To Tell the Truth, Few Know the Truth

Much has happened in the past four days since the last original article appeared on this little-read website.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio continues his one-man demolition derby in Mexico as he continues to blaspheme the honor, the majesty and the glory of God by referring to “God’s dreams” and as by distorting and corrupting the meaning of the apparition and the miracles of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Also, of course, Associate Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia has died, apparently from some kind of unspecified “natural cause” even though a pillow was found over his head when his body was discovered on Saturday morning, February 13, 2016, while vacationing in a remote part of western Texas. This has set off a fury of speculation as to which naturalist of the false opposite of the “left” President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro will nominate to replace Scalia, whose “originalist” view of constitutional interpretation conflicted with the caesar’s “living constitution that responds to the ‘needs’ of ‘real people’” approach to constitutional deconstruction.

For present purposes, however, this commentary will focus on the knockdown, drag out, Pier 6 brawl that was billed as a “debate” among the six remaining naturalists of the false opposite of the “right” in Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday, February 13, 2016. As readers of my work should be well aware by now, the commentary that follows is not going to please anyone who is caught up in the mania of the battle of false opposites against each other in the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “right.”

What I would like to do, therefore, is to offer a few comments that attempt to focus the attention of those who read these articles on the simple, inescapable truth that Catholicism is the one and only means of human sanctification and salvation.

Catholicism is also the only sure foundation of a just social order wherein men pursue the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End by submitting themselves humbly to the teaching authority of Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to the good of souls. This includes a perfect observance of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as the foundational of constitutional interpretation and civil law.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, those who want to disagree with Pope Saint Pius X are free to do, but they do only to be steeped in an endless arrays of delusions about the ability of various naturalists to stem the tide of statism and its attendant evils by using the same kind of visceral approach to politics and policy-making that Jorge Mario Bergoglio brings to Catholic Faith and Morals:

It is in this regard that I ask readers to bear with me in order to put aside the raw emotions and agitation that causes otherwise rational Catholics to lose their minds every four year during a presidential election cycle. We cannot fight naturalism with naturalism. Naturalism will be defeated only by the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as a result of a true pope’s proper collegial consecration of Russia with all of the world’s true bishops.

We are eyewitnesses to a convergence of Antichrist’s legions in the realms of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, and no election is going to stop these forces from strengthening their grip on our daily lives as evils of all description—spiritual, moral, physical—proliferate with great rapidity. Thus it is that what transpired during the slugfest in Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday, February 13, 2016, was a manifestation the forces of Antichrist playing Americans for fools as false opposites within false opposites battled each other without any grounding in simply logic, no less any understanding of First and Last Things.

No one on the stage four days ago understands that Original Sin is the remote cause of all human problems.

No one on the stage four days ago understands that the Actual Sins of men are the proximate causes of contemporary problems.

No one on the stage four days ago understands anything about true facts of history, which Father Denis Fahey defined very succinctly in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

History is concerned with individual and contingent facts. In order to discern the supreme causes and laws of the events which historians narrate, we must stand out from, and place ourselves above these events. To do this with certainty one should, of course, be enlightened by Him Who holds all things in the hollow of His hand. Unaided human reason cannot even attempt to give an account of the supreme interests at stake in the world, for the world, as it is historically, these interests are supernatural.

Human reason strengthened by faith, that is, by the acceptance of the information God has given us about the world through His Son and through the Society founded by Him, can attempt to give this account, though with a lively consciousness of its limitations. It is only when we shall be in possession of the Beatific Vision that the full beauty of the Divine Plan which is being worked out in the world will be visible to us. Until then, we can only make an imperfect attempt at what be, not the philosophy, but the theology of history. The theologian who has the Catholic Faith is in touch with the full reality of the world, and can therefore undertake to show, however feebly and imperfectly, the interplay of the supreme realities of life.

The philosopher, as such, knows nothing about the reality of the divine life of Grace, which we lost by the Fall of our First Parents, and nothing of the Mystical Body of Christ through which we receive back that life. The philosophy of history, if it is to be true philosophy, that is, knowledge by supreme causes, must therefore be rather the theology of history. Yet how few, even among those who have the Catholic Faith, think of turning to the instructions and warnings issued by the representatives of our Lord Jesus Christ on earth, when they wish to ascertain the root causes of the present chaotic condition of the world! (Father Denis Fahey, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World.)

As we live in a world of naturalism and Pelagianism, each of which is the rotten fruit of the Protestant Revolutoin, most of those in public life have no deep intellectual bearings, and the few who do take their direction from false philosophies and/or political ideologies, which are nothing other than sterile substitutes for the true Faith.

For instance, the fact that avowed an avowed socialist, United States Senator Bernard Sanders (D-Vermont), has demonstrated such strength thus far against former First Lady/United States Senator/United States Secretary of State Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is that he has an intellectual consistency to his message whereas Mrs. Clinton, who is six years his junior in age, is known to change her positions to whatever suits the moment.

To be sure, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton does have core beliefs, especially as concerns the chemical and surgical assassination of children, and she is certainly a leftist. However, she is also a very calculating person who is ruthless in her pursuit of power. Rules that apply to mere mortals do not apply to the Clintons. Still and all, she is a pretty committed ideologue, but she is very willing to hedge on her beliefs, at least rhetorically, if the occasion requires her to do so, something that contrasts with the ideological purity of the avowed socialist, “Bernie” Sanders, who spent his honeymoon in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1988 (see Bernie Sanders’s Soviet Honeymoon - National Review Online.)

Clinton and Sanders agree on the basics of statism. They disagree only on the extent and at the rate at which socialism should be implemented.

It is a different case, of course, in the organized crime family of the naturalist “right,” composed as it is of an assortment of factions, symbolized so well by the fact that the current crop of candidates of the false opposite of the naturalist “right” have nothing that truly unites them other than a desire to “win” for the sake of winning.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, an apostate Catholic whose sanguine attitude about “gay marriage” was examined in Antichrist's Interchangeable Spare Parts, part two: False Opposites Within False Opposites, believes in a “pragmatic” approach to preserving the welfare state.

United States Senators Rafael Edward Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Antonio Rubio (R-Florida) are “Christian Zioninsts” who give their unquestioned support for the murderous monsters of the State of Israel. (See the same Antichrist's Interchangeable Spare Parts, part two: False Opposites Within False Opposites.)

Dr. Benjamin Carson has demonstrated he understands very little about public-policy on a purely naturalistic level. He knows even less about First and Last Things, and he has been a full-throated supporter of fetal tissue experimentation and on using fetal tissue in vaccines, information that I have provided in previous articles.

Former Florida Governor John Ellis Bush is, well, “JEB!,” a member of the “pragmatic” Bush clan who supports “Common Core” and having our daughters register with the Selective Service once they turn eighteen years of age. He also has deep connections to the mad internationalists of the Trilateral Commission, whose goal is destroy national sovereignty and to exact popular compliance with their plans for the “better world.”

John Ellis Bush was once thought by the “establishment” to be the “one” this year. Things have not worked out very well thus far for “JEB!”, although it would certainly be God’s just chastisement upon us for our sins, both individually and collectively as a nation, to punish with us another “Bush-Clinton” race twenty-four years after the Skull and Bonesman named President George Herbert Walker Bush could not only muster 37.45% of the popular vote against Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and industrialist Henry Ross Perot. It is indeed very ironic that a nation founded in a rebellion against the exaggerated abuses of monarchical rule has created political dynasties whose scions keep insinuating themselves into election positions to do the bidding of the paymasters just as much as their namesakes in the past.

The Republican “establishment” consists of old-money WASPS, population-controllers, statists, internationalists, financiers, corporate titans and central bankers who are tightly controlled by their Talmudic puppeteers. This collection of devils has rather consistently championed such paragons of limited government founded on the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity as the thirty-third degree Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., and his fellow thirty-third degree Freemasonic vice presidential running mate in 1996, former United States Representative and former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack French Kemp (a Freemasonic ticket that bookended that of the Republican ticket twenty years before, one that featured President Gerald Rudolph Ford/Leslie Lynch King, Jr., and the ever hapless, inarticulate and mercurial Dole himself), Texas Govenor George Walker Bush, who lost the popular vote by 547,398 votes (winning only because he received 537 more votes in the State of Florida than did Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., as a result the fact that Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader won 97,488 votes in the Sunshine State), United States Senator John Sidney McCain III and Willard Mitt Romney in the past twenty years.

