03/9/15

The Serious Side of Funny Man Stan Evans

M. Stanton Evans joked about his “Law of Inadequate Paranoia” at the Thirty Fifth Annual The Pumpkin Papers Irregulars dinner on October 31, 2012. He said, “No matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it, it is always worse.”

The comment was a humorous look at America’s internal security problems. People laughed, but it was nervous laughter. The audience knew that Stan was talking about a real problem that he had dedicated his life to exposing.

At the same event, named after the documents hidden by Whittaker Chambers that confirmed the role of State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, Stan said he was optimistic that things would turn around. “I see in the country a rising tide of traditional values, a belief in personal liberty, limited government, strong national defense,” he said. “In other words, an atmosphere of hate.”

Stan made jokes exposing the insidious liberal mentality and its domination of government and what passes for public debate in the media. I recorded and posted a video of the Pumpkin Papers event from a table a few rows back, but you can still get a sense of how great a speaker and how funny he was.

But Stan also wrote important books on conservative philosophy, such as The Theme is Freedom, and ran the National Journalism Center in order to correct liberal bias in the media by training young conservative journalists dedicated to objective reporting and accuracy. Hundreds went through the training process.

I came to the National Journalism Center program as I was graduating from college in journalism in 1978. My work in Stan’s program included an outside internship at Accuracy in Media, and I was then hired by AIM’s Reed Irvine. It was my first job out of college. I later went to work for Allan Ryskind at Human Events.

In short, my career has been blessed by associations with some of the great minds in journalism and the conservative movement. All were Reagan conservatives who believed in the three-legged stool of conservative philosophy—moral values, a strong national defense and economic freedom.

I had an inkling of what journalism was all about after using Curtis MacDougall’s classic textbook, Interpretative Reporting, in college. It helped me to understand that a massive shift had taken place from objective news reporting to advocacy journalism. That’s a major reason why I became a media critic as well as a journalist.

MacDougall, who taught at Northwestern University, ran for office on the Communist-controlled Progressive Party ticket. I obtained Curtis MacDougall’s 319-page FBI file, showing he was on the “security index” of the FBI and under surveillance because of his affiliation with many communist fronts.

As I have previously reported, his Interpretative Reporting textbook criticized the media for being too soft on the late Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI). It was the perfect primer for a generation of liberal journalists taught to think that anyone opposed to communism or socialism was an extremist. MacDougall advertised himself as an “expert on McCarthyism,” and praised Fidel Castro as a “world statesman” and an anti-imperialist with a “record of achievement.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that in its obituary, the liberal Washington Post took a shot at Stan for trying to “rehabilitate the reputation of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy with a sympathetic biography.”

In attacking Stan over his McCarthy book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, Post reporter Matt Schudel insisted that McCarthy “ruined many careers with his accusations.” Of course, he failed to name anyone whose career was ruined by McCarthy.

Accuracy in Media gave Stan the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2009 for his McCarthy book.

In looking back at Stan’s career, many have noted his role in writing the 1960 Sharon Statement of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a group that got me involved in the conservative movement while still in high school. I attended a YAF conference in Sharon, Connecticut, at the estate of William F. Buckley, Jr., and heard Buckley give a powerful speech on how the desire for human freedom will never die.

I was drawn to YAF for its support of what became critical to Ronald Reagan’s conservative coalition—a belief in economic freedom, a strong national defense and traditional moral values.

While Stan had a tremendous impact on the growth and direction of the conservative movement, it’s also the case that we have seen a libertarian tendency assume prominence in recent years. Stan was always a libertarian in the limited government sense, and welcomed libertarians into the conservative movement. But what we are now seeing under the guise of “libertarianism” is something quite different.

Consider the fact that the Charles Koch Institute and the National Review Institute are co-sponsoring an event to promote the book, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future, with the author Charles C.W. Cooke. It is described as a call to arms for the growing movement of members of the right “who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” The book strikes me as an attempt to fundamentally transform the conservative movement into an ally of the “progressives” on such matters as gay rights, abortion rights, and drug legalization.

This is not what drove Stan Evans and the candidate he promoted for the presidency, Ronald Reagan.

There is also a foreign policy dimension to this unfolding debacle. Young Americans for Freedom itself seems to have been eclipsed by Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, libertarian groups which have declared NSA defector Edward Snowden a hero, and sponsor speeches by such left-wing figures as filmmaker Oliver Stone and Snowden mouthpiece Glenn Greenwald.

Based on these curious connections, as well as the adoption of a libertarian foreign policy that quite clearly would permit the Iranians to develop nuclear weapons, I get the definite sense that a traditional conservative belief in a strong national defense is in peril if these libertarians take control of the movement.

One cannot read the Sharon Statement without concluding that Stan Evans and the founders of YAF and the conservative movement were devoted to the national security of the United States. The Sharon Statement referred to the importance of national sovereignty and called for victory over the forces of international communism.

