Paul Craig Roberts

I wasn't going to say anything about this guy but keep bumping into his articles at Counterpunch, WRH, NewsMax, Vdare, Townhall, sitting in rightwing think tanks, and had to say something about which direction he's coming from, as he's published on both left and right. Today's piece on Antiwar.com Bush Is Cooking Up Two More Wars really made me wonder. I'm old enough to remember Roberts from the Reagan era, and he still champions Ronnie as the hero who brought down the "evil empire" a.k.a. former Soviet Union. And I'm still not convinced BushCo will attempt another war, much less 2 more. I'm still not convinced that the noise over Iran isn't just propaganda to scare the public, the left, and part of the Arab world. Keep folks busy with what-ifs rather than right-now.

The fact that Roberts publishes regularly at Vdare was enough to raise my eyebrows as that organization has been labeled a "meeting place for the radical right" by SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center). Considered a "racist" site by some. The Center lists Vdare on its roster of "hate groups." Vdare defends itself because some of the articles they've published have been written by a Hispanic, a Native American, a Japanese American, and good old girl Michele Malkin (what I call "white enough folks"). But no Black authors, yet.

Judging Roberts' writings on the current neocons and Bush administration you would think he loathes them. He's accuses the new cons of all the dirty tricks the left has been saying for 5 years. Roberts states : "the Bush administration knows that few Americans have any knowledge of international law and procedures and will simply believe whatever President Bush says. The highly concentrated US media is a proven walkover for the war-mongering Bush administration." Yep, he said BushCo knows Americans are dumb and gullible and the media rolls over for the war-mongering neocons.

However, in a November 27, 2000 diatribe Roberts defends Election 2000 which installed this corrupt batch of war-mongers. In November 2000 Roberts was dribbling out the other side of his mouth when he hammers on the "Florida Supreme Court's brazen decision to assist the Democrats in stealing a presidential election" :

"Massive Democratic vote fraud has made this election a close one. Having sized up Republicans as cowardly and timid, Democrats decided that they could steal the election behind a barrage of lies and propaganda laid down by their faithful allies at CNN and the TV networks. If Republicans can't muster more courage than the Reichstag, the stolen election of 2000 will put an end to representative democracy in the United States."

One could argue Roberts is/was merely championing the "rule of law," another trendy phrase our betters like to toss out to the lower classes; or in his own words "few Americans have any knowledge of international law and procedures" … meaning those same Americans know little of law and procedures, period, other than those folks familiar with hearing cops yell "up against the wall, mother------." And one could say Roberts in 2000 was comparing Democrats to Nazis/Reichstag.

Roberts condemns BushCo for what America has always done : murdering others to maintain the system. The same thing done since giving smallpox blankets to the natives, slavery, phony attacks, war after war, little wars, big wars, overt, covert, whatever it takes to maintain capitalism, the "American way of life." Roberts carried water to wash blood off his hero Reagan's hands, afterall, the tens of thousands of dead Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, was doable and done somewhat quietly. Etc. etc.

Might want to look very closely at those on the right these days who seem to be saying what the left wants to hear. Roberts wants to maintain the same collapsing system as eagerly and desperately as BushCo does. His articles and books support the same basic doctrine of a directed, manipulated, stolen "free" market. Either Roberts was snubbed, rather than rewarded, after he defended the 2000 election theft, or the neocon tactics are too brazen for his sensibilities; perhaps he prefers to slither.