“JEB!” Bush is, therefore, a proud representative and standard-bearer of statism and the New World Order who has been reduced to trotting out the man whose unconstitutional, unjust, immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and whose profligate spending on domestic programs near and dear to the heart of social engineers, former President George Walker Bush, in order to save another Bush presidential campaign in the heart of Freemasonry and anti-Catholicism known as the State of South Carolina, which  also Robert Joseph Dole, Jr’s,  firewall against Patrick Joseph Buchanan in 1996, eight years after Vice President George Hebert Walker Bush had triumphed in the Palmetto State over the aforementioned Dole.

(As an aside, Dole quite famously said to the then Vice President Bush “Yeah, stop lying about my record” when National Broadcasting Company television news anchor Thomas Brokaw asked Dole he had anything to say to the vice president, not knowing that Bush was sitting next to Brokaw, while he, Dole, appeared via satellite linkup from New Hampshire; see the transcript of the exchange appended below.)

It is with this in mind that it is necessary to give a little bit of background about how former United States Representative/former United States Ambassador to the United Nations/former Chief of the United States Liaison Office in the “People’s Republic of China”/former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency George Herbert Walker Bush came to be in a position to haunt his with his family members in public office.

Yes, you see, the blame for the plague of Bushes that has been with us for thirty-six years now rests squarely on the shoulders of the former Governor of California, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who was persuaded to choose George Herbert Walker Bush as his vice presidential running mate after a disastrous effort to forge what some considered to have been the idea of a “co-presidency” with the man who had defeated him for the Republican Party presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, by all of one hundred seven delegate votes, former President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr./Leslie Lynch King, Jr. The man who became President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor in 1981, Richard V. Allen, described how it was his idea to convince Reagan to jettison the idea of a political partnership with Ford in favor of Bush, who supported the surgical and chemical assassination of children and who had called Reagan’s economic proposals as “voodoo economics” when running against him in the 1980 primary process:

What I remember most about entering Ronald Reagan's suite early on the third evening of the 1980 Republican convention, the night of his nomination, was the silence. It's not that there weren't plenty of people around. William J. Casey, Reagan's campaign manager, Richard Wirthlin, his pollster, and his advisers Peter Hannaford, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese were all there in the candidate's elegantly appointed rooms on the 69th floor of the Detroit Plaza Hotel. So, too, was Reagan, dressed in a casual shirt and tan slacks. The entire group was seated on a large U-shaped couch, hushed, as if they were watching some spellbinding movie on TV.

The silence in the room was in marked contrast to the steadily rising noise at the Joe Louis Arena. There, word was spreading that Reagan was going to choose Gerald Ford, the former president and his bitter adversary in the 1976 primaries, to be his running mate.

As Reagan's foreign policy adviser, I didn't have much business getting involved in the selection of a vice president. But as someone who signed on with Reagan because I admired his principled criticism of the foreign policy of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, I couldn't help venturing to the suite to see what was going on. And so, at 5:30 in the evening, before I was to head over to the convention, I walked up the single flight of stairs that separated Reagan's floor from mine. It didn't take long for my suspicions to be confirmed. As I stepped into the hallway, there, coming out of Reagan's rooms and flanked by his Secret Service detail, was a tanned and fit Gerald Ford.

Once the former president and I had exchanged pleasantries, I made my way past security to Reagan's suite. Alone among those gathered on the couch, the nominee looked up and greeted me. I asked if he needed anything before I left for the arena. ''Oh, no,'' he replied, ''but thanks.''

As I turned to leave, he asked, ''What do you think of the Ford deal?''

''What deal?'' I responded, genuinely surprised that the two parties were already working out details. In addition to the vice-presidential slot, Reagan said, ''Ford wants Kissinger as secretary of state and Greenspan at treasury.'' My instant response was, ''That is the craziest deal I have ever heard of.'' And it was.

This summer, as we approach the Republican and Democratic conventions, both major presidential candidates have conducted highly structured searches for their running mates. Richard Cheney, the former secretary of defense, has spent months vetting candidates for George W. Bush. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher has been doing the same for Al Gore.

Though it was only 20 years ago, the process in 1980 could not have been more different from the one today. It is hard to imagine an unexpected vice-presidential pick at the last minute, like John Kennedy's selection of Lyndon Johnson in 1960, Richard Nixon's choice of Spiro Agnew in 1968 or even George Bush Sr.'s elevation of Dan Quayle in 1988 -- all of which caught the candidates' advisers by surprise.

But it was Ronald Reagan's nomination of Governor Bush's father that bears special telling. Reagan's selection of Bush in Detroit represented a turnabout within six hours; it came only when the negotiations with Ford, having taken on a life of their own, appeared to have reached an impasse. Had the talks succeeded and had Ford been selected, the Reagan campaign, crippled by infighting, might well have lost to the Carter-Mondale ticket in the fall. Had Reagan and Ford managed to win the election, it's very likely that their administration would have been hobbled by an unworkable power-sharing arrangement. It's also possible that the Republicans might have a different candidate today.

There are many plausible versions of how and why Reagan chose George Bush as his running mate, but most are wide of the mark. One conventional view is that Reagan, about to be nominated, recognized that he ''needed a moderate'' like Bush to balance the ticket; another version has it that Reagan, supposedly unschooled in foreign affairs, saw the wisdom of naming someone with extensive experience in the field to offset his own shortcomings. Yet another explanation holds that Reagan, a Californian, needed ''geographic balance'' and got that in Bush, with his Connecticut and Texas lineage.

These explanations are wrong. George Bush was picked at the very last moment and largely by a combination of chance and some behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Many Reagan advisers have claimed a deal was never close. The post-convention media commentary has largely reflected this view. In fact, Meese and Deaver have gone so far as to declare that Bush was their first choice all along. I take exception to their account. I saw a very different story unfold, and saw it from a privileged vantage point. From the moment I walked into that suite until the moment Bush was finally selected, I was the only person to remain in Reagan's presence throughout the adventure. With detailed notes to back up my memory, this is what I saw at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution on that long night in Detroit.

Ronald Reagan's search for a vice president started as soon as he clinched the nomination with a string of primary victories in the spring of 1980. Before long, a short list of prospective running mates had been put together, including Howard Baker, William Simon, Jack Kemp, Richard Lugar, Paul Laxalt and George Bush.

None of these prospective running mates were actually ''vetted'' in the way the process works today. Reagan knew all these men in varying degrees, but as was his style, he expected his advisers to do what was necessary to prune the list. The job fell largely to Ed Meese, who knew Reagan's mind better than anyone except Nancy Reagan.

It wasn't until several weeks before the convention that Gerald Ford's name entered into the mix. While it has never been established how it happened, most attribute it to Bryce Harlow, a respected adviser to Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford. Harlow probably initiated the idea in a discussion with his friend, William Casey, who then took it to Reagan and Meese.

As the convention approached, the Ford rumors became stronger. Although Reagan was running even with or behind President Carter in most polls, the idea struck several of us on the senior staff as a highly impractical, if not silly, idea. After all, Reagan and Ford had fought intensely for the nomination in 1976. In 1980, the G.O.P. platform carried Reagan's conservative message down the line. Its foreign policy planks in particular were, under cover of assailing Carter, a de facto indictment of the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger policy of detente with the Soviet Union. Unlike many of his predecessors, Reagan actually believed in the platform and was determined to see it put in place. The platform alone, we thought, would make a Reagan-Ford ticket unthinkable.

In Reagan's suite, however, the unthinkable had become the possible. In less than 24 hours, Reagan was going to have to go before the convention to announce his vice-presidential nominee. And yet for reasons that to this day remain baffling, not only had Reagan given his political advisers free rein to negotiate with Ford, he had also refrained from initiating conversations with other potential running mates. With no alternate plan in sight, it seemed that Reagan was prepared to embrace the wing of the Republican Party that had ridiculed him, probably disliked him and would surely do its best to undermine his agenda.

