Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus

Roger Ailes: Champion of Sovereignty

2008-09-03T21:29:00.009-04:00

Everyone knows that Roger Ailes has been a conservative Republican political operative, and then a network TV executive--and that he has been a resounding success at both. over a period of some 40 years.

But what's perhaps not known about him is his rocksolid determination to stick up for the security and sovereignty of the United States of America.

Here's what Ailes said to The Washington Post today, describing a meeting he had with Barack Obama:

According to Ailes, a onetime adviser to Republican presidential candidates, when Obama asked what issues Ailes was concerned about, he replied, "The sovereignty and security of the United States of America, period."

What else needs to be said?

"This Blessed Plot, This Earth, This Realm, This England" -- Peter Hitchens Reminds Us That Every Country Is Special To Its Inhabitants

2008-01-01T17:07:00.001-05:00

The Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus is dedicated, of course, to preserving American Freedom and Sovereignty, but we all acknowledge our historic cultural debt to England. And furthermore, the FSC admires the patriots of England--and the authentic patriots of any country--who wish to defend their land's honorable traditions and history.

Indeed, one of the greatest ever evocations of patriotism was written--of course!--by William Shakespeare, in his 1595 play, Richard II. Here, in a renowned soliloquy, John of Gaunt lets fly with his poetic devotion to his homeland, England:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

All countries should have great lyricism on their behalf. In fact, most do--but this passage is surely one of the best, in English or any other language.

Once again, the point is not necessarily that England is so great. Instead, the point is that every country is great to the people who were born there, who grew up there, and who live there now.

And so in that spirit, I extend my admiration to a British patriot Peter Hitchens, a columnist/blogger for The Mail on Sunday--not to be confused with his neocon brother, Christopher Hitchens--who devoted most of his recent blog to defending Britain and its history.

Should Oxford be dominated by Islamic religion--specifically, the call to prayer? Some say yes, Hitchens says no. (Those are the "dreaming spires" of Oxford in the picture above; no doubt some will think that those towers would make great minarets, but let's hope that never happens.

Should a woman who courageously stood up to hooligans desecrating patriot graves be prosecuted by the police? While the hooligans, who were not harmed, are free to desecrate again? Some say yes, Hitchens says no.

I love my country, and wish to defend it. Hitchens loves his, and wishes to defend it. And that's the way it should be.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori -- It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Those are the words of Horace, two thousand years ago, and they are still true today.

Let's remember that, even if, in our lives we are never called to make such a sacrfice ourselves.

This We'll Defend

2007-12-30T14:05:00.000-05:00

“In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls.” – Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, USA

The picture above is of Bunker Hill in Boston, site of the American Patriots' famous victory over the British on June 17, 1775. Those and other shots heard round the world that year are the enduring wellsprings of our freedom and of our sovereignty.

A New Year's Resolution -- Keep What We Have Here

2007-12-30T09:32:00.000-05:00

Time to count our blessings. And the biggest blessing is that we have maintained order and civility across our country for most of our history. Yes, we have our problems, but they pale beside the problems of other countries. Have a look:

From Zacatecas, Mexico comes the disturbing news from the BBC that seven police officers died in an ambush as gunmen attacked a convoy carrying three suspected criminals. In the mayhem, two of the three suspects escaped--which I guess stamps them as criminals for sure. So I got curious: How far away from the US border is Zacatecas? Answer: about 350 miles. Not too far for a would-be immigrant, or maybe terrorist, to travel.

And what sort of place is Zacatecas? Well, according to the website OurMexico.com, it's a place where Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary bandit, is much admired--see picture above, from the Cerro de la Buffa, overlooking Zacatecas.

So how much of that sort of violence do we wish to import into the US?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world comes sobering evidence that other parts of the world aren't interested in--or aren't capable of--copying our political model.

About Pakistan, here's one revealing headline from ABC News: "Pakistan Rejects Outside Help in Bhutto Probe." 'Nuff said.

