The Republicans are investigating the Hunter “Baaaden” affair, to imitate the repetitive intonations emitted by Fox News’ Australian journalist, about the “Baaaden” laptop.

Deplorables, don’t be misled into this dummies-and-ditto-heads dead-end. This is vintage lightweight, GOP tit-for-tat distraction, on par with the Democrats’ ongoing January 6 production.

The Hunter Biden preoccupation amounts to, “They (Democrats) do January 6; we (Republicans) hack away at—or hit back with—Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell.”

The outcome: The Democrats get what they want: détente. They neuter Deplorables, sending us down a political rabbit hole.

We gain nothing from such a foray. It’s zero-sum for Deplorables.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley, whom I respect, disagrees. Turley, understand, operates within the philosophical parameters of the state. By and large, he believes in the extant integrity of American institutions, even confident that one party is more righteous than the other. When out-of-sync, the good party led by the right people, or so the good professor imagines, is sure to right wrongs through a congressional committee.

Wrong. Not for nothing do we call it the Permanent State, fronted as it is by evil and stupid-party operatives.

Correctly so, the matter of the FBI’s endemic corruption and bias has been settled both in the minds of deplorables and by the objective facts. (FBI Director James Comey anyone? Director Christopher Wray?)

If the GOP were seriously working for Deplorables, and not engaged in tit-for-tat political gotcha—they’d pursue First Principles driven congressional oversight.

Duly, Biden would be summonsed for a hearing charging that by intentionally, and as a matter of policy, leaving the Southern border wide-open and unguarded—in effect inviting the world to invade our country—the president is willfully flouting his constitutional obligation to protect Americans from foreign invaders, and is thus committing treason.

The obligation of a Republican congressional majority is to pursue oversight by investigating and prosecuting a flagrant violation by the president of his constitutional obligation to defend the United States and its people from foreign invasions.

That the incoming Republican congressional majority is already falling flat, opting for showy politicking, instead of a solemn focus on Biden’s treason against his people, is all the more jarring given the GOP’s abject failure to deliver as promised in the 2022 midterms.

Other predictably ominous signs were on display at a recent Republican Jewish Coalition conference, where some Republicans who ought to disappear reappeared.

In particular, “Mike Pompeo, Trump’s hand-picked secretary of State and CIA director,” and Nikki Haley, Trump’s U.N. ambassador. She is threatening to win the presidency, bragging that “she’s ‘never lost an election and is not going to start now.’”

Both Pompeo and Haley are known for their robotic, neoconservative sloganeering against Bashar al-Assad’s more enlightened Alawite regime—did you know Syria’s Christians simply love him?—against Putin’s Russian Orthodox traditionalist rule, and the impoverished Iran, against which Israel perpetually agitates.

Trump had surrounded himself with such men and women in whom ingrained was the war forevermore neoconservative foreign policy.

Take Mike Ponce, the former vice president. He told Bret Baier, a Fox News neoconservative host, that it is imperative the “United States and the new Republican majority continue to provide the Ukrainian people with the support they need to defend themselves.”

In other words, enable war forevermore for Ukraine, so its slimy leader, Zelensky, can continue to play his biggest role yet and is exempt from his solemn duty to do diplomacy, even though, to go by biblical standards, “a leader who fails to haggle for the lives of his people is a failed leader.”

Pence spoke to the latest allegation against Russia, namely that of dropping ordnance on Poland, a NATO member. He rashly spouted forth about an Article 5 obligation to go to war for Poland, and then further waffled in his best ponderous, faux presidential manner, that Russia ought to be “transparent” during the investigation into the origin of the bomb that fell on “Ukraine” (sic: it fell on Poland, Mr. Pence). This, when the US is stoking the Russia-Ukraine conflict as vociferously as Zelensky is.

“I’ve gone toe-to-toe with Putin,” boasted Pence. He followed up with the cretin’s commonplace: “Putin understands only strength.” Other than that Trump deployed the worst possible people during his term—Pence stands as a reminder to Deplorables that he and Trump provided lethal arms to Ukraine.