At 5:50 p.m., Casey and Meese, who had left the suite shortly after my arrival, returned. They seemed pensive. Lyn Nofziger, a longtime aide, joined us a few minutes later, asking, ''What did Ford want?''

Reagan again described the deal being negotiated, complete with Ford's demands for Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, adding ''I thought that was more than a little sacrifice.'' Then Reagan went to his bedroom to take a short nap. He knew it would be a long night.

Shortly after 6:30, Kissinger entered the suite to talk to Meese, evidence that a serious negotiation was indeed in progress. Half an hour later, he emerged; we chatted briefly, but the former secretary of state revealed nothing of the talks. Meese, who was similarly guarded, said that Kissinger wanted to proceed with discussions.

This was serious. And so I did something rash: I decided to try to contact George Bush. Until that moment, the campaign inner circle had treated important issues in a collegial manner; there had been no secrets among us. But on this issue, Casey, Meese, Wirthlin and Deaver were keeping the lid on. If my colleagues could play it close to the vest on such a crucial issue, it was a game that could be played by others as well.

Although nominally still on a list of frequently mentioned running mates, George Bush was not really on Reagan's radar screen. Since the primaries, the two men had barely spoken, and they certainly hadn't discussed the vice presidency. Apart from serious policy differences, Bush had refused to admit defeat in the primary battles despite being vanquished by Reagan in 29 of 33 primaries and did not withdraw from the race until just before the California primary in June. Reagan considered the belated departure willful and unnecessary and was offended by it. Still, I thought Bush a viable alternative to Ford; he had the best credentials of the possible running mates mentioned. If not for the unsettled relations between the two, Bush could bring more to the ticket to help Reagan than anyone on the list of choices.

There was no question that a Bush candidacy would be a hard sell. Among Reagan's advisers, Nofziger and Casey viewed Bush as a liberal, and others were almost unanimously against him, some even contemptuous. I considered Bush a capable man whose positions were actually much closer to Reagan's than were Ford's, especially on foreign policy and defense matters. In 1978, Bush had requested my assistance on his campaign, but my commitment to Reagan was firm. Of the Reagan inner circle, I had the clearest channel to Bush and knew him the best.

Shortly before 7:30, I reached Stefan Halper, a Bush aide. Talking to him from the nearly empty suite, I asked him, in as circumspect a manner as possible, to seek Bush's assurance that he could support the platform ''with no exceptions.'' Halper knew what I meant: Was Bush interested in the job? Would he implicitly abandon his support for abortion and his opposition to supply-side economics by embracing the platform? I then called an old friend, Richard Fairbanks, to ask him to approach Bush with the same question. I wanted two sources of independent confirmation and knew Fairbanks was close to Bush.

At this point, Reagan emerged from his bedroom refreshed by the catnap and sat down in front of three muted television sets in the suite. Within moments, Gerald Ford appeared on CBS with Walter Cronkite, and Reagan asked that the volume be turned up. Cronkite wasted no time asking Ford if he and Reagan were discussing a ''co-presidency,'' which Ford affirmed by not disagreeing. Reagan looked appalled.

After the broadcast, the room cleared out. Reagan and I were alone. Reluctant to question him, but knowing that another track could never be started unless he agreed to it, I asked Reagan why he would not simply issue a statement denying that he had agreed to a co-presidency. There was a sense of resignation in his voice when he said, ''I can't.'' After a few seconds, he said aloud, almost rhetorically, ''Who else is there?''

''There's Bush,'' I suggested, half expecting him to close off the discussion. Instead, he paused and then said, ''I can't take him; that 'voodoo economic policy' charge and his stand on abortion are wrong.''

Sensing an opportunity, I reached for a copy of the platform lying on the coffee table, passed it to him and said, ''Governor, this is your platform, every word of it.'' I added that Martin Anderson, Reagan's chief domestic policy adviser, Peter Hannaford and I had scrutinized it carefully. ''If you could be assured that George Bush would support this platform in every detail,'' I asked, ''would you reconsider Bush?''

Reagan mulled this for a moment and then said, deliberately, ''Well, if you put it that way, I would agree to reconsider.'' The opening emerged.

At 7:50 Fairbanks called to say that Bush could indeed embrace the platform; soon thereafter, Halper phoned with the same message. Meanwhile, negotiations with Ford continued upstairs on the 70th floor, with Casey, Meese, Deaver and Wirthlin representing Reagan, and Greenspan, Kissinger and the Ford advisers John O. Marsh, Robert Barrett representing the former president.

Reagan continued to sit before the televisions, snacking on his favorite jelly beans. Senator Bob Dole appeared with the television commentator Max Robinson and declared that ''Ford and Reagan can work it out.'' Reagan commented, softly: ''No, Bob. I cannot give him what he wants.''

Seeing another opening, I then informed Reagan that Bush had given unequivocal assurances that he could embrace and defend the entire platform, emphasizing ''with no exceptions.'' He listened carefully, but did not respond. I simply could not read his reaction, and the thought crossed my mind that he was angry that I had opened a channel to Bush.

At 8:05, Reagan announced to no one in particular, doesn't Ford ''realize there is no way in the world I can accept? What kind of presidential candidate would I be in the eyes of the world if I were to give in to such demands?'' It seemed odd that despite his instincts, Reagan did not call a halt to the talks. It seemed odd, too, that so many of those who felt uncomfortable about the deal remained quiet.

Just before 8:30, Meese reported progress: Ford had modified his demands and now wanted to be ''chairman'' of the National Security Council. The notion should have been rejected outright, as the President is the head of the N.S.C. A few minutes later, Anderson and Deaver rejoined the group in the suite, and Deaver told Reagan that Ford would like to speak to him on the phone. At 8:55, Reagan went into his bedroom to call Ford. He returned five minutes later, reporting that Ford had told him that Kissinger ''now takes himself out'' of the running for secretary of state. It was clear that Ford and Greenspan had not taken themselves out of anything.

By 9:30, Sam Donaldson was reporting that Reagan would go to the arena with Ford in a matter of hours, reinforcing speculation about the ''dream ticket,'' and at 9:45, Cronkite announced that Ford and Kissinger were meeting with Reagan operatives. At 9:50, Meese came into the room: ''We're wanted upstairs'' in Ford's suite.

At 10:05, former Treasury Secretary William Simon entered, and Reagan and I sat with him in a corner. Simon, who had been mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate, was determined to stop the deal in its tracks, which was surprising since he had served in Ford's cabinet. ''Ron, take me out of this,'' he told Reagan. ''But under no circumstances take Ford. If you did that, you'd be totally compromised, and you know it.'' Simon, never a man to mince words, left; he had made a deep impression on Reagan.

By 10:45, Casey and Meese returned to the suite to present the latest version of the deal. ''It's kind of hard to describe how it would work in practice,'' Meese began. ''The president will nominate the secretaries of state and treasury, with the veto of the vice president. The vice president will name the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the national security adviser with the veto of the president. It boils down to a mutual veto power.'' In this version, Kissinger, ''taken out'' as secretary of state, would run foreign policy from the vice president's office.

At that late hour, despite its obvious and fundamental flaws and without any sort of backup plan, our side seemed determined to try to make this constantly changing arrangement work. It was almost surreal: how could a president limit his constitutional powers and prerogatives by allowing a vice president to veto his choices?

Just before 11, Nancy Reagan and the Reagan children came in to watch the convention roll call. At 11:13, Montana put Reagan over the top, and there was jubilation. At the moment of triumph, though, the negotiators were not present; they remained upstairs, locked in discussions. Meanwhile, the convention was drawing to a close -- if the Ford talks went on much longer, and failed, there would be no way to heal the disappointment. Over the course of the preceding hour, I had told Hannaford, Anderson and Nofziger that a channel had been opened to Bush and that Bush was on board with the platform. Hannaford then began to argue that the logjam had to be broken. He collected Deaver and Nofziger at the entrance to the suite and mounted the stairs to tell the negotiators that a decision was needed.

