Demopublicans vs. Republicrats - The New American Magazine - 10-13-06.pdf

Demopublicans vs. Republicrats • Elk Ranch Tragedy • Determined to Win • Rediscovering America’s Heroes

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November 13, 2006

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Vol. 22, No. 23 November 13, 2006

COVER STORY

ELECTIONS

12 Demopublicans vs. Republicratsby Gary Benoit — The record shows that there is little difference in substance between the national Republican and Democratic parties.

COVER Design by Cathy Spoehr

FEATURES

PROPERTY RIGHTS

17 Idaho’s Elk Ranch Tragedyby Dennis Behreandt — After dozens of elk escaped from his ranch, Rex Rammell witnessed their state-sponsored slaughter.

20 American Liberty at Riskby Rex Rammell, DVM, MS — Elk rancher Rex Rammell is issuing a wake-up call to all Americans that their freedoms are imperiled.

THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY

22 Determined to Win“We can never win … unless the promise of what we can build supplies more motivation than the terror of what we must destroy.”

TECHNOLOGY

25 The Japanese Robot Revolutionby Dennis Behreandt — Japanese scientists are pushing hard to develop advanced androids and integrate them into human society.

CULTURAL CURRENTS

28 Can Outrage and Optimism Coexist?by Vic LeClair III — Most of us Americans harp on the things that bother us, but can we balance political discontent with optimism?

BOOK REVIEW

30 Rediscovering America’s Heroesby Dennis Behreandt — Countering the war on masculinity, Real Men by R. Cort Kirkwood recovers man’s glorious heroic past.

HISTORY — STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM

34 Betrayal “Made in the U.S.A.”by John F. McManus — Fifty years ago, Hungary’s brave stand against Soviet tyranny failed because of U.S. government betrayal.

THE LAST WORD

44 Bad Dealings With North Koreaby William F. Jasper

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DEPARTMENTS

5 Letters to the Editor

7 Inside Track

11 QuickQuotes

33 The Goodness of America

41 Exercising the Right

43 Correction, Please!

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Virtue • the moral excellence evident in my life as I consistently do what is right

Virtue is a choice.Make it a habit.

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THE NEW AMERICAN • NOVEMBER 13, 2006 5

Terrorists WinningYes, the terrorists are winning (“Are the Terrorists Winning?” September 18 issue). President Bush laid out a clear plan for ex-acting revenge for those responsible for the cowardly attack of September 11. But the bleeding hearts coupled with the politically correct crowd have blocked his efforts at every turn.

For the record, I too support the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as civil liber-ties, but we’ll have no civil liberties if we’re dead.

I wish these obstructionists would realize extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. Thank God these restrictions weren’t in play during World War II.

Al-Qaeda and its minions have vowed to destroy the civilized world. Will it take an-other 9/11 to make everyone understand the threat?

HAROLD JOHN COMPPEN

Fair Lawn, New Jersey

LibertarianismIn a September 18, 2006 letter to the edi-tor, reader Randy Miehls comments that “conservatives” and libertarians agree on the free-market approach to government.

Allow me to clarify. Economic freedom has proven itself to be the most efficient method of dispensing scarce resources. Government intervention and meddling in the economic market limit choices, criminal-ize peaceful exchanges, and require further meddling. Market corrections are made in a free market through the millions of decisions made by consumers every day. Efficiency is rewarded with profitability. I believe that this is what we agree on.

Mr. Miehls realizes that economic prob-lems are self-correcting, yet somehow he does not believe that social or moral areas are self-correcting. He demands moral guid-ance in the form of vice laws. Would not the moral free market also contain the same type of automatic corrections as the economic free market? Is not life itself a scarce resource to be spent at the discretion of the individual?

Yes, there are those who may abuse their moral freedom just as there are those that abuse their economic freedom, but in the absence of government safety nets, they will be forced to take responsibility for those ac-tions. The war on drugs costs us all billions of dollars, tears family members apart, over-

fills our jails, and poisons innocent people in foreign lands. Yet thanks to the black mar-ket (the free market driven underground by government regulation), drugs are available everywhere, including inside prisons and in schools. The economic cost and the moral cost of freedom would be far less than that of government intervention.

Lysander Spooner wrote in “Vices are not Crimes” that “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.” If we are not free to harm ourselves, then we are not free at all.

DAVE SEELY

St. George, Utah

Global WarmingI thoroughly enjoyed and agreed with the articles on global warming (September 18 issue) by Dennis Behreandt, wherein he suggested that solar activity is to blame for the alleged rise in the “earth temperature,” a questionable parameter to begin with.

Let us not forget that back in 1975 sci-entists were gloomily predicting a new ice age, apparently unaware of the rise in global temperatures taking place in about that same range of years, according to the new “hockey stick” graph, as best as I can read it. Why were they then predicting a new ice age when the graph clearly indicates what is now regarded as an alarming rise in Earth temperatures?

The case for anthropogenic global warming necessarily rests upon the presumptions that (1) the sun is an isotropic and isochronous ra-diator, and (2) that the energy density of space, filled with electromagnetic radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum from tril-lions of cosmic radiators, is a constant. Both of these propositions are preposterous, and as a result, one must be led to the conclusion put forward in your article that any heating of the Earth, and there may be some evidence that such is taking place, is due to cosmic influ-ences, about which we can do nothing.

JOHN D. S. MUHLENBERG

Vienna, Virginia

Send your letters to: THE NEW AMERICAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912. Or e-mail: [email protected]. Due to vol-ume received, not all letters can be answered. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.

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QUANTITY TITLE PRICE TOTAL PRICE

UnderexposedWhat If Radiation Is Actually Good for You?

Most every developed country in the world, except the United States, has plans to use low-level radiation to prevent disease. The book Underexposed: What If Radiation Is Actually Good for You? tells why. (2005, 247pp, pb, $13.95) BKUE

BooksBooksFeaturedReal MenTen Courageous Americans to Know and Admire

Wonder where manly stories of heroism, courage, and integrity have gone? You can find some right here. Inspire your children, and yourself, to follow a path of virtue that others fear to tread by reading about 10 American heroes of our not-so-distant past. (2006, 256pp, pb, $12.95) BKRM

The Big RipoffFrom General Motors to General Electric, today’s largest corporations have mastered the art of working with government at every level to stifle competition. The Big Ripoff shows who is strangling America’s tradition of free enterprise and how — and what you can do about it. (2006, 285pp, hb, $24.95) BKBRO

The Rise and Fall of the Roman RepublicLessons for Modern America

Now in book form by popular demand, Dr. Bonta’s articles that were published in The New American in 2004-2005 highlight Roman actions that stabilized Rome and led to its prosperity and those that destabi-lized it and led to corruption and its down-fall. (2006, 137pp, pb, 1-4/$8.95 each, 5 or more/$7.95 each) BKRFRR

The Rise and Fall of the Roman RepublicLessons for Modern America

Now in book form by popular demand, Dr. Bonta’s articles that were published in The New AmericanRoman actions that stabilized Rome and led to its prosperity and those that destabi-lized it and led to corruption and its down-fall. (2006, 137pp, pb, more/$7.95 each

The Big RipoffFrom General Motors to General Electric, today’s largest corporations have mastered the art of working with government at every level to stifle competition. RipoffAmerica’s tradition of free enterprise and how — and what you can do about it. (2006, 285pp, hb,

Real MenTen Know and Admire

Wonder where manly stories of heroism, courage, and integrity have gone? You can find some right here. Inspire your children, and yourself, to follow a path of virtue that others fear to tread by reading about 10 American heroes of our not-so-distant past. (2006, 256pp, pb, $12.95

BooksFeatured

There are no cheetahs running wild in Arizona. For ecologist C. Josh Don-lan of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell Uni-versity, that’s a problem. Going far, far beyond any previous vision for re-wilding North America, Donlan and his collaborators have begun arguing for “Pleistocene re-wilding,” in which “megafauna” that have been absent from North America since the end of the last Ice Age are reintroduced. In the November 2006 issue of the jour-nal American Naturalist, Donlan and his 11 coauthors write: “we advocate Pleistocene rewilding — reinstituting ecological and evolutionary processes that were transformed or eliminated by megafaunal extinctions — as a conservation prior-ity in North America.”

According to author William Stolzenberg, writing in the Janu-ary-March 2006 issue of Conservation in Practice, the idea for Pleistocene re-wilding began to come together for Donlan and his partners in 2004 at, of all places, Ted Turner’s ranch. According to Stolzenberg, the group gathered at “Turner’s Ladder Ranch in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. Over easels and PowerPoint and after-hours beers, they discussed the rewilding idea and broke it down to its factual nuts and bolts, its practical challenges and criticisms, its societal costs and benefits.” The group, which in-cluded Earth First eco-terrorist Dave Foreman, came up with what

Stolzenberg described as “several so-bering premises,” including: “That human influence had utterly per-vaded the planet. That what qualifies for wildness today is a paltry facade of the awesome Pleistocene bestiary we stumbled upon only 13,000 years ago. That the difference between then and now is at least partly, if not prin-cipally, our own doing and therefore our duty to repair.”

The answer, according to Donlan and his coauthors, is to reestablish megafauna to North America. This would include certain rather mild steps like continuing to protect popu-

lations of the California condor and encouraging the growth of wild horse populations. From there the ideas get progressively stranger, like introducing populations of camels, cheetahs, el-ephants, and lions to the North American environment.

How best to accommodate and manage the new North Ameri-can megafauna? Establish a huge wildlife preserve, probably funded and maintained by the government. “A third and more ambitious scenario would be exemplified by an enormous eco-logical history park encompassing thousands of square miles in … parts of the Great Plains,” Donlan and his coauthors write. What would happen to landowners in the area is anyone’s guess, but according to the plan’s authors, there would be “adequate incentives for local landowners.”

Pleistocene America

On October 20, OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, announced that 10 of its members would “reduce pro-duction by an amount of 1.2 million barrels a day, from current production of about 27.5 million barrels a day, to 26.3 million barrels a day, effective 1st November 2006.” The move comes after the price of oil declined steeply over the past few weeks. Bloomberg News, reporting on October 23, noted: “Prices have plunged 25 percent from the record of $78.40 a barrel reached July 14.” Both the rapid plunge in prices and the OPEC decision to cut production prove conclusively that the previous high oil prices were not due to a shortage of oil.

In a condition where the supply of a commodity exceeds de-mand, the price for the commodity must fall. That is just what has been happening with oil. There never was a shortage of oil, per se. The shortages were in refined fuels and were made possible because of a series of bad policy decisions that have, over the years, led to reduced refinery capacity and laws calling for the production of relatively small batches of “boutique fuels” tailored to small geographical markets. That there was and still remains enough crude oil is reflected in the fact that oil prices continued to fall even after the OPEC announcement.

In fact, wrote Raymond J. Learsy, author of the book Over a Barrel: Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel, “something unusual happened. Not only did the spot market prices not go up, they actually fell by $l.68/bbl or 2.7%! For once the oil consuming public long conditioned these past years to react with Pavlovian obedience to every OPEC and oil industry’s pronouncement that peak oil is at hand, that oil will soon be running out, has, at last, taken a different tack. Why? I believe the market is finally recog-nizing that oil at current levels is not scarce.”

OPEC’s Cuts Mean No Oil Shortage


Inside Track

AP

AP

Inside Track

According to Associated Press, thousands of U.S. troops are being disqualified from overseas duty because they are considered se-curity risks. In some cases disqualification is owing to criminal activity, uncertain allegiance, or ill health. An increasingly com-mon reason for lost security clearance is debt. Depending on the military branch, when service members’ debt payments are 30 to 40 percent of their salary, security clearances are revoked.

The concern is that a soldier with extreme debt might sell se-crets or equipment to the enemy. Also, focus on meeting financial obligations, such as making the next house payment, could be a dangerous distraction for someone facing combat. Data obtained by AP from the Navy, Marines, and Air Force revealed an alarm-ing trend. From 2002 to 2005, the number of security clearances

canceled for financial reasons jumped ninefold to 2,654. Data from the Army was not obtainable.

Why does this growing problem with debt exist? It is not a de-liberate attempt to stay out of harm’s way, say military officials. It is attributed to other factors, a key one being easy access to payday lenders that charge very high interest rates.

Ironically, neither a lack of financial smarts nor the accrual of massive debt have affected the security clearances of politicians serving in Washington — who piled an additional $2 trillion on the National Debt from fiscal year 2002 to 2005. The American electorate might ponder whether some security clearances should be revoked on election day. An old saying goes, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Security Clearances Revoked for Excessive Debt

According to a new report released by the Subcommittee on Investigation of the House Committee on Homeland Security, “There is an ever-present threat of terrorist infiltration over the Southwest border.” The report, en-titled A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border, confirmed that “aliens were smuggled from the Middle East to staging areas in Central and South America, before being smuggled illegally into the United States” and that “members of Hezbollah have already entered the United States across the Southwest border.”

The report also estimated that “as many as 4 to 10 million illegal aliens [of all kinds] crossed into the United States” in 2005.

Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) observed in an October 17 press release that A Line in the Sand “confirms once again what the American people have known for years — that our porous borders are a welcome mat for terrorists.” True enough — but it does not have to be that way. American soldiers guard the borders of Iraq while other American soldiers attempt to secure the interior of that tragic land. They are there, we are told repeatedly, to win the war against terrorism. Meanwhile, back on the home front, our own borders are left so unprotected that a U.S. congressman is able to describe them accurately as “a welcome mat for terrorists.”

Hezbollah Takes Advantage of Porous U.S.-Mexican Border

The U.S. Justice Department on October 13 asked the federal ap-peals court in Cincinnati to overturn a lower court decision that the National Security Agency’s warrantless electronic surveil-lance program is unconstitutional. The appeals court had earlier agreed that the administration could continue the program while it is being appealed — a process that could take months.

But this is not the only front that the Bush administration has been aggressively pursuing to make the warrantless eavesdrop-ping program permanent. Though the administration had imple-mented the program in secret, based on claimed executive author-ity, it has been seeking congressional approval. But that approval,

even if granted, would not change the program’s obvious uncon-stitutionality. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution clearly states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Despite this constitutional protection, the House passed its ver-sion of the NSA warrantless surveillance bill in late September, but the Senate equivalent of the bill did not make it to the floor for a vote prior to the preelection adjournment. However, there is a good chance that Congress will take up this issue once again during the lame-duck session after the elections.

