Fancy that! A member of a meritless political dynasty, The McCains, has panned the duty-bound British monarchy.

There is a revolving door between Big Media, be it the neoliberal CNN or neocon Fox News, and members of the political duopoly. Whether practiced by the Left or the Right; this is indisputably immoral, and a conflict of interest.

To spout received opinion, Fox News has hired Ben Domenech, the unremarkable husband of the irredeemably awful Meghan McCain.

At the conclusion of a wishy-washy Fox segment about the wanton Meghan Markle, the man who had married into the McCain dynasty declared:

“There is nothing more American than hating the British Crown.”

That’s a shallow stance at best. For, if forced to choose between the mob (democracy) and the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent. This thesis is anatomized in Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, by libertarian political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

In his seminal work, Hoppe provides ample support—historical and analytical—for democracy’s inferiority as compared to monarchy:

‘… democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten. Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state.’

“[I]n light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly,” explains Hoppe.

“From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.”

The raw, ripe, rule of the demos has diminished the queen, but has yet to destroy her. Queen Elizabeth might be a member of a landed aristocracy, much-maligned in radical America—but she has acquitted herself as would a natural aristocrat.

Elizabeth II has lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class. Her Majesty has been working quietly (and often thanklessly) for the English people for over half a century.

Elizabeth Windsor was 13 when World War II broke out, which was when she gave her first official radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated “from Britain to America, Canada and elsewhere.” Still in her teens, Elizabeth joined the military, “where,” according to Wikipedia, “she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.”

Question: What was Markle—a divorced, mercenary left-liberal out of Hollywood, who had hunted Prince Harry down and married him—doing when she was a teen?

Answer: Markle was preaching pious, hackneyed, feminist homilies on the Nickelodeon channel! There, aged 11, Markle turned in a performance as a miserable, humorless, unoriginal scold, sharing banal views held by 99 percent of the American establishment.

In 2017, this writer had predicated, too hastily, that Markle, an American C-list actress, would finish what Diana Spencer, a British A-list actress, had begun: destroy the monarchy.

In 2021, Prince Philip, of blessed memory, had been teetering when his grandson’s American bride gave the performance of a lifetime, alongside the Queen of Kitsch, Oprah Winfrey.

A disgrace to decent Americans, the woman’s sordid, petty psycho-drama had exposed Markle in all her tacky tawdriness. An empty “suit,” if you will.

A brother on the set of “Suits,” Markle’s televised claim to fame, said it best:

Meghan Markle has unleashed insignificance on an anguished world, fumed “Suits” co-star Wendell Pierce. Now, that’s narcissism, isn’t it? Foisting your solipsistic, inconsequential self on the cosmos.

The queen won’t outlive Meghan Markle, but she dwarfs the ditz.

As to Ben Domenech, another intellectual pygmy with special privileges: Were the conservative, periwigged Englishmen who founded America to pounce back on to the set—they, too, would favor the monarchy over the current American mobocracy.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, April 22
Unz Review, April 22
CNSNews.com  April 23
American Greatness, April 23
Quarterly Review, April 25

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“More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without authorization in February” this year, reported the New York Times.

March saw 100,000 merry migrants waltz into the U.S., undisturbed

Caravans are getting larger, not smaller. “Newcomers continue to arrive, sometimes by the busload, at the rate of 2,200 a day,” said the same source.

Border agents are said to be bracing “to meet the medical needs” of the newcomers.” Silly me. I thought their duty was to meet the security needs of the American people.

Monthly apprehensions average 32,012.

“Apprehension”: Now that’s Orwellian speak for you. A more accurate description is: briefly stopped for a cursory wellness check before being sent on their way to the interior.

All you need to know is that children are the charm, a magic amulet. If you don’t quite get it, here’s a reenactment of “apprehension”:

Customs and Border Protection agent to migrant: “Got kids?”

New arrival at the U.S. southern border: “You bet.” (Turns to a large, brooding male.) “Pepito, say hello to the nice policeman.”

American agent: “Pepito is a little hairy for a kid and he’s covered in ink.”

Future American citizen from Salvador (with the aid of a translator paid for by the U.S.): “Pepito is just mature for his age. It’s the chemicals. They’re killing us. Asylum. Hurry. We’re dying.”

Agent sworn to protect Americans: “You’re good to go. (Stamps a bit of paper and waves the new Americans by.) “Don’t forget to return for your asylum court hearing, amigos.”

Instead of this “apprehension” farce, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas Secretary of State, has highlighted the many tactical strategies that could have—still can—be operationalized at the border to halt the treasonous Catch-and-Release policy ongoing.

Kobach faults former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for looking to Congress for a legislative remedy.

This seems a little harsh. The two chambers were dominated by Republicans for two years. It was hardly unreasonable for Nielsen to have expected from these legislators an immigration bill for the ages. Instead, she got a tax cut.