At 11:25, the negotiators returned; Casey reported that ''the answer is probably no.'' Five minutes later, Ford, accompanied by Barrett, entered the suite to talk with Reagan, and we left the room. The two men spent a few minutes alone, and at 11:35, Ford departed. We rushed back into the room, and Reagan said: ''I have to say the answer is no. All this time, my gut instinct has been that this is not the right thing. I have affection and respect for Ford. He said he would go all out to help.'' There was complete silence.

Reagan glanced around and asked those assembled -- a group that included Casey, Meese, Wirthlin, Hannaford, Deaver and me -- Well, what do we do now?'' There was no immediate response. No one offered an alternate plan. No one tossed out a name. Expecting instant opposition, I ventured, ''We call Bush.'' Once more, silence. Reagan again looked at each of us; hearing no objection, he said, ''Well, let's get Bush on the phone.''

At precisely 11:38, the phone was in Reagan's hand; though they barely knew each other, Reagan dove right in. ''George,'' he said warmly, ''I would like to go over there and tell them that I am recommending you for vice president. Could I ask you one thing -- do I have your permission to make an announcement that you support the platform across the board?'' We could hear Bush agreeing at the other end. Reagan then left for the convention center where, shortly after midnight, he took the podium to praise Ford and then to announce his running mate, George Bush.

And so it came to pass that Ronald Reagan averted what would have been a disaster for his candidacy and the Republican Party. The following morning, Ed Meese called us together and declared the official line should be that the process of selecting a running mate had been orderly and measured and that there ''never was a deal with Ford'' for the vice presidency. Technically, he's right, since no deal was ever consummated.

Months later, while on the campaign plane, I asked Deaver what was in his mind as he sat in those discussions. He thought for a moment and said, ''Look, I'm a guy from Sacramento, Calif., and there I was sitting at a negotiating table with Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger had negotiated with Mao.'' Astonished, I waited for something more, then asked, ''And so, that's it?'' He looked at me as if I didn't understand and said, sharply: ''Of course that's it. I was sitting right there!''

For his part, Kissinger, no stranger to balky negotiations, later told The Washington Post that ''if it had been possible for both the principals to go to bed, sleep on it, meet again in the morning, we could have wrapped up this thing in two hours in the morning,'' adding, ''that's how close it was.'' And I believe him.  (Ricard V. Allen on George Herbert Walker Bush as the Accidental Vice President.)

That is quite a story, and it is one that continues to haunt us yet in the farce called presidential elections. George Herbert Walker was chosen to run with Ronald Wilson Reagan to avoid disarray caused by the speculation that former President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr./Leslie Lynch King, Jr., was going to Reagan’s selection as his vice presidential running mate.

Once elected, of course, as those of who us who were alive at the time might recall, George Herbert Walker Bush bided his time in the vice presidency so that he could present himself as the heir apparent to “The Gipper.”

In truth, of course, President George Herbert Walker Bush governed as an establishment Republican, which meant that he helped to oversee the negotiations that resulted in the finalized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was signed into law in his presence by President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton on December 8, 1993. NAFTA has been a disaster that has robbed the United States of America of some its national sovereignty as it shifted as many as 682,000 American jobs and countless numbers of manufacturing plants to Mexico shifted American jobs and manufacturing plants to Mexico between 1995 and 2012 (nearly 700,000 American jobs lost to Mexico becaues of NAFTA), although, as noted in Still Selling the Rope After All These Years, part one, many more American manufacturing jobs and plans have relocated to Red China. One report from 2012 stated that the United States of America lost 2,700,000 jobs to Mexico just between 2001 and 2011 (American Lost 27 Million to Red China).

Still and all, NAFTA has been disastrous for the United States of America, the trilateralist/internationalist/statist President George Herbert “New World Order” Bush made NAFTA a cornerstone of his Pan American policy.

Even more importantly for present purposes, though, is the fact that “Pappy” Bush resorted to the old-fashioned American tool of warfare propaganda that used by pamphleteers, most notably Thomas Paine, to generate support for a break with Great Britain as the Second Continental Congress, which first met on May 10, 1775, just three weeks after the Battles of Lexington and Concord that marked the start of the War for Independence, prior to its promulgation of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and throughout the course of this nation’s history, up to and including the ongoing military involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. “Pappy Bush’s” administration deceived the American public as follows in the quest to obtain Congressional “authorization,” not an Act of War as required by the Section 8 of Article I of the United States Constitution, in the fall of 1990 to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which had been invaded on August 2, 1990, just eight days after American Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie gave the impression to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that the government of the United States of America would take no action if he decided to order his forces “annex” Kuwait:

It's plainly wrong for a member of Congress to collaborate with a public relations firm to produce knowingly deceptive testimony on an important issue. Yet Representative Tom Lantos of California has been caught doing exactly that. His behavior warrants a searching inquiry by the House Ethics Committee.

Mr. Lantos is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. An article last week on The Times's Op-Ed page by John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's magazine, revealed the identity of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who told the caucus that Iraqi soldiers had removed scores of babies from incubators and left them to die.

The girl, whose testimony helped build support for the Persian Gulf war, was identified only as "Nayirah," supposedly to protect family members still in Kuwait. Another piece of information was also withheld: that she is not just some Kuwaiti but the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S.

Saddam Hussein committed plenty of atrocities, but not, apparently, this one. The teen-ager's accusation, at first verified by Amnesty International, was later refuted by that group as well as by other independent human rights monitors. But the issue is not so much the accuracy of the testimony as the identity and undisclosed bias of the witness.

How did the girl's testimony come about? It was arranged by the big public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton on behalf of a client, the Kuwaiti-sponsored Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was then pressing Congress for military intervention. Mr. Lantos knew the girl's identity but concealed it from the public and from the other caucus co-chairman, Representative John E. Porter of Illinois.

Mr. Lantos says that the fact that Nayirah is the Ambassador's daughter did not alter her credibility. That doesn't wash. Had her identity been known, her accusations surely would have faced greater skepticism and been questioned more closely. Mr. Porter isn't angered that he was misled. But his complacency is far less troubling than Mr. Lantos's lack of candor and lapse of judgment.

The episode also calls into question the dubious financial dealings of the House caucus system. Unlike Congressional committees, which act on legislation, the caucuses bring together like-minded members to highlight issues like human rights abuses, the environment and minority concerns.

Current rules prohibit the caucuses from accepting private donations or government grants. But the caucuses often have close ties to companion nonprofit "foundations" or "institutes" that attract funds from special interests. Caucus leaders often play a central role in these foundations.

Until recently, for example, Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter headed the Congressional Human Rights Foundation. It rents space in Hill & Knowlton's Washington headquarters at a reduced rate. The same Citizens for a Free Kuwait that produced the mysterious Nayirah also gave $50,000 to the foundation sometime after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The foundation has financed caucus travel, including trips by Mr. Lantos and his wife.

Chances are that Congress would have voted to pursue the war even without this deception. Still, it's disappointing that Mr. Lantos, a tiger in pursuing low ethical standards at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has turned into such a house pet. (Deception on Capitol Hill.)

Thus it is that there was a great deal of disinformation that led up to the Persian Gulf War. It has always been thus with governments of the United States of America. Always.

Indeed, it was thus with “JEB!’s” big brother, former President George Walker Bush, in the disinformation that was used prior to the unjust, immoral and unconstitutional American invasion and occupation of Iraq on March 20, 2003. It was this disinformation that became the source of some real fisticuffs at the Republican Party presidential debate in Charleston, South Carolina, four days ago now, that is, on Saturday, February 13, 2016:

DICKERSON: ... on Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother. As you've said tonight, and you've often said, the Iraq War and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment.

In 2008, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, talking about President George W. Bush's conduct of the war, you said you were surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn't try to impeach him.

You said, quote: "which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing." When you were asked what you meant by that and you said: "For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies." Do you still believe President Bush should have been impeached.

TRUMP: First of all, I have to say, as a businessman I get along with everybody. I have business all over the world.

(BOOING)

TRUMP: I know so many of the people in the audience. And by the way, I'm a self-funder. I don't have -- I have my wife and I have my son. That's all I have. I don't have this.

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: So let me just tell you, I get along with everybody, which is my obligation to my company, to myself, et cetera.

Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? Now, you can take it any way you want, and it took -- it took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days.

He went back, it was a mistake, it wasn't a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said, "it was a mistake." The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world.

Obviously, it was a mistake.

DICKERSON: So...

TRUMP: George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.

DICKERSON: But so I'm going to -- so you still think he should be impeached?

BUSH: I think it's my turn, isn't it?

TRUMP (misidentified as "Dickerson" in the transcript): You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

(BOOING)

DICKERSON: All right. OK. All right.

Governor Bush -- when a member on the stage's brother gets attacked...

BUSH: I've got about five or six...

DICKERSON: ... the brother gets to respond.

BUSH: Do I get to do it five or six times or just once responding to that?

TRUMP: I'm being nice.

BUSH: So here's the deal. I'm sick ask tired of Barack Obama blaming my brother for all of the problems that he has had.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: And, frankly, I could care less about the insults that Donald Trump gives to me. It's blood sport for him. He enjoys it. And I'm glad he's happy about it. But I am sick and tired...

TRUMP: He spent $22 million in...

(CROSSTALK)

BUSH: I am sick and tired of him going after my family. My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: And while Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: And he has had the gall to go after my brother.

TRUMP: The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that.

(BOOING)

BUSH: He has had the gall to go after my mother.

Hold on. Let me finish. He has had the gall to go after my mother.

TRUMP: That's not keeping us safe.

BUSH: Look, I won the lottery when I was born 63 years ago, looked up, and I saw my mom. My mom is the strongest woman I know.

TRUMP: She should be running.

BUSH: This is not about my family or his family. This is about the South Carolina families that need someone to be a commander-in- chief that can lead. I'm that person.

DICKERSON: Governor Kasich, would you weigh in on...  (Transcript of February 13, 2016, Republican Primary debate.)

Leaving aside the verbal fisticuffs that flew in a fast and furious manner during this interchange, which included John Ellis Bush's whining about "attacks" on his family, whose members have dragged us into needless foreign wars and sold out national sovereignty and undermine our legitimate national security interests, especially by a de facto policy of open borders to do the bidding of the United States Chamber of Commerc, Donald Trump was speaking the truth, at least in general terms, about the fact that the administration of President George Walker Bush misled the American public about the presence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Cherry-picked intelligence evidence was used to “prove” the presence of the “weapons of mass destruction” prior to the onset of the invasion on March 20, 2003, Iraqi time (March 19, 2003, here in the United States of America). Perhaps George Walker Bush really, really believed this evidence, but he did so because he was convinced that a war with Iraq was "necessary" to make the Middle East "safe" for Israel and becaue he wanted to convince "Joe Public" that war with Iraq was necessary.

It was to justify the American invaion and occupation of Iraq that Bush gave journalist Bob Woodward two and hours' worth of interviews, providing Woodward with permission to interview administration officials as well. Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, was published in 2004, and it was in that year tha a summary of it appeared in The Washington Post:

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration. Vice President Cheney, whom Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force," led that group and had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Hussein by force.

By early January 2003, Bush had made up his mind to take military action against Iraq, according to the book. But Bush was so concerned that the government of his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, might fall because of his support for Bush that he delayed the war's start until March 19 here (March 20 in Iraq) because Blair asked him to seek a second resolution from the United Nations. Bush later gave Blair the option of withholding British troops from combat, which Blair rejected. "I said I'm with you. I mean it," Blair replied.

Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that became so strained Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessively trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact.

Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office -- had established what amounted to a separate government. The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a dinner he hosted a year ago celebrating the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and "always had major reservations about what we were trying to do."

Before the war with Iraq, Powell bluntly told Bush that if he sent U.S. troops there "you're going to be owning this place." Powell and his deputy and closest friend, Richard L. Armitage, used to refer to what they called "the Pottery Barn rule" on Iraq: "You break it, you own it," according to Woodward.

But, when asked personally by the president, Powell agreed to make the U.S. case against Hussein at the United Nations in February 2003, a presentation described by White House communications director Dan Bartlett as "the Powell buy-in." Bush wanted someone with Powell's credibility to present the evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a case the president had initially found less than convincing when presented to him by CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin at a White House meeting on Dec. 21, 2002.

McLaughlin's version used communications intercepts, satellite photos, diagrams and other intelligence. "Nice try," Bush said when the CIA official was finished, according to the book. "I don't think this quite -- it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from."

He then turned to Tenet, McLaughlin's boss, and said, "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we've got?"

"It's a slam-dunk case," Tenet replied, throwing his arms in the air. Bush pressed him again. "George, how confident are you?"

"Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," Tenet repeated.

Tenet later told associates he should have said the evidence on weapons was not ironclad, according to Woodward. After the CIA director made a rare public speech in February defending the CIA's handling of intelligence about Iraq, Bush called him to say he had done "a great job."

In his previous book, "Bush at War," Woodward described the administration's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: its decision to attack the Taliban government in Afghanistan and its increasing focus on Iraq. His new book is a narrative history of how Bush and his administration launched the war on Iraq. It is based on interviews with more than 75 people, including Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

On Nov. 21, 2001, 72 days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for war with Iraq. "Let's get started on this," Bush recalled saying. "And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to." He also asked: Could this be done on a basis that would not be terribly noticeable?

Bush received his first detailed briefing on Iraq war plans five weeks later, on Dec. 28, when Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, visited Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. Bush told reporters afterward that they had discussed Afghanistan.

While it has been previously reported that Bush directed the Pentagon to begin considering options for an invasion of Iraq immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's order to Rumsfeld began an intensive process in which Franks worked in secret with a small staff, talked almost daily with the defense secretary and met about once a month with Bush.

This week, the president acknowledged that the violent uprising against U.S. troops in Iraq has resulted in "a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people." But he insisted that his course of action in Iraq has been the correct one in language that echoed what he told Woodward more than four months ago.

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, expressed no doubts about his decision to invade Iraq, and enunciated an activist role for the United States based on it being "the beacon for freedom in the world."

"I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty."

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq, and the powerful role his religious beliefs played throughout that time.

"Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness."

The president told Woodward: "I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right. I was going to act. And if it could cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so."

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."

The president told Woodward he was cooperating on his book because he wanted the story of how the United States had gone to war in Iraq to be told. He said it would be a blueprint of historical significance that "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives."

"But the news of this, in my judgment," Bush added, "the big news out of this isn't how George W. makes decisions. To me the big news is America has changed how you fight and win war, and therefore makes it easier to keep the peace in the long run. And that's the historical significance of this book, as far as I'm concerned."

Bush's critics have questioned whether he and his administration were focused on Iraq rather than terrorism when they took office early in 2001 and even after the Sept. 11 attacks. Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill and former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke have made that charge in recently published memoirs.

According to "Plan of Attack," it was Cheney who was particularly focused on Iraq before the terrorist attacks. Before Bush's inauguration, Cheney sent word to departing Defense Secretary William S. Cohen that he wanted the traditional briefing given an incoming president to be a serious "discussion about Iraq and different options." Bush specifically assigned Cheney to focus as vice president on intelligence scenarios, particularly the possibility that terrorists would obtain nuclear or biological weapons.

Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.

Powell dismissed the plan as "lunacy," according to Woodward, and told Bush what he thought. "You don't have to be bullied into this," Powell said.

Bush told Woodward he never saw a formal plan for a quick strike. "The idea may have floated around as an interesting nugget to chew on," he said.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., according to Woodward, compared Bush to a circus rider with one foot on a "diplomacy" steed and the other on a "war" steed, both heading toward the same destination: regime change in Iraq. When it was clear that diplomacy would not get him to his goal, Card said, Bush let go of that horse and rode the one called war.

But as the planning proceeded, the administration began taking steps that Woodward describes as helping to make war inevitable. On Feb. 16, 2002, Bush signed an intelligence finding that directed the CIA to help the military overthrow Hussein and conduct operations within Iraq. At the time, according to "Plan of Attack," the CIA had only four informants in Iraq and told Bush that it would be impossible to overthrow Hussein through a coup.

