TBR News October 30, 2018

Oct 30 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. October 30, 2018:”As the mid-term election loom, Trump, frantic to keep a Republican control of Congress, is trying to convince his supporters on the far right that he is their savior. To enhance this image, he is stirring up an enormous, and very dangerous, pot of active hatred which becomes manifest in attacks on Jews and Mexicans for the present and blacks and Muslims in the near future. Trump enjoys doing this because at heart, he is a man who cannot love but can certainly hate. He sees himself as another Führer but wouldn’t make a wart on Hitler’s ass. What he can do, and is doing, is polarizing the American public in the hopes of maintaing a long term in office but which will cause more violence and internet eruptions than can be imagined. The coming mid-terms are going to be instructive indeed.”

The Table of Contents 

  • Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 65
  • Is This Worse Than ’68?
  • Trump to remove birthright citizenship for children of noncitizens, prompts Constitutional uproar
  • Trump targets U.S. birthright citizenship ahead of elections
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Time to Foreclose on the Churchill Cult
  • The Other Side of Winston Churchill

 Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 65

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

 

Apr 6, 2018

“You know a poll just came out, Rasmussen. It’s now 51. And they say that it’s 51, but add another 7 or 8 points to it.”

Source: Interview on Bernie and Sid in the Morning

in fact: Nobody credible, and perhaps nobody at all, has said this.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“So I’m not saying there won’t be a little pain. But the market’s gone up 40 per cent, 42 per cent, so we might lose a little bit of it.”

Source: Interview on Bernie and Sid in the Morning

in fact: As the financial news website The Street noted, Trump’s numbers are outdated: U.S. stock markets have fallen from their peak in January 2018 when they were indeed up more than 40 per cent from the day he was elected: “Readers won’t be surprised to learn that the President’s statistics might be a little off. At 23,932 points, the Dow is now up about 20% from 19,799, where it stood the Monday after his inauguration, not quite 15 months ago, and about 28% higher than it was the day he was elected in November 2016. At its peak of 26,616 in late January, the Dow was up 34% from Trump’s inauguration, and up 43% from his election. So maybe that’s what he’s talking about. Also, that was then, this is now.”

“We have to do something with respect to China. You know, the $500 billion a year deficit.” And: “All of our presidents before have – for some reason it just got worse and worse. And now it’s $500 billion in deficits.”

Source: Interview on Bernie and Sid in the Morning

in fact: Trump was off by $163 billion — and $125 billion if you give him the benefit of the doubt. The U.S. trade deficit with China was $375 billion in 2017 when counting goods alone, according the U.S. Census Bureau. Including trade in services, the net deficit was $337 billion, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said earlier in the month. (The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a different method of calculating deficits and surpluses than the Census Bureau.)

Trump has repeated this claim 51 times

  • Apr 7, 2018

“While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at EPA. Record clean Air & Water while saving USA Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market rate, travel expenses OK. Scott is doing a great job!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Pruitt did not pay a market rate for his condo rental from a lobbyist couple. He paid $50 a night for a room in a condo in an expensive Washington neighbourhood; crucially, he was allowed to pay only for nights he actually used, not for an entire month, and news outlets reported that his adult daughter stayed in a second bedroom in the condo when she was in town. Pruitt has argued that his arrangement was “like an Airbnb situation” rather than a traditional apartment rental, but there are almost no $50-per-night Airbnb options in that area of the city, and certainly none that allow the visitor to repeatedly book the same high-quality apartment at their convenience on short notice. While Environmental Protection Agency ethics official Kevin Minoli retroactively cleared Pruitt over the condo, saying that $50 per month adds up to a “reasonable market value” of $1,500 per month, he later issued a second statement saying he had not evaluated the “actual use of the space”; the federal government’s top ethics official, acting Office of Government Ethics director David Apol, then sent a letter to the EPA saying, “Additional information has now come to light that calls into question whether the earlier determination that the administrator paid market value for the use he made of the apartment would still be valid.” Other parts of this tweet are also questionable. “Somewhat” is subjective, but Pruitt’s security expenditures appear to be more than double those of his Obama-era predecessor. His security detail, which is reported to have 20 members, is more than three times the size of his predecessor’s; over the first three months of his tenure, his security costs were more than double those of his predecessor over the same period, environmental publication E&E News reported. It is not clear what Trump was referring to when he said “record clean air & water” or “saving USA billions of dollars.” Though the Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant inspector general for investigations has said that there have been more threats against Pruitt than there were against his predecessors, nobody has released any proof: the EPA has told reporters that it does not have any documents on such threats, and nobody anywhere in the country has been arrested for making a threat against him.

“They (China) must end unfair trade, take down barriers and charge only Reciprocal Tariffs. The U.S. is losing $500 Billion a year, and has been losing Billions of Dollars for decades.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump was off by $163 billion — and $125 billion if you give him the benefit of the doubt. The U.S. trade deficit with China was $375 billion in 2017 when counting goods alone, according the U.S. Census Bureau. Including trade in services, the net deficit was $337 billion, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said earlier in the month. (The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a different method of calculating deficits and surpluses than the Census Bureau.)

Trump has repeated this claim 51 times

  • Apr 8, 2018

“Congratulations to Patrick Reed on his great and courageous MASTERS win! When Patrick had his amazing win at Doral 5 years ago, people saw his great talent, and a bright future ahead.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Reed won a tournament at the Trump-owned Doral course four years prior, on March 9, 2014, not five years prior.

