TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Monday, June 09, 2008

The 2008 list of Bilderberg participants lists the following:

Rapporteurs
GBR "Bredow, Vendeline von" "Business Correspondent, The Economist"
GBR "Wooldridge, Adrian D." "Foreign Correspondent, The Economist"


The Economist has been a pet Bilderberg publication for decades, and has reasserted its place as the preeminent Bilderberg propagandist with several invites in recent years. So it wasn't a big surprise to find the Bilderberg house organ launch a salvo at the pro-freedom party and candidate who dare challenge their anointed savior Obama and old standby John McCain. From The Economist May 29th 2008:

"ON MAY 25th a dysfunctional minor party picked a grumpy ex-Republican as its presidential candidate. This may be just another quirk in the quirky history of the Libertarian Party.. .

The new Libertarian champion, Bob Barr, a former four-term Georgia congressman, is most famous for his poor judgment and sour temper. He led the fight to defang anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing (among his achievements: preventing the government from designating foreign groups as terrorists and denying their members visas to enter the country). He championed social-conservative causes such as the Defence of Marriage Act, which he drafted, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. His moralistic fervour faltered only when it came to his own conduct: twice divorced, he was once photographed licking whipped cream off the breasts of a particularly buxom woman. He says he was raising money for leukaemia research. (Well, he would, wouldn't he?)

The Libertarian Party is one of the perennial jokes of American politics. Barry Goldwater, a party hero, once argued that “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. Many Libertarians have interpreted that as meaning that extremism in defence of liberty is a positive virtue: one of the liveliest debates in the party is whether all drugs should be legalised, and all federal taxes abolished, next Monday or next Tuesday. The party's best presidential performance was back in 1980 when Edward Clark won 921,128 votes, or 1.1% of the electorate. Most Libertarian candidates have hovered around just 400,000 votes. The party is also badly divided between what might be called its Ruby Ridge wing and its Reefer Madness wing. The Ruby Ridge wing, which has still not recovered from the terrible day when the FBI shot several survivalists at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, believes that freedom comes from the barrel of a gun. The Reefer Madness wing is more interested in keeping the government's hands off its spliffs.

Mr Barr's candidacy is not likely to heal this division. The Georgian has a solid record on guns—he once accidentally discharged an antique pistol at a gun show—but he is much dodgier on other Libertarian shibboleths. He joined the party in 2006 only after being redistricted out of his congressional nest. He once supported both the Patriot Act and the “war on drugs”, though he is now repentant. He won the party's nomination only after six ballots and five hours of voting.

Yet the Republicans would be unwise to write him off as irrelevant: instead, they would do well to consider the reasons for the enduring success of Ron Paul, a Republican who shares many of the Libertarians' views. . .

Mr McCain is not Mr Bush. He has an honourable record as a fiscal conservative (he opposed the prescription-drug benefit, for example). He is Washington's leading campaigner against pork. He is a principled federalist on issues like gay marriage. . .

Mr Barr and the Libertarian Party, as well as Mr Paul, are both imperfect vehicles for all this pent-up anger. But they are vehicles nonetheless...
-----

Labels: bilderberg, bob barr, Ron Paul

| Posted at 15:35 | PERMA-LINK |

Comments:

Post a Comment