In July, a CIA team entered northern Iraq and began to lay the groundwork for covert action, eventually recruiting an extensive network of 87 Iraqi informants code-named ROCKSTARS who gave the U.S. detailed information on Iraqi forces, including a CD-ROM containing the personnel files of the Iraq Special Security Organization (SSO).

Woodward writes that the CIA essentially became an advocate for war first by asserting that covert action would be ineffective, and later by saying that its new network of spies would be endangered if the United States did not attack Iraq. Another factor in the gathering momentum were the forces the military began shifting to Kuwait, the pre-positioning that was a key component of Franks's planning.

In the summer of 2002, Bush approved $700 million worth of "preparatory tasks" in the Persian Gulf region such as upgrading airfields, bases, fuel pipelines and munitions storage depots to accommodate a massive U.S. troop deployment. The Bush administration funded the projects from a supplemental appropriations bill for the war in Afghanistan and old appropriations, keeping Congress unaware of the reprogramming of money and the eventual cost.

During that summer, Powell and Cheney engaged in some of their sharpest debates. Powell argued that the United States should take its case to the United Nations, which Cheney said was a waste of time. Woodward had described some of that conflict in "Bush at War."

Among Powell's allies was Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush's father, who wrote an op-ed piece against the war for the Wall Street Journal. After it was published in August 2002, Powell thanked Scowcroft for giving him "some running room." But Rice called Scowcroft to tell her former boss that it looked as if he was speaking for Bush's father and that the article was a slap at the incumbent president.

Despite Powell's admonitions to the president, "Plan of Attack" suggests it was Blair who may have played a more critical role in persuading Bush to seek a resolution from the United Nations. At a meeting with the president at Camp David in early September, Blair backed Bush on Iraq but said he needed to show he had tried U.N. diplomacy. Bush agreed, and later referred to the Camp David session with Blair as "the cojones meeting," using a colloquial Spanish term for courage.

After the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq, Bush became increasingly impatient with their effectiveness and the role of chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. Shortly after New Year's 2003, he told Rice at his Texas ranch: "We're not winning. Time is not on our side here. Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war."

Bush said much the same thing to White House political adviser Karl Rove, who had gone to Crawford to brief him on plans for his reelection campaign. In the next 10 days, Bush also made his decision known to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, who helped arrange Saudi cooperation with the U.S. military, feared Saudi interests would be damaged if Bush did not follow through on attacking Hussein, and became another advocate for war.

According to "Plan of Attack," Bush asked Rice and his longtime communications adviser, Karen Hughes, whether he should attack Iraq, but he did not specifically ask Powell or Rumsfeld. "I could tell what they thought," the president said. "I didn't need to ask their opinion about Saddam Hussein or how to deal with Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear."

Rumsfeld, whom Woodward interviewed for three hours, is portrayed in the book as a "defense technocrat" intimately involved with details of the war planning but not focused on the need to attack Iraq in the same way that Cheney and some of Rumsfeld's subordinates such as Wolfowitz and Feith were.

Bush told Powell of his decision in a brief meeting in the White House. Evidently concerned about Powell's reaction, he said, "Are you with me on this? I think I have to do this. I want you with me."

"I'll do the best I can," Powell answered. "Yes, sir, I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President."

Bush said he did not remember asking the question of his father, former president George H.W. Bush, who fought Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But, he added that the two had discussed developments in Iraq.

"You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to," Bush said.

Describing what the 41st president said to him about Iraq, the 43rd president told Woodward:

"It was less 'Here's how you have to take care of the guy [Hussein]' and more 'I've been through what you've been through and I know what's happening and therefore I love you' would be a more accurate way to describe it." (Bush Began to Plan War Three Months After 9/11.)

Yes, Donald Trump told the truth. Lies were told, first of all by George Walker Bush to himself. This poor, shallow, pathetic naturalist believed that he was doing the “Lord’s work” by spreading “freedom.” Ah, but both Bush and Trump have no idea that there is only one standard of true human liberty, the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. There is more than unites them than what divides them, therefore.

Indeed, the “evidence” of the presence of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq was nothing other than a hodgepodge of the intelligence community’s “best guesses” as to where Hussein’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” could be found. There was no conclusive proof that such weapons existed even though then United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, acting against his own better judgment, made a powerful case in behalf of such a presence when he spoke at the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003:

A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program pieced together the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to the public. A presidential commission that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be "dead wrong."

Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.

"(Powell) came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.

"There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced," Wilkerson says.

In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

"In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay, who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."

After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.

"George actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings." (Colin Powell Aide Speaks About CIA Cherrypicking of Evidence.)

It is not only  Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who felt that the “weapons of mass destruction” claim was the low point of his career. The pro-abortion Colin Powell, a firm supporter of President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, admitted five years ago that his February 5, 2003, presentation at the United Nations was a blot on his record (one among many, it should be noted!):

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is demanding answers from the CIA and Pentagon after an Iraqi defector stepped forward to admit that he fabricated claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in advance of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Powell — who has stated that his prewar speech to the United Nations accusing Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction was a "blot" on his record — spoke out a day after Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi told Britain's Guardian newspaper that he made up claims of mobile biological weapons and clandestine factories when making reports to Germany's intelligence service, the BND.

The BND had approached Janabi, who was codenamed "Curveball" by U.S. and German intelligence officials, in 2000 and again in 2002 looking for inside information about Iraq.

"They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," Janabi told the British newspaper. "I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy . . . Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right. I had a problem with the Saddam regime, I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance."

The revelations shocked Powell, who presented America's case against Saddam in a Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations.

"It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable," Powell told the Guardian. "The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president's State of the Union address and my 5 February presentation to the U.N." 

The DIA is the Defense Department's intelligence arm. The NIE is the National Intelligence Estimate, a classified document that reflects the views of America's 16 intelligence agencies and is given to key policymakers.

In his speech, Powell made mention of "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails . . . The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities." That source was Janabi, who now admits it was all a lie.

That fateful presentation by the soldier-diplomat to the world body lent considerable credibility to then-President George W. Bush's case against Iraq and for going to war to remove Saddam from power. Bush and other high U.S. officials cited the threat posed by Iraqi biological weapons as justification for the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

"I'm the one who presented it to the world, and (it) will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It is painful now," Powell said in a 2005 interview with Barbara Walters. In the speech, Powell said he had relied on information he received at CIA briefings. 

Although he told Walters that then-CIA Director George Tenet "believed what he was giving to me was accurate," Powell admitted that "the intelligence system did not work well . . . There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at the time that some of those sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up.

"That devastated me," he said.  (Colin Powell Regrets Role in Misleading the United Nations on Iraq.)

The truth of the matter, of course, is that the neoconservative war hawks in the administration of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney wanted the Iraq War as a means of “regime change,” which has wound up turning Iraq’s borders into porous sleeves through which have passed countless numbers of Iranian-trained fighters, who then wreaked their havoc on ordinary Iraqi civilians and upon the armed forces of the United States of America itself, and resulted in the persecution of Chaldean Rite Catholics and other Christians in Iraq that has caused nearly two-thirds of the entire Christian population of that county to flee their homeland to live in exile. Scores of historic Catholic churches and shrines have been destroyed in the wake of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, and not one word in condemnation of this swath of destruction has ever been forthcoming form the mouths of George Walker Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro or Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr..

Indeed, a former Central Intelligence official reported in 2006 that the Bush-Cheney White Hose did not care whether a source was right about the lack of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as administration officials had decided upon “regime change”:

(CNN) -- A retired CIA official has accused the Bush administration of ignoring intelligence indicating that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no active nuclear program before the United States-led coalition invaded it, CBS News said Sunday.

Tyler Drumheller, the former highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe, told "60 Minutes" that the administration "chose to ignore" good intelligence, the network said in a posting on its Web site.

Drumheller said that, before the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in 2003, the White House "ignored crucial information" from Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, that indicated Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Drumheller said that, when then-CIA Director George Tenet told President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking officials that Sabri was providing information, his comments were met with excitement that proved short-lived.

"[The source] told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," Drumheller is quoted as saying. "The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "

Drumheller said the administration officials wanted no more information from Sabri because: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."

CBS said the White House declined to respond to the charge and that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said Sabri was just one source and therefore not reliable.

