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Back when Paul Ryan was still holding out on endorsing Donald Trump as the GOP nominee, he referenced “free trade” as a pillar of the Party of Lincoln. In response, Pat Buchanan put the lie to that claim. Thanks to my client Kushro Ghandi for sending this post along for a look back. Readers very much enjoyed Kushro’s view on this issue posted at Richardcyoung.com earlier in the month.
Pat Buchanan writes:
But when did free trade become dogma in the Party of Lincoln?
As early as 1832, young Abe declared, “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank … and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles.”
Campaigning in 1844, Lincoln declared, “Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth.”
Abe’s openness to a protective tariff in 1860 enabled him to carry Pennsylvania and the nation. As I wrote in “The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy” in 1998:
“The Great Emancipator was the Great Protectionist.”
During his presidency, Congress passed and Abe signed 10 tariff bills. Lincoln inaugurated the Republican Party tradition of economic nationalism.
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 The Wall Street Journal
analyzes the outcome of Germany’s decision to allow waves of “unaccompanied minors” to pour into the country.
BERLIN—A 17-year-old asylum seeker’s rampage on a German train has thrown the spotlight on a subset of migrants seen as particularly susceptible to crime or radical extremism: unaccompanied minors.
The attacker’s age hits directly at concerns recently voiced by German officials and youth workers: that lone-traveling teenagers are especially prone to extremist ideology or recruitment by criminal gangs or fanatics.
Germany is currently home to some 52,232 unaccompanied refugees under the age of 18, according to the family ministry. Last year alone, between 25,000 and 35,000 unaccompanied foreign children were taken in by youth services.
Delinquent Afghan youths, in particular, have also become a fixture of German local crime reports. In February, three young Afghans were filmed harassing a group of passengers on the Munich subway.
In Paris, Debbie and I have often witnessed, first hand, groups of young smiling foreigners surrounding tourists and shoving clipboards under their noses, ostensibly looking for signatures for some made-up cause. The next step is the boosting of wallets and potentially passports. Naïve tourists don’t stand a chance against these well-orchestrated chaotic strikes. This same activity also prevails on France’s excellent rail system.
Debbie and I are always on the alert and keep plenty of space between us and any potential foreign troublemaker. We tend not to take public transportation or taxis off the street. We usually ask our hotel concierge to call for a taxi service known to the hotel.
The countries we have traveled to this year in Europe have turned hard right on the subject of Muslim immigration. This is especially so in Hungary and Austria. We have yet to hit Poland or the Netherlands, but discussion is in same hard right, anti-immigration direction. This right-wing positioning is the central reason for the stunning success of Brexit.
The progressive left in America is on the wrong side of the anti-immigration movement sweeping Europe. The ongoing experience in Europe, especially in France, Germany. Hungary and Austria, is the proof in the pudding. Immigrants from heavily populated radicalized Muslim countries just do not assimilate today, have not assimilated in the past, and certainly will not assimilate in the future.
Donald Trump clearly has made this case to the American voter. Mr. Trump’s competitor, “crooked” Hillary, informs Americans that Muslims are not the problem—they are peaceful folk. Well, no doubt, many are peaceful. But why do you not witness, hear or read about attacks by Hindus, Buddhists, Christians or Jews?
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Dick and I will no longer be looking in the rearview mirrors of our Harley-Davidsons. After 24 years of riding over 120,000 miles, we are hanging up our riding gear. Sad? In many ways, of course. But the flip side is that we have seen plenty of this country from two wheels without one serious mishap.
Back roads give insight into much of the heart and soul of America—the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly. Among our most memorable riding miles, however, were those through our great national parks, especially in Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Wyoming and Montana. It has been an experience to be treasured.
Enjoy here from NPR a virtual reality geology lesson on what the Rocky Mountains tell us about Earth.
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Pat Buchanan drives home the point that a Trump-led GOP is not going to be about open borders, free trade globalism, or reflexive interventionism.
About Cruz, a prediction: He will not be the nominee in 2020. He will never be the nominee. If Trump wins, Cruz is cooked. If Trump loses, his people will not forget the Brutus who stuck the knife in his back.
The crisis of today’s Republican Party stems from a failure to recognize, after Reagan went home, and during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, that America now faced a new set of challenges.