Administration Appeals Ruling on Warrantless Surveillance Program

According to a new report released by the Subcommittee on Investigation of the House Committee on Homeland Security, “There is an ever-present threat of terrorist infiltration over the Southwest border.” The report, en-

A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border, confirmed that “aliens were smuggled from the Middle East to staging areas in Central and South America, before being smuggled illegally into the United States” and that “members of Hezbollah have already entered

The report also estimated that “as many as 4 to 10 million illegal aliens

Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) observed in an October 17 press “confirms once again what the American

people have known for years — that our porous borders are a welcome mat for terrorists.” True enough — but it does not have to be that way. American soldiers guard the borders of Iraq while other American soldiers attempt to secure the interior of that tragic land. They are there, we are told repeatedly, to win the war against terrorism. Meanwhile, back on the home front, our own borders are left so unprotected that a U.S. congressman is able to describe

8 THE NEW AMERICAN • NOVEMBER 13, 2006

On October 20, Wal-Mart announced plans to begin selling a wide selection of prescription drugs for just $4 per prescription at stores in 14 states. The decision expands the plan that Wal-Mart first introduced in Florida in September. The retail giant expects to extend the program to as many states as possible within a year and, despite the low prices, expects to earn a profit on the program.

Wal-Mart officials also expect the low prices to bring shoppers to Wal-Mart stores, and they think it’s about time that someone tries free enterprise in the healthcare market. “Competition and market forces have been absent from our healthcare system, and that has hurt work-ing families tremendously,” said Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott. “We are excited to take the lead in doing what we do best — driv-ing costs out of the system — and pass-ing those savings to our customers and associates.”

Wal-Mart’s move has had an immediate effect on some competitors. Shortly after the initial Wal-Mart announcement to in-troduce the low prices in Florida, Target said it would follow suit in Florida. Like Wal-Mart, Target also expanded its pro-gram, this time to an additional 12 states.

While the advent of competition in the prescription drug market is a major victory for consumers, there are plenty of critics. The group WakeUpWalMart called the move a “publicity stunt,” and others were concerned that the decision to sell the generic drugs at such low prices

would drive small pharmacies out of business. “They are closing down lots of pharmacies and lots of stores all over the United States because of their unfair practices.” Madison’s Community Pharmacy told WMTV News, the NBC affiliate in Madison, Wisconsin. Criticism also came from the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA). “It’s a loss-leader type pro-gram that is solely aimed at getting people in the door at Wal-Mart. Most people going to get their prescriptions filled will be disappointed,” said Charlie Sewell, NCPA’s executive vice president of government affairs.

Cheap Prescriptions at Wal-Mart

U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were each sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for wound-ing a drug smuggler. The incident occurred last year when the two agents pursued the smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, who was trying to make it back across the border from the El Paso sector into Mexico. During the pursuit, Ramos, after finding a bloodied Compean lying on the ground from a struggle with Al-drete-Davila, shot at the smuggler, believing him to be armed. Aldrete-Davila got across the border to a waiting van, but, as it turned out, was wounded.

For their split-second decisions during their 15-minute pursuit of the drug smuggler, the two agents were convicted in a trial where important evidence was withheld from the jury, and where the dubious testimony of the smuggler, who was granted immunity by the U.S. government, was used against them. On October 19 of this year, Ramos was sentenced to 11 years in prison and Com-pean to 12 years. However, the agents have been allowed to remain free on bond until January 17, when they must report to prison.

The agents were hoping to stay out of prison during their ap-peal, and family members said the fight is not over. “It’s going to be step by step,” the El Paso Times quoted Ramos’ brother Hector Ramos as saying. “The first step is going to get him home. It’s a process.”

The El Paso Times story about the sentencing also noted that the judge “denied the defense’s motion for a new trial on the basis that three jurors said they were misled by the jury foreman and voted guilty because they thought they were not allowed to have a hung jury.”

The available public evidence indicates that agents Ramos and Compean are victims of a gross miscarriage of justice by the U.S. government. Their story is told in much greater detail in William F. Jasper’s article “Betrayed in the Line of Duty” in the Septem-ber 18, 2006 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN. “While the Bush ad-ministration seeks amnesty for illegal aliens and grants immunity to a Mexican drug smuggler,” the article points out, “it has thrown the book at two courageous Border Patrol agents.”

Border Patrol Agents Sentenced to Prison

AP

9THE NEW AMERICAN • NOVEMBER 13, 2006

Inside Track


Paul Brennan, at University College London, is leading work on the EU-funded “Optag” system. This system would “combine high resolution panoramic video imaging with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to enhance airport security, safety and efficiency.” “It would work,” Brennan says, “if each passenger were issued with a tag, which could allow location to about one metre accuracy. The video and tag data can be merged to give a very powerful surveillance capability.”

In an article entitled “How Tagging Passengers Could Improve Airport Security,” this ominous personal surveillance system was described as “essential to future security efforts.”

Brennan indicated that Optag RFID chips would not store any personal details. The report itself contradicts Brennan’s disclaimer.

The article notes: “They [RFID tags] emit a unique ID which is then cross-referenced to the passenger information already on the system — maybe the name and flight number of the passen-ger. Perhaps in the future that would be extended to things like biometric data.” Within the first few sentences, the promise that the chips “would not store any personal details” has already been broken. The tags would be used to monitor movement of people around terminal buildings.

Who determines whether someone seems “to be a security risk” — government? In whose opinion or view? Here in the United States, the present administration has dramatically dem-onstrated a proclivity toward eliminating personal liberty with wire-tapping, torture, gun confiscation in New Orleans, and re-strictions at airports. ■

It’s 10:00 P.M., Do You Know Where All Your Citizens Are?

As passed by Congress this fall, the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 included a provision (Section 1008) requir-ing that the president include his funding requests for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the annual budgets he submits to Con-gress. Years past, the president has not included this spending in his budgets. Consequently, the war has been funded through

emergency supplemental appropriations amounting to $450 bil-lion thus far. However, when President Bush signed the Defense Authorization Act on October 17, he also issued a signing state-ment indicating that he may not abide by two dozen provisions in the bill, including Section 1008.

This is not the first time the president has gone on record saying he may ignore legislation passed by Congress. As AirForce-Times.com explained in an article posted on October 18: “The Bush administration has frequently ignored requirements that it does not like by proclaiming exclusions from the law in sign-ing statements, which are written statements about how the president plans to interpret the law. Since he became president, Bush has issued statements carving out exceptions to more than 750 laws — a rate far higher than any previous president.”

Of course, presidential signing statements “carving out ex-ceptions” to laws violate the U.S. Constitution, which assigns all legislative powers to Congress and authorizes the presi-dent to administer the laws passed by Congress. The powers to make and execute the law were separated for a reason: when the president is allowed to reinterpret laws passed by Congress to mean whatever he wants them to be, Congress becomes superfluous — and we no longer have a president but an elected dictator.

Bush May Ignore New Defense Authorization Law

President George W. Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin met in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005 and rolled out plans to create a North Ameri-can Union (NAU). Although not yet official, newly released doc-uments verify the existence of working groups that are carrying out this agenda.

Judicial Watch, an educational foundation that promotes trans-parency, accountability, and integrity in government and law, has

released documents that provide evidence that the North Ameri-can Union is slowly beginning to take effect in the United States. According to an article by U.S. Newswire, working groups — such as the North American Pandemic Influenza Working Group and the Working Group on Electronic Commerce, Information and Communications Technologies — have already come into existence and maintain offices in the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

North American Union Working Groups Quietly on the Rise

THE NEW AMERICAN • NOVEMBER 13, 2006

Russian Reformers Mourn Death of Prominent Journalist“The authorities are cowards. Why didn’t they come? Are they afraid even of a dead [Anya] Politkovskaya?”As freedom of the press wanes in Russia, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov noted that no ranking gov-ernment official attended the funeral of the gunned-down journalist. Politkovskaya’s criticism of Vladimir Putin’s government for its conduct regarding Chechnya won her praise from some, and condemnation from officials.

TV Newsman Becomes the Story Himself“This was Bill Clinton unplugged — the good the bad and the ugly.”After Bill Clinton launched a vituperative, finger-pointing attack on his interviewer during a “Fox News Sunday” television program, host Chris Wallace issued his own take on the celebrated event.

Communist China’s Militarism Noted by African Diplomat“It is unfortunate that none other than the People’s Republic of China is engaged in threats to interna-tional peace and security by expanding its already huge military arsenal in readiness for an invasion of Taiwan.”Gambia’s Ambassador to the UN, Crispin Grey-Johnson, supports granting UN membership to be-leaguered Taiwan.

Texas Candidate Has a Solution for Porous Border“I want the Texas Rangers in charge.”Running as an independent seeking to become governor of Texas, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who likes to be called “Grandma,” is one of three challengers to Republican incumbent Rick Perry.

Book Claims Bush White House Ridiculed Christians“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridicu-lous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy.’”In his recently published book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, claims that the religious people President Bush relies on for support were considered “nuts” who should merely be tolerated.

UN Sanctions Against North Korea Considered Mere Show“The sanctions are at best kabuki theater. They are not going to have much effect on North Korea’s behavior.”A Korea expert at Dartmouth University, David C. Kang, likens the UN’s punishment of North Korea with highly touted sanctions to meaningless bluster and ostentation.

University Publicly Deplores Speaker Disruption“The freedom to speak, to pursue ideas, and to hear and evaluate viewpoints totally objectionable to our own is an essential value of this university and, in-deed, of our civil society.”After militant leftists interrupted and caused cancel-lation of appearances by Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist and investigative journalist Jerome Corsi, Columbia University officials, who didn’t eject the demonstrators, issued their politically cor-rect statement. ■

— COMPILED BY JOHN F. MCMANUS

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by Gary Benoit

When pundits and politicians give us their expert opin-ion about the battle between

Republicans and Democrats in the No-vember 7 congressional elections, they generally describe the opposing forces as occupying opposite sides of a giant political divide. The Republicans, they say, occupy the conservative high ground — or low ground, depending on the per-spective of the commentator — while the Democrats occupy the liberal low ground — or high ground. Of course, since the

mainstream media are liberal, the Demo-crats are usually portrayed as occupying the higher ground.

The Republican Party has been asso-ciated with conservatism and the Demo-cratic Party with liberalism since at least the days of FDR. Over the years, the insti-tutional power exercised by these major political titans has ebbed and flowed. During the presidency of Lyndon John-son, the Democrats controlled not only the White House but both houses of Con-gress. At other times the government was divided, with neither party controlling all three bodies. But in recent years, the Re-

publicans have controlled all three.Until now. As we write, about two

weeks before the elections, public opinion surveys indicate that the American people have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Republicans — so much so that the Re-publicans could lose their majority control of the House and perhaps even the Senate.

The discontent with Republicans has been fueled by the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War and by the association of Republicans with President Bush, whose public approval ratings have been plum-meting. The disclosure of Congressman Mark Foley’s sexually explicit instant

ELECTIONS

Demopublicans vs. RepublicratsDespite the notion that an ideological chasm separates the national Republican and Democratic parties, the record shows that there is little difference between the two.


messages to underage male congressional pages has also harmed Republicans’ elec-tion prospects. All of these factors have combined to create a perfect storm for be-leaguered Republicans.

Discontent with the war has become so severe that even some Republican con-gressmen have tempered their support for President Bush. “GOP’s Solidarity on War Is Cracking,” proclaimed a Los An-geles Times headline on October 20. The Times article noted that “on the campaign trail, ‘stay the course’ is a nonstarter, even among Bush’s staunchest allies,” and that “GOP candidates are breaking with the White House over how long troops should remain in Iraq.” Many voters are angry, and their mindset is to vote the bums out of office. “People are not voting for the Democrats on this issue,” Pew Research Center director Andy Kohut said. “They’re voting against the Republicans.”

This issue of THE NEW AMERICAN will be mailed to subscribers just one week before the elections, so when you read these words you may know if the gather-ing storm clouds threatening Republicans will sweep enough of them out of office to put Democrats in charge of the House for the first time since the “Republican Revo-

lution” of 1994. The Senate too may fall to the Democrats, though that’s less likely. It is the prospect of a new “Democratic Revolution” that has caused pundits and politicians alike to assign great weight to this year’s congressional elections. After all, they say, a “Democratic Revolution” would radically alter Congress.

Or would it? Despite the often-repeat-ed notion that a huge ideological chasm separates the Republican and Democrat-ic parties, the record shows that there is little difference in substance between the two. Consequently, there is little reason to expect that a “Democratic Revolution” would lead to a radical ideological shift. This would be true even if a Democrat-controlled Congress were not to operate in a divided government, which obviously it would since George W. Bush would still be president.

The Record in BriefEven Americans who are not immersed in politics generally understand that conser-vatism is the philosophy of limited gov-ernment and low taxes, while liberalism is the philosophy of a larger, more activist government. Bush revisited these contrast-ing philosophies when he observed at an

October 19 campaign stop in Pennsylvania: “Republicans have a clear philosophy: We believe that the people who know best how to spend your money are the people that earn that money, and that is you. The Democrats believe that they can spend your money better than you can.” Rhetoric aside, the Republicans have proven themselves to be very capable of spending other people’s money, which is not to say they should have spent the money in the first place or that they spent it well.

If the Republican-controlled Congress were truly pursuing a policy of fiscal conservatism, it should have at least slowed down the increase in federal spending compared to the in-crease in spending during the Clinton era, if not cut spending in the absolute sense. Instead, federal spending has actually

increased at a faster rate with George W. Bush in the White House than it did when Bill Clinton was president.

The federal government spent $1.409 trillion in 1993,* the year liberal Demo-crat Bill Clinton became president. Over the next eight years, federal spending grew at an annualized rate of 3.6 percent, reaching $1.863 trillion in 2001, the year George W. Bush became president. For the fiscal year ending last September 30 (fiscal year 2006), the federal government spent $2.654 trillion, for an annualized growth rate of 7.3 percent with George W. Bush in the White House.

