Justin Raimondo, RIP (1951-2019)

Justin Raimondo, former editorial director and co-founder of Antiwar.com, is dead at 67.

Justin CO-founded the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus (LPRC) in late 1978. Economist Murray Rothbard joined a few months later. Around the same time, Justin became one of the first employees of the newly formed Students for a Libertarian Society. Shortly after Democratic US Senator Sam Nunn and other members of Congress moved to reinstate the military draft and draft registration, Justin helped organize a number of anti-draft rallies that were held around the country on May 1, 1979. The LPRC disbanded in 1983.

He found more intellectual inspiration in the Old Right, people like John T. Flynn, Albert J. Nock, Frank Chodorov, Isabel Paterson, and other mid-20th century figures who defended the vision of a constitutional republic and protested the progressive leviathan’s despotic powers at home and abroad. Justin was especially influenced by novelist Garet Garrett, who saw Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency as a revolutionary development that gutted American freedom while leaving the superficial form of the Constitution intact, and who was perhaps "even harsher" in opposing Truman’s Cold War imperialism. Justin regarded the irreconcilable conflict between interventionists and traditionalists as the defining struggle over the heart and soul of American conservatism.

Because of his strong antiwar views, Justin also supported Pat Buchanan three times in his run for President of the United States: 1992, 1996, and 2000. In 2000, Justin gave the nominating speech for Pat Buchanan at the Reform Party convention in Long Beach. It can be seen here from 1:19:00 to 1:32:02.

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The Korean Crisis: A Way Out

The latest North Korea nuclear test coincides with leaks from the Trump administration that Washington is demanding renegotiation of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and is preparing to withdraw from it – and therein lies a possible, albeit unintentional, resolution of the crisis on the peninsula.

The relationship between South Korea and the United States is unique in the history of empires. In the past, imperial powers have extracted resources from client states, protectorates, and outright colonies, setting up mercantilist arrangements that basically plundered their territories in the “Third World” for the benefit of domestic producers. The British empire is – or, rather, was – the exemplar of this system of exploitation.

Britain’s American cousins have stood this extractive system on its head. Instead of forcing open markets and granting monopoly status to domestic producers, the Americans have reversed the terms of exploitation. In exchange for allowing US troops to occupy their territory, America’s Asian protectorates have been granted tariff-free access to our markets. And despite the “free trade” label attached to these agreements, the playing field is anything but level: in the case of South Korea, for example, non-tariff barriers to trade – such as safety standards – have been allowed to stand, particularly in the case of automobiles and appliances. Similar disparities are encoded in our trade agreements with Japan.

And so the American empire is unique in world history in that, instead of economically exploiting its vassal states, it allows its vassals to protect their own industries behind trade barriers while they are given relatively free access to the US market. The result has been the hollowing out of the US industrial base, with once prosperous cities like Detroit in ruins. This isn’t “free trade” – it’s a trade policy distorted by militarism and imperialism.

Over 30,000 US troops now occupy the southern portion of the Korean peninsula. They have been there since the non-conclusion of the Korean war, which ended in a stalemate and an “armistice’ which continues to this day. We are still technically at war with the North.

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Fire McMaster

The internal battle taking place in the Trump administration, pitting the “adults” – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, General John Kelly, and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster – against the “America First” nationalists, led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, has now spread to the media. At the center of the controversy is McMaster, whose foreign policy views are in many ways the exact opposite of Trump’s, and who – rumor has it – may be on the way out. There are indications that, despite recent expressions of support for McMaster, the President has clashed with him repeatedly: Eli Lake reports that Trump “screamed” at his National Security Advisor for calling his South Korean counterpart after Trump said Seoul would have to pay for the THAAD antimissile defense system.

The Never Trump progressive-neocon alliance is taking up the cudgels on McMaster’s behalf, while the Trump loyalists are calling for his ouster. So what are the policy differences between the two factions?

