Not A Moron

The extremism from the candidates for the Repub presidential nomination is mounting. From Sunday's "State of the Union" interview (video below) by Dana Bash of Mike Huckabee:

BASH: Governor, I want to bring it back home and to an issue that's really been percolating in the Republican race, the issue of abortion. 

Now, you oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest. I want to ask about a story, because it's really getting a lot of attention from our readers on CNN.com. A 10-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather in Paraguay, and the government wouldn't allow her to have an abortion, because that's the policy there. The girl, who is now just 11, had the baby. 

If you're president, and you have your druthers, that would be the policy here. Some of your Republican opponents say it's too extreme. What do you say? 

HUCKABEE: I think what we have to do, Dana, is remember that creating one problem that is horrible -- horrible -- I mean, let nobody be misled. A 10-year-old girl being raped is horrible.

But does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child? And that's really the issue. I know people. I worked for a man for several years, James Robison, who was the result of a rape. His mother went to three doctors in Houston, Texas, in 1943, begged doctors to abort the baby. None of them would do it. 

They all refused. Today, his organization feeds, cares for, and brings living capacity for water to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. That would never have happened, Dana.

[09:10:10] 

So, when I think about one horror, I also think about the possibilities that exist. And I just don't want to think that somehow we discount a human life. 

BASH: And that's understandable, but the flip side is, looking in the eyes of a 10-year-old girl, saying, you know, you had this horrible thing happen to you, and you're going to have to carry it out for the next nine months. That's also not easy. 

HUCKABEE: No, it isn't easy. And I wouldn't even pretend that it's anything other than a terrible tragedy.

But let's not compound the tragedy by taking yet another life. And I always think we sometimes miss the fact that, when an abortion happens, there are two victims. One is the child. The other is that birth mother, who often will go through extraordinary guilt years later, when she begins to think through the -- what happened with the baby, with her. 

And, again, there are no easy answers here. And I realize there are some people that will be very different in their view of this than me, and I respect that. I don't want to get into a shouting match with people who think I'm wrong. I respect that. 

But I just come down on the side that life is precious, every life has worth and value. I don't think we discount the intrinsic worth of any human being. And I don't know where else to go with it, but just to be consistent and say, if life matters and then that's a person, then every life matters.

Figjam on the Jezebel website commented "As a Republican voter myself, I am endlessly frustrated at the morons taking up valuable airtime from candidates I would rather hear from."

If only it were so. Unfortunately, Mike Huckabee has said nothing much different than what other Repub presidential candidates have said and, intentionally, has promoted two false memes.

Huckabee is not commenting only about a 10-year-old Paraguayan girl, but of American women of whatever age.  "When an abortion happens," he says, "there are two victims."  Labeling as a "victim" an individual who has made a thoughtful, gut-wrenching decision is glaringly paternalistic, and suggests the decision is made lightly.

The former Arkansas governor also repeats arguably the most commonly claimed myth of the entire abortion debate. He maintains the "birth mother" (actually, a woman rather than a birth mother, given that she did not give birth) "often will go through extraordinary guilt years later."

Not unless "often" means 1 in 5.  Inconveniently

According to a new study that tracked hundreds of women who had abortions, more than 95 percent of participants reported that ending a pregnancy was the right decision for them. Feelings of relief outweighed any negative emotions, even three years after the procedure.

Researchers examined both women who had first-trimester abortions and women who had procedures after that point (which are often characterized as “late-term abortions”). When it came to women’s emotions following the abortion, or their opinions about whether or not it was the right choice, they didn’t find any meaningful difference between the two groups.

These findings contradict the notion that women experience negative mental health effects after ending a pregnancy, as well as the idea that later abortions are more psychologically traumatic. 

That's right.   Conservatives tell women- uh, er, "birth mothers"- that they're committing murder, and most of them, by a wide margin, nonetheless conclude they did the right thing. But it's repeated ad nauseam while little counter-narrative is offered for fear that people will mistakenly think that abortion is being minimized. "Safe, legal, and rare" is a more cautious approach.

There is another advantage to the claim "there are two victims" in the procedure.  It enables anti-choice activists and politicians to prohibit as many abortions as possible while absolving women of any responsibility for the act they have enshrined in the law as murder.Tara Culp-Ressler of Think Progress is justifiably angry at the lack of compassion shown women who have been" charged with murder for allegedly seeking to harm their fetuses by attempting suicide, using illegal drugs, or even falling down the stairs." But these are very rare cases, in which women typically have been accused of committing acts illegal apart from abortion.

