Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan
Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” – History Is Repeating Itself
By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
I have just recently watched Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech: “A Time For Choosing” again. It strikes me that exactly what he was putting forth in that speech is as relevant today as it was then. Perhaps even more so. A copy of the full transcript will follow the video at the end of this post, so you can see and hear for yourself the Great Communicator and what he had to say all those years ago. The speech was given during the Barry Goldwater campaign and in effect, launched Ronald Reagan’s political career. His prescient words never cease to affect and move me.
As Reagan pointed out then, the issues confronting us now cross party lines. We no longer are seeing two separate distinct parties. We see Progressives on both sides working towards a political agenda that is Marxist in nature and two potential candidates that once the makeup and reality TV personas are removed, are strikingly similar. Now as then, the Democrats are pushing the ‘peace and prosperity’ line and that we have never had it so good. In fact, Obama has been saying that now for weeks, despite the reality that Americans are living and seeing with their own eyes.
Today, we see an actual unemployment rate north of 30%. That’s not the propagandic lie the masses are told… the laughably low number of 4.7% is sheer horrific revisionism. These are numbers not seen since the Great Depression. Bread lines are hidden using EBT cards… joblessness is white washed with benefits and massaged statistics… debt is simply ignored. Under Obama, we now owe well over $19 Trillion in debt and that doesn’t even begin to cover the unfunded liabilities hanging out there. A nation, even the strongest in the world, cannot long exist under such debt. I also believe our gold vaults are empty. And it is only a matter of time now until the dollar is absolutely worthless on the world market. Our enemies are sure to come calling at that point in time.
As for peace, there is no peace at hand. Thanks to the Progressive policies implemented before and after 9-11, we now live in a new world that is far more dangerous than it ever was before, where Islamic terrorists are running rampant across the planet. We are also actively funding our biggest enemies and the largest purveyors of terrorism on the planet… the Iranians. Obama has granted nuclear weapons to insane theocratic mass murderers and that will not end well.
The Legacy of Antonin Scalia
By: Michael Johns
When I first became engaged in national public policy and politics in the mid-1980s, the conservative movement had a saying, which I believe originated with former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner: “People are policy.” In essence, the phrase represented our collective recognition that success (or lack thereof) ultimately rested with the people of our movement. Without capable and committed conservatives, little was possible. But with them, nearly anything was.
In the years since, we have lost a number of American conservatives who were more than just capable and committed. They were and are conservative icons whose work helped shape and develop American conservatism—and our Tea Party movement—as the major global political and intellectual force it is today.
Who are these icons?
- Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises, who provided much of the intellectual foundation of today’s free market economic thought, left us in 1973 at age 93.
- Prominent anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, who fled the Communist Party, went on to articulate fundamental truths about communism and ultimately outed State Department employee Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, died in 1961 at age 60.
- Author and intellectual Russell Kirk, who helped define many of the enduring principles of conservatism, died in 1994 at age 75.
- Ayn Rand, whose individualist fictional writings have proven hugely inspirational to our national Tea Party movement, died in 1992 at age 77.
- William F. Buckley, Jr., who inspired many of today’s most prominent conservative intellectuals and writers, died in 2008 at age 82 (read my 2008 tribute to him here).
- And of course (most prominent of all), our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, who proved that conservatism can win and succeed as a governing political force, died in 2004 at age 93.
“The Great Bait and Switch”
Why Conservative Reagan Won Two Landslides, and Moderates Always Lose – Cruz vs. Rubio – THE “ELECTABILITY” DEBATE
By Shlomo Pollak

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, right, speaks during a news conference with Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, following a vote in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Sept. 27, 2013. The U.S. Senate voted to finance the government through Nov. 15 after removing language to choke off funding for the health care law, putting pressure on the House to avoid a federal shutdown set to start Oct. 1. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The debate continues: do we stick to our principles, or do we run to the middle?
Since Romney’s shocking defeat, this debate has taken on a new sense of urgency, with the thinking that if Obama was reelected, even Hillary can win this thing?!?
Nobody changed teams, obviously…. The moderates remained moderates, and are “now more then ever”, energized to crush the right wing, that “cost us” an important election….
The conservatives, are equally incredulous, and fear a do-over with another moderate, will net us exactly the same results as last time….
THIS DEBATE ACTUALLY SEEMS TO BE, BETWEEN REASON AND HISTORY!!!
On the one hand, the moderates’ argument seems intuitively correct, and more reasonable. The closer one is to the middle, the more of the electorate he should be able to capture. In a two party system, there is nothing to the right of the GOP candidate, no matter how moderate he is…
But History seems to tell a different story. As Senator Cruz often reminds us, the last Republican to win a landslide, was actually painting IN BOLD COLORS- Reagan. Over and over we nominate a Bob Dole, a Mcain, a Romney, and over and over WE LOSE?!?!
FACTS DON’T LIE, YET IT SEEMS SO COUNTERINTUITIVE….
Many have gone the “energize the base” route, to explain this phenomenon. They claim that, staunch conservatives, not being COMPLETELY represented by the moderate GOP candidate, just stayed home!?!
