©2015 By ILANA MERCER

Working people warm to Donald Trump. He appeals to a good segment of real Americans. The circle jerk of power brokers that is American media, however, lacks the depth and understanding to grasp the fellow-feeling Trump engenders in his fans.

THE MEDIA STRUMPETS

Amid sneers about Trump’s “crazy, entertaining, simplistic talk,” the none-too bright Joan Walsh, Salon editor-in-chief, proclaimed (MSNBC):

I look at those people and I feel sad. That is really such a low common denominator. They’re all Republicans … they really don’t have a firm grasp on reality.

For failing to foresee Trump’s staying power, smarmy Michael Smerconish (CNN) scolded himself adoringly. He was what “Mr. Trump would call ‘a loser.'” Smerconish’s admission was a way of copping to his superiority. From such vertiginous intellectual heights, Smerconish was incapable of fathoming the atavistic instincts elicited by the candidate. Nevertheless, the broadcaster “quadrupled down.” The country would be delivered from Donald by Mexican drug lord El Chapo, who’d scare Trump away.

Campbell Brown, another banal bloviator, ventured that Trump resonates with a fringe and was fast approaching a time when he would, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, “max-out the craziness” quotient.

Trump supporters were simply enamored of his vibe, said a dismissive Ellis Henican. As derisive, another Fox News commentator spoke about the “meat and potatoes” for which Trump cheerleaders hanker. I suspect he meant “red meat.”

National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein divined his own taxonomy of the Republican Beast: the “upscale Republicans and the blue-collar Republicans.” The group of toothless rube-hicks Brownstein places in Trump’s camp.

Pollster Frank Luntz provides his own brand of asphyxiating agitprop: The little people want to elect someone they’d have a beer with.

A British late night anchor—a CNN hire!—offered this non sequitur: Trump painting himself as anti-establishment and, at the same time, owning hotels: this was a contradiction.

In the mind of this asinine liberal, only a Smelly Rally like “Occupy Wall Street” instantiates the stuff of rebellion and individualism. (Never mind that the Occupy Crowds were walking ads for the bounty business provides. The clothes they wore, the devices they used to transmit their sub-intelligent message; the food they bought cheaply at the corner stand to sustain their efforts—these were all produced, or brought to market by the invisible hand of the despised John Galts and the derided working people.)

I know not what exactly the oracular Krauthammer said to anger Trump, but it was worth it:

Charles Krauthammer is a totally overrated person … I’ve never met him … He’s a totally overrated guy, doesn’t know what he’s doing. He was totally in favor of the war in Iraq. He wanted to go into Iraq and he wanted to stay there forever. These are totally overrated people.

Even media mogul Rupert Murdoch moved in on Trump, calling him an embarrassment to his friends and to the country.

Inadvertently, one media strumpet came close to coming clean about the serial failures of analysis among her kind. Wonkette, or Wonkette Emerita, aka Ana Marie Cox, spoke of “the superfluousness of the media’s predictions and its inability to perform the service of making sense of events.” Like Smerconish, Cox is hoping against hope that the little people are having fun at her expense and “are in some way in on the joke” that is Trump.

POLITICAL POWER VS. ECONOMIC POWER

To understand why his campaign has legs, it is necessary to grasp the difference between The Donald and The Career Politician. Why so? Because although his supporters can ill-articulate these differences, they live them and feel them viscerally. Their reaction to Mr. Trump is informed by a sense of Trump the private citizen, the businessman, the anti-politician. As such, they grasp that Trump’s reality, incentives and motives sharply diverge from those of the professional politician. His reasons for doing what he’s doing are different.

Differently put: A successful politician and a successful businessman represent two solitudes, never the twain shall meet—except when the capitalist must curry favor with the politician so as to further his business interests, a reality brought about by corrupt politics. Trump’s donations to both parties fit a pattern forced by the regulatory state, whereby, in order to keep doing business, business is compelled to buy-off politicians.

“What, then, is the difference between economic power and political power?” Capitalism.org supplies a succinct reply:

The difference between political and economic power is the difference between plunder and production, between punishment and reward, between destruction and trade. Plunder, punishment, and destruction belong to the political realm; production, reward, and trade belong to the economic realm.

By definition, a professional politician is opportunistic and parasitic. For his survival, he must feed off his hosts. To convince the host to let him hook on and drain his lifeblood, the political hookworm must persuade enough of them to believe his deception. The energies of this political confidence trickster are thus focused on gaining voter confidence by promising what will never be delivered and what is impossible to deliver.

