Presidential Candidate Ron Paul’s growing libertarian movement within the Republican Party is causing a high degree of angst among American liberals, who historically deflected any criticism of their crony capitalism by attacking Republicans as sycophants for the “American empire and big finance.” But with Ron Paul’s decades of authentic opposition of the “Military Industrial Complex” and the Federal Reserve, the left is being challenged as their vitriolic moralizing is boomeranging back at themselves and their Democrat allies.

An article: “Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals”, by Mat Stoller of the Roosevelt Institute and former Policy Advisor to Democrat Congressman Alan Grayson, describes Ron Paul as:

“dedicated first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him.”

Stoller confesses that liberals treasure the Federal Reserve as a power-tool of big government they wield to advance their social and military agenda. He concedes Paul and his staff have been effective by working with “vigor and principle” to force greater transparency regarding the Fed’s central banking practices and is disturbed that as Paul’s libertarian movement grows the power of the Fed to advance the liberal agenda will be diminished.

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While Obama tours the country promoting his personal donation plan, the Republican Presidential hopefuls are in a pitched battle for the nomination and arguing which tax simplification plan is best. Threatened with the possibility of rate cuts, the Media and politicians trot out the usual suspects of lies about tax hikes and tax cuts.  This is a battle Republicans must win and, to do so, they need to expose those lies.

Keep in mind that the battle between those who create wealth and those that want to redistribute it, mainly politicians, is as old as civilization itself.  We read of tax battles and even reform in every age, like Urukagina’s tax reductions in Babylonia/Sumer in 2350 BC.  Equally venerable are the constant set of demagogic lies by those against tax cuts and simplification.  It is important to note that politicians like complicated tax codes and high tax rates because they control those rates and dispense the loopholes and regulations that complicate the tax code.  Tax simplification means they lose power.  As a result, resistance to tax reform is more often the rule than reform. As for the lies, they abound, so let’s consider just a few:

Lie # 1: Tax cuts cause deficits/Tax hikes balance the budget.  The Media and the Left often say that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts led to deficits while Clinton’s tax hikes led to a balanced budget. In truth, according to the IRS, federal tax revenues rose dramatically after the overall Reagan tax cuts/reforms (98%) and the Bush tax cuts (a record $700+ billion). This is just as they did after the Harding/Coolidge cuts (61% revenue increase) and after the Kennedy/Johnson cuts (62% revenue increase).  Those are the four major income tax reductions we have had since the inception of the income tax in 1913 and every time revenues rose after they were in place – every time.

So did the tax rate cut cause a deficit? The lie, of course, is to blame the revenue gathering mechanism (tax code/rate cut) instead of the revenue spending mechanism, i.e. Congress/Presidents.  The spenders kept spending – often at an accelerated rate when they saw the new revenues.  Thus, the fault for continuing deficits lies not with tax rate cuts, which produced higher revenues, but with politicians who spent too much.

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In late August House Majority Leader Eric Cantor published an open memo announcing that House Republicans would seek to block ten regulations currently being considered by various federal administrative agencies. Most of these regulations involve the Environmental Protection Agency, including ozone protection, greenhouse gas regulation, coal ash and utility pollution standards. The National Labor Relations Board is also targeted for its proposed union election rules and its attempt to block Boeing from opening a new, non-union factory in right-to-work South Carolina.

Rep. Cantor has sound reasons to target these regulations. The economic impact of any one of these ten regulations on an economy already on the brink of a double-dip recession would be severe. Some, like new emission rules for utility plants are guaranteed to increase energy costs, which would have a cascade effect on all aspects of the economy. Others, like NLRB’s Boeing decision, are bald-faced pandering to the labor interests that shower so much support on Democrats in general and President Obama in particular. Put bluntly, the targeted regulations serve special interests like unions or environmentalists at the expense of the public interest.

While having the virtue of being good policy, and probably good politics, Rep. Cantor’s strategy has the vice of treating the symptoms while ignoring the underlying cause. The larger problem with these regulations is not that these agencies are abusing their rulemaking power; the problem is that these agencies possess rulemaking power in the first place. Administrative agencies are exercising authority which properly belongs to Congress.