But here's some more news from Kenya, where they just had an "election." Of course, in Kenya, as with most African countries, is cursed with horrendously drawn boundaries inherited from European colonialists--boundaries typically drawn in Europe for thoroughly Machiavellian purposes. That is, divide and conquer: Split the various ethnic groups across different jurisdictions so that none could easily mobilize against the colonizers. Tragically, post-colonial Africa inherited those borders, and those borders have become recipes for perpetual civil war. And that's what's going on, in low-grade form, even in relatively developed countries such as Kenya. Here's the way The New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman describes the situation, in which challenger Raila Odinga, an ethnic Luo, took an incumbent Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu:

Several foreign observers said they feared that the government was using its muscle to swing the election and stay in power, which could be a recipe for chaos, with the results rejected by millions of people and Kenya’s cherished stability in danger of collapsing.

Kenya is one of the most developed countries in Africa, but this election has exposed its ugly tribal underbelly.

Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a big tribe in Kenya that feels marginalized from the country’s Kikuyu elite that has dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and the voting so far has split straight down tribal lines, with each candidate winning big in his tribal homeland.

On Saturday, the first signs of a tribal war flared up in Nairobi, with Luo gangs sweeping into a shantytown called Mathare and stoning several Kikuyu residents. In Kibera, another huge slum, supporters of Mr. Odinga burnt down kiosks that they said belonged to Kikuyu businessmen.

“No Raila, no Kenya!” they screamed, with the fires crackling behind them.

The streets were a collage of destruction, strewn with burning tires, broken bottles, fist-size rocks and fresh shell casings from soldiers who fired in the air to scare the demonstrators off. Some men sharpened machetes on the asphalt, vowing to shed blood should Mr. Odinga lose.

Of course, America has had plenty of bloody ethnic feuds in its history. But for the most part, we have sorted these controversies out, and built a wonderful country. Nobody is saying, here in the US, for example, "No Romney, no America!" Or "No Hillary, no America!"

And we should keep it that way; we must solve our problems as Americans, in our own good time, without floods of foreigners who don't know our ways, and without floods of legislation from those who don't like our ways.

The Freedom & Sovereignty Caucus resolves to preserve our Freedom and Sovereignty. We will protect our Constitution, we will protect our liberty, we will protect our country.

If any of us wish to do more than that, politically we will find some other venue to do it. Because the FSC is focused, hedgehog-like on just a few key concerns. And yet if enough of us wish to do less than that--if we abandon our duty to our past, present, and future--then America might well be doomed to share the fate of Mexico, Pakistan, and Kenya.

Kyoto Global Governance Headed to America: Time For Us to Take Our Stand--For Our Freedom and Our Sovereignty

2007-12-29T14:13:00.000-05:00

Is this our new American flag? Will drastic controls on the US economy, dreamed up by Greens, be wrapped in the baby blue banner of the United Nations? Will we all be saluting--and more to the point, obeying--some global pollution-crat?

Folks, we are coming close to the day of reckoning here. The next President, whoever he or she might be, is going to face some enormous pressure to go along and get along with the rest of the world on global warming issues--which means big changes here at home. And I do mean BIG.

Is global warming real? Probably. Is it caused by humans--as opposed to, for example, sun cycles? Maybe. Is it a good idea to let the United Nations determine America's fate? Definitely not!

And yet that's what is happening, in slow-motion: Check out this article in The Washington Post, headlined, "THE IMPERILED PRESIDENCY A Change on Climate/In Bush's Final Year, The Agenda Gets Greener"; the piece by Peter Baker demonstrates how the international bureaucracy, egged on by big chunks of the US government, is tractor-beaming George W. Bush into some sort of Kyoto global warming treaty, in which the United Nations, or some bureaucratic offshoot, makes the big calls.

