05/3/15

Marxist Democrats and the Return of the Hanoi Lobby

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The main failure by top Republicans—and even many conservatives—is that they do not challenge President Obama as the Marxist he is, and they have no coherent alternative to his strategic plan of supporting America’s enemies.

Reflecting the current mindset—that Obama is just a misguided liberal—Republican strategist Karl Rove failed to anticipate or understand the nature of the growing anti-Obama movement, and the potential it holds. He had predicted the GOP would pick up only six seats in the House, when the Republicans picked up 14 seats. He had predicted that Republican would win the Senate with 51 seats, when the actual figure turned out to be 54.

Republicans like Rove do not understand the nature of the Democratic Party and how it has been taken over by Marxist forces. He had advised Republicans in 2008 and 2012 not to refer to Obama as a socialist. However, grassroots conservatives increasingly understand the dangers we are facing.

The 40th anniversary of the end of United States military involvement in Vietnam—and the 50th anniversary of the start of that U.S. military involvement—provide an opportunity to understand how the Democratic Party has changed. During that 10-year period, 1965-1975, more than 58,000 Americans sacrificed and died to save that country from communism.

Today, with the help of the Republican leadership, President Obama is trying to wrap up a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that includes communist Vietnam, a dictatorship with the blood of those Americans on its hands, which has no respect for the human rights of its own people. Interestingly, Obama is trying to sell the agreement as a counter to China’s influence throughout the world. He wants us to believe that China and Vietnam somehow differ on their common objective of achieving world communism at the expense of America’s standing as the leader of what used to be the Free World.

Both countries would gladly welcome the U.S. to help pay to accelerate the growth of their socialist economies and expand their markets.

Vietnam would be free today except for a Democratic-controlled Congress that decided otherwise. Lewis Fanning’s excellent book, Betrayal in Vietnam, notes that “…it was not the Hanoi communists who won the war, but rather the American Congress that lost it.” Fanning writes, “It was not until after the United States elections in the fall of 1974 that North Vietnamese field commanders received the go-ahead in their plans to conquer South Vietnam. As a result of the Watergate scandals, the Democrats had gained forty-three seats in the House. This liberal victory meant that in the 94th Congress there would be 291 Democrats and only 144 Republicans. In the Senate, the Democrats had gained three seats and the lineup was now 61 Democrats to 39 Republicans. This leftward shift of both congressional chambers played a significant role in the North Vietnamese decision to unleash its army.”

Going through the provisions of various bills offered by Democrats in Congress, he presents the case that “A Democratic caucus of the Congress of the United States, aided and abetted by a few liberal Republicans, cast the South Vietnamese people into Communist slavery.”

That left-wing caucus, Members of Congress for Peace through Law, decided that American military involvement would end, and dramatically reduced aid to the government of South Vietnam. Republican President Gerald Ford, who took power after Richard Nixon’s resignation, understood that Congress would not provide enough assistance to keep the country free of communism. Hundreds of thousands of “boat people” tried to escape the Hanoi communists who took power in Saigon while the communist Khmer Rouge took power in neighboring Cambodia, eliminating almost two million people.

The Members of Congress for Peace through Law eventually grew to became the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest group of congressional members within the Democratic Party. This faction is the subject of Trevor Loudon’s book, The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the US Congress, which is now being made into a major film.

The only Senate member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus is Vermont’s “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders, who has just announced he is running for president. It is telling that Sanders, an open socialist who collaborated with the communists through the Soviet-run U.S. Peace Council, thinks he has sufficient stature and credibility within the party to rally the “progressives.”

Sanders worked closely with the communist fronts which were busy in the 1980s trying to undermine President Ronald Reagan’s peace-through-strength policies toward the Soviet Union.

As we have noted, the name of Bernie Sanders, then identified as former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, even showed up on a list of speakers at a 1989 U.S. Peace Council event to “end the Cold War” and “fund human needs.” Other speakers at the U.S. Peace Council event included Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan; Gunther Dreifahl of the East German “Peace Council;” Jesse Jackson aide Jack O’Dell; and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official Zehdi Terzi.