The Constitution is unmistakably clear. Article I, Section 1 states that “All legislative Power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States….” If the power is legislative, and if the power is granted to the federal government by the Constitution, then the power must be exercised by Congress, and only by Congress. Congress is nowhere authorized to transfer the power to make laws to any entity. Only Congress is constitutionally empowered to make laws.

Moreover, Article I, Section 7 mandates that any action of the federal government, which has the force of law, must be enacted according to the specific process enumerated therein. Both houses must approve, and the bill must be sent to the president for his signature. His veto may be overridden, but only by a supermajority in each house. The very act of enacting rules on the part of the EPA or any other agency is thus a violation of this provision of the Constitution, because it deviates from this process.

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American political fortunes have long been tied directly to the economy… so you would think that politicians would do a better job understanding how to improve the economy.  We know consumer demand is down – because consumers don’t have the money or home equity they used to have.  That alone is keeping the economy down.  Businesses, however, are said to have money but they are not spending or investing it.  Why? Because for them it’s the early 1920’s all over again.

Our so-called brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning President, for months, has exhorted American businesses to hire employees and invest – as if wishing for an economic recovery would make it so.  Recently, however, Democrat and mega-businessman Steve Wynn told the country – and Obama, if he was listening – why cash rich business is not hiring and investing.  According to Wynn, “this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime . . . those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President . . .”

President Calvin Coolidge used to say, “The chief business of the American people is business.”  Even so, business doesn’t invest just for fun – they invest for profit – and they don’t invest if they think the risk of not making an acceptable profit is too high.  I wrote “acceptable” because business weighs the fact that even if they make money, it will be taxed.  As such, a business must decide not only if it will be able to make a profit, but will the profit be so much that it would be worth the trouble/risk after taking taxes into consideration.  Keep in mind business knows that it carries all of the downside risk and that government will take a good portion of any upside.  If at some point the risk gets too high, business investment and spending is stalled.

Today, Steve Wynn, and much of American business, believes that the risk of not making a decent profit is too high for several reasons.  For instance, business doesn’t see sufficient consumer demand – so they don’t stock their shelves or expand production as they otherwise might.  Regulations and the threat of more regulations are so high that they hold back money to pay for future costs.  Taxes and the threat of higher taxes are also high – and that too causes business to hold back spending in order to pay those future taxes.  As a result, business investment and spending is stalled.

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Phase one for restoring the republic is over: the House is now in Republican hands, thereby assuring nothing radical will sail through the Congress in the next two years (although it would be wise to be on the alert for unconstitutional executive orders intended to accomplish that purpose). If the electorate remains informed and stays on task, 2012 will see the Senate flip as well since the majority of seats up for reelection are currently in Democrat hands.

Phase two may be more difficult. How likely is it that an incumbent president will be stripped of his position? What will it take? Some say it’s a very difficult task, yet it has occurred rather often. Under what circumstances? A short survey of twentieth-century presidential politics may offer some clues as to the feasibility that Barack Obama will be a one-termer.

We can begin with William Howard Taft, Republican winner of the 1908 election as the handpicked successor to Theodore Roosevelt.

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A talk Before a Tea Party rally sponsored by the Cecil County (Md.) Patriots in Elkton, Md., 10/23/10

Twenty months ago, on February 19, 2009, business reporter Rick Santelli of CNBC took to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to deliver his famous rant against government bail-outs, and call for “a Chicago tea party.”

Santelli may have sparked the Tea Party movement. But he only tapped into outrage that had been growing in many of us for decades.

For too long, you and I have watched helplessly as a clique of politicians, intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats from both parties have tried to obliterate our Constitution, our capitalist system, and our personal liberty. This “bipartisan Ruling Class”—as scholar Angelo Codevilla describes it—sees itself as a moral, cultural, and intellectual elite. Codevilla says that “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.”

Oozing sanctimonious arrogance, viewing the rest of us as coarse, unsophisticated rubes who cling bitterly to guns and bibles, this class seeks to impose its own supposedly superior values and visions upon the rest of us, by force of law.

