Dr. Patrick Slattery and Reverend Mark Dankof discuss recent developments in Syria, Russia, and the Ukraine, and the analysis of Princeton Professor Stephen F. Cohen. They then went beyond Cohen’s analysis and brought in the role of Jewish power. They also dissected the foreign policy implications of the election, ending with the grim outlook for the entire planet should Hillary Clinton win the presidency.
Russia
Bibi Backs Trump – On Putin by Patrick J. Buchanan
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Since Donald Trump said that if Vladimir Putin praises him, he would return the compliment, Republican outrage has not abated.
Arriving on Capitol Hill to repair ties between Trump and party elites, Gov. Mike Pence was taken straight to the woodshed.
John McCain told Pence that Putin was a “thug and a butcher,” and Trump’s embrace of him intolerable.
Said Lindsey Graham: “Vladimir Putin is a thug, a dictator…who has his opposition killed in the streets,” and Trump’s views bring to mind Munich.
Putin is an “authoritarian thug,” added “Little Marco” Rubio.
What causes the Republican Party to lose it whenever the name of Vladimir Putin is raised?
Putin is no Stalin, whom FDR and Harry Truman called “Good old Joe” and “Uncle Joe.” Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, he never drowned a Hungarian Revolution in blood. He did crush the Chechen secession. But what did he do there that General Sherman did not do to Atlanta when Georgia seceded from Mr. Lincoln’s Union?
Putin supported the U.S. in Afghanistan, backed our nuclear deal with Iran and signed on to John Kerry’s plan have us ensure a cease fire in Syria and go hunting together for ISIS and al-Qaida terrorists.
Still, Putin committed “aggression” in Ukraine, we are told.
But was that really aggression, or reflexive strategic reaction?
We helped dump over a pro-Putin democratically elected regime in Kiev, and Putin acted to secure his Black Sea naval base by re-annexing Crimea, a peninsula that has belonged to Russia from Catherine the Great to Khrushchev. Great powers do such things.
When the Castros pulled Cuba out of America’s orbit, did we not decide to keep Guantanamo, and dismiss Havana’s protests?
Moscow did indeed support secessionist pro-Russia rebels in East Ukraine.
But did not the U.S. launch a 78-day bombing campaign on tiny Serbia to effect a secession of its cradle province of Kosovo?
What is the great moral distinction here?
The relationship between Russia and Ukraine goes back to 500 years before Columbus. It includes an ancient common faith, a complex history, terrible suffering and horrendous injustices — like Stalin’s starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s.
Yet, before Bush II and Obama, no president thought Moscow-Kiev quarrels were any of our business. When did they become so?
Russia is reportedly hacking into our political institutions. If so, it ought to stop. But have not our own CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, and NGOs meddled in Russia’s internal affairs for years?
Putin is a nationalist who looks out for Russia first. He also heads a nation twice the size of ours with an arsenal equal to our own, and no peace in Eurasia can be made without him.
We have to deal with him. How does it help to call him names?
And what is Putin doing in terms of repression to outmatch our NATO ally, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and our Arab ally, Egypt’s General el-Sissi?
Is Putin’s Russia more repressive than Xi Jinping’s China?
Yet, Republicans rarely use “thug” when speaking about Xi.
During the Cold War, we partnered with such autocrats as the Shah of Iran and General Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in Manila and Park Chung-Hee of South Korea. Cold War necessity required it.
Scores of the world’s 190-odd nations are today ruled by autocrats. How does it advance our interests or diplomacy by having congressional leaders yapping “thug” at the ruler of a nation with hundreds of nuclear warheads?
Where is the realism, the recognition of the realities of the world in which we live, that guided the policies of presidents from Ike to Reagan?
We have been told by senators like Tom Cotton that there must be “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.
Fine. How does Israel regard Putin “the thug” and Putin “the butcher”?
According to foreign policy scholar Stephen Sniegoski, when Putin first visited Israel in 2005, President Moshe Katsav hailed him as a “friend of Israel” and Ariel Sharon said he was “among brothers.”
In the last year alone, Bibi Netanyahu has gone to Moscow three times and Putin has visited Israel. The two get along wonderfully well.
