What is behind the push for war with Russia? by Dr. Patrick Slattery

What is behind the push for war with Russia?

By Dr. Patrick Slattery — This is a Jewish thing. But it is not just that Jews want to destroy things for no reason. But this is, especially among the American Jewish elite, a vendetta against Vladimir Putin. This vendetta was described by American academia’s preeminent Russia scholar, Professor Stephen F. Cohen.

To be sure, Cohen did not say in so many words that this was a “Jewish” vendetta. But he also did not call it a “globalist” or “corporate” or “reptilian Nazi” vendetta, which are just ways of distracting attention away from the Jewish role. He blamed a war party which he described as led by the (((New York Times))), the (((Washington Post))), and officials in the Defense and State Department like (((Victoria Nuland))). Connect the dots for yourselves, goys.

He does not say why this “war party,” as he calls it, wants to regime change Putin. But a look at recent Russian history, a history that he has written so much about, makes it clear.

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After the Soviet Union was dismantled in what was basically an unconstitutional coup carried out by the Russian President Boris Yeltsin at a time when Russia was just one (although by far the largest) of the 15 Soviet republics that made up the Soviet Union, he proceeded to privatize state assets as part of a “shock therapy” program pushed by Harvard Professor (((Jeffrey Sachs))), who was brought in as an advisor by Privatization Minister (((Anatoly Chubais))).

President Clinton sent over more Jews to advise Yeltsin on how to “reform” the economy, including Treasury Department officials (((Lawrence Summers))) (later Treasury Secretary) and (((Peter Orszag))) (later Budget Director). Under the Sachs plan, the Russian government issued vouchers to the population, which would be exchanged for shares in privatized companies. With the economy in free fall, people were willing to sell those vouchers on the cheap to anyone who would pay cash. And who had cash?

Chubais, Summers, and Orszag matched international Jewish financiers, like (((George Soros))), to young Jews with political connections. These young Jews with access to international financial capital were then able to buy up massive amounts of vouchers and take control of the privatized state assets. The international financiers could not do it themselves, because they were not Russian citizens. They needed fellow tribalists in Russia. A rigged “Loans for Shares” in the mid-1990s further solidified Jewish control over the Russian economy.

Meanwhile, living standards for Russians plummeted. Life expectancy for men fell by about eight years. Death rates sky-rocketed, mostly due to alcoholism, but starvation and freezing were not uncommon. Jews who did not benefit from this Jewish takeover of the country emigrated to Israel, the United States, or Europe. Their presence was not necessary in Russia.

Naturally, the Russians came to hate Yeltsin and his Jewish cronies. He was impeached by the parliament in 1993, only to send tanks to fire on the Russian parliament. He imprisoned the speaker of the parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, along with Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy, who was actually the rightful president. He then re-wrote the constitution.

In the presidential elections of 1996, the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov surely defeated Yeltsin. “Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, along with Russian oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Anatoly Chubais, and others feared a Communist resurgence,” according to Zyuganov’s Wikipedia page. All the men mentioned in the preceding sentence are Jews. The Wikipedia article concludes that Yeltsin “relentlessly exploited his advantages of incumbency, patronage, and financial backing” to defeat Zyuganov. The Jews at HBO even made a movie about how “Americans” help Yeltsin steal the election. Check out “Spinning Boris” starring (((Jeff Goldblum))).

With the 2000 presidential elections approaching and Yeltsin hopelessly drunk, the Jewish oligarchs were looking for a new puppet. Yeltsin had already been through a string of prime ministers, including at least two Jews (Sergei Kiriyenko and Yevgeny Primakov), but the Communist Gennady Zyuganov was still a sure bet to win the 2000 presidential elections.

So who was this Zyuganov? A 1998 article by (((David Hoffman))) of the Washington Post reports the following:

MOSCOW, Dec. 24 Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov has declared in an open letter his belief in a Zionist conspiracy to seize power in Russia and asserted that “Zionist capital” has wrecked Russia’s economy.

The letter appeared to be aimed at the Russian business tycoons — known here as the “oligarchs” — who were instrumental in reelecting President Boris Yeltsin over Zyuganov in 1996. Most of the small circle of tycoons in this country are Jewish.

So the Jewish oligarchs needed a savior. Putin was supposed to be that man. With the help of alleged Chechen terroristic bombings in Moscow that rallied the public behind Putin and his hardline response, Putin won the 2000 election. But the problem for the Jews was that he used his popular support to take on the oligarchs. He put some in prison, others fled the country, and the rest reached an uneasy truce with him so that they could retain their fiefdoms in exchange for staying out of politics.

That brings us back to the war party that Professor Cohen describes. They think that they can topple Putin and restore the Jewish oligarchy. Victoria Nuland already did a dry run of this scenario in Ukraine. It’ is not as if they really want a nuclear world war, but they think they can pull off a Russian regime change, and are willing to risk nuclear war to do it. It may be delusional, but the payoff would be enormous.

The Jews are currently in control of most of the white world with the one big exception of Russia. Massive non-white immigration is on the verge of forever excluding the possibility that ethnic nationalists in these countries could ever pose a threat to their rule, although movements in many of these countries, including the Alt-right and Trumpism in America, show that the game is not yet over.

