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Monday, April 24, 2023

Buckley’s Battle with the Birchers Was No Myth
National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.(National Review)

By ALVIN S. FELZENBERG
April 23, 2023 

His full-scale attack on the John Birch Society was a turning point. He emerged from the controversy in the role of ‘tablet keeper’ of the conservative movement.

‘Of all the crusades William F. Buckley took on in his half century on the national political stage,” I wrote in 2017, “none did more to cement his reputation as a gatekeeper of the conservative movement — or consumed more of his time — than that which he launched against the John Birch Society.”

But was his heart really in it? Matthew Dallek in his Politico discussion of William F. Buckley Jr. and the John Birch Society offers a resounding “no.” He debunks what he calls “a popular idea that Buckley cordoned off the Birchers and expelled them” from the conservative movement. He goes as far as to declare the action so many of Buckley’s admirers across the political spectrum consider his “finest hour” a “myth.” Dallek concedes that Buckley moved against JBS founder Robert Welch but states that he did not truly attack the organization Welch founded. Not so.


In the early 1960s, Buckley condemned Welch in the strongest possible terms. He feared that the liberal establishment and the Rockefeller wing of the GOP would use Welch’s comments (especially his characterization of Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of an international communist conspiracy) to cast all conservatives as “extremists,” and, therefore, unfit for public office or to influence public opinion.

Early in that decade, few, whether on the left or on the right, regarded William F. Buckley Jr. as the recognized leader of the conservative movement. Barry Goldwater was. And, as Dallek points out, Goldwater was in no mood to take on Welch’s organization, whose members Goldwater considered “nice people” (an assessment he voiced at a meeting with Buckley plotting how to disentangle conservatism from Bircherism). National Review followed Goldwater’s lead and limited its criticism of the JBS to Welch. That was then.

More on
CONSERVATISM

William F. Buckley Sr.: Father of a Revolution

The Inside Story of William F. Buckley Jr.’s Crusade against the John Birch Society

Goldwater’s national influence within the conservative movement began to decline after his landslide defeat to LBJ in the 1964 presidential election. In 1965, Buckley, as a candidate for mayor of New York City running against a liberal Republican and a liberal Democrat, wasted no time ferreting the John Birch Society out of the movement he helped found. That is what Dallek misses.

In August 1965, Buckley published three columns — both nationally and in National Review — taking the JBS to task. In a special issue of the magazine, he ran supportive commentary by Goldwater, Senator John Tower, and retired admiral William Radford. In the first essay, Buckley referenced ten JBS positions, all culled from a single issue of its magazine, American Opinion. Each statement took as its premise that large segments of the United States government were under communist control. Buckley inquired how the society’s membership could tolerate “such paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.” Elsewhere, he urged Birchers who disagreed with these positions to leave the society and beseeched readers of his own magazine to disassociate themselves politically from those who adhered to such positions.

In his attempt to draw parallels between Buckley’s actions then and Republicans of today seeking to draw distinctions between Trump and Trumpism, Dallek downplays the hailstorm Buckley brought down on himself and his magazine. Dallek refers to this as an “underappreciated price”: He “lost some subscribers; he endured barbs from allies as a result of his editorials, which had put him in the crosshairs of many leaders of the far right.” This is an understatement, to say the least. The cost was serious. So much so that, alarmed at the hemorrhaging of fleeing subscribers and donors NR was experiencing after Buckley’s scorching criticisms of the JBS, conservative columnist James Kilpatrick turned his column into a beg-a-thon to keep National Review afloat.

Undeterred, Buckley, in a photograph published by Life Magazine, delighted in holding up a one-word letter he received from an enraged Bircher. (Across the page was scribbled in Magic Marker the word “Judas.” Others proclaimed him a “traitor.”) With the Birchers attacking him so vigorously, Buckley’s liberal opponents gained little traction when they tried to portray Buckley as an “extremist.” Ditto today, as Dallek tries to fault Buckley for failing to stop the sort of radicalism, such as the January 6 Capitol riot, that his successors at NR condemned. Indeed, Buckley’s full-scale attack on the John Birch Society was a turning point for him and for the conservative movement. Buckley emerged from the controversy having assured his place as “tablet keeper” of the conservative movement, a role to which he had long aspired. It does his labors a disservice to belittle them as mere “fence-walking.”
NEXT ARTICLETrump on Late-Term Abortion: Promises Made, Promises Broken?