“The Washington Post is far more fiction than fact. Story after story is made up garbage – more like a poorly written novel than good reporting. Always quoting sources (not names), many of which don’t exist. Story on John Kelly isn’t true, just another hit job!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no evidence that the Washington Post has fabricated sources in its reporting on Trump.

Trump has repeated this claim 12 times

  • Apr 9, 2018

“And yet the other side, they don’t even bother looking…Emails that are knocked out, that are acid washed and deleted.”

Source: Remarks before meeting with senior military leaders

in fact: Hillary Clinton’s team deleted emails using a program called BleachBit. They were not actually “bleached” or “acid washed,” as Trump has repeatedly claimed.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“So they find no collusion, and then they go from there and they say, ‘Well, let’s keep going.’ And they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning. And I think it’s a disgrace.”

Source: Remarks before meeting with senior military leaders

in fact: Nobody on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has said anything like this. There is no basis for Trump’s claim that the investigators have decided that there was “no collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 18 times

  • Apr 12, 2018

“Just to finish, we have some tremendous numbers coming out from companies. We have hundreds of billions of dollars pouring back into our country from our tax cut plan where money overseas is coming in, which, Larry, you often mention and talk about. Apple, as an example, is investing $350 billion in plants — which they don’t have too many of, but they will — and campuses and everything else.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: The New York Times noted: “In fact, Apple has no plans to build a plant in the United States”; its January announcement of a $30 billion capital investment over five years specifically mentioned a new campus and new data centres, not new manufacturing operations. In addition, the announcement was not of a new $350 billion total investment. The company announced, rather, that its combination of new investments and regular spending it had previously planned would total $350 billion over five years — and it specified that it had previously planned $55 billion in spending for 2018. In other words, Apple was already on pace to spend approximately $275 billion of the $350 billion it described in the announcement. Here’s the direct quote from the press release: “Combining new investments and Apple’s current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers — an estimated $55 billion for 2018 — Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years, not including Apple’s ongoing tax payments, the tax revenues generated from employees’ wages and the sale of Apple products.

Trump has repeated this claim 20 times

“Same thing with washing machines. They were dumping — if you can believe this — washing machines all over the country. Just dumping them. And we put a 30 per cent tariff on…”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: Trump’s new tariff on washing machines is 20 per cent on the first 1.2 million imports, then 50 per cent after that; there is no tariff of 30 per cent.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“As you know, we had 32 solar plants, and of the 32, I think 30 were closed, Larry, right? There were — it’s a new industry, but they were getting absolutely killed by China and some others. And we put a tariff on those panels coming in, which were not nearly as good as the ones we make. And now we have two that are open. Can you imagine, of the 32, there were two that are — were just about limping along and barely open. These two are now doing very well and they’re looking to open seven, eight, nine of the plants.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: This is a comprehensively inaccurate description of the state of the U.S. solar industry. In referring to “two” solar companies, as he has in the past, Trump appears to mean the two companies that brought a trade complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission, Suniva and SolarWorld Americas. It is not true that they are the only two solar manufacturers remaining in the U.S. It is also not true that they are now “looking to open seven, eight, nine of the plants.” Suniva filed for bankruptcy last year, and its current status is “unknown,” Greentech Media reported in a fact-check of Trump’s claim in February. SolarWorld, meanwhile, announced in 2017 that it would hire 200 additional workers, but it did not say it would open new plants. It never had seven U.S. plants in the first place; rather, it has one major plant in Oregon that has been operating under capacity.

Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“And we’re starting to get much better results at the World Trade Organization, WTO, because they know we’re not playing games anymore. You know, we’re going to get the results or they’re not going to be so happy. I mean, it was set up to hurt us. I mean, if you look at it, 25 years ago, or whatever it was, it was really set up to take advantage of the United States, as far as I’m concerned.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: There is no basis for the claim that the World Trade Organization was set up to harm the United States. “It is simply crazy to say that the WTO was set up to hurt us. First, the U.S. was the primary architect of the WTO as a pillar of the post-war international economic system. Second, this is especially true as to the creation of the dispute resolution system,” said Stuart Malawer, a professor of law and international trade at George Mason University who has studied the WTO. The WTO was established in 1995 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; describing the round of 1980s negotiations that led to the formation of the WTO, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office wrote in a 1987 report, “The United States has been the driving force behind the negotiations, seeking to open foreign markets to its exports and to limit foreign subsidies of imports into its home market.” Ikenson said: “The system was not set up to ‘hurt’ the United States, but to strengthen the rule of law in international trade so that commerce could become more predictable and beneficial.”

“And we’re starting to get much better results at the World Trade Organization, WTO, because they know we’re not playing games anymore. You know, we’re going to get the results or they’re not going to be so happy…But we’re starting to get much better results, and that would make, I think, a lot of people very happy.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: There does not appear to be any basis for this vague claim. Said Dan Ikenson, director of trade policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute: “There is nothing to support the claim that the results have suddenly gotten better…The fact is that there hasn’t been any discernible changes in WTO decision making.” (Ikenson said that, by his rough count, four WTO decisions during the Trump era have gone against the United States, four in favour of the United States.) Contrary to Trump’s repeated assertion, the U.S. has long been successful in WTO disputes: as his own Council of Economic Advisers said in a report in February, the U.S. has won 86 per cent of the cases it has brought to WTO adjudicators; the global average is 84 per cent, China’s figure 67 per cent. (Other analyses have put the U.S. victory rate as high as 91 per cent). As is standard for the WTO, the U.S. tends to lose cases where a complaint is brought against it — but even in those cases, Trump’s advisers noted that it does better (25 per cent victory rate) than the world average (17 per cent) or China’s record (just 5 per cent). Ikenson said: “There is absolutely nothing to the claim that ‘we’re starting to get much better results.’ They’ve been consistent and fair from the outset.”