Aside from these outliers, women in the USA are not considered criminally culpable for seeking an illegal abortion because the political viability of the anti-choice movement otherwise would evaporate. Paternalistically labeling the woman a "victim" is a vital component in maintaining this rhetorical and legal jiu-jitsu.

The paternalism embedded in the myths of the woman sure to have regret after being coerced into an abortion is not peculiar to Huckabee.  He is not the first to imply that the woman is an ignorant being we must save from herself. The sentiment was encapsulated chillingly by Justice Kennedy when, in delivering the deciding vote (and majority opinion) in Gonzalez v. Carhart, he wrote 

It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.

As one individual who responded to the criticism of the candidate as a "moron" put it, Mike Huckabee "is a former governor and Fox television host. He's not making some crazy rant on the internet. He is the Republican Party. He is not a moron. He is a cruel, calculating man" rather than "some fringe person not worth taking seriously."













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Two Remarkable Comments

A Daily Kos blogger weekly hosts a poll asking "Who won the week?" It is often won by President Obama, and includes a wide array of legitimate options. For this week, the results were

The Connecticut Supreme Court, for ruling the state's death penalty unconstitutional, sparing 11 inmates on death row   12%, 393 votes

James Tracy, Mike East and Larry Morris, the retired Marines who lowered the American flag at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 1961…and helped raise it there again today, 54 years later  11%, 371 votes

The Black Lives Matter movement, which is effectively getting its message out and insisting that people pay attention  8% , 280 votes

Astronaut Scott Kelly, who chowed down on the lettuce he grew at the International Space Station and deemed it "tasty"  1%, 33 votes

Canadian parliament candidate Wyatt Scott, whose zany online ad in which he rides a goose, slays a dragon and high-fives a space alien went viral and entered political ad lore   2%, 72 votes

Hillary Clinton: still running strong against the GOP; unveils New College Compact; meets with members of Black Lives Matter activists in New Hampshire  6%, 219 votes

Go Left America and the Detroit School Board, for filing a Title VI complaint with the DOJ against MI Gov. Rick Snyder for misusing federal funds, discrimination against minorities, and abuse of power  4%, 159 votes

The senators who announced their intention to vote for the Iran nuclear agreement, inc. Franken, Tester, Durbin, Sanders, Schatz, Klobuchar and King (Go, Angus!)  20%, 655 votes

Bernie Sanders: draws a crowd of 28k in Portland and 27k in LA; National Nurses United endorsement; hires the amazing Symone Sanders of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice as new national press secretary  27%, 898 votes

Melissa Gilbert, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in Michigan's 8th District, and stands a good chance of winning  1%, 49 votes

Baseball trivia buffs: on Tuesday all 15 Major League home teams won their games over the visitors (with 4 shutouts) for the first time ever  2%, 85 votes

Bernie Sanders was the popular winner there but nothing he said last week compared to a statement from a Republican US Representative. Interviewed by a conservative talker from the southeastern part of the state, the conservative congressman admitted

I did not do what I should have done to read and find out whether Bush was telling us the truth about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 and having weapons of mass destruction. Because I did not do my job then, I helped kill 4,000 Americans, and I will go to my grave regretting that.

You can't get a better apology than that.  Compare those words of regret from North Carolina's Walter Jones to the Repub politician who on Thursday at a forum sponsored by Politico remarked

I'll tell you, though, that taking out Sadaam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal... In 2009 Iraq was fragile but secure. It was mission was accomplished in a way that there was security there. It is a fact.... It was important to create a secure situation so that the Iraqi people, uh, felt progress was being made; they weren't afraid to walk the streets.

The surge was a military success and political failure, paving the way for the election of Nouri-al-Maliki, who shut the Sunnis out of the government and created conditions ripe for increased terrorism and instability.  President Obama complied with the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the brother of the man who made the statement above.   Taking out Sadaam, an ardent foe of Al Qaeda, turned out to be a pretty bad deal, setting in motion the events which have led to the turbulence and instability in the region today.

It's a tale of two men, both Republicans. One of them doesn't understand the Middle East and is even more confused about economics. The other one, from a district which went 58%-41% for the GOP presidential nominee in 2012, offers a bold, nearly unprecedented, apology for his role in a war waged by a president of his own party. The other can raise an awful lot of money and is from a family which has produced two failed presidents. And he is the one who thinks he should be President.