Personally, after the 2012 debacle, that line of reasoning doesn’t hold water. Any voter that wasn’t 100% committed to stop Obama, with all the lawlessness, and wrong headedness, will certainly find a different excuse not to vote next time around…..
SO WHAT IS THE ANSWER??
My explanation is “THE GREAT BAIT & SWITCH”….
The media, Uber-leftist that they are, consistently root for, and aid, the candidate in any race, that is farther to the left. In the general election, they help the Democrat. In the GOP primary, they help the moderate. Jeb Bush with his embarrassing numbers, still gets more mentions, and is discussed more than Senator Ted Cruz. We consistently hear “here comes Governor Kasich”, as we didn’t stop hearing in 2012, to “watch Jon Huntsman”…
However, when a moderate secures the nomination, the media, IMMEDIATELY, switches sides!! Over night, the media turns from strong advocates for the moderate Republican, to fierce adversaries of the exact same candidate!!
In 2008, the media was falling all over themselves to support John McCain. Once he became the nominee, they we’re openly hostile. That very WEEK, The New York Times ran a full expose on some supposed scandal in the senators past….
The first thing Romney did as the fresh GOP nominee, was to go on that now infamous foreign trip. The Romney camp didn’t know what hit them!! All of a sudden, the drumbeat of media scorn, ridicule, and unfavorable coverage was pointed at THEIR direction. The strong headwind pointed at their opponents in the primary- that was wind in their back to win the nomination…reversed!! It was like someone simply turned around the media fan… Out of the blue, the Romney’s were facing fierce headwinds. THEY DID NOTHING.
Then came the biggest gift in the history of politics, and Romney squandered it! In a culmination of Obama’s many failings, a US ambassador, and three more Americans were killed in Benghazi….TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION!! It was chock full with; enormous incompetence, reckless and naive policies, inexplicable chaos, and a transparent cover-up. The Romney camp waited for their chairleaders – the media, to spread the message……crickets. To their horror, the media switched teams, and were actively chairing-on Obama, reporting, and covering the movie….
Don’t worry, we were told, by the debate Romney will “nail Obama on Benghazi”…. How did that work out?! Obama simply said he had agreed all along it was a terrorist attack, the leftist moderator agreed, the media didn’t say a word about the inconsistency, so Romney moved on to “the economy”.
IF YOU LIVE BY THE MEDIA, YOU DIE BY THE MEDIA!!!
The 2008, and 2012 campaigns, of Mcain and Romney, are best remembered, as laid back, reactionary, on the defense, and not at all aggressive. The reason is simple. Their campaigns were BUILT in primaries that the wind / media, was in their back. Additionally, the candidates themselves, have never demonstrated the ability to aggressively, and effectively, go after the left. They never honed that skill, and were certainly not battle tested.
The media props up the moderate, enticing and BAITING conservatives to follow along, only to SWITCH away, and tear the GOP candidate to shreds.
We NEED a candidate AND a campaign that is built for the general!!
Which brings us to 2016, and Ted Cruz vs. Marco Rubio.
The difference in the two campaigns is as clear as day, and publicly reported.
Ted Cruz is tirelessly focusing on organizing and retail campaigning , with intensive mobilizing efforts. The man doesn’t sleep!! In the car, he can’t do a TV interview, so he schedules a radio show. He is building a network which one can build on, and only grows, and expands against Hillary.
Rubio has been relying on favorable news coverage and attention, most of which would virtualy disappear in the big fight.
Ted Cruz, as the the nominee, will be treated no different than he’s been, since he arrived on the scene. Cruz is already scorned, hated, lied about, discounted, and ignored. He is building a formidable campaign, DESPITE the media . The only small differences in the general will be; the media will be forced to ignore him less, and will choose to mock him more.
Twice recently, the Cruz team displayed the skills they have developed and honed over the years in pushing back. Mr. Trump quickly regretted referring to Cruz’s tenure in the senate as “like a maniac”. With humor, class, and talent, they displayed a deep connection with popular culture, turned “I am a maniac” into a source of pride, and even sold “I am a maniac” gear….
When the Cruz family shot a brilliant ad, parodying parents reading Holiday books to their little children, a partisan cartoonist for the Washington Post couldn’t stand that two million people viewed it on YouTube alone. She too surely regrets her cartoon, depicting the girls as monkeys. Her editor yanked the picture, and Cruz & Co. turned this incident into what is now being referred to as a gift!!… raising millions and generating plenty of positive news coverage…
Marco Rubio, on the other hand, is now framed as the sensible, electable, moderate. In a general election he would be caught totally flat-footed. Marco is being propped up, by leftists and moderates in the media, only to collapse like a house of cards, when his supporters begin fawning over Hillary.
For heaven’s sake!! Let’s not do the same thing over and over, and expect different results.
Moscow’s Five-Star Treatment of a Three-Star Army General
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
This is a special report from the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism
Before he left for Moscow to speak at a Russia Today (RT) conference, the former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) inked a deal to write a book about how to defeat America’s enemies in the Middle East. The title of the forthcoming book by Lt. General Michael T. Flynn (Ret.) is, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.
But Flynn’s attendance at the RT “gala celebration,” including a special seat at the head table at the anniversary dinner, suggests that this retired officer, who attained a three-star rank during a 33-year Army career, views Russia as a potential U.S. ally in the war on terror.