The methods of politics, encapsulated in the title of broadcaster Mark Levin’s latest book, are deceit and plunder, in that order. (And no, Mr. Levin, electing a conservative will not transform this modus operandi.) The machinery of politics is coercion and force. If elected, a politician gains power over those who did not support him as well as over those who supported him. Once in power, and backed by police power, he revels in the right to legislate and regulate vast areas in the lives of people.

Conversely, to succeed, a man in the private economy must deliver on his promises. If he doesn’t fulfill his promises, he loses his shirt. He goes belly up.

Whereas success in politics depends on intellectual deceit and economic plunder; success in the private economy indicates that an individual has delivered on his promises: he has provided goods and services people want, built buildings and resorts they inhabit and frequent, provided his investors with a return on their investment. And he has done so using the peaceful, voluntary means of free-market capitalism. He has not passed an individual mandate to compel any and all to patronize his buildings, businesses or buy his products.

Flawed though he most certainly is—Donald Trump belongs to the category of Americans who wield economic power.

Trump has had moral and business failings aplenty. He has taken risks for which he has paid with his capital and good name. (He certainly owes recompense to the Scottish farmers of Aberdeenshire, whose lives he upended with his development.) Not given to the contemplative life, Trump is a pragmatist. He has waded into some very polluted waters. But he swims. He doesn’t drown.

To that people relate.

RAPING REALITY WITH POLITICAL THEORY

For his credibility, the politician cloaks himself in the raiment of political theory, cobbled up by liberal academics. Theory that controverts reality is his stock-in-trade. And so the politician, Democrat and Republican, will conjure “ideas”—delusional ideation really—that flout reason, the nature of man, and the natural laws of justice and economics.

People, however, are smart. They sense the discrepancy between contrived political theory and reality; between conceptual frameworks that do not reflect reality, but rape it.

Examples: The macroeconomics parroted by Democrats and Republicans dictate that economic recessions and depressions must be cured by increasing the availability of easy credit so that more spending can take place. People know this is bogus. They know they cannot “deficit” spend themselves into prosperity. Why, then, would the “country” manage to disregard the immutable laws of economics?

From the safety and comfort of rarefied zip codes, open-border theorists tutor the little people in the positive economic effects of, say, high population density on productivity and economic growth. But regular folks don’t have to travel to Cairo or Karachi to discover that this urban theory is an urban myth.

The same sort of thing happens in the hearts and minds of ordinary working men and women when Trump says Crimea is Europe’s problem. Yes, let a regional power like Germany police that neighborhood.

Or, when Trump reveals that he pays as little tax as he can. “I hate what our country does with our taxes.” A noble sentiment, because true.

Libertarian theorist Wendy McElroy explains why certain verities are second-nature: “The more basic the political issue or principle, the more likely it is to be understood by most people and to appeal to their interests.”

For example, despite pronouncements from up high that “the common man should not be allowed to judge the law” because he lacks intellectual sophistication, “the trial by jury lauded by Lysander Spooner was meant to place community opinion as a safeguard between the individual and the State. As Spooner explained, ‘The trial by jury is a trial by the country – that is, by the people – as distinguished from a trial by the government … The object … is to guard against every species of oppression by the government.'”

PARTY POOPER

That Trump is no “GOP loyalist” hardly disqualifies him from representing the Republican base, which the GOP habitually misrepresents. Given the GOP’s record; a failure to swear fealty to the Republican Party is an award-worthy failing.

On the topic of awards, James Webb, the decorated Marine who served as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy, is no GOP loyalist, either. Webb, indisputably the last salt-of-the-earth Democrat, is considering a bid for president as a … Democrat.

Trump would do well to triangulate, à la Bill Clinton, and place the talented Mr. Webb on the Trump ticket. Then, make immigration a central theme in the campaign, advance a principled, major, pro-black policy by speaking to the legalization or decriminalizing of drug use and sale—and Trump will have secured the vote of blacks, white southern Democrats and other Reagan Democrats. Like no other, drug legalization is a proxy black issue, worthy of the endorsement of the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

A ticket sporting two Alpha Males, moreover, is likely to infuriate the Alpha females of media (including those with the Y chromosome).