Confession: I have a soft spot for the ice princess, whom Trump summarily dumped.  And not only because Nielsen talked tough and smart, and has a calm demeanor and looks to match. Nielsen had been brought into the Trump Administration by retired United States Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, formerly White House chief of staff. Like Steve Bannon, Kelly was expunged from the White House by Javanka, the first couple in-waiting. This is a badge of honor. This is the very litmus test for conservatism.

And while Kelly is currently accused of migrating to the liberal side of immigration, his actions on the job told a different story. Along with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Nielsen, who eloquently defended the separation of families and the zero-tolerance policy, Kelly too talked-up family separation policy as “a tough deterrent.” And boy was it tough!

Nielsen would certainly not have been vaporized (likely at the behest of Ivanka and her houseboy) had she been liberal or soft on immigration.

In fact, Nielsen embodied chin-jutting grit: In her defense of the zero-tolerance-for-invasion policy, she was unflappable, rejecting criticism of the policy as “inappropriate and unacceptable.” Her agency, Nielsen told the news agencies, “was merely enforcing existing laws.”

Under Nielsen’s aegis, the agency spoke with clarity and conviction about having “separated nearly 2,000 children from adults over the course of six weeks at the U.S. southern border,” all as  a deterrent.

Then people like John McCain, the late senator from Arizona, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, among many others, began their energetic virtue-signaling. “The children, the children,” they wailed. “How could you?” (What they were really saying was, “Look at me. Look how much I care and how better I am than you.”)

Secretary Nielsen’s wholehearted commitment to the zero-tolerance policy and the ensuing family separations certainly earned her the ire of Democrats and their media tools, who still describe Nielsen derisively as the woman who implemented a policy that “called for all suspected border crossers—including parents and asylum seekers—to be prosecuted for illegal entry [the audacity!]. As a result, thousands of children were separated from their parents, with children classified as ‘unaccompanied.”

Duly, Secretary Nielsen never ceased pressing a derelict Congress to craft legislation that would have let her finish the job. Namely, instead of splitting families, Nielsen’s aimed to detain and deport families, kids and caboodle.

The truth is that Nielsen tried to stop the invasion with the legal tools at her disposal; by separating “families.” Then, Ivanka cried (likely because daddy’s deeds risked damaging her street cred at Davos). And President Trump put his family before American families.

The president caved, not Kirstjen. He was the one who signed an executive order to end his own commendable family-separation policy. The president then grew angry with Secretary Nielsen because she was unable to reverse his own decree to gut an effective policy.

On her departure, Kirstjen Nielsen was being blamed for legislative inaction in the first two years of the presidency, when the Republicans who controlled both houses and The Executive opted for a plutocratic tax cut in place of borders.

On the “bright” side: The U.S. was successful in detaining a Russian waif, Maria Butina, in solitary for months, then sentencing her to yet more jail time and deportation. With Ahab-like zeal did the law go after Butina, a flirty friend of the NRA. Yet it allows hundreds of thousands of the great unwashed to cross the southern border and stay in the U.S. for good.
Since the fiscal year began in October, and up until March this year, “237,327 migrants had been apprehended along the southwest border. A 97 percent increase from the previous year,” reports (or underreports) the New York Times.

By Breitbart’s telling, “Since December 21, 2018, Trump’s DHS has released more than 125,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into the country. … One and a half million illegal aliens are projected to enter the country this year.”

And they are not leaving. Maria Butina will never be back. But central America is here to stay.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom
May 9

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Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trumper, who continues to assert baselessly that “the future of the Republican party is anti-Trump.”

Fox News, generally pro-POTUS, persists in exposing Deplorables to Shapiro’s twitter travails and spats with a left that, in turn, doesn’t know left from right—for Ben is no rightist; he’s a neoconservative media-pleaser.

In this farcical tradition, Ben was asked to comment on the election of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, whom Rush Limbaugh—he knows a thing or two—calls the female Barack Obama.

Since winning the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district, Cortez, a hard-core socialist, has been the toast of the town.

True to type, Shapiro failed to come up with one principled argument against Cortez’ socialism. All that came through was:

“It doesn’t work.” Socialism doesn’t work.

Not a word did wonder boy utter about the very crux of the matter. The rights-violating underpinnings of socialism are what makes socialism and its attendant political platform both an economic wrecking ball and plain wicked.

Another popular fount of conservative philosophy is Meghan McCain. She’s as conservative as her father, John McCain, from whom she got a dynastic leg-up in the menagerie of morons that is mainstream media.

On “The View,” a very vulgar program, Meghan made a similar non-case to the one mouthed by motor-mouth Shapiro:

“Name one country that socialism has ever worked” (sic) she blurted. (Translated: “Name a country where socialism has worked.”)