In announcing his new book, Flynn said, “I am writing this book for two reasons: first, to show that the war is being waged against us by enemies this administration has forbidden us to describe: radical Islamists. Second, to lay out a winning strategy that is not passively relying on technology and drone attacks to do the job. We could lose this war; in fact, right now we are losing. The Field of Fight will give my view on how to win.”
We need military officials willing to fight and win. But Flynn’s participation in the RT anniversary celebration raises questions about what the DIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies know, or think they know, about the Russian role in global conflict and RT’s role in propaganda and disinformation.
What we can say for sure at this point is that it was not an accident that the former head of the DIA showed up in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of a TV channel that serves the interests of Moscow’s intelligence establishment. Flynn was right in the middle of the “Field of Fight,” and he must surely have known what he was getting into. It’s not called KGB-TV for nothing.
RT’s Disinformation Themes
In trying to attract and confuse an American audience, RT regularly features Marxist and radical commentators in the U.S. such as Noam Chomsky, Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and 9/11 “inside job” advocate and radio host Alex Jones. It is preferable for the Russians to use foreigners, especially Americans, to make their propaganda points. Flynn is probably the most important American ever snared in RT’s web. He has added propaganda value because of his impressive background and years of service in the U.S. Army.
The RT conference was held at a time when the Russian regime was determined to divert global attention away from its military intervention on behalf of its long-time client state of Syria. Research analyst Hugo Spaulding of the Institute for the Study of War notes that Russia’s current air campaign in Syria “is focused on targeting Syrian armed opposition groups fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rather than ISIS.” The Syrian Network for Human Rights reportsthat Russian military strikes in Syria have killed hundreds of civilians during the course of bombing hospitals, bakeries, and markets. The result has been increasing refugee flows into Turkey and Europe.
RT, however, promotes a different version of reality, a “false narrative,” as Spaulding calls it. Indeed, that is the purpose of RT—to whitewash military aggression by the Russian state and focus attention on what the United States and its allies are supposedly doing in the world.
“Russian Air Force destroys 29 ISIS camps in Syria in 24 hours,” was the headline over a typical RT story about Syria. The channel portrays Russian President Vladimir Putin, who spoke to the RT 10th anniversary dinner, as a devout Christian fighting radical Islam.
However, Russia’s open war on the ethnic Turkmen fighting the Assad regime in Syria was something that NATO member Turkey could not ignore. The Turkish shoot-down of a Russian war plane flying through Turkey’s airspace became major news and the first incident in a developing confrontation that shows no sign of ending. RT immediately went to work claiming that Turkey was benefiting from ISIS oil. The U.S. Treasury Department countered with evidence showing that Syria’s Assad is buying ISIS oil through a Russian agent.
The Honey Trap
In addition to using Americans as props and pawns, RT relies heavily on glitzy graphics and beautiful women as anchors and correspondents to promote its propaganda. RT knows what it’s doing, having run a story titled, “From Russia with lust: Femme fatal Anna Chapman, to Russian mail-order brides, to our very own RT correspondents. Americans are infatuated with Russian women!”
It is noteworthy that RT openly cited Chapman, a sexy Russian spy who was seducing an unnamed cabinet official in the Obama administration in an effort to obtain classified information. She was caught, pleaded guilty, and was expelled from the U.S. in 2010. However, she returned to Russia and was honored with an award by none other than Vladimir Putin himself. Chapman had reportedly tried to seduce NSA defector Edward Snowden.
One of RT’s attractive female anchors, Sophie Shevardnadze, the granddaughter of former Soviet bureaucrat Eduard Shevardnadze, was tasked with interviewing Flynn during the conference, which was held at Moscow’s historic five-star luxuryMetropol Hotel. Flynn appeared on a special edition of her RT show, Sophie & Co, where he appeared grateful for the opportunity, saying, “…thank you so much for inviting me and having me here.”
In her interview with Flynn, Shevardnadze did not disappoint, echoing the Russian line on the Middle East by blaming the U.S. and its allies for conflict and violence. Rather than attack Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria, Flynn responded by saying that the U.S. and Russia have “to move forward” together. Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from July 2012 to April 2014, said on RT that “…in order for us to not move to a greater level of conflict between the great nations of the world, we have to come to grips of how do we work together, how do we take interests, interests that are converging. So we have a whole set of converging interests that we are seeing right now, and unless we understand it, we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to make tactical mistakes that are going to lead to strategic consequences.”
He claimed that Russia has faced terrorism from Muslims within, as if Russia, like the U.S., is a victim of radical Islam. He said, “…there are some in this country that know this enemy from having dealt with it in Chechnya and Dagestan and other places. This is a very, very deadly enemy that we’re facing, and it’s not just hundreds or thousands, these numbers are much greater.”
In fact, as veteran Moscow correspondent David Satter and others have documented, what sometimes appears to be Islamic terrorism in Russia can be carried out with the approval—or even at the direction of—the Kremlin, in order to justify greater repression by the Putin regime. For example, the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that served to solidify Vladimir Putin’s control of the country, and justify the war against the former Soviet republic of Chechnya, wereproven to be the work of agents of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, a successor to the old KGB.
