posted March 26, 2007 03:04 PM            

Advertisers spend billions each year and have spent trillions of dollars attempting to "brand" their products.

Some here don't like the labels I've applied to them.

When the stench coming off communism and communists became too great for American nostrils to bear, they changed their names...to "progressives", to "environmentalists" and to "new democrats".

A rose by any other name eh?

Leftists have worked hard to brand themselves. Most make no bones about their leftist views.

Some of us refuse to permit leftists to brand themselves "liberals".

Over the years, leftists have aligned themselves with every enemy of America to be found any place in the world.

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of the Stalinist Soviet Union, murderer of about 70,000,000 citizens and with which the US fought a 40 year cold war.

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of communist North Vietnam's and it's communist leader Ho.

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of the little communist bast@rd Daniel Ortega and his little band of communists who were attempting to spread communist revolution in Central America.

Leftists approve of, support and attempt to deflect criticism of the murderous Fidel Castro and his little Cuban gulag.

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of the communist thug murderer of about 100,000,000 in China, Mao.

Leftists approve of, support and attempt to deflect criticism of the little madman communist Kim Jong Ill who has killed, caused to be killed and/or starved to death about 3 million North Koreans.

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of Pol Pot, a murderous communist who killed about 3,000,000 Cambodians because they were not ideologically pure enough communists for him.

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of and punishment of Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad who caused the murder of about 1,000,000 Iraqis. The man who caused the torture and rape of countless more during his 25+ years of terrorist reign and modeled his socialist regime after Stalin's Soviet Union.

Leftists have now joined hands with terrorists, who are at war with the United States. Leftists overlook their murders, torture, beheadings, attacks on civilians and can't find a harsh word to say about any of that. Worse, leftists are attempting to hand the terrorists a victory they can't win on the battlefields while at the same time attempting to hand the United States a military defeat from the halls of the Congress of the United States.

Now, it seems to me that labels matter. In the case of leftists, you've worked hard in opposition to the United States at every opportunity.

posted March 26, 2007 03:17 PM              

quote:

---

Leftists approved of, supported and attempted to deflect criticism of the communist thug murderer of about 100,000,000 in China, Mao.

---

what was it that nixon and kissinger were doing when they opened and encouraged normalized relations with China and Mao?

posted March 26, 2007 09:06 PM              

why are you so belligerent?

my words referenced nixon's very public support of Mao.

nixon/kissinger conversation with Mao ~

quote:

---

Feb. 21, 1972, Mao's residence: The first ice-breaking meeting between Nixon and Mao, arranged through Kissinger's secret negotiations. Mao wants to talk philosophy, not politics.

Nixon: I have read the chairman's poems and speeches, and I knew he was a professional philosopher. (The Chinese laugh.)

Mao (looking at Kissinger): He is a doctor of philosophy?

Nixon: He is a doctor of brains.

Mao: What about asking him to be the main speaker today?

Nixon: He is an expert in philosophy.

Kissinger: I used to assign the chairman's collective writings to my classes at Harvard.

Mao: Those writings of mine aren't anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.

Nixon: The chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world.

---

posted March 26, 2007 09:23 PM            

You post an offer of a truce, a challenge, then insult me on that same thread and backtrack here to a response I posted well before you issued your challenge and question if this is "rock throwing".

If it is "rock throwing", my aim is perfect.

posted March 26, 2007 09:33 PM            

For me, the deal breakers were opening diplomatic relations with communist China, imposing price controls and leaving US POWs in North Vietnam.

I would have made every attempt to strip Kissinger of his naturalized citizenship status and deport him out of the United States. In my opinion, Henry Kissinger and his advice were and continue to be pure poison. I do not consider him to be a genius or even half bright. I do see him as an elitist conspirator against the best interests of the United States.

posted March 27, 2007 01:22 AM              

Typically, a political label is handed to us from the higher powers, to separate the masses. I do think that politics in some ways, is like a religion. Just look how it divides us! Gosh forbid the people should be unified or actually informed. No, we can just stick petty simplistic labels on ourselves, which, by the way, are not self created, but labels offered to us.

posted April 12, 2007 01:02 PM            

When I say leftist, it immediately conjures the image of raving, ranting lunatics marching in the streets opposing the United States and everything good and necessary for a civilized society.

When I say NY Times...a label/brand btw..it immediately separates that one newspaper from all the others.

When I say Omaha, everyone understands I'm talking about a large city in Nebraska and I don't need to go into it's geographical location or demographics. The label/brand suffices to identify.

In this case, the label "socialist" is descriptive of Hillary Clinton. Now I could spend whole paragraphs delineating "socialist" behavior but I don't need to do that so why clog cyberspace with unnecessary wordiness?

I think what some here object to is that I separate liberals from leftists. Leftists have spent years attempting to deceive everyone to prevent themselves being properly labeled as "leftists".

Joe Lieberman is a "liberal". Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, John Conyers, Harry Reid and Maxine Waters are all "leftists"..among others in the Congress.

Hillary's Threat
By Dick Morris
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 12, 2007

Dick Morris gave this speech at an exclusive retreat hosted by David Horowitz in Santa Barbara, California, in late March. -- The Editors.

I used to believe that people got more religious when they got older because they were getting closer to death and they felt they needed to hedge their bets. And I felt that people got more conservative as they got older because they got richer and wanted to keep more of their money.

Then, when I got older, and became both of the above, I came to realize that while that’s true with a great many people, there was an alternate explanation that I would like to believe is true in my case and those of many others. You become more spiritual and more religious, because you realize nothing else works. And if you live a life like I have, you tried everything else. I’m the only guy that had to go to a 12-step program to get over Bill Clinton. And you become more conservative, not because you become more selfish, but because you keep the ideals that you had in your earlier years. But you realize that the way to achieve them is not the straight-ahead path that the left suggests, but the smart path that the right suggests.