By 1991, America’s border was bleeding. Thousands were walking in from Mexico every weekend. The hundreds of thousands arriving legally, the vast majority of them Third World poor, began putting downward pressure on working-class wages. Soon, these immigrants would begin voting for the welfare state on which their families depended, and support the Party of Government.
By 1991, free trade had begun to send our factories and jobs overseas and de-industrialize America.
The ideology was a belief in free trade that borders on the cultic, though free trade had been rejected by America’s greatest leaders: Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
The political correctness stemmed from a fear of being called racist and xenophobic so paralyzing, so overpowering, that some Republicans would ship the entire Third World over here, rather than have it thought they would ever consider the race, ethnicity or religion of those repopulating America.
The new GOP is not going to be party of open borders, free trade globalism or reflexive interventionism.
With Trump’s triumph, the day of reckoning has arrived.
Trump: We will never, ever sign bad trade deals
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I am aware of no one who does a better job of alerting Americans to the abject cancer of radical Islam than former CIA bin Laden unit chief Dr. Michael Scheuer.
There is no question in my mind that any incoming American president should headline on his “America First” “Defend America at all Costs” team Dr. Scheuer, America’s
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Cato Institute’s Dr. Christopher Preble, former New York City police chief Ray Kelly, former Blackwater stalwarts Cofer Black and Eric Prince and legendary former CIA operative Gary Berntsen.
 
 
 
  
 
 
Dr. Scheuer explains to loyal and adroit followers that:
The attack in Nice, France, on 14 July 2015, has set off another festival of death in Europe, complete with candles, flowers, tears, and handwritten notes. This is the current European generation’s consistently effete and feckless answer to the murderous acts of war inflicted on them by Islamist fighters. It is a tradition good for florists, stationers, candle-makers, and handkerchief producers, but it is merely a source of endless mirth for the Islamists, and horror for the few adults remaining in the West.
My own response to the attack was to thank God that it was in Europe and not America, and to ponder why in the world the Europeans have not yet hung and then drawn-and-quartered their leaders after nearly two decades of their abject failure to provide adequate national security.
If the West does not abstain it will die.
If the United States is to survive its war with Islam, it can do so only by facing reality, resolutely putting its own interests first.
The United States is bankrupt, perhaps irretrievably so. It cannot possibly afford to fight what now is a world war against the Islamists. The war itself is the result of failed, even brain-dead leadership by George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all of both parties’ 2016 presidential candidates, save Trump.
The United States government was created for only four reasons; namely, to secure the republic’s continental domain; effectively defend Americans against foreign attack; protect and assist the growth of the Constitution’s regime of ordered liberty and limited government; and facilitate the growth of American business, trade, and enterprise at home and internationally.
The U.S. military and intelligence services are too small to deal with what George W. Bush and Barack Obama have turned into a world war against Islam.
The U.S. and NATO are led by people who have proven, since Osama bin Laden declared war on them in August, 1996, that they find the idea of military victory old-fashioned and repugnant,
In Sum: There are today today and have been for over thirty years only five issues that demand implementation by the U.S. national government: (a) the aggressive dismantling of the unconstitutional legal and economic preferences given to women, minorities, legal and illegal immigrants, sexual deviants, etc., and the restoration of the equality of all before the law; (b) a 180-degree change in the republic’s interventionist foreign policy; (c) control and then elimination of the national government’s debt; (d) promotion of the highest possible level of employment; and (e) closing the borders of the United States and a adopting 10-year ban on all immigration
Also read:
751 “No-Go” Zones in France
Muslims Incompatible with French Society
And remember, this is how Hillary Clinton views terrorism:
Nice attack: “people fell like bowling pins”
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For years I have followed the excellent work of Eileen Norcross at the Mercatus Center. Norcross laid the foundations for my RIP Map, and is always a source of great information. Earlier this summer, Norcross and Mercatus Center research assistant Olivia Gonzalez, released a report Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition. Needless to say, if you’re not paying attention to what your state is up to, you might be in for a rude awakening when you see this. Read the report below.
Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition
Download (PDF, 3.54MB)
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Could a Donald Trump presidency be the last nail in NATO’s coffin? “NATO is an alliance showing multiple signs of a terminal condition,” writes Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Trump “would be almost certain to demand major reforms, and it is not out of the realm of possibility that he would even seek a U.S. withdrawal.”
The founding principle of Article 5—the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty—is that of collective self-defense: “an armed attack on one or more (members) shall be considered an attack on all.”
In an interview with the NYT, Mr. Trump makes it clear that he would decide to render aid only if the members in question have “fulfilled their obligations to us. … If we decide we have to defend the United States, we can always deploy” from American soil, adding, “and it will be a lot less expensive.”
Read more from Mr. Carpenter here.
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Donald Trump got into some trouble last week when he told the New York Times’ David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that when it came to NATO allies who might come under attack but had not pulled their own weight in the alliance, “I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, ‘Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.’”
This is heresy to the DC foreign policy establishment, which uses NATO to justify part of its existence and to fund cushy junkets to Europe. As Michelle Obama and now Melania Trump have reminded us, your word is your bond, and the DC foreign policy establishment has promised to spill American blood in defense of Talinn, Riga, and Vilnius. So for them, that’s the end of that.
For Trump, however, the theme is “America First.” According to the GOP candidate, the term implies to him nothing more than that “we are going to take care of this country first before we worry about everybody else in the world.” It’s a sentiment so modest that it’s both uncharacteristic of Trump and hard to argue with.
But it’s from this point of view that Trump’s stated preference makes no sense. Trump told Sanger and Haberman that when it comes to NATO–and presumably other alliances–he thinks the the U.S. government should be “reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth.”
Modifiers aside, although that’s somewhat more self-aware than the status quo, it’s still deranged. The U.S. military is not some global gendarmerie to be hired out to those who can afford her services. (What if China decided to hire us out?) Rather, the American people and their leaders are supposed to figure out some sort of intelligible interests for which we would go to war, then try to prevent or, if impossible, win such a war.
To get past these obvious problems, the DC establishment has used Rube Goldberg-style logic to connect the well being of villagers in the Latvian suburbs to unemployed Rust Belt machinists.
The fact is that NATO or no NATO, with Estonia spending 2 percent of GDP on defense or 20 percent, there is nothing in Estonia worth fighting a war with Russia over. It is a terrible truth of international politics that some smaller, weaker states are consigned to living next to larger, bullying ones (just ask Porfirio Díaz), but Estonia’s particular dilemma bears little on the well-being of the United States.
This would have been a very relevant fact to consider before the United States rushed into an Article V commitment to the country, but it remains relevant today. Unless one attributes witchy and transitive properties to our dozens of treaty commitments, the damage from letting the Baltic states be bullied or even Finlandized by Russia is far less than the cost of backing up a commitment to defend them. Perhaps this is why there was no NATO military plan for defending the Baltic states until five years after they were admitted into the alliance. Best not to think about it.
NATO has been transformed from a reflection of U.S. interests in Europe into something elites use to define those interests: get into NATO, and you become something worth fighting for. That gets things backward. There’s a lot in Europe that bears hardly at all on U.S. security these days, including a number of NATO member-states. Elites–including “America First” ones like Donald Trump–ought to come to grips with that reality.
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Debbie and I live in Newport, R.I. part of the year, not far from where Debbie grew up off the Cliff Walk and close to the best hotel/restaurant in Rhode Island, The Chanler at Cliff Walk. Our close second choice is Castle Hill Inn, with its rolling lawn overlooking the East Passage and Narragansett Bay. Newport is hard to match during the summer months and going into early October. Options for a tremendous getaway are endless. When your talking the best of New England, however, you had better not be on a tight budget. Getting the best comes at a price.
Summer is about lobster, and Chanler offers, along with many other fine options, an authentic New England roll. Briny oysters from all over the New England coast are among the best you’ll find. The lunch and dinner menus are a first choice for both Debbie and me, but perhaps the best feature of Chanler’s Spiced Pear restaurant is its first-rate staff—friendly, knowledgeable and accommodating.
You will know you’ve made a great first choice the minute the front portico staff takes away your Bentley to a privileged parking spot (no kidding!). And what a spot for a wedding. Along with Castle Hill, Chanler represents the best New England has to offer. Enjoy!
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