Moscow’s Role in Terrorism
Could Moscow in fact be behind much of the conflict in the Middle East, including the rise of ISIS? If Flynn has rejected this theory out of hand, it wouldn’t be the first time in history that the U.S. intelligence community failed to understand and appreciate Moscow’s role in international terrorism.
Flynn’s announced co-author, or collaborator, on his new book, Michael Ledeen, has a deep understanding of the Middle East, knowledge of how the old Soviet Union operated, and how remnants of that regime guide Russian foreign policy today. Ledeen worked as a consultant to the National Security Council, Department of State, and Department of Defense during the Reagan administration, when Soviet involvement in global terrorism was highlighted and exposed.
Ledeen’s 2003 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, describes the impact of communist disinformation and deception in the conduct of foreign policy.
Ledeen wrote about the discovery of Soviet moles in the CIA, such as Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson, and the discovery of one such mole in the FBI, Robert Hanssen. Ledeen writes, “The discovery that Soviet moles had been at work at the highest levels of the American intelligence community had particular importance in our efforts to combat the terror masters. Agency [CIA] analysts had long insisted that there was no conclusive evidence of Soviet involvement in international terrorism. One now had to wonder if that conclusion had been fed to us through the KGB moles in our midst.” Ledeen writes about how the intelligence community ignored inside information provided by Soviet defectors, such as theMitrokhin documents, which exposed the nature of Soviet-backed international terrorism, as well as the identities of “thousands of foreign agents—Western politicians, journalists, movie makers, military officers, and diplomats.”
Soviet KGB operations continued after the “collapse” of the Soviet Union in the hands of its successor agencies, the FSB and SVR. The book Comrade J examines the activities of Russian master spy, Sergei Tretyakov, who handled all Russian intelligence operations against the U.S. while serving under cover from 1995 to 2000 at Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.
Since intelligence operations continued as if nothing had happened, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, why isn’t it reasonable to assume that the Russians maintained contacts with international terrorist groups?
To his credit, Flynn has been very critical of the role of Russia’s close ally in the Middle East—Iran. In June 2015 testimony, after his retirement, he cited Iranian cooperation with North Korea, China and Russia, and pointed with alarm to the “resurgence of Russian and Chinese influence” in the Middle East. He said Russian assistance to Iran was a part of the problem, noting that “After all, the Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr is Russian-built, the two countries work very closely together in Syria, and Russia is providing Iran with an effective antiaircraft system that could be deployed against any aircraft seeking to destroy the nuclear program.”
However, in the RT interview with Sophie Shevardnadze, Flynn’s criticism of Iran was couched in terms of getting all of the Arab and Muslim countries in the region to behave. He merely said “…Iran cannot continue to go the way it’s going” because it was contributing to the conflict.
The Birth of RT
The Russians have gotten far more sophisticated, especially in the field of global propaganda and information. But the reality of what is happening behind the scenes came to public attention when two RT employees, Elizabeth Wahl and Sara Firth, resigned in disgust at the propaganda that they were ordered to spew on the air. For example, the Russian managers ordered “news” that was designed todepict the Ukrainian government in a bad light and mask Russian military interference in that country, including the shoot-down and destruction of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was carrying almost 300 people.
At the RT anniversary dinner on Thursday night, Putin made no mention of those embarrassing resignations. Instead he presented the channel as a free and independent news entity featuring “creative” people who are serving the global public interest. He said to his audience (including Lt. Gen. Flynn), “You compete on the same playing field as international news giants, and are already beating them according to many parameters. In some regions of the world, you have higher ratings than traditional news organizations that have long been operating in the international information market.”
The speech was laughable, considering the Kremlin funding and control of the channel. Yet, it was posted on the president of Russia’s website, along with photographs of the affair. Moscow is obviously proud of what it has accomplished, with the cooperation of foreigners who appear on the channel and give it credibility.
The participation of a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the event was a major coup for RT. Film and photos of his participation will help the Russians in their ongoing propaganda campaign to depict the state-funded entity as simply a respectable source of alternative news and opinion that offers different views.
Showing the continuity between the old Soviet Union and Russia, former Soviet President Gorbachev was in attendance at the Thursday night dinner. He “congratulated RT and expressed his admiration for the network,” the channel reported. Outside the event, Gorbachev called the channel a “big success.”
The Case of Edward Snowden
Flynn’s attendance at the RT conference was shocking not only because Putin is an evil ruler whose regime murders opposition figures and truly independent journalists, but because Flynn was critical in the past about the damage done by NSA defector Edward Snowden, who escaped to Russia and now lives under Putin’s protection.
Flynn said in January 2014 that Snowden’s disclosures have caused “grave damage to our national security.” He added that “the greatest cost” of his disclosures will be “the cost in human lives on tomorrow’s battlefield or in someplace where we will put our military forces…when we ask them to go into harm’s way.”
It appears that the information stolen by Snowden has contributed significantly to the advances of the enemies and adversaries of the United States. Since his defection, Russia conducted a surprise invasion of Ukraine; Communist China mounted a series of cyber warfare attacks; and ISIS has gained ground in the Middle East and around the world. The bloody terrorist assaults in Paris and San Bernardino were carried out by plotters who clearly benefitted from Snowden’s revelations and were careful to plan their attacks using encrypted communications apps, such as Telegram, which was developed by a Russian, Pavel Durov.
