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Tim Pawlenty’s CFR Connection
By Michael Collins Piper
Tim Pawlenty is in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, but there’s more to his campaign—and the people behind it—than meets the eye. The former Minnesota governor doesn’t have much charisma. Some even say he’s boring. Pawlenty doesn’t have movie-star good looks, nor is he descended from distinguished GOP “royalty.” Instead, Pawlenty has “regular folks” appeal. One of five children of a milk truck driver and the first kid in the family to get a college degree, Pawlenty lost his mother to cancer when he was just 16 and later worked his way through high school, college and law school.
After a brief period as a labor law attorney, Pawlenty went on to serve as vice president of a software company before entering politics. He and his wife Mary, a former Minnesota district court judge, have two daughters.
A five-termer in the Minnesota state House of Representatives, where he was eventually voted majority leader, Pawlenty was elected governor of Minnesota in 2002 and re-elected in 2006—winning both contests by narrow margins in three-way races. His gubernatorial years were notable and quite distinguished in the eyes of conservatives. Pawlenty balanced the state budget, reduced the growth of spending and cut taxes. On social issues, Pawlenty is distinctly conservative.
Running for president, Pawlenty is working to present himself as a tough-talking, no-nonsense candidate. Media reports variously say Pawlenty wants to appear “bold and decisive” and as “the GOP’s blunt talker.”
As such, Pawlenty is adopting hard-line rhetoric, particularly in the foreign policy arena, that places him in the center of the warmongering neo-conservative realm. Even as Pawlenty is asking Americans to accept cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits and suggesting we should work longer years before getting Social Security at all, he’s even taken Barack Obama to task for not charging more forcefully and immediately into the U.S. imperial military venture in Libya—even as the U.S. budget is already strapped.
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A former Roman Catholic who converted to evangelical Christianity, Pawlenty is an unabashed supporter of Israel—to which he made the standard politician’s pilgrimage this past December.
Pawlenty recently charged that the Obama administration “has shown an astonishing unwillingness to stand by Israel at the UN,” a position that will endear him not only to well-heeled Jewish campaign contributors who bankroll upwards of 70 percent of all national Republican campaign funds, but also to his fellow evangelical voters who are steadfast Israel supporters.
Some Pawlenty critics believe his close and long-standing friendship with former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.)—a key Pawlenty campaign advisor—does not reflect well on Pawlenty, however.
A member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations—the New York offshoot of the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs, the foreign policy-making arm of the Rothschild banking dynasty—Weber is a key figure in the global elite.
Weber is also a veteran of the now-infamous Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which once declared the need for a “new Pearl Harbor” to stimulate American grassroots support for global interventionism.
During the early 1980s, Weber urged the GOP to become “America’s new internationalist party.” As a member of Congress from 1981 to 1993—who retired abruptly after being caught up in the House banking scandal, where he was found to have written 125 bad checks on his House bank account—Weber engaged in a scurrilous effort to smear Liberty Lobby, the populist publisher of the newspaper The Spotlight, for its efforts to focus public attention on Israel’s deliberate attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, resulting in the slaughter of 34 Americans and the grievous wounding of 172 others. (See page 17.)
Weber charged that The Spotlight played a pivotal role in nearly causing his own reelection defeat after it publicized Weber’s betrayal of the men of the Liberty. The Weber-CFR-PNAC connection says much about the presidential aspirations of Pawlenty and is a point that savvy GOP primary voters need to keep in mind. Pawlenty clearly has some powerful negative influences lined up behind him.
A journalist specializing in media critique, Michael Collins Piper is the author of The High Priests of War, The New Jerusalem, Dirty Secrets, The Judas Goats, The Golem, Target Traficant and My First Days in the White House All are available from AFP.
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(Issue # 24 & 25, June 13 & 20, 2011)
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