It must be kept in mind, of course, that spending would have increased faster than it actually did during the Clinton years if Clinton could have gotten the Congress to support all of the spending he wanted, such as his “Hillarycare” socialized-medi-cine proposal. But it must also be kept in mind that George W. Bush has also called for spending increases, and those increas-es have not been limited to the Iraq War. Moreover, with a Republican president advocating big-government programs in everything but name, many Republican

* Budget figures are in fiscal years.

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Republican standard-bearer: President George W. Bush has turned the definition of conservatism on its head by advocating more spending, engaging the United States in regime change, and centralizing powers in the executive branch of government. He is shown here signing the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

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congressmen have supported spending they traditionally would have opposed.

For example, President Bush success-fully lobbied congressional Republicans to support a new federal entitlement pro-gram providing prescription drug cover-age to Medicare recipients. When Con-gress passed the legislation in November 2003, the program was supposed to cost $400 billion over 10 years, an amount that seemed gargantuan to many Republicans. But with the Bush administration solidly behind it, many of those same Republicans voted for the new entitlement program, believing that the GOP-backed version of the legislation would be better than a Democratic alternative with an even hefti-

er price tag. Now, however, the same program, which has turned out to be more expensive than expected, is projected to cost $1.2 tril-lion over the next 10 years.

President Bush has also pushed for, and gotten, large spending increases for other non-defense programs. For the Department of Educa-tion, for instance, a cabi-net-level department that

conservatives had once rightly opposed on the grounds that schools should be locally controlled, federal spending more than doubled in five years, rising from $35.7 billion in 2001 to an estimated $84.0 bil-lion in 2006. For international assistance programs — a.k.a. foreign aid, another program conservatives have traditionally opposed — spending climbed from $11.8 billion to an estimated $16.3 billion during the same time period.

It is true that this year’s deficit turned out to be much less than the administration originally forecast last February — $248 billion as opposed to a projected $423 billion — and President Bush was quick to tout that progress. In his October 11

speech about the economy and the bud-get, Bush boasted that “the difference is because we have a growing economy, and the difference is because we’ve been wise about spending your money.”

The fact that a reputedly conservative president can point to a $248 billion short-fall as good news is a powerful indicator of just how out of control U.S. fiscal policy has become.

Dime’s Worth of Difference?Back in 1968, George Wallace ran for president as a third-party candidate claiming there was not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. If the difference then amounted to less than a dime, the dif-ference would probably be comparable to a nickel or a penny today, since what differences have existed between the two parties have actually narrowed. Or, if a dime’s worth of difference still ex-ists today, it is because in some areas the Democrats have actually displayed more conservatism than the Republicans, turn-ing upside down what has historically been the case since the days of FDR.

Incredible? Not according to this magazine’s biannual Conservative Index,

which rates every U.S. repre-sentative on the identical set of 10 key House votes, and every senator on the identical set of 10 key Senate votes, regardless of party affiliation. Though THE NEW AMERICAN has never tai-lored the Conservative Index to make one party look good and the other party look bad, the Republicans as a whole have always scored higher than the Democrats — until now.

In the latest Conservative Index in our October 30 issue, the Democrats in the House came out on top with an average score of 55 percent versus the Republicans’ average score of 42 percent. On the other hand, in the Senate the Republicans still maintained the role of the more conservative of the two parties, with an average score of 65 percent versus 38 percent for the Democrats.

If the Conservative Index

Though Democrats have become critical of the Iraq War, they do not support a noninterventionist foreign policy any more than the neo-conservatives do. Recall the Vietnam War during the Johnson presidency, and our interventions in Somalia and the Balkans under Bill Clinton.

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Bad war: The growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq is provoking grass-roots anger against not only President Bush but Republicans in general.

AP


rated congressmen based on “neo-con-servatism” as opposed to traditional con-servatism, most Republicans would have earned high scores. Neo-conservatism, the “conservatism” of the Bush adminis-tration, is, like liberalism, a philosophy of big government and foreign intervention. But the Conservative Index rates congress-men based on the traditional definition — “adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsi-bility, national sovereignty, and a tradi-tional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.”

In the post-9/11 world, and with a neo-conservative in the White House, it is the Republicans and not the Democrats who have been more supportive of measures vi-olating basic liberties for the stated purpose of combating terrorism. In the October 30 Conservative Index, for instance, most Re-publicans supported and most Democrats opposed the Military Commissions Act, which truncates the rights of defendants deemed “unlawful enemy combatants” (see House vote #39 and Senate vote #39 in that index). Also, most Republicans sup-ported and most Democrats opposed the National Security Agency’s warrantless electronic surveillance program, which violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohi-bition against unreasonable searches (see

House vote #40).† President Bush lobbied hard for both pieces of legislation. But not all Republicans went along. In fact, the only two congressmen who earned 100 percent in either the House or Senate in the latest index were both Republican: Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina.

Republicans have also been more sup-portive of the war in Iraq than Democrats, though both parties supported Bush’s deci-sion to launch an offensive war against Iraq in the first place. The growing quagmire in Iraq has been blamed on Bush’s supposed go-it-alone foreign policy, despite the fact that the stated purpose of our intervention was to disarm Iraq of its reputed weapons of mass destruction pursuant to UN reso-lutions. The president also plunged the na-tion into the crucible of war without the constitutionally required declaration of war, and he has kept the troops there long after the alleged WMDs were not found, for the purpose of nation building.

This is the policy of liberalism or neo-conservatism. It is not the policy of tra-ditional conservatism, which includes avoiding foreign quarrels, going to war only when necessary to defend America and her citizens, and even then obtain-ing a declaration of war from Congress. Though liberal Democrats have now be-

come highly critical of the Iraq War, they do not support a noninterventionist foreign policy any more than the neo-conserva-tives do. Recall the Vietnam War during the Johnson presidency, and our interven-tions in the Balkans and Haiti under Bill Clinton.

Though President Bush has been able to persuade most Republicans to support his Iraq policy to date, that support is not as solid as it once was. Indeed, though the president has been very successful in get-ting Republicans to support his policies in general, he has not been successful in every instance. In December 2005, for ex-ample, most Republican representatives voted for immigration reform legislation that lacked the guest-worker/amnesty leg-islation that Bush and many Democrats strongly advocate. On the other hand, last spring Bush was able to convince enough Republican senators to come on-board to get a guest-worker/amnesty bill through the Senate.

President Bush was also able to twist enough Republican arms to get Con-gress to pass the Central American Free

† The Senate version of this legislation did not reach

the Senate floor prior to the adjournment for the

elections, but the issue may be taken up once again

during the lame-duck session.

ELECTIONS

Mr. Democrat: Bill Clinton claimed that “the most conservative, most ideological wing of the Republican

Party” controls the executive and legislative branches in a preelection address at Georgetown University.

In truth, Bush and the GOP congressional leadership aren’t even conservative.

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Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a NAFTA-type agreement for the United States and Central America that will entangle our country in another regional arrangement as part of a step-by-step process to sub-merge the United States in a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) mod-eled after the European Union. Another step in the process is the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) for North America, jointly announced by President Bush and his counterparts from Canada and Mexico at a March 2005 summit in Waco, Texas. The SPP “partnership” is being implemented step by step, without congressional approval, and if allowed to proceed unchecked its implementation will lead to opening our already porous U.S. border that the president gives lip service to securing.

Fortunately, many conservative Repub-licans have grown increasingly irate with the direction President Bush and the Re-publican leadership are taking their party. “Conservatives are as angry as I have seen them in my nearly five decades in poli-tics,” Richard Viguerie, president of Con-servativeHQ.com, wrote in the October Washington Monthly. “I would guess that 40 percent of conservatives are ambivalent about the November election or want the Republicans to lose.”

Viguerie explained: “The Big Govern-ment Republicans in Washington do not merit the support of conservatives. They have busted the federal budget for genera-tions to come with the prescription-drug benefit and the creation and expansion of other programs.... They have expanded government regulation into every aspect of our lives and refused to deal seriously with mounting domestic problems such as illegal immigration.... And they have sunk us into the very sort of nation-building war that candidate George W. Bush promised to avoid.” Viguerie’s opinion piece for Washington Monthly was one of seven from “prominent conservatives” who, in the words of that publication, “dare[d] to speak the unspeakable: They hope the Re-publicans lose in 2006.”

Looking for Real ConservativesThe record speaks for itself: neither George W. Bush nor most congressional Republi-cans are genuinely conservative. But nei-ther are liberal Democrats. Many Ameri-

can voters — both liberal and conservative — want the Republicans who have been in control out of office. But simply replacing neo-conservative Republicans with liberal Democrats will not clean up the mess in Washington since liberal Democrats are part of the problem. Admittedly, many congressional Democrats may now op-pose some of Bush’s dangerous proposals for amassing presidential power, but how would these same congressmen vote if Hillary Clinton or another like-minded Democrat were to be elected president two years from now?

In the meantime, gridlock in a divided government could impede the accumula-tion of more power in the executive branch. But how much of that gridlock would be genuine — and how much would be po-litical theater — when both major par-ties serve the same power elites? As Lou Dobbs explained in his CNN.com com-mentary posted on October 18: “I don’t know about you, but I can’t take seriously anyone who takes either the Republican Party or Democratic Party seriously — in part because nei-ther party takes you and me seriously; in part because both are bought and paid for by corporate America and special

interests.... Political, business and aca-demic elites are waging an outright war on working men and women and their fami-lies, and there is no chance the American middle class will survive this assault if the dominant forces unleashed over the past five years continue unchecked.”

Dobbs added that “those elites treasure your silence, as it enables them to claim America’s future for their own.” But if the problem is bipartisan, who is there to vote for who has a realistic chance of winning, outside of a rare exception such as Ron Paul? The only way to solve that problem is to wake the town and tell the people and get them involved, election year and nonelection year alike. Once the politi-cal climate is changed, many Republicans and Democrats will adjust their rhetoric and actions in order to keep themselves electable, and if they don’t they will be re-placed on election day by other candidates who do offer their fellow citizens a choice and who may or may not be Republicans or Democrats. ■

EXTRA COPIES AVAILABLEAdditional copies of this issue of

THE NEW AMERICAN are available at quantity-discount prices. To order, visit www.thenewamerican.com/marketplace/ or see the card between pages 38-39.

➧


ELECTIONS

Republicans or Democrats? “Our so-called representatives in both parties have been working against the interests of the middle class for so long that they take our votes for granted,” Lou Dobbs commented in his CNN.com post on October 18.

Newscom


by Dennis Behreandt

The Chief Joseph Idaho ranch in eastern Idaho lies in the shadow of both Yellowstone and Grand Teton

National Parks amid the unparalleled natu-ral splendor of the Rocky Mountain West. The ranch, owned and operated until re-cently by veterinarian Rex Rammell, has been home to a herd of hundreds of prized Rocky Mountain elk. In August, a bear, no doubt seeking an easy meal among the ranch’s herd, dug under the fence that sepa-rated Rammell’s elk from the wild elk that roam the Idaho wilderness. Shortly after, nearly 100 elk from Dr. Rammell’s herd escaped through the damaged fence.

The story of the escaped elk should have ended with Dr. Rammell recaptur-ing his wayward herd, as would have hap-pened with any other escaped livestock. Instead, the escaped elk became the ob-ject of an unprecedented property rights struggle that pitted an embattled rancher against a state government eager to assert its “right” to destroy property at the whim of the governor.

Open SeasonAccording to Idaho state officials, the elk that escaped from the Chief Joseph Idaho ranch represented an unprecedented threat to the health and genetic purity of the wild elk herd living in the region. Most of the elk that escaped were cows and state of-ficials worried that, with the approach of the rut, they would interbreed with wild bull elk. “Time is of the essence, we have to try to get these animals back,” Steve Schmidt, regional fish and game director, told the Los Angeles Times in late Septem-ber. According to Schmidt, Rammell’s elk “are a huge unknown to us. Any introduc-tion of new genes might have unknown consequences. The risk is large because we are not only talking about Idaho’s elk herd, but now we are also talking about elk who have the potential to mix with Yellowstone Park elk and elk from Wyo-ming. We have dreaded this day.”

When dozens of elk escaped from his ranch, Rex Rammell thought he faced the task of recovering his herd. Instead, he witnessed the state-sponsored slaughter of his elk.

PROPERTY RIGHTS

Elk Ranch Elk Ranch Idaho’s

Tragedy

Heavily armed: Idaho Fish and Game officer checks his military-style assault rifle while hunting for elk that escaped from the Chief Joseph Idaho ranch. According to rancher Rex Rammell, the officer had just killed four of his elk right outside the pen being used to recapture the animals.

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Others worried that the escaped elk would spread disease to wild popula-tions. “The higher density that these ani-mals are kept in tends to lead to higher risk of disease,” said Barry Reiswig of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wyoming. “You don’t know what diseases these animals may have. They are supposed to be tested and the data presented to health authori-ties, but we know that that may or may not happen.”

The escape of Rex Rammell’s elk and the unsubstantiated fears the escape en-gendered among state officials created the perfect opportunity for the state to flex its muscles and assert its dominance over otherwise privately held property. On September 7, Idaho Governor Jim Risch signed an emergency executive order au-thorizing the destruction of the escaped elk. “There is a crisis facing our elk herds in eastern Idaho. Because of the escape of domestic elk that was not reported as

required by law, we now have these farm-raised elk mingling with our wild elk herds,” said Risch. “The Ex-ecutive Order I have signed authorizes the employees of Fish and Game and the De-partment of Agriculture to immediately harvest these domestic elk. The order will also allow the Fish and Game Commission to put into place emergency rules

to authorize licensed hunters and private property owners to take these elk without a tag. This emergency action is being taken to protect our wild elk herds in Idaho. There is a serious risk of disease and an altered gene pool from these domestic elk and I am authorizing these activities to begin at the earliest time possible.”

As a result of Governor Risch’s action, a full-scale public hunt for the escaped elk was authorized. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Rex Rammell. The rancher said he had already recaptured 40 of the escaped elk by the time Risch called for open season on the elk, and he thinks he’d have been able to capture the rest in as little as one more week. But the arrival of armed state agents and private hunters in the area near the Rammell ranch scattered the already jittery animals. “Everything was very much in control until Risch’s ex-ecutive order, and then it became chaotic,” Rammell said. “I’ve been working my butt off to catch these elk.”

