Yet when the opportunity presented itself last May to attach troop-withdrawal deadlines that could have been made to stick by repeatedly inserting them into the Iraq war-spending package, Congressional Democrats and their GOP allies instead overwhelmingly voted President Bush $100 billion more in US taxpayer funds to escalate the war with no strings attached.
Democrats claimed it was because the president vetoed the first bill they sent containing withdrawal requirements. Yet when it mattered most and all they had to do was stick to their guns and keep sending the president bills with drawdown deadlines until he signed one in order to secure funding for the troops, they instead quickly caved in and granted Bush yet billions more in unregulated war money after one meager veto. Talk about “opposition” theatre.
Is that the behavior of a body that really wants to end the Iraq war?
Time and again a majority of Americans have told Washington that the Iraq war was a mistake and to start bringing the troops home; time and again numerous politicians from the two-party system (especially its Democrat wing) have nodded gravely and said to the voters: “You have been heard.” And time and again the voters have been betrayed by their “representatives.”
Are these beltway cads politically suicidal, or do they understand something about the nature of the two party monopoly in Washington and how elections and policy there are bought and paid for by certain special interests that the rest of us do not?
Writing for CounterPunch.org, Jerry Kroth thinks so.
‘Bloggers called them "traitor Democrats", and the descriptor is apropos. At the time of the [$100 billion war funding] vote, sixty-two percent of the American people favored a time-table for a withdrawal, but, more significantly, seventy percent of Democrats were so inclined. Voting against this burgeoning tide of anger betrayed the will of the people and party that put these Democrats in office.
‘Curiously, all of the traitor Democrats were huge career recipients of funds from the Israeli lobby. If we took ten Democratic apostates and compared them to ten Democrats who stood by the voters, pro-Israeli PAC contributions were ten times greater for the turncoats than those who stayed with their constituencies ($322,000 versus $34,000 on average)…
‘Three months before we invaded Iraq, a New York Times poll showed only 30 percent of the American people favored an all-out invasion, but the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) did, and it prevailed. Hardly a sprinkling of Americans favored the "surge", a meager fourteen percent, but AIPAC did, and the surge is surging as we speak. Fewer than thirty percent of Democrats supported that no-strings-budget, but AIPAC did, and the conclusion plays out another hackneyed chorus of ‘Whatever AIPAC wants, AIPAC gets’.’
***
Over the course of the Iraq war, most Americans have come to understand that the modern GOP has been co-opted by militant Zionists whose (failing) retail political brand in the US is now widely known as neoconservatism. While it is true that some neocons (like President Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Guliani) are Christian Zionists, the overwhelming majority of the movement’s intellectual and political movers and shakers are Jewish nationalist Zionists: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Scooter Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, and Charles Krauthammer, to name just a few. All of these men were instrumental in lying America into the Iraq war.
What is not widely known is that a large percentage national Democratic Party politicians are also Jewish nationalist Zionists, and many of them are in party leadership positions.
For example, Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Democratic caucus and the fourth highest ranking Democrat in the House, was a patriotic volunteer during the first Gulf War in 1991 -- for Israel. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 2006 elections, Emanuel hand-picked pro-Iraq war candidates in toss-up races, thus ensuring that the “change” being sold to voters by the Democrats wouldn’t dramatically affect the war status quo.
While Emanuel was celebrated as a genius by the left-liberal cognoscenti following the Democrats’ victory, a post-election analysis showed that Emanuel’s strategy actually cost the Democrats seats they otherwise would have won. Because so many Americans were opposed to the war, Emanuel’s pro-war Democrat candidates discouraged voter turnout in many war-opposed districts across the country.
He was, however, able to help secure a record number of Jewish members (43) into Congress, an accomplishment that excited Doug Bloomfield, the former legislative director for AIPAC.
"It's unprecedented that there have been so many [Jews] in so many positions of leadership in both houses," Bloomfield chortled after the election, perhaps confident in the knowledge that polls show 82% of American Jews identify themselves as supporters of Israel, meaning the increase in Jewish members would make Congress even more pro-Israel than it already was.
These new Jewish members have joined established Democrat Congressional leaders with staunch Jewish nationalist credentials such as Chuck Schumer, Tom Lantos, Gary Ackerman, Joe Lieberman, the notorious war profiteer Diane Feinstein, and many others.
While most on this list have decidedly left-liberals views when it comes to domestic American social policy, nearly all of them suddenly become right-wing hawks when it comes to US foreign policy in the Middle East and wars against Muslims. For example, all of the Jewish nationalist Democrat leaders listed in the paragraph above voted in favor of the 2002 Iraq War Resolution authorizing the Iraq war.
In fact, given the crossover of their political positions, it is somewhat unclear why Jewish nationalist Democrats aren’t also labeled neocons like their Jewish nationalist cousins on the right. After all, many components of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda (blind loyalty to Israel, a muscular US presence in the Middle East, massive military budgets) and the neoconservative domestic agenda (lax border control, massive immigration and a powerful central government that extracts wealth from the provinces and redistributes it to Washington-connected cronies), are also embraced by Jewish nationalist Democrats, too.
