Sorry about the type; don't know what happened.
"To His Dismay, Ron Paul Becoming Magnet For White Supremacists
BULL BISCUITS!
Talk about desperation on the cusp of madness!
Remember that large numbers of the so-called "White Supremacists" are government plants. For example, Elohim City, where Tim McVeigh supposedly plotted the OK City Bombing, was founded and run by an FBI informant, Robert Miller. During the 90s, the communications director for the tri-states militia was outed as an FBI informant.
So, no doubt in an effort to destroy Ron Paul, Bush has ordered the FBI to have their informants in these covert agitation groups to start making a public show us support for Ron Paul, in order to tarnish him.
And again, this is an old and well-worn tactic. -- Mike Rivero, What Really Happened
Thanks, Mike, for clearing that up!
Back to ignoring the good doctor then, right, MSM?
"Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Ron Paul not invited to MSNBC presidential candidate forum
"Presidential candidate forum on energy set for next month in Houston" by DAVID IVANOVICH and KATHRINE SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — Veteran NBC newsman Tim Russert has agreed to moderate a bipartisan Nov. 13 presidential forum in Houston to address energy and environmental issues, the network said today, but at least one top-tier candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, will not attend.
"We would love to have participated but have a scheduling conflict on that date,'' Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said in an e-mail.
The Greater Houston Partnership, which is sponsoring the event, has been working for several months to get candidate commitments and work out other details.
MSNBC will broadcast live coverage of portions of the forum at the George R. Brown Convention Center, the network said. Candidates will be asked to share their views on topics such as oil and gas drilling and nuclear power.
David Willett, national press secretary for the Sierra Club, said at least two major candidates have committed to participate. The Sierra Club Foundation is working with the Partnership in organizing the event.
Neither organization would identify the candidates who have committed.
"We have some strong indications from several candidates that they will attend," said Tracye McDaniel, the Partnership's executive vice president and chief operating officer.
The organizers initially invited eight candidates: Sen. Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; and Republican former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Spokesmen for the Giuliani, Richardson, Romney and Thompson campaigns said their candidates had made no commitments beyond this weekend.
McDaniel said the organizers limited the invitation list to those candidates who, two or three months ago, appeared to be in the top tier of contenders.
That selection process proved a bit awkward, since Rep. Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, is a member of the Houston area delegation but was not invited.
Now organizers are considering opening up the invitation list to include Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on the Republican side, as well as Democratic senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd."
Well, I did my duty and mailed MSNBC, and guess what?
Victory! Ron Paul NOW invited to MSNBC presidential candidate forum
"CNBC learns not to 'mess with' Ron Paul, followersDavid Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Tuesday October 16, 2007
CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood asked former Representative Joe Scarborough on Tuesday to tell him what Rep. Ron Paul is really like, because he's been amazed to discover lately that "if you mess with Ron Paul on television or online, you are going to feel the wrath of some serious followers."
Harwood explained that when CNBC did an online poll of who won the last GOP presidential debate on October 9, "Ron Paul dominated the debate, and some of my colleagues at CNBC thought that there was something wrong with that and they took the poll down. I want to tell you, my email box, thousands and thousands and thousands of email, like I haven't seen from any other -- you know, followers of Chris Dodd or Bill Richardson or Joe Biden."
Two days after the debate, CNBC Managing Editor Allen Wastler posted "An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Faithful" at the CNBC website, in which he accused them of having hacked the poll. Wastler wrote, "You guys are good. Real good. You are truly a force on World Wide Web and I tip my hat to you. ... You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can't help but admire that. But you also ruined the purpose of the poll."
However, the very next day, Harwood himself posted "My Open Letter To Ron Paul Supporters," in which he apologetically stated, "I agree with the complaints. I do not believe our poll was 'hacked.' Nor do I agree with my colleagues' decision to take it down, though I know they were acting in good faith. ... I have no reason to believe anything corrupt occurred with respect to our poll. To the contrary, I believe the results we measured showing an impressive 75% naming Paul reflect the organization and motivation of Paul's adherents. This is precisely what unscientific surveys of this kind are created to measure."
Joe Scarborough responded to Harwood's question by saying that Ron Paul has widespread appeal, with signs all over college campuses and traditional conservatives, libertarians, and even people on the far left responding positively to his positions on the war and on civil liberties. He added, though, that in the House of Representatives, "Everybody's thought that he's been crazy for a while, as far as too conservative, too libertarian. ... He's a very independent guy. He doesn't play by the rules."
