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ROBERT SCHEER: Georgia war is a neocon election ploy
San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 8/13/8 | Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Posted on 08/13/2008 7:43:05 AM PDT by SmithL

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. Iraq invasion.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which clearly was expected to produce a Russian counter-reaction. It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.

(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: bds; georgia; moonbattery; psychosis
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To: SmithL

Lets see if we understand this idiots liberal line of thought.
To scare American into voting for McCain, George Bush called Putin and said
BUSH: Hey Putty baby, howabout invading that little dinky country there Georgia and slaughtering some civilians so we can make you out to be a real threat to world peace and America safety.
Putin: Why Georgia Bushki?
Bush: Ya know we gotta Georgia over hre someplace and you know our conservatives are kinda slow and they might think its there Georgia and get real mad and vote for McCain.
Putin: Okay Bushki. But you will owe me big time for this one. Something like the keys to Iraq when your done?

Are these people (Scheer) really from the same planet we are from?


41 posted on 08/13/2008 8:15:07 AM PDT by SECURE AMERICA (Got Freedom ? Thank a Veteran...... Want to keep Freedom? Don't vote Obama)
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To: Red Badger

Wogs start at Calais.


42 posted on 08/13/2008 8:17:47 AM PDT by arthurus
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To: SmithL
Okay I'll take Scheer with a seriousness his opinion does not deserve, but here goes. If the President of Georgia was assured by the McCain people that the US would have his back would it make sense to start his military ops before McCain was elected. The very last thing a lame duck president with a 30% approval rating is going to do is commit overstretched American forces to combat with Russia in Russia's backyard. Pelosi and Reid would call Congress into session, invoke the War Power's act and force withdrawal.

Scheer seems to believe that Georgia attacked Osettia and the Russians simply counter attacked after this provocation. This operation was planned and forces deployed far in advance of Friday August 8.As Ralph Peters said yesterday, anyone with a grade above private knows you do not plan and deploy an offensive of 2+ armored divisions, supporting air and naval forces, from a standing start in 12 hours. The reality is that Georgian leadership was baited and fell for it. (Assuming the report of a Georgian move into Osettia is true and not simply a maskirova, of which th Russians are long famous.)

Finally it seems that the leftist press in the US is approaching a concensus that Russia has a legitimate interest in limiting or outright controlling the decisions made by its former republics and satellites based on geography and history and understandable Russian paranoia. It was that kind of thinking that delivered eastern Europe into 50 years of slavery and decline after WW2. It was that kind of thinking that defended the agreements at Yalta. It was that kind of thinking that both JFK and Ronald Reagan condemned and stood against when they spoke in Berlin. We are about to enter a new Cold War and the left and liberals in this country are not only accepting of the thought of delivering free peoples into the control of Russia they are demanding it.

This election has become more than a contest for power. More than a choice between economic liberty and the nanny state. It has become a struggle for the soul of America. Who we are as a people. Do we stand for Liberty? Or do we stand for conceding the rights of others and eventually our own as well in order to produce a world of peaceful compliance?

43 posted on 08/13/2008 8:23:21 AM PDT by xkaydet65 (Freedom is purchased not with gold, but with steel.)
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To: Psalm_2
for those of you familiar with David Horowitz & his anti communist website FrontPage Magazine. i once heard david comment that robert sheer is a communist.

From Horowitz's website, Discover the Networks. Communist is a reasonable label. He has all the qualifications of an Obama supporter

--------------

www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org

Date: 8/13/2008 11:18:18 AM

 

ROBERT SCHEER

 

  Was a Los Angeles Times writer from 1976-2005), specializing in issues of national security

  • His column currently appears in the Huffington Post.
  • Co-authored a 1961 book defending Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba
  • Edited the radical magazine Ramparts
  • Co-founded Berkeley’s Red Family -- a domestic, Communist guerrilla group



For nearly three decades Robert Scheer worked for the Los Angeles Times -- as a national correspondent from 1976-1993, and then as a regular columnist from 1993-2005 -- where he specialized in national security issues. From one of the most powerful press platforms in the United States, he articulated, on a weekly basis, his assertions about the moral deficiencies of America and its leadership.