Property RightsThe opportunity to bag an elk out of sea-son proved enticing to many big-game hunters, and many traveled from out of state to stalk Rammell’s elk. One of those who went to Idaho looking to bag an elk was Don Dunbar. Being a rancher and big-game hunting guide in Wyoming, the opportunity to get one of Rammell’s elk initially seemed irresistible.

“I started out with the idea of being able to harvest an elk cheaper because out-of-state permits are really high,” Don Dun-bar told THE NEW AMERICAN. “I started out thinking that I would be able to get my elk a little cheaper than usual. Then I realized about half way up there, ‘wait a minute, whose elk are these?’ The more I looked into this, the more disgusted I was and then I saw the contradictions.... The short version is: my conscience started bother-ing me. I knew I would feel guilty about killing that guy’s elk.”

Dunbar, who has become a staunch sup-porter of Rex Rammell, found the issue intriguing and began to research the sub-ject. “I pulled it up on the website of the Idaho Fish and Game and there were some contradictions. [Governor] Risch said that he had insisted on hunter participation os-tensibly to get as many people as possible to go out and kill these elk of Rammell’s. Their battle cry was ‘they’ve got disease, they’re genetically impure, they’ll spread genetics that are wrong to the wild elk.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. This particular herd, 12 years ago, was

The persecution of Rammell really was nothing more than a ploy to make game farms look bad in order to justify getting rid of them. Columnist Jim Gerber wrote in the Idaho Falls Post Register, “This is about making a politically correct statement that we do not like game farms.”

PROPERTY RIGHTS

Depredation hunt: A dead elk is dragged behind an Idaho Fish and Game truck. The elk were killed during a “depredation hunt,” authorized by Idaho governor Jim Risch, supposedly to keep them from spreading disease to the wild population.

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purchased right straight from the Yellowstone Park herd. Their genetics are identical. The only difference being that if one of these elk that Doctor Rammell has raised sported a little bit bigger antlers than the other ones, he might breed that one back to a cow to get a calf that would have larger antlers, or trophy antlers. That’s what all the hunters like.”

On the issue of disease, Dunbar found that the escaped elk were more likely to catch a disease from wild elk than to transmit disease into the wild population. “Every one of the animals that has died of natu-ral causes or was harvested has had their brains tested for chronic wasting disease,” Dunbar said. “They’ve all been negative. They’ve been vaccinated for tuberculosis which elk are also prone to. None of these elk are diseased nor ever have been. The irony is these elk are subject to the wild elk spreading disease to them.”

Under Idaho law, the state can authorize a hunt for escaped elk after seven days, though such a hunt clearly infringes on the property rights of ranchers. “State law is very clear about the authorization of the state to take action when domestic elk herds escape,” said Brad Hoaglun, spokes-man for Governor Risch. “It’s not ambig-uous at all, and the governor acted well within his authority.” Rammell disagrees. “Domestic elk by Idaho statute have been given absolute property rights,” the ranch-er said at a news conference on September 20. “Also by Idaho statute, domestic elk are classified as livestock. Therefore, with exceptions of their idiosyncrasies — like the high fence — they are to be treated like any other livestock operation regardless of what side of the fence they are on.”

State Representative Lenore Barrett sides with Rammell. “We’ve never had this particular situation before,” Barrett told THE NEW AMERICAN, adding that Gover-nor Risch’s response was “knee jerk.” Ac-cording to Barrett, “the whole thing was bogus from the get go. The bogus part is the genetics and the disease.” The persecu-tion of Rammell really was nothing more than a political ploy to make game farms

like Rammell’s look bad in order to jus-tify getting rid of them. “In fact,” wrote columnist Jim Gerber in the Idaho Falls Post Register, “this is not about a threat to our elk herd. This is about making a politi-cally correct statement that we do not like game farms.”

Of Western states, only Idaho and Utah still permit ranches like Dr. Rammell’s, and there is pressure on both states to out-law them. Wyoming officials, in fact, tried to get Idaho to do just that. “I was offend-ed that the Wyoming governor contacted Governor Risch and tried to get Idaho to do away with game farms,” Rep. Barrett told THE NEW AMERICAN.

A TragedySo far, the only danger posed by the es-caped elk has been the danger to Rex Ram-mell and his family. Dunbar, who says he has befriended the embattled veterinarian, said Rammell has even received threats. In one case, the rancher had a confrontation with a neighbor who was hunting near the ranch. When Rammell told the hunter, a neighbor, that he was hunting too close to the ranch, a brawl erupted. According to Rammell, the man pulled a gun and threat-ened to kill him. Rammell says he reported the incident, but instead of prosecuting the man who pulled the gun, the police are charging Rammell with a crime. “I’ve been punched, kicked, had a gun pulled on me, and my elk have been killed,” Ram-

mell told THE NEW AMERICAN. “Now I’m being prosecuted.”

Just as disheartening, for Rammell, has been the economic damage the state has done to him by its unrestricted hunting for his elk. The unlimited hunting of his elk has cost him, he says, $60,000 or $70,000 so far.

According to Dunbar, one of the state’s fish and game officers “shot one of these elk while it was attempting to come back through the gate being herded by Dr. Ram-mell. He dropped the elk right in the gate. It was trying to come back and eat the grain, to feed.” The loss of another elk was more than Rammell could bear, said Dun-bar: “Poor Dr. Rammell, veterinarian, his life’s work, sat down on this elk and began to cry. They then arrested him and charged him with obstruction of justice because he wouldn’t get off the elk and hauled him into jail.”

“They literally shot these elk with grain in their mouths,” Rammell said. “They were pretty nasty to me, so I called them every name in the book. I said, ‘You’re not going take another of my d*** elk in front of me,’ and I went and sat on that dead cow.” The state-sponsored hunt, which destroyed the property of a law-abiding citizen, will put Rammell out of business. “I’m not going to have any elk when this is over,” Rammell said. ■

See Dr. Rammell’s first-person account on page 20.

PROPERTY RIGHTS

Confrontation: An Idaho Fish and Game officer shakes his finger at Rammell during an encounter near the ranch. “I’ve upset a lot of people and I’ve got some serious enemies,” Rammell told THE NEW AMERICAN. “They don’t even recognize that people have any rights.”

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by Rex Rammell, DVM, MS

Imagine an America where anything unpopular is against the law. Not nec-essarily because it is causing harm,

but because a group is offended. Someone could start the criticism with lies, wave the rally flag, and ride a wave of emotion to get the majority against the activity until the law was changed to prohibit it. Imag-ine all the things which could become un-popular, and consequently unlawful, if the majority ruled.

Fortunately, America has a Constitu-tion with a Bill of Rights. The Founders realized that majority rule must be limited to preserve individual liberty. “A Bill of Rights,” wrote James Winthrop, “serves to secure the minority against the usurpa-tions and tyranny of the majority.” Unfor-tunately, we are gradually losing our rights

to ambitious bureaucrats in government who think nothing of using the power of government to destroy people. I know, be-cause it happened to me.

I am a veterinarian who specializes in raising elk for my livelihood, on my 248-acre ranch near St. Anthony, Idaho. All my elk are tested yearly for both TB and brucellosis. Any elk that dies on my prop-erty, whether naturally or by hunting, has its brain tested for chronic wasting disease (CWD). I have faithfully followed those state-issued requirements. The last thing I want is a disease harming my animals and destroying my livelihood.

Ranch elk genetics all originate from Yellowstone National Park elk. In order to reduce populations, the park gave elk to individuals and state Fish and Game departments beginning in the 1930s. Un-like wild elk where inbreeding of fathers

to daughters and brothers to sisters oc-curs, elk ranchers carefully breed their animals for desirable traits and to prevent inbreeding. I breed for trophy antlers. Others breed for meat. Like any business, we follow the capitalist system of supply and demand, using what fits our individ-ual operations.

Elk ranching is unpopular with a cer-tain group of people. These animal rights activists believe elk ranches are reprehen-sible, akin to raising mink in cages for fur. To rally the majority, these activists create imaginary horrors of disease and genetic pollution. The misinformed believe their lies. The real truth is these people will stop at nothing, including violating private property rights, to gain their cause.

Idaho Governor Jim Risch believed the lies. Through an unconstitutional delega-tion of executive authority, and motivated

AP

PROPERTY RIGHTS

AmericanLibertyLibertyat Risk

Elk rancher Rex Rammell watched Idaho’s state government trample his private property rights, and he is issuing a wake-up call to all Americans that their freedoms are imperiled.

Embattled rancher: Rex Rammell stands near his elk at his Chief Joseph Idaho ranch. An Idaho executive order signed by Governor Jim Risch has put Rammell out of business.

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by illegitimate reasons, he ordered elk that escaped from my ranch to be killed, vio-lating my private property rights. There was no public-health emergency grant-ing him authority to order my elk killed. Fortunately, with the help of my family and friends, 50 elk have been recaptured. If not for the actions of the government, we would have caught them all. To date, 32 head have been slaughtered, four with grain in their mouths at the opening of my capture pen. I was arrested trying to stop Idaho Fish and Game Department’s em-ployees and hired guns from killing my elk as the elk returned to my private land. I find it a paradox that I was arrested try-ing to protect my property from govern-ment theft.

Idaho code, 25-3705A(3) reads, “Any domestic cervidae [members of the deer family — deer, elk, moose], that have es-caped the control of the owner … for more than seven (7) days, taken by a licensed hunter … shall be considered a legal tak-ing.” This statute was actually sought in good faith by the elk ranchers should a hunter accidentally kill an escaped ranch elk. We never agreed that the law should be perverted into allowing an open season on escaped elk. But that is just how Gov-ernor Risch used this law.

By statute, ranch elk are deemed live-stock with absolute property rights, wheth-er inside or outside the fence. Anyone who lives around livestock knows that it is not uncommon for cattle, horses, sheep, and other livestock to get out of their enclo-sures. When that happens, it’s normal for neighbors to assist in getting them back inside their fence. No federal case is made of it. Elk ranchers have the same rights as cattlemen or horsemen when their animals escape. Escaped livestock do not sudden-ly become public domain, but remain the property of their owners. Governor Risch’s cattle, for example, recently escaped their pasture but none was shot. Yet, the gov-ernor ordered both Idaho Department of Fish and Game and private hunters to kill my elk when they escaped. Moreover, he excused them from liability.

This isn’t just about elk ranches but American liberty. It’s about the future of basic inalienable rights for all Americans. Government will trample on these rights if we allow it. Today it is Rex Rammell’s fight. Tomorrow it will be yours! ■

PROPERTY RIGHTS

AmericanLiberty

THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY

“We can never win … unless the promise of what we can build supplies more motivation than the terror of what we must destroy.”

Almost 50 years after Robert Welch, found-er of the John Birch Society, spoke these words, the organization is recommitting

itself to his prophetic statement. In the midst of battling many detractors, a mass of competing or-ganizations has emerged in the political arena.

“We have to be more viable in the marketplace,” says JBS Marketing Manager George Kotalik, “and we’ll become more competitive by no longer hiding our light under a bushel basket.”

For the past decade, the JBS has directed much of its effort toward promoting specific campaigns on political issues. While these campaigns have been vital in the freedom fight, they have not been as effective at growing the Society to the size and significance needed to succeed.

Enter the Determination Packet, a pres entation tool that shines a viewer-friendly light on the John Birch Society.

“The components in the packet are basically modernized renditions of timeless truths. What was old … is new again, especially to upcoming gen-erations who may not know us yet,” Kotalik states. The packet represents the first of many initiatives ultimately aimed to “turbo-charge” the cause of preserving constitutionally protected freedoms for years to come.

Arthur Thompson, CEO of JBS, agrees: “This packet represents a paradigm shift in marketing the John Birch Society to whole new groups of potential members. We are determined to win by building a better world.” ■

Determined to Win


This montage depicts elements of the Determination Packet.

“It’s time to look back to Robert Welch’s original vision for how to win,” says Art Thompson, chief executive officer of the John Birch Society. That vision is reflected in the organization’s new Determination Packet.

WORD on the street...WORD

Let freedom ring! I thank God for organizations like yours!— Kevin C. West Valley City, Utah

I heard about the Society and decided to look up your Internet site. I’m glad to see that there are people in this country who still believe in what made it the greatest nation on earth.— A.J.R.

Jacksonville, Fla.

As a member of the JBS who joined using your old website, I just wanted to congratulate you on the new site. It’s a huge

improvement over the old format, and it should do wonders for recruitment and getting out the JBS message.

— James F. Glendale, N.Y.

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient: the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding is so feeble: the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual is so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing ways, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.— Robert E. Lee (e. 1866)

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.— Samuel Johnson (1759)

To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encour-aging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors: it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.— Will and Ariel DurantThe Lessons of History (1968)

’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.— George Washington (1796)

I deem (one of) the essential principles of our government (to be) peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.— Thomas Jefferson (1801)

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man, When duty whispers low, thou must, The youth replies, I can.— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1863)

DURING WARS, AMERICAN CITIZENS AND POLITICIANS MUST HOLD THE TORCH HIGH. OUR SPONTANEOUS, CENTURIES-OLD LEGACY OF RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUALISM MUST NOT BE FORGOTTEN OR DESTROYED.

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Responsible Individualism

AMERICA’S FORMAL “MISSION STATEMENT” IS SPELLED OUT IN OUR DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE,

CONSTITUTION, & BILL OF RIGHTS.

The following quotations jibe with America’s history and spirit. They suggest that the “high road” of the past could be the

“high road” for the future.

Never believe that a few caring people cannot change the world. Indeed that is all who ever have. — Margaret Mead

History is the witness of the times, the torch of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the message of antiquity.— Cicero

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.— George SantayanaReason in Coammon Sense (1905)

All we have of freedom — all we see or know — this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.— Rudyard Kipling (1899)


by Dennis Behreandt

S tar Wars was — and remains — a cultural phenomenon for many reasons, but one of its most strik-

ing aspects in 1977 was its depiction of a human society permeated by robots. And not just any robots, but humanoid robots. In the original Star Wars movie, film-maker George Lucas envisioned robots, or “droids,” many of them bipedal and looking in a general sense like humans, as being of vital importance in helping main-tain the material infrastructure of society.

