In 2007, at the Spring meeting of the Council on National Policy — the same group that long-time member Joseph Farah reported (in his WorldNetDaily) raised $1.7 million for Santorum at their latest meeting in Houston* — Rick Santorum gave what appears to be the keynote address, seemingly introduced by current sugar-daddy and former CNP president Foster “Aspirin Knees” Friess, and it was a doozy.
[* HOUSTON – It was a big day for Rick Santorum beyond his winning of the Kansas caucuses.
The GOP presidential candidate Santorum raised $1.7 million in campaign contributions and pledges in a series of meetings at the Council for National Policy here over two days.
Newt Gingrich canceled his appearance at the same event.
The Council for National Policy is a conservative organization that includes organizational leaders and high-dollar political contributors…. — WND, Published: 03/10/2012 at 5:31 PM]
“The Gathering Storm,” clearly takes its title from Winston Churchill, but Santorum’s world view is a lot — shall we say? — different from Churchill’s.
Let’s begin from their own website, which is registered at GoDaddy to the 2010 Treasurer of CNP, Jennifer Rutledge, as noted in their IRS 990 “charitable” tax return (page 8) — charitable as in, all contributions are fully tax deductable, leaving taxpayers to make up the shortfall, or, you might say, a public welfare group for shadowy “movers and shakers,” who couldn’t possibly afford to invite the créme de la créme of the Conservative sphere to their secret wing-dings. Here’s some Directors, from page 7 of their tax return: Brent Bozell, Kenneth Blackwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Viguerie*, Tony Perkins**, Michael W. Grebe (“the president and CEO of the [Wisconsin-based, Right Wing] Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation“), and Becky Norton Dunlop, 2010’s president.
[* For “Viguerie news” — i.e. tracking press releases into their media incarnations — see this website, currently virulently pro-Santorum.]
[** You might want to take a look at this on Perkins from today:
Pastor Dennis Terry Introduces Rick Santorum, Tells Liberals and Non-Christians to ‘Get Out’ of America — Greenwell Springs Baptist Church pastor Dennis Terry introduced presidential candidate Rick Santorum and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins tonight in Baton Rouge, Louisiana …]
The 2007 Meeting was held in the usual secrecy, with the following stable of speakers:
You can find the website and speeches HERE.
Note over on the side the placement of the speech, and the length (two pages as opposed to Governor Huckabee’s one, or Fred Thompson’s one, or John Stossel’s one …) of Santorum’s speech, leading to the likelihood that it was the keynote address of that conclave of the cabal.*
[* For their 2007 FALL Salt Lake City meeting, with Dick Cheney, Foster Friess and Mitt Romney, see “Dominionist Hoedown in Salt Lake City and YOU ain’t Invited” and “Dominionist Hoedown Links (update), 29 & 30 September, 2007]
Let’s start with Rick’s opening [emphasis added] at that (highly secretive) meeting of leaders and contributors dubbed by DailyKos the “Sith Lords of the Ultra-Right.”
I just want to thank everybody here at CNP for the award. It’s quite a thrill for me. It’s the first award I’ve received since I lost my election so it’s something to remember. This is actually the first speech that I’ve giving since that election night. I haven’t had the opportunity to share comments with the public.
Let me first start with new project that I’ve got involved with and many of you have come up and asked about it. It’s with the Ethics and Public Policy Center*, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C. It is a project called the American Enemies Project, which is a rather stark term I know for some folks, a rather chilling term, but one that will hopefully grab attention to with the severity of the situation that confronts us.
If you listened to what Foster talked about it’s not really my work on national security that I was known for in the United States Senate or when I was in Congress; it was a lot of other issues, issues that were very much at the core of another type of war: a war here in America, a cultural war, one that I am very passionate about….
[* A very interesting place in 2007, which I’ll go into another day. Too much information to include here.]
Compare and contrast with Santorum’s recent “doubling down” when it was revealed that he is stridently anti-pornography (after being anti-gay, anti-contraception, anti-abortion and pro the supremacy of sperm). That “cultural war” hasn’t changed, evidently. Not to say that he hasn’t flip-flopped on some other issues. For instance, this prefaces his speech, the obligatory self-supplied “biography”:
Rick Santorum –Employment- Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he will establish and direct a program on America’s enemies; former member, United States Senate (R-PA); served, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Finance; chairman, Senate Republican Conference and the third-ranking member of the Republican Leadership; former member, House of Representatives (PA-18); former attorney, Kirkpatrick and Lockhart; former administrative assistant to Senator Doyle Corman; former campaign volunteer, Senator John Heinz. Works– Author, It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Special Mention- Member of the renowned “Gang of Seven,” a group of newly elected House members focused on cleaning up the abuse and corruption that was rampant at that time; founded, Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom; accomplishments include combating the Global HIV/AIDS epidemic, strengthening and protecting Social Security, and providing every American with access to quality, affordable health care.Education- B.A., Political Science, Pennsylvania State University; M.B.A., University of Pittsburgh; J.D., Dickinson School of Law. Personal- Father of six; married to Karen.
And, that brings us to “the Enemies” that Rick’s talking about, and what he means by “religious freedom.” I’ll skip along a ways:
Third, we need to re-evangelize Europe. Why? Well, if you look at what we’re up against, Mark Steyn wrote the book called America Alone and we really are alone in this. Maybe Britain will be with us, maybe. We’ll see what happens after Tony Blair. Israel will be with us? Not really a big help during this time. They took a pretty big shot with the loss to the war and Hezbollah. It’s going to be tough for them. We will be alone unless we somehow get some of our traditional allies back and we will not get them back save faith.
These secularized countries that are dying. Europe is dying. At their current birthrates, they’re going to lose half their population in 50 years. In Steyn’s book, he talks about the most popular boys name in Belgium: Mohammed. Forty percent of Amsterdam is Muslim, it will be Eurabia or Eurostan in the lifetime of your children unless something changes and that something is faith. It is a belief in something other than the self that makes one want to do things for others instead of just yourself, like giving of children. It is faith. It is faith that keeps our populations rates up. We need to re-evangelize.
Second, educate. I’ve talked about this so I’ll go through it quickly. We need to define the enemy. We have to say what this war really is. We must be not afraid. We have to publish articles and books and do all the things that smart people want to do, but we also have to do more. We have to fund and produce artifacts of the culture that communicate the message on a broad base scheme, because the other side does. The George Soroses and the Ted Leonsises and the Al Gores do the documentaries that get wide distribution and critical acclaim? Why? Because they are well funded and they’re supported. Jeffrey Skoll does Syriana, which says that we went to war for Haliburton. Why? Because he put his millions or maybe billions behind movies that get on your movie screen. …
There’s a whole lot more. This is the meat and potatoes of Santorum’s “enemies” and “war” philosophy, and is very illuminating as regards his current campaign. Moreover, I think it IS his current campaign. I’ll reprint it in its entirety (in case the speech is “disappeared” along with the website), but I want to draw your attention to some OTHER speeches featured on the website:
Charles Koch, 1999, Naples Florida:
Let me begin by saying how honored I am by this award. The Council, I believe, is recognized by supporters and detractors alike as a key leader in the heart and mind of this country.
