December 26, 2011 by Bob Livingston
UPI
Ron Paul makes remarks at a town hall meeting in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, on Dec. 21.
The Republican establishment has become apoplectic over Congressman Ron Paul’s growing strength in Iowa.
Last week, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad attempted to delegitimize his own State’s vote when he said that if Paul wins the Iowa Caucus, it won’t matter. Of course, if Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney wins, he won’t say that. In fact, according to Branstad, a second- or third-place finish by Gingrich or Romney will be more important than a Paul win.
“People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third. If Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire and other states,” Branstad reportedly said. What Branstad did not say was that he’s been offered a potential Vice President spot on a Romney ticket.
Branstad and his elite bedfellows are trying to draw you into an alternate universe. Never mind that two out of the past three winners of the Iowa Caucus have gone on to win the Republican nomination, a Paul win will mean the Iowa vote is irrelevant.
According to a new Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG poll of likely Republican caucus-goers, Paul has moved into first place – the fifth candidate to hold that spot since the mid-August Iowa GOP Straw Poll. This is the second recent poll showing a Paul lead.
In the ISU poll, Paul is the first choice for 27.5 percent of the registered Republicans and registered independents contacted. That’s up from 20.4 percent in November. Gingrich is the second choice with 25.3 percent, and Romney was third at 17.5 percent.
For months, the Republican elites and corporate media have treated Paul like that cranky old uncle that continues to show up at family gatherings. They’ve tried ignoring him and they’ve tried dismissing him. They’ve been running a continuous communication loop that says, “Ron Paul can’t win.” Yet, here he is, on the cusp of an Iowa victory and showing remarkable strength in New Hampshire.
A common refrain from Republicans is: “I like most of what Ron Paul says, but I can’t vote for him because of his ‘isolationist’ foreign policy.” When they say that, what are they saying?
After all, many Republicans say they can easily vote for Gingrich even though they don’t agree on some of his positions: i.e. infidelity, national database of gun owners, support for the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that permits the indefinite detention of Americans upon the President’s order, support of cap-and-trade, support of individual mandates to purchase healthcare, support of TARP and bailouts, etc. And many Republicans say they can vote for Romney, the author – essentially — of Obamacare (through his Romneycare), who has flipped and flopped on core Republican issues like a fish in the bottom of a boat. And they say they can vote for Michele Bachmann, who voted for the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA.
They are saying, simply, that they have been so terrorized by their government and the mainstream media they are willing to surrender all their freedom and wealth to the military industrial complex and big government so people in a foreign land can be bombed into submission and subjugation. Years of government propaganda and years of war have cemented in their minds the need for perpetual war.
For my conservative friends who don’t like Paul because of his noninterventionist — because that’s what his policy is, and he describes what that means here — foreign policy, consider how long we have been at war in the Mideast.
America and the CIA have been meddling in the affairs of Middle Eastern countries for decades. Read The Secret History of The American Empire, by John Perkins. In 1990, after an American ambassador hinted to Saddam Hussein that the United States would not stand in his way were he to take over territory that was in dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush and the United Nations formed a coalition to bloody his nose. We have been in a shooting war in the region ever since.
After 21 years of war in the region, are things any better? Apparently not, because the war has expanded from Iraq into Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, and it is about to expand into Syria and Iran. And American troops are in Central Africa in an “advisory” role. Yet Americans thirst for more war and the top Republican candidates, according to the elites, are advocating more.
“But,” Republicans say, “Iran is about to get The Bomb. We can’t let Iran get The Bomb!” And how do we know that Iran is about to get The Bomb? From those same people who told us — inaccurately, it turns out — that Iraq was about to acquire nuclear weapons.
Iran, which is OPEC’s second largest oil producer, can’t even refine enough gasoline for its own people. It has no reliable missile system. And we are to believe it’s technologically capable of producing a nuclear weapon?
“But what about Israel?” Republicans then ask. Israel has a couple hundred, at least, nuclear weapons sitting at the ready and is perfectly capable of defending herself.
Consider that there is much more at work here than meets the eye. To understand what is really going on, you must peel back the layers of conventional wisdom, like peeling an onion. There are nefarious maneuverings of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) at work. Few are able to escape their normalcy bias to see this. Read more>>
