An Election for the Ages

When it comes to the stakes involved in UniParty election races, dueling hyperbole is often the essence of the matter. But not here. Not this time. Not in the fraught battle in the 4th District of Kentucky.

The outcome of the Massie/Gallrein race on Tuesday may truly prove to be the inflection point at which, in its 250th year, the American Republic was either lost….or vindicated to thereby bestow its blessings upon generations to come.

That’s because what is at stake is far more than a lone Congressman’s resolute stand against the bully-boy demands for absolute loyalty by a sitting president of his own party. Nor even whether the onerous Bibi Netanyahu brigades of AIPAC truly do own the US Congress lock, stock and barrel.

What is ultimately on the line is the Donald’s dog’s breakfast of principle-free right-wing statism and his harsh uber-partisanship and demand for unwavering loyalty to every action and thought of the Dear Leader in the Oval Office. Either of these toxins, if taken to Trumpian extremes, could well threaten constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in America.

But taken together they are a terminal malignancy that endangers the very future of the Republic at its quarter-millennium. So in the pantheon of America’s heroes a Tom Massie ride to victory on Tuesday will surely rank right up there with Paul Revere’s midnight excursion, Thomas Jefferson’s mighty pen, James Madison’s constitution-drafting wisdom and George Washington’s renunciation of the kingly power.

To be sure, the Donald’s penchant for all manner of things inconsistent with the GOP’s old time religion—heavy tariff-taxes, soaring spending and public debts, open-ended borrowing and printing press money, industrial policy interventionism and random Federal stock ownership in politically favored companies, gargantuan bailouts and societal regimentation during the pandemic and much more—are evidence of what is at stake in Kentucky: Tom Massie has been the sentinel of liberty bearing witness on the floor of the People’s House against every one of these misbegotten Trumpian embraces of the Leviathan on the Potomac.

Even then, of course, you could say this is all just debatable policy. Reasonable people can disagree about the advisability or efficacy of high tariffs or big deficits or depreciating the people’s money.

But the Donald has gone way beyond being dead wrong with respect to principles or philosophy: Like Caesar, he has crossed the Rubicon of permitted conduct within the temple of American democracy itself.

He therefore must be repudiated on Tuesday as the first step toward the ultimate censure possessed by America’s constitutional scheme for containing the Kraken always lurking under the surface of state power: To wit, impeachment, conviction and removal from Office by the US Marshals. And preferably in handcuffs, which would seal a defining roadblock to Trump-like Ceasarian usurpers for generations to come.

After 455 days in the Oval Office, the Donald’s Ceasarian will to power is no longer in question. And we are not just talking about weaponization of the DOJ, or the seemingly symbolic obnoxiousness of his White House Ballroom, or the proposed triumphal arches on the national mall or his blasphemous military parades or even his tendentious attacks on the Supreme Court, which properly reined-in his sweeping abuse of the 1977 IEEA to impose trillions of tariff-taxes on American consumers without a constitutionally required enactment by Congress.

While all of these constitute overreach enough, they are in many respects in the same league as some of the excesses of Tricky Dick, LBJ, Dubya, Barry and, most recently, Otto Penn, among others.

But what truly crosses the line is the Donald’s egregiously transparent seconding of America’s War Machine to a foreign power to illegally launch a surprise military attack on Iran; and one solely in behalf of Bibi Netanyahu’s 35-year rein in Jerusalem based on demonization of the mullahs of Tehran and Qom and their IRGC confederates across the ancient lands of Persia.

That is to say, what’s different about this illegal and unconstitutional presidential war is there isn’t even a fig leaf of national security justification. There was no incursion across a fake border like at the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950 or a false flag attack like the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam in 1964 or even the doctored intelligence about Saddam’s non-existent WMDs in 2001.

The only semblance of a casus belli was a ragged potpourri of lies about Iran’s non-existent “nukes” that Netanyahu has been peddling for decades and which finally found its mark in an Oval Office occupant stupid and impetuous enough to believe it.

Yet prior to February 28th, no official agency of even the US War Machine itself endorsed Bibi’s nuke lies nor promoted the false claim that Iran was an imminent and existential threat to the military security of the American Homeland. To the contrary, the truth embodied in the Donald’s own intelligence, if he had bothered to read it, was that Iran had—

• no blue water Navy.
• no long-range bombers.
• no sea or airlift capacity to put military forces ashore on the New Jersey coast.
• no ballistic missiles capable of reaching even the Strait of Gibraltar 2,500 kilometers from Tehran, to say nothing of Washington DC 10,000 km distant.
• and, most especially, no nuclear weapons or even the semblance of a capability to weaponize HEUs.

When it comes to Iran’s purported military threat to America’s Homeland, therefore, the POTUS’ own intelligence added up to zero, nichts, nada and nugatory. That is, Trump launched an illegal and unprovoked war when even the Washington War Machine and its massive spying operations attested to the truth of the bullet points above, and thereby ixnayed any and all justifications for this utterly reckless presidential act.

And, no, the putative exposure of 45,000 US soldiers at the various Persian Gulf bases and naval deployments doesn’t count as an excuse for the unilateral military attacks of February 28th, either. That’s because by any rational form of geopolitical reckoning none of these deployments should even be there.