Under Jim Miller’s leadership, I see this effectiveness only increasing. He’s certainly been a great contributor to freedom over the years, and he’s certainly been a great friend of ours over the years. We appreciate it, Jim.
Then, what particularly adds to this honor is that this is the Richard De Vos Award. Because, to me, Rich exemplifies, as much as anybody, both what I call principled entrepreneurship and dedication to the advancement of a free and civil society….
Or, the opening speech at that 2007 CNP meeting, by Clint Bolick, “President and General Counsel, Alliance for School Choice” (See: “They’re Going After The Wisconsin Teachers,” for the Foster Friess connection.)
Or, you can choose from speeches by Richard De Vos (twice), David Horowitz, William Niskanen (whose death has precipitated the current Koch/CATO internecine warfare), William Kristol, Grover Norquist, longtime-CNP member James Dobson, and many, many more.
But, just remember, these guys aren’t important or influential. As Politico reported Friday:
But the influence of the CNP has been exaggerated, asserted one conservative operative with knowledge of the group. “They’re always behind, always late to the game and not relevant,” said the operative. “It’s one of these self-validating echo chambers where they sit around four times a year and tell each other how great and important they are, and believe their own press.”
When an anonymous Conservative operative tells you that an anonymous group of Conservative (Dominionist) power-brokers aren’t actually very important, you KNOW it’s got to be true.
Courage.
=============
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
=============
Note: This is the 2007 version of Rick Santorum’s “The American Enemies Project.”
‘And finally, we have to change the government of Iran’
The Complete “Award” speech from Rick Santorum to the Council on National Policy,
Rick Santorum
Senior Fellow
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Rick Santorum – Employment- Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he will establish and direct a program on America’s enemies; former member, United States Senate (R-PA); served, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Finance; chairman, Senate Republican Conference and the third-ranking member of the Republican Leadership; former member, House of Representatives (PA-18); former attorney, Kirkpatrick and Lockhart; former administrative assistant to Senator Doyle Corman; former campaign volunteer, Senator John Heinz. Works– Author, It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good.Special Mention- Member of the renowned “Gang of Seven,” a group of newly elected House members focused on cleaning up the abuse and corruption that was rampant at that time; founded, Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom; accomplishments include combating the Global HIV/AIDS epidemic, strengthening and protecting Social Security, and providing every American with access to quality, affordable health care. Education- B.A., Political Science, Pennsylvania State University; M.B.A., University of Pittsburgh; J.D., Dickinson School of Law. Personal- Father of six; married to Karen.
“The Gathering Storm”
I just want to thank everybody here at CNP for the award. It’s quite a thrill for me. It’s the first award I’ve received since I lost my election so it’s something to remember. This is actually the first speech that I’ve giving since that election night. I haven’t had the opportunity to share comments with the public.
Let me first start with new project that I’ve got involved with and many of you have come up and asked about it. It’s with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C. It is a project called the American Enemies Project, which is a rather stark term I know for some folks, a rather chilling term, but one that will hopefully grab attention to with the severity of the situation that confronts us.
If you listened to what Foster talked about it’s not really my work on national security that I was known for in the United States Senate or when I was in Congress; it was a lot of other issues, issues that were very much at the core of another type of war: a war here in America, a cultural war, one that I am very passionate about. And yet I found myself over the last couple of years confronting the issue of the battle against Islamic fascism and its growing array of allies against America has superseded, at least for the time being in my mind, the other issues because of its immediacy and maybe is more importantly the fact that America just simply isn’t getting it.
And so I felt a real need after I left the United States Senate to take at least a little slice of my life and dedicate it to giving voice to something that I thought very few politicians were giving voice to, or at least the kind of voice that America needed to hear to be able to come to grips with this great threat that confronts us.
The question at least I had for myself when I started to put this talk together is, what happened that led me to believe this? Because we’ve been fighting against these Islamic radicals now for quite a long time and obviously most acutely since the events of 9/11 and why has it only been in the last year or two that all of a sudden this became evident to me that I needed to do and say more? And I will posit to you a couple of things that happened along the way in the last couple of years.
What I first began to see was the growing strength of Iran. Iran has been at war with us, as you know, since 1979, since they took the hostages after the overthrow of the Shah, but what I saw was a increasing presence of Iran and the reports I was getting from lots of sources overseas was Iran’s presence in Iraq, Iran’s presence and fomenting trouble both in Lebanon and with Hezbollah and others. And so the emergence of Iran and then the election of a guy named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After his election I started to learn about who this guy is and through the entire course of my campaign I gave a speech to all these groups and I would say the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now everyone in this room knows who Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is but a year ago, I guarantee you none of you would have known who that name was. And that’s what I said. I said, “Remember this name: a year from now, everyone in this room will know it because of the threat that I believe Iran will be to this country and to the world.” And the more I studied, the more I got into it, the more I felt that I needed to talk about it and someone needed to get voice to this because the president wasn’t doing it and no other Republicans were doing and it and certainly the Democrats weren’t going to do it. And so the growth of Iran as an issue was one thing.
The second thing was as I went out the campaign trail, it was very obvious to me we were losing the war. Yes, we were losing the war in Baghdad to some degree, but more importantly, we were losing the war in the streets of Pennsylvania. And ultimately, I believe when it comes to America, any time we lose a war we will always lose it at home, not with our brave men and women in uniform.
And so I felt the need to go out in the biggest race in the country and give voice to something that candidly the president was not giving voice to and no other Republicans were either, so I started thinking about how can we turn this around, how can we convince the American public? And Tommy Franks told me a story that really helped shape me in how I thought about this war. He told the story of a conversation he had with the president a year and a half after the events of 9/11.
He went to the president and he said, if you may recall, right after 9/11 and for quite a time afterwards, the president would refer to the terrorist as cowards. He would refer to them as cowards. And General Franks went to the president one day and said, “Mr. President, please stop referring to these people as cowards. Number one, they are not. These are people who are willing to die for what they believe in. That is not a cowardly act. It may be a misguided act, but it’s not a cowardly act, and secondly, you are misinforming the American public. You want the American public to take stern action against people and you want them to have a respect for the enemy; no one respects a coward. Words matter Mr. President. What you tell people about who you’re fighting matters because people hear and put in their own mind and interpret in their own mind what these words mean. And when they hear the word coward, no one is going to rally and fight and sacrifice to fight a war against people who we shouldn’t be afraid of.”