So I’m fiercely proud of the welfare reform bill -- cut welfare by 60%, but more importantly, cut child poverty by 40%, by making welfare recipients get off their duff and out of the house, and get to work, and then rewarded their work by the earned-income tax credit, which the Clinton Administration doubled in the stretching out the eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, so you didn’t lose them when you went to work; and then giving employers tax incentives to provide jobs for former welfare recipients. So you took someone making 5,000 or 6,000 a year, and all of a sudden their pretax equivalent income was 30,000 or 32,000. And when the recession hit, they kept their jobs. And they’ve stayed out of poverty.

So I believe that Winston Churchill had it right -- if you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. And if you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you have no brain.

Because sometimes, the tough solution -- welfare reform -- is the way to bring down poverty. De-control of prices is the way to lower prices. Stimulation of energy discovery and production is the way to lower the cost of energy. Increases in the price of energy is the way to wean people away from oil dependence. Those policies that seemed counterintuitive to me as a young person became increasingly obvious as the correct solution.

I would urge you all to read the new book by John O’Sullivan, called, “The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister.” It’s a great book, and it really explains a lot about the Reagan-Thatcher approach, and how it basically ended the -- Communism in the world and changed global economics.

But I don’t really feel that much of a convert. I in fact notice that I’m sort of standing in the same place I always have. The scenery is just rotating around me, in front and in back. And it -- and what used to be a liberal position I now try to achieve by conservative goals, by conservative means. I used to refer to triangulation as using our tools to fix their car. And in a real sense, that’s a little bit of what I really believe in doing.

But of course, the other problem is they switched Clintons on me. There is, in fact, no such thing as the Clintons; these folks aren’t even related. There’s no DNA, there’s no shared inheritance. It’s not like saying I like John and Bobby, but I can’t stand Teddy Kennedy; at least there’s a presumption that they’re from the same gene pool.

In fact, anybody that knows Bill well and knows Hillary well has to begin their understanding of them not by their similarities, which almost don’t exist, but by -- they’re polar opposite people. They’re completely different human beings. Bill is intuitive and instinctual; Hillary learns everything by rote. Bill is creative and comes teeming with new ideas and insights. Your function in dealing with Bill is a little bit like trimming a hedge. You got a topiary; you got to take his ideas and shape them into something. Because otherwise, they just grow wild with this incredible creativity and this undisciplined, unbridled ability to look at things and see new paradigms.

But with Hillary, her next creative idea will be her first one. This woman is not a creative person. She’s not someone who looks for new solutions. She’s a tank. She gets programmed, and she goes straight ahead. And they tell her where to shoot and what to shoot, and she does it. She’s a vehicle for advocacy; whereas Bill is the embodiment of creativity and alternative ways of looking at issues and problems.

Bill likes people; Hillary basically doesn’t. Bill enjoys being with people; Hillary doesn’t. Bill is totally undisciplined. He has absolutely not the slightest whiff of discipline about him, in anything. Hillary is the single most disciplined person I’ve ever met in my life. For Bill, priorities are mild suggestions; for Hillary, they’re commandments. For Bill, focus is something that he doesn’t like, because it distracts him from all the stuff he’d like to look at. With Hillary, she feels insecure without focus and needs it, and looks straight ahead, and looks at what she’s zeroing in on.

When you get down to it, Bill is in politics for fundamentally neurotic reasons. He’s in politics because he does not have a strongly internalized self image. And as a result, he constantly seeks to learn who he is from the environment that surrounds him. Clinically it’s called narcissism. He’s constantly looking for a mirror to tell him what he’s like. Ooh, does this audience have some PhDs and educated people, and they’re all applauding me? Man, I must be smart. Does this audience have some people who are moral and ethicists and so on? I must be a good person. Does this audience have some women who are applauding me? I must be attractive.

In fact, I’ve isolated, after long research, what is the quality about women that attracts Bill Clinton. It is respiration. But if you forget the war on terror -- and that’s a big forget -- he was a pretty good President from the neck up.

But she would not be. She doesn’t care about popularity. Bill will never get too far away from what you want him to be. Because his goal in life is to please you, and therefore ratify a good opinion of himself. That’s how he works. That’s why I had such power over him, because I was the pollster. When he said, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” he was talking to me. And therefore, he’ll never get too far away from what the public really wants.

Hillary, on the other hand, could care less about popularity, except as a means to an end of getting elected. She’s in politics because of a deeply seated ideological point of view that she believes is right.

And if you agree with her, you’re in the wrong church now; maybe the wrong pew. Because if you agree with her, you ought to be supporting her. Because beneath all of the phoniness, beneath that cutesie giggle, beneath that, “Oh, I just stayed home and cleaned out some closets,” or, “Oh, I throw a few things together for Bill when he comes out -- goes somewhere after playing golf,” or all of that cutesie, studied informality, there lurks a woman who has a very clear sense of who she is.

And she is a really strong left-wing liberal. “Liberal” is an inadequate phrase; “socialist” is really the proper phrase. She is the closest thing we have to a European socialist. You want to know what she’s like? Look at Schroeder, in his pre-reform days. Look at Jospian in France. Look at Mitterrand before privatization blew up in his face. Look at the old Labor Party leaders that never got power, like Michael Foot and some of the others. She’s a real European socialist.

We spend about 33% of our gross domestic product on state, local and federal government. Britain spends about 39 or 40%. France spends 48%, Germany 51%, Sweden 55%. And Hillary would like us to move into the high 40s and the low 50s. And she’d like that to fund free higher education, free healthcare, free daycare, free extra nutrition, more food stamps, more welfare; the whole bit. And if you think that those are good goals, and if you think that’s the way to achieve it, support her. Because she really will do that. It’s really what she wants to do.