ALVIN S. FELZENBERG is the author of A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. and The Leaders We Deserved: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022


How the GOP's 'folk libertarians' and 'cynical irreligious right' clashed in the midterms: historian

Image via Creative Commons.
Alex Henderson November 23, 2022

When the Christian Right movement associated with White evangelical fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, James Dobson and the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell, Sr. became prominent in the Republican Party in the early 1980s, one of the United States’ most influential conservatives expressed total disdain for the movement. The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, railing against Falwell, made it abundantly clear that he believed the Christian Right was bad for the GOP and bad for conservatism.

Ironically, the arch-conservative Goldwater found himself in agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and shared their view that the last thing the U.S. needed was to become the type of theocracy that Falwell and other evangelicals wanted the U.S. to become. Goldwater, the ACLU and television producer Norman Lear’s People For the American Way weren’t anti-religion but rather, realized that a strong separation of church and state was necessary to protect religious freedom.

Falwell and Goldwater were both part of President Ronald Reagan’s fragile right-wing coalition of the 1980s, but the animosity between the two Republicans was considerable. And that tension between the secular right and the fundamentalist right continues to exist in 2022.

READ MORE: How Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, Sr. helped pave the way for Trumpism and the white nationalist horrors of the Trump era

In a think piece published by The Bulwark on November 22, historian Joshua Tait takes an in-depth look at the secular/fundamentalist rivalry on the American right — a rivalry that, according to Tait, is as intense as ever.

“On the illiberal right, there’s a divide between religiously motivated conservatives and their secular allies,” Tait explains. “This divide will likely grow, and be felt at both the elite and popular levels. In one sense, this is not new: There has long been a religious/secular fault line in the conservative coalition. But as hypocritical as the Religious Right can be, religious — generally Christian — impulses have, at times, tempered American conservatism. Now, however, we already see signs of a cynical irreligious right and how its ideas and attitudes have infected politically minded believers.”

According to Tait, trying to get the secular right and the fundamentalist right to find common ground is as difficult in 2022 as it was during the 1980s when Goldwater vowed to “fight” the Christian Right “every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’” Tait emphasizes that although “folk libertarians” are quick to express their contempt for “woke” ideology, that doesn’t automatically make them allies of the Christian Right.

“It’s hard to imagine that religious conservatives’ eternal commitments and their genuine belief in sin will allow for any sort of long-term alliance,” Tait argues. “As soon as Christians are perceived as a more censorious threat, the folk-libertarian impulse of this cohort will swing left, as we saw in the midterms.”

It's not just Trump: Midterms show the religious right is an albatross around the GOP’s neck

Image via The White House.
Amanda Marcotte and
Salon November 22, 2022

A couple of weeks out from a midterm election in which Republicans dramatically underperformed, one major theme has emerged in the post-mortems: Donald Trump is to blame. Turns out that voters do not like efforts to overthrow democracy, like Trump's attempted coup or the January 6 insurrection. As data analyst Nate Cohn at the New York Times demonstrated, Trump's "preferred primary candidates" — who usually won a Trump endorsement by backing his Big Lie — fell behind "other G.O.P. candidates by about five percentage points." The result is a number of state, local and congressional offices were lost that Republicans might otherwise have won.

Republican leaders are struggling with this information because dumping Trump is easier said than done so long as he has a substantial percentage of their voting base in his thrall. But, in truth, Republican problems run even deeper than that. It's not just Trump. The religious right has been the backbone of the party for decades, but this midterm election shows they might now be doing the GOP more harm than good at the ballot box.

As with Trump, Republicans are in a "can't win with them/can't win without them" relationship with the religious right. Fundamentalists remain a main source of organizing and fundraising for the GOP, as well a big chunk of their most reliable voters. They can't afford to alienate this group any more than they can afford to push away Trump. Doing so risks the loss of millions of loyal voters. But by continuing to pander to the religious right, Republicans are steadily turning off all other voters, a group that's rapidly growing in size as Americans turn their backs on conservative Christianity. That's doubly true when one looks at the youngest voters, the ones Republicans will need to stay viable as their currently aging voter base starts to die off.

New data from the progressive polling firm Navigator Research shows how dire the situation is for Republicans. On "culture war" issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, the voters broke hard on the progressive side of things. Among Democratic voters this midterm, 48% said abortion was an important issue for them, showing strong pro-choice sentiment. But among Republicans, only 13% ranked abortion (and the banning of it) as a driving factor in their vote. When Democratic voters were asked their main reason for their voting choice this year, abortion rights was the most popular, cited by 49% of voters. But among Republican voters, only 24% cited support for abortion bans as a major factor.

Republican politicians may have been circumspect in talking about their anti-abortion views prior to Election Day, hoping to make the issue less salient to swing voters. But overall, the past two years have been heavily defined by Republicans catering to the religious right. It's not just that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court went out of its way to overturn Roe v. Wade this past June. Republican leadership in state governments rushed forward to ban abortion, to the point where the red states seemed to be competing over how draconian their abortion bans could be.



Nor were the attacks on reproductive health care limited to abortion. In July, the House of Representatives voted on a bill to codify contraception rights so state governments couldn't ban birth control. All but eight Republicans voted to allow contraception bans. Democratic fears about legal contraception are not misplaced, either. Last week, ProPublica leaked audio of a meeting between anti-choice activists and Republican legislators in Tennessee, where the assembled can be heard gaming out their next steps to ban female-controlled forms of contraception.

The situation was similarly dire on the LGBTQ front, as Republican politicians raced to oppress queer and trans people, especially kids. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis championed the "don't say gay" law that forces queer teachers and students into the closet. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott menaced parents who accept a child's trans identity by threatening to use Child Protective Services to break up their families. Republicans keep passing laws blocking trans people from receiving health care or playing on sports teams. In addition, there's been a dramatic rise in conservatives attempting to ban books featuring LGBTQ characters.

This rash of queerphobic policy has been accompanied by an escalation of bigoted rhetoric in right wing media, all aimed at painting LGBTQ people as perverts and child predators. From Fox News on down the entire conservative media ecosystem, it's become routine to accuse queer people of being "groomers," which is a not-especially-oblique way to call them child molesters. Groups like the Proud Boys routinely target drag shows with intimidating "protests," which are starting to get violent. Over the weekend, there was a gun massacre at a gay club in Colorado Springs. While the police are still not speaking publicly about the killer's motive, observers have pointed out that the murders happened mere hours before a drag brunch, the kind of event that conservative groups have been targeting for harassment.

All of this ugliness did not help Republicans in the midterms. On the contrary, it appears to have hurt them, especially with such high youth voter turnout. As a national youth poll run by Harvard shows, younger people reject the fundamentalism that animates the Republican party. Only 12% identify as "fundamentalist/evangelical," while 37% — by far the biggest group — say they have no religious preference at all. This comports with other polling that shows that Christian churches are becoming older and smaller all the time, as young people leave in droves. Overall, 71% of Americans support same-sex marriage. About two-thirds of Americans want abortion to remain legal.

Even among Republican voters, the religious right doesn't seem particularly popular. Along with the low enthusiasm for abortion bans, the Navigator poll shows that Republican voters weren't super interested in anti-LGBTQ policy positions. Only 20% of those voters cited anti-trans views as a motivator in voting this year, despite nearly two years of non-stop right wing propaganda on this subject. The top three issues that got GOP voter juices going were opposition to social welfare spending, demands that government be "tough on crime" and anger over immigration. In other words, they were all proxy issues for white grievances about a racially diverse society. The Republican party still appeals to racist voters, but even they've lost the enthusiasm for being the panty police.

Despite this hard, statistical evidence, religious right activists refuse to accept that their extremism is hurting the Republican party. As Rachel Cohen of Vox explained last week, anti-abortion leaders insist that banning abortion is a winning issue for Republicans. Instead, as Politico reported, they're claiming that it was Republicans who failed by supposedly "not running harder on abortion restrictions."

Whether these arguments are delusional or simply bad faith hardly matters. The desperation is palpable. Christian conservatives are used to the Republican party being dependent on them, and therefore bending over backward to please them. But this data shows that pandering to the religious right might be hurting the GOP more than helping. Fundamentalists are learning they're just as dependent on the Republican party as the GOP is on them. No wonder they're doubling down. As more and more people leave their pews, their only foothold in staying relevant is to maintain control over the Republican party. As with Trump, they will not leave quietly, but continue to hold the GOP hostage to their increasingly unpopular agenda.

This 1980 report, 42 years later, sheds light on the Christian nationalist extremism of 2022


Image via Creative Commons.

Alex Henderson November 21, 2022

On August 24, 1980, the Washington Post published a report by journalist Kathy Sawyer that took a close look at what was, at the time, a new phenomenon on the right: the alliance of far-right White evangelicals and the Republican Party. And 42 years later, in 2022, Sawyer’s reporting sheds light on a movement that, critics argue, is unapologetically authoritarian in nature — a movement that has made considerable advances since then.


When Sawyer’s article was published, President Jimmy Carter was running for reelection; in November 1980, he suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of Republican former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who turned out to be the most influential U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From 1932 (the year in which FDR was elected) until 1980, liberalism arguably dominated the political conversation in the United States. But Reagan’s victory over Carter pushed the U.S. in a much more conservative direction. All of the Democratic presidents elected after the 1980s have been centrists — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — and the U.S. hasn’t had a staunch liberal in the White House since President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

As president, Reagan oversaw a fragile right-wing coalition that included everyone from far-right evangelicals to fiscal conservatives to libertarians. The Reagan coalition was by no means one big happy family, and ultimately, White evangelicals became much more influential in the Republican Party than than the libertarians they despised.

READ MORE: After Trump, Christian nationalist ideas are going mainstream – despite a history of violence



Sawyer’s report vividly describes the progress that White fundamentalist evangelicals like James Robison and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. were making in the GOP in August 1980. Reporting from Texas, Sawyer explained, “Evangelist leaders joined forces with conservative politicians here last week in exhorting millions of non-voting Christians to ‘crawl out from under those padded pews’ and take up political arms in the equivalent of a moral war to save America. The two-day gathering in the brimstone shimmer of 105-degree Texas heat was billed sedately as The National Affairs Briefing. But it was really a fusion of Bible-thumping revivalist oratory with hardline New Right politics. Its goal: to get godly conservatives elected to offices high and low across the land.”

Sawyer described a speech by Robeson in Texas, who railed against “perverts, radicals, leftists, communists, liberals and humanists" and declared, “Not voting is a sin against Almighty God.”

Sawyer reported, “The crowd heard speakers ranging from Phyllis Schlafly, anti-feminist leader of the Stop ERA movement, to a general who predicted a nuclear holocaust within a decade if America does not ‘turn to God’ and beef up military defenses against godless communism. The repentant son of atheist crusader Madelyn Murray O'Hair urged that prayer be returned to the schools. Champions of the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee promoted their cause. And throughout, attentions swung wildly from theology and scripture to instruction on how to organize without violating tax laws, the practicalities of registering a congregation to vote during the Sunday service and the importance of keeping a ‘moral score card’ on the voting record of elected representatives.”

Sawyer noted that the August 1980 event in Texas “grew out of the fledgling movement founded largely by radio and television preachers such as Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Va.”

READ MORE: How Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, Sr. helped pave the way for Trumpism and the white nationalist horrors of the Trump era

“The movement, however, has yet to demonstrate a significant ability to turn out the born-again vote,” Sawyer reported. “But it has shown enough promise to draw presidential nominee Reagan as a speaker Friday night in an appeal for Christian support. Reagan tried to avoid getting specific on such flammable topics as homosexual rights, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment during his stopover here.”

But even though Sawyer described the Christian Right as a “fledgling movement” in her article, that movement had its share of scathing critics in the early ‘80s — critics who hoped to nip it in the bud. And they were both liberal and conservative.

Liberal television producer Norman Lear — who gave us politically minded 1970s sitcoms like “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “Good Times” and “The Jeffersons” — founded People For the American Way in 1980 in response to the threat that the Christian Right posed. And on the right, conservative Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona made no secret of his disdain for the movement, which he believed was terrible for the GOP and terrible for the conservative movement. Liberal Lear and conservative Goldwater disagreed on many things, but they were on the same page when it came to saying that the U.S. needed to maintain a robust separation of church and state.

Goldwater viewed the Christian Right as a Pandora’s box, and just as he feared, the movement has only tightened its grip on the Republican Party — especially with the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were allies of far-right White evangelicals, but Trump has been much more inflammatory when speaking to them. Trump, who was only 34 when Sawyer’s article was published, repeatedly tells his evangelical and Christian nationalist supporters that Democrats pose an existential threat to Christianity in the U.S.

Of course, plenty of Democrats are churchgoing Christians. Centrist President Joe Biden is a devout Catholic; Sen. Raphael Warnock is a Protestant minister. Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, has quoted scripture much more often than Trump. But the Christian Right believes that only evangelical fundamentalists are true Christians.

When the Post published Sawyer’s article, White evangelicals were railing against Roe v. Wade but knew that there weren’t enough socially conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices to overturn it. But eventually, the Christian Right got the socially conservative Supreme Court it was hoping for. With the High Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Roe v. Wade was overturned after 49 years. And Justice Clarence Thomas made it clear that he would also like to see the Court “reconsider” rulings that offered protections for contraception (1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut), same-sex marriage (2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges) and gay relationships (2003’s Lawrence v. Texas).

In October, megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress called for “Christian nationalists” to “impose their values” on nonbelievers whether they liked it or not. In 2021, Michael Flynn, former national security adviser in the Trump Administration, called for the U.S. to “embrace one religion” and has made it clear that he believes religions other than Christianity should be illegal. And far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, in June 2022, declared, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it…. I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Forty-two years after Sawyer’s article was published, the Christian Right is not a marginal part of the Republican Party. It is a sizable GOP voting block — especially in red states — that many Republicans are afraid to criticize. And the movement, feeling empowered by the MAGA movement and the Dobbs decision, is showing no signs of backing down.

READ MORE: Texas pastor openly calls on 'Christian nationalists' to 'impose their values on society'

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

60 Years After Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy Ad,” the Silence on Nuclear War Is Dangerous

THE "AD" THAT NEVER RAN


 
 September 10, 2024
Facebook

Screenshot from the Daisy Advertisement.

One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.

The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.

Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.

His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”

So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop — and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.

Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.

Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.

Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.

Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.

Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.

“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.

Two decades after the summit that defrosted the cold war and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.

“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”

Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Nevada A Tie


For second place getween Ron Paul and John McCain. It's a statistical tie, yet one announcer on MSNBC announced earlier that when McCain had a few votes ahead of Paul, that it was a 'lead' for McCain. Now CNN predicts a tie. Yet Paul has beaten McCain, by the numbers. Paul is in the lead. He places second. But as usual this will get no press.

Its a conspiracy of silence, the media isn't talking to or about Paul. Despite his beating front runners McCain and Huckabee, and wannabes Thompson and Giuliani.He has consistently scored above Giuliani the Great White Hope from New York yet nary a comment from the pundits about him.



REPUBLICAN CAUCUSES January 19, 2008

Race
Status
Candidate
State Del.*
%
Del*
Precincts
Nevada
Updated 1 minute ago



21,537
52%
18
95%
reporting

5,345
13%
4

5,244
13%
4

3,266
8%
2

3,203
8%
2

1,777
4%
1

811
2%
0

0
0%
0


Nary a word about Paul not on Fox or MSNBC or CNN or heck even CNBC. Even though he has come in second twice now, first in Wyoming and now in Nevada. And he came in fourth behind Huckabee in Michigan.

Considering this deliberate media campaign of silence over Paul's candidacy and his campaign he still is getting support from the libertarians in the Republican base and independents.


While the media focuses on Evangelicals they overlook the importance of the libertarians and Barry Goldwater Republicans that have converged around Paul.

And he is getting their cash
Ron Paul MLK "Money Bomb" is Coming Up Monday, January 21

And he still has more delegates than Republican establishment wannabe Giuliani.

While some pundits see Huckabee as the anti-establishment candidate the Republican leadership fears. Paul is the disestablishmentarian candidate that the whole neo-con establishment fears.

SEE:

Who's the Loser?

New Hampshire Polling Puts Paul Fourth


The Secret Of Ron Paul's Success

Fox Vs. Paul

Huckabee: Paul is Dead.


Gravel and Paul on PBS

Republican Presidential Paul-itics

Libertarians for U.S. President

Ron Paul



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