Quote of the Day (November 18, 2011)

Sarah Palin: Congress Rife With 'Entrenched Corruption'
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Peter Schweizer, to Newsmax.com:

“Governor Palin understands how Washington works and the battle that needs to be fought.”

- JP

Sarah Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street

As published at The Wall Street Journal Online:
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Mark Twain famously wrote, "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." Peter Schweizer's new book, "Throw Them All Out," reveals this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory. (Full disclosure: Mr. Schweizer is employed by my political action committee as a foreign-policy adviser.)

Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad, and Mr. Schweizer details the most lucrative methods: accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it's sickening.

Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress. Members of Congress exempt themselves from the laws they apply to the rest of us. That includes laws that protect whistleblowers (nothing prevents members of Congress from retaliating against staffers who shine light on corruption) and Freedom of Information Act requests (it's easier to get classified documents from the CIA than from a congressional office).

The corruption isn't confined to one political party or just a few bad apples. It's an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It's an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.

None of this surprises me. I've been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career...

[Read More]

- JP

Scott Conroy: Palin's ‘Crony Capitalism’ Mantra Gets ‘60 Minutes’ Boost

If Cain fades, Gingrich may be well positioned to contend seriously for her endorsement.
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Scott Conroy at RealClearPolitics muses if Gov. Palin had run for president, one of her campaign's landmarks would have been Sunday night's episode of "60 Minutes":

In the venerable CBS News program's opening segment, Hoover Institute fellow and Palin adviser Peter Schweizer previewed his forthcoming book, "Throw Them All Out," which details allegations of legal, yet ethically dubious insider trading and conflicts of interest among members of Congress.

“There are all sorts of forms of honest graft that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy,” Schweizer told correspondent Steve Kroft. “So it's not illegal, but I think it's highly unethical, I think it's highly offensive, and wrong.”

Schweizer has been described in various news reports as a “foreign policy adviser” and a “speechwriter” for Palin. In fact, he is both of those things, and far more than that.

Though he has managed to stay largely under the radar until now, Schweizer’s influence on Palin since joining her staff last spring has been profound.

When Palin was still mulling a presidential run back in September, she delivered a closely watched speech in Iowa that served as a preview of sorts for Schweizer’s new book. In the speech, it was the former Alaska governor’s references to “crony capitalism” and “the permanent political class” that picked up the most attention -- buzz phrases that appear near the very beginning of Schweizer’s new tome.

“This is a book about how a Permanent Political Class, composed of politicians and their friends, engages in honest graft,” Schweizer writes in the introduction to his book, which goes on sale Tuesday. “Let’s call it crony capitalism.”

Along with Steven K. Bannon, the filmmaker behind the pro-Palin documentary “The Undefeated,” Schweizer’s influence has been instrumental in leading Palin to a renewed focus on her political roots as a reformer.

[...]

But now Bannon is considering embarking on a new film project based on many of the themes in Schweizer’s book, and Palin appears ready to reinsert herself more prominently into the 2012 fray, though not as a candidate

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- JP

J.E. Dyer on 'The Palin Doctrine' and her new foreign policy advisor

Palin is talking in the terms on which we need to be carrying on the public debate
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Gov. Palin outlined a doctrine for the use of force in her speech to military families in Denver Monday evening, and, as we noted today, replaced two advisers who were holdovers the McCain campaign team with Hoover fellow and author Peter Schweizer. J.E. Dyer, in a commentary for Hot Air finds these developments to be good news:

Many volumes could be written on the distinctions between the prevailing ideas on the use of force overseas, but this passage of Palin’s speech, combined with her taking on Peter Schweizer as an adviser, argues for a more Reaganesque than progressive-activist view.

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Schweizer is a fan of Reagan’s approach, which had no compunction about trying to undermine oppressive governments, but did so by supporting freedom movements where they were indigenous, and arming the insurgents under Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. The commitment of US force was a matter of coming to blows very rarely under Reagan: besides invading Grenada, Reagan conducted a reprisal against Libya in 1986 after the Berlin nightclub bombing, and another one against Iran in 1988 for mining the Persian Gulf and inflicting mine damage on USS Samuel B Roberts (FFG-58). The US armed forces had a high and very active profile during the Reagan years, but the actual use of force was considered necessary very seldom.

I tend to share Israpundit’s view that Schweizer’s advice will involve the sparing and summary use of force – in a shooting role. If you haven’t read his books on the Reagan approach – a comprehensive one that emphasized political and economic campaigns against the Soviet Union – I can highly recommend them. Meanwhile, compare Palin’s five points to the “Weinberger Doctrine,” a rubric that played a major role in US decisions about the use of force in Desert Storm.

As is typical of her, Palin is talking in the terms on which we need to be carrying on the public discussion of national security, our national interests, and interventions overseas. There has been a very long and extensive national dialogue on these topics over the last 100 years; we have never settled most questions as if there were a single answer. Palin – alone among potential GOP candidates – is harking back to the philosophical discussions launched by presidents and candidates like Reagan, Goldwater, Adlai Stevenson (agree with him or not, he launched a substantive debate that colored Democratic positions for the next 40 years), Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

I believe people intuit the need for this debate, as overseas interventions seem to be stalemated in Afghanistan and Libya, and the world begins to behave as if there is no US power. Palin apparently recognizes the need to talk about fundamentals – and love her or hate her, I don’t see anyone else out there doing it.

