Category: International Relations

Elie Wiesel
A Time When the World Needs Elie Wiesel

A Time When the World Needs Elie Wiesel

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Seeing the scenes of devastation, cruelty, and inhumanity — one might call it barbarity — coming out of Ukraine, and especially witnessing the hundreds of dead, tortured, and raped men, women, and children in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, I was reminded of my encounter with Elie Wiesel, modern times’ foremost advocate for the oppressed, some twenty-three years ago. I met Wiesel when assigned as his control officer during his visit to Albania, sent by President Bill Clinton as his personal envoy to look into the state of the Kosovo refugees finding safe harbor in the country and in neighboring Macedonia.

In his report on the visit, WIesel, a Holocaust survivor, wrote, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

And yet, here we are, again. Twenty-three years later and just 700 miles (1,120 kms) distant, and once more we’re witnessing the imposition of unspeakable cruelty by one people upon another.

In the lingering heat at the end of a long Albanian June day, I vividly recall Wiesel expressing to me his biggest fear, that the hatred being engendered by the terror wreaked on the victims would only lead to a desire for revenge and, he feared, that revenge would carry over to future generations. Already now we’re hearing mention — perhaps remarkably restrained given the horrors these people have suffered and witnessed — of a new hatred for the Russians uttered by Ukrainian refugees and those who stayed behind amid the violence and destruction and killing. As Wiesel wondered in 1999, whether the world had learned anything, and concluding, “I am not so sure,” we can say today that the world, and its evil-doers, has learned pitifully little.

Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. His loss is inestimable. Indeed, the world would benefit if it could hear his voice today. This is a time when the world needs Elie Wiesel. And if it can’t hear his voice, it can look back at his words spoken during his life.

I wrote the piece below, and it appeared on the first anniversary of Elie Wiesel’s death, July 2, 2017. I think it worth republishing it now, and the horrors and the inhumanity Wiesel and I heard recounted in 1999, and his concerns for the future, apply equally, if on an even bigger scale, today.

Remembering Elie Wiesel

The news of Elie Wiesel’s death reached me on the car radio last July 2 as I was driving through Banff and Jasper national parks in Alberta. The sun had come out after a very rainy Canada Day the previous day, but the news of Wiesel’s passing arrived as a shock that darkened even that bright Saturday. I had a most personal and moving encounter with the Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, author, teacher, and renowned advocate for the oppressed 17 years prior, and I knew I needed to write something of my memories of him. Unfortunately, circumstances were not conducive that day or in subsequent days as I made my way back to the U.S. and to Florida, and the months that followed proved far more tumultuous and challenging than I had imagined. But now, on the anniversary of his death, I feel it’s finally time I share my thoughts on this man who touched my life so profoundly.

In June of 1999 I was again posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, returning there on TDY at my request from my then-permanent station in Brasilia. I couldn’t bear to read any more accounts of what the Serbs were doing to the Kosovar Albanians during their onslaught on the province of Kosovo – perhaps in part due to my own partially Albanian ancestry – and I asked to be sent on temporary duty back to Tirana, where I arrived in mid-May and was to remain through most of July.

It was during the first week of June 1999 that Elie Wiesel was sent as a personal representative of President Bill Clinton to visit the refugee camps housing the displaced Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia and Albania. The President wanted to get a first-hand read on what was going on, and what the state of the refugees was, and so he turned to the man who had spent so much of his adult life speaking out for the oppressed of the world. The man who himself had survived internship, at the age of 15, at two of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Perhaps because I constituted a significant part of the embassy’s collective memory, having been posted to Tirana from 1995 to 1997, including during Albania’s own internal descent into temporary madness following collapse of the country’s massive pyramid schemes, I was assigned as control officer to Mr. Wiesel. What that meant was that I was to accompany the visitor wherever he went, look after his safety and well being, oversee the translators, drivers, and other personnel assisting in the mission, serve as liaison to the embassy and whatever relevant agencies to assure that his requests were met, answer his questions about the country and the situation to supplement what knowledge he was garnering on his own, and to generally provide whatever support the President’s envoy might need or want. It struck me then as a great honor to be selected to fill this role, and it still strikes me that way.