Science fiction was far from reality in 1977. But in the last few years, robotics has finally begun to take visible steps toward realizing Lucas’ vision. Today sev-eral Japanese firms, including such recog-nizable companies as Honda, Toyota, and Mitsubishi, are introducing prototype per-sonal robots that look the part of C3PO, Lucas’ “protocol droid.”

Embracing TechnologyAfter World War II, Japanese industry was in tatters with seemingly little hope of being able to compete in a future mar-ketplace dominated by American manu-facturing muscle. According to Timothy Hornyak, author of Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots, the Japanese saw technology as “a way to save their own country from ruin — from sliding backwards into being a colony of these imperial powers who were circling the country like sharks.” The Japanese, al-ways confident and self-reliant, looked to technology as a means of independently rebuilding their nation. “They did not de-velop this latent technophobia that you see in the West,” Hornyak told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The Japanese continue to believe that advanced technology is the key to main-taining the stability of Japanese society. Presently, Japan has one of the world’s lowest birth rates and some of the world’s

Japanese Robot RevolutionThe

With an aging population and a looming labor shortage, Japanese scientists are pushing hard to develop advanced androids and integrate them into human society.

TECHNOLOGY

Robot Revolution: ASIMO, the advanced robot built by Honda Motor Co., delivers a newspaper. Facing a demographic crisis with an aging population but a shrinking workforce, many Japanese expect robots to play a significant role in their nation’s future.

AP

longest life spans. Demographically, this means that Japan’s population is aging and facing a manpower shortage, as well as a need for personal assistants and compan-ions for a graying population. According to The Economist, it is expected that the Japanese population will shrink over the next four decades. For many in Japan, robots are being viewed as the means to head off this looming demographic cri-sis. “With Japan’s aging population, we need robots that can alleviate the burden of human tasks,” says Toshihiko Morita, director of Fujitsu’s Autonomous System Laboratory.

Concern for the well-being of an aging population is what spurred the creation of PARO. Developed by Japan’s National In-stitute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), PARO is described as a “mental commitment robot” designed to provide comfort and companionship to those who are lonely or shut in. The device is designed to look like a seal or a cat and looks more like a toy than a serious piece


Androids & ImmigrationR obots have already had a tremendous economic impact, but

mostly in large-scale manufacturing facilities. Automakers have long used robotics to speed the assembly of cars, for instance. But like the computer revolution before it, the robot revolution will occur when every family has a robot in the house. This, however, presents a challenge to the United States. It appears that the United States will have to fight demographic trends if it is to keep up with the rest of the world in robotics.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in Japan, where a signifi-cant population crisis looms, robots are seen as an important means of replacing laborers who are expected to be lost through aging. Oth-ers hope that robots will be able to play an important role in caring for the elderly and sick. According to The Economist though, some have suggested an alternative strategy: immigration. “Many workers from low-wage countries are eager to work in Japan,” The Economist reported in 2005. “The Philippines, for example, has over 350,000 trained nurses, and has been pleading with Japan — which accepts only a token few — to let more in. Foreign pundits keep telling Japan to do itself a favour and make better use of cheap imported labour. But the consensus among Japanese is that visions of a future in which immigrant workers live harmoniously and unobtrusively in

Japan are pure fancy. Making humanoid robots is clearly the simple and practical way to go.”

The West has taken the other approach. In Europe and especially in the United States, the response to a perceived shortage of low-wage labor to perform repetitive tasks has been to dip into the pool of immigrant (and in many cases illegal immigrant) laborers. In The New York Sun for September 22, writer Diana Furchtgott-Roth re-peated the old allegation that immigrants do jobs Americans won’t. “Low-skill immigrants come to be janitors and housekeepers, jobs native-born Americans typically don’t want,” Furchtgott-Roth wrote. But what low-skill immigrants really do is perform these jobs at artificially low rates of compensation. Because of the availability of such cheap labor, there is little demand for new technological innovations. Cheap labor is easy. When there is plenty to be had, why spend the money, time, and effort at devising faster, more effi-cient mechanized means of production? In the choice between cheap labor and advanced technology like robotics, America seems bent on choosing cheap labor. It’s a choice the United States may come to regret if Japan, as seems likely, succeeds in developing the robotics technology of the future. ■

— DENNIS BEHREANDT

Lifelike: Roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University appears with his lifelike female robot, Repliee Q1Expo, at the Prototype Robot Exhibition in Nagakute, Japan, on June 9, 2005.

AP


of technology. But it represents a serious step toward developing robots that inter-act with people in a naturalistic manner. A video distributed by AIST shows the ro-bots interacting with people and animals and describes their intended use. “Mental commit robots,” the AIST narrator says, “will enrich human life by providing joy and comfort through physical interaction.... The robot’s shape, movement, sound, and texture adequately stimulate the human sense so that the human will feel affection and comfort towards the robot.”

As interesting as PARO is in its abil-ity to form emotional bonds with people, the truly revolutionary nature of Japanese robotics is demonstrated in the advanced capabilities of ASIMO, the humanoid, bi-pedal robot created by Honda. An amaz-ing leap forward in technology, it is dif-ficult to do justice to ASIMO in writing. The four-foot tall, 119 pound robot must be seen to be believed, and Honda, for-tunately, has provided plenty of video on its website. The videos show ASIMO running, greeting people, pushing a cart, and exercising, among other things. With ASIMO, Japanese robotics technology has nearly matched Star Wars levels of sophistication.

According to Honda, ASIMO, which stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, is no mere marionette, but fea-tures impressive levels of artificial intel-ligence. According to Honda, ASIMO “is capable of interpreting the postures and gestures of humans and moving indepen-dently in response. ASIMO’s ability to in-teract with humans has advanced signifi-cantly — it can greet approaching people, follow them, move in the direction they indicate, and even recognize their faces and address them by name. Further, utiliz-ing networks such as the Internet, ASIMO can provide information while executing tasks such as reception duties. ASIMO is the world’s first humanoid robot to exhibit such a broad range of intelligent capabilities.”

And ASIMO has a job. Honda began using ASIMO in its new office in the city of Wako, Japan, in the spring of this year. According to Satoshi Shigemi, the lead-er of the Honda team that is developing ASIMO, “The level of Asimo’s capability was just good enough to entertain people on the stage in the past, but the new Asimo

can work at places closer to us.” According to Shigemi, “The new Asimo can perform the task of a receptionist or information guide automatically.” As impressive as this is, the ultimate aim is to integrate robots like ASIMO into human society. “Honda is aiming to create a humanoid robot that can help people and live together with people,” Shigemi said.

A Robot RevolutionASIMO is not the only humanoid robot that Japanese scientists and engineers have constructed. If ASIMO looks like it would fit in with the droids from Star Wars, Repliee Q1Expo looks like it took its in-spiration from Data, the Star Trek android that wanted to be human. Like Data, Re-pliee Q1Expo looks human, more so than the fictional Data. The robot’s designer and builder, Professor Ishiguro, told BBC News: “I have developed many robots be-fore, but I soon realised the importance of

its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence.” While Repliee Q1Expo lacks ASIMO’s advanced bipedal mobility capabilities, it is far more human-like in appearance, which may allow it to interact with people more effectively. “Repliee Q1Expo can in-teract with people,” Ishiguro said. “It can respond to people touching it. It’s very sat-isfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet.”

In many ways, robotics is now at a point where the personal computer was in the late 1960s. It is on the cusp of a revolu-tion. After watching ASIMO in action, it doesn’t take much to imagine the robot performing chores around the house. Is it snowing? Send ASIMO out to shovel the driveway. Hungry? Have ASIMO pre-pare a meal. Someday, maybe just 20 or 30 years from now according to Honda, we’ll all wonder how we managed before the Robot Revolution. ■

Multitasking: Japanese scientists and researchers are developing robots to serve myriad purposes, including as receptionists and companions for the elderly and sick. Here, an “optical tongue robot,” which can check a person’s medical profile and give health-related advice, tests an apple’s sugar content at the Prototype Robot Exhibition.

AP


by Vic LeClair III

No matter how bleak things may appear, we should always feel optimistic. Those who fought

the idea of slavery, both white and black, could see it was the right thing to do. Women who sought the right to vote knew if they fought hard enough and long enough, it would happen. Our nation was formed because of its Founders’ relent-less pursuit of freedom, and their opti-mism that it could be achieved. They fol-lowed a goal and knew that if they fought for their freedom and promoted honesty, they’d have a country that all others can aspire to. Our optimism keeps us reaching for the stars — literally. Our technologi-cal capabilities are second to none. We are a people who live in a country that is structured to allow anyone the possibility to use what talents God has given them to the best of their abilities.

When I was a young boy, my sum-mer duty was to wash and dry dishes for the family. I remember whining to my mother, “Why do I always have to do the

dishes?” She would always say, “Don’t complain unless you have a proper solu-tion to the problem, or unless there’s blood involved.”

With three brothers there was always a chance for blood, but I got her point. It was her way of saying that if I didn’t do my job, I’d need to find someone who could, and then trade jobs with that person. Mom made the meals, cleaned our clothes, ironed, and kept up with the house clean-ing. I wasn’t about to trade with her. My two older brothers worked for my dad moving cases and kegs of beer. I was too small for that. Then it hit me. “How about getting a dishwasher?”

She looked at me with a half-smile. “Now how in the world would you be paying for that? Besides, you’re my dishwasher.”

She had me there. But, I didn’t give up. I was determined that this kitchen torture wasn’t going to be my purpose in life. I saved every penny I could. By the follow-ing summer I had earned enough money to buy a used portable dishwasher. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had barely saved enough for the soap. My dad kicked in the rest so that I could start working for him at the store. But, you get the point. Optimism

has a way of correlating with self-esteem, psychological well-being, personal health, and getting out of dish detail.

There is much turmoil in the world. We know that because the media feeds us bad news every day. We live in a world that thrives on money, and tragedy sells. Mar-tin Seligman, recognized as the world’s preeminent psychological authority on optimism, wrote the book Learned Op-timism. He criticizes academics for their focus on pessimism, saying that in the last three decades of the 20th century, journals published 46,000 psychological papers on depression and only 400 on joy. His criti-cism of this disparity stems from the fact that everyone can be optimistic and that optimistic people are successful people. His research found that rather than hav-ing an inborn trait of greatness, optimistic people develop a way of explaining events that does not see defeat as permanent. Op-timism involves a set of skills which can be learned.

America is the ultimate environment to develop those skills. Because of our his-tory and our governmental structure, we are free to express ourselves in the mar-ketplace of ideas.

For those who can’t conceive why we Vic LeClair III is a free-lance writer residing in

Wisconsin.

CULTURAL CURRENTS

Most of us Americans know the importance of voicing our political opinions. But while we harp on the things that bother us, can we balance political discontent with optimism?

Can Outrage and Optimism Coexist?

29

should be optimistic in this country and shake their heads, saying, “We’re going to hell in a hand-basket,” I give you the following:

• We have the freedom we enjoy today because it is a part of us. It’s like my favor-ite chair. I’ve gotten used to the chair and its comfort and security. If someone came to my home and tried to take my chair, I would be outraged. It is likely that I would do whatever it took to make sure that chair stayed right where it was. Americans are like that with freedom, making freedom nearly impossible to displace. We won’t give it up. After all this time, we still have our freedoms largely intact. We, more than any other country, have the ability to use our freedom to keep our future safe from those who would take it away.

• Everybody has different ideas and boundaries in which their moral standards lie. But the common American denomi-nator is that for the most part, the large majority of our citizens have high moral standards and know right from wrong. Hollywood might have the freedom to put out a prod-uct filled with ideas con-trary to moral standards, but we have the same freedom to not be taken in. And we won’t be taken in because we’ve seen how high moral values lower crime, improve family life, and enhance citi-zenship. Our history proves that holding to the truth, knowing right from wrong, and maintaining wholesome moral values always win in the end.

• The statement, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” still applies. America has a long

history of emancipation. Any implication that our freedom could disappear overnight in a sudden and violent coup d’état along the lines of the Bolshevik Revolution is nonsense. Be-

cause of our tradition of freedom, tyranny can only occur here

via a long step-by-step process and by stealth.

When average citizens notice their free-doms unraveling, they will make sure that those who are trying to take those steps are dealt with.

• After 9/11 our stock market was in trouble, jobs were disappearing or going to other countries, and our security was shaken. We didn’t go home and put up the barricades. We went on about our busi-ness and tried harder. That’s what we do. We know life can get better. We know that when good stands up to evil, the good will eventually prevail. We have more than hope. We have stubborn optimism.

Stubborn optimism and goodness have a way of prevailing in the end. When my son was five, I remember him standing there with chocolate all over his face and hands, next to a candy bar wrapper on the floor. When I asked him if he ate my candy bar, he shook his head no. Under heavy interrogation he refused to break and stood his ground. I washed him up and let him

run off, knowing he would crack, eventu-ally. For the rest of the day, he couldn’t look me in the eye. He did eventually own up to it.

Today we are outraged by the Middle East crises, jobs going overseas, soaring gas prices, and a volume of other matters. To be angry is our right. How can you help but be pessimistic and even fearful? Answer: you can take a deep breath and search for the positive. The U.S. govern-ment has had the capability to nuke other nations or its own cities for decades. That is a long history of proof that men have the ability to keep their governments in check. And our checks and balances have checks and balances. As Lord Thomas B. Macau-lay (1830) noted: “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improve-ment behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

Such practices foster hate and promote despair. We can have outrage at how our government is run. All I ask, like my mother, is that we don’t just voice our complaints. Anybody can pick up a sign and join a line in protest. Find a solution that answers the question of right and wrong, taking into consideration, to the best of your ability, both the “good” goals of the divergent parties involved and the good of our country as a whole. If you find another way, a better way, state it. It’s the only way you’re going to get out of the kitchen and into the store hauling kegs. ■

TNA • NOVEMBER 13, 2006

CULTURAL CURRENTS

Can Outrage and Optimism Coexist?


by Dennis Behreandt

Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire, by R. Cort Kirk-wood, Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House Publishing, 2006, 182 pages, pa-perback. (For ordering information, see the ad on page 6.)

