"Why RFK’s Candidacy Matters to the Conservative Cause"
by David Stockman
antiwar.com (May 15, 2023)
https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2023/05/14/why-rfks-candidacy-matters-to-the-conservative-cause/

Self-evidently, there are any number of things about RFK’s policy platform that we don’t cotton to very much, and haven’t for decades.

Back in the day we were always on opposite sides with respect to aggressive environmental regulation. And, as far as we can tell, he seems to be a pretty conventional liberal on the Welfare State, the Nanny State and we are not even sure of where he stands on the Climate Crisis based assault on fossil fuel and its crucial foundation for modern prosperity and the actual reduction of human poverty and want.

But there are bigger issues now impending that are make or break for the true conservative cause. Indeed, only by shattering the uniparty consensus on these matters is their really any hope for the future of constitutional government, personal liberty and capitalist prosperity in America.

We are referring to the urgent need to:

On these crucial matters Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes far more sense than a barn full of MAGA congressman and virtually the entire cohort of the modern-day Democrats who inhabit the Washington beltway. But what is truly refreshing about his candidacy is that he has no reluctance whatsoever to take his hetrodoxy right into the maw of the liberal mainstream media.

And that’s where today’s stifling MSM consensus on these vital matters – at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Reuters, among others – needs be splintered into a thousand pieces, as JFK once said about the CIA.

As it is, today’s smallish minority of GOP advocates for free markets, small government, personal liberty and fiscal rectitude will never get the time of day on Capitol Hill until the uniparty consensus for more war, more government, more debt, more easy money and more restrictions on personal freedom is busted wide open; and that fissure, in turn, fractures the MSM narratives that currently brooks no dissent from today’s Washington follies.

In that regard, there is nothing more stupid, pointless, unnecessary and morally repugnant than Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Owing to that folly, Ukrainians in their tens of thousands – civilians and military alike – are being slaughtered and what was once the breadbasket and industrial heartland of eastern Europe is being smashed to smithereens. And all because the Washington uniparty has wildly demonized Vlad Putin for the sin of purportedly bringing the plague of Donald Trump into the the cozy interior of the Washington beltway.

For crying out loud. This is not the wanton invasion of a historically separate and independent nation by an aggressive neighbor. "Ukraine" means borderlands in Russian and for centuries its territories were a vassal and sometimes integral part of the the Russian empire. In fact, today’s borders represent little more than the parts and pieces that got assembled into a single state by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev for the convenience of their bloody rule.

That Ukraine was never built to last, in fact, is evident from the radical split of its polity that has been evident in election after election since 1991, as we amplify further below. But it must be noted here that even apart from these facts, complexities and histories, the MSM treatment of the matter has become truly ludicrous, as was fully on display during the course of the CNN Townhall with Donald Trump on Tuesday evening.

In order to pillory the Donald with his alleged Putin subservience, he was repeatedly asked by CNN’s hapless host as to whether he wanted Putin or Zelensky to win the war. And in response the Donald didn’t hesitate to state what any American leader under the circumstance should forthrightly say with head held high: Namely, that he wanted the killing to stop and the mayhem in the land to come to an immediate end.

Yet, after the event the insufferable Jake Tapper and others on the CNN panel returned time and again to Trump’s unwillingness to say that he wanted Zelensky to win.

We are rarely proud of the Donald and never sympathetic to the misguided bombast which continuously emits from his immensely overactive vocal glands. But last night we were proud because, holy moly, the Ukraine disaster is not an outdoor sporting event!

No one with any integrity should whoop it up for the pretentious tittle piss-ant who is destroying his countrymen and country, even as he lines his own pockets and those of his cronies with lucre from Washington’s Sunday afternoon warriors.

In a word, Jake Tapper is one sick dude. He and his mainstream ilk have been drinking the uniparty kool-aid for so long and have become so thoroughly infected by the Trump Derangement Syndrome that they are making a mockery of mainstream news. So doing, they have literally asphyxiated the vital debate that America needs to break out of the uniparty thought prison that is now ruining the country.

We are absolutely convinced, however, that RFK understands the stakes on the above itemized issues and has the firepower to take an alternative message to the American public, busting wide-open the stifling MSM narratives as he does.

