Category Archives: The State

NEW COLUMN: No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes (Part 2)

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iraq, Just War, Morality, Neoconservatism, The State, War

NEW COLUMN, “No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes” (Part 2), is on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

“HOW does America change if our intelligence agencies were more accurate in their assessment of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs?”

The question was posed, just the other day, in “Make America Competent Again,” by David French, at the Dispatch, a neoconservative website. The tract is an agony aunt’s meander that calls on shoring-up competency in state and civil society.

But first: Dissecting, deconstructing and exposing the neoconservative mindset and machinations matters. The reason is this:

Thanks to President Trump, neoconservatives are not exactly having a moment—they’re down in the doldrums. But they’ll be back. For neoconservatives and liberal interventionists make up the Permanent State. The ideology the likes of David French, formerly of National Review, and his ilk promote—foreign-policy bellicosity, endless immigration, mindless consumerism, racial shaming, “canceling” of deviationists and conformity to an American identity that’s been melted away in vats of multiculturalism—is in our country’s bone marrow, by now.

Therefore, the fighting words in response to French’s framing of the invasion of Iraq as a mere glitch in intelligence are these:

Oh no you don’t, you so-and-so!!

No creedal neoconservative should be able to get away with the claim that a problem of criminality is really just a problem of competency.

You’d think that a military man like Mr. French would know that fixing problems rests on defining them with precision. Recasting state corruption and war crimes as incompetence cures neither state crimes nor incompetence.

America’s war on Iraq was a war crime, plain and simple. It was a reflexive collaboration between elements in a vast, by now familiar, intelligence bureaucracy, comprised of neoconservative and liberal interventionists, whose aim was to help The Powers that Be pulverize a country, Iraq, for the purpose of making it over in the image of America.

Contra Mr. French, the war on Iraq cannot be reduced to systemic incompetence. Anyone who doggedly tracked and documented the ramp up to war, as this column did, can attest that the United States bullied its way to war, monomaniacally. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes” (Part 2), is on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

The Faces Of Justice Democrats, Who Herald ‘The Death of The Old America …’

Democrats, Justice, Multiculturalism, Politics, The State

Waleed Shahid, pictured, is a Justice Democrat spokesman. In a pinned tweet, he heralds the coming “death of the old America, and the birth of a new America.”

Among their policy objectives, Justice Democrats count  penal abolition, and universal everything, including the right of the universe to live in the USA, to enjoy a federally guaranteed job, universal healthcare and education. (Some of the aims of Justice Democrats, like a cessation to recreational wars and drug decriminalization, comport with libertarianism.)

To hasten that goal, Shahid targets voters in districts that are “majority non-white and economically diverse.” Justice Democrats like him hope “to mobilise infrequent voters in the less-white and less-rich parts of the district to vote,” so as to, presumably, bring about the desired change. The JD has the “experience, the infrastructure, the people and the coaching” to achieve transformative results.

Jamaal Bowman: Green New Deal, Medicare for All.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another familiar Justice,  “death of the old America, and the birth of a new America” Democrat.

Ayanna Pressley among the SQUAD, all Justice Democrats:

Morgan Harper:

The Economist contends, however, that mainstream Democrats are still in control, do not seek to challenge Democratic incumbents, and that “the freshmen representatives who gave the House its Democratic majority were mostly moderates from swing districts.”

Impeachment Uninteresting To A Certain Kind Of Libertarian

Constitution, Democrats, Law, libertarianism, Republicans, The State

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.

NEW COLUMN: White Guilt: Where Does It Originate And How To Fight It

Christianity, Hebrew Testament, IMMIGRATION, Judaism & Jews, Nationalism, Race, The State, The West

NEW COLUMN IS “White Guilt: Where Does It Originate And How To Fight It.” It’s on The Unz Review and on WND.COM.

An excerpt:

Is white guilt a Christian affliction? Edward Gibbon would probably say so.

Gibbon was the genius who wrote, in 1776, the 12 volumes that comprise “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” wherein he saddled nascent Christianity with the downfall of the Roman Empire, no less. (I read the 1943 version, which was “condensed for modern reading.”)

By so surmising, Gibbon brought upon himself the wrath of “bishops, deans and dons”—not to mention that of the great Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. Boswell called Gibbon an “infidel wasp” for “the chapter in which he showed that the fall of Rome was hastened by the rise of Christianity.”

And indeed, Gibbon seems to point toward Christianity’s self-immolating, progressive, pathologically inclusive nature, remarking on the courting by early Christians of “criminals and women.” [Not my words.]

Even more infuriating to his detractors was Gibbon’s prodigious scholarship. “No one could disprove Gibbon’s basic facts,” notes American author Willson Whitman.

Whitman, who wrote the 1943 Foreword to the abridged version, remarks on how “Gibbon outraged the Christians of his era by suggesting the ‘human’ reasons for the success of Christianity.”

“Among these reasons [Gibbon] noted that Christianity … attracted to its ‘common tables’ slaves, women, reformed criminals, and other persons of small importance [Whitman’s words, not mine]—in short that Christianity was a ‘people’s movement of low social origin, rising as the people rose.” [His words, not mine.]

To go by Gibbon, Christianity might be called the Social Justice movement of its day. Gibbon certainly seemed to suggest so.

In no way was Gibbon, who “professed Church of England orthodoxy,” diminishing Christianity’s centrality to Western civilization, or its essential goodness and glory. He was just following the evidence.

With Gibbon’s historical analysis in mind, it’s difficult to dispute that America, once identified as a staunch Christian country, seldom stands up for and safeguards Christian interests.

Trust Tucker Carlson to take note. On April 22, 2019, less than two minutes into this broadcast, the TV anchor observed that American foreign policy imperils the already imperiled Christian communities across the Muslim world. For one, the ancient Iraqi Christian community is a shadow of what it was under Saddam Hussein.

To their own dwindling, Western flock, American and European Christian leaders seldom offer succor and support. More often than not, church leaders are inclined to scold Westerners and berate them for insufficient procreation.

Take Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput. For outbreeding Christianity, Chaput offered praise for Islam as a civilization—as if civilizations are great because of huge numbers, rather than human capital—namely, people of superior ideas, abilities and sensibilities; people capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy, to say nothing of mercy and charity.

Has not Christianity’s great heart been instrumental in ameliorating famine, and thus enabling Muslim Africa’s population explosion? …

…  READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “White Guilt: Where Does It Originate And How To Fight It,” is on The Unz Review and WND.COM.