In the fight between Donald Trump and John McCain (R-AZ) over the senator’s military service, the liberal media have taken McCain’s side. But since when did the media get concerned about the noble cause of fighting communism in Vietnam?
Our media, led by CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite, who was then an influential media figure, protested the Vietnam War and prompted the U.S. withdrawal and communist takeover. His FBI file demonstrated Cronkite’s contacts with Soviet officials and how he was used as a dupe by the communists.
More than 58,000 Americans sacrificed and died to save that country from communism.
The liberal media never supported the war against communism in Vietnam. Yet they are now browbeating Trump over avoiding the war through deferments. Our media are full of hypocrites. They don’t admire McCain for fighting in Vietnam. They admire him because he is a “maverick” who frequently takes the liberal line, such as on “comprehensive immigration reform.”
If the liberals in the media are so enamored of McCain’s military service in Vietnam, let them revisit the history of the Vietnam War and express some outrage over the fact that it was a Democratic Congress that cut off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the communist takeover and the genocide in neighboring Cambodia.
What about some critical coverage of Obama’s recent meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the head of Vietnam’s Communist Party? Vietnam is one of the beneficiaries of Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement. If passed, it would benefit Vietnam’s communist rulers.
As we have pointed out, “Interestingly, Obama is trying to sell the agreement as a counter to China’s influence throughout the world. He wants us to believe that China and Vietnam somehow differ on their common objective of achieving world communism at the expense of America’s standing as the leader of what used to be the Free World. Both countries would gladly welcome the U.S. to help pay to accelerate the growth of their socialist economies and expand their markets.”
McCain supports the TPP; Trump does not.
We have pointed out that Vietnam is “a dictatorship with the blood of those Americans on its hands,” a reference to what the communists did to McCain and our soldiers, and “which has no respect for the human rights of its own people.”
A bipartisan congressional letter about Obama’s meeting with the Vietnamese communist reaffirmed this fact. It was signed by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), who represents one of the largest Vietnamese populations outside of Vietnam in the world, in Orange County, California. She said, “I am disappointed that the administration has chosen to host Nguyen Phu Trong, the General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party. There continues to be egregious and systemic human rights abuses in Vietnam, including religious and political persecutions. As an advocate for human rights in Vietnam I cannot ignore the dismal state of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.”
This is precisely what McCain and tens of thousands of other Americans were fighting to prevent.
Yet, McCain issued a statement, saying that he “warmly” welcomed Trong’s “historic trip” to the United States. He added, “This visit demonstrates the growing strength of the U.S.-Vietnam partnership as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the normalization of relations between our countries.”
Why is McCain celebrating a “partnership” with a dictatorship that he and thousands of Americans fought against?
What’s more, McCain says the U.S. “must further ease the prohibition on the sale of lethal military equipment to Vietnam…” Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry had partially lifted a ban on lethal weapons sales to Vietnam in October of 2014.
If our media are so concerned about an American Vietnam veteran being the target of a perceived insult from Trump, why haven’t they put pressure on the Obama administration to clean up Vietnam’s human rights record before going ahead with another agreement to benefit that regime? After all, this is the same regime that captured and tortured Sen. McCain.
The answer is that our media are using the current McCain controversy to damage Trump, who has almost single-handedly made illegal immigration into a national issue. They don’t really care about McCain’s service in Vietnam.
When President Bill Clinton normalized relations with communist Vietnam in 1995, he thanked Senator McCain and then-Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for agreeing with the notion that America had to “move forward on Vietnam.”
What has happened in the meantime?
We pointed out 11 years ago that President Clinton’s lifting of the U.S. trade embargo on Vietnam in 1995 was followed by a bilateral trade agreement. Kerry and McCain supported that, too. The U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam has been consistently rising ever since, to the point where it was $19.6 billion in 2013.
In his statement on Trong’s visit to the United States, McCain said, “Since 1995, annual U.S.-Vietnam trade has increased from less than $500 million to $36 billion last year.” He conveniently ignored the trade deficits that have cost American jobs. For example, the communist regime has been dumping shrimp products into the United States at artificially low prices, and has become the fourth largest shrimp supplier to the U.S. market, even though several shipments have been detected with banned antibiotics.