Via American hegemony, Jews indirectly dominate countries from Japan to Saudi Arabia. Countries like China and Iran may be independent, but only Russia has the military means to stand up to Zio-America.

So this is why we are on the brink of war with Russia. It is not because Putin is anti-gay. It is certainly not because of humanitarian concerns for the people of Aleppo. It is not even because the Israelis are pushing it. They are doing pretty well with the status quo, and already have gotten what they want from Russia. It is the Jewish elite, primarily in America, that sees Putin as an threat to Jewish power, just as Trump potentially is. So it should be no surprise that they are willing to do whatever it takes to remove Putin, even if it means war.

Source: Official David Duke

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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Syria: Their War, Not Ours by Patrick J. Buchanan

Syria: Their War, Not Ours

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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It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over by Patrick J. Buchanan

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“I did it my way,” crooned Sinatra.

Donald Trump is echoing Ol’ Blue Eyes with the latest additions to his staff. Should he lose, he prefers to go down to defeat as Donald Trump, and not as some synthetic creation of campaign consultants.

“I am who I am,” Trump told a Wisconsin TV station, “It’s me. I don’t want to change. … I don’t want to pivot. … If you start pivoting, you are not being honest with people.”

The remarks recall the San Francisco Cow Palace where an astonished Republican, on hearing the candidate speak out in favor of “extremism in the defense of liberty,” blurted out, “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater!”

And so he did. And Goldwater is remembered and revered by many who have long forgotten all the trimmers of both parties who tailored their convictions to suit the times, and lost.

Trump believes populism and nationalism are the future of America, and wants to keep saying so. Nor is this stance inconsistent with recapturing the ground lost in the weeks since he was running even with Hillary Clinton.

The twin imperatives for the Trump campaign are simple ones.

They must recreate in the public mind that Hillary Clinton who 56 percent of the nation thought should have been indicted for lying in the server scandal, and who two-thirds of the nation said was dishonest or untrustworthy.

Second, Trump must convince the country, as he had almost done by Cleveland, that he is an acceptable, indeed, a preferable alternative.

While the assignment is simple, as Ronald Reagan reminded us, there may be simple answers, but there are no easy ones.

What is the case against Clinton his campaign must make?

She is a political opportunist who voted for a war in Iraq, in which she did not believe, that proved ruinous for her country. As secretary of state, she pushed for the overthrow and celebrated the assassination of a Libyan dictator, resulting in a North African haven for al-Qaida and ISIS.

Her reset with Russia was a diplomatic joke.

Her incompetence led to the death of a U.S. ambassador and three brave Americans in Benghazi, and she subsequently lied to the families of the dead heroes about why they had died.

Her statements about her server and emails were so perjurious they almost caused FBI Director James Comey to throw up in public.

She speaks of Bill, Chelsea and herself as leaving the White House in 2001 in roughly the same conditions of immiseration that the Joads left Dust Bowl Oklahoma in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

But on leaving State, Hillary Clinton was pulling down $225,000 a pop for 20-minute speeches to Goldman Sachs. It’s a long way, baby, from her Children’s Defense Fund days, the recalling of which almost caused Bill Clinton to lose it and break down sobbing at the Philly convention.

What America has in Hillary Clinton is a potential president with the charisma but not the competence of Angela Merkel, and the ethics of Dilma Rousseff.

However, here is the problem for the Trump campaign.

While exposing the Clinton character and record is essential, among the primary rules of presidential politics is that you do not use your candidate to do the wet work.

Eisenhower had Vice President Nixon do it for him. President Nixon had Vice President Agnew, who was good at it, and enjoyed it.

Yet, still, on the mega-issue, America’s desire for change, and on specific issues, Trump holds something close to a full house.

The country wants the border secured and immigration vetting toughened to keep out the kind of terrorists who committed the atrocity in San Bernardino.

The country wants an end to the trade deficits with China and the endless export of U.S. factories and manufacturing jobs.

On Americanism versus globalism, the country is with Trump. On an America First foreign policy that keeps us out of trillion-dollar, no-win Middle East wars, the country is with Trump.

On Teddy Roosevelt’s “Speak softly, and carry a big stick,” Ike’s “Peace through strength,” and JFK’s “Let us never fear to negotiate,” the country is with Trump.

Americans may not love Vladimir Putin, but they do not wish to go to war with Russia, which we avoided in half a century of Cold War.

Americans do not want to go nation-building abroad, but to start the nation-building at home. On coming down with both feet on rioters, looters, arsonists and Black-Lives-Matter haters who call cops “pigs,” America is all in with Donald Trump.

As for going after Clinton, the media hysteria surrounding the Donald’s new hire, Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, suggests that this may be a fellow who is not without redeeming social value.

Moreover, outside events could conspire against Clinton.

The coming economic news — we had 1 percent growth in the first half of 2016 — could cause a second look at Trumponomics. And whoever is out there strategically dropping Democratic emails may be readying an October surprise for Hillary Clinton, a massive document dump that buries her.

As Yogi Berra reminded us, the game “ain’t over, till it’s over.”

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Is Trump the Peace Candidate? by Patrick J. Buchanan

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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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Will Putin Get a Pulitzer? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Will Putin Get a Pulitzer?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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