Published: April 21, 2008 08:19 pm         

STUMPTALK: Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, where’s the intellectuals?

Democrats worry that frivolous misspeaks and a prolonged fratricidal battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will wreak the party, making way for a GOP win in November. But then extricated by GOP John McCain’s own gaff, the Dems and a willing media pounced to heckle McCain. In a speech after his trip to Iraq, McCain appeared to foolishly misspeak when he claimed that Iran was in cahoots with al-Qaeda. Travel-partner Senator Joe Lieberman whispered in his ear, “Iran is Shia whereas Iraq is Sunni.”

Not only weak on economics, McCain apparently is confused about the geopolitics of the region, else he would have admonished uninformed Lieberman and explained why he was not wrong:

Islamic Shia represents a minority of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, less than 200 million. The Shia are concentrated in Iran, southern Iraq and southern Lebanon, but with significant Shiite pockets scattered over the globe. Over the centuries, Shia and Sunnis have lived peacefully together for long periods, though it is only U.S. occupation that has caused Iraq to split into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish mini-states with Kurdistan now flirting with Israel.

The U.S.-installed Baghdad regime controls nothing but the Green Zone. Real power is held by Iranian-backed Shia Islamic Supreme Council and its Badr militia, bolstered by al-Qaeda infiltrating from the Shia-region of Afghanistan. According to intelligence reports, Iran now dominates 60 percent of Iraq and is gaining. Lieberman’s suggestion that Iraqi mischief-makers are a part of the Sunni majority is absurd. Artificially created out of the Ottoman Empire by Old Europe, Iraq in reality ceased to exist soon after America invaded it. Where are the intellectuals?

On the home front, conservatives love to portray themselves as advocates of libertarian principles, ever since the Ronald Reagan’s talks for General Electric in the 1950s: free enterprise, private property, limited government, the Constitution, our founding principles and fundamental rights. The problem is that conservatives don’t practice what they preach. Long ago they threw in the towel on libertarian principles by embracing the big-government programs of the welfare-warfare state.

Democrats also abandoned their once proud principles in favor of a socialist state, for which many of us wouldn’t be too upset if the party crashed and burned over its petty squabbles. But retrospectively, this is the grand old party that elected one of our truly great presidents: Glover Cleveland, the last constitutionalist, a conservative who genuinely believed in a society based on economic liberty and a constitutionally limited republic. But so did liberals in those days, which is why Cleveland, a Democrat, vetoed a $10,000 farm bill to aid struggling Texas farmers, “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

It was Grover Cleveland’s politics that swayed GOP holdouts like Robert Taft of Ohio who opposed Roosevelt’s “socialist surge and war-state,” the root of the Ron Paul revolution. USA Humpty Dumpty is badly broken, a direct result of the perversion of Constitutional rule for 70 years of social experimentation. That America abandoned a republic based on liberty, can only be attributed to a courtier and uneducated populace. Where are the intellectuals to put Humpty together again?

Stumptalk is published weekly in the Crossville Chronicle. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the Chronicle publisher, editor or staff. Phil Billington serves as coordinator of this column. He may be reached at 484-2766.