As we know too well, the ultimate goal of our Ruling Class is power. They exist—not to produce, not to invent, not to create—but to manipulate and master others. Ronald Reagan memorably summed up the Ruling Class’s governing outlook this way: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

By contrast, the rest of us Americans seek power over circumstances, but not over each other. We acquire our personal sense of identity and self-esteem through productive work—not through imposing our will, values, and visions on our neighbors. We accept a “live and let live” philosophy.

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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) has falsely accused  the Tea Party of having ties to the Ku Klux Klan.  Speaking at the NAACP convention, she said: “All those who wore sheets a long time ago lifted them off to wear Tea Party clothing.”

Now is the time to speak some Truth to Power.

It would have been far more truthful for the congresswoman to have admitted the fact that all those who wore sheets a long time ago lifted them to wear Democratic Party clothing.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan was established by the Democratic Party.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of Republicans — African-American and white – in the years following the Civil War.  Yes, the Republican Party and a Republican President, Ulysses Grant, destroyed the KKK with their Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

How did the Ku Klux Klan re-emerge in the 20th century?  For that, the Democratic Party is to blame.

It was a racist Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson, who premiered Birth of a Nation in the White House.  That racist movie was based on a racist book written by one of Wilson’s racist friends from college.  In 1915, the movie spawned the modern-day Klan, with its burning crosses and white sheets.

Inspired by the movie, some Georgia Democrats revived the Klan.  Soon, the Ku Klux Klan again became a powerful force within the Democratic Party.  The KKK so dominated the 1924 Democratic Convention that Republicans, speaking truth to power, called it the Klanbake.  In the 1930s, a Democrat President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, appointed a Klansman, Senator Hugo Black (D-AL), to the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the 1950s, the Klansmen against whom the civil rights movement struggled were Democrats.  The notorious police commissioner Bull Connor, who attacked African-Americans with dogs and clubs and fire hoses, was both a Klansman and the Democratic Party’s National Committeeman for Alabama.  Starting in the 1980s, the Democratic Party elevated a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), to third-in-line for the presidency.

Speaking more Truth to Power, the Republican Party has been a resolute enemy of the Ku Klux Klan, terrorist wing of the Democratic Party.

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Remember the good old days of black rage, when it was common place to know better than to mess with the brothas? Many a white folk radiated a pheromone of fear around the melanistic men and women who could snap and issue a retroactive cathartic beat down at any moment if they thought whitey was trying to get mighty again.

It ain’t that way anymore…

Now white folks are afraid of how much black people are going to complain.

The NAACP has been the flagship of making the black community look like the biggest community of sissies in America, as they continually promote us as victims. For decades they’ve boo hoo’d about the white man, yet remain loyal to what has always been an oppressive party; the Democrat party.

I’ve explored the NAACP’S interactive timeline and legal milestones on their webpage, and they list the injustices of the Jim Crow laws, the bigotry of Woodrow Wilson, etc. They’re well aware of the evils perpetrated, but hesitate to call the evil doers by their name. They’re slow to acknowledge that these oppressive laws and legalities were imposed on the black community by the Democrat party.

If you dig deep into the bowels of their website there may be a reference or two about Democrat naughtiness that amounts to a lil’ pat on the boo-boo.

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In his recent cover story for The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti praises CNBC’s Rick Santelli effusively for erupting against Barack Obama’s redistributionist policies on 19 February 2009 in such a fashion as to inspire the Tea Party Movement. Then, he blasts Fox News commentator Glenn Beck for seizing upon the current crisis as an opportunity for urging on the part of his fellow Americans a serious reconsideration of the country’s first principles.

“What distinguishes Beck from Santelli is,” Continetti writes, “the breadth and depth of his critique.”

In his broadcasts, books, and stage performances, Beck provides his audiences with a dark vision of American life. In this bleak tableaux, rich, highly educated, radical elites are using the instruments of power to control the common man and indoctrinate his children. The elites, Beck says, seized on the 2008 financial crisis to shape America according to their socialist, fascist, globalist vision. The only remaining obstacle to the elitist agenda is the pro-freedom movement that wants to return to America’s founding principles. The elitists fight the patriots by calling them racists and extremists.