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In Which We Assume Mere Ignorance

In the video below of an interview (video below) conducted by O'Reilly Report Eric Bolling, Dr. Ben Carson contends

Maybe I'm not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood. But you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is.  And I know that she believed in eugenics and that she was not particularly enamored of black people. And one of the reasons that you find more of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so you can find a way to control that population.

That is accurate. Ben Carson is not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood. It is less clear he knows who Margaret Sanger was, for her views were complex and complicated, and sometimes unclear, not unlike this blog.   Sanger focused on legalization of birth control, as well as access to birth control within the poverty-stricken black community.

Wikipedia maintains she "did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects." Any animus toward blacks evidently did not prevent acceptance of the inaugural Margaret Sanger Award by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who also stated

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. . . . Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

But Carson's criticism of Planned Parenthood was not limited to its founder. He did not remark "and one of the reasons that you found more of their clinics in black neighborhoods" but rather "and one of the reasons that you find more of their clinics in black neighborhoods...."  Slickly, he tried to draw a straight line from the controversial remarks of Sanger and the current activities of Planned Parenthood.

If in fact there are more Planned Parenthood clinics in black neighborhoods, the motivation hardly would be nefarious.  The rate of unwanted pregnancy is far higher in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods while access to birth control information and options is more limited. Additionally, in those poor neighborhoods, there is a great number of women who themselves are unable to pay for the other health services, such as AIDS testing, pelvic exams, Pap tests, and screenings for breast cancer, offered by Planned Parenthood.   Women in those areas may also have reduced mobility, an inability to travel to other parts of the city or rural area to obtain those services.

But we already knew Ben Carson as a member of the Every Young Woman A Baby Vessel Party. What we didn't know is that Dr. Carson is blissfully ignorant of the field of urban geography.  Unless a variance is obtained, no organization can operate in a building in a particular location if it is not consistent with the local zoning ordinance, which will keep it out of most affluent white sections of a city.  Notwithstanding its value to women of the area, Planned Parenthood is further disadvantaged because not all of its clients are going to be from that municipality. Its clientele will be drawn in part from outside of the town in which it is located.

Significantly, as a non-profit, Planned Parenthood is exempt from local taxes, and thus the kind of operation that revenue-minded officials are loathe to see take up important real estate. It lacks the sexiness of a craft beer tavern, sushi bar, or art gallery and will not be welcomed  as would a business, such as a convenience store, hardware store or drugstore, providing critical services or products for the neighborhood.

Individuals in some neighborhoods, additionally, would coalesce against such an establishment being set up in their backyard.    The services provided are less crucial for the affluent than for the poor or the working class; and well-off people are particularly well situated to impose their will upon local boards and officials.

Planned Parenthood, even if it wished to set up shop elsewhere, may be relegated to poor, hence minority, neighborhoods. Further, if the organization wants to go into those areas, it is merely following an iron rule of the private sector in responding to demand.

It's funny how the Carson hasn't recognized that. It is also a reminder that no matter how brilliant an individual- even a famed surgeon- is in his area of expertise, he might be blithely ignorant otherwise. Self-serving,  The candidate told Bolling "to solve problems doesn't necessarily require a lot of political experience."  However, a little bit of knowledge about how government works would go a long way and Ben Carson seems to be no more aware than he is open-minded.

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Just Another Pol

In one of the most innocuous comments in an awful article in "The Week," Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes "So one of the blessings of our ongoing populist moment of anti-politician anger has been the rise of non-politician candidates. Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and certainly Donald Trump bring a different perspective from the career politicians who have graced the Republican stage."

Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson all appear to be non-politicians.  But the latter (as well as probably the first) only appears not to be a politician.

Dr. Jen Gunter has found that Dr. Carson in 1992 published a paper entitled "Colloid Cysts of the Third Ventricle:"   Immunohistochemical evidence for nonneuropithelial differentiation, in which materials and methods included "using human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation."

That would be the same Ben Carson who has claimed “At 17 weeks, you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and hands and the heart’s beating. It can respond to environmental stimulus. How can you believe that that’s just a[n] irrelevant mass of cells? That’s what they want you to believe, when in fact it is a human being.”   (Video below is of an earlier abortion controversy that befuddled Dr. Carson.)