Interestingly, in his report to the President, Mr. Wiesel said he was “accompanied by three able US government officials” during his visits to the two countries, and in acknowledging the role played by the embassies and the U.S. government agencies that assisted with the visit, he said, “They went out of their way to be helpful. They bring honor to our country.”

In truth, I felt that it was he who brought honor to us through his visit and, more than anything, the serious, sensitive, and intense manner in which he approached his role and the kindness he showed to everyone he came in contact with.

June brings heat to Albania, and the tents housing the thousands of refugees who had fled their homes in Kosovo were hot in the June sun. Elie Wiesel never faltered for a moment as we went from camp to camp, interviewing dozens of people in each camp, conducting the interviews in the tents, working through a translator, and listening intently to the unrelenting accounts of personal horror and loss that poured out. I sat in on most of these interviews, and hour by hour and day by day the strain and the sadness grew.

We got out into the areas where the camps had been set up, and this provided me with the occasion of my first-ever helicopter ride, aboard a U.S. Navy Sea Stallion that carried our entourage west out of the capital to our first stop. The schedule we kept up would have been grueling all by itself, but Wiesel was unstopping in his quest to speak with as many of the refugees as he could, seemingly disregarding any jet lag he might have picked up coming from New York, even at the age of 70 at the time.

We set up individual interviews as well as, as I recall, one or two group sessions, always in the big white refugee tents. For hours upon hours we heard women tell of watching their husbands and sons taken away and gunned down by the Serbs. We heard of parents separated from their children, of children watching their parents killed before theirs eyes, of the difficult and dangerous trek over the mountains and out of Kosovo to relative safety in Albania.

As Wiesel wrote in his report to President Clinton, “I listened to their tales of senseless cruelty and inhumanity which characterized Milosevic’s army and police; they have been reported in the international media. Still, it is different to hear it first-hand. One feels frustrated and powerless in their presence. And embarrassed. Pristina and Pec, Djakovica and Cecelija, Mitrovica and Glogovac, Kuraz and Izbica: eyewitnesses brought back harrowing detailed graphic reports from Kosovo’s killing fields. They go on and on. Forced expulsions, houses looted, villages burned, insults, threats, imprisonment, repeated rapes of young women, beatings of young men, separation of men and women, summary executions: everywhere, the process is the same. And the tormentors – who are they? Most of them are former neighbors.”

He heard again and again how it was former neighbors who were inflicting these cruelties, and I remember the interview Wiesel cites in his report: “ ‘A policeman came with his 5-year-old son,’ a man with an extraordinarily kind face told me. ‘He pointed at us and asked the boy to choose the prisoner to be beaten that morning.’ ”

When we took breaks, or when it was time to head back to Tirana at day’s end, we would watch the refugee children playing their games between the tents, as children will do.

“In this haunted world of Kosovo refugees, adults wept,” Wiesel writes in his report to the President. “Children did not. They sang. They played games. They laughed. And I no longer know what hurt us more: the children’s laughter or their parents’ tears.”

But what is not contained in those words is what we saw, again and again, which was children not just laughing and singing, but also pretending in their play to capture and execute one another, having picked up perhaps all too well what they had witnessed back home. I remember being at dinner in an open-air restaurant with embassy colleagues the evening of our camp visits and trying to describe what I had witnessed. But I was unable to get past the image of children forming guns with their fingers and using them to play-shoot their playmates in the back of the head, and breaking down at the table, not able to go on. The memory still haunts me and brings tears to my eyes even as I write these words.

It’s relevant to recall the details of Elie Wiesel’s life, being born into a town in Transylvania, a part of Romania that was transferred to Hungarian control for several years during World War II. And from there being hauled off with his family to the Nazi concentration camps as part of the Holocaust. Only Elie and two older sisters survived, their parents and younger sister killed in the camps, and the only reason Elie survived was by lying about his age, saying he was 18 and so able to work and prove useful to his captors. His life since then was marked with concern for the oppressed, and working to see that something like the Holocaust could never be repeated.