She will not just raise taxes because of the deficit. She will not just raise taxes to fund ambitious social spending. She’ll raise taxes to redistribute income. And by the way, we have a lot of income redistribution in this country.

I always tell Latin-American politicians, the reason you’re screwing up is you’re not good enough communists. You’re not as good communists as we are in the United States. We have 1% of our population that makes 20% of our national income and pays 36% of our national taxes. And we have 50% of the population that pays three and a half percent of our taxes in the United States. And that includes sales tax and property tax, and all of that.

And Hillary will just tilt that playing field even more. And I believe that that’s wrong. Because while I believe in higher education for everyone, and I believe in medical care being available to everybody, I also realize that the only way you can do that is to create wealth, so that you then can redistribute it. Trickle-down doesn’t work in my judgement, but irrigation sure as hell does.

And you can’t irrigate when it doesn’t rain. And I believe that Hillary will dry up the job creation, the economic force vital, that animates the growth in the American economy and leave us with what Western Europe has. Since 1980, 80% of the jobs that have been created in the OECD world -- the industrialized world of Western Europe, North America and Japan -- were created in the United States. Another 10% were created in Britain, and another 10% were all of Europe and all of Japan combined. And the reason is that we have this incredibly low tax cut rate; lower thanks to Bush.

By the way, did you see what the Democrats did the other day? They passed a reconciliation or budget bill, and they announced, there is not a penny of tax increase in this bill. Yeah, right. But it repeals all of the Bush tax cuts in 2010, when they’re set to expire. So it’s the biggest tax increase in history. But they’re busy saying there’s not a penny of tax increase in this anyway. And the alternative minimum tax basically replaces the tax code. We’re going to have a flat tax, guys. But it’s going to be 40%.

So the whole -- I believe that the whole engine of our economic growth would be sapped if Hillary implements the plan that I think she has in mind for the United States. And Hillary Clinton will do this. For all of the phoniness, for all of the insincerity, this is who she really is.

But a long time ago, Hillary came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t vote for her if we knew what she was like. And she’s right. She’s got a case. So she develops these many masks that she puts on -- the mask of moderation, the mask of being just a normal working mother, the mask of being a feminist. This woman never accomplished anything; her husband handed it to her.

Is there anybody who seriously believes she could ever have been elected senator from New York State, in which she’d never lived, and gotten the Democratic nomination without a primary fight, if her husband weren’t President at the time? Is there anybody who here seriously believes she could be running for President if her husband were not Bill Clinton?

There’s nothing that brings Obama to the table, there’s nothing that brings Edwards to the table, there’s nothing that brings Giuliani or McCain or any of the other candidates to the table, except their own biography, their own worth, and their own merit. If you want a feminist model, look at Condoleeza Rice. She made it herself; brought herself up from the Birmingham ghetto. And everything she’s done in life, she has created and she has done.

The only -- Hillary Clinton most reminds me of somebody else who’s in the White House whose father preceded him in public life, and wouldn’t be there unless his father were there. But maybe I should save that for another church and another pew.

But the point is, to describe Hillary Clinton as a feminist is just ridiculous. And what she does is she hides behind these masks, behind these alternate constructs of who she really is. A week after 9/11, Hillary announced on “The Today Show” with Katie Couric that Chelsea’s life was saved because on 9/11, she was jogging around the towers of the World Trade Center, and she ducked into a coffee shop at the last minute, when the plane hit, and she actually heard the airplane hit.

Well, four months later, Chelsea gave an interview to Talk Magazine that my wife, Eileen, found -- nobody else focused on the discrepancy, and she e-mailed Drudge, and Hillary was caught red-handed in this distortion -- Chelsea said she was asleep in her apartment four and a half miles from Ground Zero. And a friend called her and said, “Wake up and turn on the television set, and look at what’s going on. You’ll never believe it.”

So why did Hillary completely fabricate this story one week after 9/11? You can’t say that she didn’t know what Chelsea was doing; obviously she would have talked to her in the intervening seven days. Why would she invent this out of whole cloth? To understand that, you come to understand how Hillary fakes it, and why she fakes it.

Hillary was having a big problem at that point adjusting to being the Senator from New York in the wake of 9/11. Was the first time we really needed a senator -- “we” because I’m a New Yorker. I feel those two Twin Towers missing like molars missing in the back of my mouth. And we needed a senator. And here we have this Arkansan, or Illinoisan, or whatever she is. And, you know, can she find the World Trade Center? Does she know where Ground Zero like is?

So Hillary went before a rally at Madison Square Garden, a few days after 9/11, for first-responders and for policemen, firemen; and for survivors and the families of victims. And she was booed off the stage. She literally said, “Hello” -- said, “Ladies and gentlemen.” And soon as she said, “Ladies,” a crescendo of boos came up. She couldn’t get out a word, and she had to leave the stage. In the video of that, it’s edited out.

So she knew she had a problem. And then, she knew that Chuck Schumer, the other Senator from New York’s, daughter, Jessica Schumer, went to my alma mater, Stuyvesant High School, which is located right next to the World Trade Center. Had the World Trade Center fallen east instead of southwest -- fallen west instead of southeast -- it would have crushed the high school and killed Jessica Schumer.

So Hillary had to sort of one-up her co-senator from New York and, at the same time, establish a bond of intimacy with the people who were the first-responders and the families, to get over the feeling of estrangement of being an alien senator at the time when they really needed someone who they felt close to them. And she felt she’d never get caught. And she felt she could lie about her family endlessly, which she does. And she made this up, and just invented it out of whole cloth.