For the sake of illustration we focus on war and peace. And in that context, just consider the Ukraine fiasco and the proxy verdict that it renders for the entire War Party enterprise.

It shows that we don’t need anything remotely like the current $1.3 trillion national security state budget, and that virtually all the monsters the neocons have conjured up to justify the Empire actually pose no threat to the homeland security properly defined at all.

The truth of the Ukrainian matter is just like the case of the Forever Wars of recent decades. To wit, there is nothing at stake of importance to either humanity or the security of the "free world" or most especially the safety and liberty of the American homeland in Washington’s misbegotten adventure in Ukraine. Absolutely nothing at all – -and that especially includes the screaming hypocrisy of the War Party’s rote incantations about the rule of law, the sanctity of borders and the freedom of the peoples of Ukraine and their neighbors.

That’s right. Dozens of regime changes later, and these people have the temerity to prattle on about the so-called principles that Washington has wantonly violated for decades on end?

Moreover, as we have repeatedly documented, this is not an "unprovoked" Russian invasion but a civil war in the "borderlands" of what has historically been greater Russia. The present civil war, in fact, was instigated in February 2014 by the illegitimate government installed in Kiev after Washington’s coup d’ etat against the duly elected and Russian-friendly president.

This regrettable Washington-managed "regime change", in turn, set the regions of the artificial state of Ukraine against each other based on long-standing differences of language, religion, ethnicity and economics, among others. And when the Russian speaking populations of Crimea, the Donbas and the Black Sea coastal areas sought separation owing to fears of repression by the Ukrainian nationalist and Neo-Nazi politicians who took control of the government in Kiev, the latter brought the bloody violence of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, including the overtly Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, down upon them.

That is to say, the Kiev instigated civil war against the Russian speaking populations of the east and south had been raging for eight years before Putin finally responded to their pleas for overt military assistance; and also after upwards of 14,000 separatist military and civilian personal had been killed by Kiev’s violent onslaught against what was purported to be its own population.

It also came 15 years after Putin had insisted (at the 2007 Munich Security Conference) that Ukrainian ascension to NATO and the emplacement of missiles within minutes from Moscow was a red line that could not be crossed. Yet by February 2022 it was virtually certain that Ukraine would join NATO and that hostile military forces would be implanted even closer to Russia’s doorstep.

Any properly educated eighth-grader today knows what happened when Khrushchev placed missiles 90-miles from American shores in October 1962. Do these Washington "exceptionalists" and neocon dunderheads not think that turnabout is fair play, or at least that other nations have vital strategic interests as well?

Can they not see by now that the rest of the world is not about to automatically genuflect to the commands and whims of the Washington imperium?

As it finally transpired on the Ukraine matter, the Russian "invasion" came after 10 days of massively stepped-up Ukrainian artillery attacks on the Donbas, which by every signal of military action and logistics implied that a full scale Kiev-mounted "invasion" of the separatist republics was imminent.

So Trump’s CNN Townhall insistence that the US objective should be "peace" in Ukraine – not a Zelensky "win" or a proxy war degradation of Russian forces or regime change in Moscow – is more than compelling. That’s especially because the region’s history makes a framework for peace readily possible – even if might take slightly more than the 24 hours the Donald allotted himself to accomplish the task.

At bottom, the route to peace is through"partition" of what had never been an independent nation before the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine’s 70 year reign of oppression. In fact, as reprised below, today’s Ukrainian state had never existed until it was brought to life at the end of the aforementioned gun barrels leveled on the peoples of the region by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

Indeed, the die was caste during the last legitimate election in 2010, when the Russian-friendly candidate, Yanukovych, won the national election by a hair, on the back of 60-90% margins in the Russian-speaking east and south (blue areas of the map) against the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Tymoshenko, who won the less economically prosperous areas of the center and west by similar 60-90% margins (red areas).

One merely needs to note the city names in the blue areas of the map to understand that the war in Ukraine is about partition, not "freedom", as the War Party so risibly suggests: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Mariupol, Zaporizhia, Kryvyi Rih, and Odessa all voted blue big time in 2010; have been at the front lines of the civil war since 2014; and mostly voted to leave Ukraine and join mother Russia during last September’s referendums.