I think hearing the Kosovar refugees tell of the horrors that they were subjected to and witnessed brought back too many bad memories to Elie Wiesel. I could see it in his face, a look I can still see today, the effect all this was having on him. And in a low voice what he conveyed to me was his fear that this terror the refugees experienced was just going to carry on, was going to engender hatred and a desire for revenge, and the adults and the children playing their games were going to return to Kosovo with a desire to inflict on the Serbs what the Serbs had inflicted on them. It was this fear for the future that concerned him the most.

He writes in his report, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

His fear was that the victims would become the victimizers, seeking to wreak back onto the Serbs what their Serb neighbors had done to them. Toward the end of his report Wiesel expresses his concern for the future: “Their bitterness, indeed their hatred for [Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic] and his subordinates, will not fade away.”

When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him “a messenger to mankind.” But at the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, it is Wiesel’s words that are carved in stone: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Other words spoken by Wiesel must give us pause for thought, though. Lamenting that his father had no grave at which he might grieve, he said, “What can I tell him? That the world has learned? I am not so sure.”

In June 1999 and afterward, Elie Wiesel bore witness to the suffering and cruelty brought down on the Kosovar Albanians, and I think it added to his uncertainty that the world had changed since the Holocaust. But for me, a lowly embassy control officer, I will never forget his presence or his concern. In those couple of days, my life was truly touched by him.

Read Elie Wiesel’s full report to President Clinton here.

Photo by Remy Steinegger, World Economic Forum. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Looking at the mess inside Biden's brain
Sweeping Up the Mess in Biden’s Brain

Sweeping Up the Mess in Biden’s Brain

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After his seriously faltering performance in Europe in recent days, even the most ardent supporter of our alleged president has to admit something is seriously wrong with him. If they can’t admit this simple fact, repeatedly broadcast out for all the world to see, either they are profoundly dishonest or, plausibly, they might be suffering from the same dementia afflicting the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Unless you’ve been vacationing in a cave on a remote island lackng Internet or cable service, and if you’ve been paying even cursory attention to the frightening blather coming out of Biden’s mouth in recent days, you have probably already heard the things he’s been saying that have gotten so much attention. These aren’t just Jell-O Joe’s usual gaffes and non-sequiturs. They go to the heart of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine and Russia, and they come at a time of critically high tension, the highest tension in many decades, between the two biggest nuclear powers on earth. In the midst of a world-class crisis when the utmost precision is needed in our leaders’ language, President Grandpa is out there uttering babble that would befuddle your typical Applebee’s waitress.

The only comfort we can take is that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know Biden is just pinch hitting and isn’t really calling the shots in the U.S. Their psychological warfare experts have no doubt fully briefed them on what is, or isn’t, going on between Biden’s ears, so they can take some of his rants and rambles much as the rest of us take the rants and rambles of a favorite, but over-ripe, relative at a holiday dinner. That’s thin comfort, though. Not the only difference, but one of the bigger ones, between Uncle Terrance and Uncle Joe is that Uncle Joe has his finger on the nuclear button, while Uncle Terrance just needs some help putting gravy on this mashed potatoes.

Aside from my attempts at humor, this is no laughing matter. After all, Biden is, even if nominally, the Commander-in-Chief. So when he says the U.S. might use a chemical weapon, that American troops would soon be witnessing Ukrainian women standing in front of tanks in Kyiv, or that Vladimir Putin needs to go as head of state in Russia, these statements potentially indicate huge shifts in U.S. policy. And when, in each case, White House staff quickly come out and say, never mind, those things aren’t really U.S. policy, sweeping up the mess originating in Biden’s confused brain, that again raises the very real question of who really is in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

If that isn’t bad enough, once back on U.S. soil, and adding to the confusion and the questions about what really is our policy, Biden petulantly insisted he never said the things he said — things that have been recorded and broadcast a zillion times — and then angrily said he’s not rolling back anything. Did you hear that, Vlad? Joe says you have to go. And he really means it. It’s enough to make preppers out of all of us.

Letting Joe Speak for Himself

We can see now, more clearly than ever, what happens when Jell-O Joe doesn’t have his trusty teleprompter to read from, and why he’s repeatedly told — as he himself readily says — that he’s not allowed to answer questions. Once off script, the script his aides and speechwriters have prepared for him, he’s like a four-year-old spilling out family secrets, and whatever else comes into his head, to the neighbors. Only he does it with his eyes closed, seemingly struggling to find the next idea hiding among his remaining functioning brain cells.