So she’s very different from Bill. Bill wouldn’t have to invent that. Bill would never be booed off that stage. He’d get up there biting his lower lip; tears would well up in his eyes. Everybody -- they’d be rushing up to give him handkerchiefs. Bill has this empathy with people. You’d swear that he’s an emotional, empathetic person, but he’s not. He’s like a headlight reflector that reflects the headlights of the car. He picks up your empathy, and he shines it back at you. And you’d swear he’s shining, but he’s not. He’s reflecting what you’re sending out. And as a narcissist growing up in an alcoholic household, he learned to pick up those vibes and react to them, and reflect them.

But Hillary can’t do that. But she grew up around a guy who does. And she saw that this is essential to his political advancement. So she tried, and she knows she can’t, so she fakes it. She was -- Chelsea was at 9/11. She was a concerned parent. She’s named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mount Everest five years after she was born. She’s a Yankee fan. She moves to Arkansas and affects a Southern drawl. She goes to New York and discovers that her step-grandfather was Jewish. She goes to Selma, and she says, “I stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King, who made it possible for a woman to run for President,” cleverly confusing the 19th and 15th Amendments to our Constitution. And then she goes to New Hampshire, and she’s Catholic all of a sudden. “John Kennedy stood here, and he was the first Catholic, and I’ll be the first woman.” And her strategy is essentially to fake this kind of connection, because she can’t generate it internally.

Now a gentleman over there said that he would like me to stop telling people that Hillary’s going to win. Well, that’s like asking Paul Revere to say the British aren’t coming. Now it doesn’t mean that they’re going to win, but they are definitely coming.

And I began to hear, a year ago, Republicans say, “Oh, I wish that Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, because she’s going to be the easiest for us to beat.” And that is just flat out wrong. It’s like saying, I wish there’ll be a nuclear war. Hillary would be a disastrous President. She would be a horrible President. And it’s a fate to be avoided like the plague. Not only would she be the liberal we’ve been talking about, but she would manage to combine that radical liberalism with a Nixonian feeling about means and ends.

Because Hillary believes she is the last good person on earth. Because Hillary believes that everybody who opposes her programs is doing so out of selfish greed; that they want to keep their money and soak the poor. Because she believes that she’s the only one that has the courage to stand up and speak out for the needs of women and children, and re-jiggle our tax structure to completely turn around our national priorities. And because she believes that about herself, she believes anything is okay to achieve her ends. Mother Teresa wants to feed the starving in Calcutta, so she highjacks a jet and flies over there to get there faster.

Hillary is a deep believer in the means justifying the ends. What woman would hire private detectives to snoop on her husband, to find the names of all the women he’s been involved with; not for the purpose of confronting him or divorcing him or reforming him, but for the purpose of blackmailing the women into silence so he can get elected President, and she can go along as First Lady to the White House?

She is a Nixonian in her view of means. And I do not want that woman controlling the FBI and the CIA and the DEA and the IRS and the FBI. And if she does, and you want to hear me speak in the future, Santa Barbara’s too close; you’ll have to go to Peru. But yet, but yet, she has a very good chance of being elected.

Now, recently there was a poll that said that 50% of the American people said they would never vote for Hillary Clinton -- a Harris Interactive Poll. And the problem with those polls is the first question they ask is, “Are you registered to vote?” And if you say no, they politely hang up. And if then they say, “How likely are you to vote,” and if you say, “I won’t vote; I never do,” they politely hang up. But that’s Hillary’s base that they just hung up on. Those are the people she’s going to use to win.

The fundamental dynamic of American politics since 1996 has been an increase in turnout. In ‘96, we had 95 million voters. In 2001, we had 101 million voters. In 2004, we had 121 million voters. And if Hillary runs, you’re going to get 135 million, 140 million Americans voting out of a voting-age population of 200 million. And overwhelmingly, those new voters are going to be single women. Half of all women in the United States are single -- there’s hope, guys. And women are 54% of the vote. They’re 52 of the population, but they register more, and they vote in higher numbers.

So 27% of the vote should be single women. But it was 19% in 2000, it was 23% in 2004. And if Hillary runs, it’s going to go up to 27 or 28% of the vote. There were 19 million single women who voted in 2000. There were 27 million that voted in ‘04. She’s going to move it up to 35 million or 40 million. And all of those voters are going to be Hillary Clinton voters.

There was a poll just done by Gallup. And it showed that men and women over 50 are 35 for Hillary if you’re a woman, and 34 if you’re a man. Gender made no difference. But under 50, like all of you are, it made a huge difference. Women under 50 were 43% for Hillary; men under 50 were 27% for Hillary.

So young, single women, who are juggling two kids, who work minimum-wage jobs, who pay no attention to politics, who never watch Fox News or CNN -- they watch the Oprah show and they watch the soap operas, and they watch the downscale programming, and they never vote; they don’t participate -- but they’ll learn three weeks before the election that there’s a woman running with a serious chance of winning. And they’ll learn that that is somebody that really could provide them with daycare and with healthcare, and with a higher minimum wage and with guaranteed fringe benefits and pension benefits. And that’s going to be -- and child support enforcement. And that’s crucial to them.

Basically, when you get down to it, people under the age of 65 and over the age of about 30, who are married, usually don’t need government, unless there’s some extraordinary thing, like they’re handicapped, or they’re brought up in a heritage of poverty, or they’re the objects of discrimination. But younger people and older people need government. And if they’re single especially, they need government. Because they got shafted in the divorce, or they’re single parents trying to make ends meet, or they’re retired, living on after their husband died, on a single income. And that creates a tremendous impetus for voting Democratic.