Scarborough further noted that if Paul were to run for president as an independent, it "would be really bad news for the Republicans." He then seemed to think better of his earlier remark about Paul's colleagues considering him crazy, concluding, "He's an extremely impressive man, he's brilliant ... and everybody's excited about this guy."
The following video is from MSNBC's Morning Joe, broadcast on October 16, 2007.
URLNow, who are you going to vote for, reader?
"So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?" by Lawrence Hunter October 15, 2007
Helen Thomas asks another zinger:
"So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?"
Answer: Democratic and Independent voters who are sick of the Iraqi debacle have no where to go other than to move over and vote for Ron Paul in Republican primaries.
The fact that someone other than I hasn't figured this out indicates either that anti-war Democrats and Independents are brain dead or they are quietly seething at the Democratic Establishment, especially Hillary Clinton, without a way to express their rage. MoveOn.org, for example, seems to spend more time filling its coffers and shilling for Hillary than forcing the Democratic Establishment to get serious about ending the war.
Since it is impossible to look inside people's hearts and minds, it is not possible to know whether they are too preoccupied with getting their kids to baseball, ballet and Cotillions to have time to worry about mundane issues like war and peace. I guess we will just have to wait a while longer to see if Americans are too paralyzed by fear and anesthetized with propaganda to rise up in rebellion against the Establishment.
By all objective standards, there is more than adequate reason for freedom-loving, anti-war Democrats and Independents to be enraged at the Democratic Establishment Trio (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) who to a (wo)man refuses to guarantee they will have the troops out of Iraq by 2013 when the next president's first term expires; nor are they willing to pledge to obtain congressional authorization before bombing or invading Iran.
One detects more than a modicum of cynical political expediency in their reluctance to talk straight with the American public. They sense it will be a Democratic year, and they want to sit on their lead over Republicans, play rope-a-dope, go into a four corners stall. But, as Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson pointed out recently, this may be a self-destructive strategy:
". . .looking at the tea leaves for 2008, a heavily Democratic Senate and a Democratic president may well be swept into power.
"They won't be, however, if Democratic voters have despaired of the efficacy of elections.
"For millions of Democrats, the contested verdict of 2000 and the overturned verdict of 2006 -- war is repudiated, war is escalated -- were bad enough. The killer for Democratic prospects would be if millions of Democrats believed that a President Clinton , or Obama, or Edwards, would keep a significant number of troops in Iraq, too.
"On this particular, Democratic primary voters do have some choices.
". . . In voting for the Lieberman-Kyl legislation that deemed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, she [Hillary Clinton] opened the door for Bush and Vice President Cheney to charge into Iran, or its airspace, with what they would claim to be congressional permission."
__________Harold Meyerson, "The Silenced Majority," Washington Post, October 10, 2007.
Notice, while Meyerson makes the perfunctory assertion that "Democratic primary voters do have some choices," he doesn't specify what those choices are, probably because he realizes there are simply no viable options inside the Democratic primaries. Are you getting the drift?
A week earlier, in an October 4, 2007 column, Washington Press Corp dean Helen Thomas put the question more directly: "So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?"
The fact of the matter is the only real choice anti-war Democrats and Independents have is to move over into Republican primaries and vote for Ron Paul.
But, you won't see anyone in the mainstream media or even the vaunted blogosphere talking about this fact. Crossover voting during primary season used to be a standard topic of punditry. Curious, isn't it, that crossover voting isn't even mentioned anymore -- especially curious since as recently as 2002, Republican voters crossing over into the Georgia Democratic primary were instrumental in defeating Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney:
"It looks like the Republicans wanted to beat me more than the Democrats wanted to keep me," McKinney said after her primary defeat, referring to the large number of Republicans who took advantage of Georgia's law that let them switch parties on primary day.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/21/elec02.ga.primary.aftermath/index.html
Talk about the dog that refuses to bark. What is MoveOn.org spending all its time and money doing? Why isn't MoveOn.org out there organizing a MoveOverVoter campaign to create an anti-war insurgency in Republican primaries to make Ron Paul a plurality victor? Why? Why? Why? Can anyone say Hillary, Hillary, Hillary?"
The article exposes MoveOn as just another group of controlled opposition flunkies for Ms. Hitlery and the DemocraPs, doesn't it, reader?