And so it is with these other war of words that we’ve had. I became convinced that one of the reasons we were losing this war is because the American public didn’t respect the enemy. They didn’t think there was any consequence of losing. They didn’t think we could lose. And even if we did lose, it didn’t matter. Why? Well, who are we fighting? Terrorists. Who are these terrorists? The terrorist number one is Osama bin Laden. Who is he? He’s a guy we haven’t seen in five years who lives in a cave, who communicates with rather crude instruments, to mostly other terrorists of the like. We don’t see them either. They look like a bunch of ragamuffins. They have crude telecommunications and even cruder weapons. This is who we’re afraid of? This is who the United States of America is going to lose to? No, people don’t believe that. You’re not afraid of a guy you don’t see. You don’t even know if he’s alive, how are you afraid of him? Yet we continue to say, as the president continues to say, we’re in a war against terror. Terror is a tactic; it is not an enemy.
The day after the president returned back from Baghdad at a meeting of the Republican leadership, House and Senate, in the Cabinet Room and we were talking about the war and he was talking about the prospects for success now that, as he just came back and met the new government – al-Maliki, the new prime minister of Iraq, and I told the president something I’d never done. I’d never really given a lecture to the president, but I felt, after having gone through what you heard me go through on the campaign trail and other things that I felt that I needed to do so. And I told him just what I told you: “Mr. President,” I said, “you are misleading the American public. This is no more a war on terror than the World War II was a war on blitzkrieg. Terror is a tactic; it’s not the enemy. The enemy has an ideology and we have to be courageous enough, brave enough to be able to confront the American people with the truth: that we are fighting a war against Islamic fascists, people who use Islam to support their fascist ideology of wanting to control the world. That’s what they’re doing. That’s who they are. And if you don’t tell that to the American public, then why would the American public believe it’s true? If you’re not willing to stand up and say what the truth is as an advocate for this war, how are they going to know it?”
Franklin Roosevelt had the courage in the 1940s to go up and say we’re fighting Nazism, that we’re fighting Japanese imperialism. I’m sure there are many Germans who were very upset about that, many Japanese who were upset about that, but you know what? Roosevelt didn’t care, because the stakes were high enough that we had to tell the truth because we needed the support of the American people. If we use euphemisms to describe our enemy, then that tells you that we’re not particularly serious about what we’re up against, doesn’t it?
I told the president he had to start to change the lexicon and he had an opportunity to do so, which I’ll get to in a moment. Well, he didn’t. I gave the National Press Club speech about a month later. I walked into my next meeting at the White House, which happened to be two days after that speech and handed the speech to Tony Snow and then said to the president, “Mr. President, you need to give this speech. You have to start using these terms. You have to start educating the American public or not only are we going to lose this election, we’re going to lose this war.”
A few days later, you may recall was when the British thwarted the attempted airline hijacking, so it was actually the airline bombings and the president the next day was quoted as saying that we were at war with Islamic fascists. Well, there was a huge outcry over his remarks. Most of the complaints were that we can’t use that term, Islamic fascists, it disgraces Islam.
We’re not saying that all people of Islam are fascists. What we’re saying is there are people who are fascists who are using Islam and we have to say it. But the president said it and then a couple of days later he unfortunately made a trip to the State Department. The State Department pleaded with him, and Karen Hughes in particular pleaded with him, please don’t use that term again, it’s offending our friends in the Islamic world and here at home. The State Department said that you can’t use that term, it’s just too offensive. The president hasn’t used it since.
If we’re not going to be honest with whom the enemy is, don’t expect the American people to follow us. It’s as simple as that. And so I spent the rest of the campaign talking about that because I though this was the issue of our time. It was not the smartest political move, as it turned out. A lot of my advisors reading the polls said, “You know, Rick, this is a losing effort here. I mean, this is all you’re talking about. This is what your commercials are about. You’re driving this train and it’s just going nowhere, not in this environment.” But I continued to work at it and then some things happened that made me think that maybe I don’t even have the whole picture. The events in the fall of 2006 made me rethink again about the nature of the enemy that we confront.
There was a meeting down in Havana, Cuba, of a group of non-aligned nations and we saw the warm up act for the United Nations meeting a couple of weeks later. These non-aligned nations, more accurately, nations aligned against the United States – led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and others, floated out an enormous amount of anti-American rhetoric and efforts to stand up as a movement against the United States. Then we saw in the interim North Korea explode a nuclear weapon, then we went to the United Nations and saw the tag team of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling the president a devil to the applause of the American left.
I thought to myself, well, maybe we need to take a little deeper look at what’s going on here, what is this relationship between radical Islam and these leftist organizations? And so we started to look a little bit more. I started seeing the moves of our enemies and the American left. I started to see the chess pieces move around and I had this eerie feeling that I know what’s going to happen and someone better start talking about it.
And so I gave a speech called “The Gathering Storm.” A good friend, Frank Gaffney came up and helped put some exclamation points on that toward the end of the campaign. Some pretty good speeches but a bad idea, really bad idea. They got lots of press, really huge coverage in all the press, all of which said, basically, Rick Santorum, warmonger, wants to go to war with the world. Not exactly the right message to the time when America is tiring of the war that we’re in. So the lesson learned by most Republicans, if they paid attention, was: good idea not to talk about expanding this war or any complexity with respect to Iraq, just keep it simple. Let’s just keep focusing on Iraq.
But there is a gathering storm. There’s a gathering storm of Islamic fascists. The president for the first time thankfully at the State of the Union Address began the education process about who we’re up against and it’s not just this group of people called terrorists or radical Islamists. They’re two really distinct groups of folks, radical Sunnis and radical Shiites. We need to understand who they are and what they’re all about, what their objectives are, where they come from. As many books as have been published on the subject, most people haven’t read them. Oh, you’ve heard about them but it takes a lot of time and why read them? It’s not that important. The president doesn’t talk about it and he’s the principal advocate of war. And if he’s not talking about how this is important, then why do you need to know? Why does the American public need to take the time to find out?
You need to know that we are up against two virulent strains of radical Islam, one within the Sunni religion, the other within the Shiite religion. In the Sunni religion, this is not necessarily unprecedented. The Sunnis are the ones who have been waging war against the West forever. Well, since the creation of Islam. But this particular strain is new. The old strain was snuffed out at the end of the Ottoman Empire when Ataturk eliminated the last caliph, and so the strain of sort of the general sense of warring of Islam against the West came to a close and now what has come up through the ranks is this rather odd strain. This strain really being a minority called Wahhabism.
This Wahhabism is much more virulent than the strain that confronted the West for over 1,000 years. These people are very serious about what they want and take extremist views of what the Sunni faith is all about. We ask ourselves, and who are these people? Yes, you know them as al Qaeda; you know them as a whole variety of different terrorist groups. You also knew them as the Taliban in Afghanistan. Those that were at their zenith at the events of 9/11.