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- JP

Ben Smith: Sarah Palin and neocon advisors part company

"The personnel shift carries an ideological charge."
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Ben Smith reports that Gov. Palin and two neoconservative foreign policy advisers who had been writing speeches and providing her with foreign policy advice since the days of the McCain campaign have parted ways:

An aide to Palin, Tim Crawford, confirmed that Orion Strategies' Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb are no longer working for her PAC. They parted, both sides said on good terms.

"Randy flat out said, 'We can't give you the time,'" Crawford said.

"I very much enjoyed my time working with Governor Palin and wish her and her family all the best," Scheunemann said in an email. "If she decides to run for any office again, she will be a formidable candidate."

Crawford said they've been replaced by Peter Schweizer, a writer and fellow at the Hoover Institution who blogs regularly at Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace.

Smith points out that the change may indicate a move on the former governor and vice presidential candidate's part to further distance herself from the neoconservative philosophy:

Palin parted ways with that aggressive internationalism in a speech yesterday, condemning U.S. involvement in Libya and laying out a more cautious philosophy of the use of force. Schweizer has articulated a more skeptical view of the use of American force and promotion of democracy abroad.

"Egypt does a lot of things wrong, but they have also been pro-American on a lot of levels," he wrote of Obama's support for protesters in Egypt -- which was being roundly criticized by neoconservatives for being insufficiently vigorous. "When protests broke out in Iran earlier during his tenure in the White House, Obama was not willing to openly back them, at least until he came under considerable fire. But now he is supporting them in Egypt?"

Schweizer has also been skeptical of American involvement in Libya, which he compared to Vietnam, speculated that France is "on the brink of a violent civil war" between radical Muslims and its resurgent right.

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We've long believed that Gov. Palin's libertarian streak was at odds with the neocons in her organization, and the replacement of Scheunemann and Goldfarb with Schweizer could be a sign that she is fine tuning her staff for a 2012 presidential run as the small government Reagan conservative she has always been.

When Weekly Standard's founder and editor William Kristol, Goldfarb's mentor of sorts, began to back away from his support of Gov. Palin, we thought that it was an indication that neoconservatives had finally realized that she was never going to be the rubber stamp for neocon thinking that they hoped she would be. Today, Kristol confirmed our suspicions by attacking Gov. Palin when he really didn't have to. When you don't toe their interventionist line, neocons sure can get snippy. Memo to Bill K: What part of "We can't afford any more foreign adventures" don't you comprehend?

Not only does the personnel shift allow Sarah Palin to distance herself from neoconservatism, but ABC's John Berman observes that it also "removes one of the few remaining links" to John McCain's 2008 campaign organization.

Peter Schweizer's Hoover Institution bio is here.

h/t: Tony Lee

- JP

Schweizer: Gov. Palin Schools Washington Post on History

Palin is right: Bigger government is not the solution to our problems
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Peter Schweizer, Editor in Chief of Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace watchdog blog, caught Steve Stromberg of the Washington Post in the act of getting schooled by Sarah Palin:

The Washington Post, which never passes up an opportunity to attack Sarah Palin, has gone after her for criticizing President Barack Obama’s “Sputnik” reference in the State of the Union Address. Palin noted accurately that what Obama was calling for was to our problems. She further pointed out big government socialistic solutions are what in part did the Soviet empire in. Those comments sent Steve Stromberg at the Washington Post into a hyperbolic fit, declaring that her analysis is “weird.” But his response indicates that he knows as little about the Soviet Union and Sputnik as President Obama’s speechwriters.

Stromberg says that Palin misconstrues Obama’s main point that “the Americans who responded to early Soviet success in space exploration by educating themselves and out-innovating the Soviets.” But Stromberg misses Palin’s larger and more important point about history: Sputnik was really meaningless in the larger scheme of things. It was all hype, and it was basically used by people in Washington to advance their own political agenda. Perhaps Stromberg should have consulted the Post’s own archives before he went after her. As Newsweek (which the Post used to own) wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik:

Less than a week after Sputnik began orbiting Earth once every 96 minutes, politicians and the press had spun it into a shocking symbol of Soviet superiority that could soon lead to nukes falling on American cities. But far from being alarmed by Sputnik, newly released archives show, Eisenhower and his military and intelligence advisers welcomed it. The terror triggered by the uninstrumented, 184-pound silvery satellite, roughly the size and shape of a blue-ribbon watermelon and emitting an A-flat beep from its rudimentary radio transmitter, had little basis in reality.

Newsweek goes on: “With Sputnik’s 50th anniversary this week, we’re in danger of getting it wrong yet again, for the supposed lessons of Sputnik are ones we should actually unlearn.” Ouch. Memo to Stromberg: Read some history next time. Memo to President Obama: quit the myth-making.

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- JP