Only Ron Paul stands out against this deranged chorus

By Alexander Cockburn
Counterpunch | January 4, 2011
 Email: alexandercockburn(at)asis.com 

A Catholic former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa’s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a virtual tie with Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney. Well after chilly midnight on caucus night in the Midwestern state, Iowa’s Republican Party declared Romney the winner by 8 votes. Each hovered just below 30,000 votes, with libertarian Republican Ron Paul of Texas running third with a respectable 26,000-plus votes.

Only a couple of weeks ago Newt Gingrich seem poised for exactly the same unexpected surge that blessed Santorum across the last week. But battered by volleys of viciously negative campaign ads financed by big Republican money backing Romney, Gingrich ran fourth with just under 16,000 votes. Hobbling along in the rear came Texas governor Rick Perry, Tea Party star Michele Bachmann and – with 668 votes – Utah millionaire Jon Huntsman.

Exactly four years ago, Santorum’s surprise showing last night was prefigured by the upset victory of a Protestant evangelical, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who won with 41,000 votes, Romney came second on that occasion with 30,000 votes, a little more more than he managed yesterday, with a similar 25 per cent of the vote. Third, with 15,000 votes came the man who actually won the Republican nomination, John McCain.

So, as far as Republicans are concerned, Iowa can be a poor predictor. On January 10 the surviving candidates will be going head to head in New Hampshire. Romney has spent months in the state and has one of his several dreary homes there. Santorum, who committed months of seemingly fruitless effort clasping the hands of countless Iowans, has little presence in New Hampshire and a tiny war chest of campaign cash. Romney’s big-money attack dogs who were too busy battering Gingrich in Iowa to notice Santorum’s late surge, will unleash a torrent of abuse via TV and radio. New Hampshire is a must-win for Romney if he is to escape the charge that he simply can’t clinch any race. Two debates are scheduled and an embittered Newt Gingrich, no slouch in the campaign-debate setting, will be quivering to get his revenge.

Watching the Iowa results with some satisfaction are Obama’s campaign chieftains. To them, the Iowa contest showed that Iowa’s Republicans simply couldn’t figure out who to vote for. No one pleased them for long. Bachmann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich each had their moment in the sun, then faded. A week ago Ron Paul seemed set to win. Had the Iowa vote been held a week from now, Santorum might too have been eclipsed and Huntsman limped to the front.

The Republican high command decided some time ago that Romney is their best chance of beating Obama. Though infinitely elastic in political doctrine he’s not a nut. It’s imaginable that the all-important independent voters in the general election in the fall could vote for him. Romney made his millions buying and selling companies, very often firing workers in the process. He governed Massachusetts without egregious failure, passing the precursor to Obama’s health insurance reform, which achievement has been a red rag to the conservatives, who regard him as (a) a crypto-liberal and (b) an agent of Satan, since he is a Mormon. No Mormon has ever been president and reservation about the Church of Latter Day Saints extends beyond conservatives. For example, Mormon theology is not friendly to the children of Ham.

Troubling to this same Republican high command is Ron Paul, who has won passionate adherents across the political spectrum. The right likes him for his libertarian economics, which prompt Paul to denounce the basic elements of the social safety net – Social Security and Medicare. He would abolish the Federal Reserve ( a laudable objective). He’s a gold bug, and in his speech to his supporters Tuesday night he shouted a line which I’ll hazard has never before been uttered on an election night podium – “We’re all Austrians now” – thereby proclaiming his allegiance to the economist Ludwig van Mises and parodying the line actually coined by Milton Friedman, though often attributed to Richard Nixon, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

A lot of leftists like Paul because he really is an ardent anti-imperialist – the only one in the race – vigorously denouncing America’s wars, its overseas bases and its alliance with Israel. Paul is also an eloquent foe of the imperial presidency and of constitutional abuses such as the law signed by Obama on December 31, giving the military a role in domestic enforcement against terrorists and opening US citizens to military detention without benefit of counsel, without charges, and without trial.

Part of Paul’s vote in Iowa was undoubtedly leftists who, under Iowa’s rules, could cross over and vote in the Republican caucus. Republicans fear that if Paul gets sufficiently incensed at his treatment by their party, he might bolt and run on the Libertarian third party ticket, thereby draining votes from the Republican candidate next November. For their part the Obama forces similarly fear that Paul would steal vital left votes from those thoroughly disillusioned with the President. In the run-up to the Iowa vote The New York Times ran more than one aggressive onslaught on Paul for newsletters, racist in content, which ran under Paul’s name twenty years ago, and which he has since disavowed.