Bush has been a stumbling block to these Green Globalists--"Greenalists"?--but he won't be president for much longer. And in fact, Bush is so over-extended in Iraq, and now Pakistan, that he no longer has the bandwidth to mind the store here in the US. And so the Post article is full of quotes such as these skid-greasing words from some unknown adviser:

"You could conclude, as this administration has, that you want to be seen ultimately as having evolved and opened some doors and maybe started a glide path to the next administration."

In other words, the Globalist Greens are just waiting for Bush to be shuffled off the stage so that they can enact their agenda with the help of some more pliable president.

As a point of comparison, this is what happened to Great Britain, as it got pulled, slowly but surely, into the clutches of the European Union. The great Margaret Thatcher was a determined "Euroskeptic," but the Eurocrats simply waited her out--two years after she left office, her successor as Prime Minister, a weak Tory named John Major, signed the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, that cinched the EU clinch on Britain's hard-won freedom and sovereignty. And ever since then, London has had to trim its sails to accommodate the dictates of some pickle-size/banana-shape regulating paper-shuffler in the EU HQ of Brussels.

And it can happen here, only worse, if we are not wide awake as a new generation of even more ambitious would-be world-governors reach to grab control of our economy and society.

The FSC believes that it makes sense to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, and to increase domestic energy production. If we apply good ol' American knowhow, we can figure out how to make various renewable energy sources--everything from solar to wind to nuclear--more viable and cost-effective. And we can probably also continue to use domestic oil, natural gas, and coal, along with new techniques for carbon sequestration (for example, why can't we sequester carbon in the form of solid bricks or boulders, which we could then use to build mountains for recreational purposes? or maybe even a wall?)

But what we must not do, ever, is sign a draconian global warming treaty that is administered by some world body to our own disadvantage relative to our economic competitors, such as China and India. If we do so, we will de-industrialize America, while those other countries continue to industrialize. And that seesaw action--us going down, them going up, under the watchful eye of some globauthority--is a formula for impoverishment and defeat.

Repeat: impoverishment and defeat. Which is to say, the end of our prosperity, the end of our freedom, and the end of sovereign identity as an independent nation.

The Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus Pledge

2007-12-28T18:17:00.001-05:00

The Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus urges all American citizens to read this Pledge and to take this Freedom and Sovereignty Pledge:

We, the citizens of the United States of America do hereby pledge to preserve and protect the Sovereignty of our flag and the Freedom for which it stands.

We believe that Sovereignty is the essence of American Freedom.

We believe that our Sovereignty makes it possible to preserve and protect our Freedom: It is not possible to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, or secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity—unless we protect our Sovereignty against all enemies and threats, foreign and domestic.

So whereas the Sovereignty of our nation is immediately threatened by under-defended borders, we must strengthen our border defenses, so that all Americans can once again be secure in their own country.

And whereas the Sovereignty of our Nation is threatened by amnesty for those who have violated our immigration laws, we must prevent such amnesty, which would undermine the rule of law and encourage further Sovereignty-eroding law-breaking in the future. While America must remain a friend to all the peace- and liberty-loving nations of the world, we must enshrine the principle, now and forever, that everyone who lives in America, or visits America, abides here as the result of a transparent and fully legal process.

Therefore, I, ___, pledge to defend the Sovereignty and therefore the Freedom of the United States of America. I will seek to defend Sovereignty and Freedom in the civic arena, and at the ballot box; I will hold our leaders up to a strict standard of accountability. And yet at the same time I am mindful that sometimes, in extraordinary circumstances--which I pray will never again afflict these shores--our legally constituted armed forces have sometimes had to fight, and die, for our Freedom and Sovereignty.

Always faithful to our history, our Constitution, and our fellow citizens, I join with others to make a solemn declaration in regard to America’s Freedom and Sovereignty: This we’ll defend.

If every American takes this pledge, and means it, then our Freedom and Sovereignty will be assured.

(C) Copyright 2007, the Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus. Permission is hereby granted for personal and non-profit use. Please notify the Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus when this pledge is invoked.