In her defense, we should say that everyone knows Meghan McCain is no Michael Oakeshott. The problem being that Ben is considered the very embodiment of Russell Kirk, a classical conservative, and the intellectual father of American conservatism, may it rest in peace.

For these two establishment crowd-pleasers it all boils down to pragmatism, not principle. Hence “socialism doesn’t work.”

Gone is talk about individual rights. Put differently, if socialism worked—brutal rights-violations and all—conservatives such as Ben and Meghan would have a tough time arguing against it. Did not Trotsky joke that socialism works just fine if you make dissenters “a head shorter”?

What animates the two crass pragmatists is a progressive sensibility.

A real thinker, libertarian Second Amendment attorney James Ostrowski, makes this case in his book, “Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America.”

“There is a very close relationship between pragmatism and progressivism,” argues Ostrowski. By pragmatism, he does not mean practicality. Rather, he means “the school of philosophy developed by Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey from 1870 to 1907.”

“In essence, this group developed the notion that truth is what works. That is, there is no truth in the traditional sense,” namely in the sense of the correspondence between our ideas and objective reality.

“In effect, these men, following the trend of modern philosophy, rejected the notion that there is an objective reality outside our minds that we can know. Instead of explicitly rejecting the notion of truth, these thinkers ‘simply … defined it out of existence.’”

Whatever works or whatever “smart” people like Ben and Meghan thought worked at any particular time: that was truth.

Duly, “Pragmatism also provides ammunition for progressivism’s transformation of democracy from a means to choose leaders whose task is to protect only natural rights, to a system whose highest principle is majority rule. If we cannot know the truth, the notion of natural rights cannot be defended.” Let the mob adjudicate right from wrong.

Pragmatism and thus progressivism, warns Ostrowski, have hardened into rigid dogmas in themselves, with their own proclivity for political violence.

Witness how pragmatists, like the “socialism doesn’t work” progressives aforementioned, justify unconstitutional wars of craven aggression and destruction on the ground that, “Sorry scores died and were displaced in Iraq and Libya; but we thought it would work.”

“Pragmatism, with its denial of objective truth,” posits Ostrowski, “is the ideal epistemology for progressivism, an ideology that has no rational basis in fact or logic and is, ultimately, a form of self-help therapy to make its adherents feel better about an often hostile and puzzling world.”

Not for nothing do the likes of Meghan and Ben, like so many in our progressive flabby body politic, practically trip over one another in showy self-righteousness to protest “racism”; what is, what isn’t. Blah, blah.

Classical liberals and classical conservatives, however, ought to do no more than insist individuals be left to their own devices, just so long as they don’t harm others. And by “harm” we do NOT mean hurt feelings.

“In combating progressivism, there must be an awareness of how pragmatism has been absorbed into the thinking of most Americans. To slay the beast of progressivism, we must first slay its philosophical bodyguard, pragmatism.”

Conservatives are supposed to be principled defenders of natural rights: life, liberty and property. We’re not supposed to be crass pragmatists, who dismiss socialism as no more than unworkable. Instead, inveigh we must against socialism as a rights-infringing, tyrannical, aberrant ideology that subjugates individual to state.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
Quarterly Review, The Unz Review, WND.com,
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, Constitution.com
July 26

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On just about every issue, in 2016, candidate Trump ran in opposition to Sen. Lindsey Graham. Donald Trump won the presidency; Lindsey Graham quit the race with a near-zero popularity, as reflected in the polls.

The People certainly loathe the senator from South Carolina. A poll conducted subsequently found that Graham was among least popular senators.

No wonder. Graham is reliably wrong about most things.

But being both misguided and despised have done nothing to diminish Sen. Graham’s popularity with Big Media, left and right. Thus were his pronouncements accorded the customary reverence, during a July 10 segment, on Fox News’ “The Story.”

Which is when he told anchor Martha MacCallum that, “Putin is not doing anything good in Syria.”

Then again, Lindsey is being consistent. The revival of “one of the world’s oldest Christian communities,” in Syria, is not something the senator we’ve come to know and loathe would celebrate.

It’s true. “A new Syria is emerging from the rubble of war,” reports The Economist, a magazine which is every bit as liberal and Russophobic as Graham and his political soul mate, John McCain, but whose correspondents on the ground—in Aleppo, Damascus and Homs—have a far greater fidelity to the truth than the terrible two.

“In Homs, …  the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large crucifix hangs over the main street.” ‘Groom of Heaven,’ proclaims a billboard featuring a photo of a Christian soldier killed in the seven-year conflict. And, in their sermons, Orthodox patriarchs praise Mr. Assad for saving … the Christian communities.”

Don’t tell the ailing McCain. It’ll only make him miserable, but thanks to Putin, Assad “now controls Syria’s spine, from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south—what French colonists once called la Syrie utile (useful Syria). The rebels are confined to pockets along the southern and northern borders.”

“Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria’s victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam from which Mr. Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities.” (“How a victorious Bashar al-Assad is changing Syria,” The Economist, June 28, 2018.)

A Christian teacher in Homs rejoices, for she no longer must live alongside neighbors “who overnight called you a kafir (infidel).”

The teacher’s venom is directed at John McCain’s beloved “rebels.” Internet selfies abound of McCain mixing it up with leading Sunni “rebels,” against whom Putin and Bashar al-Assad were doing battle. Who knows? McCain may even have taken a pic with the infamous “rebel” who decapitated Syrian Franciscan monk Father Francois Murad.

Ignoramuses McCain and Graham had both urged the US to send weapons to the “rebels”—even as it transpired that the lovelies with whom McCain was cavorting on his sojourns in Syria liked to feast on … the lungs of their pro-Assad enemies. A devotee of multiculturalism, Lindsey could probably explain the idiosyncratic cultural symbolism of such savagery.

Infested as it is by globalist ideologues, the permanent establishment of American foreign policy refuses to consider regional, religious, local, even tribal, dynamics in the Middle East. In particular, that the “good” guys in Syria—a relative term—are not the Islamist “rebels,” with whom the senior Republican senator from Arizona was forever frolicking; but the secular Alawites.

You likely didn’t know that Alawites like al-Assad also “flinch at Shia evangelizing. ‘We don’t pray, don’t fast [during Ramadan] and drink alcohol,’ says one.”

Under Putin’s protection, the more civilized Alawite minority (read higher IQ), which has governed Syria since 1966, is in charge again. Duly, reports the anti-Assad Economist, “Government departments are functioning. … electricity and water supplies are more reliable than in much of the Middle East. Officials predict that next year’s natural-gas production will surpass pre-war levels. The railway from Damascus to Aleppo might resume operations this summer. The National Museum in Damascus, which locked up its prized antiquities for protection, is preparing to reopen to the public.”

Good thinking. The “rebels” would have blown Syria’s prized antiquities to smithereens.

Given that Islamists are not in charge, the specter of men leaving their women and fleeing Syria has had an upside. Syrian women dominate the workforce. Why, they’re even working as “plumbers, taxi-drivers and bartenders.” Had Sen. Graham, his friends the “rebels,” and their Sunni state sponsors won—Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar—would this be possible? Turkey is currently sheltering “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group linked to al-Qaeda, and other Sunni rebels.”

Aligned against the Christian-Shia-Alawite alliance are Israel and America, too. They’ve formed a protective perimeter around rebel holdouts.

Before the breakthrough, when Sunni rebels were gaining ground, Syria’s “women donned headscarves,” and “non-Muslim businessmen bowed to demands from Sunni employees for prayer rooms. But as the war swung their way, minorities regained their confidence.” “Christian women in Aleppo [now] show their cleavage, the internet is unrestricted and social-media apps allow for unfettered communication. Students in cafés openly criticize the regime.”

Contra the robotic sloganeering from Lindsey, Nikki Haley and the political establishment, Russia has been pushing Bashar al-Assad to open up Syria’s political process and allow for the revival of “multiparty politics.”

Alas, the once bitten Assad is twice shy. His attempts, a decade ago, to liberalize Syrian politics resulted in the ascendancy of Sunni fundamentalism, aka Lindsey Grahamnesty’s rebels. (The nickname is for the Republican senator’s laissez-faire immigration policies, stateside.)

As has Russia called “for foreign forces to leave Syria,” Iran’s included. Iran commands 80,000 Shia militiamen in Syria. “Skirmishes between the [Iranian] militias and Syrian troops have resulted in scores of deaths. Having defeated Sunni Islamists, army officers say they have no wish to succumb to Shia ones.”

It all boils down to national sovereignty. So as to survive the onslaught of the Sunni fundamentalist majority, the endangered Alawite minority formed an alliance with the Iranian Shia, also a minority among the Ummah. Now, civilized and secular Syrians want their country back. In fact, many Syrian “Sunnis prefer Mr. Assad’s secular rule to that of Islamist rebels.”

©2018 ILANA MERCER
Quarterly Review, The Unz Review, WND.com, 
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, 
Constitution.com
July 12

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Yemen’s northern Houthi rebels clearly wear many hats. More so than the invading coalition, the rebels are of the community and often for the community ~ilana

All the spots America chooses to mess with are too complex for the prosaic American mind to grasp, for we are schooled to see societies unlike our own through a Disneyfied, angels-and-demons prism ~ilana

©2017 By ILANA MERCER

News first broke about America’s Niger misadventure on October 4. “The real news here is that the US has forces in Niger, where they’re conducting covert operations,” this writer tweeted out. “Hashtag America First.”

