Month: May 2020

Fred C. Koch was run out of the United States in the late 1920’s for patent infringement.  So he set up shop in the Soviet Union, and built 15 modern oil refineries for Joseph Stalin.  He later constructed one of the largest refineries in Hitler’s Germany.  It was one of the very few capable of producing the high octane fuel needed for fighter planes.

I guess he felt he needed to atone for his sins, so in 1958 he cofounded the John Birch Society, dedicated to opposing communist subversion.  Somehow this deeply stupid man became convinced that Article V of the Constitution was a threat to the very Constitution that contained it.  The man had no political sense.  He was a fool.

In 1966 he retired and handed his business over to his son Charles.  Charles Koch is every bit as dumb as his father.  He, too, believes Article V must never be used.  His money helps fund most of the conservative think tanks in Washington, and he makes sure none of them have anything to do with Article V.

Not content with opposing any and all efforts for basic political reform, he’s now partnered with George Soros to undermine American foreign policy toward Communist China.  The Quincy Institute is a Koch/Soros joint enterprise, and it spouts propaganda that looks like it came straight from Beijing.  Here’s the story from a recent edition of the Washington Free Beacon.

This is what the Reagan Project, and all other Article V organizations, are up against.  Vast wealth, wielded by idiots, arrayed against a small band of patriotic Americans.  But we’ll prevail, in the end, because we’ll have the American people on our side, once we get the word out.

And Koch and Soros will have something in common with another great villain of American history, the physician who conspired with John Wilkes Booth.  His name was Mudd, and theirs will be too.

1. HJR 809 is more than just an Article V Resolution.  It’s the occasion of a collision between the advocates of political reform, left and right, and the dedicated opponent of all American institutions, George Soros.
2. Soros is sometimes misidentified as a Jew.  He’s no more of a Jew than Benedict Arnold was an American.  As a young man in Hungary under German occupation in World War II, he collaborated with the Nazis, and betrayed his own people, to save his own skin.  Perhaps it’s a sense of self-loathing that leads him to hate our country, which liberated Europe, and saved the Jews who had survived.
3. But getting inside the head of George Soros would require the skills of a trained psychiatrist, and I’m not one of those. I just know it’s a dark and evil place.  He has no recognizable political philosophy.  It’s tempting to call him a nihilist, but that’s not quite accurate, since he has one core belief:  hatred of the United States, and all it stands for.
4. If the tone of this letter is seems angry, it’s because of my anger toward George Soros for stopping me and my colleagues of the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, Bill Fruth in particular, in our campaign to get 34 state Article V resolutions for a BBA.
5. Some of you remember Bill.  He came to you five or six years ago, escorted by Jim Brown of the NFIB.  He met with you individually, over the course of a week, and managed to sell you on Article V.  He was so effective that the BBA Article V resolution passed the Senate unanimously and had only three nays in the House.
6. In 2015 Bill and I were in Missoula, working for passage of our BBA resolution.  Western Montana is one of the few places in this country with a strong following of the paranoid schizophrenics of the John Birch Society, co-founded in 1958 by Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers.  They had us beat in House Judiciary, until Rep. Ellie Hill, a Democrat who was pushing Wolf-PAC’s resolution, rode to the rescue.  She and two of her Democratic colleagues gave us the votes to get out of committee.
7. She then lined up ten of her Democratic colleagues to give us the votes needed to pass on the floor.  That’s when George Soros intervened.  One of his front groups got through to Democratic Governor Steve Bullock, and asked him to kill our bill.  He called Ellie and told her she had to back off.  The Democrats in the House Minority worked closely with Bullock, and had no choice but to comply.
8. The following year Scott Sales, a hard core Bircher, became President of the Montana Senate, and any hope of passing our resolution there were gone for the next four years.  George Soros stopped us in Montana, and we never really recovered.  We couldn’t get to 34 without it.
9. So now I’ve associated with Wolf-PAC.  I believe in campaign finance reform, just as I believed in a BBA.  But what I really believe in is Article V.  It’s our last best hope of reforming the grotesquely corrupt United States Congress.  Most of the Republicans there are as bad as the Democrats.  When they were first elected they were idealists, but they’ve been captured by the money and the power of what is aptly called the Swamp.
10. Congress is unable to function because it is beholden to the special interests of the ruling elite.  It is incapable of reforming itself.  An intervention is needed, and the Framers of the Constitution placed that responsibility on us, the state legislators.
11. Coincidentally, we are all witnessing another Soros project, rioting in the streets organized by Antifa.  Soros funds them, and here is the proof.
12. I ask you, again, to vote for HJR 809.  Take a stand with George Mason, and against the enemy of your country, George Soros.
13. Your colleague.
14. Senator Fritz Pettyjohn, Alaska, retd.

52 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the rioting which broke out was the worst civil unrest in this country since the Civil War.  Women feared for the safety of their families, and voted accordingly.  Richard Nixon, a politician no one liked or trusted, emerged as the beneficiary.   He ran as the law and order candidate, and only the candidacy of segregationist George Wallace prevented him from winning in a landslide.