Scheer co-authored a 1961 book defending Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in Cuba. In 1965 he ran for liberal Democrat Jeffrey Cohelan's congressional seat, attacking Cohelan from the radical left. He was the political editor of the largest magazine of the radical left, Ramparts, and was given (by the Cuban dictatorship itself) the diaries of Che Guevara to publish.

Later in the 1960s, Scheer and Tom Hayden co-founded Berkeley's Red Family -- a commune of urban guerrillas which trained its members in the use of explosives and firearms and called for the creation of "liberated zones" in the United States; this "liberation" was to be achieved by force of arms. Dedicated to Maoist principles, Red Family leaders adorned the walls of their headquarters with portraits of such heroes as Ho Chi Minh, North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, and Black Panther thug Huey Newton.

Scheer strongly supported the violent Black Panther Party in the 1960s. He helped get the infamous Eldridge Cleaver out of the prison where the latter was serving an indeterminate sentence for rape, and he edited Cleaver's writings for publication in book form. Distinguishing himself from the mass of what he deemed "racist whites," Scheer felt solidarity with the Panthers' cause. In his introduction to an article in which Cleaver declared his intention to kill whites -- an article that Scheer himself titled "The Courage to Kill" -- Scheer expressed his approval of Cleaver's sentiments with the exclamation, "Right on, Eldridge!" After Cleaver fled the U.S. following his ambush of two San Francisco policemen in 1968, Scheer joined a Red Family overseas delegation to visit the fugitive.

In the early 1970s, Scheer joined the Red Sun Rising commune, which was devoted to "armed struggle" and embraced Kim Il-Sung. In the three decades that followed, Scheer rose to influence at the L.A. Times (in part through his marriage to Narda Zacchino, one of the Times' top editors); he became a friend of Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty; and in his columns he vigorously opposed America's Cold War efforts against the Soviet bloc.

"What the heck, let's bomb Baghdad," is how Scheer depicted the thought process by which "our accidental president" -- George W. Bush -- decided to forcibly disarm Saddam Hussein in 2003. "Sure," Scheer wrote sardonically, ". . . many of [Baghdad's] more than 3 million inhabitants will probably end up as 'collateral damage,' but if George the Younger is determined to avenge his father and keep his standings in the polls, that's the price to be paid."

Scheer further claimed that President Bush was driven by an unspoken desire to create a global American empire. "The world's current unprecedented hostility toward the United States," he wrote, is "a profound alarm over the imperial endpoint of Bush's design for the world." "Imperialist greed," he added, "is what 'regime change' in Iraq and 'anticipatory self-defense' are all about, and all of the rest of the Bush administration's talk about security and democracy is a bunch of malarkey." Moreover, Scheer deemed it "fitting" that, just prior to the Iraq War, Bush had met to strategize with his British and Spanish counterparts in the Azores, "an island chain originally settled by a Portuguese Crusader whose goal was to encircle the Muslim world with Christian armies."

Scheer believed that a lust for oil was yet another of President Bush's motivations for war, explaining that "oil is black gold, and Iraq has a whole heck of a lot of it."

Scheer also saw the Iraq War as a "diversion" tactic: "the modern equivalent of the Roman Circus, drawing the people's attention away from the failures of those who rule them"; "a smoke screen to obscure our floundering economy"; and a "convenient distraction" from President Bush's "close personal and financial ties to the company -- Enron -- whose demise is the most glaring symbol of the broad moral disarray of the nation's corporate culture."

Despite President Bush's dogged attempts to disarm Saddam Hussein non-violently -- via United Nations Resolutions and meaningful inspections (on the heels of twelve years of Iraq's refusal to abide by its disarmament obligations) -- Scheer depicted Bush as a trigger-happy warmonger. "Hussein is not the aggressor," said Scheer, "we are." He characterized Bush as one of "the vast majority of Americans who blissfully and conveniently forget that we are the only ones to ever actually use a nuclear weapon." "[This] may explain," Scheer added, "why even those who love freedom and democracy as much as we do are frightened not only of Saddam Hussein, but increasingly of us."