NOBLESSE OBLIGE

In an interview with NBC, Trump explained the difference between the politicians running and a businessman like himself: He has a lot to lose. They have nothing to lose.

As a longtime observer and analyst writing in opposition to the state and the political process, I find the specter of the anti-politician—the rugged, unrefined, cowboy individualist—fascinating, certainly worthy of tracking, and quintessentially American.

Among America’s great industrialists and capitalists there has always been a long history of noblesse oblige—the notion that wealth, power and prestige carry responsibilities.

Public service to the American Founders meant that men put their own fortunes and sacred honor on the line. Their lives too.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review,  Praag.org, The Libertarian Alliance
& The Unz Review
August 7, 2015

The post Trump The Party Pooper Should Triangulate appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

In 2004, Time magazine described in detail how illegal aliens rushing the southern border commit property crimes and despoil the environment:

When the crowds cross the ranches along and near the border, they discard backpacks, empty Gatorade and water bottles and soiled clothes. They turn the land into a vast latrine, leaving behind revolting mounds of personal refuse and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart. Night after night, they cut fences intended to hold in cattle and horses. Cows that eat the bags must often be killed because the plastic becomes lodged between the first and second stomachs. The immigrants steal vehicles and saddles. They poison dogs to quiet them. The illegal traffic is so heavy that some ranchers, because of the disruptions and noise, get very little sleep at night.

As most American yokels see it, the perpetrators are responsible for these willful, unprovoked acts of aggression. As most libertarian sophisticates see things, our restrictionist immigration policies caused the “culprits” to vandalize—and sometimes kill—en route. This is how the devotional libertarian claptrap goes: If the border were opened, and these people were permitted to enter unfettered so as to work for Americans seeking to employ them, they’d opt to buy a bus ticket rather than defecate and despoil their way to their destinations.

Here’s the inside dope: borders are de facto open. There might not be a bus service transporting illegals to “designated pickup points,” where “they will ride in thousands of stolen vehicles … on the next leg of their journey to big cities and small towns from California to North Carolina,” as the typical odyssey has been described by Time. (Buses, it appears, are not the preferred ride.) But neither is anyone stopping Mexico’s flotsam from flooding US border cities, and beyond. Under George W. Bush, there has been no enforcement of immigration laws to speak of. During his years in office, over 4 million aliens (and counting) have entered the country unhindered.

By Time’s telling, for every person the border patrol apprehends, at least three make it into the country safely. In State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan reports that “work-site arrests fell to 159 in 2004,” compared to “between 10,000 and 18,000 in the Clinton years 1995, 1996, 1997.” Sporadic raids carried out recently are symbolic spasms that have, if anything, bolstered the open-border crowd’s argumentum ad misericordiam (appeals to pity). In the absence of any deterrent, apprehension achieves no more than to signal to the illegal to try again.

Now, about that Magical Mystery bus tour the open-border libertarian brought up: There are no legal impediments to a Mexican acquiring a visa and a bus ticket, and entering the US legally as a visitor or tourist, without traversing treacherous terrain. Once in the US, such a visitor could blend into the “madding crowds.” There are no impediments to so doing other than the cost of a visa: $100. Neither is a bus ticket free, although it is probably as cheap.

Why, then, don’t illegals embark on this easier route? My guess is that in addition to being unable to afford a bus ticket and visa fee, this cohort is so poor and uneducated that it has probably never acquired the necessary Mexican papers to apply for a visitor’s visa to the US. The “matricula consular” is likely the first ever Mexican document possessed by the illegal alien—a pedestrian possibility preachers of laissez faire immigration have never contemplated.

When you and I turned a certain age, we acquired identity and travel documents as well as a driver’s license. We may not like the procedure, or even agree with it, but it’s what we do as responsible adults. That the “immigrants” crossing the border on foot don’t possess Mexican documents is not because they are the edgy, anti-authoritarian, entrepreneurial risk-takers of tomorrow, as some libertarians (and Geraldo Rivera) patronizingly depict them. Rather, it is because they live in the shadows in their land, and are only transporting chaotic lives to this land. I suspect that the illegals entering this country are, for the most, incapable of carrying out such simple tasks

Why else would American politicians be sponsoring—and taxpayers shouldering—bureaucracies aimed at assisting these illiterates… in filling out forms? The Michigan Immigration Clerical Assistant Act, for example, aims to “protect” “immigrants” from “notarios”: scam artists who pretend to help, but prey on the illegal’s illiteracy. Like gangs, and counterfeiters of Social Security and driver’s licenses, “notarios” are yet another spin-off criminal enterprise arising from the influx into this country of millions of welfare-dependent illiterates.