At the time he extended diplomatic relations, Clinton said, “Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives. They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people. Today the Vietnamese are independent, and we believe this step will help to extend the reach of freedom in Vietnam and, in so doing, to enable these fine veterans of Vietnam to keep working for that freedom.”
False. The Vietnamese people did not become independent. They became slaves of the communists.
Obama recently met with their slave master. But our media didn’t utter any tears for the victims of communism.
You may also recall that then-Senator Kerry ran a Senate investigation that brought the search for live American POWs from the war to a close. McCain was a member of the Kerry committee.
Since McCain has been in the news for his military service, this should have been a newsworthy topic for our media.
Roger Hall, A POW/MIA researcher, went to court, having sued the CIA for documents on missing or abandoned Vietnam POWs. Hall and many others are convinced that hundreds of American POWs were left behind in Vietnam.
Former Senator Bob Smith (R) of New Hampshire wrote the legislation creating the Senate Select Committee on POWs and MIAs in the early 1990s in order to get the truth released to the public.
“Despite the release of thousands of documents and the testimony of dozens of witnesses, I could not complete the job. Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Select Committee, and Senator John McCain were more interested in establishing diplomatic relations and putting the war behind them than they were about finding the truth about our missing,” said Smith. “I fought them constantly to the point of exhaustion. It was a very sad chapter in American history.”
A YouTube video exposed McCain’s efforts to block access to POW information and examines his alleged cooperation with the North Vietnamese while he was in captivity. Senator Smith is one of those featured in the video.
Why don’t the media remind us of that? We have the answer. They are too busy bashing Trump and trying to look patriotic about the Vietnam War.
President Obama was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday night, pitching the Iran deal as the best way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and claiming once again that it came down to this deal, or war. This week he did an end-run around Congress by going to the United Nations, where the UN Security Council unanimously adopted the agreement between the P5+1 (U.S., England, France, Germany, Russia and China) and Iran. As we have pointed out, this agreement virtually guarantees Iran a path to having nuclear weapons, if they don’t already. Plus, it will release them from tough sanctions (no “snap-back” sanctions are feasible), and will soon provide them with approximately $150 billion of their frozen oil revenues to continue to expand their state sponsored terrorism and hegemonic ambitions. The U.S. held all the cards when the negotiations began, yet made concession after concession, completely abandoning numerous red lines that were previously insisted upon.
Today, Wednesday July 22nd, an important demonstration and rally will be taking place in Times Square, in the heart of New York City, to call attention to the multitude of problems with this so called agreement, and to try to prevent it from going into effect. It is called the Stop Iran Rally, and features an outstanding lineup of speakers. Six of them are members of our Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, including Adm. James “Ace” Lyons (Ret.), former CIA Officer Clare Lopez, Gen. Paul Vallely (Ret.), Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret.), Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee). In addition, the list includes former CIA Director James Woolsey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Morgenthau, Caroline Glick, Frank Gaffney, Mort Zuckerman and George Pataki. Too many to name them all. To see the full list, take a look at the poster.
The event is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m., and will last at least two hours. You can watch it live by clicking here. I will be in attendance, and will be reporting on the event.
In a Sunday column in The Washington Post, “Stop laughing at Donald Trump,” a liberal analyst from the Brookings Institution tries to warn the Washington, D.C. beltway elites that they should take the businessman seriously because he has figured out how to win a national election—by taking the white vote. This is the “silent majority.”
While it is true that minorities and other groups helped elect President Obama twice, “the white portion of the electorate, which votes strongly Republican, underperformed in support of John McCain in 2008, and white turnout was down in 2012,” when Mitt Romney was the Republican presidential nominee, notes William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the University of Michigan.
In other words, if McCain and Romney had only come across in a more conservative and assertive manner, and had appealed to more white voters, they probably would have won.
Frey comments that Trump “appeals to a vein of the U.S. electorate that will remain a significant voting bloc for several election cycles to come: older whites.”
Yet, GOP politicians and Fox News commentators such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer have been attacking Trump and his policy positions. McCain went further, smearing Trump supporters as “crazies,” before Trump fired back, in comments on McCain’s war record. Veteran reporter Sharyl Attkisson said Trump’s comments were taken out of context and distorted by The Washington Post.