According to Scheer, "the most outrageous Big Lie of the Bush administration [is] that delaying an invasion to wait for the UN to complete inspections would endanger the U.S.  The fact is that for more than a decade the military containment of Iraq has effectively neutered Hussein, and there is no reason to believe that can't continue."

But in fact, Scheer had argued for years in the L.A. Times that containment efforts were a cruel means of "punish[ing] the Iraqis for failing to overthrow Hussein." "In Iraq," he wrote, " . . . more than one million children [who] suffer from malnutrition . . . are the true victims of our embargo, not Hussein, who continues to live the high life."

Just prior to the start of the 2003 war, Scheer asserted that because "Iraq at this time poses no direct threat to the well-being of the American people," it logically followed that "the maiming or killing of a single Iraqi civilian in an attack by the United States would constitute a war crime." He complained that the U.S., by aggressively enforcing UN Resolution 1441 (which offered Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations"), had "gutted" the United Nations.

But when the UN had backed an American-led coalition to drive Iraq's invading army out of Kuwait twelve years earlier, Scheer was not at all in favor of following that organization's decrees. In March 1991, he decried Americans' "patriotic orgy" over the coalition's campaign of "terrorism" that was not unlike the "hijacking [of] a commercial aircraft -- treating civilians as combatants."

Asserting that America's military efforts in the war on terror were founded on the "simplistic" notion of a struggle between good and evil, Scheer in 2002 declared that the world's most destructive practitioners of evil resided in the Bush administration and corporate America. "Is there any doubt," he asked rhetorically, "that the chicanery of Enron executives and [other] top CEOs has done more long-term damage to the U.S. economy than the efforts of anti-American terrorists?"

In contrast to his sentiments about President Bush, Scheer has been a consistent supporter of Bill Clinton -- describing him as "a great president," "supremely capable," and "one of the hardest working, most competent, fundamentally decent and smartest men to ever serve in the office." During the Clinton administration, Scheer dismissed most criticisms of the President as the rantings of partisan "jackals" intent on making Clinton feel "the lash of the self-righteous."

Scheer enjoyed his friendships with Clinton White House operatives like James Carville and Sidney Blumenthal as much as he savored the salons of the Hollywood left. Such associations have always boosted his sense of superiority over the less well-connected. In a revealing moment, Scheer once mocked an unemployed journalist thusly: "Look at you. You support the System, and you're struggling, while I attack it and have a six-figure salary and a yacht, and am surrounded by Hollywood stars" (reported in David Horowitz's Radical Son).

Scheer is also a great admirer of former President Jimmy Carter, who he once described as a man who "won the Nobel Peace Prize for a career of successfully waging peace." Added Scheer in October 2002: "While Carter has exhibited the patience of the peacemaker, a sweet Jesus for our time, willing to rebuke contemptible leaders while offering them a path for redemption, Bush has become a self-fulfilling prophet of war, delighting in the discovery of what he defines as immutable evil, thereby justifying an endless crusade against the infidels."

In November 2005, Scheer was fired from his Los Angeles Times job; his column now appears regularly in the Huffington Post.

In addition to his writing, Scheer has taught courses at Antioch College, New York City College, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He currently teaches a course on media and society at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

 


44 posted on 08/13/2008 8:24:55 AM PDT by SJackson (Sell San Francisco to China to finance Obama health care, Bill O'Reilly)
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To: SmithL

Scheer idiocy.


45 posted on 08/13/2008 8:33:28 AM PDT by KC_Conspirator
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To: Red Badger

These people are delusional.


46 posted on 08/13/2008 8:42:34 AM PDT by redangus
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To: SmithL
ROBERT SCHEER: Georgia war is a neocon election ploy

TRANSLATION: His boy Barack is useless in tough foreign policy situations. Barack would make a good secretary of HUD and that's as high as he should go

47 posted on 08/13/2008 8:47:54 AM PDT by dennisw (That Muhammad was a charlatan. Islam is a hoax, an imperialistic ideology, disguised as religion.)
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To: Doctor Raoul

Some Dem was test-driving the party line yesterday, and it was Bush’s fault because we were caught by surprise: Massive intelligence failure by this administration.