Back to that spot of bother on the border—you know, the land that is being turned into “a vast latrine”; that environmental blight Gore and his gang of greens never mention. This is to be expected when government restricts naturally licit behavior, our la-di-dah libertarian repeats robotically. Here, invariably, a comparison is drawn to the Drug War. Accordingly, the drug consumer, whom the state has criminalized by legal fiat, is compared to the illegal immigrant, whose naturally licit actions the state has also outlawed.

And, in error, vice is conflated with crime.

“Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property,” explained Lysander Spooner, the great 19th-century natural rights theorist. “Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.” True enough, in natural law, a drug consumer is not a criminal. He, however, becomes one when he harms another’s person or property.

Ditto the illegal alien. Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state’s laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of social determinism, not individualism. A philosophy also known in simpler parlance as the dog-ate-my-homework school of thought.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    May 4

The post That Spot Of Bother On The Border appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Bush’s war flouted what the Founding Fathers established and bequeathed. A limited, constitutional republican government is, by definition, incompatible with the hegemon America has become. And a government is guilty of treason when it conscripts its own people and their property in the service of other nations ~ilana

A couple of tedious paragraphs into her paean to George Bush, scribbler Suzanne Fields divulges triumphantly that she hangs with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. These two Beltway Babes got together last week to dish “over a Danish and a cup of black coffee.” Their tête-à-tête inspired a serenade for the man whose testes, says satirist Jon Stewart, are now so large as to be visible from outer space.

These are heady days for neoconservatives like Fields, their “crusade for democracy” in the Middle East having, apparently, been vindicated. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who never stopped whooping it up for the war, expressed the prevailing wisdom in his best (unconsciously) Orwellian manner: “War leads to peace.”

While the neocons crow, the liberals defect in droves. Comedy Central’s Stewart (a non-defective lefty) said in near despair, “They might have been right.” The usually intelligent Richard Cohen was so stirred, he burst into a ditty for democracy. And the band plays on.

Not that the Second War Between the States is over just yet. Scarborough summed up with the signature simple-mindedness red-staters have sought – and found – in Bush: “The Democratic Party, the Arab Street, the broadcast networks, National Public Radio, an odd assortment of college professors, and a slew of other pseudo-intellectuals join the motley crew of left wing elites who, by ignoring historical trends, became sad parodies of themselves.”

There’s a problem with Scarborough’s taxonomy of losers. He has left out those on the Right – libertarians, paleolibertarians, and Old School conservatives – who opposed the war for principled reasons. But this is the strategy (as popular among liberals as it is among neocons): forget principles, knocking down straw men is just too much fun.

At the coffeehouse, over that Danish, our neocon crumpets concluded that Dubya’s preemptive invasion of Iraq (Rice termed it “the policy”) had lit the fuse of freedom under Middle Eastern hides. However, the certainty of ditzes dissolves when exposed to moral – and careful – considerations.

In Iraq, now a lawless failed state, dames don’t congregate over Danish – they duck and dive to avoid bombs and bandits. (Amnesty International’s report is here.) Neither is it that obvious that Iraq will be freer when the elected majorities – the Shi’ite Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq – come to grips with their democratic empowerment. But when that time arrives, I trust Fields will relocate her edgy reporting from the café to the field … in Iraq. (And don’t forget your abaya, Suzanne. I have a nasty feeling that, like body armor, it’ll be for years to come a de rigueur accouterments of freedom in liberated Iraq.)

Like others of her ilk, Fields has hurrahed recent developments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Lebanon. But in the Middle East (bar Israel and perhaps Lebanon), The Street is far more radical than the strongmen in power. In her joyous delirium, Fields probably failed to notice that anti-Western militant Islamists walloped pro-Western moderate reformers in the limited municipal elections permitted in Saudi Arabia. As Time reported, the restricted elections in the Kingdom saw Islamic hardliners outpoll nearly 650 other candidates. And the sight of the Shi’ite Hezbollah Party, half a million strong, flexing its political muscle in Beirut earlier this month didn’t warm the cockles of this heart. I guess Condi could always remove Hezbollah from our list of terrorist organizations so the delirium could continue unabated.