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Paul Johnson is one of my favorite historians. In his already classic A History of the American People, he singles out the Woodrow Wilson administration as “one of the great watersheds of American history.” What does he mean by that?

Watershed Man?

Americans prior to the Wilson era, Johnson explains, “enjoyed a laissez-faire society which was by no means unrestrained but whose limitations to their economic freedom were imposed by their belief in a God-ordained moral code rather than a government one devised by man.”

In other words, although Americans were free to do as they wished, they always understood there were limits placed on that freedom by God. Generally speaking, they either stayed within those limits or were punished for violating them.

The Wilson era replaced that mode of thinking—normally called self-government—with a code created by man and instituted via civil government.

Typical of the earlier approach is this gem found in a speech by President John Adams:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge . . . would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

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Geoffrey R. Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago and editor of The Supreme Court Review, has a pertinent suggestion: the retirement of Judge Stevens and the impending nomination of his successor should spark “a frank discussion” of “the proper role of judges in our constitutional system” [“Our Fill-in-the Blank Constitution,” The New York Times, April 14]. True to his promise of frankness, he charges “conservative” judges with advancing “disingenuous descriptions of what judges—liberal or conservative—actually do.”

Such men as Roberts and Scalia claim to seek the original meaning of the framers, to serve as umpires who call the plays as they see them, according to the rules. But, Professor Stone charges, they do no such thing.

Such Constitutional phrases as freedom of speech, due process of law, free exercise of religion, cruel and unusual punishment do not define themselves, he remarks; “they did not have clear meanings even to the people who drafted them.” Rather, the framers left such definition “to future generations.”

This conservatives all too eagerly have done. “Fueled by their own political and ideological convictions, they make value judgments, often in an often aggressively activist manner that goes well beyond anything the framers themselves envisioned.” The list of horrors proves long: examples include First Amendment protection for advertisers; prohibition of the regulation of guns; the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Meanwhile, liberal judges have upheld Madisonian principle by striking down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, forbidding forced sterilization, protecting the rights of political dissenters and of minority religious denomination, and similarly handsome things. Bad conservatives. Good liberals.

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Of course there were no news accounts of this, so we missed it. On March 31st, Rep. Paul Ryan delivered a keynote address to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, one of the better state-based free market think tanks. It is a magisterial distillation of where we are…and where we need to go. Full text of the address below:

Last week, on March 21st, Congress enacted a new Intolerable Act. Congress passed the Health Care bill – or I should say, one political party passed it – over a swelling revolt by the American people. The reform is an atrocity. It mandates that every American must buy health insurance, under IRS scrutiny. It sets up an army of federal bureaucrats who ultimately decide for you how you should receive Health Care, what kind, and how much…or whether you don’t qualify at all. Never has our government claimed the power to decide when each of us has lived well enough or long enough to be refused life-saving medical assistance.

This presumptuous reform has put this nation … once dedicated to the life and freedom of every person … on a long decline toward the same mediocrity that the social welfare states of Europe have become.

Americans are preparing to fight another American Revolution, this time, a peaceful one with election ballots…but the “causes” of both are the same:

• Should unchecked centralized government be allowed to grow and grow in power … or should its powers be limited and returned to the people?
• Should irresponsible leaders in a distant capital be encouraged to run up scandalous debts without limit that crush jobs and stall prosperity … or should the reckless be turned out of office and a new government elected to live within its means?
• Should America bid farewell to exceptional freedom and follow the retreat to European social welfare paternalism … or should we make a new start, in the faith that boundless opportunities belong to the workers, the builders, the industrious, and the free?

We are at the beginning of an election campaign like you’ve never seen before!