The current issue is what to do about the war in Afghanistan – the fifteen year-plus futile crusade that is now the longest war in our history. Bannon wants out, the “adults” want to escalate the war with more troops. Trump himself leans toward the Bannon view: he reportedly rejected a plan prepared by the “adult” faction and sent them back to the drawing board.

However, from a noninterventionist perspective, the battle lines are not all that that clear. In an interview with an administration insider, the Daily Caller reports:

“Everything the president wants to do, McMaster opposes. Trump wants to get us out of Afghanistan – McMaster wants to go in. Trump wants to get us out of Syria – McMaster wants to go in. Trump wants to deal with the China issue – McMaster doesn’t. Trump wants to deal with the Islam issue – McMaster doesn’t. You know, across the board, we want to get rid of the Iran deal – McMaster doesn’t. It is incredible to watch it happening right in front of your face. Absolutely stunning.”

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Who Tried to Kill Putin – Five Times?

Oliver Stone’s series of interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin – conducted between July 2015 and February 2017 – has garnered a lot of attention, albeit in most cases not for the right reasons. In a much-noted appearance of Stephen Colbert’s comedy show, the liberal host attacked Stone for not confronting the Russian leader for his alleged crimes – which simply shows that Colbert didn’t bother seeing the interviews, because Stone most certainly did question Putin about this and other related matters. A review in Salon follows a similar pattern: the reviewer apparently did view at least some parts of the interviews, but predictably focused on the most superficial material: Putin loves Judo, he’s not a feminist, and won’t be marching in any Gay Pride events. Shocking!

In the present atmosphere of Russophobic hysteria, no honest account of what is happening in Russia or what Putin is really all about is likely to be taken at face value. What’s astonishing, however, is that this four-part documentary was even made at all– and shown on Showtime, where it is currently playing. Less surprising is the fact that the interviews contain several news-making revelations that the “mainstream” media has so far largely ignored.

It gets interesting right from the beginning when Stone delves into Putin’s early career. As a KGB officer stationed in East Germany, then the German Democratic Republic, he describes the GDR as entirely lacking the “spirit of innovation,” a “society [that] was frozen in the 1950s.” Hardly what one would expect from the caricature of a Soviet apparatchik Western profiles of Putin routinely portray. And also right from the beginning there is a tension between Stone, with his often archetypal liberal-left views, and Putin, whose perspective – if it has any American equivalent – might be called paleoconservative.

When Stone tries to identify Putin with Mikhail Gobachev, the Soviet liberal-reformist leader – “he has a resemblance to you in that he came up through that system. Very humble beginnings” – Putin rejects this outright with laconic disdain: “We all have something in common because we’re human beings.” Gorby, a favorite of American liberals, is seen by Putin as someone who “didn’t know what [he] wanted or know how to achieve what was required.”

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Spygate: America’s Political Police vs. Donald J. Trump

Everyone is suddenly talking about the Deep State – the configuration of spy agencies, career bureaucrats, and overseas spooks whose murky omnipresence has been brought to light by President Trump’s contention that he was “wiretapped” by his predecessor.

With his usual imprecision, Trump managed to confuse the issue by ascribing the surveillance to Barack Obama, and so naturally spokesmen for the former President had no trouble batting this charge away. But as a former Obama speechwriter put it:  “I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the [White House] ordered it.”

And then there’s the word “wiretapping”: this brings to mind the old-fashioned physical “bug” that our spooks used to plant on their target’s phone lines, installed in the dead of night. But that isn’t how it’s done anymore. As Edward Snowden revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) scoops up everyone’s communications, and stores them in a database for later retrieval. Loosely-observed “rules” are supposed to make it hard (but not impossible) for the spooks to spy on American citizens, but the reality is that there are plenty of times when such information is scooped up “incidentally,” and in those cases the identities of those spied on must be redacted.

Except not anymore.