Will the neocon sorority applaud when Hosni Mubarak is forced into allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to assume its rightful place in the “nascent” Egyptian democracy? I won’t: the Brotherhood murdered the peacemaker Anwar Sadat, begat Hamas, and has fomented revolution throughout the Islamic crescent – Algeria, Syria, Sudan, you name it.

These fabulous prospects notwithstanding, Geoffrey Wheatcroft of the Guardian thinks that linking the ripples in the Middle East to Bush’s conquest of Iraq is simple post hoc ergo prompter hoc. He asks, “Primitive peoples suffering from drought put a maiden to death and the rains come. Did the human sacrifice change the weather?” Shouldn’t the Bush boosters, then, put the breaks on the bombast? A case-by-case examination of the so-called thaw in the Middle East certainly supports circumspection.

Lebanon‘s “Cedar Revolution” was ignited by the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The semi-kosher elections in the Palestinian Authority were facilitated by the death of Arafat. Mahmoud Abbas, however, may be hanging on by the hair of his chinny chin chin. Hamas is immensely popular in the PA. Its decision to boycott the elections significantly diminished voter turnout. Abbas’ embrace of democracy is not likely to diminish the standing of these terrorists among Palestinians.

Still, I happen to agree somewhat with the neocons that Bush’s brute force in the Middle East has probably played a part in the brute facts developing on the ground. But the case against the invasion doesn’t rest on denying what can’t be denied: bullying and bludgeoning do have outcomes.

The relevant questions are: What kind of outcomes and at what cost?

In the Middle East, majority rule may well unleash a pack of wolverines, as Radley Balko puts it. Sadly, Americans (and our Fearless Leader) are capable of grasping only a Disneyfied version of majority rule, not the Middle Eastern version. This is why they doggedly conflate democracy with freedom, and “the freedom to vote” with liberty. Here’s a useful tip for Fields: voting is synonymous with freedom only if strict limits are placed on the powers of elected officials and only if individual rights are respected. Forget the Magic Kingdom; these conditions do not obtain in the Saudi Kingdom – to give but one example.

It’s indisputable that Bush, much aided by laptop bombardiers like Fields, has won the war – if “winning” means “spinning.” However, the crucial thing to bear in mind is that, even if the aftershocks of the invasion were irrefutably beneficial – and they are anything but – they wouldn’t expunge the Original Sin. In Bushite theology, any injustice is pardonable so long as, in retrospect, some good can be attached to it.

And make no mistake, the invasion of Iraq was an injustice.

Consequence-based “morality” doesn’t alter the reality that the attack on Iraq flunks every ethical consideration I can imagine. The Just War criterion for preemptive war allows one to attack someone who would otherwise directly attack you. Iraq, a Third World wreck of a place, halfway around the world, posed no such danger to the American superpower or to any American ally. On just cause, Alex Moseley, Ph.D., adds, “Aggressive war is only permissible if its purpose is to retaliate against a wrong already committed (e.g., to pursue and punish an aggressor), or to preempt an anticipated attack.” So Bush had no just cause. The invasion certainly flouted the libertarian (or classical liberal) axiom that prohibits aggression against non-aggressors. And it flouted the Christian duty to do no harm to one’s neighbors.

Nevertheless, Tim Russert, “good” Catholic that he is, has recently absolved himself and his media colleagues for not getting it right on the war. But contrary to Russert’s intellectually dishonest claims, there were plenty of authoritative and able people who could have assisted him and his colleagues, intellectually and morally. There were other ways to deal with whatever problem Iraq presented, and there were other people who knew how.

Back to the crumpets. After having prayed the requisite number of “Hail Caesars,” Fields finally gets a little perspective. She warns that “the spirit of Patrick Henry has not emerged in Lebanon,” and that “Mahmoud Abbas is no Thomas Jefferson.” True, but Genghis Bush is no Thomas Jefferson, either. Bush’s war also flouted what the Founding Fathers established and bequeathed. A limited, constitutional republican government is, by definition, incompatible with the hegemon America has become. And a government is guilty of treason when it conscripts its own people and their property in the service of other nations.

Nothing nullifies the eternal verities that the Founders (of whom Fields is justly proud) spoke. Remember John Quincy Adams?

“She [America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

“Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age,” observed another great American, Lysander Spooner. “Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another. … These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten.”