Official media ignored the ambush of the American Special Forces, until the story gained anti-Trump traction. No word came from John McCain. Three weeks hence, the senator from Arizona is making history. McCain, who has never encountered a war he wasn’t eager to prosecute, is questioning the folly in Niger.

The senator from Arizona can run but can’t hide from the pollution he has left along his political path. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo; McCain jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and “more boots on the ground.” At the prospects of war with Iran, McCain burst into song, “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran.” The possibility still makes this war ghoul smile. Before that, McCain promised a 100-year war in Iraq.

Senator McCain’s jingoism has encompassed Syria, Georgia, Mali, Nigeria, and China. Where the US could not effect regime change, as it did fecklessly in Afghanistan and Libya—McCain would typically call to side with an imagined local “friend of America” against an imagined “foe of America.” McCain has many imaginary friends.

Where his target country was beyond US bullying (Russia), the idea of the resumption of a cold war was an option McCain liked. He is currently fulminating over a slight delay in sanctions against Russia. When all efforts to tame the world militarily fail, McCain is partial to the idea of UN troops acting as his surrogates, say in Sudan.

No war makes Johnny a sad boy. But now he’s considering a subpoena over Niger.

GLOBAL CENTRALIZER

Playing out in Niger are the permanently entrenched, unchanging, American foreign-policy interests. Keen observers will detect a familiar pattern. Once again, the American bias everywhere is toward a powerful, overweening central state. This conceit has put our forces on a collision course with the tribal interests America toils to tame.

Indeed, US foreign policy often flouts local authority. It certainly disavows separatists and generally discourages any meaningful devolution of power. Born of a loose confederation of independent states, America now stands for the strong centralized state. Our interchangeable leaders strive to see the same in the tribal lands of the Middle East and Africa.

MEDDLING IN YEMEN’S CIVIL WAR

In Yemen, America is working to impose a central authority on “bickering sheikdoms.” In the South alone, Yemen has 14 such principalities. Southern secessionists are at war with the north, have been for at least 139 years. There, “even the bottled water,” notes the Economist, “is called ‘South.'” There’s no such thing as a united Yemen. Never was.

Into this fray, the US has waded. So stupid and dangerous is our foreign-policy colossus that it imagines America is fighting al-Qaida by backing the Saudi-led coalition to vanquish northern Houthi rebels. The northern Houthi rebels, however, clearly wear many hats. More so than the invading coalition, the rebels are of the community and often for the community.

As America’s Emirati partners in Yemen are realizing, “Motivating recruits to push north is an uphill task even with the payment of bonuses. Those who were happy to fight for their own homes seem unenthused about fighting for somebody else’s.”

Would that the Empire’s military would confine itself to that constitutional mandate: fight for home and hearth and no more. Alas, our soldiers have been propagandized to conflate fighting for American freedom with fights in Niger, Burkina Faso (yeah, I know) and Mali.

Ultimately, all the spots America chooses to mess with are too complex for the prosaic American mind to grasp, for we are schooled to see societies unlike our own through a Disneyfied, angels-and-demons prism.

More so than the Middle East, Africa is riven by tribal interests and dynamics. These, McCain or CENTCOM (the United States Central Command) have no hope of understanding, because they’re wedded to the idea that their own home (America) is nothing more than an idea, and never a community of flesh-and-blood people with a shared, treasured patrimony.

AND NOW, NIGER

To their credit, Africans’ fealty is not to deracinated political propositions—democracy, human rights, gay marriage, and communal bathrooms—but to each other. They will kill for clan and kin. (And they kill each other, too.)

Niger is no different. You’re told that the Americans and the French are empowering the local forces of Niger against the mythical ISIS. Poppycock. This is never the case. In Africa, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the conflicts are regional, tribal, old, if not ancient.

Tongo-Tongo, the Niger village that ambushed our unsuspecting Green Berets, had not been “infiltrated” by hostile forces; that’s the take of Niger’s central government, itself a very recent development. If past is prologue, it’s fair to assume that the Niger government is vested in developing as a French and American client state with all the attendant perks.

Villagers have likely learned not to wait for any trickle-down from the state. The Tongo-Tongo villagers enticed our forces to mill about, giving their homie militant benefactors just enough time to set up an ambush in a kill zone.

Imagine! Locals don’t particularly relish a visit from the American and French patrolmen and their Nigerien puppets.

Again, Niger is heavily dependent on bribes from the West (foreign aid, we call it). We reward Niamey (the capital) to play war games with us. This is another case of an Islamic, if multi-ethnic, tribal land, whose people don’t want Americans there. (And even if the people of the region wanted us there, America has no business being there. Deplorables voted against the concept of making Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali great again.)