On the U.N. resolution that affirmed the “territorial integrity” of Ukraine, Israel abstained. And Israel refused to join in sanctions against a friendly Russia. Russian-Israeli trade is booming.
Perhaps Bibi, who just got a windfall of $38 billion in U.S. foreign aid over the next 10 years from a Barack Obama whom he does not even like, can show the GOP how to get along better with Vlad.
Lindsey Graham says that the $38 billion for Israel is probably not enough, that Bibi will need more, and that he will be there to provide it.
Remarkable. Bibi, a buddy of Vlad, gets $38 billion from the same Republican senators who, when Donald Trump says he will repay personal compliments from Vladimir Putin, gets the McCain-Graham wet mitten across the face.
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Is Tide Going Out on Hillary? by Patrick J. Buchanan
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Were the election held today, Hillary Clinton would probably win a clear majority of the Electoral College.
Her problem: The election is two months off.
Sixty days out, one senses she has lost momentum — the “Big Mo” of which George H. W. Bush boasted following his Iowa triumph in 1980 — and her campaign is in a rut, furiously spinning its wheels.
The commander in chief forum Wednesday night should have been a showcase for the ex-secretary of state’s superior knowledge and experience.
Instead, Clinton looked like a witness before a grand jury, forced to explain her past mistakes and mishandling of classified emails at State.
“Of the two candidates,” The New York Times reported, “Mrs. Clinton faced by far the tougher and most probing questions from the moderator, Matt Lauer of NBC, and from an audience of military veterans about her use of private email, her vote authorizing the Iraq war, her hawkish foreign policy views…”
On defense most of the time, Clinton scored few points.
And with a blistering attack on Lauer, the Times all but threw in the towel and conceded that the Donald won the night.
“Moderator of Clinton-Trump Forum Fields A Storm of Criticism,” was the headline as analyst Michael Grynbaum piled on:
“Mr. Lauer found himself besieged on Wednesday evening by critics of all political stripes, who accused the anchor of unfairness, sloppiness, and even sexism in his handling of the event.”
When your allies are ripping the refs, you’ve probably lost the game.
Indeed, in this dress rehearsal for the debates, Donald Trump played Trump, while Clinton was cast in the role of Mexican President Pena Nieto, who just fired the finance minister who told him to invite the Donald to Mexico City for a talk.
There are other indices the tide is turning against Clinton.
Consider the near hysteria of a media that has taken to airing charges, in echo of “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy, that Donald Trump is somehow the conscious agent of a Kremlin conspiracy.
Why? Because Trump accepts the compliments of Vladimir Putin and refuses to call the Russian ruler a “thug,” which is now apparently the mark of a statesman.
Moreover, when it comes to her strongest suit, foreign policy, before Clinton can elaborate on her vision, she is forced to answer for her blunders.
Why did she vote for the war in Iraq? Why did she push for the war in Libya that produced this hellish mess? Does she still defend her handling of the Benghazi massacre? What happened to her “reset” with Russia?
Most critically, when facing the press, which she has begun to do after eight months of stonewalling, she is invariably dragged into the morass of the private server, the lost-and-found emails, her inability to understand or abide by State Department rules on classified and secret documents, and FBI accusations of extreme carelessness and duplicity.
Then there are the steady stream of revelations about the Clinton Foundation raking in hundreds of millions from dictators and despots who did business with Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Bill Clinton now describes himself as a “Robin Hood” of Sherwood Forest who took from the rich to give to the poor, with Hillary Clinton presumably cast in the role of Maid Marian of Goldman Sachs.
It is all too much to absorb.
To get her “message” out, Clinton has to punch it though a media filter. But many in this ferociously competitive and diverse media market today know that the way to the front page or top of the website is to find a new angle on the plethora of scandals, minor and major, surrounding Hillary and Bill.
And with thousands of emails still out there, the contents of which are known to her adversaries, she will likely have IEDs going off beneath her campaign all the way to November.
Consider the coughing fits, a repeated distraction from her message. Should they go away, no problem. But if they recur, people will rightly demand to know from a physician what is the cause.
Because of her own blunders, Clinton’s adversaries have achieved a large measure of control over how her campaign is reported.