We’ve done a pretty good job with our coalition allies of coming down and hammering this strain. We’ve eliminated the Sunni regime and the Sunni radical regime in Afghanistan. We eliminated a sympathetic Sunni regime to Sunni terrorism in Baghdad, and that is Saddam Hussein. And we have degraded al-Qaeda greatly and other Sunni terrorist organizations, but that does not mean that they are quiet. There’re still two nation states controlled by radical Sunnis: Somalia and Sudan. There are a whole other variety of other terrorist organizations and they have spun off and continue to cause problems as we saw just the other day in Great Britain. So Sunni radicalism is still alive and well and being fed, as we know, by Saudi Arabia and their madrassas, as well as other houses of worships all over the world funded by the Saudis and others who preach this radical and hateful version of Islam. The Sunnis are the majority. I think it’s about 85 percent of Islam is Sunni.
And then you have the Shi’as. For years, for centuries the Shi’as were sort of the peaceful Muslims. They didn’t want to govern anything. In the majority Shi’a countries, Sunnis will always govern because that was a theological thing, until 1979 and guy named Khomeini. He sort of changed things. He decided you know what; these Sunnis have a good idea about trying to establish a worldly kingdom. Sunnis always were waiting for the ultimate kingdom, the return of the imam, the 12th imam, but now they thought, we got to take control of the situation and rule in his stead, and so Khomeini came up with this idea that started the revolution in Iran and they’ve spun off terror groups like Hezbollah. Shi’a is the only majority in three states. Three major states: Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. Those are the three majority Shiite Muslim states. All problem area’s for us right now. Why? Because of this radical brand of Shiism that is brand new to the Shi’a, making them very much like their brothers the Sunnis.
I believe the Shi’a is probably, at this point, the most dangerous strain. Why; because of Iran, because they’ve got huge oil money behind this effort. None of this would be a big deal if oil money was not contributor to these strains. Osama bin Laden wouldn’t be anywhere if it wasn’t for one thing: oil. And so now we have Iran in a position to project power and to use Sunni-like theology, if you will, to conquer the world. So we have these two entities. This is the enemy, but it’s not just them anymore.
You saw the other day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveling around Central and South America, to Venezuela and to Nicaragua and to Ecuador and to Bolivia. This wasn’t a family vacation; he was there for a reason. These are all countries that are very sympathetic and aligned with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez is, in the eyes of most Americans, a buffoon. He’s a buffoon who is the fourth largest supplier of oil to the United States of America. He’s a buffoon who is, you hear in the press, nationalizing just about everything in the country. He just got his parliament to give him supreme authority to do whatever he wants to do in Venezuela. There will be no further elections and certainly not anything close to a fair election is Venezuela as long as he is in power. He is learning everything right at the knee of Fidel Castro and as those who have followed Cuba know, the Cubans are very good at keeping control once they get it.
So now he is spreading his power throughout Central and South America and you say, well, Castro has been trying to do this for years. The major difference being that Castro never had a drop of oil to do it with. No, Chavez is not as smart as Castro, but he’s smart enough to know to listen to Castro. And so now we have this alliance between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranians and Venezuela. Yes, they have a defense pact between the two countries. They started a fund, you may have seen it: $2 billion to counter America in the Americas. I refer to it as his hedge fund against America. As he says often, he will use oil as a weapon. He used it to get Daniel Ortega elected in Nicaragua. He gave all sorts of assurances of oil supplies for the Nicaraguans at cheap prices in exchange for their votes for Daniel Ortega and he’s trying to do it in other areas of Central and South America.
And who is Venezuela? They are not just a partner of Ahmadinejad’s but they are the largest purchaser of foreign arms in the world. They have a million-person army; they are spending $30 billion over the next few years to build 20 military installations in Bolivia which is the heart of South America. And where are these military installations? They’re on the borders of the countries that border Bolivia, like Argentina and Chile and Brazil. And they are manned, yes, by Bolivian troops, but they are commanded by Venezuelan and Cuban troops. You think he’s sending a message to his neighbors in South America? He is serious about effectuating what Castro has preached for 40 years and has the resources to do it and is in alliance with radical Islam.
How so? One of the axioms I learned early in my life is the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and we see that playing out today. Let’s throw in North Korea, too. Yes, they exploded a nuclear weapon. What’s the relationship? Well, there are widespread reports that there are Iranian scientists in North Korea and you saw in the paper the other day about North Korean scientists being in Tehran. There was an exchange there of a nuclear North Korea in need of cash with an Iran in need of nukes with tons of cash. That is a very bad and dangerous combination, with a world that continues, as Jacques Chirac so aptly said the other day, just decides to look the other way as they pursue their nuclear ambitions.
And then finally you have Russia. Russia, a country that is increasingly looking familiar, increasingly looking like the old Russia in the way they support nations that align against the United States. They block actions to contain nuclear technology and to block actions that again are harmful to the free world. These are the countries that are lining up and arraying against us. This is the gathering storm and it’s a gathering storm that’s real.
Winston Churchill said in his book, The Gathering Storm, which is the history of the second World War, it began with a short description: “How the English speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allow the wicked to rearm.” And here we sit.
Listen to the debate on Capitol Hill, listen to the mainstream media. The president for once confronts a country, Iran, that is providing training, logistics, resources, and weapons and personnel and leadership to the insurgents in Iraq who are killing our men and women in uniform. Mike Hayden, who’s the head of the CIA said, when he was asked the question about EFPs – we all know IEDs, now there’s EFPs, explosive formed projectiles – he was asked a question by Ron Wyden about these EFPs and where they’re coming from, that there were reports that they’re from Iran and General Hayden said, quote: “The EFPs are coming from Iran. They’re being used against our forces and incident for incident cause significantly more casualties that any other improvised explosive devices do and they are provided to the Shiite militia. That’s correct.” We have the head of our intelligence department saying that Iran is giving weapons to our enemy, who are killing our men and women in uniform and Democrats and many Republicans stand aside and say, “Oh, we dare not provoke them.” To do what? Kill more? We didn’t provoke them to do this. They are at war with us. At some point, hopefully not too late, we will understand that and act accordingly. The president is taking the right steps. He is being hammered on both sides and in the media for doing so.
So as bravely as I stand up here before you and talk about how we need to confront these threats, let me assure you there is absolutely nothing in it for a politician to agree with me. If you’re a Democrat, why would you? Why are you going to talk about a broader threat? You’ve got a great gig going right now just focused on Iraq and how messed up things are. Why are you going broaden this thing? Just let’s keep focusing on Iraq. And of course, if we just focus on Iraq, we’ll never win in Iraq because the problem isn’t just in Iraq. So it’s great for the Democrats politically. Obviously, I’m not suggesting they’re not patriotic and that they don’t want to win the war. You can suggest that but I’m not going to suggest it. They’re not going to bring in all these other threats that we have and start to confront them because Republicans do not want to be seen as warmongers.