So, if John McCain’s hatred of President Trump has driven America’s most ardent warmonger to question the American intervention in Niger—that’s a good thing.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
Mises Wire , The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
The American Thinker, WND.com, The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, The Liberty Conservative, Constitution.com.
October 26

The post Regionalism Vs. The U.S. Centralizer: Finally, A War John McCain Doesn’t Love appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Said the president: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and, at times, a policy-making arm of the Government. … [T]his quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”

This dire warning about the propensity of the Central Intelligence Agency to go rogue came from Harry S. Truman.

Truman’s call to “limit the CIA role to intelligence” was published in December 22, 1963, by the Washington Post (WaPo). The same newspaper is now decrying Presidents Trump’s decision to “end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.”

The move is a good one. The WaPo threw Russia into the reportorial mix purely to sully President Trump (and due to the intellectual deficiencies of correspondents incapable of teasing apart policy from political intrigue).

The 33rd U.S. president, a Democrat before the great deformation of that party, was first to issue the warning against the agency he had established. Not only was the newly founded intelligence arm of President Truman mutating into “a policy-making arm of government,” but it was “a subverting influence in the affairs of other people,” he cautioned.

In 1963, Truman was meditating on restoring the monster he had created “to its original assignment” of intelligence gathering in the raw. The CIA’s sole purpose was to keep the president apprised of information unfiltered, un-politicized.

In 2017, Trump is dealing with a genie too powerful to beat back into the bottle: a mutated swamp creature.So, is this a screeching U-turn in Trump’s foreign policy? Who know, but in Syria, at least, President Trump is inching closer to delivering on a campaign promise. The president finally appears to be seeking a solution sans regime change, with strongman Bashar Al Assad still at the helm.

Curtailing this “symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue”—stopping the CIA and the National Security Council (another of President Truman’s metastatic creations) from fomenting more war in Syria and confrontation with Russia—is a start. In ending the “covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria,” Trump, hopefully, has disassociated from the “rebels.” The little we know about these people is not good.

For one thing, they play Americans like a fiddle. For another, they can’t be trained.

One US training program for these prize Syrian fighters—for whom John McCain is plumping from his sickbed—cost the American taxpayer one billion dollars. The program yielded “four or five” trained people on the battlefield! Not “four or five” battalions, but “four or five” individuals. That’s no waste of American taxpayers’ money! That’s not a bad return on an investment; it’s a scandal! For corruption on this scale in China, the politicians in charge are executed.

The Swamp—the generals, the CIA and the NSC—is roiling. Try as they may, their arguments for unseating Assad are poor, best encapsulated in the angels-and-demons worldview of Nikki Haley, Trump’s U.N. ambassador. The president has hired individuals who don’t articulate the principles he ran on, former Gov. Haley, for example. Thanks to President Trump, Haley went from provincial idiot to global village idiot.

Once confined to spitefully tearing down Gen. Lee’s battle flag in South Carolina—Haley’s windy verbiage is now heard around the world. The woman promotes war on behalf of an administration that promised diplomacy where doable.

“In no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government,” thundered Haley. Her Disneyfied production at the U.N. stars an evil dictator who was killing his noble people, until, high on paternalism, our heroic Haley (and Hillary before her for Libya)—rode to the rescue.

Our bickering wards in the region aren’t about to forget their religious jealousies and join forces, and certainly not under American guardianship. The conflict is regional, tribal, ancient. Syria is impervious to outside, top-down intervention.

For their part, the marionette media and their political puppet-masters detest Donald Trump. For them, an honest examination of the merits of his decision to divest from anti-Assad rebels is out of the question.

Instead, a decision to terminate what Truman himself would view as a rogue CIA operation is refracted through the distorting prism of America’s “reigning Russophobia.”

©2017 ILANA MERCER
The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review, The American Thinker,
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, The Liberty Conservative,
Constitution.com, Ricochet.com.
July 22

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©2015 By ILANA MERCER 

Bless Donald Trump. Inadvertently, by just being Donald, Mr. Trump has delivered more good news to liberty lovers.

In his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump is not only threatening the Republican establishment, but is forcing a war with the cable news channel that does the Republican regimists’ bidding.

The Fox News Channel backed Genghis Bush’s wars. The Powers That Be at FNC now wish to roger (Ailes) America, again, by delivering the country to neoconservative tool Marco Rubio, or to fool John Kasich (governor from Ohio), or to Ms. Fiorina, whom tacky media types call “Carly.” However, this little lady’s honeyed words conceal a burning desire to commit the country to an arms race with China and Russia.

Not for naught did Scott Walker go from two percent in the polls, to zero, to sayonara.

Walker, that live wire, picked up his marbles and went home, blaming Trump for making him sad. But like the rest of the establishment’s candidates, Walker had served up the same sub-intelligent, hackneyed lies about the root-causes of the migration problem plaguing Europe.

Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan populations are on the move, the neoconservative posse preaches, because of a failure to remove Bashar Hafez al-Assad, a man who was the source of stability in Syria, much like Saddam Hussein was in Iraq.

Have we learned nothing about the perils of toppling law-and-order dictators, only to see the rise of barbarians worse than their predecessors?

Evidently not.

Bar Rand Paul and, to a degree Donald Trump, all the Republican candidates insist that American exceptionalism lies in leading the world not in technological innovation, comity, commerce and as exemplars of individual rights—but by projecting military power the world over.

The US government’s bankruptcy, the candidates see as having no bearing on their own unanimous plans for an arms race with the other super powers and a renewed military offensive in the Middle East.

Since the second primary season Republican debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, FNC’s Sean Hannity has been promoting Rubio’s rabid ideation with zeal. Rubio regularly trashes Vladimir Putin for trying to prop Assad up, so that the Islamic State does not capture Damascus.

Regrettably, other than to sensibly say that he’d get along with Putin, Trump made absolutely no attempt to demonstrate a familiarity with the issues, at Simi Valley. He might want to rethink his relaxed approach, for it belies the candidate’s claim to have surrounded himself with the best people possible, or to have good judgement.

Trump’s good judgment has since surfaced in a conversation with Greta Van Susteren: “If Putin goes into Syria and is “able to knock out ISIS,” that’s not the worst thing he’s ever heard, Trump told the host.

That excellent instinct—allow Putin to degrade and destroy ISIS if he wants to—comes from a very different perspective than Rubio’s lamentations about Russia “replacing us as the single most important power broker in the Middle East.”

You see, Trump’s instinct is to conduct foreign policy that benefits Americans. He doesn’t want Americans dying for nothing. Rubio’s prime objective is to conduct foreign policy that aggrandizes Washington.

Like other neoconservatives, he dreads being a politician in a country that is no longer the world’s military hegemon. For if America busies itself not with elective wars, but with commerce, the shift in power and prestige will be away from politicians who prosecute wars, and back to The People who produce prosperity.

“I’m owned by the people!” affirmed Trump, who wants what the people want. Having spent a total of two years of his working life outside government, Rubio—reflexively, not consciously—wants what’ll glorify The State, the thing by which he survives and thrives.

And what does the battered GOP base want? The base, I hope, has wizened up to the neoconservatives.

The base, I hope, will realize that neoconservatives are still in the business of creating their own parallel reality and forcing ordinary Americans, Europeans and Middle-Easterners to inhabit the ruins.

As I read it, the GOP base wants government to reverse the things it has done; to repeal laws, wars, and do no more harm.

Unless in defense of the realm, Americans are uninterested in more of the same foreign-policy folly. Let us keep our military mitts to ourselves, and defend our own borders. That, it would appear, is the prevailing sentiment among Republican voters, although not among the regimists who congregated at the Reagan Library.

Therefore, it is to Rand Paul’s prescriptions during the debate that Trump should look, and not to the War Tourette’s of the rest:

• Refrain from a rash foreign policy.
• Engage with Russia and China.
• Talk to the Mullahs before you “bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” (a jingle popularized by jingoist John McCain).
• Leave dope policy to the states (not ideal, for consumption is to be left to the individual, but better than most).
• Do not sign on to bomb Assad out of existence. You’ll miss him when he’s gone.
• Remind Hillary Clinton who broke Libya.

Donald Trump has done another fine thing since Simi Valley, about which the media is audibly silent.

In the honorable tradition Benjamin Franklin wished to establish, Trump said he’d forfeit a salary as president. Many of our Founding Fathers believed America’s representatives ought not to be paid at all.

As a man among metrosexuals, Trump’s demeanor, naturally, is unlike that of his fork-tongued adversaries. Nevertheless, Trump was genial, even gracious, at Simi Valley.

He showed contrition over his unkind cuts about Carly Fiorina’s face. Fiorina could have cracked a smile, but didn’t. (Or, perhaps she couldn’t, considering the likely nips-and-cuts suffered by The Face).

And Trump refused to grovel. Good. Groveling about impolitic statements is the first sign of a housebroken GOPer.

So here’s why Trump is good for liberty:

By waging internecine warfare against the political masters and their mouthpiece (FNC), Trump is undermining the bastions of neoconservatism in America; he is dealing a structural blow to the edifice of Beltway Republicanism.

In response, the Beltway boys are rising on their little hind legs.

As Megyn Kelly riffed about Trump’s sexism, Fox News commentator Rich Lowry blurted out this on Kelly’s File: “Carly Fiorina cut Trump’s balls off with the precision of a surgeon.” (Kelly, who is turning out to be rather vacuous, detected no sexism there.)

Another slick Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, a regular on CNN, recently asked Trump supporter Ann Coulter on Twitter if Trump paid her “more for anal.”