So all of the polling examines only the current numerator and the current denominator. And yeah, it’s true -- of the 120 million people that voted in ‘04, there are probably 60 million that’ll never vote for Hillary. But there are 20 million new ones coming in that won’t come in if anybody but Hillary runs, and they’re going to vote overwhelmingly, three to one and four to one, for Hillary Clinton.

Remember that while Rove squeezed out every last Republican, and got them to the polls in ‘04, and increased turnout among white, married men and women from 60% to 70%, to bring in the Bush election of ‘04 -- so Bush got 12 million more votes in ‘04 than he got in ‘00 -- that while that was happening, nine million more people voted for Kerry than voted for Gore -- overwhelmingly single women. And that’s the army that’s going to elect Hillary Clinton, if she wins the Democratic nomination.

Now, I believe that she still can be defeated. But we have to understand the danger, and we have to rally and move against it.

Now, I’m working with a group at Citizens United, headed by Dave Bossie, that is producing a film on Hillary Clinton. It’s going to be a 90-minute documentary. If you’ve noticed, I’ve spoken for more than 30 seconds today? It’s taken longer than 30 or 60 seconds to tell you who Hillary Clinton is. And Citizens United is going to produce a full-length film, like the swift-boat movie, or on the left like “Fahrenheit 911,” to really give people the flavor and an understanding of why she should not be President. And I would urge you to contact Citizens United and do what you can to help that. It’s CitizensUnited.org. And I believe that you can bring the story to people’s attention.

Now, in the current race, in the current play-by-play, it’s very interesting what’s going on. Hillary is sinking, in part not because anyone’s hitting her, not because anyone’s knocking her. There are no negative ads running, and for the moment, she’s not in the middle of a scandal -- but because people are seeing her and deciding, God, what a phony this woman is. They’re watching her positive campaign, and they’re coming to a negative conclusion, which is really neat. She’s making a negative campaign redundant.

The problem is that Obama isn’t doing anything. Obama had a good head of steam in January and February. And think what you will about Obama; he’s ABH -- anybody but Hillary. And Obama was doing pretty well, and then he sort of ran out of gas. He hasn’t moved up in the last month and a half. And when you look at his polling, you come to understand that the reason he’s not moving up is that he’s not articulated any kind of positive rationale for his candidacy. His campaign boils down to, “Here I am,” and, “Read my books.”

And it reminds me a little bit of the Gary Hart campaign -- fresh ideas, new approach, but where’s the beef? And Edwards has moved up slightly in the polls in the last week or so; I don’t think so much because of sympathy, but I think that people actually saw him on “60 Minutes” and were very taken and very impressed. And I think that he certainly deserves that. But it’s going to take some doing to defeat Hillary for this nomination.

Now I know that as Republicans, as conservatives, you would like the Republican nominee to be somebody with a long history of support of the pro-life movement. And you’d like someone with a long history of opposition to gay marriage. And you’d like someone with a long history of opposition to gun control. But wouldn’t you like to beat Hillary more?

And believe me, there is one guy that can defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton. And his name is Rudolph Giuliani.

And like I told you, I’m a New Yorker. And, you know, if Bloomberg runs and Hillary runs and Giuliani runs, there’ll be two and a half New Yorkers in the race, just like “Two and a Half Men” TV series. But look, when Rudy took office as Mayor of New York in 1993, there were 1,994 homicides. And when he left office in 2001, there were 650, if you don’t count the 3,000 they killed on 9/11.

But the point is that he took a city that was absolutely going, going, gone, and he completely turned it around. The unemployment rate went from twice the national average to less than the national average. The budget went from deficit to surplus, with no significant tax increases. He had the usual increase of real estate taxes, but it was less than anyone else had done. And at the same time, he cut the other taxes that New York depended upon.

And this guy absolutely understands the number-one social issue of our time, the number-one concern of the pro-life movement, the number-one concern of the pro-gun movement, the number-one concern of the heterosexual marriage movement, the number-one social conservative issue of our time -- terrorism. Because pro-life includes living if you have an office in the World Trade Center.

And I believe that Rudy Giuliani, uniquely among the candidates running for President, understands the war on terror, gets it, and understands how to deal with it. And that’s why I’m supporting him for President. And the fact that he can beat her is not a problem with me.

Now, you know, I have earlier been a strong supporter -- and my wife and I wrote a book on Condoleeza Rice, who I think has done an incredible job as Secretary of State. This is the untold story of the George Bush Administration. Libya flipped. Iraq and Afghanistan are not pacified, God knows, but they no longer subsidize terrorism. Sudan terrorizes its own people, but it’s out of the terrorism-sponsoring business. And Bush has drawn that noose tighter and tighter and tighter around the neck of North Korea and Iran.

What he did with North Korea is he realized that economic sanctions wouldn’t work. Because Kim Jong-il doesn’t give a damn how many of his people starve to death, as long as he gets his three meals every day, that includes caviar and a whole lot of other stuff. But he did realize that Kim Jong-il has a work ethic. This man has labored in the vineyards counterfeiting money, running the drug trade, laundering funds and engaging in all kinds of illegal activity. And he had this piggy bank in Macau, where he had $25 million in his own personal savings account. And George Bush told the Macau bank it could no longer use U.S. dollars.

And then China followed suit, with Bush’s urging, and closed down the piggy bank. And for him to get his money out of the bank, he’s got to start dismantling his nuclear weapons. And this infant, this man with a psychology of a seven-year-old, faced with not having his toys, is actually backing down in the nuclear issue. And I believe Bush will continue that pressure.

How did Bush and Rice get China to turn on a dime? One word -- Japan. They went to China, and they said if North Korea goes nuclear, Japan is going to go nuclear. Self defense, deterrence. And if there’s one thing on earth that Beijing does not want, it’s a nuclear Japan. They’ve had some bad history together, chemistry that really didn’t work. So I think that that has been so successful, that diplomacy. And the son-of-a-gun won’t claim credit for it.