The president, God bless him, I can guarantee you that the State Department is saying, Mr. President, don’t go after the Iranians in the country, don’t kill them, don’t sanction them, don’t go after companies that do business with them, all of which that he has suggested that we should do and that we are doing now. But I guarantee that the State Department said, don’t do it, you’re going to offend. We need to talk to them. We need to negotiate with them.
The Defense Department, you saw the reason the president took so long to make his decision, you heard General Casey; they didn’t want more troops. Why? They were afraid of stretching the military. It’s already stretched, they know that, and they don’t want to stretch it anymore. And my goodness, taking on Iran? No, Mr. President, you can’t do that – can’t do that.
What are our intelligence folks telling to the President? Well, you look at Iran and you say, Mr. President what are your options here? Well, you know, there’s nearly no great alternative in Iran. There’s no strong leader in the opposition. There’s no organized resistance. Therefore, Mr. President, I suggest you negotiate with them. That’s what they’re all telling him. The national media is beating its brains in. In my opinion, he’s doing the right thing.
But he’s not doing enough. He’s not doing enough. He’s doing the right thing with Iran, but we’re not going to solve the problem by just chasing down a few bad guys in Iraq. This is a much bigger problem than just chasing down a few bad guys. The president was right when he said that we are, “in the decisive ideological struggle for the 21st century.”
Now, think about what he just said. This is not just a military conflict, this is an ideological conflict and so we’re not going to just win or lose this battle on the battlefield. There are some who would like to pretend that if we retreat, that the problem will just go away; it won’t follow us here. Some have suggested that the Islamic fascisms is just a few crazies in the world and that Islam is a peaceful religion mainly and that really it’s not in need of reform, it just needs to be left alone to their own designs. It’s what people say in America. It’s a reason for getting out. It’s wrong. It’s wrong.
The question is what do we do? How do we win this war? I want to share with you some of my ideas. I suggest that we evangelize, educate, engage, and eradicate.
Evangelize: I don’t mean Christianize Muslims by evangelizing. What I do mean is to share with them a witness, a witness of what happened in Christendom. Christendom like Islam, was a connection between the church and the state for 1,000 years, over 1,000 years. Papal armies, papal wars; after the reformation, kings going to battle, who were the heads of also the church. This is something that’s very familiar to Christendom and we changed. We modernized. We understood the importance of religious pluralism not just for the sake of the state, but for the sake of the faith. Islam has to do the same and we have to help them do that. Now it will be hard for them; some say impossible. They said that about Christendom, too, but we have to try.
Second, we need to promote religious freedom everywhere, including here, as hard as it may be, but certainly around the world. It has to be a high priority for us. It’s something that we have to talk about and we are absolutely ill-equipped with a State Department who doesn’t know religion from first base.
I was on the phone today with Ambassador John Hanford. He happened to call Mark Rogers, who was in the car with me and Ambassador Hanford was put in that job – there was a job of ambassador on religious freedom. That job was supposed to be a job that reported directly to the secretary. After the State Department got through interpreting the law, he is now buried in some bowels in the State Department doesn’t see anybody anywhere and he’s not seen as an important person over there. They just don’t understand. They won’t understand. We need to reprioritize and understand that the conflict is not just a military conflict, but really an ideological one and faith is at the center of it.
Third, we need to re-evangelize Europe. Why? Well, if you look at what we’re up against, Mark Steyn wrote the book called America Alone and we really are alone in this. Maybe Britain will be with us, maybe. We’ll see what happens after Tony Blair. Israel will be with us? Not really a big help during this time. They took a pretty big shot with the loss to the war and Hezbollah. It’s going to be tough for them. We will be alone unless we somehow get some of our traditional allies back and we will not get them back save faith.
These secularized countries that are dying. Europe is dying. At their current birthrates, they’re going to lose half their population in 50 years. In Steyn’s book, he talks about the most popular boys name in Belgium: Mohammed. Forty percent of Amsterdam is Muslim, it will be Eurabia or Eurostan in the lifetime of your children unless something changes and that something is faith. It is a belief in something other than the self that makes one want to do things for others instead of just yourself, like giving of children. It is faith. It is faith that keeps our populations rates up. We need to re-evangelize.
Second, educate. I’ve talked about this so I’ll go through it quickly. We need to define the enemy. We have to say what this war really is. We must be not afraid. We have to publish articles and books and do all the things that smart people want to do, but we also have to do more. We have to fund and produce artifacts of the culture that communicate the message on a broad base scheme, because the other side does. The George Soroses and the Ted Leonsises and the Al Gores do the documentaries that get wide distribution and critical acclaim? Why? Because they are well funded and they’re supported. Jeffrey Skoll does Syriana, which says that we went to war for Haliburton. Why? Because he put his millions or maybe billions behind movies that get on your movie screen.
Invest in the culture. I’ll tell you what, answer this question: would you rather have someone, if you wanted to win America, someone get up and give a great political speech or have a movie in every theater across America? If you can answer that question, then you know where you have to start putting some of your resources.
We have to explain to Americans how we lose and what the consequences of losing are, because they don’t understand. We have to engage the American people. The president started the other night on energy. I know there are some people who would say, well, I didn’t like this policy or that. Look, we have to do something about energy security in this country, we have to produce more, we have to conserve more because we are funding the enemy who wants to kill us and destroy us. Energy policy has to be a priority. Frank Gaffney is leading the way on something called terror-free investments. Sarah Steelman, the treasures of Missouri, is the first to do that: create a public fund that was guaranteed terror-free; in other words, not investing in companies that do business with countries that support terrorism. We need to do it public sector-wise, as well as put the pressure just like some other groups have done in the past in the business community, like South Africa and the Sullivan Principles in not investing dollars in terrorism that are killing our men and women in uniform.
We have to engage the Americas. They made fun of Chavez and Ahmadinejad at the United Nations. They did the same thing to a guy named Nikita Khrushchev who banged a shoe, they made fun of him. And we found out he wasn’t such a funny guy. But Ahmadinejad is doing is exactly what Khrushchev was doing. I mean, they’re learning from history. We’re not but they are. How do you really get at America? At our soft underbelly. What they’re doing is very, very smart. We’ve focused all of our energy and all of our time, where? In the Middle East against them fighting on their front door. So what are they going to do? Bring it to our back door. It’s what they’re doing. And what are we doing? For the most part, ignoring it. You never hear the president talk about what’s going on there. We don’t refer to Chavez. Why? Because he’s a buffoon. Until one day we wake up and find out that this buffoon has stuff that could really be damaging to us, right across the bay.
We need to engage the Americas. We need to build closer ties so the spread of leftism, not Islamic fascism, but radical leftist ideology does not spread through our Central and South America. Eradicate: we have to defeat the enemy. We’ve got to win. We’ve got to go and stay in Iraq and anywhere else that we are confronted with this enemy, on the battlefield, with better intelligence to protect us here at home and obviously improve security.
And finally, we have to change the government of Iran.