Let’s let Joe speak for himself, and just take the most egregious statements to come out of his visits to Belgium and Poland, juxtapositioned with what others in his administration and on White House staff have said, and you can draw your own conclusions.

On sanctions and deterrence

Joe, in Brussels last Thursday, in answer to a CBS reporter’s question: ““Let’s get something straight. If you remember, if you covered me from the very beginning, I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him [Putin]. Sanctions never deter. You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter.”

But the administration line for weeks and months said something quite different (emphasis added):

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, on Feb. 11: “The president believes that sanctions are intended to deter. And in order for them to work — to deter, they have to be set up in a way where if Putin moves, then the costs are imposed.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken in February: ““The purpose of the sanctions in the first instance is to try to deter Russia from going to war. As soon as you trigger them, that deterrent is gone. And until the last minute, as long as we can try to bring a deterrent effect to this, we’re going to try to do that.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: ““We want them to have a deterrent effect, clearly. And he hasn’t invaded yet.”

Just after Russia’s initial incursion into Ukraine, Daleep Singh, deputy national security adviser for international economics and deputy director at the National Economic Council: “Sanctions are not an end to themselves. They serve a higher purpose. And that purpose is to deter and prevent. They’re meant to prevent and deter a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that could involve the seizure of major cities, including Kyiv. They’re meant to prevent large-scale human suffering that could involve tens of thousands of casualties in a conflict.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, herself an expert at verbal nonsensical salad, at a NATO conference four days before the invasion: ““Absolutely, we strongly believe [that sanctions deter]. It will exact absolute harm for the Russian economy. The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence.”

Of course, a day after the invasion started, Biden walked over his VP’s claim, saying: “No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening.”

Oopsie.

On possible U.S. use of a chemical weapon

Biden, last Thursday in Brussels, on whether Russia might use a chemical weapon and what the U.S. response would be: “We would respond. We would respond if he uses it. The nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use.” Later, asked by a reporter whether the use of chemical weapons by Russia would trigger a NATO military response, Biden, again eyes closed as he struggled to make a reply, responded, “It would trigger a response in kind.”

Those last two word — “in kind” — raised the question whether that meant the U.S. would use a chemical weapon in response.

Friday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tried to mop up Biden’s verbal spill: “The United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstances.”

On American troops in Ukraine

After chowing down on pizza and taking selfies with members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Rzeszow, Poland, last Friday, Biden, speaking in his somnolent way, told the troops: “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see — you’re gonna see women, young people standing in the middle in front of a damned tank just saying, ‘I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground.’”

Nothing like a good story to liven up reality, but a Biden sweepsperson, uh, I mean spokesperson, followed up by saying: ““The president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”

On regime change in Russia

Wrapping up his tetralogy of verbal deviations from official U.S. policy, Uncle Joe had one more whopper to throw on the grill on Saturday before (thankfully) leaving Poland: After berating Putin for his invasion of Ukraine, this time shouting his words, Biden ended with, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Other than giving the liberal American media something they can fawn over, shouting out the words don’t make them any less, well, stupid. If what Biden said sounds to you like a call for regime change in Moscow, you’re not alone in that. Even the very liberal Atlantic had a handle on the problem. As the magazine subtitled Tom Nichols’s piece on Biden’s speech, “The words of every world leader matter right now, and none more than those of the president of the United States.”

Which kind of underscores why Biden’s verbal wanderings are important. And troubling.

Rushing to walk back Biden’s impromptu remark, a White House spokesman said, “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

Well, that’s not what he said, and it sure sounded like a call for regime change to a lot of people.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned that use of such inflammatory language in an already volatile situation was not useful, and he was not alone among European leaders expressing anguish over Biden’s words. And the Kremlin said “personal insults” — Biden had called Putin “a butcher” — would further undermine relations, such as they are, between Russia and the U.S. Ostensibly this also would make reaching some sort of diplomatic settlement to the conflict more difficult. People can, and do, die over such blunders.

