Thoughts While Shaving: Ron Paul’s Advice to “Take Out the CIA”…The Sun-Times’ Anti-Catholic, Bigoted Refusal to Endorse Dan Lipinski.

                   Feast of St. Vincent of Saragossa*

           

                                       “Take Out the CIA!”

               Excessive libertarianism leads to anti-patriotic, anti-defense anarchy where it joins hands with the Left.   It is toward this end that Rep. Ron Paul…whose initial economic prescriptions are excellent…has been moving with a vengeance.  During the 2008 presidential debates he came close to agreeing with the psychopathic Left that the U. S. has itself to blame for intruding in the Middle East.  That’s only a half-step away from those who have claimed that Bush planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers because of a conspiratorial wish to involve us in a war on the side of Israel.

              Last weekend,  in an address to the Campaign for Liberty, a non-profit educational group he founded, Paul said this (captured also on YouTube):

            “There’s a coup.  Have you heard? The CIA runs everything!  They run the military. They’re the ones over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries…And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve…And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II.  They are a government unto themselves. They’re in businesses…They take out dictators…We need to take out the CIA!” 

           Pathetic. Let this former foreign service officer tell him that the rap against the CIA isn’t that it is running the country but that it isn’t doing as well as other nations’ intelligence units to safeguard this country.  

          This is what I’ve long perceived with Paul’s foreign policy…as distinct from much of his cogent economic policy expressed in his two books I just finished—End the Fed(where I don’t go as far as he but certainly endorse a congressional audit and believe its power should be drastically scaled back to its central mission of defending the dollar and not playing with interest rates which trigger boom and bust cycles)… and Revolution where, apart from foreign-defense notions, he states his economic ideas thoroughly and with erudition.

           His defense views, such as they are, coincide with the most drastic ideas that are commonplace expressed in The Daily Kos—the ideas that America has been essentially an evil enterprise, an enterprise controlled for the most part by a foreign-leaning cabal.  Toward the end of his life when he was growing dotty, Eugene McCarthy whom I knew very well, echoed the same thing about the CIA and America generally: abolish it and have us apologize to the world and beg forgiveness for our “sins.” A sad end to a cerebral man I covered and for a long time admired..

            Abolishing the very mediocre CIA would of course leave us defenseless to our enemies.  Like Paul, McCarthy in his dotage postulated that if we would retreat from the world, we would not have any enemies. I am one with both of them about us severely reducing our foreign commitments regarding aid and troops stationed in countries around the world but that is not all that they want. 

       They want us to retreat to our borders…and sadly, use the late Sen. Robert A. Taft as their model. Taft never remotely said anything even close to that.  You can’t convince Paul of that since he uses Taft as an lodestar for Paul’s foreign policies—the same Taft who, had he been nominated in 1952, would have picked General Douglas MacArthur for his running-mate.  And MacArthur wanted to bomb China to win the Korean War.  (Later, as president, Eisenhower passed the unofficial  word to the Chinese that if they wouldn’t put pressure on North Korea to settle the war at Panmunjum , he’d by God see to it that they got the H-bomb delivered post-haste. They complied quickly).   

              In my last meeting I had with McCarthy in 2003 in St. Paul (where he was attending Elmer Andersen’s 95^th birthday), he zeroed in on Israel and what he believed were a cabal of Jewish bankers and manipulators which had gained stranglehold over George W. Bush.

             There was no reasoning with him but I pointed out that if the Jews had such control over Bush, they sure didn’t show it at election time where they regularly endorsed and contributed to Bush’s enemies to the tune of 72%. And as the Democrats were their favorites, the Democrats such as Carl Levin, a Jew himself, is notably unsympathetic to any military incursion in the Middle East which as it happens would be advanatageous for Israel.  (Since then Barack Obama has made no bones about the fact that his thumb is on the scale weighted against Israel and hasn’t lost Jewish support: the reason being that secular Jews have largely embraced a new religion: liberalism with all its canons for weepy sympathy for the Palestinians etc.). 

          Back to my conversation with McCarthy.

        He said that’s true (about Levin and other highly placed Jews including those who run The New York Times) but then his argument shifted.