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“We lose (on trade) with almost everybody. We lose with Canada. We lose with Mexico. We lose with the European Union. We lose with — certainly, we lose with China, Vietnam. I mean, no matter where you go, it’s very rare — very rare that our country has a surplus.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: It is not “very rare” for the U.S. to have a trade surplus with another country. While the U.S. has a substantial overall trade deficit — $566 billion in 2017 — it has surpluses with more than half of its trading partners, according to data from the U.S. government’s own International Trade Commission: in 2017, the U.S. had surpluses with Hong Kong, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, Chile, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Kuwait and dozens more countries and territories. And that’s only counting trade in merchandise; when you count trade in services too, the U.S. also has a surplus with Canada.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“We lose (on trade) with almost everybody. We lose with Canada.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: U.S. data has consistently shown a U.S. trade surplus with Canada. In a report released the month before Trump’s tweet, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported a $2.8 billion U.S. trade surplus in goods and services with Canada in 2017. Press secretary Sarah Sanders has said that Trump is referring to the trade deficit in goods alone, which was $17.6 billion in 2017, but Trump himself never specifies that he is using this narrower measure.

Trump has repeated this claim 15 times

“So we are opening up the European Union or we’re not going to be very nice about it. At the European Union, we’ll lose about $151 billion this year.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: This figure excludes trade in services. The overall trade balance with the European Union in 2017 was a deficit of about $102 billion, according to U.S. government statistics. While the U.S. did have a trade deficit of over $151 billion if you only count goods, it also had a surplus of about $50 billion in the trade of services.

Trump has repeated this claim 29 times

“The other thing is, if you look at the European Union — we’re talking to them — I don’t know if you realize it, but they have virtual barriers against even agriculture, from going in. So they sell us their Mercedes-Benzes, and they sell us their BMWs, and they sell all the different things. And we have no barriers whatsoever.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: The U.S. also has non-tariff barriers — policies, other than tariffs, that can restrict trade. On European cars, these barriers include environmental standards that differ from those of the European Union. “It’s worth noting that all countries have ‘barriers’ to foreign-sourced vehicles, and the U.S. is no exception. I refer to safety and emission laws,” said Bill Hampton, editor-in-chief of AutoBeat Daily. “Volkswagen’s diesel emission scandal is about this very issue: VW diesels that meet European emission standards aren’t clean enough to meet our regulations. Rather than spend the money to add more sophisticated emission controls, VW opted for illegal software to game the emission test.”

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“Remember what I said: When you’re $500 billion down, you can’t lose a trade war.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: Trump was referring to the trade deficit with China. He was off by $163 billion — and $125 billion if you give him the benefit of the doubt. The U.S. trade deficit with China was $375 billion in 2017 when counting goods alone, according the U.S. Census Bureau. Including trade in services, the net deficit was $337 billion, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis said in a report released the week before Trump spoke. (The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a different method of calculating deficits and surpluses than the Census Bureau.)

Trump has repeated this claim 51 times

“Because, right now, if you have — and I use this example because it’s so easy — if we sell a car into China, number one, they won’t take the car; and number two, if they did take the car, it’s 25 per cent tariff.”

Source: Remarks at meeting with governors and members of Congress

in fact: Trump was correct about China’s tariffs on U.S. cars. He was incorrect that China “won’t take the car” even if U.S. automakers are willing to pay the tariffs. While automakers export few made-in-America cars to China — Fiat Chrysler and Ford export a total of 30,000 vehicles to China, according an analysis by Evercore ISI — that is because they have manufacturing operations in China, under joint ventures with Chinese companies, to produce most of the cars they sell in China. Ford sold 1.2 million vehicles in China in 2017; General Motors sold 4 million vehicles in China, a record.

Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

 

Is This Worse Than ’68?

October 29, 2018

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman.

Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators.

Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what Charles Dickens called “the worst of times” in America? Is today worse than 1968?

Certainly, the hatred and hostility, the bile and bitterness of our discourse, seem greater now than 50 years ago. But are the times really worse?

1968 began with one of the greatest humiliations in the history of the American Navy. The U.S. spy ship Pueblo was hijacked in international waters and its crew interned by North Korea.

A week later came the Tet Offensive, where every provincial capital in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand U.S. troops died in February, 10,000 more through 1968.

On March 14, anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against President Johnson.

With LBJ wounded, Robert Kennedy leapt into the race, accusing the president who had enacted civil rights of “dividing the country” and removing himself from “the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.” Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, is “calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”

Today, RFK is remembered as a “uniter.”

With Gov. George Wallace tearing at Johnson from the right and Kennedy and McCarthy attacking from the left — and Nixon having cleared the Republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire — LBJ announced on March 31 he would not run again.

Four days later, Martin Luther King, leading a strike of garbage workers, was assassinated in Memphis. One hundred U.S. cities exploded in looting, arson and riots. The National Guard was called up everywhere and federal troops rushed to protect Washington, D.C., long corridors of which were gutted, not to be rebuilt for a generation.

Before April’s end, Columbia University had exploded in the worst student uprising of the decade. It was put down only after the NYPD was unleashed on the campus.

Nixon called the Columbia takeover by black and white radicals “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.” Which many have since become.

In June, Kennedy, after defeating McCarthy in the crucial primary of California, was mortally wounded in the kitchen of the hotel where he had declared victory. He was buried in Arlington beside JFK.

