Libertarians for Ron Paul » The War Party
“Republican presidential front-runner Sen. John McCain on Thursday defended his statement that U.S. troops could spend “maybe 100″ years in Iraq — saying he was referring to a military presence similar to what the nation already has in places like Japan, Germany and South Korea.” source:http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/14/mccain.king/index.html
Of course, we kept troops in Germany & Japan to defend those countries from Russia & China. Who does Senator McCain propose we are defending Iraq from?
“The problem with Hillary Clinton is two-fold: First, she’s likely to be as bad or worse than Bush on all of those issues, and second, she’s the one Democrat the Republicans still have a chance to beat.”…
“Start with Clinton’s general election vulnerabilities. No Democrat inspires more wrath and anger on the right than Hillary Clinton. This isn’t because of her policy positions—on most issues, she’s really not all that far removed from President Bush. It’s leftover partisan anger from the Bill Clinton years.”…
“Then there is Hillary Clinton on the issues. Cato Institute President Ed Crane recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times pointing out that when you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton’s grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn’t conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.”
Radley Balko looks at Clinton’s likely continuation of Bush League statism @ http://www.reason.com/news/show/123103.html
“The defense industry this year abandoned its decade-long commitment to the Republican Party, funneling the lion share of its contributions to Democratic presidential candidates, especially to Hillary Clinton who far out-paced all her competitors.”
“An examination of contributions of $500 or more, using the Huffington Post’s Fundrace website, shows that employees of the top five arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics — gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to Republicans.”
“Senator Clinton took in $52,600, more than half of the total going to all Democrats, and a figure equaling 60 percent of the sum going to the entire GOP field. Her closest competitor for defense industry money is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R.), who raised $32,000.”
More evidence on Hillary Clinton and the warfare state http://tinyurl.com/2vbdm2
”President Bush has no better friends than the spineless Democratic congressional leadership and the party’s leading presidential candidates when it comes to his failing Iraq policy.”"Those Democrats seem to have forgotten that the American people want U.S. troops out of Iraq, especially since Bush still cannot give a credible reason for attacking Iraq after nearly five years of war.”
“Last week at a debate in Hanover, N.H., the leading Democratic presidential candidates sang from the same songbook: Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, and Barack Obama of Illinois and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards refused to promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, at the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. Can you believe it?”
When the question was put to Clinton, she reverted to her usual cautious equivocation, saying: “It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting.”
Obama dodged, too: “I think it would be irresponsible” to say what he would do as president.
Edwards, on whom hopes were riding to show some independence, replied to the question: “I cannot make that commitment.”
Helen Thomas continues @ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/334324_thomas05.html
“The Iraq War has given the neoconservatives—who favor the assertive use of American power abroad to spread American values—something of a bad name, and several of the Republican candidates seem less than eager to hire them as advisers. But Rudy Giuliani apparently never got that memo. One of the top foreign-policy consultants to the leading GOP candidate is Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement.”
Newsweek reports on Mayor 9/11’s ties to the warhawk intellectuals who brought us the Iraq disaster http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21162326/site/newsweek/
For the first time ever, Iraq won the Asian Cup football (soccer) title, beating Saudi Arabia in a match held in Jakarta, Indonesia. Violence has been down the last couple of days as Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds came together in a unity that trumps politics.
“This is a game that Iraq won, and I hope Bush won’t now say, look, I made them win that match,” a member of the Iraqi Olympics Federation in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “He did it once and we hated him even more for that because it was our boys who won despite the miserable support we are getting from the Americans and our government.”
After the 2004 Olympics win, Iraqi football star Salih Sadir told reporters, “Iraq as a team doesn’t want Mr. Bush to use us (in an ad) for the presidential campaign…we don’t wish for the presence of the Americans in our country. We want them to go away.” Iraq’s football coach Adnan Hamad Majeed had then said: “(My problems) are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American Army has killed so many people in Iraq.”
Rod Dreher, a former National Review champion of the war, explains that the colossal failure of the Iraq War has “shattered his illusions” about government.
Among his reflections:
I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military — neither in their honesty nor their competence.
I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone.
Thanks to Lew Rockwell.
The best that can be said about the upcoming presidential election is that in January 2009 President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney will be out of office. It is tempting to believe that their successors couldn’t be worse.
Doug Bandow looks at how things could get worse if any of the leading candidates are elected http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=11210
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David Boaz of the Cato Institute warns readers of the New York Daily News that “…Giuliani’s authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. He defends the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. He endorses the President’s power to arrest American citizens, declare them enemy combatants and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge. He thinks the President has “the inherent authority to support the troops” even if Congress were to cut off war funding, a claim of presidential authority so sweeping that even Bush and his supporters have not tried to make it. more here: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8264
At the South Carolina Republican Debate on May 15, former Governor Mitt Romney called for doubling the size of the Guantanomo detention center
A report issued last year notes that 55% of detainees were not found to have fought against the United States, and only 8% had any connection to Al Qaeda http://tinyurl.com/3744su
If Ron Paul can get Guantanomo closed, Gitmo memorabilia might become collectible http://www.cafepress.com/lawrenceshoppe/2233172