48 posted on 08/13/2008 8:48:04 AM PDT by Cyber Liberty (Who would McQueeg rather have mad at him: You or the liberals? FREE LAZAMATAZ!)
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To: SJackson

Thanks for the post.

Scheer is one of those people who, if one had any doubt of whether they were on the side of good or evil, would make that crystal clear to any honest person.


49 posted on 08/13/2008 8:48:17 AM PDT by subterfuge (BUILD MORE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS NOW!!!)
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To: SJackson

Great job exposing this certified POS.


50 posted on 08/13/2008 8:59:59 AM PDT by BOBTHENAILER (One by one, in small groups or in whole armies, we don't care how we do it, but we're gonna getcha)
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To: autumnraine
I find alot of dumbies in America are all for Communism and don’t really understand what that is or how it affects people.

Scheer knows exactly what Communism is. Indeed, when Gorbachev committed the Soviet Union to Glasnost, Scheer was inspired to switch his allegiance from the Soviets to Kim Jong-Il's North Korean regime.

So, here is a guy who enjoys the benefits of free speech in a free country -- but uses his free speech to promote the most repressive regime on earth.

Which brings up a question: how did such a vermin get his gig as a national columnist? When working for the Los Angles Times, he married the editor's daughter.

51 posted on 08/13/2008 9:01:10 AM PDT by okie01 (THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Ignorance on Parade)
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To: SmithL

Scheer = box of tools.


52 posted on 08/13/2008 9:01:50 AM PDT by Trajan88 (www.bullittclub.com)
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To: SmithL

This guy must have and advanced case of AIDs from his San Francisco butt buddies and it has affected his brain...


53 posted on 08/13/2008 9:10:55 AM PDT by chilepepper (The map is not the territory -- Alfred Korzybski)
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To: SmithL

Every time the official lunacy level of the democratic party and its leftist minions can not possibly be topped, another Scheer type comes along. Now the republican party has evidently caused the Russians to invade Georgia just to influence the election. No one really needs to comment on this.


54 posted on 08/13/2008 9:15:06 AM PDT by Oldpuppymax (AGENDA OF THE LEFT EXPOSED)
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To: DBrow
If you bombard the peoples of a nation with a continuous stream of stuff like this, it will have an effect. Yes, fundraising is part of it, but I think the goal is to color people's perceptions.

The human mind has a deep affinity for conspiracy theories. They negate the need to take responsibility for ones own actions, since the conspiracy will defeat you no matter what you try to do. They are a ready made excuse for failure, real or perceived. They can never be disproved and attempts to do do so inevitably feed the delusion.

55 posted on 08/13/2008 9:40:01 AM PDT by PsyOp (Truth in itself is rarely sufficient to make men act. - Clauswitz, On War, 1832.)
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To: SmithL

Do the libs actually think Bush is going to step down?


56 posted on 08/13/2008 9:41:07 AM PDT by TigersEye (Berlin '36 ... Olympics for murdering regimes. ... Beijing '08)
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To: roses of sharon

“And we do not have a serious or professional news media to protect the unwitting public from these Democrat shysters.”

Nope, just amateurs in pajamas.


57 posted on 08/13/2008 9:53:15 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: PsyOp

I like that, good post.


58 posted on 08/13/2008 9:55:55 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: DBrow
Nope, just amateurs in pajamas.

Touche!
59 posted on 08/13/2008 9:57:46 AM PDT by roses of sharon (SAVE YOUR GAS RECIEPTS, SEND TO PELOSI!)
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To: wideawake
If John McCain can engineer a made-to-order international crisis with the Presidents of France, Russia and Georgia all as his unwitting puppets why would he need to run for President of the USA? He's already far more powerful.

But it's true, wideawake. The great and powerful Wizard of AZ makes The Obamessiah look like a birthday party magician. He turned the first black President into a racist knocking the mighty Hildebeast on her ample butt. He alters birth certificates with his mind. He causes uncontrollable stuttering from thousands of miles away. I'm waiting for him to turn Barack into a chupacabra at Coors Field in front of thousands of witnesses.

60 posted on 08/13/2008 10:01:29 AM PDT by TigersEye (Berlin '36 ... Olympics for murdering regimes. ... Beijing '08)
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