Regardless, the crossover between parties when it comes to worldviews and their policy manifestations hasn’t been lost on everyone. In 2004, writing for the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, Julia Gorin noted:
‘As a new staple of mainstream American vocabulary, "neoconservative" warrants a reminder of the term's beginnings, before it became chic newspeak. It originally referred to a movement of largely Jewish liberals who gave leftism an honest and protracted effort, who dutifully reviled every Republican president through Eisenhower, who did their time in inner cities, and who gave peace and social engineering a chance, until the real-world consequences of their good will forced them to acknowledge that what they were doing wasn't working but in fact backfiring. At which point, these men (e.g., Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol) underwent a midlife epiphany and became conservative after the 1960s. Today the word applies to anyone who undergoes such a transformation, Jewish or not…With today's "post-9/11 omigod I think I may be Republican" Democrats, what we have in effect are neo-neoconservatives.’
Gorin is right: today’s Democrats do bear a close resemblance to neocons of the right. And not just the Jewish nationalist Democrats. Politicians like the Clintons, and even Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi all have distinctly neocon foreign policy leanings. Hillary voted for the Iraq War Resolution, Pelsoi stripped a provision from the controversial $100 billion Iraq war funding bill that would have made it harder for Bush to go to war against Iran, and Harry Reid recently admitted he wants to keep tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq, even after the mythical ‘withdrawal.”
The sub-text of Gorin’s article for The Wall Street Journal (which was a long-winded complaint about how the word “neocon” had become a coded anti-Semitic epithet) was not just that after 9/11, we’re all “Republican Democrats” now, but that after 9/11, all Americans should adopt the perspective of Zionist victims of Islamic terror as well; after all, aren’t we all united in our common “victimization” at the hands of those evil Muslims?
Gorin may be indulging in a bit wishful thinking about the average American’s willingness to embrace the militant victim mantle (as so many hair-trigger Zionists have) and about Americans’ susceptibility to being manipulated into adopting the siege mentality of Israelis, but judging from the Israel-like policies of the two-party political class in Washington since 9/11, she’s taken a perfect reading of the character of Republican-Democrats of today, who’s post 9/11 policies can best be described as…kosher genocide.
***
So why does the left, ostensibly the opposition to the right, put up with neocon Democrats?
In part, it’s because as Kroth’s analysis of the “traitor Democrats” shows, they don’t have a choice. Strings are being pulled for -- and huge money is being thrown behind -- traitor Democrat candidacies. (Insiders like Rahm Emanuel and his wealthy friends see to that.) So essentially, the neocon Democrat problem in the Democratic Party is part and parcel of the Jewish nationalist presence in the Democratic Party.
But the left-liberal intelligentsia refuses to touch the Jewish nationalist problem because confronting it would largely undermine the worldview that motivates the left-liberal base’s raison d’etat: namely that A.) Christianity is the apex of evil, (and we all know that Jews are victims of Christians, never the other way around); and B.) there is a nearly miraculous, transcendent quality to multiculturalism (and Jews are part of the multicultural tapestry).
With regard to the latter, to acknowledge that the left-liberal program to institutionalize multiculturalism may in fact cause more problems than it solves (insomuch as the successful group-conscious warmongering of Jewish-American nationalists demonstrates that not every ethnic group that is granted a foothold in America is willing to assimilate, and some of those that are not have their own distinctly anti-liberal agendas and are fully capable of imposing those agendas on the rest of us) is to strike a huge blow to a major left-liberal tenet.
The left-liberal conceit is that a permanent minority victim class is perpetually under siege from the Christian majority, and only they (left-liberals) can hold back the tide and save Enlightenment, tolerance, and the progressive American way. (Ironically, this echoes the Israeli conceit that it is a bulwark against Islamofascism). If it turns out that a large percentage of a crucial member of the progressive-minority-victim coalition (the Jews) isn’t so enlightened (or even tolerant) after all, that poses a huge problem to left-liberal theory and a crisis to its self-image, at which point serious contemplation would be in order.
Will the left-liberals continue to compromise their principles to maintain the partnership with wealthy and powerful Jewish nationalists for the money, the influence and the shock troops that Jewish nationalists bring to the left-liberal cause, or will they break with them on principle and risk their flight to the GOP?
It’s all too much for the left-liberal intelligentsia to contemplate, and so it averts its eyes and insists that the Christian-Right, capitalism, the oil industry and the military-industrial complex comprise the extent of the forces pushing the Iraq war from the wings.
However, the left-liberal fantasy can only be maintained for so long. Americans want to end the war and bring the troops home, but the left-liberals will never be able to do that because their Jewish nationalist caucus won’t let them. Eventually, Americans are going to realize this.
And when that happens, the left-liberal Democratic coalition is going fracture on the question of US troops in the Middle East -- whether they are fighting in Iraq, Iran, or both -- just as the GOP coalition has been fractured by the same issue.
At that point, one possibility is that the Republican-Democrat neocons will morph into a single party (in many ways they already have), leaving the field wide open for a coalition of authentic conservatives and authentic liberals.
Libertarianism, anyone?
Chris Moore is publisher of LibertarianToday.com