In a sense this is like Watergate, where, no matter that Richard Nixon might be managing well a Yom Kippur War or a strategic summit in Moscow, the press and prosecutors cared only about the tapes.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s message has begun to come through — loud, clear and consistent.
He will secure the border. He will renegotiate the trade deals that have been killing U.S. manufacturing and costing American jobs. He will be a law-and-order president who will put America first. He will keep us out of wars like Iraq. He will talk to Vladimir Putin, smash ISIS, back the cops and the vets, and rebuild the military.
Other than being the first woman president, what is the great change that Hillary Clinton offers America?
The Clinton campaign has a big, big problem.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Book Review Coming Soon
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin’s forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn’s stature as “a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy”–Harrison Salisbury
This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.
Book review coming soon.
Syria: Their War, Not Ours by Patrick J. Buchanan
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The debacle that is U.S. Syria policy is today on naked display.
NATO ally Turkey and U.S.-backed Arab rebels this weekend attacked our most effective allies against ISIS, the Syrian Kurds.
Earlier in August, U.S. planes threatened to shoot down Syrian planes over Hasakeh, and our Iraq-Syria war commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, issued a warning to Syria and Russia against any further air strikes around the city.
Who authorized Gen. Townsend to threaten to shoot down Syrian or Russian planes — in Syria?
When did Congress authorize an American war in Syria? Is the Constitution now inoperative?
That we are sinking into a civil war where we sometimes seem to be fighting both sides is a tribute to the fecklessness of the Barack Obama-John Kerry foreign policy and the abdication of a Congress that refuses to either name our real enemy or authorize our deepening involvement.
Our Congress appears again to have abdicated its war powers.
Consider the forces that have turned Syria into a charnel house with 400,000 dead and millions injured, maimed and uprooted.
On the one side there is the regime of Bashar Assad and its allies — Hezbollah, Iran and Russia. Damascus buys its weapons from Moscow and has granted Russia its sole naval base in the Mediterranean. And Vladimir Putin protects his interests and stands by his friends.
To Iran, the Alawite regime of Assad is a strategic link in the Shia crescent that runs from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to South Beirut and Lebanon’s border with Israel.
If Syria falls to Sunni rebels, Islamist or democratic, that would mean a strategic loss for Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, which is why all have invested so much time, blood and treasure in this war.
If they are going to lose Syria, Assad, Iran, Hezbollah and the Russians are probably going to go down fighting. And should we decide to fight a war to take them down, we would find ourselves with such de facto allies as ISIS and the al-Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaida.
Have the hawks who want us to target Assad considered this?
The American people would never sustain such a war in the company of such allies, with its risks of escalation, to remove Assad, who, whatever we think of him, never terrorized Americans or threatened U.S. vital interests.
Years ago, Assad dismissed Obama’s demand that he surrender power, then defied Obama’s “red line” against the use of chemical weapons. He is not going to depart because some U.S. president tells him he must go.
As for the Syrian Kurds, the YPG, they have sealed much of the border with Turkey and fought their way ever closer to Raqqa, the capital of the ISIS caliphate. But what has elated the Americans has alarmed the Turks.
For the YPG not only drove ISIS out of the border towns all the way to the Euphrates; this summer, with U.S. backing, they crossed the river and seized Manbij.
Turkey’s fear is that the Syrian Kurds will link their cantons east of the Euphrates with their canton west of the river and create a statelet that could give Turkey’s Kurds a privileged sanctuary from which to pursue their 30-year struggle for independence.
If, when the war ends in Syria, the YPG is occupying all the borderlands, Ankara faces a long-term existential threat of dismemberment.
After recent terrorist attacks on his country, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recognizes that ISIS is a monster with which he cannot live. Thus, this weekend, he sent tanks and Arab troops to drive ISIS out of the Syrian border town of Jarablus.
Now Turkish troops and their Arab allies are moving further south into Syria to expel the Kurds from Manbij. Joe Biden, visiting Turkey, told the Kurds to get out of Manbij and back across the river.
How does the U.S. protect its interests while avoiding a deeper involvement in this war?
