Posted by
Falcon46 on Friday, September 05, 2008 12:00:00 AM
Dear Mr Krauthammer,
Your analysis about Sarah Palin is just flawed through and through and makes me wonder what your underlying motivations and connections are that would produce such a distortion about her experience and qualifications for the VP slot. What has the so-called experience of other presidents produced that has been overlooked by most of the Press.
Some examples:
The Charismatic Theodore Roosevelt: Lots of “experience” but he was a political bully who ushered in the era of big government and meddling in other country’s internal affairs. The Panama Canal was pushed over an approved alternative route by his fomenting internal strife in Columbia, allowing Panama to be separated from Columbia. In the early 1920s the United States paid tens of millions of dollars in reparations to Columbia in an embarrassing agreement concerning our complicity in the whole affair. He completed a secret agreement with Japan making Korea a military protectorate under Japan’s boot and sewed the seeds for further Japanese Imperialist expansion, later accelerated by the British refusal to renew their treaty with Japan. His outrageous use of executive orders circumvented our constitution. His escalating government regulations disrupted industries, destroyed jobs, and led to the higher cost for almost everything. His antitrust laws punished companies that saved consumers money. It is arguable that perhaps more people have been killed than saved by the FDA food and drug regulations he first established. Many of his conservation policies degraded our environment, especially WRT government grazing lands. He resurrected the income tax from the political ashes in 1906 and the final result was “soak the rich” income taxes that soaked everybody. He started the decline of the railroads (still the most energy efficient way to move freight) with the Hepburn Act and other laws. He was a warmonger and lobbied heavily for our involvement in World War I, which was a disaster for the world although it seems his fervor relented with the loss of his son in that conflict. If I could, I would sandblast his face from Mount Rushmore.
The Legendary Woodrow Wilson: Wilson was, oh, president of Princeton, governor of New Jersey, and our only highly educated president to herald from academia. With him we got the income tax and he and a subservient Congress conveniently ignored the fact that “income” in the 16th Amendment did not mean the wages and salaries of the average worker – see the Congressional Record of the 1909 debates concerning the meaning of income in the 16th Amendment that was sent out to the states for ratification. We also got the Federal Reserve Act that has inflated and undermined our currency and middleclass wealth from that time to the present. He meddled in Mexico with disastrous results, replacing one crooked dictator with another. He was an anglophile who thought the British form of government superior to our own (but he swore an oath to protect and defend our Constitution) and when Britain and France were about to default on +billion dollar loans, he (conferring primarily with Edward Mandell House with close ties to big eastern banks) led us into World War I after promising to keep us out. The result was the World got Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II as we know it, which would not have happened if Germany had won. And Germany might have done more to avert war if it had known of Britain’s secret agreement to support the French! Thanks to Clinton’s release of heretofore undisclosed government records we now know the Lusitania was carrying 180 tons of rifle/cannon munitions, the Germans knew it, that Wilson prevented the Germans from publishing their notifications of vessels carrying war contriband in newspapers like the NYT to warn the public, and that Churchill withdrew the promised destroyer escort in submarine infested waters while the Lusitania was ordered to cruise at 3/4 speed. The propaganda that Wilson encouraged about the poor Belgians was just that. About 8,000 died when the German armies roared through their territory but the Belgians had killed between 7 and 9 million Africans in the Belgian Congo as part of their ivory and rubber trade between 1885 and 1910. Where’s the justice? Wilson created the American Protective League to quell opposition to the War (300,000 deputized citizens by late 1918) that violated people's constitutional rights in all kinds of ways and might represent the first appearance of big government Fascism in the United States. His 14 Points were written, not by him, but mostly by Walter Lippmann and he went to Europe with no strategy as to how they would be implemented with the support of vengeful allied victors. Yeah, Wilson had experience and education all right and look what we got. If I could, I would rewrite Wilson’s legacy in every high school textbook.