Quite unexpectedly, a television series has illustrated just how far out of favor masculinity has fallen

among the cultural elite. The show is Bat-tlestar Galactica and in its current iteration has garnered its fair share of praise. Peter Suderman’s laudatory essay in National Review is similar to the praise heaped on the show by others. Galactica, Sud-erman says, is “a show about spaceships

and killer robots that is also arguably the most potent, dramatically vibrant series on television. An unflinching examination of how the military, government, family, and religion interact in the fragile ecosystem of society, it is as morally and intellectu-ally serious as it is thrilling.”

The current Galactica is derived from the original Battlestar Galactica series starring Lorne Greene that first aired in 1978. Both shows feature the character “Starbuck,” a cocky and brash Viper pilot who has unsurpassed skill in the cockpit and unsurpassed bravery under fire. Not only that, but in the original series Star-buck, as played by actor Dirk Benedict, smoked cigars and chased women. Ac-cording to Benedict, the Starbuck charac-ter he played “was all charm and humour

and flirting without an angry bone in his womanizing body.”

Naturally, there was no room in the cur-rent series for this kind of character. So Starbuck became Kara Thrace (played by actress Katee Sackhoff), a cigar smoking female Viper pilot. Still brash, still brave, but in the new Galactica, Sackhoff’s Starbuck represents the realization of the radical feminist dream to remake men into women and women into men. That doesn’t sit well with Benedict. “The war against masculinity has been won,” he wrote in a recent essay. “Everything has turned into its opposite, so that what was once flirt-ing and smoking is now sexual harassment and criminal.” The new Starbuck was part of the “re-imagining” of the series to bring it into accord with the present culture, ac-

A decades-long war on masculinity is reducing the American man to a sniveling shadow of his former greatness. Real Men by R. Cort Kirkwood recovers man’s glorious heroic past.

REDISCOVERING AMERICA’S HEROES

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cording to Benedict. “To take what once was and twist it into what never was in-tended. So that a television show based on hope, spiritual faith, and family is unimag-ined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction. To better reflect the times of ambiguous morality in which we live, one would as-sume,” Benedict concluded.

Much as the new Galactica has re-imagined Starbuck, the prevailing culture has re-imagined men in general. Taking a cue from feminists like Gloria Steinem, who once said “we badly need to raise boys more like we raise girls,” our culture has done its best to destroy masculinity. According to Christina Hoff Sommers, au-thor of The War on Boys, there is “a move-ment to reconstruct boyhood, to produce boys who will be less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing — simply put, more like girls.”

The list of social ills caused by this fem-inization of masculinity is long and sordid. The problems are unlikely to be reversed any time soon unless an effort is begun to restore to men some degree of under-standing of those manly virtues — includ-ing bravery, integrity, loyalty, honor, and faith — that marked the heroes of bygone

ages. The best way to do that is to examine the lives of some of those exemplary men of the past. This is just what author R. Cort Kirkwood proposes to do in Real Men, a book that extols the virtues of 10 men who em-body the masculine ideal.

The Fires of WarWar has long been the proving ground for masculine heroism. The conspicuous example is Thermopylae where a handful of Spartans under the leadership of Leonidas held off vast hordes of Persian invaders, succumb-ing only when they were betrayed. But such heroism predates the great conflict of the Persian War. Homer’s Iliad records the Trojan hero Hector’s speech before battle:

The gallant man, though slain in fight he be,

Yet leaves his nation safe, his children free;

Entails a debt on all the grateful state;

His own brave friends shall glory in his fate;

His wife live honour’d, all his race succeed,

And late posterity enjoy the deed!

In posterity, through the work of Kirk-wood, present-day readers can “enjoy the deeds” of several men whose bravery was tempered in the fires of war. No fewer than eight of the 10 profiles in Real Men are of warriors whose martial valor on the field of battle and personal conduct in civilian life remain exemplars. Among these is the “Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion.

The Swamp Fox was an exemplary member of the founding generation who pledged — and then committed — their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred

The list of social ills caused by the feminization of masculinity is long and sordid. The problems are unlikely to be reversed unless an effort is begun to restore to men some degree of understanding of those manly virtues that marked the heroes of bygone ages.

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honor to the cause of liberty. It is difficult to perceive, several hundred years hence, the degree of courage such a course of action required. The British were merci-less in persecuting those who fought for the young nation. “Bloody” Banastre Tar-leton, the feared British cavalry officer, thought nothing of terrorizing colonial Americans.

In one case Kirkwood recounts, a widow named Mary Richardson, who had sent her son to warn Marion about a Tarleton plan, was mercilessly flogged by the British, her cattle destroyed, and her barn razed. Mar-ion himself lost everything. His “house was pillaged and burned, and his cattle and horses scattered or seized,” Kirkwood notes. “At war’s end, the Swamp Fox had to rebuild from nothing.”

Despite the dangers, Marion fought

on, rendering invaluable service to the cause for in-dependence. According to Lighthorse Harry Lee, a contemporary, Marion “was virtuous all over.... Beloved by his friends, and respected by his enemies, he exhibited a luminous example of the beneficial effects to be pro-duced by an individual who, with only small means at his command, possesses a

virtuous heart, a strong head, and a mind directed to the common good.”

The same could be said for Davy Crock-ett, another hero of the early American republic. Crockett’s life and deeds have been the stuff of legend for years and only recently has this exemplar of the American spirit been neglected. Crockett came from an abysmally poor family. The conditions of his early life boggle the mind, and one can scarcely imagine a modern man sur-viving the rigors that Crockett endured as a child. As Kirkwood points out, Crockett persevered despite setback after setback, eventually reaching Congress, where he steadfastly and famously refused to ap-prove of a bill that would have given the federal government the power to take money from taxpayers and give it to an-other person.

The issue was whether to give $10,000 to naval

hero Stephen Deca-tur’s widow. Against

this measure, Crockett argued:

“We must not permit our

respect for the dead

or our

sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.... Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of char-ity.... We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but … we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.” If only today’s congres-sional socialists would exhibit a touch of this wisdom.

An honorable man, Crockett pledged his own money to the relief of the widow De-catur. But this alone didn’t make Crockett a legend. That would come at the Alamo, where, facing certain death, Crockett par-ticipated in the defense of Texas from Mexican General Santa Anna.

Catalogue of HeroesIt takes more than bravery to make a hero. It could be said that only those who em-body the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude can truly reach the level of the heroic. Most of those highlighted by Kirkwood embody these virtues to some degree, but among them, one — the incomparable Robert E. Lee — stands supreme. Kirkwood hits the nail on the head when he writes, “Robert E. Lee was so grand a figure, so dissimilar to any American considered a hero today, or even when he lived and before, that measuring a man against him is almost unfair.” In American history, perhaps only George Washington can compare. And it is in Washington that Lee himself found a hero. According to Lee biographer Doug-las Southall Freeman, Lee “had come to view duty as Washington did, to act as he thought Washington would, even perhaps, to emulate the grave self-contained cour-tesy of the great American rebel.”

And in Washington may be found the sole failing of Kirkwood’s Real Heroes, for Washington is conspicuous in his ab-sence. If Lee, the greatest of the heroes chronicled by Kirkwood, looked to Wash-ington as a hero, it seems beyond doubt that any book on great American heroes

should contain a robust discussion of the republic’s first president. Still, this is a

minor complaint. In a nation in which boys and men are in desperate need

of role models, Kirkwood’s Real Men serves as a treasure trove

of noble exemplars. ■

Any book on great American heroes should contain a discussion of the republic’s first president, which Real Men lacks. Still, this is a minor complaint. In a nation in which boys and men are in desperate need of role models, Kirkwood’s Real Men serves as a treasure trove of noble exemplars.

TNA • NOVEMBER 13, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

32

to give $10,000 to naval hero Stephen Deca-

tur’s widow. Against this measure,

Crockett argued: “We must not

permit our respect for

the dead or our

unfair.” In American history, perhaps only George Washington can compare. And it is in Washington that Lee himself found a hero. According to Lee biographer Doug-las Southall Freeman, Lee “had come to view duty as Washington did, to act as he thought Washington would, even perhaps, to emulate the grave self-contained cour-tesy of the great American rebel.”

And in Washington may be found the sole failing of Kirkwood’s for Washington is conspicuous in his ab-sence. If Lee, the greatest of the heroes chronicled by Kirkwood, looked to Wash-ington as a hero, it seems beyond doubt that any book on great American heroes

should contain a robust discussion of the republic’s first president. Still, this is a

minor complaint. In a nation in which boys and men are in desperate need

of role models, Kirkwood’s Men


Young LifesaverTwelve-year-old Tucson, Arizona, resident Viktor Chavira isn’t even a teen and al-ready he has helped save two people from drowning, most recently his own father.

According to an October 9, 2006 post-ing on the Tucson Citizen website, this past summer Viktor’s cousin was playing in a pool when she began choking. Northwest Fire Captain Adam Goldberg told the Citi-zen that Viktor jumped into the pool and got her out. But this was only the begin-ning of his youthful career as a lifesaver.

On October 8, Viktor’s father, Victor Chavira, had been cleaning their backyard pool “when he tripped over the family dog, hit his head on the deck and fell in.” It is estimated that “he was in the pool 20 to 30 minutes” before Viktor happened to find him “floating face up.”

As Viktor had done earlier for his cous-in, he now bravely dove in to rescue his father, but in this case, Viktor was unable to pull his father out of the pool. Staying calm and thinking quickly, Viktor decided to go and call 911. “The dispatcher told Viktor to hold his dad’s head above water until paramedics arrived at their home.”

The elder Chavira is now recovering from his ordeal. Young Viktor’s poise in the face of danger did not go unnoticed. “We’re going to give him a job in about six years,” Captain Goldberg remarked. “Where any other adult would be freaking out, this 12-year-old was cool as a cucumber.”

Widowed HopeIn Afghanistan, there are nearly one million widows, out of a total popu-lation estimated at about 27 million. Many of the women are widows as a result of war. The Christian Science Monitor reported about what it means to be a widow in that country: “Wid-ows are very dependent on their in-laws. Particularly the husband’s broth-ers, the male members of the family, have a lot of say. The widows can lose their homes, they can even lose their children.”

“Widows are marginalized,” continued the article, and other societal norms fur-ther stack the deck against them: “Women

are not free to walk to a market and sell their goods.... Because women do not ride bicycles, they must walk miles.” To help Afghani widows rise above poverty, two American women from Massachusetts who were 9/11 widows, Susan Retick and Patti Quigley, created their own charity — which got its start when the women donated much of the money they had re-ceived in compensation for their husbands’ deaths.

The money raised goes toward assis-tance programs meant to give Afghani women freedom, a sense of self-worth, and a future for their children. The women in Afghanistan may be given “chickens, an incubator and three-month supply of feed” so that they can sell and eat the eggs; or they may be given a cow and a calf so that they can sell the milk; or they may be taught to make leather goods or how to spin silk.

Because the Afghani women gain finan-cial independence from their male rela-

tives through the program, they can direct more of their own futures and do what is of primary importance to them — send their children to school. Retick and Quigley started the charity in 2003 and “collected $325,000 in the first two years. This year they hope to raise $250,000.” Retick and Quigley visited Afghanistan earlier this year to meet some of the Afghani women who have received help and to make sure that the Afghanis’ lives were, in fact, improving.

But why did the women undertake this project? They told MSNBC.com that they were so aware of the great support that they received in the United States after 9/11 that they couldn’t “turn their backs on those in need in other parts of the world.” Susan also recalled a saying that she read in a grief counseling book: “You can’t al-ways choose the roles you play in life, but you can choose the way in which you play them.” ■— STEVEN DUBORD & KURT WILLIAMSEN

THE GOODNESS OF AMERICA

Helping Afghan war widows: To help Afghani widows rise above poverty, Susan Retick and Patti Quigley (right), two American women from Massachusetts who were 9/11 widows, both pregnant at the time of the attack, created their own charity called Beyond the 11th.

AP


by John F. McManus

M ost Americans know little about the nation of Hungary. Few know anything of the heroic

1956 attempt to cast off the tyranny im-posed on its people by the Soviet Union. And only a very small handful of contem-porary Americans have any appreciation of an immense betrayal that first stimu-lated the Hungarian people’s uprising but then left them defenseless at the mercy of their oppressors. Before dwelling on that horrible betrayal, we briefly recount the story of a remarkable people’s brave at-tempt to be free.

Hungary endured a none-too-pleasant Nazi occupation during much of World War II. In early 1945, the nation found

itself “liberated” by an occupation force of several hundred thousand Soviet troops. Life for the ordinary Hungarian immedi-ately went from bad to worse as the newly arrived liberators robbed, raped, and pil-laged from one end of their nation to the other.

The Soviets and their hand-picked Hun-garian collaborators speedily conducted elections in the fall of 1945 and, even though loyal Hungarians won overwhelm-ingly, communists used their control of the police and their domination of the media to undermine the result. Over the next three years, as James Drummey reported in this magazine in 1986, Moscow-trained puppets “collectivized agriculture; nation-alized industry, banking, and trade; took over all residential property; and con-

trolled all employment.” Democratic government ceased to exist and, by 1949, the hard fist of communist rule had taken total control. The com-munists then proceeded to outlaw religion in the heavily Catholic coun-try, closing monasteries and convents, deporting priests, and creating the “peace priest movement” made up of traitorous clergymen willing to co-operate with tyranny. As had occurred in the other Soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe, commu-nist-style hell had com-pletely triumphed.

Seven years later, many thousands of in-credibly brave Hungar-ians decided that they’d had enough of living under the heel of their Soviet occupiers. On October 23, 1956, grow-ing numbers of students, workers, women, and children filled the streets of Budapest demanding

relaxation of the ironclad rule under which they were suffering. Ordered to disperse by the ruthless Soviet-led security police, they refused and were immediately fired upon. When the ethnic-Hungarian tank crews demanded that the Soviet forces cease killing civilians, they too were slaughtered and more demonstrators were attacked. But from this modest beginning, the revolt only grew in numbers and in its admirable determination.