We can stand aside and pretend that they are not at the core of what the problem is around the world, but they are. The funny thing is that the majority of the Iranian people are pro-American. The strongest pro-American sentiment in the Middle East is in Iran among the people and we have to have a deliberate policy to change that regime and we do not.
Many people have suggested that we are at a time right now that is similar to the late 1930s and the early ’40s where the storm is gathering around us and we choose to look the other way. We choose to believe that all of these crazy people who are saying they want to destroy us don’t really mean it or don’t have the capability of doing it, just like we did back in the late 1930s.
I will close with a quote that many of you have heard, you’ve heard certainly the last part of it, from Winston Churchill on June of 1940 when he addressed the British people as Britain stood alone after the fall of France. Britain was alone, America, June, 1940, a year and a half before America would stand by Britain’s side, a year and a half before we would announce we would stand by their side and sometime after that before we had the capability to do so.
And so there stood Britain alone against the onslaught of the Axis powers and he said, quote: “What General Weygand called the battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say: this is their finest hour.”
This is America’s hour alone. What Winston Churchill said 67 years ago is true today. What is your answer? God bless you.
–30 —
And HERE, from another website (CNP has multiple and partially overlapping websites for some reason), is the 2011 iteration of that same speech, before that same audience. Given on February 5, 2011, since Reagan was born February 6, 1911 and Santorum says it’s “tomorrow.” The thinking is set out in 2007, and its result is seen in 2011, which cannibalizes snippets of the 2007 speech. Paragraphing is theirs. [sic]
The Honorable Rick Santorum
Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Biography
Rick Santorum – Employment- Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center; contributor, Fox News Channel; columnist, The Philadelphia Inquirer; vice president of business development, Mpower Media; former member, United States Senate (R-PA); served, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Finance; former chairman, Senate Republican Conference and the third-ranking member of the Republican Leadership; former member, House of Representatives (PA-18); former attorney, Kirkpatrick and Lockhart; former administrative assistant to Senator Doyle Corman; former campaign volunteer, Senator John Heinz. Works- Author, It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Special Mention- Member, the famous “Gang of Seven,” a group of newly elected House members focused on cleaning up abuse and corruption; author, 1996 Welfare Reform Act and the legislation that outlawed Partial Birth Abortion; founded, Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom. Education- B.A., Political Science, Pennsylvania State University; M.B.A., University of Pittsburgh; J.D., Dickinson School of Law. Personal- Father of seven; married to Karen; they live in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
“The Gathering Storm of the 21st Century and our Continued National Security Threats”
SENATOR SANTORUM: It is really an honor and a privilege to be here. And what a treat it was to sit next to Richard Viguerie – I felt like I was at the knee of someone who has run so many campaigns and has so much wisdom. I want to thank you for the work you have done here at CNP and for giving me a little bit of your time tonight. I did want to make my presentation brief. I was asked to come and talk about national security tonight and I will do so. Obviously national security is a big issue today in regards to what is going on in the Middle East, and I will as briefly as I can go through that. But I got up at 3:30 this morning because of Ed Atsinger and Stu Epperson – I do Bill Bennett’s Morning In America radio program every Friday from six to nine in the morning. So to get up and prep in time I had to get up at about 3:30 in the morning and get down to the studio in Washington D.C., which is where I was today. So I did that program, hopped on a plane, and came here. I was fielding telephone calls all morning so I figured I would field some questions here tonight and keep with the program.
I want to talk about national security tonight because when I lost my election in 2006, as Becky said, I was a “cause” politician. I got involved in politics and ran for Congress because I cared about the issues and, really was never given a chance to win almost any of the races that I ran. But I continued to fight for what I believed in and never really worried about the consequences of winning and losing because you are only in that position for a short period of time and you never know what is going to happen – good years, bad years, you have to do what you think is right. So I continued to do that. In 2006 when I lost, I sat down with some of my friends and asked, “should I just check out?” I got beat, I should obviously spend more time with my wife and children, and start a private sector career. I thought for every issue that I worked on, I cared about, there was somebody there in Congress or there was some group out there that I felt comfortable would be able to carry the banner and continue to fight for the conservative cause. Except one. I was really concerned about national security.
We lost the 2006 election in large part because of the war in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld was fired the day after the election. At that time, things seemed to be crumbling and that we were going to lose our resolve. And I had some experiences in the election year of 2006 that I will share with you briefly. I gave a speech at the National Press Club in June of 2006 after having spent a year or more on the campaign trail talking about the threat of radical Islam. And I was concerned as I went out there and talked about the war, and talked about Islam, and talked about the Jihadist, that I was being met with blank stares among Republicans. I went to the President and gave this speech about how we had to redefine the war. That the President, by defining this war the war on terror, had misdefined the war. And that calling this a war on terror was the equivalent to Roosevelt calling World War II a war on blitzkrieg. The terror is a tactic, it is not an enemy, and that we had an obligation to be honest with the American public. What I found is that when I wanted to go out and talk about why we have to win this war, Republicans as well as others, didn’t care. And the reason they didn’t care, I found out, is because they didn’t think there was a consequence to losing the war. We hadn’t told them what would happen. What does it mean? Why does it matter? Other than the fact that, well, we are America and we want to win. So I gave this speech at the National Press Club and the next day I happened to be called in at a meeting of the leadership in the cabinet room. And I never will forget walking over to the President and standing up when it was my turn to talk. I stood and said, “Mr. President, I gave this speech yesterday at the National Press Club and I explained pretty much what I just told you.” I walked over to Tony Snow and I handed him a copy and I said, “Mr. President, you need to read that speech and you need to give a version of it. This country needs to be mobilized in order to not lose this war in Iraq, because we are going to lose it in America.” So I continued to fight that battle and when the election came around in 2006, I went out and started working on national security. I’ve spent the last four years at the Ethics and Public Policy Center doing just that – lecturing on dozens of college campuses, writing, sending out an email every week, talking about what is happening right now in the Middle East was going to happen. I remember in the Spring of 2006 – this was four or five months after the Iranian election – going around and talking to folks at my campaign meeting and my fundraisers and I would talk about the threat, the greatest threat to the country at that time, which was in my mind Iran, and people would say no you mean Iraq, we are fighting Iraq. I said no, no, the problem is Iran. And I said there is this guy, and I would say his name, and I would say none of you have ever heard of him – nobody ever had – and I said you will know his name and know how to pronounce it within a year and the name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And I have been out for the last four years talking about the Jihadist, talking about what we have – an incompatible situation. I know Frank Gaffney and I know he is here today, he is a great friend and mentor, and he talks about Shariah. There is an incompatibility between western culture and Shariah. It is incompatible. We cannot live with that difference because they cannot live with that difference. They are not fighting us because we oppress them, they are not fighting us because we have more stuff. They are fighting us because they do not believe we should not exist. They believe it is their duty to conquer us for our own interests. They believe they are doing justice. They are doing what God has called them to do. And we have to recognize that in the hot spots that we see now percolating up, and what we saw in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are taking on a mission to save Western Civilization. And people say, well – how can these people who live half way around the world who have the barest amount of technology and resources and all these things, how can they be a threat to the United States of America? They don’t like America, on their street, policing their block. China doesn’t want us to be the dominant force in the Asian Pacific. Russia doesn’t want us to be the dominant force in Asia and Europe. And the Islamist Jihadist do not want us to be the dominant force in the Middle East, and in Africa, and eventually in Europe. So you go on to the Bolivarian Marxist in Central and South America, they want us out of their territory too. So there are lots of interests out there. The problem is that we have a President that agrees with them. We have a President who believes this country is so corrupt in its dealings with the rest of the world, has done so many harmful things in involving themselves in world affairs, that we need to withdraw from the world and simply pay attention to building a nice little western democratic socialist state here in America. That is the model, that is why Barack Obama apologizes, that is why he bows, that is why he goes to our friends and turns their back on them and embraces our enemy. That is why in the green revolution he supported the dictators, he supported the hostile regime visa vie America. And in the revolution going on in Egypt, against a regime that has been friendly to the United States, he supports the protestors. It is all through the mindset that he sees everything through the eyes of his focus on transforming America.