Trump, for his part, fired first on the political flank. Now, in a pincer movement, Trump opened up a new front and is gunning for the establishment’s media megaphone.

This is why Trump’s war with Fox News is part of a just, liberating war.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance, The Unz Review & LewRockwell.com
September 25, 2015

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“It’s the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.” “It disqualifies him as a presidential candidate.” “This is the end of his run.” So crowed the political operatives looking to take down Mr. Trump, and by so doing, protect the political status quo and ease themselves into positions of greater power. The egos in the anchor’s chair and the pundits opposite chimed in: “He’ll make the more serious candidates look more serious,” predicted the next Michael Oakeshott and favorite imbecile, S. E. Cupp.

The Donald is in the dock for desecrating one of the political establishment’s most sacred cows: Sen. John McCain. Speaking at a forum in Iowa, the popular presidential hopeful said these sagacious things about the Republican from Arizona:

“[McCain’s] not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay?” (On the same occasion, Trump ventured that he was not particularly for the Vietnam War, a position that should endear him to principled libertarians.)

Not only does Donald Trump not owe Sen. McCain an apology; McCain likely owes mea culpa to Trump—and to the very many Vietnam veterans and their families whom he is alleged to have betrayed. Yes, the heroic prisoner-of-war pedigree upon which McCain has established his career and credibility is probably a myth.

For our purposes, the story begins with Sydney Schanberg, back in the days before American journalism became a circle jerk of power brokers.

Mr. Schanberg is one of “America’s most eminent journalists.” “For his accounts of the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975,” Schanberg “was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting ‘at great risk.’ He is also the recipient of many other awards–including two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism.” Schanberg’s byline at The Nation magazine further reveals that:

The 1984 movie, The Killing Fields[watch it!], which won several Academy Awards, was based on his book ‘The Death and Life of Dith Pran’–a memoir of his experiences covering the war in Cambodia for the New York Times and of his relationship with his Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran.

Schanberg is also the author of a “remarkable 8,000-word exposé”: “McCain and the POW Cover-Up.” Here follow the opening paragraphs. They provide a précis of the forensic evidence collected by Schanberg against McCain as ally of Vietnam War POWs and men missing inaction:

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books. …
… The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number–probably hundreds–of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate “Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.” The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine. …

The tale that has more twists than a serpent’s tail would be incomplete without mentioning another newsman, Ron Unz. First in his capacity as publisher of The American Conservative (July 1, 2010 cover story), and currently as editor-in-chief of The Unz Review—Mr. Unz has kept Schanberg’s voluminously sourced and criminally underexposed exposé alive in the alternative (intelligent) media.

Schanberg’s own journalistic and military man’s instincts were first piqued when “military officers [he] knew from that conflict began coming to [him] with maps and POW sightings and depositions by Vietnamese witnesses.” Having served “in the Army in Germany during the Cold War and witnessing combat firsthand as a reporter in India and Indochina,” Schanberg had “great respect for those who fight for their country.” To my mind,” he explained, “we dishonored U.S. troops when our government failed to bring them home from Vietnam after the 591 others were released—and then claimed they didn’t exist. And politicians dishonor themselves when they pay lip service to the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers only to leave untold numbers behind, rationalizing to themselves that it’s merely one of the unfortunate costs of war.”

The man is clearly not an intemperate sort. Some would say that to knowingly leave servicemen behind in the service of political ambition is treason.

Despite his position “as one of the highest-ranking editors at the New York Times,” Schanberg was forced to unmask Hanoi John, on September 18, 2008, in The Nation magazine. He recounts: “I took the data to the appropriate desks [at the New York Times] and suggested it was material worth pursuing. There were no takers.”

In the war-hero department, McCain is manifestly more beloved by the bien pensant elites than his “Democratic counterpart,” Vietnam Medal of Honor recipient Democrat Bob Kerrey. While not a “single mention of McCain’s role in burying information about POWs” is to be found in the annals of the NYT; the paper of record—“a compliment [rightly] used these days as a cudgel”—took upon itself to expose (in its magazine) Bob Kerrey for having “ordered his men to massacre over a dozen innocent Vietnamese civilians—women, children, and infants,” in February of 1969.

McMussolini’s more recent record of devastation is an organic extension of his mythologized past: “John McCain the politician,” wrote Trump in a USA Today editorial, “has made America less safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures, covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of his time in the Senate pushing amnesty. He would rather protect the Iraqi border than Arizona’s.”

Were Donald to dig deeper, he’d discover that McCain as champion of prisoners-of-war and men missing-in-action is as dubious as “John McCain the politician.”

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance &  The Unz Review
July 24, 2015

• Screen picture capture courtesy of “Splint.“

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©2015 By ILANA MERCER

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance,  Target Liberty & The Unz Review
May 29, 2015

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©2015 By ILANA MERCER 

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