look mum, a cockwoble…
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/25/intercepted-podcast-mike-pence-is-the-koch-brothers-manchurian-candidate/
JS: What I really found extraordinary about your piece is this notion of Mike Pence, not really as a principled conservative Christian, but as a real opportunist willing to set aside what he claimed were his bedrock principles in favor of whatever his kind of corporate paymasters or political expediency dictates he should do. Is that your sense?
JM: Yeah. And that was a surprise to me too. I mean, I think everybody had thought of him as kind of defining social conservatism and evangelical Christianity, and, in fact, what the reporting showed was that he’s very ambitious and he’s made his deals when he needs to.
And, in fact, his whole career really has been nurtured, supported, and sponsored by huge right-wing corporate interests. And I hadn’t realized that myself until I dug into it.
JS: There was a sense that Mike Pence was kind of this like shitty-magic-penny to buy the Christian right, sort of like calm with the idea of Trump being president.
JM: He definitely was. He was the bridge. He was the seal of good housekeeping that enabled the Christian right to come on board.
And, you know, but to go into your first question about the surprise of how ambitious he was and how willing he was to cut deals when he needed to, I mean it shouldn’t have been a surprise because the biggest deal and the biggest sort of Faustian bargain that he’s made was getting on the ticket with Donald Trump, who, of course, defines everything that Christian evangelicals say that they dislike, you know? His willingness to make that deal should have tipped everybody off.
JS: You were able to get some pretty powerful quotes or assertions from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He, of course, is the Democratic senator from Rhode Island and one of the things that he said to you was that if Mike Pence were to become president, that the government would be run by the Koch brothers. Maybe you can unpack that and explain the connection between — because the Koch brothers aren’t known as fanatical Christian supremacists.
JM: No, I mean and, so, isn’t that interesting? The Koch’s are libertarians, or you could call them neoliberals. They are supposedly people who believe in kind of social liberalism. But there they are having sponsored the career of Mike Pence. And I think it’s a real tip off to what the Koch’s really care about.
The issue that matters to them is not any of the social issues, no matter what they’re saying. What matters to them is allowing business to take over the power in the country, and particularly their own business. So, they’re pushing back on regulations, and they’re pushing back on taxes and trying to shrink the power of the government and replace it with their own power.
And Mike Pence has been willing to carry their water on that. I hadn’t realized, despite writing “Dark Money,” a book about the Kochs, I hadn’t realized the extent to which they were working hand-in-glove with Pence and vice versa and how it began.
And it really goes back to 2009 in earnest. I mean it starts before then, in his working for think tanks that are funded by corporations and huge right-wing donors such as the Kochs.
But in 2009, there was a piece of legislation moving forward in Congress that was a huge threat to Koch Industries. And that was a tax on carbon pollution, something that would make the fossil fuel companies like Koch Industries pay for what they were doing to the environment.
And Pence really took up their cause in 2009, and he echoed their talking points. He took a petition that was created by the Koch’s main political group, Americans for Prosperity, and he got tons of signatures on it in Congress and eventually managed to help kill that bill in the Senate so it never happened. And also to kind of permanently align the Republican Party against doing anything to try to deal with climate change. That was a gift of major proportions to Koch Industries. That cemented his relationship with the Kochs, and they then started just pouring money into him.
They sponsored the next phases of his career and they really began to push for the idea of Pence himself becoming a presidential candidate and they were hoping it would come out that way. But Pence kind of screwed it up. He goes back to Indiana, becomes governor and he’s really a failure. And he makes decisions and takes positions that hurt him so much that he can’t run for president right away.
https://ifamericaknew.org/us_ints/p-neff.html
It was 12 years ago, on March 14, 1983, that the commandant of the Marine Corps sent a highly unusual letter to the secretary of defense expressing frustration and anger at Israel. General R.H. Barrow charged that Israeli troops were deliberately threatening the lives of Marines serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon. There was, he wrote, a systematic pattern of harassment by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that was resulting in “life-threatening situations, replete with verbal degradation of the officers, their uniform and country.”
Barrow’s letter added: “It is inconceivable to me why Americans serving in peacekeeping roles must be harassed, endangered by an ally…It is evident to me, and the opinion of the U.S. commanders afloat and ashore, that the incidents between the Marines and the IDF are timed, orchestrated, and executed for obtuse Israeli political purposes.”1
Israel’s motives were less obtuse than the diplomatic general pretended. It was widely believed then, and now, that Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s most Machiavellian politician-generals, was creating the incidents deliberately in an effort to convince Washington that the two forces had to coordinate their actions in order to avoid such tensions. This, of course, would have been taken by the Arabs as proof that the Marines were not really in Lebanon as neutral peacekeepers but as allies of the Israelis, a perception that would have obvious advantages for Israel.2
Barrow’s extraordinary letter was indicative of the frustrations and miseries the Marines suffered during their posting to Lebanon starting on Aug. 25, 1982, as a result of Israel’s invasion 11 weeks earlier. Initially a U.S. unit of 800 men was sent to Beirut harbor as part of a multinational force to monitor the evacuation of PLO guerrillas from Beirut. The Marines, President Reagan announced, “in no case… would stay longer than 30 days.”3 This turned out to be only partly true. They did withdraw on Sept. 10, but a reinforced unit of 1,200 was rushed back 15 days later after the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila that accompanied the Israeli seizure of West Beirut. The U.S. forces remained until Feb. 26, 1984.4
During their year-and-a-half posting in Lebanon, the Marines suffered 268 killed.5 The casualties started within a week of the return of the Marines in September 1982. On the 30th, a U.S.-made cluster bomb left behind by the Israelis exploded, killing Corporal David Reagan and wounding three other Marines.6
Corporal Reagan’s death represented the dangers of the new mission of the Marines in Lebanon. While their first brief stay had been to separate Israeli forces from Palestinian fighters evacuating West Beirut, their new mission was as part of a multinational force sent to prevent Israeli troops from attacking the Palestinian civilians left defenseless there after the withdrawal of PLO forces. As President Reagan said: “For this multinational force to succeed, it is essential that Israel withdraw from Beirut.”7