In 1981, the Soviet-front U.S. Peace Council held its second national conference. Endorsers included Democratic Rep. Danny K. Davis, one of Obama’s associates in Chicago, and David Cortright of a group known as SANE, for the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.

Rep. Davis got an award from the Communist Party in 2012 and the major media ignored it. Jeremy Segal recorded video of the Democratic Representative getting the communist award—and still the media ignored it

Today Cortright is the Associate Director of Programs and Policy Studies of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which offers a Ph.D in “Peace Studies.” He is in charge of a conference this week in Washington, D.C. titled, “The Vietnam War Then and Now: Assessing the Critical Lessons.”

The Kroc Institute is named after Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s Corp. founder Ray Kroc. She contributed $69.1 million to establish and support the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

The final conference panel, “The Anti-War Movement: What were the impacts of the anti-war movement?,” includes Cora Weiss and Tom Hayden, supporters of the communist enemy, and Cortright himself, an agent of influence or dupe.

Hayden is probably the best known of the “anti-war” activists, having become “Mr. Jane Fonda” when he married the actress after she posed with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down and kill American pilots over Vietnam. Hayden had personally written a June 4, 1968, “Dear Col. Lao” letter to a North Vietnamese official that ended, “Good fortune! Victory!”

Not surprisingly, Hayden, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s, would later join “Progressives for Obama.”

The Democrats in Congress at that time were working with what became known as the “Hanoi Lobby,” a collection of communist and socialist groups that played a key role in America’s defeat. The remnants of the Hanoi Lobby are active today in such areas as backing Obama’s normalization of relations with and recognition of communist Cuba.

Then, like now, their plan is to work on behalf of enemies of the United States. Although they usually call themselves “anti-war” peace activists, they don’t seem to be concerned about wars started by anti-American regimes and movements which undermine U.S. interests. The Sanders candidacy will help smoke them out.

Ironically, Sanders is opposing Obama’s Asia trade agreement, largely because Big Labor is against it, while top Republicans in the House and Senate are trying to round up enough votes to approve fast track trade promotion authority for Obama and then pass the agreement itself. These are the same Republicans who have been complaining that Obama has assumed too much executive authority.

It seems as if the Republicans never learn. Or else they don’t want to.

03/17/15

Hillary Clinton’s Tangled Web of Lies

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While some liberal commentators may continue to dismiss the coverage of Emailgate as “nonsense,” and a “fake scandal,” the fact remains that Hillary Clinton’s ongoing lies regarding her exclusive use of private email while serving as Secretary of State constitute just more of a long trail of deceptions reaching back to her youth. In 2008 Accuracy in Media published a column by the now-deceased Jerome Zeifman, the Democratic Party’s general counsel for the Watergate investigation. I had several conversations with him in his final years.

Zeifman was openly critical of Mrs. Clinton. Having worked with her during the formative years of her career, he had tremendous insight into her early character, which continues today. “Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust,” he commented for AIM in 2008.

Some have said that Zeifman “fired” Mrs. Clinton; but she was let go as one of a number of staff no longer needed. But as Zeifman said back in 1998, “If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her.”

Mrs. Clinton’s unethical practices during the Watergate investigation included “erroneous legal opinions,” “efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel,” and a general “unwillingness to investigate Nixon,” according to Zeifman.

The Democratic strategy of the time was to “keep Nixon in office ‘twisting in the wind’ for as long as possible” so that Republicans could not reclaim legitimacy, and so that a Democrat could gain the presidency, he wrote. Such cold political calculations ignored the damage that President Nixon was doing to the country in favor of acquiring political power.

“According to her boss, Democrat Jerry Zeifman, Hillary met with Teddy Kennedy’s chief political strategist—a violation of House rules,” Ben Shapiro recently wrote for Front Page Magazine. “She then manipulated the system to avoid investigating Nixon, hoping he’d stick around long enough to sink Republican election chances in 1976, letting her boy Teddy into the White House.”