But Drumheller said it was not unusual for the administration to rely on single-source stories when those stories confirmed what the White House wanted to hear.

He cited a report the CIA received in late 2001 that alleged Iraq had bought 500 tons of uranium-containing compounds from Africa.

"They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all," he said.

Bush included the reference, which was attributed to the British and turned out to be false, in his 2003 State of the Union Address.

The CIA in 2002 had sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate the claims, and he went public in July 2003 criticizing the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq. The subsequent publication of his wife's identity as a CIA employee spawned an investigation that resulted in the indictment of Cheney's chief of staff and is still ongoing. (Full story)

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure," Drumheller told CBS' Ed Bradley. "This was a policy failure. I think, over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time."

The White House earlier this month reacted angrily to a report that Bush had cited trailers suspected as biological weapons labs as proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after intelligence officials knew that the trailers were not part of a WMD program. (Full story)

"I cannot count how many times the president has said the intelligence was wrong," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

He added that the administration has implemented reforms to make sure that "the executive branch and the Congress have the best possible intelligence as they move forward to deal with the threats that face this country and face this world."

Another retired CIA official in February said the Bush administration disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war.

In an article published in the journal Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called the relationship between U.S. intelligence and policymaking "broken." (Full story)

In November 2005, CNN obtained a 2003 CIA report that raised doubts about a claim that al Qaeda sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemical and biological weapons -- assertions that were repeated later by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. (Full story)

A day after that report surfaced, Bush gave a speech on Veteran's Day in which he accused critics of the Iraq war of distorting the events that led to the U.S. invasion.

Bush said that "intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein" and that a Senate Intelligence Committee report issued in July 2004 "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." (Full story)

The Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush, also found no evidence that political pressure skewed the intelligence. But neither that commission nor the Senate panel addressed how the administration made its case for war.

Senate Democrats have pressured the Intelligence Committee to complete a second phase of its report that would focus on how the prewar intelligence was used by the administration, rather than how it was produced. (CIA Intelligence Coopted by Desire for War.)

This is about as clear as it gets. The war hawks wanted war with Iraq, and that's what we got, and that's what we're still paying for at the present time.

A review of the facts about the preparation for and the commencement of aftermath of the Iraq War should put to rest any question about the complaints made by JEB! Bush or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity about what Donald Trump said about this monstrous exercise in American “exceptionalism.'

Although many articles have been written on this site about the Iraq War (several articles on the subject were published in The Remnant between January of 2003 and March of 2006, including A Tale of Two Speeches), it is worth repeating once again several points to remind the very few readers of this site that the predicates necessary to engage in a just war were not fulfilled and that tremendous atrocities have been committed by the government of the United States of America and by the various private contractors that were hired to provide "security" in the wake of the power vacuum created by the American invasion and overthrow of the dictator Saddam Hussein and that Iraq and to "rebuild" a country whose infrastructure was eviscerated by American bombing. (For a review of the predicates of the just war theory as I attempted to apply them to the possibility of an Iraq War in late-2002, please see The Real Enemies Are Within, part 1; and The Real Enemies Are Within, part 2 .)

The push on the part of the neoconservative war hawks in the administration of then President George Walker Bush to use the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001, as the pretext to plan a war with Iraq had its roots in the "Project for the New American Century," which was cooked up by some of those who would later plan and execute the Iraq War as a means of effecting a "regime change" in Iraq that would benefit "America's only ally" in the Middle East, Israel, by creating a peaceful, democratic Arab nation that world conform to the principles of American "exceptionalism" (which contends, of course, that the American "way" is the and only model for all countries in the world in order to know true "progress" and social and economic growth and stability, that it is the "mission" of the United States of America to spread its "way" around the world).

Among the charter signatories of the "Project for the New American Century," which released its statement of principles on June 3, 1997, were Jeb Bush, Richard B. Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Norman Podhoretz, James Danforth Quayle (yes, that James Danforth Quayle), Donald Rumsfeld, the Catholic neocon war hawk and mocker of the Social Reign of Christ the King named George Weigel, and Paul Wolfowitz. Among those who made made contributions to the work of the "Project for the new American Century were Richard Armitage, John Bolton, William Kristol, and Richard Perle. Readers will surely recognize that several future officials in the administration of President George Walker Bush were very active in an organization which sought to promote "regime change" in Iraq as the means to "stabilize" the Middle East as to make the region safe for the country that persecutes Palestinians and sees fit to invade the sovereign country of Lebanon and to bomb its civilians at will, Israel. 

Richard Cheney, of course, was Vice President of the United States of America, from January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was the Chief of Staff for Vice President Cheney from 2001 to 2005.

Donald D. Rumsfeld was the United States Secretary of Defense from January 20, 2001, to December 18, 2006.

Richard Perle was the Chairman of the Defense Board Advisory Committee in the White House of President George Walker Bush from 2001 to 2003.

Paul Wolfowitz was the Deputy Secretary of Defense of the United States of America from January 20, 2001, to June 1, 2005.

John Bolton was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from August 1, 2005, to December 9, 2006.

Richard Armitage was the United States Deputy Secretary of State from March 26, 2001, to February 22, 2005.

Mind you, this is only a sampling of the individuals whose neoconservative war hawk roots who served in the George Walker Bush administration who had an association with the "Project for the New American Century."

It was on January 26, 1998, that several of the participants in the "Project for the New American Century" sent an open letter then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton to urge "regime change" in Iraq:

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.  In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat.  We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world.  That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.  We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months.  As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections.  Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished.  Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production.  The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets.  As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.  It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.  As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely,

Elliott Abrams    Richard L. Armitage    William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner    John Bolton    Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama    Robert Kagan    Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol    Richard Perle    Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld    William Schneider, Jr.    Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz    R. James Woolsey    Robert B. Zoellick

(See Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,)  

There was, therefore, a predisposition on the part of the neoconservative war hawks in the administration of then President George Walker Bush to use the tragic events of September 11, 2001, as the pretext to launch an immoral, unjust, unconstitutional invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no immediate or any kind of real, legitimate threat to the national security of the United States of America. This unjust war has cost the lives of nearly five thousand American citizens, including civilians, and has been responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 thoroughly innocent Iraqi civilians (estimates vary), some of whom have died as a result of American military actions, others of whom have died as a result of terrorist attacks launched by various warring Mohammedan factions within Iraq and by those who used the country's porous borders after the invasion as a sieve to seek to attack American forces in Iraq that they could not otherwise reach from their home countries.

The financial costs of the war have been staggering. The social costs for Americans at home have been staggering as the family lives of regular military service personnel and, most especially, of reservists in the United States National Guard have been disrupted and, in all too many instances, entirely broken, shattered. As I wrote The Remnant on early-2003 in in anticipation of these costs of the pending war, "for what?" To make Iraq safe for a "democracy" it did not want and will always be threatened by rival factions? For what?

Here is a brief synopsis of the misrepresentations that were made in the propaganda build-up to the Iraq War in 2002-2003 here in the United States of America:

1) Saddam Hussein had no "weapons of mass destruction." He destroyed his stockpile of biological weapons in the 1990s. The biological agents that he used on the Kurds in 1991 were sold to him by the United States of America in 1985 to be used in the then ongoing Iran-Iraq War. Hussein, who was certainly a brutal thug responsible for the deaths of about 1.5 million Iraqis between 1969 and 2003 (about the same number of innocent human beings put to death under cover of the civil law by means of surgical abortions each year) simply stockpiled those weapons to be used in his own country at a later date. Who was the American envoy who arranged for the sale of these biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Look for yourselves:

  Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983.  (National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/ There is an interesting, fact-based article, replete with links to national security documents, available at: Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein.)

As noted just above, Hussein stockpiled these weapons sold to him by the United Sates of America, choosing not to use them in the war against Iran, which did not end until 1988, and used them instead on the Kurds in northern Iraq following the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, a war that was launched to expel Iraq's forces from a country, Kuwait, which Hussein believed that American Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, 1990, had signaled to him was not of significant enough interest for the United States of America to do anything other than express a verbal condemnation in its behalf should he, Hussein, decide to reclaim Iraqi land that was taken away from it following the end of World War I.