RT has consistently portrayed Snowden as a whistleblower, and ran what was apparently intended as a humorous promotional ad in connection with the 10th anniversary celebration. It imagined that the NSA defector would return to the U.S. and be elected U.S. president. The ad shows an elderly Barack Obama in the year 2035 complaining about RT’s “propaganda.”
Snowden apparently wasn’t at the RT celebration, but former Russia Today TV star, Julian Assange, appeared via videotape from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was interviewed by the well-known American “progressive” commentator, Thom Hartmann, who is paid by Moscow to host an RT show that appeals to liberals and left-wingers. Incredibly, the issue being discussed was the “right to privacy”—a right that doesn’t exist in Russia itself. Assange was the recipient of massive leaks from former U.S. Army analyst Bradley Manning, who is becoming a woman named Chelsea while serving a prison term for espionage.
Obama’s Support for Terrorism
One issue raised in RT’s interview of Flynn was a heavily-censored 2012 DIA memo that has been interpreted by many as confirmation that the U.S. and some of its allies had armed the terrorist groups in the Middle East that eventually became ISIS. According to the memo, these groups were seen as effective in countering the Russia/Iran/Syria axis in the area. The memo also described China as backing the Syrian regime.
Flynn’s criticism of this policy since he left the DIA has been made in different venues, including in interviews with Al Jazeera and Der Spiegel. As Flynn has correctly indicated, it is apparent that Obama’s policy in the Middle East has been a disaster. The Benghazi terrorist attacks in Libya, which cost the lives of four Americans, came to pass after the U.S. “switched sides in the war on terror,” as areport from the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi has demonstrated. But just as the Obama administration must be held accountable for arming terrorists, so too must the role of the Putin regime in fostering terrorism be exposed.
In addition to the evidence of an FSB role in domestic terrorism, a defector from the Russian intelligence agency has just confirmed Russia’s role in creating ISIS by recruiting former members of Saddam Hussein’s security services. The former FSB officer told Ukrainian journalist Andriy Tsaplienko that “the Russian special services believed that if a terrorist organization was set up as an alternative to Al-Qaeda and it created problems for the United States as Donbas does for Ukraine now, it would be quite good.” Donbas is the name for the region of Ukraine that has been the staging area for terrorists from Russia, organized by the FSB, to seize territory and undermine Ukraine’s central government. Once again, Russia has demonstrated its commitment to global conflict rather than peace and reconciliation.
The FSB defector said that in order to create ISIS, the Russians selected former officers of the Iraqi army and members of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. All of them had graduated from Moscow-based “educational institutions,” he said, referring to the time when the Saddam Hussein regime was in a close alliance with the Soviet Union. The overthrow of the Saddam regime was a huge blow to Russian influence in the Middle East. Iran and the Assad regime are the only firm Russian allies left in the region.
Russians Fighting for Terrorist Groups
The Daily Beast ran an article, “Russians Are Joining ISIS in Droves.” But the idea advanced by The Daily Beast that these terrorists are a threat to Russia is not borne out by the evidence. It seems like they are more of a threat to the rest of the world, especially the United States. In what could be seen as an observation or a threat, Putin himself publicly acknowledged that there are an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Russians fighting for ISIS. By contrast, FBI Director James Comey has estimated that approximately 250 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria to join ISIS. These potential terrorists are believed to be threats to America.
On December 3rd, the U.S. Justice Department announced that Irek Ilgiz Hamidullin, a Russian national and former Russian army tank commander, had been sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison for conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers and bring down an American helicopter, as well as for “conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and several other charges relating to an attack that he led against U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan in November 2009.”
It is telling that the U.S., not the Russian authorities, prosecuted him. Perhaps the U.S. was reluctant to turn him over to Moscow. This is reminiscent of the case of the Russian arms dealer and former Soviet military officer Viktor Bout, the legendary “Merchant of Death” who is serving a 25-year sentence in U.S. federal prison. Bout was lured out of Russia, where he was living openly, and arrested in a sting operation in Thailand by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Some of the weapons Bout was selling were for communist Colombian terrorists to use against Americans.
RT has covered the Bout case relentlessly, always in a manner critical of the United States for apprehending and prosecuting him. RT has even highlighted how Bout’s wife has set up The Road Home Foundation to facilitate the return to Russia of Bout and other Russians convicted of crimes abroad.
In another sensational case, the Boston Marathon bombing was carried out by two brothers from Russia, but the Russian connection was immediately discounted on the ground that the Russians had reportedly warned U.S. authorities about the bombers’ travels back and forth to the old Soviet Union. Curiously, RT ran claims by their mother back in Russia that the terrorists were “set up” by the FBI.
It is indeed strange how a Russian connection seems to surface in some of these most sensational terrorism cases.
In the more recent San Bernardino attack, we have a case of two Russian beautiesmarried to Muslim men. A Russian blonde beauty had married into the terrorist’s family, and another Russian woman had married Enrique Marquez, a convert to Islam who bought the weapons used in the massacre.
Nuclear Jihad?
In his June 2015 testimony, Flynn acknowledged that the U.S. intelligence community has had a “mixed” record in one important area—“tracking clandestine nuclear weapons programs.” In this context, it is significant that in his December 9 testimony to Congress, FBI director James Comey made a passing reference to how the bureau had disrupted “a nuclear threat in Moldova,” an Eastern European country and former Soviet republic. There is much more to the story and it directly involves the criminal regime in Moscow.
The story came to light in October, when the Associated Press disclosed that “gangs with suspected Russian connections” had tried on several occasions to “sell radioactive material to Middle Eastern extremists.” AP said the latest known case came in February this year, “when a smuggler offered a huge cache of deadly cesium—enough to contaminate several city blocks—and specifically sought a buyer from the Islamic State group.”
In a follow-up report, the Center for Public Integrity said the nuclear material in the various cases “appeared to have the same origin—a restricted military installation in Russia.” It added that “no one in the West knows exactly who has this nuclear explosive material, and where they may be.”
The group concluded, “It’s a mystery that so far has stumped America’s best spying efforts, in no small measure because the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin has refused to provide needed information on the case—or even to acknowledge that some of the country’s nuclear explosive materials are missing.”
Don’t look for RT to get to the bottom of this.
A Stamp for Disgraced Newsman Cronkite?
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
Before Dan Rather disgraced himself as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, there was Walter Cronkite, who paved the way for a communist takeover of South Vietnam and openly despised and attacked President Ronald Reagan’s peace-through-strength policies. Cronkite, who became an advocate of world government and a stooge of Soviet propaganda operations, is now the subject of a campaign to put his likeness on an official U.S. postage stamp.
The terrible truth about Walter Cronkite, as we noted in 2009 after his passing, is that he “symbolized liberal media bias and used that bias with disastrous consequences for our nation and the world.”
This wasn’t just our opinion. The 1974 book by Dr. Ernest W. LeFever, TV and National Defense, examined in meticulous detail how CBS News programs under Cronkite “were frequently critical of U.S. policy,” usually from a perspective that “implied or called for a lesser military commitment and lower defense expenditures.”
The CBS News bias against a strong national defense continued when President Reagan took office, after the policies of Democratic President Jimmy Carter had severely weakened America’s standing in the world.
The push for a Cronkite stamp comes at a time when Robert Redford is playing Cronkite’s successor, Dan Rather, in a movie ironically titled “Truth” and based on a lie. Rather used forged documents to smear Republican President George W. Bush’s military service.
The proposed stamp seems to be a case of the old media longing for the days when a figure like Cronkite, once known as “the most trusted man in America,” could manipulate the public and affect national policy with little, if any, dissent.
The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Radio Television Digital News Association are leading the campaign to have the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, a 12-member group appointed by the postmaster general, issue a stamp in Cronkite’s honor.
As CBS Evening News anchorman, Cronkite campaigned against the American effort to save Vietnam from communism and attacked President Reagan for his anti-communist and anti-Soviet views. What was suspected during his life became known after his death. Cronkite was named in his FBI file as having been targeted in a Soviet “active measures” campaign against President Reagan’s anti-communist foreign policy.
Later in life, as if to confirm his role as an agent of influence against his own government, Cronkite made an appearance before the World Federalist Association, which favors world government financed by global taxes, and called for the U.S. to renounce “some of its sovereignty” and pass a series of United Nations treaties. Then-First Lady Hillary Clinton also appeared, via videotape, to pay tribute to the former CBS Evening News anchorman.
In 1988, Cronkite addressed a left-wing People for the American Way conference and denounced President Reagan for the “unilateral” military actions in Grenada, when the U.S. military evicted a communist gang, and Libya, when Reagan ordered a military strike in retaliation for the acts of terrorism against Americans.
Incredibly, Cronkite said that the smartest president he ever met was Jimmy Carter. The Carter presidency paved the way for the coming to power of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Islamic zealots in Iran. Later in life, Carter became an advocate of the interests of the Arab/Muslim world against Israel.
But SPJ at-large board member Bill McCloskey told Accuracy in Media, “In my view, Walter Cronkite deserves to be commemorated by the Postal Service as were a few other prominent journalists. He had a talent for engaging the American public in the important issues of the day in a way that they could understand and digest. His talent showed particularly in his reporting on Watergate and Vietnam, two very complex stories that had great importance to his audience, which was vast. There is a reason he was known as ‘the most trusted man in America.’ Certainly Walter Cronkite fulfills the Postal Service’s goal of commemorating American history better than some of the current crop of stamps featuring stylized eagles, flowers, ducks and bunnies.”
Regarding coverage of the war in Southeast Asia, Cronkite “contributed a great deal to our defeat in Vietnam,” noted Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine.
As we have previously pointed out, the bloody result of the Vietnam War was 58,260 U.S. servicemen and nearly one million civilians dead. The South Vietnamese military lost about a quarter of a million, while tens of thousands of South Vietnamese allies of the U.S. were left behind after the American military withdrawal and tortured in communist camps. Thousands of others fled in leaky boats, becoming known as the “boat people.”