Of course, there is one group of voters (a very small, but powerful, group) that will NEVER like Ron Paul:
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Bush Jews Don't Want Ron Paul
"GOP hopefuls want Bush Jews" by Ron Kampeas Published: 10/15/2007
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Each of the leading GOP presidential candidates to some degree has run away from the Bush legacy. But this week they will be making their case before one of the president's most loyal constituencies: Republican Jews.
The Republican Jewish Coalition on Tuesday is hosting a forum in Washington for presidential hopefuls. Six of the party's nine candidates were invited, and five will attend: former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, and current U.S. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas.
Matt Brooks, the RJC's executive director, said he expects "defining" speeches in terms of foreign policy.
"The emphasis clearly is going to be on foreign policy," Brooks said. "And a number of them are planning to make their more defining foreign policy speeches. They'll be putting together snippets they’ve said before but tying it up to one foreign policy."
Brooks says the candidates are conscious that more than the RJC members in the room will be watching.
"They'll be watched nationally by primary voters, and internationally leaders will be watching, considering some of the challenges that will face the next president," he said. "They look at these things and parse very closely the words the candidates say."
The RJC event comes at a time when the president's approval ratings are perpetually hovering around 30 percent and many Republican constituencies, lawmakers and candidates are walking away from the Bush White House. Many leading Republican Jews, meanwhile, remain fiercely loyal to the president and to the most hawkish elements of his foreign policy agenda.
Brooks himself this summer joined two other RJC board members -- Ari Fleischer, Bush's former White House spokesman, and Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul -- in establishing FreedomsWatch, a group dedicated to preserving what likely has become the president's most unpopular legacy, the Iraq occupation.
Most of the new group's funders are well known as the RJC's principal backers, including Mel Sembler, a former ambassador to Rome, and Richard Fox, an RJC founder.
On several fronts the RJC continues to stake out right-of-center positions, even as Bush and the GOP candidates have moderated their stands.
For example, in recent months the Bush administration has raised its voice on the need to deal with global warming, yet in its September-October bulletin, the Republican Jewish organization mocks Democrats who focus on the issue.
The Democratic front-runner, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), is criticized for asserting that "we should not hesitate to engage in the world's most difficult conflicts on a diplomatic front," though Giuliani has essentially made the same argument.
Republican Jews also have emerged as one of the few constituencies willing to touch what has become a third rail in congressional politics: Bush's determination to roll back parts of the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program, a program that reaches children from families that earn above the Medicaid threshold but still cannot afford insurance.
[So THAT'S WHY he vetoed the program!
His Zionist controllers TOLD HIM TO!]
SCHIP has wall-to-wall Jewish community backing, but in recent weeks Noam Neusner, Bush's former Jewish liaison, defended the president's position in the Forward and Michael David Epstein, a senior RJC activist, did the same on JTA.
Brooks said such loyalty is natural for a president that has proven second to none in his backing for Israel.
"Bush has earned it," he said. "Here's a president who in very difficult and challenging times, especially on core issues like Israel, was there for us and was one of the only world leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel."
Among other instances, Bush gave Israel slack in putting down a flare-up in the Palestinian intifada in the spring of 2002 and in striking back against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Also in April 2004 for recognizing some Israeli settlements as a reality on the ground and repudiating a right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.
That might translate into tough questions for some of the candidates. The major GOP hopefuls back the president's tough approach to forcing Iran to suspend its suspected nuclear weapons program, but Giuliani argued recently that diplomacy has been neglected as an option.
McCain and Romney have backed the engagement in Iraq but been sharply critical of how it has been carried out.
Brownback last week backed a pro-settler initiative to extend Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank, directly undercutting Bush's attempt to leave a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of his legacies. The Bush administration is convening a peace conference to that end that will take place next month in Annapolis, Md.
Such transitions are natural, Brooks suggested, adding that he expected most of the candidates will emphasize differences with the Democratic front-runners, Clinton and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who have emphasized diplomacy in dealing with Iran.
The RJC forum, Brooks said, is aimed at reminding "the Jewish community that it will have some important choices to make as we start to address a post-Bush environment."
[Riiiiight! They have already chosen: Ms. Hitlary!]
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, was invited but could not attend.
Not invited were long-shots U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter of California, Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Ron Paul of Texas. Paul was rejected because of his consistent voting record against U.S. assistance to Israel and his criticism of the pro-Israel lobby."