It appears that the “crazies” include a lot of ordinary Americans who are sick and tired of politics as usual. Trump, in contrast to McCain and Romney, has figured out a way to fire them up and tap their anger and frustration.
A 2014 study by Professor Marisa Abrajano on the coming backlash to immigration policy not only explains the Donald Trump phenomenon, but also why the liberal media are so determined to destroy him. The media know that Trump’s appeal threatens the ability of the Democratic Party to continue to fool white voters into embracing liberal policies that destroy their own communities.
Her academic paper, published by the Brookings Institution, was clearly designed to warn liberals about how a “broad backlash” to immigration could damage the Democratic Party. She said a backlash could not only “shift the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans” but benefit “rightward leaning candidates throughout the country” who want to do something about it.
“Immigrants may be arriving in historically high numbers,” she noted, “but they account for only a relatively small fraction of the nation’s population. Native-born whites still represent 63 percent of the population and, perhaps more importantly, some 75 percent of its voters.”
Hence, the key to Democratic Party success lies in manipulating the minority groups and immigrants into voting for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, as they currently do, while also conning a significant number of whites into voting Democrat. This is a con because the Democratic Party has no interest in protecting the interests of white people as a political or special interest group.
The Abrajano report has some interesting comments about media coverage of the issue that may help explain the reaction to Donald Trump. It says, “At the aggregate level, we find that when media coverage of immigration uses the Latino threat narrative, the likelihood of whites identifying with the Democratic Party decreases, and the probability of favoring Republicans increases.”
Of course, the liberal media never use the “Latino threat narrative,” and the phrase is meant to suggest that concerns about immigration are somehow racist or improper. Our media have done their best to play down the problem, through such maneuvers as banning the term “illegal alien” and substituting “undocumented worker.”
What Trump has done is bring the issue to the fore, making it out to be the threat that it is. The Trump surge, plus the murder of a young American in San Francisco by a Mexican illegal alien and the prison escape in Mexico of a drug cartel leader, have put the dangers on the front pages of our newspapers in a manner that has garnered the attention of the nation. Our media have been forced to cover the issue in a way that captures the peril our nation currently faces. As a result, the Democrats and their liberal media allies fear that white voters have now been dramatically educated about the political stakes and may vote accordingly in favor of their own interests.
The media have no problem with blacks and Hispanics voting for Democrats in large numbers and affirming and protecting their own racial identities. But when whites do it, it suddenly becomes racism. That charge has carried a lot of sting in the past, but with illegals streaming across the border and Middle Eastern Muslims creating enclaves in places like Tennessee, it looks more and more like members of the “silent majority” are deciding to be silent no more. They are realizing that the lives of their family members and the cultural identity of their nation are at risk.
“Immigration and other factors appear increasingly to be pitting the declining white majority against the growing non-white minority,” she wrote. That majority may have found its voice in Trump, a man unafraid of the liberal media and the GOP establishment, which wants to continue the losing strategy of pandering to the minorities who overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
Abrajano also wrote, “The conventional view of pundits and prognosticators and maybe even most social scientists is that the dramatic growth of the minority population and its strong ties to the Democratic Party portend the demise of the Republican Party.” She adds, “That may be true in the long term. But that prediction ignores the white population and the possibility of a widespread white backlash in the short term.”
It appears that “short term” has now arrived. His name is Donald Trump.
Abrajano’s co-author, Hajnal, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, recently wrote that Republicans’ “opposition to immigration reform actually represents a winning strategy, not a losing one.”
Of course, the term “immigration reform” is code for amnesty for illegals.
That aside, he acknowledges that “Republicans win or lose largely depending on white voters. Whites still make up the vast majority of voters—some 75 percent in 2014—and whites tend to favor the Republican Party by large margins. Republican congressional candidates garnered 60 percent of the white vote in 2014. All told, 89 percent of all Republican votes in 2014 came from white voters. Put simply, the Republican Party doesn’t really need the minority vote.”
Since the Republicans have a winning strategy, what holds them back from using it? It’s called political correctness, which holds that appealing to people based on their fears of immigration destroying their country is racist and wrong. Trump didn’t care what the media thought and decided to address the issue anyway. The response speaks for itself.