Likely a bit of a fabricator, Pence then blamed Biden for confining billions in Ukrainian military aid to “blankets and boxed meals.” He thinks he alone could truly support Ukraine in the style to which this little tinpot destination has become accustomed. So argued Mr. Pence, striking his best “I’m-presidential” pose.

We are further informed that Pence and wife Karen visited Ukraine … blah blah blah, and he is thus in the position to advise that it is imperative that the USA continue to pump this great Democracy with funds to defend its great democracy.

Of course, the “defending-democracy” premise is one that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson uses in his case against assisting Ukraine in perpetuity. Carlson claims Ukraine is not a democracy, hence deserves no defense.

Both Pence and Tucker use democracy to justify opposing policies, proving only that democracy as a premise for or against a particular American foreign policy is wrong. And an error.

These discrepancies only expose the impoverished neoconservative nature of a foreign policy based on the US’s obligations to act in furtherance of democracy across the world.

“If you are willing to fight communists in your country; we’ll provide you the means”: Mike Pence explained that this is the Reagan doctrine to which he subscribes.

Right there is another good reason to disqualify Pence and jingoists like him from office. Putin’s Russia is not communist; it is traditionalist, reactionary; a Russian-Orthodox centered, somewhat-authoritarian state widely supported by the Russians.

Pence is still working from the defunct, cold-war based Reagan doctrine.

The man, Pence, holds a neoconservative foreign policy and believes his priorities lie with Ukraine, not with the people of the US, Deplorables in particular, whose freedoms are curtailed stateside.

So, the hell with Hunter; call Joe in for hearings on treason, and cancel the neocons while you’re at it.

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©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, November 24
Unz Review, November 24
The New American, November 28

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“We are one American nation. We must unite. We have to unify. We have to come together.”

Every faction in our irreparably fractious and fragmented country calls for unity, following events that demonstrate just how disunited the United States of America is.

They all do it.

Calls for unity come loudest from the party of submissives—the GOP. The domineering party is less guilt-ridden about this elusive thing called “unity.”

Democrats just blame Republicans for its absence in our polity and throughout our increasingly uncivil society.

These days, appeals to unity are made by opportunistic politicians, who drape themselves in the noble toga of patriotism on tragic occasions. The latest in many was the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre of October 27.

In the name of honesty—and comity—let us quit the unity charade.

The U.S. is not united. Neither is America a nation in any meaningful way. It hasn’t been one for a long time. 

Consider: In the late 1780s, Americans debated whether to nationalize government or keep it a decentralized affair. The discussion was one in which all early Americans partook, nationwide.

Think about the degree of unity that feat required!

The eternal verities of republicanism and limited government were understood and accepted by all Americans. The young nation’s concerns centered on the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. (The Anti-Federalists, the unsung heroes who gave us the Bill of Rights, turned out to be right.)

Around the time The Federalist Papers were published in American newspapers—Americans were a nation in earnest.

For it takes a nation to pull that off—to debate a set of philosophical and theoretical principles like those instantiated in the Papers, Federalist and Anti-Federalist.

The glue that allowed so lofty a debate throughout early America is gone (not to mention the necessary gray matter).

The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 4 million but 327 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust.

Each year, elites pile atop this mass of seething antagonists another million newcomers.

Democrats, who control the intellectual means of production—schools, social media, TV, the print press, the publishing houses, think tanks, the Permanent Bureaucracy—they insist mass immigration comports with “who we are as a people.”

The last is yet another hollow slogan—much like the unity riff.

Modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,” possess little by way of social capital to unify them.

We don’t share the same core values, morals or mannerisms. We don’t revere the same heroes. We tear down other countrymen’s historic monuments. (As governor, Nikki Haley, hardly a member of “The Mob,” led the charge in South Carolina.) We display different regalia. Our attachment to one language, English, is tenuous at best, and waning.

Surveys suggest Americans today would rather avoid one another, choosing instead to hunker down unhappily in front of the telly.

As Americans, what unites us most is our passion for, and patterns of, consumption. America is an economy, not a nation.

