Antiwar.com Blog

Hike on over to National Review Online, where they’re having Ron Paul Day, in the guise of a general symposium on the South Carolina Republican debate: I especially liked Kate O’Beirne’s remark:

“I thought [McCain’s] most uncomfortable moment was during the introductions when the sidebar bios reminded us that he is only a year younger than Ron Paul, who is old enough to remember that Republicans used to want to eliminate Cabinet agencies — now that’s old!”

What the debate showed is that the Republican committment to war and torture trumps the old Republican philosophy of fiscal sanity and limited government: this is why Giuliani, the furthest from a traditional conservative Republican sensibility in temperament as well as ideology, is widely viewed as having won. His rise represents the triumph of Bizarro Conservatism, otherwise known as neoconservatism: Ron Paul’s campaign represents the death-agony of the old Goldwater-Taft-limited government legacy of the GOP. Or at least that’s the scenario we’re all supposed to believe. Whether it plays out like that, in the long run, remains to be seen. In any case, the gang over at National Review is caught in a conundrum: they all proclaim that Rep. Paul is a “fringe” candidate, and yet they can’t stop talking about him.

According to Jonah Goldberg, Paul’s raising the banner of Robert A. Taft makes him “irrelevant.” But then why is every commentary on the debate in NRO fixated on him? I’ll tell you why: because Paul offers not only a coherent alternative to the crazed foreign policy views of the neocons, but also one that has deep roots in the GOP (as I pointed out in my soon-to-be-reprinted Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement). As I have argued at length over the years, the anti-imperialist legacy of the Old Right is ready for a revival, and the neocons are deathly afraid of it: that’s why the NROdniks are up in arms about Paul’s heresy.

To Jonah, bringing up the ghost of Taft is an “argument from authority” — which is an oddly anti-traditionalist trope coming from an avowed “conservative.” As far as the neocons are concerned, however, history is something to be made, not revered or even remembered. Yesterday may belong to Ron Paul and Robert A. Taft, but tomorrow belongs to Benito Giuliani, who isn’t running for President but for Maximum Leader.

At least Jonah tried to engage Paul, and what he represents, intellectually, albeit in his typically facile manner, but the real exemplar of the new mutant “conservatism” of leader-worship and sado-masochistic paeans to waterboarding is one Kathleen Parker, whose overtly sexual “big Daddy” imagery of Rudy “spanking” Ron Paul shows the psychopathology of red-state fascism. She writes:

“Giuliani played daddy tonight and spanked Ron Paul for blaming the U.S. for 9/11. Big points for calling on Paul to withdraw his absurd statement. Message: Don’t mess with Rudy.”

These people are twisted in more ways than I care to imagine: this is Weimar “conservatism” of a most degenerate sort, and it is really impossible to argue with Ms. Parker’s pornographic politics. To the cadre of Bizarro conservatism, the biggest Daddy wins the title of Maximum Leader, and dissidents are “spanked.”John Derbyshire, on the other hand, isn’t buying Giuliani’s act:

“Ron Paul vs. Rudy Giuliani punch-up about the motivation of the 9/11 attackers. Ron Paul put forward the ‘blowback’ theory, which I first heard on or about Sept. 12, 2001, from Pat Buchanan, and which is perfectly plausible, though in my opinion an over-simplification. Rudy: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.’ For goodness sake, Rudy. Don’t you READ? The reality is, Rudy, that entire books have been written to promote the blowback theory. Have your staffers read some of them & write up abstracts for you. You NEVER HEARD of this theory? Gimme a break.”