Nixon, who had swept every primary, was nominated on the first ballot in Miami Beach, and the Democratic Convention was set for late August.

Between the conventions, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his Warsaw Pact armies and hundreds of tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful uprising known as “Prague Spring.”

With this bloodiest of military crackdowns since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West: There will be no going back in Europe. Once a Communist state, always a Communist state!

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the thousands of radicals who had come to raise hell congregated nightly in Grant Park, across from the Hilton where the candidates and this writer were staying.

Baited day and night, the Chicago cops defending the hotel, by late in the week, had had enough. Early one evening, platoons of fresh police arrived and charged into the park clubbing and arresting scores of radicals as the TV cameras rolled. It would be called a “police riot.”

When Sen. Abe Ribicoff took the podium that night, he directed his glare at Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Daley’s reply from the floor was unprintable.

Through September, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without being cursed and shouted down.

Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said, these people “aren’t just hecklers,” but “highly disciplined, well-organized agitators. … Some are anarchists and some of these groups are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the country.”

After his slim victory, Nixon declared that his government would take as its theme the words on a girl’s placard that he had seen in the Ohio town of Deshler: “Bring us together.”

Nixon tried in his first months, but it was not to be.

According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”

No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.

 

Trump to remove birthright citizenship for children of noncitizens, prompts Constitutional uproar

October 30, 2018

RT

President Trump is planning to sign an executive order ending the automatic right to citizenship for children of noncitizens and illegal immigrants born in the US. Trump’s statement prompted a Constitutional panic on Twitter.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump told Axios in an interview taped on Monday. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

While Trump was ambiguous on the subject, it is likely that the children of legal immigrants who have attained US citizenship will be unaffected by the planned policy order.

In the US, birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” While originally drafted in 1868 to establish civil rights for freed slaves and their descendents, the amendment has been widely interpreted to grant full citizenship rights to anyone born within the US.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment,” Trump told Axios. “Guess what? You don’t.”

“It’s in the process. It’ll happen . . . with an executive order,” he said.

If Trump intended to press ahead with the executive order, the president would likely face a complete and total backlash.Trump’s critics immediately sounded the alarm on Twitter.

While Trump can issue an executive order on birthright citizenship, that order can then be challenged in court, and overturned if it is found unconstitutional. This was the case earlier this year and last year when the first iterations of the president’s controversial travel ban were declared unconstitutional by federal courts.

Any executive order issued by Trump would therefore have to fall within the boundaries set by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court would have to determine whether the text of the 14th Amendment actually guarantees birthright citizenship, a matter of intense debate among legal scholars.

A proper originalist interpretation of the US Constitution, as presently written, guarantees American citizenship to those born within our borders, with only a few limited exceptions,” lawyer Dan McLaughlin wrote in a National Review column last month.

However, McLaughlin noted that one line in the Amendment – “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – could cause some ambiguity. If Congress were to decide that illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, then the case could be made that the protections of the 14th Amendment do not apply to them. Indeed, at the time of the Amendment’s writing, Senator. Lyman Trumbull argued that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else,” for example, a foreign country.

Trumbull’s interpretation has been used by opponents of birthright citizenship, like legal scholar Edward J. Erler, to argue against automatic citizenship, but the text of the Constitution can be endlessly dissected and analyzed for different answers.

Some scholars have called for Congress to finally legislate on whether the children of noncitizens are subject to US jurisdiction or not, and end the debate for good.

In a Washington Post op-ed this July, former Trump administration national security official Michael Anton called for such legislation, and argued that “the notion that simply being born within the geographical limits of the United States automatically confers US citizenship is an absurdity — historically, constitutionally, philosophically and practically.”

With immigration a top priority for Republican voters, some saw the President’s statement as bluster, intended to fire up his base ahead of next week’s crucial midterm elections.

Trump has touted a hardline approach to immigration in recent weeks, as a thousands-strong ‘caravan’ of migrants makes its way to the US’ southern border from Central America. Trump has called the caravan an “invasion” and the Pentagon has announced plans to deploy 5,200 troops to the border, where they will bolster the existing National Guard and Customs and Border Patrol presence.

Trump has also vowed to corral the migrants into “very nice”tent cities upon arrival, where they will be held until their asylum cases can be heard.

While the president claimed the US is “the only country” that offers birthright citizenship, 33 other countries, including Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, do the same

 

Trump targets U.S. birthright citizenship ahead of elections

October 30, 2018

by Lawrence Hurley and Susan Heavey

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Tuesday revived his support for the legally questionable theory that citizenship is not automatically conferred on children born in the United States of illegal immigrants, in a bid to reshape immigration policies with crucial congressional elections a week away.

Seeking to shore up support for fellow Republicans, Trump told the Axios news website he would issue an executive order on the subject, a unilateral move without congressional approval that would require a radical new interpretation of existing law and almost certainly be challenged in the courts.

Under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the U.S. Civil War to ensure that blacks previously subject to slavery had full citizenship rights, citizenship is granted to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

It has been routinely interpreted over the years to confer citizenship to people born in the United States whose parents are illegal immigrants.

Trump, who has made rhetoric against illegal immigrants a central plank of his presidency, originally spoke out against birthright citizenship when he first started running for president in 2015.

LEGAL ARGUMENT

The legal argument espoused by conservative activists for excluding children of illegal immigrants would likely be based around the language in the 14th Amendment that says people born in the United States are citizens if they are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Activists seeking to limit immigration, including Michael Anton, who wrote an article on the subject for the Washington Post in July, argue that illegal immigrants are not under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore their children born on U.S. soil should not be U.S. citizens.