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The US economy remains in a tepid stage at best – subject to a multiple dip recession at worst.  Unemployment is high and private sector jobs are taking longer than usual to rebound.  Even the Obama Administration is forced to admit unemployment will be high for a long time to come.   Starting two years ago this July, I said if Obama was elected President, we would have a difficult economy, at best, for at least six years.  Unless our governments, federal and state, make a concerted effort to change the economic psychology facing Americans today, that prediction can’t help but come true.

There is no question that the American economy is in bad shape.  Unemployment has only been this high one other time since World War II, i.e. in the 1980’s.  Recessions similar or deeper than this recession occurred in 1918, the Great Depression, the 3 recessions of the 1950’s, and the stagflation of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Recessions of this magnitude take on a life of their own because both businesses and consumers are plagued with doubts – doubts about future government policy, doubts about consumer spending, doubts about the prospects for future investments.  Those doubts literally diminish future economic activity as investors and consumers favor caution over investing and spending.  The psychology of larger recessions exaggerates downturns as fears mount.  That Psychology of Doubt delays recoveries in ways that cannot be measured by statistics alone.

In order to break that Psychology of Doubt, it takes bold action on the part of governments – not half measures or technical adjustments.  Indeed, each of those recessions did not end until there was a dramatic change in the government policy – usually a change to the very policies that drove our economy into the ditch in the first place – excepting only World War II’s effect on the Great Depression.

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Before the most recent report on Lehman Brothers’ use of Enron-like methods to hide debt from its balance sheet, Greece had recently been accused of similar shenangians.  The sovereign was under scrutiny for swaps it had set up with Goldman Sachs that allowed the nation to mask its real debt load, effectively cooking its books in order to meet the fiscal standards required for admittance into the Eurozone in 2001.  This was not the first time this type of deceptive transaction had been consummated.

The joyfully iconoclastic financial blog Zero Hedge had uncovered a little-known 2001 report by a little-known Italian Economist named Gustavo Piga which showed that Italy had used almost the exact same transactions as those used by the Greeks to mask their finances and gain entrance to the Eurozone in 1997.  For his courageous exposé, most disturbingly Piga’s life was threatened.  Why was this the case?

Piga had been the first to find “…a real-world example of how sovereign borrowers can use derivatives to window-dress public accounts as a means of achieving short-term political goals.”  As the Council on Foreign Relations which collaborated with Piga on the report noted, Italy was able to do this by “taking a cash advance in 1997 against an expected foreign exchange profit in 1998.  Under accounting rules, this is simply impermissible.  Borrowers cannot use loans to anticipate capital gains on a bond.”  The transactions allowed Italy to artifically reduce their deficit in 1997 by increasing their deficit in 1998.

And according to the CFR, what was the significance of this Enron-like Italian book-cooking?

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Last week, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a crime syndicate dedicated to tightening the Democratic Party’s grip on America, dissolved its national structure.  Too much of ACORN’s corruption had been exposed to public scrutiny for it to run its vote fraud and extortion rackets effectively.  So, ACORN activists will have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as New York Communities for Change and New England United for Justice in Massachusetts.

ACORN does indeed operate like the Mafia, but it more closely resembles another organization that began as an affiliate of the Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan.  Aside from intimidating some bank executives, ACORN does not engage in violence, but like the KKK it has vote fraud as a top priority.

There have been two distinct organizations known as the Ku Klux Klan.  The modern-day KKK, with whom most people are familiar, was spawned in 1915 by the Hollywood epic Birth of a Nation, premiered at the White House by a Democrat president, Woodrow Wilson.  Cross-burning and other rituals were actually inspired by the movie.  The Klan came to dominate the Democratic Party so thoroughly that the 1924 Democratic National Convention was known as the “Klanbake.”

It is not so much this Klan 2.0 that ACORN parallels as the original version.  Established in 1866, Klan 1.0 was an affiliate of the Democratic Party during the Reconstruction era.  Named for “kuklos,” the Greek word for “circle,” the Ku Klux Klan waged war against the Republican Party in the former Confederate states.  Goofy titles for its commanders such as Wizard and Cyclops were intended to disguise the fact that the KKK was a paramilitary organization.  In some areas, leadership of the Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party were indistinguishable.

