RECENT CONFERENCE EXPOSES SHARP
DIVISIONS IN CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT
By Mark Anderson
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The huge Conservative Political Action Conference,
or CPAC, in Washington, D.C. last month appeared on the surface as an event with
a reasonably unified message. But it became evident that participants held an
exceedingly broad range of views and that getting a clear sense of direction,
other than widespread criticism of the Obama administration, would not be easy.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and Rep. Ron Paul
(R-Texas) spoke under the same CPAC roof. And Fox News commentator Glenn Beck,
who is little more than a highly paid TV actor, was the closing speaker. All
three, even with quite different messages, received rousing ovations.
Clearly, it would be tough for Cheney and Paul to agree
that water is wet. The two Republicans are light years away from each other
policy-wise, but still fit under the GOP’s “big tent.”
Indeed, this was a mainly Republican event—the assumption
being that only Republicans can take the lead to define “conservatism.” Tea
party people were there, some of whom are Republicans, but several of whom
prefer to be independent of the two-party “duopoly.”
While the independents were not in charge, they and
renegade Republican voters made their voice known by naming Paul the winner of
the presidential straw poll at the CPAC event. This suggests that the ideas of “Rockefeller
Republicans” who took center stage in the 1960s and gave us Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and the George W. Bush-Cheney team are losing
their appeal, however slowly.
Ronald Reagan may not fit the same exact mold as the
others, but he did preside over a quantum spending leap and a tripling of the
national debt, though he’s credited with the fall of Soviet Communism and
creating a “feel-good” conservative era that those other presidents could not
match.
Neo-conservative Fox News naturally tried to downplay Paul’s
win, yet CPAC participants gave Paul the nod by 31 percent, the largest margin
of victory in recent years. The starchy Mitt Romney, one of Paul’s former
presidential opponents, got 22 percent; and another former governor, neo-con
Sarah Palin, who had just spoken to the national tea party in Nashville and should have been riding a
popularity wave, was a dull third with 7 percent. Previously, Romney won the CPAC
poll several times.
Cheney, like Newt Gingrich who also attended CPAC, is an
especially powerful neo-con. Cheney copresided with George W. Bush over the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the
toppling of Saddam Hussein and the parallel killing of some 1 million Iraqis, a
death
toll recalled by one of the CPAC participants. Whatever one
may think of Cheney—some CPAC participants insisted he is the right stuff—he is
manifestly a Rockefeller Republican.
A former Wyoming
congressman, Cheney is well known to have addressed the Rockefeller-financed Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR), telling the infamous organization that essentially
dictates U.S. foreign policy
that he never dared to mention his CFR membership when he met with Wyoming voters during his
time in Congress. The CFR’s trans-nationalist elder, David Rockefeller, was in
that CFR audience and expressed approval for Cheney’s deception of the Wyoming public. Video
footage confirms Cheney’s sly remarks.
Nor did Cheney mention his continued CFR membership in his
surprise appearance before the CPAC audience last month, even though the CFR’s
internationalist credo—a strange brew of neo-conservatism and UN-based world
socialism—bears no tangible relationship to the conservatism that Paul tries
his best to practice in the tradition of Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater.
That brand of conservatism peaked before the GOP’s Rockefeller
wing took over around 1964 and converted the GOP into a party that would one
day support and defend the North American Free Trade Agreement, the UN, “the
warfare state” for which the military straddles the globe, and spending schemes
that easily rival and sometimes surpass Democratic expansion of the federal
government beyond Constitutional confines. The $14 trillion national debt is a
bipartisan achievement.
This Rockefeller clique essentially did away with any
remaining major differences between the two dominant parties. That’s why, no
matter which party is in power, the general direction of the nation is the
same: ever-bigger government, ever-bigger national debt, more and more losses
of U.S.
industry and so on.
Having attended the CPAC event on Feb. 19, AMERICAN FREE PRESS
detected what one might call the “Cheney faction,” though its size was tough to
determine.
It includes those who will tolerate a great deal of the
erosion of constitutional protections to fight the “war on terror”—which risks
strangling the very freedom that soldiers are told to protect, and undermining the
Constitution they take an oath to defend.
Participant Brian Henchey, a Massachusetts
radio host, believes in tougher border security but chafed when AFP asked him
if most U.S. troops overseas
should be brought home to protect U.S. borders.
Unwittingly, he prefers the “Rockefeller road” over Paul’s
alternative.
Henchey called Paul’s non-interventionist stance “naïve.”
When asked whether U.S.
domestic freedom could be lost in the ongoing war on terror, he replied: “If
you’re dead, it doesn’t matter,” meaning that if there are serious terrorist
attacks inAmerica, squabbling over freedom becomes a moot point, as he sees it.
“Frankly, that is why Cheney gets a standing ovation,” he
added, just a few hours after Paul spoke on Feb. 19. “I’d rather have an
aggressive government.”
Pressed on this matter, Henchey did not express a threshold
beyond which too much freedom would be lost in this supposed anti-terror war.
“If that is what is needed to stop an attack from
happening, that would be something of value,” he said of giving up freedom. “I
am very comfortable with someone like Dick Cheney gathering intelligence on me,
because I know he is going to keep me safe.”
“Because the president fights undeclared wars, we keep our
freedom,” added another CPAC participant, Robert Founder. He scoffed when asked
if ending private central banking was the key issue.
Founder, who believes the low birthrate and eventual under-population
are the most serious problems, was quite candid, leaving no room for third
parties or independents.
He called them “a bleeding, cancerous disaster, every
single one. . . . They confuse and demoralize the voters; they damage the civic
body.” He added, “The job of the president is to deceive us and lie us into
wars.”
Paul, of course, is a polar opposite, envisioning a
nonimperial president who would seek peace, or a congressional declaration of
war, should war be needed. By its very nature, a Paul government would not have
800 military bases in at least 130 countries. It would not ordinarily intervene
in other nations’ affairs.
Don Lee of McClatchy newspapers wrote recently that for
three decades Paul was consigned “to the far fringes even among conservatives.”
But with the economy falling, “Paul’s ideas are not only gaining a wider
audience but are also helping to shape a potentially historic struggle over economic
policy”—referring to Paul’s “long-derided proposal” to audit the Federal
Reserve that was finally passed by the House as part of H.R. 4173 but went no
further.
Paul told the CPAC crowd that conservatism means “to conserve
our Constitution,” but that “conservatives” today support liberal
internationalist Woodrow Wilson’s concept of military intervention to police
the world, which costs megabillions and shatters the frugal spending usually
associated with conservatism. He added that the Cheney-Gingrich neoconservative
view is Wilson’s
view and is not “true conservatism.”
He recalled that he had received the most support among
military voters when he ran for president.
So, will America
remain aboard the decades-long “Rockefeller express” that keeps it on a
permanent war footing with un-conservative, massive spending, or take a different
route? We know which faction has the money and power.
Should they be allowed to keep calling the shots, and should
the two-party system that has maintained this status quo for so long
continue to define political reality and claim it has the answers when nothing
has changed?
Mark Anderson is
a longtime newsman now working as the deputy editor for AMERICAN FREE
PRESS. Together he and his wife Angie provide many photographs of the
events they cover for AFP. Mark welcomes your comments and inputs as
well as story leads. Email him at at [email protected].Subscribe to American Free Press. Online subscriptions: One year of weekly editions—$15 plus you get a BONUS ELECTRONIC BOOK - HIGH PRIESTS OF WAR - By Michael Piper.
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(Issue # 12, March 22, 2010)
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