To be sure, the Washington hegemonists, neocons and warmongers will insist that these referendums were invalid, but that doesn’t explain the dog which is not barking. To wit, in the Russian-speaking blue areas of the map there have been virtually no reports of a "resistance" movement among the local populations in opposition to the Russian "occupiers" and the purported quislings who run the pro-Russian separatist governments and militias. If anything, they believe they have been "liberated", not "occupied".

So here’s the ultimate insanity of the $190 billion that the US/NATO will have poured into what amounts to a de facto genocide upon the peoples of what is now this wretched stretch of black earth. That is to say, the clear outlines of a diplomatic solution and the potential armistice borders were drawn by the people themselves in the 2010 election.

With Putin’s referendums already having been completed in most of the blue areas, what remains is to silence the guns, ratify the territorial status quo and enable an international peace conference to carry to its logical conclusion the partition of post-communist Ukraine that was implicit in the 2010 election results.

As it has happened, post-communist Yugoslavia did it and Czechoslovakia did it and all the effected populations are far better off. It’s now time for the borders created by Lenin from "New Russia" and from parts and pieces of the Czarist empire and post WWI Galicia, and by Stalin from parts of WWII era Poland, Hungary and Romania and by Khrushchev from Russian Crimea, to be assigned to the dust bin of history.

For Washington to draw back from the dangerous precipice on which it has now precariously perched the world, therefore, depends only upon NOT rallying to the perpetuation of borders created by the dead-hand of the Soviet butchers and tyrants. Is that so hard?

Not befuddled by Washington’s anti-Putin myopia, RFK may just have the clarity of vision and common sense to see that this is what the War Party’s crusade actually boils down to.

His father before him came to see the folly of Vietnam and the Empire’s earlier squirrely claim that the dominoes would fall without Washington’s brutal military intervention.

As it happened, what fell was not the dominoes, but Washington’s dodgy puppet government in Saigon – -a historical development that at length paved the way for the massive supply of goods coming out of the successor economy to the shelves of American retailers from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Accordingly, the goal of preserving the borders drawn by the bloody tyrants of the Soviet Union is beyond hideous. For once, the Donald was right: It should be repudiated forthwith.



The irony is that the demonized Putin – monster or not – would buy the partition solution in a heartbeat. That’s because he doesn’t want to rule (and heavily subsidize) the rump of Ukraine depicted by the red areas above, anyway.

While we doubt that he is as evil as Washington claims, we are also quite sure he is way too smart to want to rule what would be the hostile populations of Kiev and Lviv – to say nothing of the even more hostile peoples of Poland, the Baltics and western Europe.

Of course, Zelensky and his claque of bloodthirsty scoundrels would scream to high heaven. Well, unless they were given safe passage to transport themselves and the billions they have stolen from American taxpayers and socked-away in secret bank accounts to safe havens far from the homelands they have destroyed by their obstinate promulgation of gigantic lies.

So just as John Quincy Adams forewarned, this misbegotten war is not about freedom and democracy in the slightest.

Ukraine is every bit as authoritarian and corrupt as Russia, and likely now more so. All of the opposition press has been shutdown or taken over by the state; most of Zelensky’s opponents have been arrested or killed; there are no longer any true opposition parties; the national security apparatus has been largely purged of dissenters; and Zelensky has recently even attacked the Russian Orthodox Church.

Needless to say, all of the other statist ills that now imperil America including the nation’s spiraling national debt and growing stagflationary crisis depend upon purging the GOP of its neocon infested ranks and Washington of its obeisance to the bipartisan War Party and the folly of the Empire’s Forever Wars.

In turn, that salutary end requires that the stranglehold of the uniparty and its MSM megaphones and scribes on the public policy debates in America be severed cleaner than the fate which befell Saddam Hussein’s head at the imperial gallows.

To that end, America needs a new leader with backbone, principles and electoral appeal who can lead the charge against the bipartisan War Party. As far as we can tell, RFK is more suited for that task by a long shot than anyone else on the political scene today.

During his announcement speech Kennedy said the following, and at this late, dire stage of the game that’s exactly what the hour requires.

"This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years," Mr. Kennedy said, a reference to his complaint that social media platforms and the mainstream media have not given him a fair hearing. "I got a lot to talk about. They shouldn’t have shut me up for that long because now I’m really going to let loose on them for the next 18 months."

We can only hope he does. Early, often and with enormous energy, enthusiasm and effect.