Yet Mrs. Clinton is involved with The Clinton Foundation, and likes to present herself as an idealist. For example, her most recent press conference to address concerns about Emailgate was held in the United Nations building right after she finished a speech on women’s rights.

Back in 2008 Ron Rosenbaum of Slate Magazine called this ongoing dichotomy “Hillary I vs. Hillary II.” The first Hillary is an “idealistic believer in helping and healing children,” he writes. The second is a Machiavellian, which Rosenbaum cast as an “idealistic Machiavellianism, the use of complex tactical manipulation to achieve noble idealistic goals.”

Which is why up to $16 million in taxpayer funds will have been sent to the Clintons by Election Day of 2016, with some of it allocated to the “salaries and benefits of staff at his family’s foundation,” according to Politico on March 12. “But scrutiny of the act—and of the vast financial empire built by the Clintons—is poised to intensify as questions mount about the family’s commingling of personal, political, government and foundation business,” it reports.

Like so many in the media, in 2008 Rosenbaum refused to accept the rotten core—that Mrs. Clinton might have actually been cynical and politically calculating at such an early age. “I must admit, I found myself taken aback at Zeifman’s charges because I didn’t think Hillary had lost her innocence that early—or even now had become as cynical as some now say she is,” he wrote.

Zeifman clearly outlined how cynical Mrs. Clinton was at 27—and this informs her actions in the present scandal.

The second Hillary, the other side, is “not the dewy-eyed idealist, but the shrewd Machiavellian many see her as now,” wrote Rosenbaum in 2008. Yet, he concluded that he “find[s] Hillary Clinton more of a mystery, perhaps a more complex character in a novelistic sense, than Richard Nixon… I’d almost want to see her become president just to solve the mystery.”

The most recent of many Clinton scandals, Emailgate, itself demonstrates ongoing political corruption at the expense of national security, transparency, and accountability by both Mrs. Clinton and the White House.

Ben Shapiro finds no mystery in Mrs. Clinton and her husband’s repeated missteps: Mrs. Clinton just plain lies, and has kept on lying throughout her political career. “Hillary is still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI,” he notes. Cheryl Mills, “helped prevent the Clintons from turning over 1.8 million emails to Judicial Watch, Congress, and federal investigators,” yet this close Clinton ally “ended up being in charge of document production for Hillary’s State Department in the Benghazi investigation.” Shapiro is referring to Project X, in which those 1.8 million emails were kept hidden from Congress and the media. The story was broken by the investigative journalist Paul Rodriguez in late 1998, and Accuracy in Media reported on this cover-up at the time.

And now we have Emailgate, part 2, where Mrs. Clinton supposedly transparently turned over all her work-related emails to the State Department,

  • After using a private email account,
  • Years later,
  • After they were vetted by her advisors,
  • After deleting approximately half of the 60,000 emails, and
  • After allegedly using key word searches to determine whether the emails were work-related instead of reading each one of them,
  • Oh, never mind, it turns out they did read all 32,000 “personal emails” before they were deleted.

During her March 10 press conference, Mrs. Clinton deceived once again when she said, “The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.” But the State Department threw her under the bus on that one, when Jen Psaki, State Department spokesman, said three days later that “the department only started automatically archiving emails for other senior officials in February,” long after Mrs. Clinton was gone from the State Department.

Another problem she faces is the OF-109 form, which every State Department employee is required to sign upon departure from their job, certifying that they have turned over all work-related documents and communications, including email. So did she sign it, and hold on to the work material for nearly two more years, or did she get a pass on signing it? Either way, this would apparently be a violation of a law, or at least a State Department policy. So far, Hillary is refusing to answer that one, as is the State Department.

There are gaps within her email spanning months, according to Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC).

USA Today’s Catalina Camia put it most simply: “We can only go by what Clinton says.”

It’s the media’s mandate to verify—not take Mrs. Clinton, nor any of our political leaders, at their word.