As the New York Times reported on January 12:

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A Win for the Deep State

Let’s be clear about how and why former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn was ousted from his post: a cabal of current and former members of the “intelligence community,” fanatically opposed to Donald Trump’s stated desire to “get along with the Russians,” leaked the top secret transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Russian ambassador Sergay Kislyak. Although we don’t yet know exactly what transpired – as of this writing, BuzzFeed hasn’t gotten their hot little hands on the transcript – there was apparently some discussion of lifting sanctions on Russia, which is something the cabal and its collaborators in Congress and the media are determined to prevent at all costs.

Flynn was in the crosshairs of the War Party because he’s the most prominent of those around Trump who advocated for détente with Russia. Also, his somewhat loopy belief that Islam, per se, is a pernicious political ideology rather than a religion, made him a natural enemy of the pro-Saudi faction within the intelligence community, which had long worked with Riyadh to, among other things, overthrow the government of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.

Flynn’s alleged “crime” – supposedly lying to Vice President Pence about the content of the call – wasn’t a crime at all: James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, blatantly lied under oath to Congress and yet kept his position. What this non-scandal is all about is an attempt to criminalize the view that we have no real quarrel with Russia, that our common interests override any bumps along the road to détente. If you don’t go along with a new cold war with Russia then, ipso facto, you’re a “Russian agent” who needs to be investigated. This is what the neocon-liberal alliance is now pushing, and the first victim of this hate campaign is Flynn. He won’t be the last.

Democrats are now calling for an investigation into Flynn’s “Russia links,” in typical McCarthyite fashion, but what’s really called for is an investigation into the media’s links to the “intelligence community” – which leaked the transcript of Trump’s conversations with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mexican President Enrique Nieto as well as the transcript of Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador. As Trump tweeted this [Tuesday] morning:

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Spare Us the Theatrics

The Trump administration has the media and its political opponents (or do I repeat myself?) in a lather as the White House continues to fire executive orders in quick succession, demolishing the old order and enraging both liberals and their newfound neoconservative allies. Amid all the virtue-signaling hysterics, the most significant aspects of what is occurring are being overlooked – and it’s my job to point them out.

While the blue-state crowd is protesting President Trump’s order banning travel to the US by citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, what gets lost in all the shouting is that the legal and political basis of his order was laid down by President Barack Obama. These people don’t care to recall that, in 2013, Obama banned all refugees from Iraq for six months, and his action was hardly noticed: Trump is only proposing a ninety-day pause. What prompted Obama’s action, as ABC News reported at the time, was “the discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq.”

Two years later, Congress passed a law, the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, that restricted travel visas for citizens of “states of concern,” i.e. Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Iran and “any other country or area of concern.” Obama promptly signed it. In early 2016, the Department of Homeland Security unilaterally extended these restrictions to Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. What this meant was that the visa waiver program did not apply to citizens of these countries: travelers had to apply for a visa at US embassies, a highly problematic matter (Syria, for one, has no such facility) and were very unlikely to be successful in their efforts. I don’t recall any protests at the time.

In short, the legal and political basis of Trump’s executive order – which is being denounced as an unprecedented attack on our allies (Iraq), civil liberties, and decency itself – was laid during the previous regime. Trump has simply dispensed with the fiction that these travelers are welcomed by our government, and issued an ostensibly temporary outright ban.

Aside from the hypocrisy underscored in that history, however, a larger point needs to be made: this all follows from our bipartisan foreign policy of perpetual war. Regardless of one’s views on immigration, the idea that we can invade the world and then proceed to invite the world is worse than naïve – it’s dangerous. As Garet Garrett, that prophet of the Old Right, put it more than half a century ago:

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Purge the CIA

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified at a hearing on “Russian interference” in the election that there’s a difference between “skepticism” of the intelligence community’s assessment and “disparagement” of said community. While stopping short of asking for a “safe space,” this admitted liar used the opportunity to cry on the shoulders of Donald Trump’s assembled enemies: “We’re not perfect,” he burbled, but hey everybody makes mistakes.

