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Friday, August 12, 2011

Rick Perry: another clueless Texas Governor getting his strings pulled by neocons; Is that what America really needs right now?

From:
Rick Perry, ‘Hawk Internationalist’

Or is that "internationalist hawk"?
(AntiWar.com) -- by Justin Raimondo --

The idea that the Republican party Establishment was going to tolerate a takeover of their party by a rag-tag bunch of insurgent "tea partiers" was never very convincing, and Rick Perry’s entrance into the race as the "Teastablishment" candidate – to the hosannas of the neocons — should put that delusion to rest.

For months, the media and the Republican mandarins have been anointing one candidate after another as the chief competitor to Mitt Romney, presumed by many to be the frontrunner. First it was Tim Pawlenty, and after he went nowhere fast it was Jon Huntsman, who has about as much chance as Gary Johnson of winning the race. Now it’s Texas Governor Perry who’s going to unite the various Republican factions around a post-Reaganite, post-Bush conservative consensus. The only problem with that is Perry has aroused the ire of Texas conservatives, who noted the Governor’s Texas Transit Corridor highway project made liberal – if you’ll pardon the expression – use of eminent domain. The TTC proposal put him on the other side of the barricades from most Texas conservatives – and also put him at odds with Rep. Ron Paul, another fast-rising GOP presidential contender, who introduced legislation to block federal money for the scheme. I’ll leave it to others to expose Perry’s RINO credentials on domestic issues, and focus instead on his hostility to the Tea Party when it comes to foreign policy.

At its inception, the Tea Party, as an inchoate movement with no real national leaders, and a fervently single-issue focus, had no foreign policy agenda. As time went on, however – that is, as the bills continued to stream in for our wars in the Middle East – that began to change. It changed because no one can address the fiscal crisis at the core of our problems without facing the question of how to cut the misnamed "defense" budget. It soon became apparent to the tea partiers that a military tasked with policing the world – instead of actually defending this country – accounted for a good chunk of change. Under the all-inclusive rubric of "defense" we spend more than a trillion dollars a year, as much as for so-called entitlements. The rest is "discretionary" spending – you know, like running the actual government.

In any case, the tea partiers, confronted with a bloated Leviathan, soon discovered that the military budget is among the holiest of the federal budget’s sacred cows, and that this reverence is bipartisan: neither the GOP Establishment nor the Democrats would sign on to any real cuts in this sector. The result: a budget deal that relegated possible cuts in the military and overseas budget to the final "tranches" of the budget-reduction process, to go into effect only if the "Super-Congress" fails to reach an agreement.

In short, they’ll yank your grandmother off her life support system, and cut your Social Security – which you’ve been "paying into" all these years – just as you reach retirement age, long before they’ll touch a penny of the trillions being funneled overseas to our far-flung outposts of empire.

The tea partiers, most of them, find this galling, to say the least, and the rumbles of discontent with this Americans-come-last policy provoked a response from the Establishment: the tea partiers, the neocons cried, are a modern manifestation of the dreaded "isolationists," and the Obama cultists joined in the hand-wringing, defending the Dear Leader’s Libyan adventure against Republican "isolationists" like Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, and George Will.

Undeterred, tea party activists are pushing ahead with their campaign to cut back Big Government on all levels – including the international level. As The Hill reports, tea partiers are putting pressure on Republicans appointed to the "Super-Committee" to wield the budget knife unsparingly...

This is in radical juxtaposition to the views of Señor Perry, who has been characterized by one of his top aides as a "hawk internationalist." This is a good indication that the much-ballyhooed Perry bandwagon began going off the rails before it ever got started. Do the Perryites really believe they can sell their candidate to crusty conservative Republicans as an "internationalist"? Does Phyllis Schlafly know about this?

Just look at who’s been giving him foreign policy advice: according to Josh Rogin, over at Foreignpolicy.com, he’s been in meetings "sometimes for hours" with the likes of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, former NSC "strategy guru" William Luti, and a host of other neocons from the last administration, many of whom were instrumental in lying us into war in Iraq. Feith and Luti were the nexus of a disinformation network which fed false "intelligence" to the Congress, the White House, and the public to justify a disastrous invasion which we are still paying for in lives and treasure.

Oh, and what a surprise: it turns out the Perry-neocon lash-up was brokered by disgraced former Defense Secretary Donald "Known Unknowns" Rumsfeld.

Another clueless Texas Governor surrounded by the same Praetorian Guard of conniving neocons who led us down the road to imperial overstretch and fiscal ruin last time around – isn’t that just what the GOP needs right now?...MORE...LINK

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