Which, coincidentally(?) is where the American people are, too!
Talk about desperation on the cusp of madness!
Remember that large numbers of the so-called "White Supremacists" are government plants. For example, Elohim City, where Tim McVeigh supposedly plotted the OK City Bombing, was founded and run by an FBI informant, Robert Miller.
During the 90s, the communications director for the tri-states militia was outed as an FBI informant.
So, no doubt in an effort to destroy Ron Paul, Bush has ordered the FBI to have their informants in these covert agitation groups to start making a public show us support for Ron Paul, in order to tarnish him.
And again, this is an old and well-worn tactic. -- Mike Rivero, What Really Happened
Thanks, Mike, for clearing that up!
Back to ignoring the good doctor then, right, MSM?
"Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Ron Paul not invited to MSNBC presidential candidate forum
"Presidential candidate forum on energy set for next month in Houston" by DAVID IVANOVICH and KATHRINE SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — Veteran NBC newsman Tim Russert has agreed to moderate a bipartisan Nov. 13 presidential forum in Houston to address energy and environmental issues, the network said today, but at least one top-tier candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, will not attend.
"We would love to have participated but have a scheduling conflict on that date,'' Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said in an e-mail.
The Greater Houston Partnership, which is sponsoring the event, has been working for several months to get candidate commitments and work out other details.
MSNBC will broadcast live coverage of portions of the forum at the George R. Brown Convention Center, the network said. Candidates will be asked to share their views on topics such as oil and gas drilling and nuclear power.
David Willett, national press secretary for the Sierra Club, said at least two major candidates have committed to participate. The Sierra Club Foundation is working with the Partnership in organizing the event.
Neither organization would identify the candidates who have committed.
"We have some strong indications from several candidates that they will attend," said Tracye McDaniel, the Partnership's executive vice president and chief operating officer.
The organizers initially invited eight candidates: Sen. Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; and Republican former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Spokesmen for the Giuliani, Richardson, Romney and Thompson campaigns said their candidates had made no commitments beyond this weekend.
McDaniel said the organizers limited the invitation list to those candidates who, two or three months ago, appeared to be in the top tier of contenders.
That selection process proved a bit awkward, since Rep. Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson, is a member of the Houston area delegation but was not invited.
Now organizers are considering opening up the invitation list to include Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on the Republican side, as well as Democratic senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd."
Well, I did my duty and mailed MSNBC, and guess what?
Victory! Ron Paul NOW invited to MSNBC presidential candidate forum
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Tuesday October 16, 2007
CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood asked former Representative Joe Scarborough on Tuesday to tell him what Rep. Ron Paul is really like, because he's been amazed to discover lately that "if you mess with Ron Paul on television or online, you are going to feel the wrath of some serious followers."
Harwood explained that when CNBC did an online poll of who won the last GOP presidential debate on October 9, "Ron Paul dominated the debate, and some of my colleagues at CNBC thought that there was something wrong with that and they took the poll down. I want to tell you, my email box, thousands and thousands and thousands of email, like I haven't seen from any other -- you know, followers of Chris Dodd or Bill Richardson or Joe Biden."
Two days after the debate, CNBC Managing Editor Allen Wastler posted "An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Faithful" at the CNBC website, in which he accused them of having hacked the poll. Wastler wrote, "You guys are good. Real good. You are truly a force on World Wide Web and I tip my hat to you. ... You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can't help but admire that. But you also ruined the purpose of the poll."
However, the very next day, Harwood himself posted "My Open Letter To Ron Paul Supporters," in which he apologetically stated, "I agree with the complaints. I do not believe our poll was 'hacked.' Nor do I agree with my colleagues' decision to take it down, though I know they were acting in good faith. ... I have no reason to believe anything corrupt occurred with respect to our poll. To the contrary, I believe the results we measured showing an impressive 75% naming Paul reflect the organization and motivation of Paul's adherents. This is precisely what unscientific surveys of this kind are created to measure."
Joe Scarborough responded to Harwood's question by saying that Ron Paul has widespread appeal, with signs all over college campuses and traditional conservatives, libertarians, and even people on the far left responding positively to his positions on the war and on civil liberties. He added, though, that in the House of Representatives, "Everybody's thought that he's been crazy for a while, as far as too conservative, too libertarian. ... He's a very independent guy. He doesn't play by the rules."