The Bush administration is less clever than the merest child, for it believes it has discovered “something better than truth, and justice, and universal law.” The deplorable achievement of Fields and her fellow travelers is to have persuaded Americans to adopt the same conceit.

©By ILANA MERCER
March 23, 2005
Antiwar.com

The post SECOND THOUGHTS, FIRST PRINCIPLES appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

As the 19th-century American philosopher of liberty, Lysander Spooner, pointed out, ‘Guilt is an intrinsic quality of actions.’ Judging by the actions they commanded, Mr. Bush and his privileged playmates are as guilty as sin ~ilana

“The weapons do not exist,” was David Kay’s reply to the question, “What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to find in Iraq?”

Kay, a former top U.S. weapons inspector, endeared himself to the media as an invasion enthusiast. The evidence he now marshals to explain why no WMD were found in Iraq is the same old evidence those of us who opposed this war cited back in the dying days of 2002. So, no, not everyone was bullish about the Bush administration’s WMD balderdash. And, yes, Kay has done no more than validate some very old verities: There have been no WMD in Iraq for some time.

Kay’s official findings will doubtless be “withheld” until after the election. But having publicly fumed about the impotence of the U.N.’s Hans Blix, Kay now seemingly vouches for the effectiveness of the much-maligned inspection process.

What Kay now parrots, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council before the war: There were no nuclear-designated aluminum tubes in Iraq; no uranium was imported, and no nuclear programs were in existence. Between 1991 and 1998, the IAEA had managed to strip Iraq of its fuel-enriching facilities, tallying inventories to a T. Or in Kay’s belated words: “Iraq’s large-scale capability to produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced – if not entirely destroyed – during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections.”

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Congress in 1999 was privy to intelligence reports which similarly attested to a lack of “any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox (1998) to reconstitute its WMD program …” Accounts of this nature have evidently been available to Congress for years. They reiterated, as one report from the Defense Intelligence Agency does, that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were [sic] destroyed between 1991 and 1998.”

Kay’s “news” ought not to have been new to the blithering boobs in Congress.

The CEIP further bears out that in October of 2002, Congress was apprised of a National Intelligence Estimate, a declassified version of which was released only after the war. Apparently, entire intelligence agencies disputed key contentions that the administration – its experts, and its congressional and media backers – seized on and ran with.

While clearly pandering to policy makers, U.S. intelligence reports were still heavily qualified by conjectural expressions such as, “we believe Iraq could, might, possibly, and probably will.” The State Department and the White House, however, cultivated a custom of issuing “fact” sheets with definitive statements from which all traces of uncertainty had been removed.

Condoleezza Rice (who had categorically denied she possessed the analytical wherewithal to connect the dazzlingly close dots between Arab men practicing their aeronautical take-off skills and terrorism) was suddenly doing nothing but connecting disparate dots. She, Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush never stopped gabbling about a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, chemical and biological blights, Scuds and squadrons of unmanned aerial vehicles streaking U.S. skies, and traveling laboratories teeming with twisted scientists. The language they used – and still do to this day, unrepentant – ignored the deep dissent in the intelligence community.

The most immediate threat to Americans clearly came from their own leaders.

Bush could have abided by the Constitution of the United States. Instead, he chose to violate it, declaring war by executive order. Members of Congress could have honored their oath to support the Constitution. Instead, they flouted it, failing to debate the wisdom of going to war and blithely approving the president’s usurpation of power.

The official decision to go to war was declared around the time U.N. monitors were scouring Iraq, and, if we are to believe Kay, doing so effectively. It was announced not long after, having conducted hundreds of inspections between November 2002 and March 2003, ElBaradei reported, matter of fact, to a disinterested, jingoistic media what Kay claims today to have “discovered”: There were no WMD.

And the decision was made by the executive, not the intelligence community. The intelligence community is a causal link in the chain of culpability – it is responsible for propagating the lies that fed an unscrupulous executive. But it was not the intelligence community that made the final decision that turned Iraq from a contained “rogue” state to a chaotic “failed” state.

Kay and his Iraq Survey Group will be praised for their marvelous forensic efforts, even though they’ve done nothing but verify the veracity of existing evidence. These were the facts before a bloody and unnecessary war; these are the facts now that over 500 Americans are dead, close to 3,000 are disfigured and maimed, and thousands of Iraqis are similarly hurt and hobbled.