The Mythical Franklin Roosevelt: He was the one term governor of the “Big State of New York” (what experience) and a fraud, failure and liar as a president. His lying started with his claims to authorship of his speeches from the “Happy Warrior” speech written by a NY judge, to “we have nothing to fear but …” lifted from Henry David Thoreau in a speech written by Sam Rosenman and others. He lied to the people in late 1932 about his “first” New Deal that quickly became his “second” fascistic New Deal in early 1933 with the unconstitional NRA and AAA. While millions starved in 1933 he, using taxpayer money, slaughtered millions of livestock that were buried in mass graves, burned cornfields, and plowed under oats and wheat to raise their prices instead of using these government purchased items to aid those barely surviving the ravages of the Depression. He ignored Hoover’s pleas to save the banks (Dec’32 to Feb’33), greatly exacerbating bank failures and the loss of millions in deposits by average Americans and then used Hoover’s treasury secretary/undersecretary Ogden Mills and Arthur Ballantine to create a plan to closs/reopen the banks and explained it all in a straightforward speech written by Ballantine (but portrayed as his) in one of his fireside (vomit) chats. He criticized Hoover’s deficits and then proceeded to create enormously larger deficits. He touted Mussolini as a great leader until the Ethiopian invasion of 1935 and subscribed to the autocracy of Fascism with similar programs of his own in the New Deal. When the “second” New Deal resulted in the second Depression of 1937-1938 (11,800,000 unemployed versus 11,529,000 in 1933), he became a disciple of Harvard/Tufts academic elites who convinced him to increase deficits even more by inflating our fiat currency through a “third” New Deal that was nothing but a system of tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect that survives to the present as the "Nanny State." He enriched himself at public expense through schemes like having the Postmaster General give him the rare “proofs” and unperforated sheets of each stamp issued to enrich his stamp collection valued at less than $500 when he entered office but valued at about $300,000 when he died ($4,500,000 plus in today’s dollars). His unconstitutional court-packing scheme is legendary. He used the coercive power of government through the FBI, Treasury Dept and IRS to intimidate and silence critics of his methods and policies. His family experienced 7 divorces during his reign as president (a scandal all by itself) as sons James and Elliot through aside wives and children for other women made possible by exploiting the political/financial connections of their president father. Eleanor enriched herself through her White House connections and allowed known communists and radicals to bed down in the Whitehouse for months on end. Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter and Four Freedoms was a big lie. After Germany invaded Russia and he was sure his policies would lead to war with Japan, he released the top secret Rainbow Five war plan (see Chicago Tribune and Washington Times 4 Dec 1941 editions) surreptitiously through surrogates to hopefully get Hitler to declare war on the United States if the Japanese attacked us, which Hitler did, thus making his desire to get us into the European War a fait accompli. He knew war was imminent but didn’t alert the commanders in Hawaii or for that matter the Philippines. He even ordered commissioned a schooner, the Lanikai, outfitted with two lewis machine guns, a three pound cannon, and a radio receiver that was to set sail on 8 Dec 1941 from the Phillipines to create an incident for War, only aborted by the 7 Dec Japanese attack. His and his staff’s foreign policy failures allowed most of Eastern Europe and China to fall into communist hands under dictators whose crimes against humanity were at least as great as Germany/Japan's and it is worth noting that Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 to primarily keep it out of Soviet hands. Roosevelt’s so-called “Brain Trust” failed on the economy, on foreign policy, on the implementation of the United Nations, etc. It was men like Marshall, Stimson, Knox in government and similar leaders in industry along with the oft forgotten “common man” who won WWII. I could go on and on, but I will summarized by saying if I could bulldoze the Roosevelt Memorial in DC, I would, and replace it with nice environmentally friendly shade trees.
Truman, Eisenhower less so, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter were also bad for America in many respects and “experience” did not mitigate the mistakes and bad results. But a willingness to uphold and defend our Constitution, having core values and the willingness to resist corruption would have reduced them! Recently, only Reagan and in a very few instances Bush II embodied such traits.
Clinton’s speech after the first attack on the TTT is emblematic of his naiveté, lack of historical knowledge and political cowardice. The linking of the crusades that took back the Jewish/Christian city of Jerusalem from Islam, who conquered it by force of arms, to a justification for the TTT attack ignores the fact that the crusaders were acting in self-defense and never tried to conquer the centers of the Islamic faith, Medina or Mecca. And as far as I can tell Clinton never got the central role of “abrogation” in Islamic beliefs.
Sarah Palin’s Resume: Sarah Palin's reform resume would be remarkable in any political career. She entered politics at 28, winning a seat on the Wasilla city council as an opponent of tax increases (imagine that). Defeating Wasilla's three-term incumbent mayor four years later, she swept the mayor's cronies out of the bureaucracy (imagine that). In 2003, Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski (former Atlaska Senator of 22 years) appointed her to the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Shortly after joining the oil and gas commission, Mrs. Palin commenced an ethics probe of the state's Republican party chairman, Randy Ruedrich, involving conflicts of interest with oil companies. The probe resulted in her resigning but eventually, the corrupt Ruedrich had to resign and pay a fine. She took on both an entrenched Republican with monied interest backing and a tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect Democrat and won. She seems to understand the lower taxes/smaller government real conservatism of the creative hardworking middle class - not the William Buckley country-club conservatism based upon the Jay Nock big government anti-communist conservatism. Her record is one of "real" knowledge, experience applied for the public good, and courage.
Most of us are not looking for a “new generation of leadership” but a different type of leader that will, with the immediate financial support the internet can provide, take on the political, legal and monied elites of DC and beyond. We are sick of the, excuse me, crap that I briefly covered above implemented by “men of experience” and want the dead hand of government reduced in our daily life. We know the country is being slowly degraded and bankrupted by a cabal of socialist politicians, media, lawyers, academics and one-world bankers/financiers. I’ll take a Sarah Palin over a Thompson, Huckabee, Romney, Pawlenty, Leiberman, Obama, Biden, Dodd, Kennedy, Boxer, Pelossi, Reid, Feinstein, Durbin, Leahy, Buckley, Hoyer, Guiliani or adnauseam any day. And if anyone on the conservative side can pursue political issues better according to David Horowitz’s “The Art of Political War” with both male and female voters than Sarah Palin, please let us know who that person would be.