Professor Paul Kengor’s book, All The Dupes Fit To Print: Journalists Who Have Served As Tools of Communist Propaganda, devotes a chapter to Cronkite, noting he was singled out in Soviet propaganda operations as willing to go along with communist campaigns against U.S. foreign policy. The record is clear for anyone, including professional journalists, to see.
Nevertheless, Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication has joined the campaign to honor Cronkite, saying it is encouraging alumni, students, faculty, staff and the journalism community to write a letter of support to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee.
Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan said, “Walter Cronkite is our school’s guiding light…We are rallying our network of students, alumni, faculty and friends to get behind this fantastic proposal by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio Television Digital News Association.”
The eagles, flowers, ducks and bunnies that the SPJ’s McCloskey says are featured on stamps are harmless. Cronkite left a legacy of suffering and death and helped destroy objective news reporting in the process. It is shocking that a journalism school is named after him and that the SPJ, which maintains an ethics code, is leading a campaign to honor the disgraced journalist.
However, a stamp in tribute to Cronkite would be on the same level as a movie honoring his disgraced successor.
After honoring Cronkite, can a stamp paying tribute to Brian Williams be far behind? Williams’ lies are penny ante compared to Cronkite’s ability to destroy a free South Vietnam, apologize for Soviet communism, and promote world government.
- Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, 475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Room 3300, Washington, DC 20260-3501.
Is Trump the Next Reagan?
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, one of many communist groups in the U.S., argues that “the long period of reaction that began in the late 1970s and greatly accelerated under Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States is drawing to a close.” Leaving aside the Marxist rhetoric about “reaction,” one has to say there may be some validity to what the communists are saying. After all, Bernie Sanders seems to be leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Marxist Jeremy Corbyn has become head of the Labor Party in Britain, and the socialist New Democratic Party is poised to win national elections in Canada on October 19.
On the Republican side in the U.S., the leading candidate, Donald Trump, seems to have no ideology at all. While he has made illegal immigration into an issue, his statements on other issues demonstrate no coherent outlook on the nature or size of government. On foreign policy, his claim that he could negotiate with Russia’s Vladimir Putin seems to be a reflection of his “Art of the Deal” approach to business matters. But Putin means business, and the Russians can’t be trusted. It’s shocking that Trump thinks he can somehow negotiate a good deal with Putin, whose military position has been enhanced under the presidency of Barack Obama.
In order to understand the Sanders phenomenon, I covered the senator’s Monday night appearance in Manassas, Virginia, where he spoke to a mostly young white audience. The media exaggerated the number of people who turned out, with several reporters putting the size of the crowd at 10,000. But about 2,000 people did, in fact, show up, feeling the “Bern” as Sanders took it to the “billionaire class” and demanded freebies for the “kids,” as he called the students with college debt. He knows that free college has an appeal, like the general socialist notion that government can provide goods and services at little or no cost. It’s a fable that students who should be getting a good education are falling for in increasing numbers. They account for much of the Sanders movement.
Sanders made only one mention of Russia in his Manassas speech, saying that he hoped that the U.S. would join with Russia and other countries to tackle so-called climate change. He didn’t have one word of criticism for Putin over the invasion of Ukraine and threats against other nations, including the U.S.
Russia is a good place to start when analyzing both Sanders and Trump. It is a test of what they know and would do about foreign policy. Sanders, who honeymooned in the old USSR and worked with Communist Party fronts like the U.S. Peace Council, doesn’t want to talk about it. Let’s hope Trump gets pressed on this issue during Wednesday night’s debate on CNN.
On Tuesday, we received more ominous news about Russian military advances. Reuters reported that General Frank Gorenc, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, cited “alarming” moves by the Russian military since the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and its takeover of Crimea. He made the comments at the annual Air Force Association conference.
Air Force Times headlined his remarks, “USAFE commander: Russia catching up with Air Force.” This paper quoted Gorenc as saying, “The advantage that we had from the air, I can honestly say, is shrinking, not only with respect to the aircraft that they’re producing, but the more alarming thing is their ability to create anti-access area denied areas is a challenge that we’re all going to face up to and that we’re all going to have to train to.”
So how would Donald Trump negotiate with Putin over this? It seems the only response the Russians would understand would be for the U.S. to modernize its own military, in order to maintain an advantage.
It’s clear that Sanders and Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn would get along very well. Indeed, Sanders said he was delighted that Corbyn won the election as head of the British Labor Party. Corbyn is considered so far left that it is not unfair to call him a stooge of Putin and Russia.
The Sanders success and the Corbyn victory are two reasons why a communist outfit like the Party for Socialism and Liberation is so optimistic about the future, from the “progressive” perspective.
The Marxist group proclaims, using its familiar jargon, that “A new period of resistance to monopoly capitalism/imperialism is opening up, potentially leading to a revival of not only the trade unions but the revolutionary workers’ movement throughout the world. That this initial revival of anti-capitalism and socialism is being frequently, although not exclusively, expressed through the vehicle of electoral politics is to be expected in the first stage.”
It does indeed look like the socialists and their fellow-travelers are on the move. When you add to their forces a Marxist pope whose anti-capitalist rhetoric has been matched by dealings which enabled President Obama to recognize the communist government of Cuba, one has to acknowledge that the Thatcher and Reagan years are behind us and that their enemies have managed to come out on top.