First, recognize that ISIS and the al-Nusra Front are our primary enemies in Syria, not Assad or Russia. Geostrategists may be appalled, but the Donald may have gotten it right. If the Russians are willing to fight to crush ISIS, to save Assad, be our guest.
Second, oppose any removal of Assad unless and until we are certain he will not be replaced by an Islamist regime.
Third, we should assure the Turks we will keep the Kurds east of the Euphrates and not support any Kurdish nation-state that involves any secession from Turkey.
America’s best and wisest course is to stop this slaughter that is killing a thousand Syrians a week, use our forces in concert with any and all allies to annihilate the Nusra Front and ISIS, keep the Kurds and Turks apart, effect a truce if we can, and then get out. It’s not our war.
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Trump’s Road Still Open by Patrick J. Buchanan
By Patrick J. Buchanan
At stake in 2016 is the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate and, possibly, control of the House of Representatives.
Hence, Republicans have a decision to make.
Will they set aside political and personal feuds and come together to win in November, after which they can fight over the future of the party, and the country?
Or will they split apart, settling scores now, lose it all, and, then, after November, begin a battle to allocate blame for a historic defeat that will leave wounds that will never heal.
Republicans have been here before.
After the crushing defeat of 1964, Govs. Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and William Scranton, whose principles required them to abandon Barry Goldwater, discovered that, when the cheering of the press stopped, they carried the mark of Cain.
As national leaders, they were finished.
Richard Nixon, who had lost to JFK, lost to Gov. Pat Brown, quit politics and moved to New York to practice law, took off two months in 1964 to campaign for Barry Goldwater.
Four years later, with Barry’s backing, Nixon was rewarded with the party’s nomination, and the presidency.
Now between Goldwater and Trump there are great differences. A relevant one is this: Trump still has a chance of becoming president.
In August 1964, Barry was 36 points behind LBJ. As of today, Trump is 10 points behind Clinton. From Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush, many presidential candidates have been able to close a 10-point gap and win.
What does Trump need to do? In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “Keep your eyes on the prize” — the presidency. And between Trump and the presidency today stands not Paul Ryan, but Hillary Clinton.
The Donald, his campaign, and party need to cease attacking one another to the elation of a hostile media, and redirect all their fire on the sole obstacle between them and a Republican sweep.
Nor is it all that complex or difficult a task.
For, as secretary of state, Clinton made a compelling case for her being ranked as about the worst in American history.
She began her tenure by breaking State Department rules and setting up a private email server in her home. She compromised U.S. national security, setting off a criminal investigation that ended with the director of the FBI virtually accusing her of lying about everything she told the country about her misconduct.
As of mid-July, 56 percent of Americans thought the Democratic nominee should have been indicted.
She is a compulsive fabricator, telling a harrowing story about running under sniper fire across the tarmac of some Balkan airfield, until TV footage showed her accepting a bouquet from a little girl.
Her “reset” with Russia was brushed aside by Vladimir Putin. Spurned, she now compares him to Hitler. Is this the temperament America wants in the First Diplomat, in dealing with nuclear powers?
She was a cheerleader for a war in Libya that left that nation a hellhole of terrorism, requiring another war to clean up.
“Benghazi” has today become a synonym both for the selfless heroism of American warriors, and for the squalid mendacity of politicians desperate to cover their fannies. Clinton is in there with the latter, accused of misleading families of the fallen about why their sons died.
Twenty years ago, The New York Times’ William Safire called Clinton a “congenital liar.” Has her subsequent career disproven or validated that judgment?
Trump, though, needs not only to make the case against her, but for himself, and for the ideas that vaulted him to victory in the primaries that brought out millions of new voters.
What are they?
Trump will secure the Southern border and halt the invasion of illegal immigrants.
He will throw out the Obama tax and trade policies that have betrayed American workers and bled us of our manufacturing power. In all future trade deals, Americanism will replace globalism as our guiding light.
Where Clinton regards Ruth Bader Ginsburg as her model Supreme Court justice, Trump’s nominees will be in the tradition of Justice Antonin Scalia.
“America First” will be the polestar in foreign policy. Cold War commitments dating to the 1950s, to fight wars for freeloader nations, will all be reviewed. Allies will start standing on their own feet and paying their fair share of the cost of their own defense.