          It was that the goofy…his term…evangelical Christians were in lockstep with the Jews because the bible thumpers believe that they must be looked on with favor by Christ who was a Jew.  I responded this is true but the Jews largely dislike…even despise… the Evangelicals (witness the Jewish-run New York Times) because they believe the bible thumpers are trying to convert them—which isn’t true…and the Jews are embarrassed by the nauseously excessive fawning given to them by Pat Robertson and his colleagues—which causes Jews endless teasing by colleagues.  By then I could see that McCarthy, then 87 was tiring.  He underwent a coughing spasm so serious I thought he’d die right then and there.  End of conversation and that was the last time I saw him. 

                              The Sun-Times’ Anti-Catholic Bigotry.

             So much for the thought that Jim Tyree will affect the far-Left Sun-Times in any way, positive or not. It’s one thing to hope that Tyree would, as leader of the consortium that runs the tabloid, exert any responsible leadership in turning its wheel the slightest tad center-ward.  It’s neo-Marxist editorial page is driving it out of existence…all the while Tyree. not much more than a ruddy-faced South Side Irishman of traditionalist Democratic habits, is counting the paper clips, proclaiming some peculiar kind of Establishmentarian detachment that he will not apply any editorial tug of change in the wheelhouse. 

              But there was hope that he could exert an adult counter to the raving anti-Catholicism that has dominated the editorial and features pages…not withstanding that a few CINOs…feather-light Tom McNamee, editor of the editorial page…Carol Marin its political columnist…Richard Roeper its aging stereotypical boy columnist long in the tooth…are writing there.  There simply is no counterweight to the reigning anti-Catholic bigot who garners a full page every few days for his hate-the-Church fulminations, Neil Steinberg. All these twerps are continuing unmolested in the Tyree era.

             And now it’s even worse. It’s one thing for the paper to take a far-Left liberal position…vehement pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage… in its editorials but anti-Catholicism has even spouted there in its candidate endorsements.  Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Democrat, has an ADA voting record of 90%, an ACLU of 82%, League of Conservation Voters of 100% and Family Research Council of only 58%.  Still the goofy Left Sun-Times editorial page under the supine follower-of-orders McNamee wouldn’t endorse him.

             Why not? Lipinski is a hated pro-lifer and voted for the dreadful Stupak amendment “which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for insurance plans that cover abortions.”  Opposition to public monies for abortion is not only right down the middle of the American consensus, it happens to be consonant with Lipinski’s deeply held conscience. No good says the brayingly raucous Sun-Times under CINO owner Tyree. Tyree is evidently one of a band of brothers of South Side Irishmen…Daley, Burke and all the rest of wobbly pragmatists… who rise above principle where his Church is concerned in favor of the Democratic party. Does this bog well for the future of the Sun-Times? Let Tyree look to Massachusetts, see how the Irish blue-collars voted  and draw his own conclusions for his paper’s future. 

              And lest the Tribune’s Dold snigger, he’s almost…not quite.,.. as bad.

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    *: St. Vincent of Saragossa [circa AD 304].  Instructed in theology by none other than St. Valerius, bishop of Saragossa, the city in northeast Spain. Vincent was ordained a deacon and preached to the people but was apprehended along with his sponsor Valerius by Dacian, the governor of Spain who reported to the cruel Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.  Dacian had earlier put to death 18 martyrs at Saragossa but he placed Vincent in jail at Valencia where they experienced severe hunger and other maladies.  Dacian hoped their imprisonment would shake their constancy but not so. Valerius had suffered from a speech impediment so he ordered Vincent to answer for them which Vincent did—outraging Dacian. Dacian allowed Valerius to be banished but subjected Vincent to excruciating torture, including having him stretched on a rack and his flesh torn with iron hooks.

        Without protest or complaint, Vincent endured this which caused Dacian to explode in rage and return Vincent to prison. He died there and Dacian commanded his body be thrown on a marshy field. It was but a raven appeared and defended it from being devoured by birds of prey, whereupon Dacian still not satisfied ordered that it be stuffed into a sack and tossed into the sea. The body in the sack was washed up on a nearby shore, identified as Vincent from which many miracles were obtained.