If you look at what went on in Western Europe – when the transformation occurred during the 20th century, and these countries became socialist republics – what was the first thing that had to go? The military. You can’t afford to be strong in national security if you are spending all your resources on the government creating dependency among its citizens. This is the methodology, this is what we are facing. This is why we have to be, as conservatives, on the wall and on the watch. Right now, everyone wants to focus on the economy and focus their attention on what’s going on with the growth of government, but it is all tied to what is going on around the world. It’s tied to a President who believes that if we withdraw and if we cut our military we can then afford the programs that he is proposing here in America. The issues are related. We always talk about – and I’m going to be in Chicago tomorrow night talking about – Ronald Reagan. Tomorrow we are going to be celebrating Reagan’s 100th birthday in Chicago, and there will be 100th birthday celebrations all over the country. And Ronald Reagan believed in the three legged stool. And people think there are just three legs to the stool. But they weren’t three independent legs of the stool. Those legs were made of the same material. And they are joined together and they work efficiently and connect. They are based on the principle that our Founders established in The Declaration of Independence. I love the Constitution, but I’m a Declaration of Independence man. The Declaration of Independence gave us the heart of American exceptionalism. We are “endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.” That is the heart of American exceptionalism. That is what makes us different from every other country in the world. And remember that at the time that that was written, our ancestors had come from countries who did not believe that. They believed that the creator gave rights to the King. And then the King, to use the popular vernacular, “spread the wealth around.” Our Founders had a different DNA, they understood the role of faith. They understood that each person was equal in the eyes of God. Not equal because you were equal to him or he is equal to her, but because in the eyes of God we are equal and therefore we are equal. We have rights from him and the government’s role is to protect those rights to serve the people, not people serving the sovereign. That is the fabric of America that makes us exceptional, that makes us defend human rights and the dignity of every person. It makes us stand up for the child of the womb as a human being who is entitled to rights and for the integrity of the family, because we understand its intrinsic value of inculcating that faith and virtue that is necessary, as Mr. Franklin said, for a free people to have freedom. All of these things weave together what America is. It is the three legs of the stool. Three legs of the stool made of the same material. And if we are going to be successful as conservatives, we cannot have truces by lopping off one leg of that stool. Or truces by knocking off another leg of the stool of those who say we shouldn’t be involved, it’s not our job. We need to be defenders of liberty, and promoters of the dignity of every human life. We need to stand as that shining city on the hill. We need to be that beacon for the world. For if not us, who? I would be happy to take your questions.
ATTENDEE: Senator, we have heard a number of people talk about defense today. But we are not hearing anyone talk about civil defense. Ronald Reagan briefly tried to revive this but it died completely under Clinton when he closed the Office of Civil Defense. And we need to talk about this because Al Qaeda has got nuclear weapons, or nuclear material, and our population is not only ignorant, but terrified of things that are not a problem, but thousands or millions of them will die of panic if nothing else. So when are we going to start talking about the simple principles that could save thousands of lives and the simple basic equipment that at least every firefighter and police officer should have, if not every American?
SANTORUM: First off – thank you for that. You are absolutely right. But again, it goes back to this political correctness run amuck that we really do shy away from having a conversation with the American people about the potential threat. We spend all of our money and all of our focus on these little folks in blue uniforms at the airport. I mean as if that is the only vulnerability that America has. And we spend billions and billions and billions of dollars while if you are on a bus, on a train, in a tunnel – nobody, nothing. No security. The idea of creating “fortress Americana” at our airports and spending billions of dollars and doing nothing to tell people about preparedness of having some extra water, some extra food – I mean we see what happens when hurricanes come and snowstorms happen in Chicago: panic. People don’t know what to do because no one is prepared. We have gotten so use to being just in time and that everything will be there at the grocery store, or when you turn the light switch on, the light goes on. We are this instant society and we just believe that it always will be that way. There may be a time where it isn’t, and it will be a shock to us because no one has prepared us. I know we have had conversations here and you have had speakers talk about EMP’s and the potential damage – just catastrophic fallout – but it would certainly be a lot less if we actually prepared for it. If we actually tried to talk to the American public about some of the things that could happen instead of having an occasional horror movie or some sort of 24 episode. When our leaders don’t talk about it, it isn’t real. And our leaders don’t talk about it because then you have to pay attention to it. You have to devote resources to it. You have to actually make decisions based on it. And I don’t think we have had leaders, this one certainly, unfortunately, even the last one, who was willing to make that commitment.
ATTENDEE: Senator, last spring you and I talked about the possibilities of doing better in Pennsylvania and I thought you were hopelessly optimistic when you outlined your plans for doing better with the house races in Pennsylvania.
SANTORUM: We should have won seven.
ATTENDEE: And yet this year “blue” Pennsylvania went very well in the House, Senate, State Legislature, House seats, and Governor’s race. Could you talk about Pennsylvania as a pivotal key State? That if it switches to vote for Republicans at the Presidential level, at the State level, that changes the balance of power in the country. And you are kind of front and center in that issue.
SANTORUM: In Pennsylvania, we picked up five congressional districts; we should have picked up seven. If we would have put some additional resources into two, we could have picked up seven congressional districts. We lost most of those, well actually, all of them in 2006. In 2008 we could have gotten almost all of them back.