It’s not surprising that GOP presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio would go after Trump. For whatever reason, perhaps because they want to appear “inclusive,” they are desperate to appeal to Hispanics, a voting bloc that is essentially owned by the Democrats.
This is not to say that some Hispanics do not agree with Trump.
Maria Espinoza launched the group America First Latinos, in order to “prove, once and for all, that the majority of Latino citizens are solidly behind the U.S. Constitution and a secured national border.” Espinoza also launched the Stolen Lives Quilt project, whose members appeared with Trump at his July 10 news conference. The group remembers the victims of illegal alien crimes in the U.S. and is coming to Washington, D.C. this week to press their case against criminal aliens coming across America’s open borders.
This is a horrific idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hunting down and dispatching terrorists and bad guys on our turf. But internment camps? Let’s just stop for a minute and wonder why Wesley Clark has done an about face so suddenly. Anything they can use in the name of national defense like internment camps can also be used against everyday Americans at their discretion. The internment camps in WWII were shameful and wrong. The same would be true here. If you have to deport people or prosecute them, that is one thing. But to round up everyone you deem ‘radicalized’ is quite another. What does that even mean to Clark? Color me highly suspicious of this and shocked that it is being floated out there.
Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”
He called for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism, saying, “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”
The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.”
In a memoir written the following year, he also famously alleged that the White House under Bush had developed a massively imperialistic plan for the Middle East, which would see the administration attempt to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Earlier this year I spoke with Clark at the annual Lewis and Clark University Symposium on International Affairs in Portland, Oregon. The subject of our discussion was how to deal with the potential threat of foreign fighters returning from armed conflicts abroad. At the time, Clark spoke out strongly against “the politics of fear” and eroding democratic institutions and norms, while reiterating his criticism of the excesses committed by Bush-era neoconservatives under the banner of fighting terrorism.
But on Friday, he was advocating the revival of a policy widely considered to be among the most shameful chapters in American history: World War II domestic internment camps. Aside from the inherent problems in criminalizing people for their beliefs, Clark’s proposal (which his MSNBC interlocutor did not challenge him on) also appears to be based on the concept of targeting people for government scrutiny who are not even “radicalized,” but who the government decides may be subject to radicalization in the future. That radicalization itself is a highly amorphous and politically malleable concept only makes this proposal more troubling.
“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” Clark said. “I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists.” And he added that “not only the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”
Despite an outcry about his comments on social media, Clark has not responded publicly. As of Monday morning, his latest tweet was from Friday, encouraging his followers to watch his interview.
Wesley Clark is a political hack. His suggestion here should chill every American right to the bone. He’s not just suggesting it for America either… he’s suggesting it be done globally. Listen to the video closely. He’s suggesting people who are likely to be radicalized should be imprisoned. This is unconstitutional and barbaric. He’s suggesting here that we suspend the Constitution (even more than they already have) and build and populate gulags. I can’t believe what I’m hearing and seeing. Things are hurtling out of control in America. Americans better stand up and stop this or we are going to see a fascist tyranny take hold here and fast. Internment camps? What scares me the most is that people on both sides of the political sphere are cheering this on. Unfreaking believable.
Find out why New Zealand’s Trevor Loudon changed my thinking about almost every political event in America since 1920’s. How can so many of our best and brightest leaders in politics, business, media, and academics be so wrong about so often wrong about so many things?
Loudon reminds of facts we all once knew but forgot, because few people mention them today. He gives new information, including secret documents that were briefly made public in Russia before Vladimir Putin took control. He leads to conclusions which are both astonishing–and logical.
Loudon will speak at two area events Saturday, July 25. First breakfast with Trevor at 9:30 am (Shore Diner, Tilton & Fire Roads by Parkway Exit 36 in Egg Harbor Twp.) $10 additional cover over regular menu price to defray expenses.
Then, 6 pm catered reception/dinner with the author at beachblock home of one of our members near Plaza Condo (4600 Block) in Atlantic City. 100 donation for dinner/reception. Attendance at dinner deliberately limited to encourage one-on-one conversations with the author.
Loudon’s latest book “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within” explains how a small group of radicals changed politics of his native New Zealand in 1980’s by joining, and gradually taking over influential mainstream organizations. He describes how same tactics by similar groups are fundamentally transforming America today.