The fact is, these extensive US forces do not provide an iota of enhanced security to the Homeland territory of the USA; they are deployed there, instead, in behalf of a so-called “ally” that has become nothing less than a genocidal terrorist state that systematically undermines America’s legitimate national security in the middle east and beyond.

Likewise, and also in the “no” category, is the hoary story peddled by Bibi and his AIPAC/neocon Fifth Column about Iran’s alleged 47-year war on America from 1979 to 2026. Most especially, the alleged Iranian murder of 1,050 Americans pursuant to chants of death to the Great Satan is an entirely threadbare propaganda concoction.

• Not one of these 1,050 American deaths during this period occurred on American soil.
• Just 9 of these deaths were attributable to the Iranian military over the span of a half century.
• Fully 603 of these deaths occurred at the hands of Iran-aligned Iraqi militias defending their own country when the US invaded and occupied it in 2001-2003, which militias happened to be Shiite in a majority Shiite country.
• Another 241 were killed at the US Marines barracks in Beirut in October 1983 after the US had foolishly intervened in the war in Southern Lebanon between local Shiite defenders of their own homes and towns against the occupying Israeli army; and which deployment did not have a goddamned thing to do with the Homeland Security of America, as President Reagan belatedly recognized when he quickly redeployed these marine forces to an aircraft carriers deep in the Mediterranean Sea.
• In all fully 1,000 or 96% of these ballyhooed America deaths happened in the context of unnecessary US military deployments to the region and the resulting interventions in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and adjacent territories and coastal waters that had exactly nothing to do with the Homeland Security of America,

Even after all this, however, you might say that Congress merely needs to put on its Big Boy Pants and shutdown the Donald’s illegal and illicit war in behalf of a rogue ally. But what takes the entire case over the Rubicon to the imperative of impeachment is the joint campaign of the Netanyahu Fifth Column and the Donald’s own vicious attacks on Tom Massie and a handful of former MAGA colleagues who have come to his aid.

The Netanyahu Fifth Column has already spent upwards of $15 million including $3 million from the unregistered Israeli lobbyists, Paul Singer, Miriam Adelson and John Paulson, and millions more from AIPAC affiliated operations. These funds are obviously being mobilized as a lesson to every sitting member of the US Congress: Embrace the Netanyahu deployment of American military forces when, if and as needed or be purged from office.

Moreover, when you add the millions more mobilized by the Trump-aligned super-PAC called MAGA KY you are at$15 million to defeat Tom Massie in a primary 0r upwards of $800 per vote that would be needed for Gallrein to win. But the manner in which these staggering amounts of campaign funds are being assembled is truly beyond the pale.

That is to say, the Donald is conducting an illegal, unnecessary and globally destructive war in behalf of a foreign power, and then combining the vast resources of his own Super-PAC with the latter’s US-based campaign funding-raising machine to drive from office the single most consistent and courageous politician to serve in the US Congress in modern times: Not only as as a stout opponent of the Iran War and all the misbegotten Forever Wars, but also as a champion of personal liberty, free markets, small government, fiscal rectitude and sound money (well, at last since our own 4-year term in 1977-1981!).

This massive mobilization of campaign funds in behalf of the Netanyahu Agenda is bad enough in its own right. But if you simply read the bombastic, juvenile name-calling words of these two weekend missives from the Donald, there is no escaping the conclusion: To wit, the man is a not mentally fit, and therefore is a clear and present danger every day he remains in the Oval Office.

Getting Donald Trump into US Marshal’s handcuffs and out of the Oval Office will surely be an arduous task. But a giant step in this direction can be taken by the voters of the 4th District of Kentucky tomorrow by sending Tom Massie back to Washington with a message that will ring down through the ages—that is, that Ceasarian bullies and constitution-usurpers have no place in the governance of American democracy.

If we are lucky it may also liberate the GOP from the noxious statist tentacles of Trumpism. The truth is, there is no chance for the survival of constitutional liberty and free market prosperity in America unless there is a vigorous competition in Washington between the Government Party of the Dems and an authentic anti-government party per the traditional old time balanced budget religion of the GOP.

The present complete absence of this competition is the true evil of Trump-O-Nomics. That is to say, managed trade and investment via the Donald’s hideous tariffs and Art of the Deal trade negotiations are bad enough. So is his blatant labor market manipulation and its state-ordered shrinkage in the guise of deporting illegal aliens, when a market based solution could be achieved in a heartbeat via a proper guest worker program that systematically vetted work-seeking immigrants at US embassies and consulates in Mexico and points south.

But the real statist danger of Trump-O–Nomics arises from the Donald’s utterly mistaken lifelong belief that low interest rates and printing press money are the key to economic prosperity.

They are not. Massive monetization of the soaring public debt is what ultimately enables uncontrolled Federal spending, borrowing and untoward statist interventions in the free market and relentless Washington meddling in the operations of a free society.

So, yes, there is a chance to get two birds with one stone in the tomorrow’s historic election in the 4th District of Kentucky,

A victory for Tom Massie would be the death knell for the Netanyahu usurpation of America’s War Machine and would pave the way for bringing the Empire home.

Even more importantly, it would also be a crushing political defeat for Trump that could finally trigger the removal from office of a rightwing statist whose abandonment of the GOP’s historic commitment to fiscal rectitude and sound money threatens the very long-term survival of constitutional liberty and free market prosperity in America.

https://davidstockman.substack.com/p/an-election-for-the-ages-bb5