That would be the same Dr. Carson who has falsely tried to link Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger to the Nazis and has posted a petition online asking that federal funds be denied Planned Parenthood because of what he terms its "Baby Organ Harvesting Programs."

An interview with The Washington Post's Dave Weigel revealed

Carson had not forgotten and considered the type of research he did to be useful. "When we obtain tissue like that, we want to know what the origin of that tissue is developmentally," he said. "Knowing that helps us determine which patients are likely to develop a problem. It’s one of the reasons why at the turn of the last century, the average age of death was 47. Now, the average age of death is 80. Using the information that you have is a smart thing, not a dumb thing."

The candidate clearly was neither apologizing nor backtracking, given that

"You have to look at the intent," Carson said before beginning a campaign swing through New Hampshire. "To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it."

Yes, the intent. In Dr. Carson's case in 1992, it was research, evidently studying tissue from an aborted baby. In the case of Planned Parenthood in 2015, it is.... research. Most commonly, it is research pertaining to Parkinson's and other degenerative diseases. BuzzFeed, however, has learned researchers "work on a diverse range of projects: understanding human blindness, developing vaccines, making better models of HIV, and creating therapies for liver failure, just to name a few."

Rationalization, however, has no limit. The good doctor continued

"My primary responsibility in that research was when I operated on people and obtained the tissue....  "  He noted that he has not used fetal tissue samples since then. "This has everything to do with how it’s acquired. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it."

The report contained the passage "Nasal mucosa was obtained from transsphenoidal hypophysectomies. Human choroid plexus, ependyms, and nasal mucosa were obtained from two fetuses aborted at the ninth and 17th week of gestation."   It was procured from babies who, according to Carson's ideology, were killed.  Planned Parenthood performs legal abortions and transfers fetal tissues for no profit to a research facility. Dr. Carson performed research on tissue from aborted fetuses.

Ben Carson sees, or pretends to see, no moral conundrum. Whereas lay people sometimes admit wrong, few politicians admit they are wrong. (There are the very rare, and courageous, exceptions.) Apologies are permitted as long as they are not genuine but actual admission of wrongdoing is avoided at almost all costs. Ben Carson understands this and has acted accordingly.

Better to be unmasked as a hypocrite, especially if your supporters (as in this case) will forgive you or deny there is a  conflict. Ben Carson understands this and has responded accordingly. Congratulations are due to him- he has become a politician and without even having to admit it.












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Cracking Down On Campus Drug Use To Make A Point

It's very difficult to think calmly and rationally when your judgments are colored by race.  So Van Jones (photo, Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) deserves compassion and sympathy rather than vitriol.  Still, he needs to be shown the way out of the morass of illogic in which he is wallowing.  There are many examples of misguided reasoning in Jones' recent interview with Salon's Elias Isquith. Not the most significant but perhaps the most interesting comes when nearly at the end Jones claims

Listen, real economic populism that tries to deal with the question of income inequality cannot fail to talk about the criminal justice system. I mean, a major driver of income inequality — and certainly racial inequality — is that you have whole categories of people who are being herded off to prison for stuff that kids are doing on Ivy League campuses right now. But they have nothing on their records, while you’ve got poor kids, living 20 minutes away, who are called felons. As long as that’s happening, you will have income and racial inequality in this country.

It's not only Ivy League colleges on which students have a greater immunity than anyone- white or black, rich or poor, male or female- has off the campus.  One impediment to enforcement is the conflict between town and gown aggressive enforcement would provoke. Additionally, drug activity on campus usually is conducted less openly than it is on the streets, which mimics the greater openness generally with which blacks commit drug offenses, one of the reasons African-Americans are arrested at a greater clip than European-Americans.

Order is typically maintained at a residential college by campus police. Indeed, those police can be empowered to make arrests and perform the same law enforcement functions as do municipal police. In fact, they already have that power in some states. We got a glimpse as to how that can turn out when

A white campus police officer was charged with murder Wednesday for fatally shooting an unarmed black man after a routine traffic stop last week, an incident a local prosecutor decried as a “senseless, asinine shooting.”

The episode added Cincinnati to the list of cities where white officers have shot and killed black civilians, drawing national attention and fueling an ongoing debate over police use of deadly force against minorities.

A similar shooting in 2001 provoked violent riots here. With that memory still fresh, local officials moved swiftly and deliberately to try to contain the fallout.

“It was so unnecessary for this to occur,” Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters said at an afternoon news conference. Of more than 100 police shootings reviewed by his office, Deters said, “this is the first time that we’ve thought, ‘This is without question a murder.'”