Most legal scholars say the jurisdiction language denies citizenship only to those who are not bound by U.S. law, such as the children of foreign diplomats.

Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute, said that although there is a debate in academic circles among conservatives on whether Congress could legislate on the issue without running afoul of the 14th Amendment, “it’s not something that can be done by executive action alone.”

One Republican member of Congress, frequent Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham said he would move forward to introduce legislation “along the same lines” as Trump’s order.

At least since 2005, Republicans in the U.S. Congress have regularly offered legislation ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States if their parents were in the United States illegally. But the legislation has never advanced, even when the House of Representatives or Senate was under Republican control.

Neither Graham nor Trump gave any details about the latest plan. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President Mike Pence said the plan may not be unconstitutional, telling Politico in an interview that while “we all cherish” the 14th amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has not weighed in on the issue entirely.

“But the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether or not the language of the 14th amendment, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, applies specifically to people who are in the country illegally,” Pence said.

The Supreme Court has not ruled specifically on the issue of whether illegal immigrants can be denied birthright citizenship.

In 1898, however, in the case of a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants who lived permanently in the United States, the court ruled that the government could not deny him citizenship.

Saikrishna Prakash, a conservative legal scholar at the University of Virginia, said Trump faces long legal odds to ending citizenship as a birthright.

“We’re a nation of immigrants so if I were to bet I would think the president is going to lose,” he said.

Reporting by Susan Heavey and Lawrence Hurleyin Washington; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung, Yeganeh Torbati, Lisa Lambert and Richard Cowan in Washington; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Grant McCool

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 30, 2018

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

 

Conversation No. 47

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 1996

Commenced: 1:50 PM CST

Concluded: 2:22 PM CST

GD: Good afternoon, Robert. Am I being inconvenient?

RTC: No, Gregory. I’ve finished lunch, done a bit with the Switzers, read the papers and the rest of the day is free. How are you doing? Getting ready for Thanksgiving?

GD: Oh yes. I was reading a Sheldon ‘Furry Freaks’ cartoon that showed a bunch of hippies at Thanksgiving. One of them was making a terrible face and he said to the girlfriend, who had obviously cooked the bird, ‘This stuffing is really terrible. What is it?’ And she replied that it came already stuffed from the organic foods shop. It obviously had not been emptied of its innards and I was wondering how much of it they ate.

RTC: Typical long-hair stupidity. I take it your turkey is not from an organic turkey farm?

GD: Free range turkeys? No, they stuff them in little pens, fatten them and then into the eye with the icepick and into the defeathering machine. As Cromwell was supposed to have said about Charles I, ‘Cruel necessity.’ But it tastes fine if you aren’t socially conscious.

RTC: It smacks of the concentration camp soap stories.

GD: And don’t forget the shrunken heads and the lampshades while you’re at it, Robert. We mustn’t be callous and forget the crime of the century. Of course, it’s interesting that the Turkish murders of a million unarmed Armenians some years ago seems to be strangely forgotten.

RTC: Well, the Israelis are friends with Turkey and since they run the media here, they have an understanding about that. There can’t be stories that would eclipse their very own big money maker and which at the same time would offend one of their only allies.

GD: Oh, the bitter realities of realpolitik. You recall talking about the Pedophile Academy you people run?

RTC: I do. You aren’t interested in joining, are you?

GD: No, actually, I lust after sheep. Just think of it as Farrah Fawcett in a fur coat and all will come out in the end.

RTC: A pun is the lowest form of humor, Gregory.

GD: I know and I am so ashamed. but they do look so cute in lacy panties.

RTC: I am certain you’re joking, Gregory. Do you have lamb at Easter?

GD: Sir, think you I am so callous? Months of true love to be followed by sordid death and the roasting pan? Terrible, Robert, terrible. Oh well, I suppose there in our imperial city things are really pure and noble.

RTC: Hardly. You mentioned the kiddie’s club. There’s a lot worse than that in our fair city, believe me.

GD: Oh, I am sure of that. Prominent Evangelical leaders meeting in a basement dungeon while someone like Pat Robertson, dressed in mesh stockings and a feather boa, whipping teen-aged acolytes with a cat of nine tails. I’ve heard Washington is famous for things like that.

RTC: Actually, yes it is. For example, one of the less appetizing aspects of our little Company has been the fairy club.

GD: You mean you hire all those nasty florist types?

RTC: No, I mean we have an entire subsection devoted to the care and feeding of queers. It’s under the Science and Technology people and consists of raging homos whose job it is to infiltrate groups of prominent Beltway queers, get the information on them so we can blackmail them into doing what we want. We’ve set up male whorehouses around here, all equipped with special mikes and cameras so we can get the evidence on the creeps and then twist their arms. They staff these places with young military personnel…mostly Marines but quite a few Army people, and naturally sailors. We have a lot of Congressmen in the basket and one hell of a lot of senior military people around to do what we want, not to forget foreign diplomats, important business people and, as you say, some impressive religious leaders. It’s mostly the military that we bag and a large number of the far right and the very fanatical religious types.

GD: That’s not surprising. Most of those people are drawn to strength and a well-muscled Marine with a leather belt is a pretty good illustration of what they consider strength. Far right types like leather boots and domination. I suppose the marks pay for sex?

RTC: Oh, yes, and pay very well. First they pay cash and then they pay later in services. You would be astounded the number of fairies in high places here and most of them are in our little bags. And they do perform for us. A proper vote on yearly cash allotments, no questions asked, shutting off people who don’t like us, promoting or assisting those who are known to be on our good list. We have one Supreme Court justice, at least five appellate court judges, God knows how many senior FBI people, quite a few NSA personnel and, who would be shocked, enough State Department queers to stock a good hotel. I, personally, have nothing to do with this, but my friend Ed is involved in the administration of this and he has mentioned governors, senior senators and so on that he can jerk around at leisure. Of course, we set up the male whorehouses, but never, never have any of our people on the premises. We have surveillance monitors all over the neighborhood and perhaps next door listening to the tapes and turning on the TV cameras but we don’t want one of our straight people bagged if the local cops raid a place. The DC cops are stupid and corrupt beyond belief, but one never knows if they’ll get a wild hair up their ass and pull a raid. If they did, of course, we could quiet it down in the court system here, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. It does pay off, Gregory, and I can assure you that I, personally, have nothing to do with it.

GD: I don’t question that, Robert. Anyone I might know about?

RTC: Oh, God, it would be wonderful if you put all of this into your books, but if you did, don’t talk about it in front or you would have many problems. Faggotry is a fact of life, Gregory, but none of these assholes want to be exposed. Nixon had his times with Bebe Rebozo, too, but of course never in one of our DC peg houses. That never went anywhere, but I know it’s true. There are tapes. We bug all kinds of rendezvous places like certain motels, beach houses and so on. For example, we couldn’t bug Nixon’s place in Florida, but we certainly could bug Rebozo. It’s quite an area of exploitation, Gregory. Once we nailed a very senior Israeli diplomat who liked to be whipped by muscular young blacks and when we wanted some information, Jim just casually showed him some stills from a surveillance tape and you would be amazed how much instant cooperation we got on a certain Arab matter. And speaking of diplomatics, the Saudis are absolutely the worst. They’ll fuck anything in sight if it’s warm, and my, they do have lots of money.

GD: I recall an old Persian poem I once read out loud in Lit class that goes, ’Across the river there is a boy with an ass like a peach, but alas, I cannot swim.’ I had to go home for two days for that but the class had quite a laugh.

RTC: You must indeed have been quite a scholar.

GD: No, I was quite a trouble-maker. One of my teachers once told me, in front of the class, that I was an idiot’s delight. I told her right back that I was pleased to make her so happy. This time, I went on leave for a week.

RTC: Well, she had it coming.

GD: Oh yes, she did. They never liked me in high school, Robert, and the feeling was mutual. Once, I entered a national patriotic essay contest and, by God, I won a big prize. I wrote about the joys of being a patriot and the usual drivel. Anyway, I got the letter at home and I assume the school was told at the same time. Wonderful responses from them. They had planned for a special assembly to honor the gifted one, but no way would they do this for me. Do you know, they actually called me in and suggested, very firmly, that I step aside and let little Robbie the Pig get the prize? This was the son of the local Methodist minister and a real toad. Chubby, whining, self-righteous and a born stool pigeon. Learned the art from dad, no doubt. Anyway, I flatly refused to yield. Then they called my mother and went to work on her. Of course she didn’t need any leaning and for two weeks, I got nothing but stereophonic yammering from both parents. I just wasn’t a good advertisement for the school and a real gentleman would let them have a grand ceremony for Robbie the Pig. I still wouldn’t budge so they sent the award and the check to me at home and I had a hell of a time getting the check away from my father, who tried to keep it. Lovely.

RTC: Not very civilized behavior, Gregory. I think you did the right thing then.

GD: Oh yes, Robert, and I certainly did the right thing about two weeks later.

RTC: I am almost afraid to ask. No more detergent in the school soup pot?

GD: No, this came before that. I felt I had been dishonored, and as Mueller once said to me, I have a fine fourteenth century mind. One cannot permit that sort of thing. My revenge was fairly simple and direct. Of course, no one suspected me, which is a little of a letdown, but the uproar was worth it. In the main hall of the school, right by the front office, was a large, bronze medallion with a depiction of the school symbol on it. It was set into the floor right in front of another bronze piece that listed all the former students of the high school who died in the Second World War. On both sides were flags, and during school hours, two members of the Honor Patrol stood on both sides of the sacred lares and panares to prevent careless or evil students from trampling on the school crest or not saluting, hand on chest, the plaque. My, my, what an inviting and sacred target. I broke into the school one Saturday night, very easy considering the very pickable locks and the better reality that there was no watchman. Now, I suppose, they would have surveillance cameras every ten feet but we were not so advanced then. I got into the chemistry lab, stole two bottles of concentrated nitric acid and a pair of acid-proof lab gloves, went down the hall and poured one bottle all over the floor relic. Much hissing and bubbling and clouds of stinking smoke. The second bottle I uncorked and poured the contents all down the wall piece. Much hissing, smoking and so on. Then, I tossed the bottles into a convenient trash bin and left by the front door. Outside they had the imperial flag pole in the courtyard. Every morning, the royal honor guard attended the morning flag-raising while someone played some raucous piece, off key of course, on a bugle. As a sort of afterthought, I took out my Swiss Army knife and cut the halyards on the pole and pulled down the lines. The pole was about sixty feet tall and set in concrete so replacing the lines would be a major task. My, my, and I felt so good all the way home.

RTC: Your honor had been avenged?