2) The Iraqi government had no involvement in the September 11, 2001, attacks upon the World Trade Center towers in the City of New York, New York, and upon the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

3) The Iraqi government had no involvement with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. Saddam Hussein was a thug who governed Iraq in the style of a Mafioso don. Mobsters protect their territories very carefully. Saddam Hussein, a very secular and non-observant Mohammedan and a xenophobe who had no use for foreigners of any type (saved for the Soviets when it served his purposes to have them train his military forces), never wanted a rival gang of mobsters to enter and possibly destabilize his country.

4) According to then President Bush, in an address given on October 7, 2002, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had a "growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas" (see George W. Bush: Address to the Nation on Iraq From Cincinnati, Ohio). This last point was particularly laughable. Growing fleet? How about two unmanned aerial vehicles? That's right, two. Their range? About 650 miles, which means that these unmanned aerial vehicles would had to have been transported by the nonexistent Iraqi navy undetected by satellite reconnaissance in order to get close enough to the United States to drop the nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussein was alleged to have possessed or was in the "process" of developing. Absolute absurdity designed to frighten the American public and win international support for his scheme of "regime change" to aid the not-so-"democratic" State of Israel and American corporate interests.

5) Saddam Hussein was not attempting to purchase enriched uranium from the country of Niger to foment another attack on the United States of America, contrary to the claim made by President George Walker Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving. (President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address.)  

No, it was George Walker Bush and his neoconservative war hawks who were deceiving the world. Saddam Hussein, caught up in his delusional world of paranoia and thuggery, was content to rattle the cages of the United States of America. He had no credible means to attack this country whatsoever.

The unjust, immoral, unconstitutional invasion of the sovereign country of Iraq to impose upon its people the "American way" so as to make the Middle East safe for Israel has also devastated Iraq's population of Christians, including Chaldean Rite Catholics. Mohammedan violence against Catholics and members of various Orthodox sects has been relentless in the past seven years. As bad as Saddam Hussein was, and he was a brutal thug, to be sure, he was a clever politician who wanted to have the support of as many groups as possible in Iraq, which is why he protected the small Christian minority in that country. One of the consequences of Hussein's overthrow has been to make Christians "fair game" for Mohammedan murderers, who have long desired to kill off or to drive into exile the "infidels."  (See More Christians Killed in Iraq, Chaldean bishop says U.S. accountable for death of Archbishop of Mosul, and Go Tell Iraq's Catholics--and American Babies--About The "Lesser of Two Evils".)

Neither the George Walker Bush administration or that of his successor, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, have cared much to stop the violence against Christians as to do so would mean angering members of warring Mohammedan factions who are deemed "necessary" to build a "democratic" Iraq. The lives of Chaldean Rite Catholics and members of the various Orthodox sects are as expendable to American policy-makers, who have, of course, sanctioned outright torture and introduced contraception into country almost immediately after the first wave of the American invasion began seven years ago today, as the lives of Palestinian Arabs and the Lebanese are to the murderous thugs in the government of Israel and in that country's defense forces. Too bad. The "better" world must be built. Too bad that so many innocent lives must be killed. Too bad.

To tell the truth, you see, Donald J. Trump told the truth about what happened in the run-up to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq that began on March 20, 2003. All of John Ellis Bush’s whining about “attacks on my family” are just a case of emotionalism. Indeed, the Bush family has been involved in the support of one evil after another dating back to the days that his grandfather, United States Senator Prescott Bush (R-Connecticut), supported Planned Barrenhood in the 1950s.

To tell the truth, of course, so does Donald John Trump, who believes that, apart from the surgical execution of innocent preborn babies, that Planned Barrenhood does “good work”:

CRUZ: You said, "Planned Parenthood does wonderful things and we should not defund it."

TRUMP: It does do wonderful things but not as it relates to abortion.

CRUZ: So I'll tell you what...

TRUMP: Excuse me. Excuse me, there are wonderful things having to do with women's health.

CRUZ: You see you and I...

TRUMP: But not when it comes to abortion. (Transcript of February 13, 2016, Republican Primary debate.)

Donald Trump told the truth about Iraq no matter what the “talking heads” want to believe, and he has told the truth about the border and the dangers posed by Mohammedans who are flowing into this country.

Believe me, as a native New Yorker, I understand and appreciate the brash, bold loudmouth who will speak the truth as he knows it to be without regard for the consequences, and it is does appear as though that Trump has suffered a loss of support because of his outspokenness about what happened in the aftermath of the attacks that took place on September 11, 2011 (see Trump Falls Behind Cruz in National NBC/WSJ Poll.)

Very importantly, though, Donald Trump does not know the truth about Planned Barrenhood, and that alone is enough for any believing Catholic not to jump on his bandwagon—or even that of Rafael Edward Cruz, who is glad that he and his wife only have two children as opposed to seventeen. Mind you, I understand that we live in concrete circumstances. However, my retort to this is that we are in the diabolical trap and that there is no way out of this trap other than by prayer, penance, and fasting. Millennials are attracted to the Communist Bernard Sanders because they have been miseducated to love cradle-to-grave socialism as their entitlement. How is this reality going to change in the future by means merely natural?

The restoration of right order in the United States of America cannot be built on a blithe acceptance of the very evil, contraception, that made adultery and fornication “free” of its natural consequences during a woman’s childbearing years, produced an epidemic of divorce and broken families, the feminization of poverty, the rise of single mothers and of children who feel unloved, many of whom join gangs or resort to hallucinogenic substances to attempt to “escape” from the emotional pain inflicted upon them by living in abnormal circumstances and without the benefits of the true Faith to help them carry their crosses.

Lest this truth be forgotten in all of the commotion of four nights ago, most contraceptives abort, and most contraceptives abort most of the time.

Moreover, the restoration of right order in the United States of America cannot be built upon the uninhibited, unrestrained public use of profanities and vulgarities that further coarsen an already vulgarized “freedom of speech” that offends God and wounds the very souls of those who utter them.

Sure, it is fun to see the Republican establishment get pushed around and poked in the eyes. However, we are only witnessing fisticuffs of false opposites against each other. Not even a naturalist who speaks the truth on some issues can defeat the evils of the day even if he wanted to do so, which none of the Republicans seek to do as each and every single one of them supports contraception and makes “exceptions” to the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment.

Although the next commentary will focus on the aftermath of the death of Associate Justice Scalia, whose refusal to use the Natural Law in judicial decision-making has been the subject of several commentaries of mine in the past twenty years, suffice it to say that all of the talk about this year’s election being about the Supreme Court of the United States of America is very premature.

The cowardly lions of the organized crime family of the naturalist “right” are not going to be able to withstand the pressure from Obama/Soetoro from now until Tuesday, November 8, 2016. Our caesar will nominate a supposedly “moderate” person to replace Scalia, who was quite a devotee of the Talmud (see Call Me Jorge), and that person will proceed to serve as an instrument of chastising us all the more.

My advice is simple: Pray Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary for the graces that will be needed in the years ahead as it will not be until the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart that right order will be established in the world and the errors of Russia, which are the errors of Modernity and Modernism, cease to be spread.

Cheer up!

This is the time that God has chosen from all eternity for us to live and thus to sanctify and to save our souls as members of the Catholic Church. This is a great time to be alive and to give witness, despite our own sins and failings, to the truths of the Catholic Faith. For, to tell the truth, few know the truth about the purpose of human existence, and we must give thanks to God every day for having the gift of the Catholic Faith as we embrace the sufferings of the moment with joy, patience and gratitude as the consecrated slaves of His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint James the Greater, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Appendix

Transcript of Senator Robert Joseph “Bob” Dole, Jr.’s Comments to Vice President Bush, February 11, 1988

BROKAW: That’s Senator Bob Dole who is standing by in his headquarters, anything you’d like to say to him at this point?

Vice Pres. BUSH: Well, just wish him well and meet him in the South

BROKAW: And Senator Dole is there any thing you’d like to say to the Vice President?

Sen. DOLE: Yeah, stop lying about my record. (Bush and Dole Mix It Up on NBC.)