Clapper’s remarks were clearly aimed at Trump, who has tweeted his contempt for the effort by the CIA and allied agencies to conjure up a Russian conspiracy to put him in the White House. Citing Julian Assange’s statement to Sean Hannity that a teenager could’ve hacked the Podesta emails, Trump’s tweets evoked the rage of the Washington Establishment – how dare he question those who failed to prevent 9/11, told us Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” and failed to foresee the rise of ISIS, which they (through President Obama) characterized as “the JV team”!

The hearing quickly degenerated into a “Hate Assange” session, with McCain asking Clapper "if any credibility should attached to this individual” given WikiLeaks’ “record of leaking materials that put U.S. lives in direct danger.”

"Not in my view," Clapper replied.

Only in Washington would this exchange not be followed by howls of jeering laughter. It was Clapper, after all, who lied under oath to Sen. Ron Wyden and the Senate when asked about the extent of spying on US citizens engaged in by the National Security Agency, and later was forced to apologize for it.

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Dana Rohrabacher for Secretary of State?

President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks continue to be the focus of those looking for portents of what is to come, and the main source of speculation is over the position of Secretary of State. After giving Trump supporters quite a scare with indications that he just might pick none other than Mitt Romney, it looks like the subsequent outcry – including from campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who went public with her opposition – deterred Trump, and it’s rumored that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is now favored to win the prize. (Although don’t bet the farm on it.)

Rumor also has it that Rohrabacher was offered the deputy Secretary of State position, with the odious John Bolton in the top position, but that Dana refused on the grounds that Bolton’s foreign policy views are in many ways the exact opposite of Trump’s (and his own).

Rohrabacher’s political career is really quite a story. Here is someone who went from being a follower of Bob LeFevre, a pacifist libertarian, to a militant Reaganite who championed the cause of the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s. As a young libertarian, he was a kind of troubadour, who took his guitar and his ultra-sectarian brand of libertarianism all across California, carrying the LeFevrian message of “autarchy” (i.e. market anarchism mixed with intransigent pacifism) to all who would listen. (Another disciple of LeFevre around this time was Charles Koch.)

A founder of one of the earliest libertarian organizations that fueled the growth of the libertarian movement in the 1960s, the California Libertarian Alliance, Rohrabacher was a veteran of the internecine wars on the right that sundered Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the conservative youth group, into libertarian and Buckleyite factions. Rohrabacher was a leading light of YAF’s Libertarian Caucus, along with his good friend, Don Ernsberger. Ernsberger, who was for years a member of the Libertarian Party National Committee, went on to become Rohrabacher’s deputy chief of staff in Congress. But before making it to Washington as a legislator, Rohrabaher worked in the media relations office of Reagan’s 1976 campaign, and then in the press office of the Reagan White House, where he became a speechwriter for the President. The speech in which Reagan announced his “Reagan Doctrine” is attributed to him.

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What Would an ‘America First’ Foreign Policy Look Like?

As Donald Trump takes the reins and we all prepare for the next four years, the need to translate rhetoric into reality comes to the fore. Trump spent the campaign repeating a phrase that horrified the elites – especially the foreign policy Establishment – even adopting it as his official campaign theme: “America first.”

The elites were aghast because the phrase evokes the legacy of the biggest anti-interventionist movement in American history: the America First Committee, a coalition of conservative businessmen and progressive activists (including the socialist Norman Thomas) who not only opposed US entry into World War II, but also pointed to the authoritarian tendencies of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, which they feared would be exacerbated in wartime – as indeed they were.

Smeared by pro-war liberals and their Communist party allies as “Nazi sympathizers” — in the same way antiwar activists were later accused of being pro-Communist, pro-Saddam Hussein, pro-terroriost, etc. – the AFC has not fared well with historians, who, for the most part, are Roosevelt partisans, and globalists in any case. The America Firsters are the original “isolationists” the War Party warns us about, “dangerous” subversives who saw that in the quest for a “world order,” Americans would lose their old republic.