I agree with this, but would add: it all depends on the meaning of the word “hear.” Of course Giuliani has heard of the “blowback” theory, in one form or another, but did he really hear it in the sense of understanding it intellectually? The totalitarian mindset of a man like Giuliani doesn’t admit to ideas he disagrees with: he merely reacts, with indignation, as Benito did in response to Paul’s disquisition on the long history of our deliberately provocative policy in the Middle East. Of course Giuliani was being disingenuous when he exclaimed that he’d “never heard” of such an explantion for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that’s because intellectual dishonesty is part and parcel of who Giuliani is, and what he aspires to become. If you think he’s lying now, just wait until he’s President. The man is a danger to the Republic, and its only fitting that he should take umbrage at Ron Paul, the Republic’s last defender in Washington: it’s a classic confrontation of good (Paul) and evil (Benito) — and you couldn’t ask for a more dramatic narrative.

Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo discusses Dr. Ron Paul’s performance in the second GOP presidential debate May 15th, what it reveals about the corruption of the Republican Party and the American people, Homeland Security, the totalitarian impulse of Rudolph Giuliani, and the vile Washington Post‘s ulterior motive in trashing the antiwar candidates.

MP3 here.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winning reporter and documentary filmmaker Hendrick Smith talks about his PBS special “Spying on the Homefront,” about the National Security Agency and FBI’s spying on the American people – far beyond the so-called “terrorist surveillance program” that the administration claims, the fact that the feds now have almost total access to private firms’ records, why innocent people do have something to worry about, the suitably of the FISA court in handling warrants for national security threats, the unanimity of the people involved in the program that the American people’s liberty is threatened, jerking tappers around for sport and how it’s only getting worse.

MP3 here. (16:55)

Hedrick Smith is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of several best-selling books. He has created and hosted twelve award-winning PBS prime-time specials and series on topics including Washington’s power game, Soviet perestroika, the global economy, education, and teen violence. For 26 years, Smith served as a correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Saigon, Paris and the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that produced the Pentagon Papers series. In 1974, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting from Russia and Eastern Europe. Hedrick Smith has published several national best-selling books, including The Russians (1976), The Power Game: How Washington Works (1988), The New Russians (1990) and Rethinking America (1995). Smith’s books and documentaries are frequently used for college and high school courses on government, sociology, and economics.

Patrick Foy, author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report, discusses his article for Taki’s Top Drawer, “The Kissinger Connection,” and the foreign policy consensus that led to the invasion of Iraq.

MP3 here.

Patrick Foy is an essayist, short story writer and photographer. He lives in Florida.

Hats off to Ron Paul for another great performance in the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina last night.

For almost six years, politicians have acted as if it is federal crime to speak bluntly about 9/11.    On the day of the attacks, George Bush proclaimed that the hijackers attacked because they hate America for its freedom.  This has been treated as a revealed truth ever since.  (When I saw Bush on TV that day, I was perplexed how the US government could know the motive before it knew the identity of the hijackers).

Ron Paul has never kowtowed to this dogma, and last night he deftly debunked the 9/11 catechism: “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.”

 As Justin noted, Giuliani sought to huff-and-puff Paul’s truth off the stage.  But the Republican establishment’s hot air isn’t going to succeed this time.

I have a long quote from the debate transcript over at my blog, where comments on Paul, Guiliani, et al. are welcome.

In response to Ron Paul’s reasonable and informed contention that our interventionist foreign policy created the “blowback” that gave rise to Al Qaeda, and 9/11, Rudy Giuliani burbled “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that!”

Of course he hasn’t heard it: he’s so busy pandering to the worst instincts of red-state fascists Republicans, calling for a national ID card, and drooling at the thought of torture that he has no time for a reality-based assessment of American foreign policy. That bullying would-be Mafia don, who looks and acts like someone out of “The Sopranos,” demanded that Ron Paul “withdraw his remarks and tell us he didn’t mean it.” Paul’s answer,

“I believe the CIA is correct when it warns us about blowback. We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.”  

 In effect: screw you, Rudy!

As even the dumbos over at FreeRepublic.com acknowledge, Rep. Paul is factually correct. Bin Laden’s fatwa gave his reasons for the attack, and the savaging of Iraq — pre-invasion — is front-and -center..