The Sharon Statement is still relevant today.

As we witness a former KGB spy preside over Russia’s re-emergence, in alliance with Communist China, as well as Marxism taking control of country after country in Latin America, we can now understand that declarations of victory over communism were premature. But the goal of the Sharon Statement then and now is still legitimate.

In this context, Stan’s book on Stalin’s Secret Agents, co-authored with Herbert Romerstein in 2012, is required reading. The book demonstrates that we are still coming to grips with the full story of how enemy agents operated on American soil in the highest levels of government. Trevor Loudon’s book, The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists, and Progressives in the U.S. Congress, brings this terrible story up to date.

Stan Evans showed that we can laugh at the ridiculousness of the liberals while taking seriously the threat they pose to the American way of life.

But with progressives taking aim at, and even infiltrating the conservative movement, we should only laugh long enough to catch our breath and take action to preserve the legacy Stan and so many others left behind for us. Stan’s “Law of Inadequate Paranoia” may not be so funny after all.

03/9/15

Forum: Is the Republican Party Dead? Can It Be Saved?

The Watcher’s Council

Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: Is the Republican Party Dead? Can It Be Saved?

GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD: Au Contraire! As best understood, GOP is like going ganksta – scoring majorities every where in state and local chiz. And if GOP Governors really wanted to do some monkey wrenching they could regress back to the old school days when state governors and their legislative posse determined who the senators were.

Lee Outlaw disagrees and gives up 3 reasons why cause the GOP is kaput:

The focus on RINO’s.
Destruction of true conservatives.
Rise of Libertarians

Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason: The Republican Party is not dead but it has become corrupted with political and social progressives. To have any chance to get a true conservative to win the primary election it is going to take hard work at the local level. By now, Americans who have been paying attention know that our country is headed in the wrong direction under the Obama presidency. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, sixty-two percent of Americans believe we are headed in the wrong direction. This includes eighty-two percent of Republican voters and sixty-six percent not affiliated with either the Democrat or Republican Party.

Grass roots Get Out The Vote volunteers have to convince those registered as Independent to change party affiliation to Republican so they can vote in the primary and help select the Republican candidate. This is the only way we have a chance of getting a conservative in the White House. In addition, our contributions should go directly to the candidates. We need to find our candidate early and throw all of our efforts behind him or her and make sure they garner the nomination.

We have the numbers. We need to get the momentum early and keep it going throughout the primary process and into the general election.

JoshuaPundit: If not dead, certainly at least on life support, although an infrastructure this large and well rooted may take some time before the coroner of history notifies us. Put simply, a political party’s raison d’etre is its support of certain principles. In the case of the Republicans, for instance, it was originally the abolition of slavery. Actually, a lot of the original Republican Party came from the Whigs after that party split over that issue.

A party simply cannot go on disrespecting its declared principles and lying to its base supporters time after time and expect them to turn out and vote. That’s what eventually happened to the Whigs and that’s why over 3 million self-identified Republicans sat on their hands and stayed home in 2012.

I’m normally an optimist, as you know, but here’s how I see it. The GOP, no thanks to the RNC, won an historic majority in the House in 2010 with the promise they were going to defund ObamaCare. They didn’t and caved, with the excuse they didn’t run the Senate. And in 2012, they ran the one candidate unable to attack ObamaCare. In 2014, the GOP campaigned on taking over the senate and thy were elected to stop Obama’s agenda, especially his unconstitutional amnesty for illegal aliens by executive order. You’d think anyone with a modicum of political sense would understand that 15-30 million new Democrat voters might just affect their election prospects in the future, but not these guys! The donor class and the Chamber of Commerce want a continual stream of cheap labor and the Dems want the votes, so there’s a real meeting of the minds here at the country’s expense!

And it’s not just amnesty. On virtually every issue, the Republicans have sacrificed their constitutional power of the purse and have allowed this president and Harry Reid to do whatever they wanted. Even Reid’s using the nuclear option to shove through radical judges and appointees like those FCC functionaries brought no retaliation from the house… or from the Senate, now that Mitch McConnell is majority leader.

There are many admirable Republicans, but they aren’t the ones leading the party and as such, their efforts have been doomed to frustration. The Republicans right now are a house divided, and to paraphrase Lincoln, without something radical changing I don’t see them standing.

The Right Planet: We are quickly approaching the point where the GOP will be relegated to the dustbin of history, in my opinion. If Obama’s illegal executive amnesty is allowed to stand, it will bring at least eight million new voters into the Democratic Party. And that’s a conservative estimate. If the Republican leadership believes allowing executive amnesty will create new Republican voters, they are utterly delusional–not to mention the ominous precedent of allowing a sitting president to rule by decree, sans Congress.

But, according to Trevor Loudon, the Chamber of Commerce has spent $1.7 billion promoting amnesty over the past 10 years. Why? Simple answer: cheap labor. It appears that members of the Vichy wing of the GOP are only thinking of profits and their own expedient ends. California, which is the most populous state in the union with the most electoral votes, has already been lost to the Marxists and communists. If executive amnesty is not shot down, the GOP can kiss the second most populous state in the union, Texas, goodbye. And if that happens, you’ll never see another Republican president elected again in your lifetime. We’ll have a one-party state ruled by the unions and the communists. If you think the progressives are arrogant now, just wait until they have sole control without any effective opposition. You won’t have to visit Venezuela or Cuba to see what it’s like. You’ll be living in it.

The Glittering Eye: I’m not really sure how to answer the question. Let’s start with some definitions. There are several different types of political parties. The two we’re most interested in a programmatic parties and catch-all parties.

A programmatic party is a party that has a clear, stated identity and point-of-view and a program that implements that point-of-view. A catch-all party is the opposite–it’s a political party that unites people with many different, often drastically different points-of-view. A catch-all program practically by definition does not have a coherent program.

The next definition we need is one of electoral systems. Rather than going through the whole array of different alternatives I’ll just mention the system that we have. In the United States we have what is referred to as a “winner take all” system. This contrasts with, for example, a proportional representation system.

It is widely recognized that “winner take all” systems inevitably evolve into two party systems.

Okay, now to the forum question. For the last thirty years both the Democratic and Republican Parties have been inching towards being programmatic parties. As they have, the number of people who are independents, unaffiliated with either party, or only marginally affiliated with either party has increased.

There is no future for a programmatic party in the United States be it a conservative party or a liberal party. The only viable parties at the national level are necessarily catch-all parties. There are other practical problems with tossing the RINOs and DINOs out of the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively but the most immediate result of doing that will be to discredit the entire idea of political parties. That won’t mean that the two major parties will be tossed into the ashcan of history. It means they’ll become decreasingly representative of anything but a handful of party bosses and big donors.

The Independent Sentinel: Yes, it’s dead, stone cold dead. Near as I can figure, the only thing they really stand for is not increasing the minimum wage.

Actually, that’s not fair. They still care about the military though they seem a little shaky on that lately too. They did pass sequestration and our military now have to worry about job security, pay, benefits, housing allowances, and affordable medical care.

They run as Republicans and serve as Democrats.

Ask Marion: The Republican party is dead if they do not run and fight the good and successful fight in 2016 to nominate and elect a fiscal and constitutional conservative to the office of President of the United States.

The U.S. Congress has been co-opted by RINOs and progressives like House Speaker John Boehner, Senator John McCain and his buddy Senator Lindsay Graham who line up with the Democrats to demonize and stop the true Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Rand Paul, Congresswoman Mia Love, Congressman Trey Gowdy, Senator Mike Lee, Congressman Jason Chavetz, Congressman Jeff Sessions and the like… who are desperately trying to save America and live up to their campaign promises.

Our Watcher’s Council Teammate Sara from the Independent Sentinel recently wrote: “;The Republican party is officially dead. Remember that autopsy Republicans held after Romney lost in 2012? They were serious. They had an autopsy because they’re dead.”;

Grumpy of Grumpy’s Notebook recently asked, “Why the Hell Boehner Still Speaker?”

Ace Of Spades HQ featured: “It’s Over: Boehner, Boehner’s Establishment Allies, and Democrats Unite to Fund Obama’s Executive Amnesty”

And former Senator Jim DeMint wrote a great piece entitled, “If Not Now … When? Will the GOP Majority Ever Stand for Anything? ”

The Republican Party is close to going the way of the Whig party but there is much more at stake than the GOP. Because of where America stands… teetering on the very edge of existence, 2016 could be the end of both the Republican Party as well as the America we grew up in, our Founders gave us and the rest of the world used to envy.

We need to stop listening to the progressive media, educate ourselves and then educate our family, friends and neighbors. The Republican Party and America need Gov. Sarah Palin, Gov. Scott Walker, Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul or the like as their candidate in 2016 and our president for the next 8-years… Or they both will be extinct!

Well, there you have it!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum and every Tuesday morning, when we reveal the week’s nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it… or any of the other fantabulous Watcher’s Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that, y’know?

03/9/15

America’s Military Power in a Steep Decline

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

“Eliminating the terrorists of today with force will not guarantee protection from the terrorists of tomorrow. We have to transform the environments that give birth to these movements…It may be training young people so they can get jobs…it may be working to eliminate corruption and promote the rule of law…”

The Obama administration proposal that a jobs program be created for the militants in the Middle East was met with appropriate derision because what the jihadists need is killing. That’s what they are doing to Christians, Jews and others in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The quote above is by John Kerry, the Secretary of State, and to be fair, his February 18 Wall Street Journal commentary began by saying “The rise of violent extremism represents the pre-eminent challenge of the young 21^st Century. Military force is a rational and often necessary response to the wanton slaughters of children, mass kidnappings of schoolgirls, and beheading of innocents. But military force along won’t achieve victory.”

Kerry is wrong. History as recent as the mid-20^th century is proof enough that the military defeat of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan was the only thing that ended the threat they represented. He was also wrong when he told a congressional committee that the world is a safer place these days when it is clear to anyone it is not.

We are being led by people who live in some alternative universe where pixie dust and unicorns exist.

The real question the Obama administration has to answer is why, since he took office in 2009, has he been systematically reducing the military power of the United States? By pulling our troops out of Iraq he created a vacuum filled by the Islamic State (ISIS) that now threatens the entire Middle East and parts of North Africa. He has since curtailed plans to pull most of our troops out of Afghanistan.

Out of sight of Americans, however, the key personnel, the leaders on which our military depends, have been subject to a purge. General Paul Vallely (Ret) has warned that “Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, high ranking military officers have been removed from their positions at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented,” adding that “He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”

In late February, 84 former U.S. government officials, retired U.S. military leaders, and national security experts sent an open letter to the House and Senate leadership asking them to work together to end the harm that the Budget Control Act and sequestration is inflicting on our Armed Forces.

They deemed the trillion dollars of required defense spending cuts “a grave and growing danger to our national security…as threats intensify across the globe.” The cuts “are undermining the readiness of our forces today and investment in the critical capabilities they will need tomorrow.”

“In the last three years, the Army’s strength has been cut by nearly 100,000 soldiers. The Navy’s contingency response force is at one-third the level of what it should be. Less than half of the Air Force’s combat squadrons are fully ready. Approximately half of the Marine Corps non-deployed units lack sufficient personnel, equipment, and training.”

These were facts set forth in the National Defense Panel’s July 2014 report. It warned that if sequestration takes effect in fiscal year 2016, the U.S. would be facing an “immediate readiness crisis.”

This lack of readiness was the subject of a Wall Street Journal commentary, “Europe’s Defense Wanes as the Putin Threat Grows” by Ian Birrell, so it is not just the United States that lacks sufficient troops and weapons in the event of a war. Birrell noted that “With fewer than 100,000 full-time troops, Great Britain now has a smaller army than during the mid-19^th-century Crimean War.” Other members of NATO have cut their defense budgets in recent years. He warned that “As we fight this new Cold War, Western leaders need to relearn the old lessons of crisis management and deterrence that defeated Mr. Putin’s Soviet predecessors—and relearn them quickly.”

Recall that Secretary Kerry has gone on record saying that “climate change” is the greatest threat the U.S. and the world faces. Little wonder that Chuck Hegel resigned as the former Secretary of Defense given the pressure he was under from a White House indifferent to the real problems and threats the U.S. faces.

In 2014 the Pentagon released a “Climate Change Adaptation Forecast” and any defense funds diverted to this plan were just that much less than needed for our troops in the field and the real needs of the U.S. military. Are they supposed to be fighting melting ice bergs or staying ready for potential military threats from China or Russia?

An example of the idiotic political correctness, scarce Pentagon resources are being diverted to a plan to generate 50% of the Navy’s energy needs from “alternative sources” by 2020, including $3.5 billion for biofuels. You cannot fight a global war if the Navy cannot swiftly and easily acquire oil to run its ships that are not nuclear-powered and fly its aircraft.

At the same time, the U.S. has been reducing its stockpile of nuclear arms. The State Department’s Rose Gottemoeller, under-secretary for arms control and international security, recently told a group “The U.S. commitment to achieving the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons is unassailable.” She noted that the nation’s stockpile of active weapons is down 85% from maximum cold war levels, falling to 4,804 in 2013 from a high of 31,255, adding that “We still have more work to do.”

This completely ignores nuclear nations like North Korea who have bad intentions toward the U.S. and their neighbors and it runs completely contrary to the U.S. negotiations with Iran that would permit it to become a nuclear armed nation.

This is worse than diplomatic schizophrenia; it is a plan for national suicide.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently told Congress that Russia and China have placed their highest priority on building up and maintaining strategic nuclear forces.

If you want to know what is wrong about the entire approach to our nation’s military needs, consider that since 2009 when Obama took office, the Pentagon’s civilian workforce has grown about 7% to almost 750,000, while active-duty military personnel have been cut by approximately 8%.

At the same time, dozens of military-equipment and weapons programs have been canceled, including a new Navy cruiser, a new search-and-rescue helicopter, the F-22 first-generation fighter, the C-17 transport aircraft, missile defense and the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.

We are not prepared to fight a war and now you know why.