Unite we Americans do over the state of our sovereign debt—it’s bad! But not over what it means to be a sovereign people.

For half the country, sovereignty entails hordes of defiant scofflaws breaking the border. For the other half, sovereignty means borders. (And some respite, maybe even a moratorium on the incessant influx.)

People become rightfully resentful of others when forced into relationships against their will.

Signs of the attendant, endemic civil unrest are already evident.

Don’t knock the cliché. Good fences (or walls) do indeed make good neighbors, within countries and between them.

A sense of security and sovereignty are essential to the health of individuals and nations alike. Developmental health in kids is predicated on respecting their bodies and their boundaries.

Wait a sec: Kids need boundaries but the communities in which they reside don’t?

Why do boundaries or borders become cardinal (racist) sins when staked out by communities? And why is trespass a praiseworthy creed?

A peaceful society is one founded on voluntary associations, not forced integration.

By extension, if the Christian pastry man doesn’t care to bake a cake for a gay wedding; leave him be. There are plenty cake-makers who’ll cater for your event.

Where’s the morality and munificence in compelling a service from an unwilling service provider? Servitude not service is what the gay master is exacting from the baker subordinate.

People are harming nobody when they withhold their wares. It’s their right. The baker owns his labor and his property. Leave him alone.

Currently, our overlords in Deep State D.C. insist that because we’re so rich and innately mean, they should decide what to do with the lion’s share of our earnings (including to distribute it to the world).

No need. Americans are terribly generous—and most generous when left to choose their charities.

We are most generous to strangers in need when they, in return, don’t encroach on our space, and respect the natural rights we have in our person and property.

Besides, people get mad, even murderous, when Big Brother tells them who to shower with brotherly love.

An uneasy co-existence, not coerced unity, is the only hope for calm in our country.

Respectful disunity is the only way forward.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
Townhall.com, American Greatness ,
Reckonin‘ &  Ricochet
November 1

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It’s fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump’s foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:

“… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. ‘The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,’ Trump said. ‘We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'”

“For a moment,” swooned Lake, “I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.”

Onward to Venezuela!

Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an expansionist foreign policy with “American exceptionalism.”

It’s not.

As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country’s founding. They’re more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State.

That’s just the way things are.

So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in “a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war,” Riyadh’s ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake.

After a campaign of “America First,” the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369!

Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate sheiks?

Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected. Curiously, they’re currently rioting.

If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency—its spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump’s original “America First” plank—is to “undermine American democracy.”

Besides, “good” Americans know that only the Russians “meddle.”

In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man rule.

When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration—is that another bloodline in-the-making?—has not broken with America’s ruling dynastic families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).

It’s comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN’s human rights affairs. In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly, beheaded with a sword.

Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik. At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)

Our bosom buddies, the Saudi’s, are currently barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like this one. Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.

No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump’s National Security Strategy. Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of “sovereignty,” but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to “multilayered technology”; to the “deployment of additional personnel,” and to the tried-and-tested (not!) “vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors.”

These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.

“It’s often said that the Trump administration is ‘isolationist,'” wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. “In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without … any debate in Congress or the media.”

Indeed, while outlining his “new” Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that “the American people are weary of war without victory.” (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000 additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not undertaking nation building.

This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one’s mouth.

Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send “4,000 additional soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan,” and you’ve done what Obama and Bush before you did in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.

Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting force that doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.

The upshot? It’s quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and Norway. “We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them.”

With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our dangerously united political factions.

This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives—who now comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism? In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives—aka Conservatism Inc.—did the same.

Having consistently complained of his isolationism, the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump’s interventionism. The other option is to admit that we of the callused Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always right.

Not going to happen.

To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton’s triangulation tactics. To others, it’s a cynical sleight of hand.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, WND.com,
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom,
The Liberty Conservative, Constitution.com, Storia.me,
The Ron Paul Institute.
January 3

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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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©2016 By ILANA MERCER 

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance & The Unz Review
January 15, 2016

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