While Others Merely Talk About Foreign Affairs, Congressman Walter Jones Stands Up for Homeland Security

2007-12-28T16:07:00.000-05:00

Most politicians go with the herd. And so, for example, if everyone in Washington is talking about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, well, that's what most pols talk about, too. Which is why the airwaves and newspapers are full of people uttering pieties about policies in a country that most of them have never been to. But to be blunt about it, there's not much to be done from Washington DC. Bhutto's tragic murder happened in another country, about which we know little and about which we can do little--The New York Times recently reported that American diplomatic personnels are not safe in big swathes of the country. So it's no wonder, therefore, that most of our $10 billion in foreign aid has been wasted over the last seven years.

Yes, it's great that we have a foreign policy establishment full of new ideas and plans for helping Pakistan, and some of them might even help--although it sure seems to me that pushing a tribal/feudal country prematurely into "democracy" is a formula for trouble. But don't take my word for it--ask the Bhutto family.

But in the meantime, the average American needs protection, too. And it's the issue of homeland security--the sine qua non of sovereignty--that politicians can make a difference, if they choose to worry about such humdrum topics as the folks back home. Because, as we have learned, the long arm of jihadism, including from Pakistan, can reach deep into the United States if we aren't careful. Not just to New York and Washington, as we saw on 9-11, but also to such out-of-the-way places as Lodi, Calif.

And so Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) has focused on a vitally, perhaps life-savingly important issue: The status of Pakistanis coming to the US, legally and illegally. To be sure, the question of Pakistanis coming into this country is not a "top drawer" issue with the DC-NY elites; no doubt there won't be a single seminar by the Council on Foreign Relations on the issue. But in terms of actually making a difference in people's lives, here in the US, the Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus believes that Jones should get credit for keeping his eye on the ball--the ball here at home.

The graphic above is a copy of Jones' letter to President George W. Bush, in which Jones reminds the Administration about the importance of homeland security, and asks a pointed question about the status of Pakistanis who have overstayed their visas in the US. I wonder when he will hear back from the White House, or the adminstration.

Here is Jones' December 28 press release:

Jones urges review of U.S. immigration policy toward Pakistan

Washington, D.C. – In a letter today to President George W. Bush, Congressman Walter B. Jones (R-NC) urged the President to conduct an immediate top-level review of our nation’s immigration procedures regarding Pakistan.

“In light of the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto, I am very concerned about the current state of our nation’s immigration policy toward Pakistan,” the letter states. “Now more than ever, border security equals national security, and national security equals border security.”

“According to the Department of Homeland Security, in 2006, 17,418 Pakistanis were admitted as legal permanent residents to the United States and 53,458 were admitted as non-immigrants. Additionally, the Denver Post reported in March 2006 that as many as 660 Pakistanis were caught entering the United States illegally between 2002 and 2005 – which means many more Pakistani nationals, as well as other nationals, successfully infiltrated our borders and were never apprehended,” the letter states. “This is a serious situation, made all the more serious by Pakistan’s status as a nuclear power. In addition, Pakistan’s close proximity to Iran and Afghanistan is a continuing source of concern, increasing the need for American vigilance.”

“Also, according to the Department of Commerce, ports in my home state of North Carolina have received many shipments from Pakistan during the first 10 months of 2007 alone,” the letter continues. “I know that your Administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative seeks to thwart the trafficking of deadly nuclear materials, including “loose nukes,” but in light of Pakistan’s troubled status, I hope you will agree that a searching scrutiny of our port security posture – from Wilmington, North Carolina to Washington State – is much needed.

“Mr. President, in view of Pakistan’s volatile political climate and its considerable stockpile of nuclear weapons, it is essential for the United States to seriously assess its current policy of immigration and importation from Pakistan,” the letter concludes. “As part of your assessment, I respectfully request a report from you on the number and possible whereabouts of all Pakistanis who are presently residing in the United States on the basis of overstayed visas. I am sure you will agree that vigorous law enforcement is needed here at home, even as we mourn the loss of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan.”