Amid all the blustery rhetoric, one has to wonder why the U.S. has been so slow to provide the levels of weapons support asked for by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and which the U.S. has promised. As I always say, don’t go by what people say. Go by what they do.

More Biden creepiness

Adding to the bizarre aspect of all this, Biden did his usual inappropriate flirting with a young Ukrainian refugee, serving as a volunteer assisting other refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, named Victoria. After hugging her, rubbing her shoulders, and letting his hands remain on her, he asked her, through a translator, “How do you say, in Ukrainian, who do you owe those beautiful eyes to? Your father or your mother? Who had the eyes?”

The stunned Victoria simply answered that they were from her mother.

“Mother’s eyes. You owe mama very big. You owe mama,” Biden blathered to the woman, before moving on to mingle with other refugees and volunteers and picking up small children to hold them, as he has been wont to do with small children over the years.

Not content to offend Ukrainian refugees, he also had to insult Americans’ intelligence, too. In one of his other more outrageous statements, Biden compared the Ukrainian refugees fleeing into Poland to the millions of illegal immigrants his administration has allowed to cross the U.S. southwest border into the U.S. As I keep saying, you can’t make this stuff up.

Denying reality . . . or not aware of it?

Of course, Biden never said any of these things, anyway. Just ask him, like Fox News’s Peter Doocy did at a presidential press conference on Monday. Here’s the actual conversation, and you can judge what the reality is:

Doocy: “Are you worried that other leaders in the world are going to start to doubt that America is ‘back’ if some of these big things that you say on the world stage keep getting walked back?”

Biden: “What’s getting walked back?”

Doocy: “Just in the last couple days . . . it sounded like you told troops they were going to Ukraine, it sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon, and it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia, and we know . . . ”

Biden, interrupting: “None of the three occurred.”

Doocy: “None of the three occurred?”

Biden: “None of the three . . . You interpret the language that way.”

Later, Biden repeated, “I’m not walking anything back.”

He might not be, but the rest of his motley crew is busy not just walking, but running things back, desperately trying to sweep up Biden’s verbal messes, re-write what we actually heard, and stave off World War III. Meanwhile, the rest of us — and the world — wonder who, if anyone, really is at the helm. If you still believe it’s Jell-O Joe, I have a nice bombed-out building in Mariupol to sell you.

Featured image: Messy Room, levelord, Pixabay. Used with permission.

Joe Biden eats pizza with the troops in Poland, Evelyn Hockstein, Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Marina Ovsyannikova holds sign protesting war in Ukraine on Russia's Channel One TV
Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

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America’s newsrooms could use more people like Marina Ovsyannikova. That’s her there, holding up that sign on Russia’s state-run Channel One TV informing viewers that they’re being lied to about Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.

“NO WAR,” the sign says, and then in Russian, “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here,” and finally ending with, “Russians Against War.”

Facing possible prosecution and severe punishment, Ovsyannikova, a news editor at the station, felt she couldn’t stay silent any more as state television pumped out falsehoods to gin up public support for the country’s invasion of its neighbor. Her dramatic display of dissent was followed in short order by the similarly inspired resignation of Lilia Gildeyeva, a long-time anchor at Gazprom Media-owned NTV — technically a commercial station but closely aligned with the Kremlin — who fled the country before submitting her resignation, saying she feared she wouldn’t be allowed to leave if she resigned first. Just last year Gildeyeva was on a list of journalists praised by Putin for “achievements in developing mass media.”

While many in Russia know they’re being lied to by their so-called news media, many Americans have been slow to catch on that their so-called news media have been lying to them, too. Incessantly fed tall tales of “Russian collusion” and “Russian misinformation” and “Russian interference in American elections” by their own print and broadcast news sources, Americans have been led down a path of divisiveness, lies, coverups, and political fraud that would put Russian propagandists to shame.

