An organization I run, The National Republican Trust PAC, raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Scott Brown win the Massachusetts special election to fill the seat vacated upon the death of Ted Kennedy. That organization will now do everything possible to see that Brown is defeated by a primary opponent when he faces reelection in 2012. Why? Because there is no difference between him and a Democrat.
Now, we knew going in that Massachusetts is a liberal state and we would not be able to count on Brown for very much, but something even people in his very blue home state would have understood is a vote against ratifying the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).
The excuses for voting in favor of New START are pathetic. Basically those in favor insist that the treaty will allow US inspectors back into Russia to make sure the Russians are eliminating their nuclear stockpile in accordance with the treaty. Mitigating that, however, is the fact that our inspectors can only look at the sites that the Russians tell us we can inspect. That’s it. That’s the best argument the other side had for supporting the treaty. On the other hand, you could write a thick book about the reasons to vote against it.
Russia desperately wanted the US to sign this treaty; in fact, Russian leaders even warned us that we had better not tamper with the language of the treaty while it was being considered during the lame-duck (illegitimate) Senate session. One of the reasons they couldn’t contain their participatory enthusiasm is that the treaty limits our ability to deploy a missile defense system. And we just might need that missile defense system because the treaty calls for reductions in nuclear-armed missiles, which leaves Russia with an even greater strategic offensive advantage.
It is complicated to explain, but here is a good way to look at it: Imagine that the US has a hand gun and five bullets, and the Russians have a hand gun and ten bullets. Russian Premier Medvedev says to Obama that he will throw away five of his bullets if Obama throws away five of his. Only an idiot would take that deal. Well, an idiot or someone who doesn’t mind selling out his country.
But there is a precedent to this stupidity. Twelve years ago the Russians made the outlandish argument that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty did not apply to them because they were no longer the USSR but it did apply to us because we were still the United States. Communist China, which was never involved in the ABM Treaty, also asserted that the US should be bound by it. Most observers at the time were sure the Russians and Chinese were “punking” us, but the joke ended up being on us because President Clinton agreed with them. In short, Clinton sided with the two most dangerous countries on the planet, at that time, against his own country. No wonder many senior people who worked in national security in the nineties were quietly saying Clinton was a traitor (I am not kidding).
So why would Scott Brown vote to ratify such a treaty? Who knows, but one thing we know for sure is that when it is revealed that the world is more dangerous because of this, the Democrats will remind us that Republicans voted to ratify it and it was “bipartisan.” If one doesn’t see how agreements such as this will make the US and the free world less safe, you needn’t look any further than what is happening on the Korean Peninsula right now. North Korea has nuclear weapons today because of the Clinton administration’s 1994 “Agreed Framework,” a fool’s deal that was supposed to ensure that North Korea did not get nuclear weapons. But instead of preventing them from getting nukes it accelerated their nuclear program. And throughout the rest of the Clinton years career intelligence analysts were telling them in very strong terms that North Korea was cheating on the agreement and pursuing nukes more rapidly with technology we provided them under terms of the agreement. But, instead of acknowledging the failure of the “Agreed Framework” and fixing it, Clinton and his people crowed about its success in stopping the dangerous Kim Jong Ill from getting the bomb he threatens the Pacific Rim with now. Democrats such as Clinton and Obama cannot be trusted to negotiate sensitive national security agreements.
Scott Brown wasn’t the only Republican to vote to ratify New START, and there will be dire political consequences for the others too. Every Republican who voted to ratify New START must be defeated. Issues like this are far too important to our nation’s security to allow them to be undermined by a liberal Republican coddled by the political establishment in the U.S. Senate. If we cannot count on liberal Republicans to at least vote the right way on national security issues, then what is the point of having them in the Senate at all? We are better off letting Democrats get the sole blame for their destructive policies. This is a major reason so many Republican voters are looking for alternatives to the GOP. They expect Democrats like Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to sell out their country, but they are fed up with Republicans who allow the Democrats to take them as hostages and later as “bipartisan” shills when the consequences of their decisions become evident.
Scott Wheeler is a former television producer, investigative journalist and author of the book Shadow Government: What Obama Doesn’t Want You to Know About His Czars. He is also the founder and Executive Director of the National Republican Trust PAC.