Which is precisely what happened.

Whether consciously or not, Trump has revived this long-disdained trend in American politics, and, what’s more, he has won. So how does –or should – he translate this kind of rhetoric into reality?

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‘McCarthyism,’ Then and Now

What we are seeing today with the revival of the cold war mindset is in many ways the complete opposite of the “old” McCarthyism: the target may be the same – Russia as the bogeyman de jour – but the methods and sources of the neo-McCarthyites are quite different.

To begin with, the “old” McCarthyism was a movement generated from below, and aimed at the elites: the “new” McCarthyism is a media construct, generated from above and created by the elites.

The average American, while hardly a Putin groupie, is not laying awake at night worrying about the “Russian threat.” The fate of Ukraine, not to mention Crimea, is so far from his concerns that the distance can only be measured in light-years. And when some new scandal breaks as a result of WikiLeaks releasing the emails of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, Joe Sixpack doesn’t think “Oh, that just proves Julian Assange is a Kremlin toady!” WikiLeaks is merely confirming what Joe already knew: that Washington is a cornucopia of corruption.

The Acela corridor elite, on the other hand, does lay awake at night wondering how they can pull off a regime change operation that will eliminate the “threat” represented by Putin once and for all. Ever since the Russian leader started mocking Washington’s hegemonic pretensions, criticizing the US invasion of Iraq, and pointing out how US-funded Syrian “rebels” are merely jihadists in “moderate” clothing, Putin has been in their crosshairs – and the propaganda war has been relentless.

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The New Iron Curtain

A foreign army consisting of 31,000 soldiers from an anti-American alliance are conducting military “exercises” a few miles from San Diego. Hundreds of tanks converge on the Rio Grande, while jets from 24 countries converge in attack formation, darting through Mexican skies.

It isn’t hard to imagine Washington’s response.

Yet that’s precisely what has been happening on Russia’s border with the NATO alliance, as the cold war returns. Economic sanctions aimed at sinking Russia’s fragile economy, plus a propaganda campaign designed to characterize Russian President Vladimir Putin as the second coming of Stalin – or, in Hillary Clinton’s view, Hitler – have history running in reverse. Once again, an iron curtain is descending across Europe – only this time it’s the West’s doing.

The European Union renewed sanctions against Crimea on Friday: their “crime” – holding a referendum in which the overwhelming majority of voters opted for union with Russia, restoring what had been the status quo since the days of Catherine the Great. And the EU is slated to extend sanctions against the Russian Federation later this week.

Yet dissent against this revival of the cold war is rising in Europe, notably in Germany, where Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is calling for the “gradual” lifting of sanctions to reflect progress in the implementation of the Minsk accords, which call for the demilitarization of Ukraine and elections in rebel-held territory. This reflects a division within Germany’s left-right coalition government: Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats are holding out for “full” implementation of the accords. Yet it is the government in Kiev – held hostage by far-right crazies – that has been dragging its feet over Minsk, refusing to grant autonomy to east Ukraine and vowing to continue the war against the rebels in spite of Kiev’s lack of success in pacifying the rebellious region.

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Nationalism, Patriotism, and Libertarianism

I was struck by a tweet from libertarian Republican congressman Justin Amash, who has become the “new Ron Paul” now that the three-time presidential candidate and libertarian icon has taken a well-deserved rest from politics. The other day he tweeted:

“Patriotism & nationalism are profoundly different. Patriotism is love of country. FA Hayek called nationalism ‘a twin brother of socialism.’”

Amash, who has vowed to never support GOP frontrunner and likely presidential nominee Donald Trump, undoubtedly had the New York real estate mogul in mind, but no matter what one thinks of The Donald, Amash is quite wrong about the nature of American nationalism and the meaning of “patriotism.”