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Haiti is located on the western side of the island of Hispaniola approximately 700 miles southeast of Miami between Puerto Rico and Cuba.  The Treaty of Ryswick signed by France and Spain in 1697 resulted in the formation of two separate but incongruous states, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  The official language of Haiti is French and Creole while in the Dominican Republic it is Spanish.  The mostly black population is a result of slave trading when it was a French colony.

In 1897 through 1912 instability in Haiti drew attention to its strategic importance.  A small number of Germans maintained a large amount of economic power.  German military intervention during a Haitian revolt in 1902 and word that Berlin considered using Haiti as a fueling station for its naval fleet became a concern for the United States. Under the policies of the “Monroe Doctrine” President Woodrow Wilson began planning for the occupation of Haiti.

The occupation of Haiti finally ensued and the United States ruled Haiti through a military government from 1915 through 1934. Under military rule Haiti prospered through development of a road system, schools, improved disease prevention, medical care and communications.

Unfortunately the Haitians grew to resent the occupation of the United States and violent protests resulted in the deaths of many Haitians at the hands of the US military.  In 1934 the US left Haiti and the country became a dictatorship.

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“Ever since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform in 1912, seven presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — have taken up the cause of reform time and time again,” President Obama said in a statement hailing the Christmas Eve Senate vote to take over 1/6 of the nation’s economy.  “Such efforts have been blocked by special-interests lobbyists who have perpetrated the status quo that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.”

Note the date of TR’s “calling” for reform. It’s 1912.  Nationalized health care was part of the platform of the Progressive Party that year and every year thereafter. Americans are more familiar with the name Theodore himself gave to that third party bid. After being shot by a would-be assassin in Milwaukee, TR said it takes more than a single bullet to stop a Bull Moose. Instantly, the colorful sobriquet was applied to the Progressive Party.

What did Theodore himself think of his new-found allies, the Progressives? He was sincerely committed to reform. And he certainly thought he had been cheated out of the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1912. After all, he had won all the state party primaries in the limited number of states that held them. But TR also recognized that some of his Progressive supporters went over the top. For them, he coined the wonderful phrase, “the lunatic fringe.”

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Today, in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating the Federal Reserve. Less than 100 years later, the head of this institution would become Time’s Man of the Year.

The other day  I made the assertion that Barbara Boxer (D – Tiny Town) was the stupidest member of the United States Senate.  I may have spoken too soon.  Here’s a serious challenger:

Yesterday, in his desperate attempt to win friends, influence people and reach across the aisle as he tries to bring the senate’s version of a “health care” bill to a vote, Sen. Harry Reid (D – Las Vegas) decided to go for broke.  Speaking in his trademark tremulous, reedy voice that makes that of his predecessor, the homunculus from South Dakota, Sen. Tom Daschle (D – IRS), sound like Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” the punch-drunk former boxer compared Republican opposition to the proponents of slavery and segregation.  “When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today…  History is repeating itself before our eyes.”

No words of mine can possibly do justice to the magisterial presentation of the Sage of Searchlight, so please have a look and listen before we continue:

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At the end of last week, I was watching President Obama’s speech before the United Nations. I must admit it was given with eloquence and was quite moving. However, for the most part it was rhetoric and the dreams of an idealistic man in Fantasyland. I do not want to really beat a dead horse, but as stated in my last article about the ideology of liberals, President Obama’s foreign policy completely ignores reality. It is almost delusional. Obama dreams about everything being utopian, but ignores the writings on the wall. And, in the process he insults our trusted ally Israel by demanding it stop building settlements without requiring the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

The speech was also very Wilsonian. I could imagine the words of Woodrow Wilson pitching the League of Nations to the United States Congress after the end of World War One. The League of Nations “is a definite guaranty of peace. It is a definite guaranty by word against aggression. It is a definite guaranty against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin. Its purposes do not for a moment lie vague. Its purposes are declared, and its powers are unmistakable. It is not in contemplation that this should be merely a league to secure the peace of the world. It is a league which can be used for cooperation in any international matter.” In fact, parts of President Obama’s speech today mirrored these themes exactly. (more…)