Scarborough further noted that if Paul were to run for president as an independent, it "would be really bad news for the Republicans." He then seemed to think better of his earlier remark about Paul's colleagues considering him crazy, concluding, "He's an extremely impressive man, he's brilliant ... and everybody's excited about this guy."
The following video is from MSNBC's Morning Joe, broadcast on October 16, 2007.
URLNow, who are you going to vote for, reader?
"So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?" by Lawrence Hunter October 15, 2007
Helen Thomas asks another zinger:
"So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?"
Answer: Democratic and Independent voters who are sick of the Iraqi debacle have no where to go other than to move over and vote for Ron Paul in Republican primaries.
The fact that someone other than I hasn't figured this out indicates either that anti-war Democrats and Independents are brain dead or they are quietly seething at the Democratic Establishment, especially Hillary Clinton, without a way to express their rage. MoveOn.org, for example, seems to spend more time filling its coffers and shilling for Hillary than forcing the Democratic Establishment to get serious about ending the war.
Since it is impossible to look inside people's hearts and minds, it is not possible to know whether they are too preoccupied with getting their kids to baseball, ballet and Cotillions to have time to worry about mundane issues like war and peace. I guess we will just have to wait a while longer to see if Americans are too paralyzed by fear and anesthetized with propaganda to rise up in rebellion against the Establishment.
By all objective standards, there is more than adequate reason for freedom-loving, anti-war Democrats and Independents to be enraged at the Democratic Establishment Trio (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) who to a (wo)man refuses to guarantee they will have the troops out of Iraq by 2013 when the next president's first term expires; nor are they willing to pledge to obtain congressional authorization before bombing or invading Iran.
One detects more than a modicum of cynical political expediency in their reluctance to talk straight with the American public. They sense it will be a Democratic year, and they want to sit on their lead over Republicans, play rope-a-dope, go into a four corners stall. But, as Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson pointed out recently, this may be a self-destructive strategy:
". . .looking at the tea leaves for 2008, a heavily Democratic Senate and a Democratic president may well be swept into power.
"They won't be, however, if Democratic voters have despaired of the efficacy of elections.
"For millions of Democrats, the contested verdict of 2000 and the overturned verdict of 2006 -- war is repudiated, war is escalated -- were bad enough. The killer for Democratic prospects would be if millions of Democrats believed that a President Clinton , or Obama, or Edwards, would keep a significant number of troops in Iraq, too.
"On this particular, Democratic primary voters do have some choices.
". . . In voting for the Lieberman-Kyl legislation that deemed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, she [Hillary Clinton] opened the door for Bush and Vice President Cheney to charge into Iran, or its airspace, with what they would claim to be congressional permission."
__________Harold Meyerson, "The Silenced Majority," Washington Post, October 10, 2007.
Notice, while Meyerson makes the perfunctory assertion that "Democratic primary voters do have some choices," he doesn't specify what those choices are, probably because he realizes there are simply no viable options inside the Democratic primaries. Are you getting the drift?
A week earlier, in an October 4, 2007 column, Washington Press Corp dean Helen Thomas put the question more directly: "So what are the leading Democratic White House hopefuls offering? It seems nothing but more war. So where do the voters go who are sick of the Iraqi debacle?"
The fact of the matter is the only real choice anti-war Democrats and Independents have is to move over into Republican primaries and vote for Ron Paul.
But, you won't see anyone in the mainstream media or even the vaunted blogosphere talking about this fact. Crossover voting during primary season used to be a standard topic of punditry. Curious, isn't it, that crossover voting isn't even mentioned anymore -- especially curious since as recently as 2002, Republican voters crossing over into the Georgia Democratic primary were instrumental in defeating Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney:
"It looks like the Republicans wanted to beat me more than the Democrats wanted to keep me," McKinney said after her primary defeat, referring to the large number of Republicans who took advantage of Georgia's law that let them switch parties on primary day.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/21/elec02.ga.primary.aftermath/index.html
Talk about the dog that refuses to bark. What is MoveOn.org spending all its time and money doing? Why isn't MoveOn.org out there organizing a MoveOverVoter campaign to create an anti-war insurgency in Republican primaries to make Ron Paul a plurality victor? Why? Why? Why? Can anyone say Hillary, Hillary, Hillary?"
The article exposes MoveOn as just another group of controlled opposition flunkies for Ms. Hitlery and the DemocraPs, doesn't it, reader?