To begin with, Hayek was clearly talking about European nationalism, not the American variety. I’ll get to the difference between them, but I want first to point out the irony of Amash’s citation of this particular Hayek quote, because the great libertarian theorist was here talking about the problem of centralization: that is, the growing tendency of smaller political units to be subordinated to and swallowed up by bigger entities.

If we place Hayek’s discussion in the present context, then it becomes clear that nationalism is not the enemy but a (potential) friend of liberty. For the modern trend is toward supra-national entities, like the European Union, the UN, and the North American “Free Trade” Agreement, which are engaged in erecting precisely that “society which is consciously organized from the top” so abhorred by Hayek. When nationalism is arrayed against globalism, i.e. against the concept of a regional super-state, or even a World State, libertarians must clearly take sides with the former.

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‘America First’ – The Trump Slogan the Establishment Hates

Why has the Establishment pulled out all the stops in an effort to smear him, stop him, and crush him underfoot? Every single day the “mainstream” media unleashes a foam-flecked fusillade of fury at the GOP front-runner: he’s a “racist,” he’s “corrupt,” his campaign manager is a “bully,” he “incites violence,” etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Of course, the media is going to attack any Republican candidate. However, this time, the GOP elite is joining in, and the level of ferocity is something we haven’t seen since 1964. That was the year Barry Goldwater’s trip to Germany provoked a report by Daniel Schorr on the CBS Evening News that falsely linked the GOP candidate to German neo-Nazis – while Nelson Rockefeller denounced Goldwater’s delegates as “extremists” who “feed on fear, hate, and terror.”

Yes, “terror”!

The same violence-baiting hysteria is being deployed against Trump, but one has to wonder what’s behind it. I was watching Bill O’Reilly the other day, and he was saying that it has to do with the elite’s visceral dislike of Trump as a personality. They think he’s a “vulgarian” who appeals to the rubes in flyover country. Well, there’s something to that: these consumers of arugula and “artisan” cheese no doubt disdain the hamburgers-and-beer crowd embodied by Trump’s persona, but there’s more to it than that. And I can sum it up in two words: foreign policy.

Yes, yes, I know: foreign policy isn’t supposed to figure in presidential elections. Dan Drezner keeps telling us that. And yet I couldn’t help but notice that the anti-Trump hysteria hit a high note (or is that a new low?) when he came out with a series of foreign policy pronouncements and started attacking NATO. The hairs on the back of the necks of the foreign policy wonks must’ve stood at attention when he adopted “America first” as his campaign slogan.

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The Revolt Against NATO

A recent report published in Foreign Policy magazine, a bastion of the internationalist Establishment, illustrates quite neatly how the anti-interventionist cause is making big gains – and how to effect real change in American foreign policy. The headline reads: “Senators Slam NATO ‘Free Riders’ in Closed Door Session With Secretary General,” and the story went on to relate how GOP Senators are suddenly complaining about how and why the burden of NATO falls largely on Uncle Sam’s sagging shoulders:

“For under an hour, senators grilled [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, about why only five members of the 28-nation club spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, the official amount NATO recommends each nation to set aside. Some expressed particular dissatisfaction with Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, which does not meet the 2 percent threshold.”

Although the article claimed that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) “and other US officials” have “blasted” our feckless allies for years over this imbalance, this is the first time we’ve heard about it. Why is that? Well, it’s because the Republican frontrunner, one Donald J. Trump, is making an issue of it, and even suggesting that NATO, which he says is “obsolete,” is a relic of the cold war that ought to be entirely abandoned.

This has the foreign policy Establishment in a panic, with legions of  “experts” rising up to denounce Trump’s heresy as misguided, absurd, and – of course! – “isolationist.” Yet the politicians can’t afford to be so dismissive: after all, they have to listen to their constituents, at least to some extent. And it’s quite telling what Sen. Corker – who has warned the “Never Trump” crowd to back off – had to say to Stoltenberg:

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The Establishment’s Last Stand

The good news for anti-interventionists out of Iowa is that Bernie Sanders has defied the conventional wisdom and effectively delayed the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton. In spite of a ramped up effort to isolate the Vermont socialist from the Democratic mainstream, Hillary is in for a bruising fight that will only get bloodier when Sanders smashes her in New Hampshire, as seems likely.