On October 25, an even larger crowd of unarmed civilians filled Budapest’s main square. Soviet tanks and security police responded by firing into the throng, kill-ing many hundreds. Angered by such brutality, numerous Hungarian officers and soldiers left their posts, joined the freedom fighters, and supplied the peo-

Betrayal “Made in the U.S.A.”— STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOMHISTORYHISTORY

Fifty years ago, Hungary’s people made a brave stand against Soviet tyranny. They failed to win their freedom because they were betrayed by the U.S. government.

Billboard reminder: In New York, a billboard shows scenes from the 1956 effort of the Hungarians to throw off Soviet control.

AP


ple with small arms. James Drummey recounted some of what followed:

The bravery of the Hungarian chil-dren, some of them not much bigger than the rifles they were carrying, was astounding. They were able to stop many Soviet tanks by spreading liquid soap or grease on the narrow streets causing the vehicles to slide into trees or buildings. Some youngsters would dash out of hiding and stick a length of pipe into a tank’s treads, bringing it to a halt. Others would then attack with Molotov cocktails or stuff rags soaked in gasoline in the [tank’s ex-haust] system so it would catch fire. When the tank crews jumped out, they were shot down. One 12-year-old boy tied grenades to his body and ran into the tracks of the lead tank in a column, blowing himself and the tank’s tracks to pieces, but stopping the column so others could attack the remaining tanks.

This burst of freedom had been accom-plished with little more than small arms and bare hands. But it lasted only three weeks. On November 4, Hungary’s free-dom fighters woke to find themselves facing an invasion of 2,000 Russian tanks and 140,000 Soviet troops. They struggled against huge odds until the last of their outnumbered, outgunned, and overwhelmed numbers capitulated on No-vember 13. During those three desperate weeks, 25,000 Hungarians paid the ulti-mate price and 100,000 suffered wounds. In the ensuing days, approximately 40,000 were rounded up and deported to Soviet slave labor camps. Moscow-directed op-pression again ruled, and it continued until 1989 when the Soviet Union curiously col-lapsed and the Soviet enforcers departed for Mother Russia.

It is certainly worthwhile recalling the love of liberty that impelled mere students, women, and workers to rebel against a military-enforced tyranny. There will, of course, be some mention of their bravery in the press and on television if only to recall that the 50-year-old event occurred. But it is relatively certain that any mention of the U.S. betrayal of the Hungarians will be omitted. It is that be-trayal that ought to be aired.

Hungary Betrayed by AmericaHungary’s brave citizens had acted on repeated encourage-ment to revolt supplied by America’s Radio Free Europe broadcasts. All they had to do, said the broadcasts, was rise up and needed help would ar-rive. Charles Legendy, a stu-dent in Budapest at the time and now an American citizen, recently told the New York Times what he remembered the early days of the revolt: “It seemed we could change the system. Russian troops were ordered to put down the uprising, but were inef-ficient, hesitating. We were almost sure America would intervene. After all, we were being attacked for being pro-Ameri-can, and Radio Free Europe was encour-aging us to end the regime.” Instead, as

was later revealed by a courageous con-gressman and others, Legendy and fellow Hungarians were betrayed. What actually happened is something no real American can be proud of.

In a July 20, 1960 speech delivered in Buffalo, New York, Congressman Mi-chael Feighan (D-Ohio) told a stunned audience:

The full truth about the Hungarian Revolt should not remain swept under one of Washington’s many bulging rugs. The men who betrayed that small nation, and those who similarly betrayed other nations and peoples, have never been held to account for their treachery.

— STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOMHISTORYHISTORY

Prelude to violence: On October 23, 1956, students, office personnel, and factory workers gathered in Budapest with 16 demands, including the withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces.

AP


You will recall the revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, and that by October 28, the Hungarian patriots had rid their country of the Russian oppressors. A revolutionary regime took over and there was a political hiatus for five days.

Then the State Department, alleg-edly concerned about the delicate feelings of [Yugoslavia’s] Commu-nist dictator Tito, sent him the follow-ing cable assurances of our national intentions in the late afternoon of Fri-day, November 2, 1956: “The Gov-ernment of the United States does not look with favor upon governments unfriendly to the Soviet Union on the borders of the Soviet Union.”

It was no accident or misjudg-ment of consequences which led the imperial Russian Army to reinvade Hungary at 4:00 AM on November 4, 1956. The cabled message to Tito was the go-ahead signal to the Rus-sians because any American school boy knows that Tito is Moscow’s Trojan Horse.

A quick look at a world map will show that the northeastern part of Hungary shares

a border with Russia, then known as the Soviet Union. It didn’t take long for Tito to share the message with his communist patrons in the Kremlin.

While the State Department was seal-ing Hungary’s fate, President Eisenhower publicly declared that “the United States deplores the intervention of Soviet mili-tary forces.” He said that those forces had invaded “not to protect Hungary against armed aggression but rather to continue an occupation of Hungary by the forces of an

alien government for its own purposes.” And he told a hastily assembled press conference that “the heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary,” adding that America would “do all within our peace-ful power to help them.” The president had correctly described the Soviet purpose but he failed to follow through on the prom-ises given to Hungary’s 10 million people. Hungarians didn’t need America’s “heart,” and they had assuredly been led to believe by Radio Free Europe that the promised help would be other than “peaceful.”

Worse yet, while their short-lived suc-cess was still alive, Spanish leader Fran-cisco Franco decided to send real help to the Hungarians in the form of weapons. He contacted German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and obtained permission for his planes to refuel in Germany while on their mission to Budapest. But, as then-popular commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr. reported on March 27, 1957, “It took Eisenhower’s prestige as President to bring enough pres-sure on Franco and Adenauer” to cancel the arrangement. The desperately needed arms from Spain never reached Hungary.

The United States then turned the mat-ter over to the United Nations. As author Frank J. Johnson concluded in his 1962 book No Substitute For Victory, “Hungary died because the only nation capable of saving it, the United States, chose to let it die — pretending that we could default on our own responsibility by calling on an organization incapable of handling such a situation.” The United States, of course, knew without question that any action contemplated by the United Nations on be-


Hungarian freedom fighters take aim at members of the communist secret police on November 2, 1956, during an anti-communist uprising in Budapest, Hungary. Throughout the desperate weeks of active resistance, some 25,000 Hungarians were killed.

AP

Quick “victory”: On October 29, 1956, the Soviet forces began their withdrawal, and the Hungarians believed that they had won their freedom.

AP


half of Hungary would promptly be vetoed by the USSR. The UN would never act to thwart Soviet designs in such a crisis, and anyone who understood the world body’s structure knew that it wouldn’t.

The mid-1950s was a period when the Soviet Union’s domination of much of Europe had generated strong rumblings of discontent among its victims. The peoples in the USSR’s satellite nations were uneasy to say the least. There had been food riots in Czechoslovakia and in the Western Pol-ish city of Poznan. In the early hours of the Hungarian revolt, a fairly large number of Russian troops stationed in Budapest defied orders to suppress the rebellion and joined the rebels. Even Soviet-appointed leaders — Prime Minister Imre Nagy, General Pal Maleter, and others — turned on their So-viet masters and sided with the revolt.

Although he had been trained in Mos-cow and was thought to be loyal to his So-viet masters, Nagy immediately appealed to the U.S. government for help, even ask-ing for diplomatic recognition for the new Hungarian government. But all was in vain. Placed on trial by the Soviet puppets who succeeded him, Nagy was executed along with General Maleter and others in 1958.

Had the Hungarians succeeded, there would have been similar uprisings in other European captive nations. But it was not to be. Unlike important news regularly de-nied the captive peoples all over Europe, details about the U.S. betrayal made its way throughout the communist-dominated world. There were no more rebellions dur-ing the next three decades. Then, in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev, the very Soviet leader

who ordered the rape of Hungary, toured the United States as a guest of President Eisenhower. The message to Eastern Eu-rope’s captive peoples was clear: America is not your friend.

A Pattern of BetrayalOver the years, many have learned that if you have America for a friend you’ll soon have no need to search for an enemy. A dwindling few might recall a classic exam-ple of U.S. perfidy when 1,400 anti-Cas-tro militants were sent ashore at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in 1961. Their invasion had been planned, financed, and controlled by America’s CIA. The patriotic Cubans had even been trained by American experts at a secret location in Central America. But,

once they landed, promised air support and the expectation of help from Cuba’s under-ground anti-Castro groups never material-ized. Planes with Cuban pilots strapped into their cockpits were ordered to remain grounded, and it was later learned that the rebel groups within Cuba had never been notified about the planned operation. The invasion failed completely with the result that Fidel Castro became an international hero throughout the communist and left-ist world. After all, he had successfully repulsed what everyone knew was a U.S.-backed operation. What happened in Cuba in 1961 fit a pattern of conduct.

Fidel Castro had actually seized control of Cuba at the end of 1958 with critically important help supplied by the U.S. State Department and America’s liberal media. As Castro was gathering his forces, U.S. Ambassador Arthur Gardner warned Washington superiors that the bearded revolutionary was a communist. Gardner was speedily replaced and kept from hav-ing any contact with his successor, Earl E.T. Smith. But Smith too learned the truth about Castro, warned the State Department of his discovery, and was himself replaced. A third U.S. ambassador in a period of less than three years was on the scene when Castro triumphantly took control of the island nation only 90 miles from the tip of Florida. Ambassador Smith wrote about his experiences in his 1962 book The Fourth Floor. All during this period, criti-cally important depictions of Castro as a


Soviet devastation: On November 4, 1956, the Russians sent thousands of tanks and over 140,000 troops into Hungary to put down the uprising, while military supplies on their way to the Hungarians were stopped by their so-called supporters.

AP

AP

Preventing future incidents: As part of their efforts to thoroughly destroy the morale of those who would try to rebel, the Soviets put on show trials — often ending in death sentences — such as this one of three Hungarians who killed a communist secret police officer.


glorious, freedom-loving patriot appeared in liberal U.S. publications.

Other instances of betrayal would fill many pages in an article such as this. The following is a list of American betrayals and the names of books documenting the perfidy:

• The delivery of Poland to the commu-nists: I Saw Poland Betrayed.

• The U.S. betrayal of the Free Chinese in favor of Mao Tse-tung’s bloody-handed forces in the late 1940s: several good books on the subject such as While You Slept.

• One columnist sarcastically noted that in Korea we had “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory”: None Dare Call It Treason.

• In 1958, Lebanon’s pro-Western, anti-communist president Camille Chamoun sought help from the United States to thwart insurgency within his nation and found himself forced out of office: The Actor: A Study in Deception, a thorough look at the career of John Foster Dulles.

• The Belgian Congo’s valiant Moise Tshombe faced a U.S.-backed attack by United Nations forces that decimated his region: 46 Angry Men.

• During the late 1960s and early 1970s, success in Vietnam was made impossible by incredible restrictions placed on our own forces by individuals in Washington who never wanted the communists to lose anything: Background to Betrayal covers the undermining of anti-communist groups in Vietnam, and Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State points out that the peace arrangement which finally ended the conflict allowed the communists to leave 150,000 fully equipped troops in South Vietnam.

• America had no better friend in all of Latin America than West Point graduate Anastasio Somoza. But our government sided with the communist Sandinista movement and Somoza was forced into exile: Nicaragua Betrayed.

Do Not Forget Hungary’s SacrificeBoth before and after the Hungarian revolt, the pattern of American duplicity was there for all to see. But our diplomats correctly expected that America’s image as the great-est opponent of communism would shield their treachery. The ruse worked.

The full truth about the Hungarian re-volt should not remain swept under one

of Washington’s many bulging rugs. The men who betrayed that small nation, and those who similarly betrayed other na-tions and peoples, have never been held to account for their treachery. Read about the betrayals and find out the truth of this tragic tale. While you’re at it, check the backgrounds of the men who instigated all of these betrayals, find the name of the organization that they all belonged to, and learn that these betrayals weren’t based on bad political decision-making, but were intentionally done. Sad to say, the same organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, the group of Ameri-can elites who shape our foreign policy, still dominates our government, mass media, foundations, academia, and even the military. Having betrayed so many others, they are now busily betraying our nation itself with sovereignty-compro-mising pacts, subservience to the United Nations, and rejection of the limitations

placed on them by the U.S. Constitution.During the first week of November

1956, while the battle for Budapest raged, an unknown voice appealed via radio to mankind. In desperate tones, the freedom fighter begged: “People of the world, lis-ten to our call. Help us — not with advice, not with words, but with action, with sol-diers and arms. Please do not forget that this wild attack … will not stop. You may be the next victim.”

History shows that freedom can be lost because of armed might. But freedom can also be lost through steady usurpa-tion and eventual consolidation of total power. This is betrayal from within. The unknown freedom fighter from Budapest warned that those to whom he was appeal-ing “may be the next victim” of a future tyranny. As our own government’s already frightening power continues to grow al-most daily, his is a warning that no Ameri-can should ignore. ■


Leaving while they could: After the Soviet forces crushed the resistance, tens of thousands Hungarians, who had already tasted Russian occupation, fled across the border into Austria.

AP

Escalating WarAs pertains to the Mideast conflict, Americans are repeatedly told by politicians and pundits that we can either attack the terrorist-sponsoring regimes of Syria and Iran or negotiate and give gifts of foreign aid, but as this issue explains, those alternatives won’t settle matters and there is another way. (August 21, 2006, 48pp) TNA060821

Spy NationAre the intelligence initiatives of the Bush administration really making us more safe? This issue of THE NEW AMERICAN scrutinizes the long-term ramifications of electronic eavesdropping, the consolidation of the intelligence branches, and “extraordinary rendition.” (July 24, 2006, 48pp) TNA060724

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GotchaAfter his daughter’s house had been bur-glarized twice in the previous week, Don-ald Stewart decided to protect her home. So he hid under a blanket in his daughter’s Andrews, South Carolina, house after she went out.

At about 8 p.m. on September 14, right on schedule, two men entered the house and “began taking a dresser from the house.” That’s when Stewart “surprised them,” reported myrtlebeachonline.com. The startled men dropped the dresser, while Stewart took aim and fired. Stewart managed to hit one of the men in the chest before they made their escape — their brief escape.