GD: Yes, and the next day, it was even more pleasurable. I had so little to really enjoy in those days, I treasured every moment, believe me. Came into the school and saw no one. Halls empty. For a hopeful moment, I thought that there was no school but it was not to be. Walking around, I came to the main hall which was packed with very emotional fellow students. Weeping girls and outraged boys. I managed to work my up towards the front of the mourners and saw my handiwork, full in the face as it were. It looked like the sacred relics had been made of brown sugar and melted in great gullies. I didn’t obliterate them but you could only see a few letters on the wall plaque and the mess on the floor looked like it had been at the bottom of the sea for a thousand years. Police all over the place, taking pictures, very angry honor students, people in a state of anger and grief. And all over a few crummy pieces of bronze. Oh, yes, and a scene outside where a fat janitor was risking his life on a ladder that kept slipping, to replace the flagpole ropes. They had to get a local fire truck out later on to do the job. Oh, my, and the police, who made Mongoloid idiots look like Harvard graduates, running all over the place with note books, interviewing everyone that would hold still. Massive grief and anger. A special assembly, mandatory attendance, in which the principal and other lesser lights offered a small reward to any snitches listening. You’d have thought someone took the Shroud of Turin and used it for toilet paper. Ah well, these rare and beautiful moments are ones to be treasured.

RTC: Simple but effective, Gregory.

GD: Always smile at a man when you kick him in the balls, Robert. Oh, that thing played out for about a month and then we were all asked to contribute to a replacement venture. When the collection cup came around in my math class, I spit into it. Another moment of perverse happiness. The soaping of the stock pot was a real, transcendent joy for me, but the curtain raiser was almost as much fun. The thought, and the sight, of most of the student body soiling their clothes, and the floors, was good enough to keep me warm for months but the wailing and cursing of my fellow stoats at the scene of the great sacrilege in the upper hall was not to be denigrated.

RTC: Did you ever tell your friend Heinrich Mueller about this?

GD: No. I don’t think he would have approved of it and I admired him. Listen, do you think you might get a list of your limp-wristed victims? Of course, I assure you that I will publish it, know that in front.

RTC: Not while I’m alive, but yes, I think I can accommodate you. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to read about all the suicides or flights from Congress.

(Concluded at 2:22 PM CST)

 

Time to Foreclose on the Churchill Cult

He’s a religious faith that no one is allowed to question without forfeiting membership in Western civilization.

October 15, 2018

by Paul Gottfried

The American Conservative

In a recent broadside in National Review against “ill-informed critics of Churchill,” Ben Shapiro mocks his opponents by reminding them that they “would be speaking German if he (Churchill) had not led the fight against Hitler.” If that’s the worse that would have happened had the Third Reich prevailed, it would have been an exceedingly small price to pay for such an outcome.

I offer this comment as someone who grew up speaking German and who still regards it as his second mother tongue. According to Shapiro, those who dare criticize Churchill are mostly “a variety of groups ranging from Indians to Sudanese to Asian tribes.” These quibblers, he writes, are fixated on Churchill’s “racial comment” which “have taken out of context to slander his achievements.” Supposedly those who dwell on Churchill’s imperialist ideas or slurs about lesser breeds are uniformly on the left and mistakenly believe that “an ounce of sin washes away a lifetime of heroism.”

But Shapiro never demonstrates that Churchill spent his entire life engaged in heroic action. He properly recognizes his heroism in standing up to Nazi Germany; and he notes that Churchill “successfully led Great Britain through the most dangerous time in her history.” But was this a more dangerous period than when Churchill’s ancestor the Duke of Marlborough opposed the expansive despotism of Louis XIV, which threatened both England and the European continent in the early 18th century? What about the heroism of William Pitt the Younger, Britain’s very young prime minister who kept his country fighting on against Napoleon and his empire after other countries had deserted the cause?

It’s also not clear in what way we attack the West “by savaging the civilizational history” that Churchill embodied. Are we not allowed to write critically about someone whom Shapiro, and presumably National Review, want us to admire for his presumed “lifetime of heroism”?

Unfortunately there was a lot in Churchill’s life that was not particularly heroic—it’s striking that our current conservative establishment is willing to “contextualize” away “bigoted” statements made by Churchill, while ranting against Churchill contemporary H.L. Mencken, when he made his own. But then Mencken supposedly took the wrong side in World War One, in which he was effusively pro-German, while Churchill did everything in his power to poison Anglo-German relations before that cataclysm, which he regarded as inevitable. This came after Churchill helped foment the Boer War in South Africa, which enabled the British Empire to swallow up the Transvaal and other parts of South Africa. Later as First Lord of the Admiralty, he imposed on Imperial Germany a starvation blockade that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. This blockade wasn’t lifted until several months after the hostilities had ended. In the Second World War Churchill supported the terror bombing of German cities, at a time when these population centers could no longer defend themselves and when the war was all but lost.

In March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri, Churchill warned about an “iron curtain” descending on Eastern Europe, but during the war he had been at least as willing as FDR to accommodate Stalin. At Yalta the prime minister worked to preserve the British Empire by shamelessly praising Stalin and the Soviet Empire. His positions in trying to hold on to British India in the face of widespread native opposition receive ample treatment from John Charmley, Roy Jenkins, and other non-authorized biographers. Eventually this preoccupation became Churchill’s stubborn obsession.

Perhaps the most staggering catalogue of Churchill’s sins can be found in a long essay and a number of lectures produced by a Taft Republican and visceral isolationist Ralph Raico. Contrary to what Shapiro tells us, the most passionate critics of Churchill have been on the pre-neoconservative Right; and Raico, a trained German historian, comes out of that venerable conservative tradition. Churchill was certainly not the hero of the Right before the neoconservatives elevated him to that eminence. Not all the praise bestowed on him is of course baseless. Much of it stems from Churchill’s opposition to a Nazi regime that almost managed to exterminate European Jewry.

