Thursday 28th of March 2024

rand paul saves the world, before joe mucks it up again with hawks in his ears...

paul

It’s strange to think but Rand Paul is something of an institution now. He’s still an insurgent, of course, as he always has been, but he’s been a member of the Senate for almost a decade.

 

He was first elected all the way back in 2010 on a platform of Tea Party government-cutting and the more restrained foreign policy first brought to a Republican debate stage by his father Congressman Ron Paul.

“My dad began the process of bringing libertarians and people from a less hawkish foreign policy into the Republican Party,” Paul told me on a phone call. “And we’ve kept that going, though we’re not there yet.”


Since then, Paul has fought some winning battles and plenty of losing ones, though always grounded in a commitment to liberty at home and realism abroad. For a brief moment in 2013, public opinion was even on his side, as he stood on the Senate floor for almost 13 hours to filibuster against the Obama administration’s refusal to rule out using drones against American citizens on U.S. soil. Yet he’s also struggled to bring about change on issues like surveillance and war powers.

These days, Paul has found himself closer to the seat of power. He’s emerged as something of a Trump whisperer, coaxing the president to follow his better instincts on foreign policy, countering the influence of more hawkish advisors like John Bolton.

“I think what Trump is trying to do is a good thing,” Paul said of the president’s attempts to shift the American military out of the Middle East. “I wish he’d done it sooner. I hope he’ll do it to the maximum degree possible.”

Alas, Paul said, those around the president have often counseled him wrongly. “I told him John Bolton was a disaster,” he said, adding that Trump’s advisors have often blocked “the good impulses and instincts the president has. This was true of [former defense secretary Mark] Esper and all the others.”

As for Trump’s recently accelerated attempts to bring the troops home from Afghanistan, Paul is all in: “I think zero’s a better number than 2,000 or 4,000,” he said of how many troops we ought to leave behind. He conceded that we might need to keep a contingent of Marines in Afghanistan to guard the American embassy there, though he expressed concerns that if too many troops remained, it could make it easier for a future president to escalate again.

Trump has lately been on something of a withdrawal spree, attempting to remove troops from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, West Africa, and Germany, with mixed results. Yet what of a report in the New York Times earlier this week that the president told his cabinet he wanted to bomb Iran over its continued nuclear program? The Times says it was the supposed hawks in the administration, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who talked him down.

Paul expressed skepticism that Trump had said anything like that. “All of my conversations with the president about Iran have been him expressing to me restraint and not wanting to go in,” he said. (In that, Paul is in rare agreement with Senator Marco Rubio, who also questioned the Times‘ account.)

There is a long-running internecine clash between congressional Republicans who take a more realist view on foreign policy, like Paul, and those who have changed little since the Bush years. Notable in the latter group is Congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, who is reported to have ambitions to be speaker of the House and even president.

Paul isn’t impressed. “There’s a lot of blood on their hands that frankly could have been avoided had we not listened to the Cheneys and the Bushes,” he said. Of his congressional colleagues, he estimates that “three fourths of them still don’t want to leave” the Middle East and cites Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as being the main problem. “McConnell’s been the leader of this,” he said. “There’s not a lot of difference in the philosophies between McConnell and [John] McCain.”

Is there hope? Paul looks to a handful of newly elected Republicans who diverge from the hawkish establishment consensus. He reserved special praise for Cynthia Lummis, the libertarian-leaning senator-elect from Wyoming whom he endorsed earlier this year. He also expressed hope that a revitalized antiwar left could successfully pressure congressional Democrats.

And what of the most powerful Democrat in the country? Paul predicts that Joe Biden will be a weak chief executive, believing he’ll fall victim to interest-group liberalism, pulled in too many directions by too many voices. Any policy accomplishments, as Paul sees it, will be a “hodgepodge,” heavily influenced by those outside the Oval Office.

In part, this is because Biden himself is a vacuum. “When I think of Biden and ideas,” Paul says, “I don’t usually think of them in the same sentence.”

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rand-paul-talks-trump-war-and-why-the-cheneys-still-have-blood-on-their-hands/

doing the prelims for bomber biden...

