Day one of the Rand Paul campaign was eventful. A lot of fury surrounded Paul’s foreign policy views. A neocon front outfit called the Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America is spending a reported $1 million on an ad saying that Paul supports Obama’s deal with Iran, so he’s “dangerous.”
Paul equivocated on the Iran deal during his announcement speech yesterday. He said that he was for negotiations and against war; but he wants Congress to sign off on the deal. And he signed the crazy Tom Cotton letter to Iranian leaders dismissing Obama’s negotiations as “mere executive agreement.”
Where did that money for that ad come from? The New York Times reports on the veteran conservative professionals working for the group but not the funders.
Chris Matthews was so angry about the ad he said that MSNBC shouldn’t air it. He said that Paul is taking on the “neocons and the piggish money behind them,” Politico reported.
Speaking soon after Paul announced he was running for president, Matthews said he salutes Paul “for having the guts to take on this crowd” and that he’s a candidate worth watching.
Matthews went on a populist riff on Paul’s behalf:
“You talk about big money being spent against him, let’s lay out who these people are. These ads are not coming from God. There is a rotten crowd out there that is hawkish in the Republican Party that wants to fight more wars and do more regime change and nation-building… All of this money that’s trying to create a right-wing hawkish Republican for president may not sit too well for the average Republican voter because the cloth-coat regular Republicans who send their kids to war are not the one who pay for these ads. They are totally different people. The ones who send their kids to war and come home maimed, and wondering what they hell they were doing it for — those people are not impressed by these goddamn ads.”
Matthews is obviously channeling the fury out there against the neocon Republican establishment–which has adherents among Democrats too. Matthews has regularly trumpeted the poll showing Paul ahead of Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania–an antiwar gauge.
Some of his fury is surely aimed at the Israel lobby, but Matthews still can’t say its name. He does a dog whistle instead; these aren’t “regular Republicans who send their kids to war.” No, Bill Kristol dodged the draft. Paul announced yesterday in Louisville with a stirring speech about taking “our country back“– from the special interests, he said, and the surveillance state. Maybe that is a dog whistle about the Israel lobby? I used the same words, “I want my country back,” in a post aimed at Israel’s influence inside the US discourse.
Neocon Michael Goldfarb implies that Matthews is anti-Semitic:
Don’t read too much into it, some of Chris Matthews best friends are piggish money people….
Yes but why isn’t Matthews calling out names? He should read Eli Clifton’s latest reporting on the money behind Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, who calls the Iran deal “Munich” and Obama Neville Chamberlain. Kirk is getting hundreds of thousands from the AIPAC crowd.
Kirk, who has never been “moderate” when it comes to Israel, has received major funding from both the biggest AIPAC-aligned PAC—NORPAC—and RJC [Republican Jewish Coalition] director [Paul] Singer.
According to Center for Responsive Politics data, from 2009 to 2014 Kirk received $111,585 from NorPAC and $105,950 from employees of Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by hawkish GOP billionaire Paul Singer. Taken together, contributions by NORPAC and Elliott Management have been the single-largest source of campaign contributions to Kirk during his career as a senator.
That’s the Israel lobby, neocons, Israel firsters, as MJ Rosenberg calls them. They’re big government hawks. Singer is a leader on same-sex marriage.
The Times describes the neocon donors as people who have the “power to reshape the Republican race.” Here are Nicholas Confessore and Maggie Haberman reporting in the New York Times on the pushback that Jeb Bush is getting from them over his alliance with his father’s top aide, James Baker, because Baker criticized Israel’s lack of commitment to a two-state solution at J Street three weeks ago:
Other wealthy donors, mindful of their power to reshape the Republican race with “super PAC” donations, have been more direct: The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson recently made what two people briefed on it described as an “animated” call to one of Mr. Bush’s top supporters after former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Bush adviser, criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in a speech in March..
Jewish donors… remain angry at Mr. Bush for a March 23 speech that Mr. Baker, who was secretary of state under Mr. Bush’s father, delivered to J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group. Mr. Adelson, perhaps the single largest Republican donor, quickly complained to Mel Sembler, a Florida developer who has long supported Mr. Bush.
Bush has had to answer the criticism, the Times says:
Mr. Bush was pressed again about Mr. Baker’s speech at another California event last week.
In defending himself, Mr. Bush, who has described himself as “my own man” on foreign policy, pointed out that his brother had a strong record of support for Israel, one attendee said.
Mr. Sembler declined to discuss his call with Mr. Adelson, but maintained that most of the party’s big donors were moving to Mr. Bush. He acknowledged, though, that “a few” were saying they would “hold off and see who else is really going to get in.”