Of course, there is one group of voters (a very small, but powerful, group) that will NEVER like Ron Paul:
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Bush Jews Don't Want Ron Paul
"GOP hopefuls want Bush Jews" by Ron Kampeas Published: 10/15/2007
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Each of the leading GOP presidential candidates to some degree has run away from the Bush legacy. But this week they will be making their case before one of the president's most loyal constituencies: Republican Jews.
The Republican Jewish Coalition on Tuesday is hosting a forum in Washington for presidential hopefuls. Six of the party's nine candidates were invited, and five will attend: former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, and current U.S. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas.
Matt Brooks, the RJC's executive director, said he expects "defining" speeches in terms of foreign policy.
"The emphasis clearly is going to be on foreign policy," Brooks said. "And a number of them are planning to make their more defining foreign policy speeches. They'll be putting together snippets they’ve said before but tying it up to one foreign policy."
Brooks says the candidates are conscious that more than the RJC members in the room will be watching.
"They'll be watched nationally by primary voters, and internationally leaders will be watching, considering some of the challenges that will face the next president," he said. "They look at these things and parse very closely the words the candidates say."
The RJC event comes at a time when the president's approval ratings are perpetually hovering around 30 percent and many Republican constituencies, lawmakers and candidates are walking away from the Bush White House. Many leading Republican Jews, meanwhile, remain fiercely loyal to the president and to the most hawkish elements of his foreign policy agenda.
Brooks himself this summer joined two other RJC board members -- Ari Fleischer, Bush's former White House spokesman, and Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul -- in establishing FreedomsWatch, a group dedicated to preserving what likely has become the president's most unpopular legacy, the Iraq occupation.
Most of the new group's funders are well known as the RJC's principal backers, including Mel Sembler, a former ambassador to Rome, and Richard Fox, an RJC founder.
On several fronts the RJC continues to stake out right-of-center positions, even as Bush and the GOP candidates have moderated their stands.
For example, in recent months the Bush administration has raised its voice on the need to deal with global warming, yet in its September-October bulletin, the Republican Jewish organization mocks Democrats who focus on the issue.
The Democratic front-runner, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), is criticized for asserting that "we should not hesitate to engage in the world's most difficult conflicts on a diplomatic front," though Giuliani has essentially made the same argument.
Republican Jews also have emerged as one of the few constituencies willing to touch what has become a third rail in congressional politics: Bush's determination to roll back parts of the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program, a program that reaches children from families that earn above the Medicaid threshold but still cannot afford insurance.
[So THAT'S WHY he vetoed the program!
His Zionist controllers TOLD HIM TO!]
SCHIP has wall-to-wall Jewish community backing, but in recent weeks Noam Neusner, Bush's former Jewish liaison, defended the president's position in the Forward and Michael David Epstein, a senior RJC activist, did the same on JTA.
Brooks said such loyalty is natural for a president that has proven second to none in his backing for Israel.
"Bush has earned it," he said. "Here's a president who in very difficult and challenging times, especially on core issues like Israel, was there for us and was one of the only world leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel."
Among other instances, Bush gave Israel slack in putting down a flare-up in the Palestinian intifada in the spring of 2002 and in striking back against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Also in April 2004 for recognizing some Israeli settlements as a reality on the ground and repudiating a right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.
That might translate into tough questions for some of the candidates. The major GOP hopefuls back the president's tough approach to forcing Iran to suspend its suspected nuclear weapons program, but Giuliani argued recently that diplomacy has been neglected as an option.
McCain and Romney have backed the engagement in Iraq but been sharply critical of how it has been carried out.
Brownback last week backed a pro-settler initiative to extend Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank, directly undercutting Bush's attempt to leave a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of his legacies. The Bush administration is convening a peace conference to that end that will take place next month in Annapolis, Md.
Such transitions are natural, Brooks suggested, adding that he expected most of the candidates will emphasize differences with the Democratic front-runners, Clinton and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who have emphasized diplomacy in dealing with Iran.
The RJC forum, Brooks said, is aimed at reminding "the Jewish community that it will have some important choices to make as we start to address a post-Bush environment."
[Riiiiight! They have already chosen: Ms. Hitlary!]
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, was invited but could not attend.
Not invited were long-shots U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter of California, Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Ron Paul of Texas. Paul was rejected because of his consistent voting record against U.S. assistance to Israel and his criticism of the pro-Israel lobby."
Which, coincidentally(?) is where the American people are, too!