Against this trend, here in America, we have the spectacle of a businessman leading the Republican race for the presidential nomination who has flip-flopped on every significant public policy issue, including his political party identification. Indeed, The Smoking Gun website cites documents indicating that Trump switched political party affiliations many different times. While Reagan left the Democratic Party and became a Republican, he did this for solid ideological reasons.
Reagan talked issues, while Trump talks about himself, especially his hair. Reagan had a good head of hair and an anti-communist brain to go along with it.
The Secret of Trump’s Success
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
“Go back to Univision” is how Donald Trump handled Mexican-American “journalist” Jorge Ramos when he tried to disrupt a Trump news conference. When Hillary Clinton compared Republicans to terrorists, the Republican National Committee asked for an apology. This contrast demonstrates why Trump is doing so well and the Republican Party, in general, is doing so poorly.
On the Megyn Kelly Fox News show on Thursday night, much was made of the fact that Hillary had made her comparison between Republicans and terrorists as she was looking at her notes. In other words, Kelly and her guest concluded, it was a deliberate insult. Of course it was. Why was this a surprise? Mrs. Clinton had returned to her roots as an Alinskyite, someone who demonizes her opponents as a deliberate strategy. Why can’t conservatives get it through their heads that Hillary is a committed leftist who can be just as good as Obama when it comes to poisoning the public discourse for political purposes?
Republican National Committee (RNC) Press Secretary Allison Moore said, “For Hillary Clinton to equate her political opponents to terrorists is a new low for her flailing campaign. She should apologize immediately for her inflammatory rhetoric.”
What is the point of such a statement? Does the RNC seriously believe Hillary will consider apologizing to Republicans? What the RNC should have said is that Hillary was back to using Alinskyite tactics, which she learned about in college, and that the use of such a strategy demonstrated her grounding in a form of Marxism. The RNC could have said that the American people have had enough of these divisive tactics from Obama, who has come close to inciting a race war in the United States, and that the public cannot tolerate another un-American presidency in which a top Democrat equates political opponents to foreign enemies.
As we argued more than two months ago, you have to study Marxism to understand Hillary. It is apparent the RNC hasn’t done its opposition research. Despite her love for money, Hillary is as much of a leftist as Barack Obama. She studied Alinsky in college and went to work as an intern for a law firm that employed communists. The best source of information on this is Hell to Pay, a book on Hillary by Barbara Olson, who told me in an interview in 2000 that she expected Mrs. Clinton to run for president and that her political background made her a “budding Leninist” who understood the concept of acquiring, accumulating and maintaining political power at any cost. In the same vein, she is determined to destroy the Republicans at any cost. Joe Biden has to understand this side of Hillary. It may be one reason why he is reluctant to jump into the presidential race against her. With a history of plagiarism and embarrassing off-the-cuff remarks, Biden could be torn apart.
Hillary Clinton has the blood of four Americans on her hands over her handling of Benghazi. Yet, she compares Republicans to terrorists? And the RNC responds by asking for an apology? This is almost comical.
Trump doesn’t ask for apologies. He fires back any way he can. That’s why, despite questions about his ideology and even religious views, he strikes a chord. The American people have watched their country being destroyed from within for seven years and they are tired of politicians responding with hearings, investigations and requests for apologies. They can’t figure out why Obama hasn’t been impeached by now. They want someone to tell it like it is about the deterioration of our nation and those responsible for its demise.
What Trump has done, on so many occasions it is difficult to count, is to finger the media for their role in the destruction of America. Can you believe he actually accuses liberal reporters of being dishonest? He actually mocks and ridicules them to their faces.
Univision deserves scorn. It is a “news” organization that openly targets Trump and he has the guts to counterattack when one of Univision’s hired guns shows up at a Trump news conference for the purpose of making a spectacle of himself and trying to embarrass Trump. “Go back to Univision” is precisely the comment that Ramos deserved. If anything, one can argue that Trump was too nice for inviting the advocacy journalist back to the press conference.
The Los Angeles Times calls Ramos “the Spanish-language Walter Cronkite,” and suggests that the confrontation could somehow “prove dangerous for Trump, who thus far been something of a Teflon candidate.” This is the obligatory reference to how Trump has opened himself up to the charge of racism for putting the obnoxious Ramos in his place. Later in the article, we read that Ramos’s daughter is working for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, but Ramos “has said her job doesn’t affect his work.” Sure. Now we have another example of why Trump calls the media dishonest.
As for the comparison with Cronkite, the long-time CBS Evening News anchorman was as much of a fraud as Ramos. Cronkite undermined the war against communism in Vietnam and used his newscast as a soapbox to argue against President Reagan’s military buildup to counter the Soviets. Cronkite’s FBI file showed he was a dupe of the Soviet intelligence services, who could be counted on to promote Soviet objectives. After he retired, he showed up at a World Federalist meeting to accept an award and endorse world government through the United Nations. Hillary was there via videotape to thank him.
Ramos should ask for an apology from the Los Angeles Times for being compared to Walter Cronkite. I’m joking, of course. They are both disgraces to the journalism profession.