University of Cincinnati police officer Raymond Tensing, 25, now faces life in prison for shooting Samuel DuBose, 43, on the evening of July 19, roughly two minutes after pulling him over for failure to display a front license plate. At first, Tensing said he was forced to shoot DuBose because he was being dragged by the car and nearly run over, according to the initial police report. But Deters said that didn’t happen, and Tensing was wearing a body camera that captured the incident.

The video, released Wednesday, appears to show DuBose turning the ignition after Tensing tells him to take off his seat belt. The officer reaches toward the door, yells “Stop!” and draws his gun. Then he thrusts the weapon through the open car window and fires a single round, striking DuBose in the head.

“He wasn’t dealing with someone who was wanted for murder. He was dealing with someone who didn’t have a front license plate. This was, in the vernacular, a pretty chicken-crap stop,” Deters said, adding: “I’m treating him like a murderer.”

Jones might want to reconsider that idea of setting loose campus police, who would probably be at the center of the the effort Jones is advocating.  University of Cincinnati police officer Tensing had the legal authority to pull the motorist over but his behavior was an apparent affront to decent policing.

Even Jones' statement "I mean, a major driver of income inequality — and certainly racial inequality — is that you have whole categories of people who are being herded off to prison," though seemingly uncontroversial, is inaccurate.   Arresting young black men (at greater rates than young or middle aged white men, middle aged black men, or women) is not "a major driver of racial inequality." It is not even a minor driver of racial inequality. It reflects racial inequality, which may be (and here, is) a whole lot different.;

It is a symptom of racial inequality. A society that is racially unequal is likely to end up having a differential impact upon one part of society than another. Poverty, broken families, limited job opportunities, and restricted access to inherited wealth have a habit of doing that. Those are the primary factors which result in the greater burden of arrest and incarceration in the African-American community.

As luck would have it, those are among the things to which Bernie Sanders has devoted his career and his presidential campaign, which realization has been obscured by the militant wing of Black Lives Matter and by Van Jones.

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Going On The Offensive On Iraq

Two months before being elected President

Barack Obama said the surge of American forces in Iraq has ``succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,'' though Iraqis still haven't done enough to take responsibility for their country.

``The surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,'' Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a recorded interview broadcast tonight on Fox News's ``The O'Reilly Factor'' program.

Obama has come under repeated criticism from Republican rival John McCain for opposing President George W. Bush's decision last year to send 20,000 extra combat troops to Iraq. While Obama said before that the additional forces have damped insurgent violence, his comments on the program were some of the strongest he's made on the issue.

Barack Obama, running for the highest office in the land in 2008, was loyal most of all to his own campaign for the presidency, which thankfully saved us from a Vice-President Sarah Palin.

Now, however, as Jeremiah Wright and millions of Americans have put it over the years, "the chickens have come home to roost."  Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday, John Ellis Bush (spinning the tale five days earlier, below) stated

So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the joint chiefs knew was necessary?

That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill – and that Iran has exploited to the full as well.

ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat.

And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this?  Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge…then joined in claiming credit for its success … then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.

Author and Slate contributor Fred Kaplan demolishes John's argument as he explains

Bush got a crucial fact wrong in this chronicle: His brother’s administration—not Obama’s—signed the status of forces agreement, on Nov. 17, 2008, which stated, in Article 24: “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”

Article 30 of that same agreement stated that its terms could be amended “only with the official agreement of the Parties in writing and in accordance with the constitutional procedures in effect in both countries.” These “constitutional procedures” included a vote by the Iraqi Parliament—and at no time between 2008 and 2011 was the Iraqi Parliament going to take such a vote.

Granted, President Obama did want to get out of Iraq; he won the White House in large part on that promise, and there was no more support in the United States than in Iraq for a continued presence of American troops. And yet Obama did send emissaries—among them former aides to George W. Bush—to seek an amendment to allow a few thousand residual forces. The Iraqi government refused. Unless Obama wanted to re-invade the country, there was nothing to be done.

There was another fallacy in Bush’s description of the surge: Though it was a huge tactical success, it did not pave the way toward “victory.” As its architect, Gen. David Petraeus, said on several occasions, the surge was meant merely to create some “breathing space,” a “zone of security,” so that Iraq’s political factions could form a unified government. The problem was that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki didn’t want unity: He didn’t want to make a deal on power-sharing, oil revenues, or land settlements with Sunni or Kurdish leaders; he wanted to maintain Shiite dominance—and it was Maliki’s stubbornness that revived the sectarian violence and left a lane open for ISIS, whose leaders exploited their fellow Sunnis’ resentments.