Jones is a controversial figure in American politics; many disagree with his criticism of the Iraq war, although none who know him dispute his sincerity or his patriotism. But here's what really matters: Over the Christmas holidays, Jones was alert enough to sniff out an important issue, and to bring it to the attention of the Bush administration--which has all too often been lackadaisical about these matters--and the nation, which is only beginning to wake up to the mortal threats we face on the home front.

In fact, Jones has been on the forefront of issues concerning American Sovereignty, including illegal immigration and also dubiously legal Mexican trucks. He has also been a tireless champion of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, the two Border Patrol agents who, many believe, were given an unfair trial and extraordinarily harsh prison sentences for doing their enforcement duty along the Rio Grande River two years ago.

If the Bush administration ever gets serious about border and port security, Jones will be remembered as one of the reasons why.

But in the meantime, Jones does what he can from his Congressional perch; and that counts for a lot. Pro-Sovereigntists everywhere agree that Walter Jones is to be praised for his foresight, and for his energy and dedication on behalf of his constituents, and in defense of all Americans.

Time to Get Real About Pakistan, and About the Defense of America--What the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto Means For Americans

2007-12-28T14:12:00.000-05:00

Heckuva job, Condi! One doesn't wish to make light, in any way, of a terrible situation in Pakistan, but we must also remember that our leaders have an obligation to wise and farseeing. And if they are not wise and farseeing, we should get new leaders. And part of being farseeing, of course, is knowing what you don't know--what can't be known. In trying to manipulate Pakistani politics from 10,000 miles away, the Bush administration tried to play the political equivalent of drawing to an inside straight; actually what they wanted to do was much harder than that--more like hitting a hole-in-one on a difficult golf course in a high wind. In statecraft, humility is a great asset, although it's OK to feign that--this is politics after all. But what's really needed is a sense of what's realistic. As Bismarck, perhaps the most effective European diplomat of the 19th century, reminded us, "politics is the art of the possible." And given the Bush administration's pitiful track record when it comes to Pakistan--no apprehension of Osama Bin Laden, no suspension of cross-border aid to Taliban forces in Afghanistan, no effective oversight of US foreign aid, there was much reason for Rice and her boss, President George W. Bush, to be humble about their capabilities. And within just a few months, their high-hopes/low-realism strategy is in ashes.

If The Washington Post is to be believed, it was our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who urged Benazir Bhutto to go back to Pakistan--where, of course, she was killed on Thursday.

As this disturbingly detailed front page article in the Post makes clear,the US was heavily involved in all aspects of the deal, from ill-starred beginning to tragic ending:

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy -- and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism.

So what to do? It would be too much to hope that those arrogantly overconfident neocons would completely fall silent, even when they have proven wrong yet again.

But fortunately, a few bold voices of resurgent realism are shining through. One such is Andrew C. McCarthy, writing for National Review Online. McCarthy gets right to the point, using blunt language that should be a cold slap in the face to those who see Pakistan as some place where American armchair "strategists" can play out their fantasies of Machiavellian mastery. Here's McCarthy, in his own blunt words:

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.

Once we've had our fill of neocon fantasy, we can return to what works in foreign policy--realism, the art of the possible. Last year Michael Lind , a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, published a useful history book, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, which sought to remind Americans of their own successful history in diplomacy. Lind does not argue for isolationism, he argues for a constructive internationalism, based on time-tested balance-of-power politics. Good! We need a foreign policy that works, for a change.

The stakes are high--mushroom cloud high.

Idealism and altruism are great. But as history reminds us, the continued freedom and sovereignty of America depends on flinty-eyed don't-tread-on-me toughness and realism. Maybe we can make other countries better. But most definitely, we must preserve and protect the United States of America.

That's the mission of the Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus.