It is becoming much clearer why the Neoconservative-led Republican Party establishment chose Sarah Palin as its VP candidate. There seems to be four primary reasons for this. First, the female factor. Palin may well be appealing to Hillary fans who had their heart set on a female candidate. Second, the social conservatism/Republican base issue. Sarah appeals to all of the core Republican rank-and-file political interest groups: pro-lifers, pro-gunners, evangelical Christians, fiscal conservatives, ”free market libertarians”, paleocons, and other such milieus. Third, Sarah Palin comes from outside the ranks of the elite. Rumor has it Mitt Romney was originally scheduled to be McCain’s VP until all the brouhaha about his seven houses came along: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/how_palin_got_picked/

Lastly, the Washington Times has reported that Mrs. Palin has an Israeli flag on the wall of her governor’s office:

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/04/palins-evangelical-faith-drives-pro-israel-view/ 

No wonder the Neocons, who are essentially nothing more than the “Israel First Party”, found her to be such an appealing VP prospect. Here’s uber-neocon Bill Kristol, son of Neconservative godfather Irving Kristol, offering his endorsement of Palin two months before she was selected:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSy8sNiH9-0

So the fix is in. Palin is indeed the Neocons’ dream, a political outsider capable of appealing to the Republican base, crossing over to Democratic and Independent women, and willing to function as a useful idiot for the “Zion Uber Alles” agenda of the Neocons. It fits perfectly. The day Palin was named as McCain’s running mate I saw her on television praising McCain for his supposedly prescient warnings of the supposedly renewed Russian threat which are supposedly legitimated by the Russo-Georgian conflict. What a crock. A serious foreign policy thinker would at least consider the irreducible minimum of serious international questions to be dealt with. These include:

1. The need to reverse the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations’ efforts to encircle Russia by incorporating former Warsaw Pact nations and Russian border states into NATO. What is the current need for NATO, anyway? The original purpose of the alliance was to prevent Soviet incursion into Western Europe by taking advantage of the military weakness of these nations following WW2. The European countries are wealthy enough to provide for their own military defense. If they refuse to do so, that is their problem.

2. The domination of American Middle East policy by a handful of narrow special interests, primarily the Israel Lobby, the armaments industry and “Big Oil”.

3. The need to end the war in Iraq, which was initiated under fraudulent pretenses.

4. The impending loss of the war in Afghanistan.

5. Efforts by the Bush administration to destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan.

6. Efforts by the Neocons to provoke war with Iran under the pretense of combatting Iran’s grossly exaggerated nuclear capabilities.

7. The need to recognize Palestinian independence.

8. The financial dependence of the US on Russian, Chinese and Japanese banks.

9. The dramatic fall of the value of the dollar, now known as the peso north of the Rio Grande.

These are just the beginnners. There is no evidence that Sarah Palin knows anything or cares anything about any of these matters, but then neither does her running mate or her competitors. Therefore, the accusations made that she is “unqualified” are true but irrelevant.

ARV associate and ATS webmaster Jeremy Weiland of Social Memory Complex http://blog.6thdensity.net/ has done a very good job keeping the rest of us informed concerning the protests at the Republican convention and the incidents of police brutality, harrassment and arbitary arrest that are taking place there. While these unfortunate people no doubt deserve our support, e.g., contributing to bail funds, writing letters of protest to newspaper, jamming phone lines, etc., these incidents also remind me of why I generally look askance at such protests. Forty years ago, anti-Vietnam War protestors staged a rally at the Democratic convention in Chicago that turned into a streetfight between protestors and cops. This was in the days before SWAT teams and paramilitary policing. I have long predicted that the present US ruling class/regime-the product of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush-would never again allow civil unrest of the kind that transpired in the 1960s to take place. Today, the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden would suffer the fate of the folks at Waco in 1993. The only exceptions are those situations like the L.A. riots of 1992 and the New Orleans hurricanes of 2005 where the state simply loses control. As Jeremy as written:http://richmond.leftlibertarian.org/2008/9/3/goodbye-to-protest

“there are important lessons being learned on site about how the Seattle model has been rendered ineffective by the Miami model. Essentially, as I argue at my blog, we need to realize that protest is dead:

So if we’re in a police state now, what do we do? Obviously, there was a point at which the citizens of Germany in the ’30s gave up on speaking out. There was a point at which the Soviet citizens stopped protesting the Bolshevik treachery. Throughout history, people who found themselves under a totalitarian government had to face a terrible fact: that the modes of democratic society were no longer tenable.

But to admit to yourself the horrible truth, that we have lost our country, that is the truly difficult thing. Keep in mind, however, that it has always been through denial, self-deception, and lack of honesty on the part of the people that totalitarianism has gained a foothold. We must be courageous, pragmatic, and most of all careful. The rules have changed, and if we’re going to play this game we do well to use our time-outs to strategize, not simply to feel sorry for ourselves. In other words, as much as I hate to say it, we’re going to have to unlearn the bad habits of citizenship in a democratic republic.

It’s time for the activist movement to modify their tactics to reflect the new environment. Flaunting our outrage in the hopes of media attention and citizen backlash has failed. Throwing our bodies on the gears of the machine has not slowed it, let alone stopped it. Protesting every violation of our rights just demonstrates in spades how vulnerable and dependent we are. Demonstrating and organizing just provide easy targets for agent provocateurs, infiltration, and extralegal, preemptive harassment.”

I actually gave up on protest demonstrations years ago, viewing them primarily as theatrical events and social gatherings rather than serious political actions. Most of the participants in such efforts typically come from the Left, which serves as yet another powerful bit of evidence that the Left has not progressed intellectually or tactically in forty years. More than ever, we are in need of a “third way” beyond the Neoconservative/Zionist/Trotskyite/Jacobin jingoism of what passes for the Right and the cultural Marxism/60s nostalgism of what passes for the Left. The Right maintains its position by offering jingoistic nationalism and pandering to right-wing political interest groups and presenting itself as the party of “hard-working, tax-paying, decent, real Americans” versus all of those hippie and Hollywood weirdos and homos. The Left maintains its position by pretending to be the party of all of the oppressed or allegedly oppressed-the poor, the elderly, workers, women, racial minorities, gays and others. Of course, both factions are really just the different sides of the coin of state-capitalism who disagree slightly on the best way to go about managing the global corporate empire. From where will a “third force” arise?

The American Right is not really a “right” at all but a kind of neo-Jacobinism. The American Left is a hopelessly archaic relic from past times with no sense of direction whatsoever, and with all of its core constituent groups being solidly integrated into the ranks of the middle to upper middle classes. It is time to look beyond the “conservative” paradigm of nationalism, economic conservatism and “traditional values” and the “liberal” orientation towards the welfare state and 1960s-style cultural politics. I have in the past suggested the need for a “revolutionary right that out-lefts the left” or perhaps a “revolutionary left that is so far left it is on the right.” I have long believed that the key to the development of a revolutionary outlook that bridges the radical right with the radical left is to appeal to the lumpenproletarian classes across conventional cultural and ideological boundaries. With this idea in mind, my attention was recently called to the following description of my own approach:

http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/06/16/all_i/#comment-20080618004609

“Forget smashing the state- if you could just get together a visible left-libertarian movement which really does have participation from women, people of colour, etc., which really does care about actual individualism and being able to live as you desire, which can gain respect from the left and force recognition from the vulgar and reactionary libertarian right, which distinguishes itself clearly from nihilistic Strasserist Keith Preston-style thuggery, and which really has something to offer as a social and mutual aid network for people who care about their lives being their own… “

For those who don’t know, a “Strasserite” is more or less a follower of the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, who were left-wing rivals to Hitler in the early days of the National Socialist movement in Germany. No, I’m not really a Strasserite, but from the above comments one gets a good idea of where the Left’s cultural politics eventually lead. “Forget smashing the state”, indeed. Forget smashing the empire that has slaughtered millions worldwide and threatens nuclear war. Forget smashing the police state that has become a modern slavocracy. Forget the Third Worldization of the American economy. Who cares about all of that so long as we can chase butterflies in the park, just so long as a more than proportional number of the butterfly-chasers originate from all of the Officially Oppressed demographic groupings?

No, my friends, it is time for war. We have two highly successful models to draw upon-Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Nepal’s Peoples’ War Group, two factions as ideologically different as they could be but providing shining examples of what real revolutionary politics actually looks like. Of course, this does not mean that we simply go out and start shooting. We’ll leave that to students and postal workers. The pan-secessionist movement is growing. Dozens of separatist organizations have appeared and more are no doubt on the horizon. Our natural constituencies are the lumpen masses ignored by the Right and Left of the establishment. Our role models are our friends from Lebanon, Nepal and elsewhere.  The fourth generation forces are on the rise worldwide. Rot in Hell, Neocons and Leftoids, we’re done with you.