When North Korea exploded its atomic bomb, three and a half weeks before the November elections of ‘06 -- just like Fidel Castro’s missile placements were revealed four weeks before the congressional election of 1962 -- I was on O’Reilly, and Hannity & Colmes, shrieking, “Talk about this. Make this your issue. Get people’s mind off the war. Focus on the really serious threat of a crazy guy, a lunatic with nuclear weapons. Get people focused on it.” Instead he didn’t, because I think he felt that to do so would be counterproductive. And instead, he initiated this quiet diplomacy that is now working before our very eyes, and suitably buried on page A26 of the L.A. Times and A31 of the New York Times. Nobody’s covering it. But yet he’s saving the Far East.

And in the meantime, he’s drawing the noose closer and closer around the neck of Iran. What he’s doing is understanding that the Achilles heel of Iran is its economy; they have none. Eighty-five percent of their government revenues come from oil and gas revenues. And when the Shah was around, it was producing six million barrels a day. Now it’s down to 3.9 million barrels. And the reason it can’t get that production higher is because they can’t pay for oil exploration or drilling or pipelines. And they don’t have refineries. Half of their refinery capacity is in Dubai.

So Iran is an economic basket case. Domestic demand is rising at 10% a year. And the oil revenues of Iran are going to decline from 55 billion in ‘06 to 44 billion in ‘07. And that’s 85% of the government’s revenues. That means they have to stop subsidizing gasoline at $0.35 a gallon. They have to stop free food and subsidized housing. And with 70% of their population under the age of 30, you cut those subsidies, and you are in terrible trouble politically. And since only 40% of the Iranian population is Farsi, there’s ethnic splits there as well that develop. And Bush is squeezing Iran incredibly.

Now, this is something that is not a spectator sport. You can participate in that; each of you, each one of you. We currently have tremendous economic leverage as citizens over Iran, if we choose to use it. There are 485 companies that are publicly traded that provide Iran with $80 billion of energy investments. And the pension funds of the United States, the 50 states, supply those 485 companies with $170 billion of pension fund investments.

So get a hold of Schwarzenegger. Get a hold of the State Treasurer in California. And urge them to cut off their energy investments to any company that does business with Iran and North Korea.

Now stop clapping and pick up a pen, okay? I got homework for you -- pen and paper, everybody. Come on, get them out. Okay.

You got to go online, and you got to go to www.disinvestterror.org. That’s an organization run by the guy you’ll be hearing today: Frank Gaffney. Frank will show you that there is a mutual fund, called the Roosevelt Fund, that does not invest in any of these 485 companies and has a return that probably equals or beats the mutual fund your personal assets and your 401(k) is invested in.

Well, if we hit Shell Oil with a reduction in their share price, which means a reduction in the bonus to the CEO, they’re going to run screaming from Iran so fast you won’t know what caught them. And when they do that, Total and Repsol, and Hyundai and Siemens, and a whole lot of those companies that are on that list, are going to be following suit.

And there’s another thing you can do. This one involves you being -- working with some Democrats. When I worked for Clinton in ‘96, Alfonse D’Amato was pushing a bill called the Iran Libya Sanctions Bill. And it was a brilliant piece of legislation. It said that when a foreign company -- American companies are prohibited now -- but a foreign company invests in Iran’s energy sector, the United States government must impose sanctions on that foreign company. And the sanctions where you can’t get import-export bank financing, you can’t underwrite a treasury bond issue, you can’t become a defense contractor -- can’t be in the overseas private investment corporation funding -- all kinds of stuff that really is significant.

And Clinton, of course, wanted to veto the bill, because Sandy Berger got him to do it. And I used that argument that I always used with Bill -- you’ll lose the election if you don’t. And he agreed to sign the bill. But Berger got a national security waiver inserted that said the President could waive these sanctions any time he wanted. And it was passed, and Clinton signed it and bragged about it in his acceptance speech at the ‘96 Convention -- I know; I wrote it.

So then the two times that that issue came up, he waived the sanctions. Because the Western Europeans raised hell -- that this was extraterritoriality, this was American inserting sovereignty over companies that were none of its business, and la-dee-dah-dee-dah. And Clinton was petrified by that, and he waived the sanctions.

Bush has been even worse. He hasn’t even waived the sanctions. He hasn’t even mentioned them, isn’t applying them; the law’s still on the books. But he hasn’t enforced it, because he doesn’t want to get Western Europe even angrier at him than they are over Iraq.

But now, Chris Dodd in the Senate and Tom Lantos in the House -- Democrats both -- have introduced the Dodd-Lantos amendment that eliminates the national security waiver. You know, they’re Democrats; they want to sock it to Bush. And it forces him to apply those sanctions. And Duncan Hunter, the Republican running for President, is co-sponsoring that bill in the House. And Trent Lott is about to join it as a co-sponsor in the Senate.

And I believe that bill may pass, with a veto-proof margin. And George Bush may say to the Congress, “Oh, my God, are you going to pass this bill? Well, then, I am going to veto it. And if you override this bill, well, then there’s nothing I can do, is there, folks? I have to go to Western Europe and apply these sanctions.” And they say, “How dare you assert extraterritorial -- this is American imperialism.” Bush can say, “I couldn’t agree with you more; I vetoed the bill. And those son-of-a-gun Republicans overrode my veto, and Condi and I are helpless.” And I think that will be a tremendous arsenal in the quiver of our effort to deal with Iran.