I always say that as I’ve traveled around the country, and I have been doing a little bit of that, there are very few places that I go in the country where I don’t say “well this is just like this part of Pennsylvania.” The state is very much a microcosm of the country. It’s got East Coast cities, Mid West cities, very rural areas, suburban areas, different kinds of ethnic communities, etc. It is a microcosm. The problem with Pennsylvania is Eastern Pennsylvania. All you folks from New York and New Jersey have been moving to my State. And you are moving because of high taxes and big government, and then you come and you vote for high taxes and big government and then wonder why your taxes are high. Maybe you should just keep moving to Ohio – just keep moving. I didn’t mean to say anything bad about Ohio. That is the problem, the eastern part of the state. I was remarking to Faith Whittlesey, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett won sixty-three out of sixty-seven counties. Three of the four counties he lost, were the city of Philadelphia of course we lose by four hundred or four hundred and fifty thousand votes but he also lost two of the big suburban counties which use to offset the city. That was the old pattern, lose to the city and the three suburban counties would offset the vote in the city and now they add to the vote in the city, all because of this demographic change. What we have to do and what we have been doing and the reason we won is we are focusing a lot of time in the central and western parts of the State. The western part of the State is heavily Union and heavily Democratic, and has been for a long, long time. It is where I came from, and began to create the Republican party that use to be the Blue Blood Republican Country Club Party of western Pennsylvania. The Republican Party was the old steel barons until I came around. No offense to John Heine but John Heine sort of symbolized the Republican Party of Western Pennsylvania, and we changed that. And as a result from work that we have been doing over the past twenty years, now our gubernatorial candidate won every county in Western Pennsylvania, John McCain won counties that hadn’t been won by Republicans since the great depression. So that area of the State is changing and if we can accelerate that then we can offset what is going on there. So theoretically having a candidate from Western Pennsylvania on the Presidential ticket, for example, might be a good thing to have if you want to win Pennsylvania in 2012.
ATTENDEE: Senator, I want to take you back to the EMP issue. This is an issue I have cared about for a long time. It has been recognized that we know how to deal with this problem. At least with respect to the ballistic missiles that might be launched off our coasts from ships, and yet we do nothing about it. The technologies around. We know how to deal with it in the region off the coast of Mexico, which includes the panhandle of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas and so on, and yet we do nothing. Frankly, I’ve given up on Washington. The technology to deal with it has been around for ten years. We know how to do it. I want to know what we can do to raise the interest among the local folks, the grass roots. You say you’ve been on the road speaking to them and so on. I really would like your reaction to that because I think it takes them to make things happen. Washington has got its head in the sand.
SANTORUM: I can’t disagree with you, but I would say that there are certainly folks who are interested in running for President on the Republican side who are aware of this issue that will talk about this issue. I would not give up on our leaders but without question if you can get a grassroots movement going and educate, but very few people talk about it and very few politicians do. Very few members of Congress, I’ve talked to members of Congress, they don’t know about it. They don’t know that there was an EMP commission. They don’t know really very much about any of this. When I first discussed this with people they sort of said, well it is just science fiction. Well, in a sense it is – but it is real. To the extent that you can build a grassroots effort on this, go for it. But don’t give up on politicians, in fact, make it a charge for you or for others to go and meet with politicians and lay out the case to them. It is not that hard to understand and the facts are there, the reports are there, it is pretty easy to be convincing.
ATTENDEE: Senator, I’m glad you support all three legs of the stool, including the cultural battle we are engaged in. And I’m also very proud of you for understanding the issue in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. But I was just at a super secret society dinner in Hollywood with this Speaker of the House who was applauding the changes taking place in Egypt. So you know he is a nice guy, he has a good sense of humor, he has a great tan, and it would be wonderful if Frank or some of the people here could speak to him. If you could speak to him and help him to understand that this is not a frivolous matter when you overthrow somebody who has been at least warm towards Israel and the United States, to somebody who is, at worst case, the Muslim Brotherhood.
SANTORUM: What is happening in Egypt is going to accelerate, it is not going to stop in Egypt. I mean it is going to happen in other places around. It’s Syria maybe next, it’s Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, go on down the list, Yemen maybe. These are all places where this type of revolution could occur. Some of these countries are friendly to us, others are not. But all of them are run by secular dictatorships of a sort. And all of them are highly susceptible to be tipped toward where the population is. I don’t know if I have shared with you the surveys in Egypt, but eighty-four percent of Egyptians believe that if someone converted from Islam, they should be killed. And you go down to what the Jihadist, the Muslim Brotherhood, teach and you look at surveys in Egypt and a very large percentage of the population believe these teachings, and so to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood is just a small group – well Ayatollah Khomeini was just a small group. I don’t know if you heard today, the Grand Ayatollah in Iran was out there cheering on the protestors in Egypt, saying this is another revolution. George Bush had the right policy, in effect, when he said we need to move to more openness and toward democracy around the world. Move, not have a heart attack. Move gradually, work with governments to create economic freedoms and other types of freedoms, gradually. Allowing this to take root and allowing secular institutions to be able to be successful, and to work with our friends, and to go after our enemies. But look at what happened in Iran a year and a half ago and the President’s response to that. Well what could he do at the time? Right before I left the Senate in the Spring of 2006, I had introduced a bill called the Iran Freedom Support Act, and what it called for was sanctions under the nuclear program and also a fund of money to help build relationships and help support the pro-democracy movement, to help support the secular movement within Iran to overturn their government. Now I will tell you a little story. I offered that as an amendment to the Defense Appropriation Authorization Bill in June of 2006. There was a Senator who got up and blocked it from being voted on for a week. The Administration was “neutral” on it. They refused to take a position because they don’t like Congress telling them how to run Foreign Policy. In the meantime, they were talking about, in fact, they began negotiations with, Iran in the Summer of 2006. And so I offered this amendment. And then late one night, I get a call from the Senator who was blocking it, his name was Joe Biden, and he called and said I’m releasing the hold, we can have a vote in the morning. So we get up and have a vote – I had sixty co-sponsors to my amendment – and I get up to the floor and Joe Biden hands me a letter and talks to me on the floor, it is from Condaleezza Rice opposing the bill. And we lost by two votes. Now, six months later after the Iranian negotiations fell apart, I offered the bill again and we were able to get it passed. And we funded, it was either seventy-five or one hundred million dollars, to go to help fund a burgeoning secular pro-democracy movement. The Bush administration didn’t spend the money. Oh they spent the money, but just not on that. The Obama administration repealed the money all together, didn’t spend a penny. So we had an opportunity for the President to say in Egypt, well you know I am just reacting to a situation, I didn’t know. He didn’t do anything to move our country in a position to where this didn’t happen. And he didn’t take advantage of the situation in Iran which could have toppled a regime, and instead of having riots, which is going to cause Islamic regimes to go into place over the next year or two, we might have had a situation where we would have seen secular pro-democracy regimes coming forward and tumbling against tyrannical forces who are assailed against us, and such, an occurrence in history. But we better be able to talk about that, better be able to inform the American public and be honest with them. And I love John Boehner, he was a fellow gang of seven member with me when I was in the House of Representatives, but he needs to understand more about what has happened here in the last few years. And not give credit to Barack Obama because he
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.