As for the defense of the United States, Peace through Strength, the Eisenhower policy, will be the Trump policy. And as our strength is restored, Trump will, like Ike, Nixon, Reagan and Bush I, negotiate with enemies and adversaries from a position of strength. But we will negotiate.
America’s era of endless wars — is coming to an end.
Where Clinton will continue all of the policies that produced the unacceptable present, we will change Washington as it has not been changed since Ronald Reagan rode in from the West.
As for the renegade and cut-and-run Republicans who just won’t come home, as they say at Motel 6, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”
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Is Trump the Peace Candidate? by Patrick J. Buchanan
By Patrick J. Buchanan
With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton’s lost emails.
Not funny, and close to “treasonous,” came the shocked cry.
Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need not trigger a U.S. military response.
Even more shocking. By suggesting the U.S. might not honor its NATO commitment, under Article 5, to fight Russia for Estonia, our foreign-policy elites declaimed, Trump has undermined the security architecture that has kept the peace for 65 years.
More interesting, however, was the reaction of Middle America. Or, to be more exact, the nonreaction. Americans seem neither shocked nor horrified. What does this suggest?
Behind the war guarantees America has issued to scores of nations in Europe, the Mideast and Asia since 1949, the bedrock of public support that existed during the Cold War has crumbled.
We got a hint of this in 2013. Barack Obama, claiming his “red line” against any use of poison gas in Syria had been crossed, found he had no public backing for air and missile strikes on the Assad regime.
The country rose up as one and told him to forget it. He did.
We have been at war since 2001. And as one looks on the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and adds up the thousands dead and wounded and trillions sunk and lost, can anyone say our War Party has served us well?
On bringing Estonia into NATO, no Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing so insane a war guarantee.
Eisenhower refused to intervene to save the Hungarian rebels. JFK refused to halt the building of the Berlin Wall. LBJ did nothing to impede the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of the Prague Spring. Reagan never considered moving militarily to halt the smashing of Solidarity.
Were all these presidents cringing isolationists?
Rather, they were realists who recognized that, though we prayed the captive nations would one day be free, we were not going to risk a world war, or a nuclear war, to achieve it. Period.
In 1991, President Bush told Ukrainians that any declaration of independence from Moscow would be an act of “suicidal nationalism.”
Today, Beltway hawks want to bring Ukraine into NATO. This would mean that America would go to war with Russia, if necessary, to preserve an independence Bush I regarded as “suicidal.”
Have we lost our minds?
The first NATO supreme commander, Gen. Eisenhower, said that if U.S. troops were still in Europe in 10 years, NATO would be a failure. In 1961, he urged JFK to start pulling U.S. troops out, lest Europeans become military dependencies of the United States.
Was Ike not right? Even Barack Obama today riffs about the “free riders” on America’s defense.
Is it really so outrageous for Trump to ask how long the U.S. is to be responsible for defending rich Europeans who refuse to conscript the soldiers or pay the cost of their own defense, when Eisenhower was asking that same question 55 years ago?
In 1997, geostrategist George Kennan warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era.” He predicted a fierce nationalistic Russian response.
Was Kennan not right? NATO and Russia are today building up forces in the eastern Baltic where no vital U.S. interests exist, and where we have never fought before – for that very reason.
There is no evidence Russia intends to march into Estonia, and no reason for her to do so. But if she did, how would NATO expel Russian troops without air and missile strikes that would devastate that tiny country?
And if we killed Russians inside Russia, are we confident Moscow would not resort to tactical atomic weapons to prevail? After all, Russia cannot back up any further. We are right in her face.
On this issue Trump seems to be speaking for the silent majority and certainly raising issues that need to be debated.
How long are we to be committed to go to war to defend the tiny Baltic republics against a Russia that could overrun them in 72 hours?
When, if ever, does our obligation end? If it is eternal, is not a clash with a revanchist and anti-American Russia inevitable?
Are U.S. war guarantees in the Baltic republics even credible?
If the Cold War generations of Americans were unwilling to go to war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union over Hungary and Czechoslovakia, are the millennials ready to fight a war with Russia over Estonia?
