad guy by good guys:

“There are an awful lot of bad people in this world. We can’t kill them all, it’s not our job.”

However you finesse it, the premise of Tucker’s statement is that the American government, and the cognoscenti who live in symbiosis with it, get to adjudicate who’s bad and who’s good in the world. The debate is never over right or wrong, but over whether our universal American Judges should or shouldn’t act on their immutably just moral calls.

Even Tucker, whose antiwar sentiments are laudable, conceded that this Suleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

So who’s right? Or must we accept that it is up to the United States government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.

The atavistic argument—“Suleimani deserved to die”—made on Fox News holds true only if you believe that the US is the repository of an international and universal code of law and is deputized to uphold this code of law.

This primitive argument is true ONLY if you believe the US government is universal judge, jury and executioner, deciding who may live and who must die the world over.

As to whether the US government has a right to eliminate a state actor by declaring him a “terrorist”:

Like it or not, Suleimani was an Iranian state actor, the equivalent of our Special Operations Commander.

We would not tolerate Iranians designating America’s Special Operations Commander, Gen. Richard D. Clarke, as a terrorist, although they may have plenty reasons to do so.

Our Special Operations forces and their command encroach on the Iranian neighborhood much more so than Iranians and their special forces encroach on American territory.

If Iranians took out America’s Special Operations Commander somewhere in North America—we would definitely consider it an act of war by Iran.

* Image courtesy BBC News.

Laughable Impeachment: Libertarians (The Good Kind) LOVE Undermining Foreign Aid

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President Donald Trump will be impeached and then tried and acquitted. That’s the platform on which the Democrats are running a presidential campaign.

As to the substance of the articles of impeachment against President Trump:

First up is “Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine.”

At the behest of Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, Devin Nunes, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and with the active participation of Vice-President Mike Pence, and Mick Mulvaney, the chief of staff—the Office of Management and Budget implemented a hold on Ukraine’s assistance funds.

What’s not to like about a hold on foreign aid? It was a short-lived hold, but it was good while it lasted.

What we libertarians don’t like is that the funds were eventually released to Ukraine. No matter what, libertarians want to see foreign aid imperiled in any way possible, for as long as possible, preferably for good.

By contrast, the Beltway libertarians, the ones Tucker Carlson entertains, will map the ins-and-outs of the impeachment with the fastidiousness of a government bureaucrat. And they’ll go into the weeds of the Ukraine affair, what the Democrats and their supporters are calling “a sprawling, months-long campaign spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer.”

From where I’m perched, it’s a big yawn. “Impeachment [Is] Uninteresting To A Certain Kind Of Libertarian“:

Democrat or Republican initiated, impeachment as we’ve come to know it intimately, showcases the might of the American Administrative State in all its muscular display of extra-constitutional powers. There is nothing constitutional, and very little that is naturally licit, in this process, despite all the “solemn” references to the poor, unused document.

The second part of the Democrats’ report, leading up to the drawing up of articles of impeachment, entailed Trump and his “officials declining to take part in the impeachment inquiry …”

The report argues that Mr Trump’s blanket refusal is unprecedented—Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton all complied with House requests for information—and that such defiance represents “an existential threat to the nation’s constitutional system of checks and balances…and rule of law”.

Did you hear that? This is midriff-splitting funny.

Trump defying a corrupt and ossified body (that gave America one unjust, criminal war after the other) is said to constitute “an existential threat to the nation’s constitutional system of checks and balances…and rule of law.”

To libertarians, the good kind, that idea that congress represents some sort of bulwark against a mortal, existential danger is just uproariously funny.

  • Image is Adam Schiff courtesy “Cowdog“

 

Impeachment Uninteresting To A Certain Kind Of Libertarian

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As a libertarian, I’m not in the least interested in the impeachment proceedings and process.

Democrat or Republican initiated, impeachment as we’ve come to know it intimately, showcases the might of the American Administrative State in all its muscular display of extra-constitutional powers. There is nothing constitutional, and very little that is naturally licit, in this process, despite all the “solemn” references to the poor, unused document.

That the participants wrap themselves in the toga of constitutionality makes the process all the more  farcical.

To quote from my “Moral Of The Mueller Inquisition, Part 2″:

“As a scrupulously honest broadcaster, Tucker Carlson recently confessed to ‘looking back in shame’ for having originally supported Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Clinton. (Good libertarians have always opposed the very existence of the OSC. This writer certainly has.)”

Another comment, relating to the above and to the imperative to, at the very least, denounce the last two impeachment productions undertaken by the extra-constitutional Office of Special Counsel (OSC):

I like Jonathan Turley a lot. But I am shocked that he supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I am beginning to suspect that Turely, despite repeated denials, is a Republican through-and-through. Why not say so, sir?

Here is Jonathan Turley, in 1998.

In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker; it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. The allegations against President Clinton go to the very heart of the legitimacy of his office and the integrity of the political system. As an individual, a president may seek spiritual redemption in the company of friends and family. Constitutional redemption, however, is found only in the company of representatives of all three branches in the well of the Senate. It is there that legitimacy, once recklessly lost, can be regained by a president.