As the 19th-century American philosopher of liberty, Lysander Spooner, pointed out, “Guilt is an intrinsic quality of actions.” Judging by the actions they commanded, Mr. Bush and his privileged playmates are as guilty as sin.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
January 30, 2004

The post WHAT WMD? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

And so, I spoke at length about how it came to be that Americans, by and large, took the Iraq war, its prosecutors and their propaganda to their hearts. Needless to say, the effect I had on some in the audience was as intense as the effect Basil Fawlty had on his German guests ~ilana

The effect I had on some in the Libertarian Party’s audience was as intense as the effect Basil Fawlty had on his German guests ~ilana

When The Germans come to stay at “Fawlty Towers,” Basil Fawlty, the quirky hotel manager in the classic British comedy, is adamant to put his best foot forward and not to mention The War. Basil being Basil, this is not to be. The caustic anti-hero suffers a concussion, and spends a good deal of the episode goose-stepping around his poor guests, reducing them to tears.

I’d have preferred not to mention The War during a talk I recently gave at a Libertarian Party convention. To further commandeer the “Fawlty Towers” script: We know who started it! Still, it’s been personally important for me to keep processing it because there are certain things about this war that make it unprecedented. And so, I spoke at length about how it came to be that Americans, by and large, took the Iraq war, its prosecutors and their propaganda to their hearts. Needless to say, the effect I had on some in the audience was as intense as the effect Basil Fawlty had on his German guests.

This is a testament to the administration’s achievements. In mere months, Washington has radically transformed the way most Americans—including some libertarians—think. True to their Trotskyist roots, the ideologues in this administration have been catalysts for a consciousness lowering—not raising—among most Americans, breaking down and even inverting certain civilizing precepts which only a short while ago united us.

Commentator Eric S. Margolis offered up a quote by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, America’s senior representative at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the tribunal’s chief prosecutor. It highlights all the more the gaping moral void that has opened up in American society:

“We must make clear to the Germans,” said Jackson, “that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.”

Justice Jackson was articulating not a temporary but a timeless truth—the principles of the natural law are indisputably correct. To wage aggressive wars violates a universally accepted verity. It violates the paramount laws that children manage to internalize at a tender age: “…one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another,” spelled out Lysander Spooner.

To the 19th-century libertarian natural rights theorist this may have been child’s play, but it has become a chore for most Americans. How they square their adoption of Bush’s New Morality (preemptively lying one’s way to war) with their commitment to a higher authority is outside my purview. I do know that the state ought not to come between a libertarian and the natural law.

A vehement letter I received from a conference attendee reveals sadly that many “libertarians” see the law of the state as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. Or as the man blasted, “Get your facts straight, the president has the power to declare war under the War Powers Act—like it or not, that is the law.”

The inference here is that what the law says is inviolably just.

The writer got one thing straight: War was declared by executive order! Flouting his obligation to get “the consent of the governed,” to quote the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Bush bullied a corrupt Congress into authorizing war against Iraq before the November midterm elections. Congress’s vote was no more than a formality.

The writer, however, proves ignorant both of the U.S Constitution and the libertarian duty to reject the law of the state when it is at odds with natural justice.

Over to James Madison: “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded.” Thus it is Congress that declares a war. The U.S. government is beholden to the Constitution, which prohibits the president from declaring war. Explains Louis Fisher, senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress: “Keeping the power to commit the country to war—and to all the costs of war—in separate hands from the power to wage war once declared was a bedrock principle for the framers.”

Modern statutes like the War Powers Resolution, the Iraq Resolution, and the Use of Force Act do not displace the constitutional text and the framers’ intent.

But even if the Constitution approved of Bush and Congress’ subterfuge, the natural law does not. Because it is rational and rooted in the very nature of man, natural justice is immutably true; it is the ultimate guide to what is right or wrong. It may no longer guide most Americans, but it must never cease to inform libertarians

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
May 7, 2003

The post UNNATURAL LAWLESSNESS appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Third parties have no place in transactions between consenting adults, unless these transactions infringe directly—not foreseeably—on their property or person ~ilana

If we accept state aggression based on prior restraint arguments, then aggress we must ad absurdum. Why not prevent all teenagers from driving, or, even better, all socialist parents from procreating, lest they sire proponents of state theft? ~ilana

Darryl Strawberry is perhaps not a very savory character, but a criminal he is not. He has been classed—and hounded—as a criminal by a law that brutally punishes adults for the substances they ought to be able to ingest, inhale or inject at their own peril.