Their undoing came because they exited the area so rapidly that they left their truck behind. When the uninjured robber, Mark Jayroe, tried to retrieve the truck, Stewart caught him and held him at gunpoint until the police arrived. The second burglar, Ron-ald Chandler, was later arrested as well.

Protective OrderTravis Wigington drove through a locked gate in front of his ex-wife’s trailer, broke out several windows, and shot into the trailer with a .22-caliber rifle, even as his ex-wife, Carol Johnson, yelled out that her six-year-old daughter was in the line of fire. While Travis attacked, Johnson called the police.

As Johnson spoke to a police dispatcher, she decided that enough was enough, and she grabbed a pistol and shot back. She described the situation to the Daily Demo-crat (Durant, Oklahoma): “He was gonna kill all of us I guess. I was just dodging bullets and trying to keep (my daughter) down. It was a nightmare.”

When the shooting ended, she had a wound to her shoulder, and he was hit in the groin and was out of commission. An initial investigation of the September incident indicated two things: Johnson is likely giving a truthful version of events, and court orders to stop dangerous people from going near their victims really aren’t worth the paper that they’re written on.

Durant Police Chief Gary Rudick told the Democrat that Wigington was out of

jail on bond at the time of the incident after twice previously violating a protec-tive order to stay away from Johnson. He specified: “I hate to see this because a pro-tective order doesn’t help in this kind of incident when someone is that committed to hurting somebody. The justice system is failing in these deals.”

First-time ShooterIn Pensacola, Florida, on September 22, a husband and wife were working in their grocery store when a man came in with a stocking mask over his face and said, “This is a stickup.” The 60-year-old hus-band, William Deen, thought it was “some kind of joke” until the robber shoved a gun in his face, reported the News Journal.

When the robber got on his hands and knees to go behind the counter, William went for the robber’s gun. As he and the robber fought, his wife, Vivian, who had never fired a gun before in her life, “grabbed a handgun kept behind the coun-ter and fired at the robber’s shoulder.” She fired twice, missing both times. The rob-ber didn’t choose to stand around and give her a few more tries; he fled for the door, minus any loot.

The police didn’t recommend that any-one try to stop a robbery by pulling a gun. But William said he works too hard to give away his money to a criminal.

Quick-shooting CabbieAlexander Johnson, a would-be armed robber, told police after he had been shot by a cab driver that he and an accomplice, Arthur Joseph, had planned to rob a cab on the night of September 23. In fact, the cab that they held up was the second one that they attempted to rob that night. The first attempt failed because the cab driver be-came suspicious and wouldn’t stop. Later the two men called the Casino Cab Com-pany to get a new target.

When the Casino cab arrived, the two men jumped into the car. Johnson had a gun and wore a mask. Joseph had neither a gun nor a mask. The Shreveport, Loui-siana, cabbie told KTBS-Channel 3 what went through his mind: “With one of them

not having a mask on at all, having his face completely exposed, I felt as they were going to get my money and kill me.” And so he grabbed his own pistol, pointed it, and started blasting. He hit Johnson five times.

Small Woman, Big GunWhat do you do if you’re a 110-pound woman who is alone and facing down two masked men who want to rob your auto repair shop? You pull out a .357-caliber magnum pistol, of course. On September 22 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, Sheri Brown was alone at the auto repair shop that she and her husband own when two men, one large and one small, drove up and demanded money. “She grabbed a pole … and smacked the big one,” Sheri’s husband Dan told the Tribune Review. “He then hit her in the head, but she was able to get away,” he added.

She rushed to where the shop’s gun was kept, throwing chairs and miscellaneous items in the path of the pursuing robbers to slow them down. As soon as the robbers saw her grab a gun, they fled posthaste.

Dan Brown noted that the robbers must have been watching the rural business because they arrived immediately after he left. In the aftermath of the attempted robbery, Sheri sports some bruises and a determination to get a concealed carry per-mit and a smaller-sized personal weapon.

Taking No ChancesAt 12:32 a.m. on September 8, Vincent Llanas of Thornton, Texas, was on the phone with a police dispatcher because he had heard someone trying to break into his house. According to the Cameron Herald, Llanas told the dispatcher “that he was inside with his wife and three small chil-dren.” As he talked to police, the would-be burglar broke a window and reached in to unlock the door. Llanas responded by shooting through the door with a shotgun, spraying the burglar, Joel Simank, with de-bris. Simank fled on foot, but was caught a short distance away. He was treated at a hospital and then arrested. ■

— KURT WILLIAMSEN

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The Politics of ProfligacyITEM: An Associated Press article in USA Today, entitled “Federal Deficit Now Lowest in 4 Years,” reported on Oc-tober 11: “The federal deficit fell to a four-year low in the budget year that just ended, a result President Bush pointed to Wednesday in claiming Republicans are better stewards of the economy than are Democrats.”

Earlier in the day the administration had released budget numbers showing that the deficit was $248 billion for the fiscal year ending September 30, which was well below the $423 billion deficit the admin-istration had forecast in the budget it sub-mitted to Congress in February.CORRECTION: Neither Democrats nor Re-publicans have much to be proud of when it comes to proper stewardship of the tax-payers’ money. While it is obviously better to have a somewhat smaller deficit than expected, the bar has been set mighty low to call this a brilliant success.

The deficit over the last year was not quite as large because spending rose 7 per-cent while tax revenues jumped 12 percent. It should not be a point of honor to have taken that much more from the taxpayers.

For the last fiscal year, the federal bud-get blew up to an astounding $2.7 trillion. This was, as pointed out in a Wall Street Journal editorial on October 6, “a 9% in-crease, or triple the inflation rate. Over the past six years, the federal budget has increased by 49.2%. The main cause of the deficit decline — 90% of it, says White House budget director Rob Portman — is a tidal wave of tax revenue. Tax collec-tions have increased by $521 billion in the last two fiscal years, the largest two-year revenue increase — even after adjusting for inflation — in American history.”

Piling on all of these taxes is not about to make the economy healthy. Moreover, the price tags on the so-called entitlement programs are actually rising even faster than the government’s capability to pay for them. In addition, when you have deficits you have debt payments, and that burden on the economy is skyrocketing — total-ing $406 billion in fiscal 2006. The Wall Street Journal on October 12 quotes Brian

Bethune, U.S. economist at the consulting firm Globe Insight, as follows: “Spending is rising faster than the growth rate of the economy.”

For all the credit (or blame) often given to Republicans as champions of “busi-ness,” the GOP-led Congress and White House have extracted a huge amount of tax blood via corporate income taxation. Tax collections from corporations jumped 27 percent last year (to $254 billion) and are up by more than 70 percent over a two-year period.

And an increase in individual income taxes last year, up to about $1 trillion, rep-resents the largest proportion of the overall jump in tax revenues; such taxes were up 13 percent over the previous year. Should this really be something about which to gloat? Lest one think the taxes represent just more “soaking of the rich,” think again. There just aren’t enough “rich” people to fund all this big government. The progressive income tax — one of the tenets of Marx-ism — cuts deeply into the middle class in order to redistribute the wealth.

According to the Joint Economic Com-mittee, the top half of American taxpay-ers is paying the highest tax share in decades — a total of 96.7 percent of the individual income taxes in 2004 (the last year for which such figures are available). The top one percent of income-tax filers shelled out 36.89 percent of income taxes; the top 10 percent was hit for 68.19 per-cent; the top quarter paid 84.9 percent. How wealthy are the alleged plutocrats in the top quarter? You qualify for this level with adjusted gross incomes of $60,041, according to IRS figures.

Defense spending has been on the in-crease, but it is not the main villain in this piece. Between 2001 and 2006, fed-eral spending outlays in nominal terms jumped by $820 billion, according to Dan-iel Mitchell and Michelle Muccio of the Heritage Foundation. Of this, 71 percent was unrelated to defense. “The largest do-mestic spending increases have occurred in education spending (up 137 percent), international spending (up 111 percent), and health research and regulation outlays (up 78 percent).”

Yes, the economy of the United States is growing. But government over the last several years has been absorbing an even larger share of the economy, rising to al-most 21 percent of Gross Domestic Prod-uct, the highest share in a decade.

Expenditures have become truly breath-taking. Even disregarding those expendi-tures on defense and homeland security, as noted by the Cato Institute a year ago, President Bush is the biggest spending chief executive in the last three decades. “Indeed, spending as a percentage of GDP has grown more under George W. Bush than it has under any other president since Franklin D. Roosevelt,” write Mitchell and Muccio.

The Republican legislators have large-ly given the White House a free pass for spending, though that doesn’t mean it’s been free for the taxpayers. Far from it. “Probably the most striking contrast be-tween the Bush era and the last six years of the Clinton administration is this: Con-gress cut Bill Clinton’s non-defense re-quests by an average of $9 billion each year,” comments Peter Grossman in the Indianapolis Star. “But Congress has added an average of $16 billion to Bush’s requests. The president has never vetoed these Republican spending binges.”

Needless to say, this does not mean that Democrats should be praised for frugal-ity. For example, consider the new hero of the Democrats, Ned Lamont, who has been running for the Connecticut Senate while terming himself a “fiscal conserva-tive.” Not by a long shot. He has bragged that he wants to spend more for “clean energy and energy independence,” a “se-rious, long-range infrastructure plan to upgrade our schools, public transporta-tion, highways, our sewage treatment and our levees in below sea-level areas [and] a transportation strategy which intercon-nects cities and suburbs, inner cities and jobs and affordable housing, and ports and airports.”

We already have too many of those kinds of “fiscal conservatives.” Rather, we need less boasting, less spending, and more constitutional government. ■

— WILLIAM P. HOAR


‘‘Like the Clinton admin i s t r a t ion before it, the Bush

administration is setting us up for another negotiated fi-asco with North Korea. The recent six-nation summit on Korea hosted by Beijing is preparing the way for anoth-er decade of extortion pay-ments to Kim Jong Il’s to-talitarian terror state. On the table are billions of dollars in loans, food, oil, and technol-ogy — courtesy (mostly) of U.S. taxpayers — to bribe Supreme Leader Kim to stop acting like the tyrannical megalomaniac he is.”

That was the opening paragraph for my column in this space three years ago, in September 2003. Back then, the Bush ini-tiative was being praised by the foreign policy establishment that has been behind one diplomatic betrayal after another, from Yalta to the Korean War to Cuba to Vietnam to Iran, etc., etc. — to the present. Lee Feinstein, the Council on Foreign Rela-tions’ (CFR) director for strategic policy, hailed the supposedly stunning achievement by President Bush and his then-Secretary of State Colin Powell of bringing North Korea to the negotiating table as a great “diplomatic victory.”

Mr. Feinstein was one of the key Clinton State Department officials who a decade earlier had set up the infamous “Agreed Framework” (brokered by former president Jimmy Carter) to provide the Communist Pyongyang regime with light-water nuclear reactors, oil, cash and food — in exchange for Kim Jong Il’s promise to cease its nuclear weapons program. North Korea’s recent nuclear testing and its truculent attitude toward global condemnation of its actions show once again how reliable are Kim’s promises — and the CFR’s strategic advice.

Many had hoped that the change of administrations in 2001 would signal an about-face in this dangerous policy toward North Korea. But the Bush administration continued the Clinton policy of oil, cash, food, and technology bribes for Pyongyang’s promises of good behavior. On June 13, 2001, President Bush stated that after several months of review, he was directing his national security team to “undertake serious discussions with North Korea,” with the objective of bringing about “improved implementation of the [Clinton-Carter] Agreed Framework.”

Three months later we experienced the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The country was no longer in a mood for coddling and aiding ter-ror states. Playing to this public mood, President Bush, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, made his now-famous “axis of evil” declaration. He specifically cited North Korea, one

of the axis members.And, he continued, to

thunderous applause, “We will work closely with our coalition to deny terror-ists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction.”

But what really happened? Barely two months after mak-ing that seemingly resolute vow, Bush was already back-tracking on his anti-terror pledge with regard to Korea. On April 1 (yes, April Fool’s Day), President Bush issued Presidential Determination

No. 2002-12, a memorandum to the secretary of state, in which he ordered $95 million to be delivered to the Korean Penin-sula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the agency in charge of transferring funds to Kim’s regime.

Most significantly, the president went on to say: “I hereby waive the requirement in Section 565(b) to certify” that Pyong-yang was abiding by the Agreed Framework, i.e., that North Korea was verifiably complying with its promises to end its nu-clear weapons program, eliminate its ballistic missile threat and stop further ballistic missile technology imports. Not that any sensible person viewed the certification provisions as a reliable protection against North Korean cheating. But when Kim Jong Il refused to allow inspectors access to his facilities, President Bush simply ignored even these minimal demands of the law and sent the $95 million anyway.

The Bush administration didn’t cut off U.S. oil aid to North Korea until November of 2002, when evidence of its nuclear weapons cheating became too obvious to ignore. And it wasn’t until 2005 that the administration cut off U.S. food aid to Kim’s criminal regime.

On December 21, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney an-nounced: “I have been charged by the President with making sure that none of the tyrannies in the world are negotiated with. We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.”

Nevertheless, here we are back negotiating with Kim and, more importantly, Kim’s longtime main sponsor, financial back-er, and supplier of verboten technology: Communist China. Bei-jing is the big winner, pretending to be our indispensable ally in reining in its surrogate regime in Pyongyang. Gary S. Samore, the CFR’s vice president and director of studies, in an October 6 interview, confirmed the CFR party line on North Korea, claim-ing that “the most important asset the United States has is to work with China.” And that is our official policy as well. ■

Bad Dealings With North Korea

THE LAST WORDBY WILLIAM F. JASPER

First Ten Amendments to the ConstitutionArticle I. Congress shall make no law respect-ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Govern-ment for a redress of grievances.

Article II. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Article III. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Article IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirma- tion, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Article V. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of

life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Article VI. In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtain- ing witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Article VII. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Article VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Article IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respec- tively, or to the people.

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“’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world....”

– George Washington (1796)

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Demopublicans vs. Republicrats - The New American Magazine - 10-13-06.pdf