His campaign website has a special section on Israel that is all praise. Rand Paul on Israel:
I’m proud to support Israel, America’s longtime friend and ally in the Middle East.
Israeli cafés and buses are bombed, towns are victimized by hundreds of rockets, and its citizens are attacked by Palestinian terrorists.
It’s time we took a stand for Israel by standing up to the enemies of Israel, the enemies that murder Israeli citizens.
That’s why I proposed a bill called the “Stand with Israel Act” to cut off the flow of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Palestinian Authority.
As long as the Palestinian Authority is allied with Hamas not one more tax dollar should flow to them.
Neocon Bill Kristol is unpersuaded. He reminds readers of Paul’s filibuster against drones:
Will Rand stress threat of US government drone strikes against Americans in cafes in his announcement?
Update: the Democratic National Committee has also slammed Rand Paul over his foreign policy. In an email with a title conflating Jewish religion and Zionism, “Rand Tries to Hide the Afikomen from American Jews on His Elimination of Foreign Aid to Israel,” it says:
With Rand Paul’s rocky presidential campaign rollout, he has made one thing is clear: no matter how he says it: Paul still wants to cut all foreign aid to Israel, and he’s reminded us of that multiple times in the past 12 hours. In an attempt to ‘expand his map,’ he continues to change his story depending on who he is talking to, but we know what his position is on this issue – and it’s dangerous for Israel and for the United States.” – DNC National Press Secretary Holly Shulman
This morning [Paul] got testy with Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show when she asked him a simple question, even giving him the benefit of the doubt: “You once proposed ending foreign aid to Israel, you now support it…?” Without letting her finish her question Rand Paul said, “…I still agree with my original statement from years ago that ultimately all nations should be free of foreign aid.”
The directness and alacrity of this appeal seem to be evidence that a lot of pro-Israel money is in play, between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Thanks to Max Blumenthal and Janet McMahon of WRMEA.
There is a backstory related to Rand Paul’s web page on Israel. Originally it featured a photo of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. After Politico’s Blake Hounshell tweeted about it, the mosque photo was replaced with the Israeli flag.
The neocons hate Rand Paul because he is the comeback of the socially liberal Rockefeller Republican who isn’t crazy about foreign wars on behalf of Israel.
Bill Kristol thought he had purged them in the 90s, but he was wrong. In 2012 all the young energy among the GOP voters was around Ron Paul. He could tour elite Ivy league campuses and speak to diverse audiences in a way that the neocon candidate simply never could.
This is what Bill Kristol fears. He understands that the democrats are already lost. Hillary is the last train for them. Now he is watching a populist attack on the big-money crowd that he represents and he is terrified.
P.S. The anti-Semite smear didn’t begin with Goldfarb but with Hadas Gold, an Israeli-born journalist. It was the kind of smear that Jeff Goldberg had perfected. This was the old liberal-neocon alliance among Zionists that we’ve seen so many times in the past but which is far more rare these days. It’s what banished Pat Buchanan from mainstream GOP media for speaking of “Israel’s amen corner”.
It’s noteworthy to see it back in action precisely because it is quite rare these days. Unlike those days, you won’t see it bite. The more the neocons attack the more they will expose themselves.
The lobby is over.
If anyone thought Ron Paul offered any hope for the Palestinians, they were chasing a dream, If they think the same thing about Rand, they are delusional. Besides, he doesn’t have a chance. He looks all puffy lately, like he has been drinking a lot of gin since he became a senator-….He was so svelte just a few years ago….And that perm may work in Kentucky, but anywhere else it makes him look like a shyster…and I’m not being biased-I felt the same way about Al Sharpton back in the day.
I see two things happening, or want to “see” them. One is Matthews’s anger at big-ZIon: AIPAC et al. Piggish Money Masters, if you will. (Kosher Pigs, tho.) Another (I’d hope) is anger at ALL big-money, every element of the American oligarchy. Every “special interest”.
Why’d anyone (except someone who concentrates on Palestine, or an antisemite, or, of course, someone who doesn’t want to spend another $1T on another war) be particularly upset about Big-Piggy? After all, some pressure for war must come from Big-Defense (Eisenhower’s MIC). And the great crash of 2008 and the next crash are brought to you by kindly old (special interest) Big-Banks.
BTW, I bet no children of any CEOs go to war. That’s saved as a special career opportunity for the children of the poor. That’s not just neocons.
I was a huge Ron Paul supporter, and still am, but I will not vote for his son. I just can’t take the kissing up to Israel. Makes me sick. Ron Paul’s ideas were mostly popular, but his delivery wasn’t very good. Rand could have adhered to his father’s positions, and would have been better at promoting them.