The Israeli military has allegedly struck at least two sites in Syria, including in the Damascus countryside and near villages south of Quneitra, Syrian state media reported. Only material damage was inflicted in the attacks.

Early reports indicate the strikes, launched early on Wednesday morning, hit near the town of Jabal Al-Mani in a rural area around the Syrian capital, as well as the village of Ruyhaina located south of Quneitra, which straddles the border between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. It is yet unclear what munitions were used in the attacks or whether Syrian defenses attempted to intercept them.

"The Zionist enemy launched an airstrike from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan towards southern Damascus, and the losses were limited to material,” an anonymous Syrian military source told SANA.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/507723-syria-israeli-aggression-quneitra-damascus/

 

 

This Jewish attack on Syria is designed to spur retaliations that could give "reasons" to bomb Damascus when Biden is president... Read from top.

let tulsi and rand take care of the republic...

 

 

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

-Ben Franklin

 

@RepThomasMassie & I intro'd 'Protect Our Civil Liberties Act' (HR8970) to repeal the so-called Patriot Act & end illegal government surveillance pic.twitter.com/QEB8gKxFKu

— Tulsi Gabbard  (@TulsiGabbard) December 16, 2020

 

 

 

Since election day Tulsi Gabbard, a tweener between Gen-X and a Millennial, has been a non-stop source of, admittedly, Quixotic bills to put paid her insurgent campaign in the Democratic primaries as someone interested in fixing real foundational problems with the country and the bipartisan corruption in Washington. 

She continues to reach across party lines introducing legislation which form the basis for a populist election strategy targeting the 2022 and 2024 elections. 

From whistleblower protection to repealing Section 230 of the CDA to the bill in the tweet above co-sponsored with libertarian Thomas Massie, Gabbard is an example of what the future holds for the political future once this meta-stable, oligarchic rule-by-men period of America is over.

It’s clear that Gabbard wants no part of being a part of the Democratic Party that’s in power now. That’s why she didn’t run for re-election and I suspect these moves are all laying the groundwork for a return to politics in 2024 as an independent or Sanders-like outsider.

I’ve been writing for years now that our problems stem from an unwillingness of the older generations of politicians to give up power. If anything, they persist because they are owned by the forces that put them there in the first place to pull off this betrayal of the people that has been in the works for decades. 

And they will stay in place until they are no longer needed. Just ask Diane Feinstein who is now being sacrificed to make way for the transition team to finish the job she started. 

I always saw Trump as Gen-X’s moment to pull a Ronald Reagan and say, “Mr. Trump, tear down this Swamp!” but the real story is that Gen-X is allowing Obama to do that tearing down and hand what’s left back to the old monied elites.

The fight now is between the cross-currents within Gen-X. Equal parts commie and libertarian the one uniting principle is a desire to reform the old order. 

It is my read that people like Gabbard, Massie, Sen. Rand Paul and a few others see the problem. Gabbard’s a leftist, but she’s no doctrinaire commie. That makes her and interesting pivot figure around which a coalition to retake control or build back better the U.S. can be formed. This will be necessary once Obama’s incoming crew of vandals overreaches and are thrown out on their asses.

Regardless of the outcome in the coming months and years the changing of the guard is close at hand. Post-Trump America will look very different than pre-Trump. Trump was the apotheosis of the Boomers.

His legacy will be forcing the Deep State into the open, bringing the fight against them out of the shadows. 

Trump, however, doesn’t represent the future of America. He’s weighed down with the mythology of an America that never really existed. 

That mythology, however, is something worth building on not allowing Obama and The Vandals to tear down. I believe Gabbard understands this.

I also believe at least 75 million Americans understand this. 

For the American people to not be frog-marched into the dystopian nightmare of Klaus Schwab’s dreams it will be the revealed character of the Gabbards, Massies and Pauls to lead once the violence reaches a crescendo.

Make no mistake, there will be violence. It is inevitable because the people who voted for Trump will not be placated with UBI or settle down as their voices are silenced. 

The fraudsters will forever be looking over their shoulders, lashing out at minor opposition as traitors who need to be put down.

 

Read more:

https://tomluongo.me/2020/12/16/republic-dies-next-generation-must-rise-gabbard-paul/

 

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