Politics Plus

Every year, CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee), more accurately labeled CPUKE, conducts a straw poll to see whom the rabid Republican base would choose as President.  They virtually never actually do, thank goodness!  If you don’t already know who this year’s winner is, I’ll give you three hints.  One, he is an idiot!  Two, he is the son of an idiot!!  Three, he is named after an idiot!!!

With 31 percent of the vote, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) won the closely watched Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll this weekend, dwarfing second place finisher Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) 11 percent of the vote.

The son of libertarian icon and former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), Rand Paul has emerged as the nation’s leading spokesperson for an anti-government philosophy that would undo nearly all the accomplishments of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Era. As a Senate candidate in 2010, Paul came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964′s bans on private discrimination — including the bans on employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters — claiming that the right of “private ownership” should trump African Americans’ and other minorities’ right to be free from invidious discrimination. Permitting private discrimination, according to Paul, is “the hard part about believing in freedom.”

Nor are Paul’s libertarian views limited to his skepticism towards civil rights protections. In 2013, Paul endorsed a long-ago overruled Supreme Court decision called Lochner v. New York. The Court’s Lochner opinion relied on a fabricated “right to contract” that it and subsequent cases used to strike down various laws protecting workers from exploitative employers — on the idea that if a worker signs a contract that forces them to work 16 hours a day for barely subsistence wages then it would somehow violate the worker’s rights to pay them more money for fewer hours work… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

I’m not at all surprised at his victory.  After all, this IS CPUKE, so there are no sane alternatives.  Consider the runner up.

At the outset, I freely admit that oversight of our national security organs has been the Obama administrations weakest area.  However the abuses of power are far fewer than they were under Bush, or would be under any Republican.  Obama has failed, because he left those areas largely in Republican hands, and when he did appoint Democrats, they came from Hillary’s camp instead of his own more progressive advisors, who had based his campaign on transparency.  Now the CIA appears to have committed a major criminal act, putting them way out of bounds.

It was early December when the Central Intelligence Agency began to suspect it had suffered what it regarded as an embarrassing computer breach.

Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee.

What the C.I.A. did next opened a new and even more rancorous chapter in the struggle over how the history of the interrogation program will be written. Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.

Each side accuses the other of spying on it, with the Justice Department now playing the uneasy role of arbitrator in the bitter dispute. “It’s always been a dicey proposition to be investigating Congress,” said W. George Jameson, a C.I.A. lawyer for decades. “You don’t do it lightly.”

At the center of the dispute is the classified internal C.I.A. review of the detention and interrogation program, a review that Democratic senators believe buttresses the conclusion in the intelligence committee’s 6,300-page report that the program yielded little valuable intelligence… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

First of all, investigating the CIA is Congress’ job.  Investing Congress falls to the FBI and the Justice Department.  The CIA’s demesne is foreign intelligence and operations, NOT domestic, which is forbidden.  Therefore, investing their overseers is clearly a criminal act.

I have to add that, in predicting every international event of consequence from the Reagan Regime on, the CIA has been caught flatfooted every time.  They have utterly failed in their foreign intelligence role.  The entire agency needs to be reorganized to focus that agency on its primary role, gathering foreign intelligence.

This is Rachel’s second major Iraq War special, and if you have not had the good fortune to see it, or want to see it again, you can watch it here.  She made her point well and documented it with her usual thoroughness and accuracy.  While my own analysis includes a second reason, she agreed completely with my main  reason.  Enjoy!

The U.S. cannot escape from its sins in Iraq until it honestly accounts for its reasons for invading the Middle Eastern nation, said MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

She explained to Jon Stewart on Wednesday night’s “Daily Show” that she made a new documentary, “Why We Did It,” to help examine some of those unanswered questions.

“I did another documentary a little bit more than a year ago about how we were lied to, about how the administration’s case about why we had to go to war in Iraq wasn’t true, and how they sold us a false case,” Maddow said. “It sort of leads right away to the next question, that if the case they made wasn’t really why they wanted to go, why did they really want to go?”…

Inserted from <Raw Story>

Here’s the video I found in two segments:

I think we all knew that it was about the oil, but I have never seen it so well documented in one place.

In my opinion, there was also a second reason why.  The main place we station troops in the Persian Gulf is Saudi Arabia.  There the Wahhabi sect exerts considerable influence on the government and the populace.  Wahhabis are Republican Supply-side pseudo Muslims, the main source of funding for Al Qaeda, and every bit as rabid and hate-filled as Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians are here.  Because Saudi Arabia is the home of Islam’s two holiest places, Mecca and Medina, they consider the presence of US troops on Saudi soil to be sacrilegious pollution.  That presence is one of the two main reasons, along with US support for Israel, for Al Qaeda terrorism against the US.  The US is concerned that the welcome mat for our troops could be rolled up at some future time.  The Bush Regime intended to make Iraq a puppet client state and a permanent base for US forces to control the Persian Gulf from a local than does not make us beholding to the Saudis.