On the Republican side of the aisle, the news from Iowa is decidedly mixed. There are glad tidings in the fact that the two candidates not wholly-owned subsidiaries of the neocons came in first (Cruz) and second (Trump). Yet the unexpectedly strong third place finish by the War Twink Marco Rubio has the War Party celebrating. Not that we didn’t know Rubio was going to come in third all along: that’s what the polls told us, and they were right. Yet we were being primed in the run up to the actual balloting with the narrative that third place was actually a “victory” for the Cuban Bombshell. And we have the “mainstream” media chiming in with the usual neocon suspects when it comes to pushing this line.

Ideologically, Rubio is the perfect neocon vehicle. He is not only opposed to the Iran deal, he has also suggested war with Tehran is practically inevitable. He avers that we should’ve been arming the Syrian Islamist rebels from the very beginning, a view he shares with Hillary Clinton. He has run ads complaining that the US spies on Israel – but hasn’t said a word about extensive Israeli spying on the US. He wants to add $1 trillion to the military budget: he wants to shoot down Russian aircraft over Syria and confront Moscow in Ukraine. And his dog whistle to the neocons is his campaign theme: he touts “a new American century,” limning the battle-flag of the old Project for a New American Century that did so much to give us the invasion of Iraq.

The Rubio campaign, in essence, is the GOP Establishment’s last stand against the roiling tides of populist backlash that threaten to bring it down. Which is why the donor class is rapidly moving into Rubio’s camp. The Cruz campaign is an attempt to straddle the fence: while the Canadian-born Senator has been critical of the neocons, he’s such a consummate opportunist that he isn’t above placating them as long as he gains some political benefit. And his foreign policy stance contains elements of neoconservatism, as well as a somewhat attenuated realism. Trump, as this perceptive piece on his foreign policy team makes clear, is an unambiguous realist, which is why the neocons have pulled out all the stops in their effort to derail the Trump Train.

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Trump: America’s Funhouse Mirror

The latest outburst of self-righteous indignation directed at Donald Trump underscores what hypocrites Americans are, as well as illustrating their seemingly endless capacity for self-delusion. This latest eruption of moralizing is occasioned by Trump’s proposal that all travel by Muslims into this country must be ended – “until we find out what the heck is going on.”

Oh, moan liberals and conservatives alike, this is terrrrrible!!! It’s bigoted! It’s unconstitutional! And it’s not very nice! Yet Congress is set to approve a bill with broad bipartisan backing that would deny visa-free travel to anyone who has been in Iraq or Syria in the past five years. Not only that, but the legislation would end visa-free travel from friendly nations like France and Belgium, where Muslims make up a significant minority of the population. Trump’s proposal – given its draconian premise – actually makes more sense, in that it wouldn’t include a French wine wholesaler on a tourist visa or a Belgian Jewish doctor here to attend a medical conference.

Even self-described “libertarian-ish” politicians like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) are on the same wavelength as Trump on this one: a couple of weeks ago he introduced legislation “suspending” entry into the US by visitors, students, refugees, etc., from countries with “significant jihadist movements.” His father, former presidential candidate Ron Paul, introduced very similar legislation – the “Terror Immigration Elimination Act” – back in 2003 when he was a congressman. Paul the Younger’s spokesman says he opposes Trump’s proposal – but The Donald is simply taking the principle animating Sen. Paul’s legislation and applying it more consistently.