The former major-league star was recently sentenced to 18 months in prison for violating probation, following a 1999 conviction on drug and solicitation of prostitution charges.

So Strawberry is a cokehead with an appetite for unwholesome sex. Will someone tell me why this is the business of anyone other than he and his unfortunate wife?

There is no shortage of meddling third parties that find certain consensual, capitalistic acts between adults to be offensive. Some people want to stop the trade in pornography. Others would like to make it prohibitive for adults to purchase cigarettes or junk food.

For one thing, “Consumer sovereignty,” as libertarian economist Pierre Lemieux notes, “reflects the assumption that each individual knows better than anybody else what is good for him. This idea runs counter to state paternalism, whether in smoking, pension plans, drugs or whatever.”

For another, any transaction that was at the time of occurrence voluntary, and hence beneficial to the participants, can, retrospectively, be denounced as harmful and regrettable. A litigious culture facilitates this trend. Government and other busybodies, however, would do well to consider that if an exchange is voluntary, then both parties expect to benefit from it.

Where no force or violence is involved, a voluntary exchange is, by definition, always mutually beneficial, inasmuch as, at the time of the exchange, the buyer of the drugs valued the purchase more than the money he paid for it, and the seller valued the money more than the goods he sold.

Third parties have no place in transactions between consenting adults, unless these transactions infringe directly—not foreseeably—on their property or person. Strawberry and his suppliers have appetites and values I don’t share. But I fail to see how their decadent deals infringe on my rights.

Having arbitrarily decided that certain patterns of consumption are potentially worse for individual and society than others, the policy pinheads have proceeded to preemptively trample the constitutional rights of people like Strawberry, before the foreseeable harm to society occurs.

If we accept state aggression based on prior restraint arguments, then aggress we must ad absurdum. Why not prevent all teenagers from driving, or, even better, all socialist parents from procreating, lest they sire proponents of state theft?

“Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another,” wrote Lysander Spooner, the great 19th-century theorist of liberty. And government has no business treating vices as crimes.

Drug use is a private choice. Incarcerating people for their consumption choices has the logical consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder. If for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else—government—owns him. People ought to be arrested only for crimes they perpetrate against another’s person or property.

Be mindful, though, that the coercive, therapeutic state is a poor substitute for the avenging state. Justice Florence Foster, who presided over Strawberry’s case, had repeatedly opted for compulsory treatment for the eight-time all-star.

Law-enforced medical treatment, however, must be as volubly opposed as prison. Over and above the immorality of coerced wealth distribution, treatment schemes paid by the taxpayer ensure that those of us who choose to refrain from drug taking subsidize the lifestyle of the addict. Less addiction will come about, not by distributing resources from the risk averse to the reckless, stealing from responsible adults, and rewarding the rash and imprudent—but by making the addict responsible for the risks he takes.

This is not an easy task given that some self-destructive behavior has acquired disability status and is legally protected. When insurers cannot transfer to the addict the full costs of the risk he poses, they must make those of us who choose to watch our diets, exercise, and refrain from smoking or drug taking the repository for these costs. Insurance must be permitted to exercise its mandate to discriminate between risk groups. With such discrimination comes the incentive on the part of the insured to avoid lifestyles or behaviors that incur costs.

Reducing addiction lies, then, in withdrawing the perverse incentives that reinforce the maladaptive behavior. To use 12-step locution, state-mandated treatment programs are “enablers.” The dismal failure of state programs launched by the addiction industry, the high rates of recidivism they yield, and the pesky fact that most quitters among smokers do so solo—goes to show that addicts quit when they decide to. And they are more likely to be nudged in that direction when made to shoulder the consequences of their lifestyle.

Once the state retreats from punishing vices, it will fall, once again, to custom and religion to reinvigorate those informal checks on behavior the therapeutic state has undermined. Shame, loss of face, being denied membership, excommunication, counseling and support are some of the ways moral communities have, in previous eras, kept their members in check.

Drug addiction, of course, is a chosen habit or lifestyle—not a disease. A society that cleaves to a worldview that parlays misdeeds into diseases does so at its own peril. Darryl Strawberry, sadly, happens to have a serious and genuine disease. Strawberry’s metastatic cancer is yet another good reason to set him free and cut him loose.

© By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
May 8, 2002

The post VICES ARE NOT CRIMES appeared first on ILANA MERCER.