Unfortunately what is admirable about Churchill is blown up into a “lifetime of heroism,” with sometimes embarrassing effects. For example, Churchill’s belligerent opposition to the Kaiser’s Germany is seen through lenses shaped by his later resistance to Hitler. During and before the First World War the British and Americans—we are led to believe—were already combatting a German evil that eventually spawned Hitler’s regime. Furthemore, if Churchill later urged treating colonial subjects a bit roughly, it may be explained that he was just trying to prepare the natives for Anglo-American democracy. What Canadian political theorist Grant Havers ridicules as “the Churchill cult” has been transformed into a religious faith that no one is allowed to question without forfeiting his membership in Western civilization.

Trying to look at the historical problem more dispassionately, it seems to me that great political figures are usually morally flawed; and this was doubtless true of Churchill. According to his biographer Charmley, Churchill “exulted” at the opportunity of going to war. On the eve of the Great War, he prepared for a European-wide conflict “not only in the sense of making sure the Fleet was ready but also in trying to influence opinion in that direction within the Cabinet.” His passion for armed conflict was almost insatiable. Needless to say, one could find the same defects in other historical luminaries on whom we confer the appellation “great.”

Not all political greats have won the struggles they engaged in. Although one can admire the aristocratic character of Robert E. Lee, this was a commander who lost a war he never wanted. A fervent admirer of Lee, Churchill might also have seen himself on the losing side of history. Charmley maintains that his subject symbolized his country’s “end of glory.” Throughout his life, he stood for the British Empire, British independence, and an “anti-socialist vision of England.” In the end, Churchill watched all three vanish.

 

The Other Side of Winston Churchill

October 20, 2018

by Christian Jürs

The personality of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill could very well be a subject of interest to an alienist who, by definition, is a physician who treats mental disorders. There is a saying that the world is governed with very little sense and there are times when one could add to this statement that it often has been governed by lunatics.

Churchill was born in 1874 and died in 1965. His father was Randolph Spencer-Churchill, a son of the Duke of Marlborough. The first Duke was John Churchill, one of England’s most capable military commanders, who died without male issue in 1722 and the title was given to one of his nephews, a Spencer. As a courtesy, the Spencer family was allowed to add Churchill to its name, separated by a hyphen. Winston always wanted to believe that he was a gifted military leader in the mold of the first Duke but his efforts at generalship were always unqualified disasters that he generally blamed on other people. This chronic refusal to accept responsibility for his own incompetent actions is one of Churchill’s less endearing qualities.

Randolph Churchill died early as the result of rampant syphilis that turned him from an interesting minor politician to a pathetic madman who had to be kept away from the public, in the final years of his life. His mother was the former Jennie Jerome, an American. The Jerome family had seen better days when Jennie met Randolph. Her father, Leonard, was a stock-market manipulator who had lost his money and the marriage was more one of convenience than of affection.

The Jeromes were by background very typically American. On her father’s side, Jennie was mostly Irish and on her mother’s American Indian and Jewish. The union produced two children, Winston and Jack. The parents lived separate lives, both seeking the company of other men. Winston’s psyche suffered accordingly and throughout his life, his frantic desire for attention obviously had its roots in his abandonment as a child.

As a member of the 4th (Queen’s Own) Hussars, in 1896 Churchill became embroiled in a lawsuit wherein he was publicly accused of having engaged in the commission of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.” This case was duly settled out of court for a payment of money and the charges were withdrawn. Also a determinant factor was the interference by the Prince of Wales with whom his mother was having an affair.

In 1905, Churchill hired a young man, Edward Marsh (later Sir Edward) as his private secretary. His mother, always concerned about her son’s political career, was concerned because Marsh was a very well known homosexual who later became one of Winston’s most intimate lifelong friends. Personal correspondence of March, now in private hands, attests to the nature and duration of their friendship.

Churchill, as Asquith once said, was consumed with vanity and his belief that he was a brilliant military leader led him from the terrible disaster of Gallipoli through the campaigns of the Second World War. He meddled constantly in military matters to the despair and eventual fury of his professional military advisors but his political excursions were even more disastrous. Churchill was a man who was incapable of love but could certainly hate. He was viciously vindictive towards anyone who thwarted him and a number of these perceived enemies died sudden deaths during the war when such activities were much easier to order and conceal.

One of Churchill’s less attractive personality traits, aside from his refusal to accept the responsibility for the failure of his actions, was his ability to change his opinions at a moment’s notice.

Once anti-American, he did a complete about-face when confronted with a war he escalated and could not fight, and from a supporter of Hitler’s rebuilding of Germany, he turned into a bitter enemy after a Jewish political action association composed of wealthy businessmen hired him to be their spokesman.

Churchill lavishly praised Roosevelt to his face and defamed him with the ugliest of accusations behind his back. The American President was a far more astute politician than Churchill and certainly far saner.

In order to support his war of vengeance, Churchill had to buy weapons from the United States and Roosevelt stripped England of all of her assets to pay for these. Only when England was bankrupt did Roosevelt consent to the Lend-Lease project, and in a moment of malicious humor, titled the bill “1776” when it was sent to Congress.

Hitler’s bombing of England was not a prelude to invasion, but a retaliation for Churchill’s instigation of the bombing of German cities and Churchill used the threat of a German invasion to whip up pro-British feelings in the United States. Threats of invasion by the Germans, in this case of the United States, have been cited by such writers as Weinberg as the reason why Roosevelt had to get into the war. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese had even the slightest intention to invade the continental United States and exhaustive research in the military and political archives of both countries has been unable to locate a shred of evidence to support these theories.

 

 

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