And I believe that when all this happens -- when you switch your 401(k)s, when you get Schwarzenegger to withdraw his pension money, and when the Lantos-Dodd bill passes -- I do not believe it will be necessary to attack Iran militarily, because they won’t be in business anymore. They’ll be on the ash heap of history, like Ronald Reagan said.

Well, I was very deliberate in my choice of timing here. I wanted to speak only after you’d eaten, because I knew my talk about Hillary might ruin your appetites. But now that you’ve safely digested, I would be happy to answer questions from anybody.

But first, I do want to give you another piece of homework. My wife and I write a column almost every other day. And it’s really an analysis of the Presidential race, brought to you live and in person. And if you want to get it e-mailed to you for free, pretty much every day, go to DickMorris.com and enter your e-address, and sign up, and you’ll get it.

And next week, we’re actually going to be beginning to use that website for more than that. We’ll be putting a lot of material on it about staying current in the Presidential race. And love you to come online, and love to be able to share my thinking with you.

posted April 12, 2007 01:42 PM              

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Hillary Clinton, the Democrats and the Iraq War:

A Socialist Alternative
I am running as the Socialist Equality Party candidate for US Senate from New York, challenging the Democrat Hillary Clinton, to bring to the widest possible audience a socialist alternative to militarism, social reaction and aggressive capitalism.

The following statement by the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US Senate from New York, Bill Van Auken, was distributed to the April 29 demonstration in New York City demanding an end to the US war against Iraq. It is also available in PDF.
The tens of thousands of people marching through the streets once again to demand an end to the US war in Iraq are confronted with some painful yet inescapable political truths.

First, protest in and of itself will not shift the policy of those who have launched the illegal invasion of Iraq and who continue a bloody war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,400 US troops.

Those who occupy the White House and the Pentagon are impervious and hostile to popular opinion, as all of their policies demonstrate.

Secondly, the two-party system that monopolizes political life in the US works to actively thwart the will of the clear majority of Americans who want this war to end and to see all US troops withdrawn now.

The one great advantage enjoyed by Bush—as a flurry of opinion polls show his approval rating dropping to barely a third of the public—is that he faces no real challenge from the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats.

These political realities are no revelation. They have been manifested continuously since even before the war began. Then, protests by millions upon millions around the globe failed to sway the Bush White House from launching its “preventive” war of aggression.

And the Democrats in Congress—New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton prominent among them—echoed the lies of the White House and voted a blank check authorization for Bush to launch that war.

At that time, Senator Clinton praised her husband’s 1998 decision to launch “Operation Desert Fox,” in which cruise missiles rained down on Iraq, killing thousands.

She likewise pointed out that it was under the Democratic Clinton administration—not the Republicans—that Washington changed its “underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change.”

But more than three years have passed, years of unspeakable horrors, from the massacre of Fallujah, to the torture at Abu Ghraib and the mass killings by US trained death squads.

It is high time to confront these realities squarely and draw the necessary conclusion: not a single serious step can be taken to end the war in Iraq and oppose the eruption of global US militarism outside of a decisive break with the Democratic Party.

So long as it remains tied to the Democrats and the perspective of pressuring the parties and institutions of America’s ruling elite, the antiwar movement will be a means not of ending the war but merely of venting the outrage felt by millions.

A real struggle against war requires a new political strategy based upon the independent mobilization of working people on a socialist and internationalist program.

This is the perspective upon which I am running as the Socialist Equality Party candidate for US Senate from New York, challenging the Democrat Hillary Clinton.

My party and its supporters will utilize the 2006 election not merely to expose the thoroughly rotten record of Clinton, but to bring to the widest possible audience a socialist alternative to militarism, social reaction and the unrelenting attacks on democratic rights carried out by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Clinton’s record is clear. She voted in 2002 for the war and has continued to defend her vote, no matter that the vast majority of people in New York and throughout the country now know that the justification for attacking Iraq was based on barefaced lies that she herself promoted.

She opposes a withdrawal of US troops from the country and has voted repeatedly to continue funding the war.

As a leading figure in the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council, she joined in issuing a statement declaring that, “Democrats must make it clear to the public that we stand for winning in Iraq, not a rush for the exits.”

In other words, the bloodbath must continue until all resistance is crushed and 26 million Iraqis are subjugated to US corporate control of their country and its oil wealth.

Nor is Iraq the end of it. Clinton has sought to attack the Bush administration from the right on the issue of Iran and its nuclear program.

Speaking last January at Princeton University, she denounced the administration for having “lost critical time in dealing with Iran” and accused it of having acted to “downplay the threats” and “standing on the sidelines.”

This, under conditions in which the Bush administration has carried out endless threats against Iran. Then, Clinton issued a threat of her own.

While acknowledging the need to seek international support for sanctions, she added, “We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran.”

One of those options was revealed recently: launching nuclear strikes against Iranian targets.

There are those who have protested against Clinton’s policies, but she is by no means an aberration. Hillary Clinton is the most representative leader of the Democratic Party as a whole and its attitude towards war, which is why she is considered the front-runner in the bid for the 2008 presidential nomination.

Indeed, the Democratic National Committee, at its spring meeting last week in New Orleans, took a decision not to discuss Iraq until after the election.

Once again—as in 2002 and 2004—the Democrats are working to deliberately disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who want an end to this war and to prevent the elections from being turned into a referendum on Iraq.

Instead, the Democrats are running on a “real security” platform, unveiled last month, which vows to “rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.”

As part of this pledge to outdo even the Bush administration in military spending and international aggression, the party promises to double the size of the Special Forces, the Army’s elite killing units developed for the suppression of popular insurgencies.

Even the supposedly “liberal” wing of the party supports continued US intervention, as evidenced by the amendment to the latest “emergency” war appropriations bill put forward this week by Senator Russ Feingold.