Needed now is diplomacy.
The trade-off: Russia ensures the independence of the Baltic republics that she let go. And NATO gets out of Russia’s face.
Should Russia dishonor its commitment, economic sanctions are the answer, not another European war.
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Source: Official Patrick J. Buchanan Blog
Will Putin Get a Pulitzer? by Patrick J. Buchanan
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Waving off the clerics who had come to administer last rites, Voltaire said: “All my life I have ever made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”
The tale of the thieved emails at the Democratic National Committee is just too good to be true.
For a year, 74-year-old Socialist Bernie Sanders has been saying that, under DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party has been undercutting his campaign and hauling water for Hillary Clinton.
From the 19,200 emails dumped the weekend before Clinton’s coronation, it appears the old boy is not barking mad. The deck was stacked; the referees were in the tank; the game was rigged.
For four decades, some of us have wondered what Jim McCord, security man at CREEP, and his four Cubans were looking for in DNC Chair Larry O’Brien’s office at the Watergate. Now it makes sense.
Among the lovely schemes the DNC leaders worked up to gut Sanders in Christian communities of West Virginia and Kentucky, was to tell these good folks that Sanders doesn’t even believe that there is a God. He’s not even an agnostic; he’s an atheist.
The idea was broached by DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall in an email to DNC chief executive officer Amy Dacey:
“Does [Bernie] believe in a God. He has skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and atheist.”
Dacey emailed back, “Amen.”
In 1960, John F. Kennedy went before the Houston ministers to assert the right of a Catholic to be president of the United States. Is the “Marshall Plan,” to quietly spread word Bernie Sanders is a godless atheist, now acceptable politics in the party of Barack Obama?
If Marshall and Dacey are still around at week’s end, we will know.
The WikiLeaks dump came Friday night. By Sunday, Clinton’s crowd had unleashed the mechanical rabbit, and the press hounds were dutifully chasing it. The new party line: The Russians did it!
Clinton campaign chief Robert Mook told ABC, “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke in to the DNC, took all these emails, and now they are leaking them out through the Web sites. … some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”
Monday, Clinton chairman John Podesta said there is a “kind of bromance going on” between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Campaign flack Brian Fallon told CNN, “There is a consensus among experts that it is indeed Russia that is behind this hack of the DNC.”
Purpose: Change the subject. Redirect the media away from the DNC conspiracy to sabotage Sanders’ campaign.
Will the press cooperate?
In 1971, The New York Times published secret documents from the Kennedy-Johnson administration on how America got involved in Vietnam. Goal: Discredit the war the Times had once supported, and undercut the war effort, now that Richard Nixon was president.
The documents, many marked secret, had been illicitly taken from Defense Department files, copied, and published by the Times.
America’s newspaper of record defended its actions by invoking “the people’s right to know” the secrets of their government.
Well, do not the people have “a right to know” of sordid schemes of DNC operatives to sink a presidential campaign?
Do the people not have a right to know that, in denying Sanders’ charges, the leadership of the DNC was lying to him, lying to the party, and lying to the country?
What did Clinton know of Wasserman Schultz’s complicity in DNC cheating in the presidential campaign, and when did she know it?
For publishing stolen Defense Department secrets, the Pentagon Papers, the Times got a Pulitzer Prize.
If the Russians were helpful in bringing to the attention of the American people the anti-democratic business being done at the DNC, perhaps the Russians deserve similar recognition.
By the Times’ standard of 1971, maybe Putin deserves a Pulitzer.
Undeniably, if the Russians or any foreign actors are interfering in U.S. presidential elections, we ought to know it, and stop it.
But who started all this?
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has used cyberwarfare to sabotage centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear plant in Natanz. We have backed “color-coded” revolutions in half a dozen countries from Serbia to Ukraine to Georgia — to dump rulers and regimes we do not like, all in the name of democracy.
Unsurprisingly, today, Russia, China, Egypt and even Israel are shutting down or booting out NGOs associated with the United States, and hacking into websites of U.S. institutions.
We were the first “experts” to play this game. Now others know how to play it. We reap what we sow.
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Source: Patrick J. Buchanan Blog