It’s hard to imagine Santorum getting long term traction. He’s a very conservative Catholic who crept into the US senate in 1998 after the incumbent Pennsylvania senator, John Heinz. It’s hard to imagine him cutting a wide swathe through the Baptist south, though against Romney, who knows?

Santorum says that as president he would bomb Iran tomorrow. Romney and Gingrich don’t lag far behind in their ravings against the Islamic Republic. Obama ratchets up sanctions against Iran while supposedly telling Netanyahu that the US will not endorse any attack by Israel on Iran. Only Ron Paul stands out against this deranged chorus. Given a chance, I’ll vote for Paul, even though he hasn’t a prayer of taking over the Oval Office. One has to draw the line somewhere, though I don’t feel in the least Austrian.

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Iowa Votes for War

By Michael Hoffman

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum together received 60,000 votes in the January 3 Iowa caucus compared with Ron Paul’s 26,000. Relentless media vilification of Rep. Paul did its job. Jennifer Rubin writing in the Washington Post:

"Several thousand votes behind the leaders was Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who seemed to lose momentum in the final week of the campaign....Maybe the coverage of his conspiratorial newsletters and loony foreign policy views dampened enthusiasm....Most relieved by Paul's somewhat disappointing finish is the Iowa Republican Party, which dreaded the vilification that would have accompanied a Paul victory, perhaps even threatening the state's hold on the first contest in the presidential primary process. The isolationist segment on the party took it on the chin. With the two front-runners both forceful advocates for a strong national defense, talk of the Republican Party dabbling with isolationism should be muted."

Romney and Santorum seek war with Iran according to Israeli policy dictates. Santorum, like Michelle Bachmann, is a self-proclaimed conservative Christian, who, in reality, is a creature of the rabbis of Orthodox Judaism. As Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senator he regularly pilgrimaged to New York to sit at the feet of the most odious Talmudists and receive their instruction in political chicanery and the need for America to go to war with the perceived Middle Eastern enemies of the Synagogue.

Rep. Ron Paul is the only peace candidate in the presidential contest. I wish there was someone else. Paul’s advocacy of “Austrian School” usury is a grave flaw. But there is no one else. He is the only candidate who sincerely advocates peace, something which the American people overwhelmingly supported from 1918 to 1941; throughout the presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower in the 1950s, and in the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the 70s and 80s, but no more. Having learned little from the killing and maiming of thousands of US troops and a trillion dollars in taxpayer money squandered on the messianic neocon mission of intervening in a thousand-year-old civil war between rival Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, Americans are still convinced (by the media) that the “Islamic threat” is best countered by a “strong national defense” consisting in maintaining our military meddling in Islamic affairs in faraway Afghanistan, Iran and Arabia; anything contrary to this policy is stigmatized as “isolationism.”

The horrible consequences of a U.S. war with Iran are almost never summoned by the media as a pressing issue for the presidential candidates. War with Iran will make the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan look like Teddy Bear’s picnic. An invasion of Iran will seriously damage America’s economy for decades, increase our thralldom to Red China and launch us into the permanent war footing which former Vice President Dick Cheney called for when he declared that the “war on terrorism” should proceed for generations. Imagine cursing our children and grandchildren with such a butcher’s bill!

This is the curse that is beginning to take shape as Ron Paul is rejected in favor of a consummate politician like Mitt Romney and a fanatical crypto-rabbi such as Rick Santorum. 

The quality of life in America will continue to decline as our “Homeland Security” police state and war economy sucks resources from education, medical care, Social Security and mass transit.

The people of Iowa and New Hampshire, along with Americans in general, have no clear idea what Talmudic Judaism is, what counterfeit “Israel” represents and how the Talmudic mentality deftly plays Right and Left for the self-destructive ends of an ideology predicated first and foremost on hatred of Jesus Christ and all gentiles. Romney and Santorum are the means for weaponizing that ideology on the international stage, as did George W. Bush to such devastating effect. We can’t afford these men, but perhaps we deserve them.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism’s Strange Gods, published in November by Independent History and Research.

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