In presenting his proposal, Feingold stressed that his call for “withdrawal” concedes “the need for certain US forces to be engaged in counter-terrorism activities, the training of Iraqi security services, and the protection of essential US infrastructure.”

In other words, tens of thousands of US troops would be redeployed to continue attacks on the Iraqi people and assure American control of the oil fields.

Those who claim that a blow can be struck against Bush and the war by supporting the Democrats against the Republicans in November are either fooling themselves or deliberately deceiving others. This is the Democrats’ war is as much as it is Bush’s.

The platform of the Socialist Equality Party upon which I am running against Clinton provides the only politically viable basis for mounting a genuine challenge to US militarism.

We call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US military forces from Iraq. We demand full compensation to the Iraqi people for the death and destruction unleashed upon their country.

As well as to those who have suffered the consequences in the US itself—the families of slain troops and the soldiers who have returned with grievous physical as well as psychological wounds from this war.

And the SEP insists that all those responsible for conspiring to launch this illegal war of aggression must be held accountable, through the convening of war crimes tribunals.

The struggle against war can be waged successfully only if it is directed at its source, which lies in the social and economic crises that plague US and world capitalism.

The Iraq war arose out of a long-developed policy that enjoys the support of the two major parties and the corporate and financial interests that they both defend.

It is a policy of utilizing US military might as a means of offsetting the relative decline of American capitalism by seizing control of strategic resources and markets, at the expense of economic rivals in Europe and Asia.

To maintain its position as the dominant power, US imperialism is determined to secure a stranglehold over the world’s energy supplies. In this sense, Iraq is only the beginning, the prelude to far larger and bloodier confrontations.

This war is being fought for a ruling financial oligarchy whose interests and income are separated from those of working people by a social gulf unprecedented in history.

Yet, the two-party system keeps this stark class divide from finding any expression in official political life, subordinating all foreign and domestic policy to the pursuit of profit and the self-enrichment of this ruling layer.

Hillary Clinton, who sits on a $20 million campaign fund and who together with her husband, now counts her income in the millions, is a member in good standing of this wealthy elite.

The struggle against war requires the political mobilization of the working population. They are the ones paying the price for militarism and the reactionary social policies pursued in the interests of the profit system, in the form of unemployment, falling living standards, cuts in social conditions and the rising number of young working class men and women killed and maimed in Iraq.

The Socialist Equality Party advances a program for the radical reorganization of the economy in the interests of working people, including the repeal of the past two decades of tax cuts for the rich and a sharp increase in tax on corporate profits and the accumulated wealth of the super-rich.

We propose the transformation of major corporations into public utilities to make resources available to put an end to poverty and create social equality.

I urge all those who support the fight for an end to war and inequality to join in the SEP’s campaign.

Participate in the drive to place our party on the ballot this summer and join in distributing our program as widely as possible.

posted April 12, 2007 02:23 PM            

You seem to have a definite affinity with these communists/socialists/Marxists/Maoists naiad.

The article you posted is full of lies as well. Are you so unsophisticated as to not have noticed? Or, is any lie in the advancement of a cause justified?

BTW, where were you and the rest of the leftists attempting to play the moral superiority and compassion superiority card when Saddam was murdering, torturing and raping citizens of Iraq...results, about a million dead Iraqi citizens? I don't recall seeing any of these communist groups marching in the streets against Saddam. I'm not in the least impressed by the phony show of compassion by leftists.

I don't give a damn whether you are for or against the war in Iraq or any place else.

The Congress authorized the removal of one of the worst butchers of his own people in power at the time. That should be the end of the story. Your side lost the argument over the removal of one of your communist/socialist dictators.

I'm also not impressed with another socialist badmouthing Hillary Clinton. That Hillary is a socialist/Marxist is not in doubt. That she is running for president is not in doubt. That Hillary could never in a million years be elected if her true positions on domestic and foreign policy became known is also not in doubt.

Something else which is not in doubt is that the people you consistently side with, post articles on their behalf and generally push forward could never in a million years be elected to a federal office in the US.

All the screeching, howling, shrieking and pants wetting have not advanced your cause one millimeter.

posted April 12, 2007 09:16 PM              

all your fallacies are so glaring...to the extent that your only recourse is to launch into shrill personal twisting and squirming.

posted April 12, 2007 10:16 PM              

some of what you post i actually agree with.

posted April 13, 2007 07:20 AM            

I noticed you didn't explain exactly when you on the left actually developed a conscience. It certainly wasn't in evidence when Saddam was liberally killing Iraqi citizens. So, when did the leftists who daily call Bush....a liar, a baby killer, a murderer, Hitler, the Antichrist and Satan.....when did your morally superior, compassion stricken consciences flower into full bloom?

Of course, leftist antiwar protest screeching wouldn't have anything to do with the fact Saddam Hussein was a fellow leftist/socialist/Marxist. It wouldn't have anything to do with attempting to shield and protect a fellow leftist who just happened to be a murderous leftist dictator...would it?

posted April 13, 2007 09:45 AM              

and the article i posted is all about her alignment with the same goals of the current administration, pro-war, helped set the stage for ongoing war in the middle east, and the rest....but --

you're demanding an explanation about how/why/when leftists developed compassion and a conscience??

i've said nothing whatsoever about Hillary being either a leftist or compassionate. you called her a leftist; it's therefore your perogative to provide the explanation about leftists' "sudden development" of compassion and conscience. esp as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion at hand.

i posted an article that presented a different perspective on her politics than the one that you posted. nothing more. what's unbelievably unsophisticated is your relentless demand that one believe, religiously, every word and idea, and identify with, unquestionably, every source that one posts or discusses. it absolutely squashes any chance of literate, thoughtful discussion about anything.