Democrats are the caring, Mommy party, while Republicans are the strict Daddy party.  If the rioting around the country continues, and gets worse, Joe Biden will wind up paying the political price.  He’s the Mommy party candidate, and when people feel unsafe, they don’t want Mommy, they want Daddy.

1968 was a nightmare of a year.  The country seemed on the verge of falling apart.  Lyndon Johnson had lied to the country about the war in Vietnam, and the President of the United States was therefor loathed by a strong bipartisan majority of the country.  I don’t think a more despised man ever served as President.

The war had the country split down the middle, but Tricky Dick Nixon figured out how to win a majority in the electoral college.  When someone says presidential politics is a popularity contest, have them explain President Richard Nixon.

All of which bodes well for President Trump.  He can’t win without the votes of people who actively dislike, even loathe him.  But the way things are going, he’ll get enough of their votes to win a second term.

You could even make a bumper sticker:  Rioters and Looters for Trump.

Robert A. Caro is one of the great presidential biographers, and his four volume “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” is a masterpiece.  The fourth volume was completed in 2011, and I’ve been waiting for the fifth, final volume ever since.  This will cover Johnson’s prosecution of the Vietnam War, and his ultimate humiliation.  It isn’t a pretty story, and there’s no way Caro can make Johnson look any better than he was.

Caro is 84 now, and he’s apparently having trouble bringing his story, Lyndon Johnson’s story, to an end.  He greatly admires Johnson’s passage of civil rights legislation, and doesn’t want to tarnish his reputation.  But as a professional historian, he has no choice.  I think that’s what taking him so long.

If you think I’m being too hard on Johnson, consider this.  Our POW’s were being tortured in North Vietnam, but Johnson made sure the American people never found out about it.  He was afraid the public reaction would force him to take the measures which could win the war.  But he didn’t want to do that, so we never knew.

When Nixon took office in 1969 the stories of torture were allowed to go public, and there was outrage.  Fearing that the American public would demand drastic action, the North Vietnamese stopped the torture.  From 1969 until they were released in 1973, our fellow Americans, who put their lives on the line for us, no longer had to endure the hideous brutality that went on from the time of their capture until Lyndon Johnson was no longer President.

That’s a story Caro has no choice but to tell.  And the great “civil rights champion” Lyndon Johnson will go down in history as the most despicable man ever to hold the office.

This is the story that sinks the stock.

My first taste of politics was the 1964 Republican National Convention, held in San Francisco’s Cow Palace.    I was the Chairman of the Tom Collins chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, which I had organized at Diablo Valley College in the East Bay, 20 miles west of the city.

A few of us went to the San Francisco airport to greet Barry Goldwater when he arrived.  I went to a speech at some venue and sat directly behind my hero, William F. Buckley, whose leg was in a cast from a skiing accident.  Buckley liked people to think that he had injured himself by kicking at a TV set, but it wasn’t true.  I was able to sneak into the Cow Palace to hear Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois nominate Barry Goldwater for President.  Dirksen was an old fashioned orator, and his speech, “The Peddler’s Grandson” was high level political rhetoric.

I’ve been hooked on politics ever since.  Political campaigns have always been the most fun, but legislative politics can be pretty interesting as well.  And in that vein, Monday the Tennessee House will vote on Wolf-PAC’s bill, HJR 809.

The Wolf-PAC team, led by Leah Lancaster, feels good about the vote, but you don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, and it isn’t a lock.  There are 99 members of the Tennessee House, 73 Republicans and 26 Democrats.

These people are not professional politicians, or professional legislators.  Legislating is just a part time job, and there’s hardly any money in it.  These men and women make their living as insurance agents, or lawyers, or merchants, or farmers.  They’re just regular people.  People with a desire to serve and a yen for politics, and political combat.  They enjoy what they do, and consider it an honor.

Few of them have any special knowledge or expertise in the things they’re voting on.  They’re more or less average Americans, with all the strengths, and weaknesses, that entails.

So, with a group of 99 citizen/legislators, you just never know.  One of them can get some crazy idea, and if he’s convincing enough, or influential enough, get a bunch of his colleagues to go along with him.  That’s what I’m concerned about on Tuesday’s vote.

However, our sponsor is respected senior statesman Rep. Kelly Keisling, a 69 year old insurance agent from Byrdstown, population 803, the county seat of Pickett County.  Kelly is a Great Living American, and I’m sure is more than capable of dealing with any unforeseen problems.  But just in case, the Reagan Project will be promoting this bill with key legislative leaders, and getting back in touch with an old friend, State Rep. Dennis Powers, of Jacksboro.

Dennis is an insurance agent, and a long time champion of Article V.  Babbie and I met him on our tour through the South, in the spring of 2014.  I’d stopped by Dennis’s office at the capital while we were in Nashville, but they were out of session, so I left a note with a staffer.  Later, in Charleston, South Carolina, we met him at a small dinner party hosted by David Biddulph of the BBA Task Force.

Dennis is quite a character, and I hope I’m able to get through to him before Mondays’ vote.  In politics, you leave no stone unturned.