Unfortunately, the surge as a success is an idea deeply embedded in American journalism and as a result, influential with the American people. It has not been a dominant argument because voters understand that Gulf War II, initiated by George W. Bush under false pretenses, was a mistake and bears more responsibility than anything for unleashing dangerous forces in the Mideast.

Still, John Ellis Bush's argument is dangerous, one which might resonate with voters in a general election, whether the candidate is the former president's brother or someone else.  It would not have fooled anyone, had Democrats pushed back against it when it was continually claimed by John McCain. Worse yet were those Democrats, such as Barack Obama, who lacked the fortitude to rebut the false argument that the surge, largely a failure, was a smashing success.














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Words Without Context

Say what you will about Rand Paul.  He is, for instance, an avowed supporter of a balanced budget amendment, which Charles Pierce has referred to often as "the worst idea in American politics."  (The second worst is an elected judiciary. Right, again.)   Paul believes in the right to discriminate against people if they can rationalize it on the basis of religious belief: "if people have an opinion, it's a religious opinion that is heartly felt, obviously they should be allowed to practice that and no government should interfere with them." That probably should be a finalist for the third worst idea in American politics, given that the balanced budget amendment and election of judges have the first two positions wrapped up.

The Kentucky senator either is a far-right conservative masquerading as a libertarian or a libertarian masquerading as a far-right conservative who believes in the same things as do virtually all of  his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination.   One is nearly as bad as the other.

To his credit, Paul does depart from his colleagues in opposing the administration's claim of an untrammeled right to spy on the citizens it serves. He has also departed slightly from his party's foreign policy consensus and has sponsored an amendment requiring the President to declassify 28 pages of the congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

When President Bush in 2003 classified that portion of the 900 page report, he claimed that its release would make it "harder for us to win the war on terror." Representative Walter Jones- a Republican from North Carolina- noted "There’s nothing in it about national security. It’s about the Bush administration and its relationship with the Saudis."

Jones has read the 28 pages.  Then-Florida Senator Bob Graham, who asserts "That chapter refers primarily to the issue of who financed 9/11 and it points a very strong finger of suspicion at Saudi Arabia," has read them.

Nonetheless, another Graham, and contender for the Repub presidential nomination, Lindsey Graham, has not read them.  Another candidate, failed governor Chris Christie, whose recent debate performance amounted to "I care more about the 9/11 victims than anyone else," contended “Different people in Congress are interested in different things.  If they have an interest, they should go and they should read it. I don’t know why they wouldn’t have an interest, but I’m not going to sit here and dictate to people what they spend their time on."

As far as is generally known, no one has asked Donald Trump, who now is the leading candidate despite Thursday's event, what he thinks about the 28 pages, nor whether he has any clue what they refer to. However, Trump- testosterone flowing- phoned in to GOP TV's Fox and Friends (video below) Tuesday morning and stated

Now we take oil. We should have kept their oil. Now we go in, we take the oil. We thereby take their wealth.

The other thing, through Saudi Arabia, Steve, through Saudi Arabia and other places, tremendous money's flowing in. We have to stop that flow of money. But take the oil, knock the hell out of 'em."









The interview ended after Trump went on and on about the Mideast.  Even if it hadn't, no one would have asked him about the 28 pages. Nor would anyone ask him who takes the oil, who it's given to, and for whose benefit. The USA ("we?") already fought one war to enable multinational oil companies to develop oil fields.  If Donald Trump wants another, he should tell us.

Donald Trump may be a gasbag. But he's the Republican Party's gasbag, and someone ought to determine what lies behind the bravado.  He tells us the Mexican government is sending to the USA all manner of violent criminals, but he's going to get them to pay for a wall to keep those people in Mexico.  Now he says "we go in" and "take" the wealth of the Saudis, whom he argued in 2011 would raise the price of gasoline to "5 or 6 dollars a gallon for gasoline pretty soon."

Trump doesn't tell us where the wealth would go. Nor has he taken the first step (acquiring information) in deciding upon policy toward Saudi Arabia. He demonstrates no more curiosity than Lindsay Graham or Chris Christie about what the government in Riyadh has been up to.







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