Let’s look at the provenance of another supposedly outrageous Trumpian proposal: the idea of establishing a database tracking Muslims in the United States. This is supposed to illustrate The Donald’s unique evil, but in fact mosques in this country have been under heavy surveillance for years. New York City had a Muslim surveillance program, and the FBI has been entrapping Muslims in phony “terrorist” plots as a form of security theater. And then there was the proposal for a comprehensive program of systematic spying by David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and Richard Perle, a former top Bush administration official, as put forth in their book, An End to Evil:

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The War Party Lost the GOP Debate

Most Americans don’t think much about politics, let alone foreign policy issues, as they go about their daily lives. It’s not that they don’t care: it’s just that the daily grind doesn’t permit most people outside of Washington, D.C. the luxury of contemplating the fate of nations with any regularity. There is one exception, however, and that is during election season, and specifically – when it comes to foreign policy –  every four years, when the race for the White House begins to heat up. The President, as commander in chief, shapes US foreign policy: indeed, in our post-constitutional era, now that Congress has abdicated its responsibility, he has the de facto power to single-handedly take us into war. Which is why, paraphrasing Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is certainly interested in you.

The most recent episode of the continuing GOP reality show, otherwise known as the presidential debates, certainly gave us a glimpse of what we are in for if the candidates on that stage actually make it into the Oval Office – and, folks, it wasn’t pretty, for the most part. But there were plenty of bright spots.

This was supposed to have been a debate about economics, but in the Age of Empire there is no real division between economic and foreign policy issues. That was brought home by the collision between Marco Rubio and Rand Paul about half way through the debate when Rubio touted his child tax credit  program as being “pro-family.” A newly-aggressive and articulate Rand Paul jumped in with this:

“Is it conservative to have $1 trillion in transfer payments – a new welfare program that’s a refundable tax credit? Add that to Marco’s plan for $1 trillion in new military spending, and you get something that looks, to me, not very conservative.”

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Is Hillary Clinton Above the Law?

What did we learn from the Democratic presidential debates? We learned that Hillary Clinton hates Edward Snowden, loves the Patriot Act, and considers “the Iranians” among her biggest enemies. In short, we learned that she may very well be Lindsey Graham in drag.

And we also learned what many already knew: that she considers herself above the law. What we didn’t know, however, but do now, is that Bernie Sanders agrees with her. Or, as he put it:

“Let me say — let me say something that may not be great politics. But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.”

To begin with, it is not true that the American people don’t care about this issue: a whopping 58 percent tell pollsters that Mrs. Clinton “knowingly lied” when she said there was no classified information on her private email server. Does Bernie think Americans want to be ruled by liars? Her popularity has plummeted ever since the existence of her secret server was revealed: voters don’t think she’s trustworthy. Sixty-six percent believe her lax practices endangered national security, and majority of voters want a criminal probe of her actions.

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No Justice, No Peace

These days I’m often reminded of this paragraph from what I think is Glenn Greenwald’s best book:

“Those with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever. Often they need not even exploit their access to superior lawyers because they don’t see the inside of a courtroom in the first place – not even when they get caught in the most egregious criminality. The criminal justice system is now reserved almost exclusively for ordinary Americans, who are routinely subjected to harsh punishments even for the pettiest of offenses.”

I couldn’t help but think of the above as I read the news that Jesse Benton, Ron Paul’s former campaign manager and a top aide to Sen. Rand Paul, and John Tate, a former official of the Paul-affiliated Campaign for Liberty, have had bogus charges of bribery, “conspiracy,” falsifying campaign records, and other trumped up charges – all serious felonies – thrown out of court. In dismissing the charges, US District Judge John A. Garvery cited prosecutorial misconduct: the government was clearly out to get Benton and Tate any way they could – and, of course, smear the libertarian movement.

This was always clearly a political case, in which a dissident group with little political influence in the corridors of power was being targeted by the Big Boys, who were out to discredit them and shut them up. Although the investigation had been going on for quite some time, it’s no coincidence that the indictment was announced days before the first presidential GOP presidential debate was to begin.

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