Some of us have known for a long time that the mainstream media were complicit in deceiving the American public, largely on behalf of the Democratic Party and party elites and in the rabid and irrational manifestation of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). As a recovering journalist, I’m more attuned to these things than most, and have been calling out the lies and deceit in the nearly five years I’ve been posting my pieces on FJY.US and now on Substack. It’s always nice to be right, and as the truth inexorably comes out, things I’ve reported and opined on have almost in all cases been proven correct. It’s bitter pleasure, though, seeing how readily so many people, including people I know personally, bought, and continue to buy, into the lies being fed them.

Unless one is a regular viewer of Fox News — itself maligned by the media and political propagandists — or is willing to search out and read or listen to knowledgeable sources not corrupted by the prevailing political orthodoxy, one wouldn’t have a clue what really is going on in this country.

It only took 17 months and what amounts to a fraudulent presidential election for the exalted New York Times to finally acknowledge that the laptop reported in October 2020 by the New York Post to belong to First Son Hunter Biden is, in fact, authentic. The Times couldn’t even admit that it had covered up the story at the time it broke — part of a massive media and Big Tech coverup geared toward getting Hunter’s father, Joe, elected president, and to block the reelection of the Orange Menace. It buried the acknowledgment in a story this week reporting how Hunter borrowed money to pay a million dollar delinquent tax bill and remains under a federal investigation into his shady international business deals.

“People familiar with the investigation,” the Times bleated, “said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer [Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud] and others about Burisma [the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Biden served for a cool million dollars a year despite knowing nothing about either energy or Ukraine] and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Duh. Ya think?

Hunter Biden himself from his laptop

Covering Up Biden’s Corruption

If you were reading my posts — or the New York Post — in October 2020 none of this would be news to you. You’d already know about the connection between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Burisma, and the whole sordid affair. And if you were reading my posts or watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News, you would know about how the corruption involving Hunter ties directly to his father, then Vice President and now doddering about the White House masquerading as President while Ukraine goes up in flames. And if at the time you listened to Carlson’s interview with Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski you’d also know how that corruption extends to China and the Biden family’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

If you didn’t listen to that interview or read the Post stories and other key pieces of information I linked to in my October 29, 2020, piece on Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media, now would be an opportune time to do so. Better late than never.

In a coordinated move that would make the Russian censors proud, most of the U.S. media and Big Tech — led by Twitter and Facebook — squelched the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election, going so far as to lock out the Post‘s own accounts and shutting down anyone who even mentioned them. They were given cover by a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials — including such professional Obama Administration liars and current CNN pundits as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, who has admitted previous support for the Communist Party — which said the Hunter laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Never mind that, by their own admission, they had no evidence to support this audacious claim.

“If we are right” — operative word if — “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the letter said.

What would have been correct, and honest, would have been if they wrote “this is the Democratic Party trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.” But that was the last thing they wanted Americans to know as they were already casting their votes. Now these same “former intelligence officials” refuse to withdraw or apologize for their own misinformation discrediting the laptop story.

Following the election, one-in-six Biden voters polled — 17 percent — said they would have changed their vote had they known about the laptop story or the other stories concerning scandals related to the Biden-Harris ticket that the media and Big Tech suppressed. Of course, I wonder what it would take, if all that isn’t enough, for the other 83 percent to change their vote. In any case, what even the 17 percent number says is that the outcome of the election would have been very different had the media and Big Tech not conspired to pull the wool over the eyes of American voters. Russian disinformation, indeed.

Hillary and Vlad Vladivostok Sept 8 2012

Back to the Beginning: Hillary Clinton

As I said, some of us have known all along that the so-called Russian collusion theory, which attempted to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, was a hoax perpetrated by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Once the Mueller investigation ended in March 2019 with no evidence of collusion, prosecution of the real guilty parties should have been commenced, but wasn’t. The wheels of justice, to the extent they turn at all, turn exceptionally slowly, especially when highly placed individuals are concerned, and 14 months later, in May 2020, we began to get further confirmation of the extent to which the effort to discredit Trump essentially amounted to an attempted coup d’etat.

Once the 2020 election was over it was considered safe to reveal details of the conspiracy that led to the election of Jell-O Joe Biden and, more at issue, the defeat of Donald Trump. The full details of this conspiracy — that’s the actual word used by the author of the Time story detailing the process — were contained in a pivotal February 2021 piece by Time‘s National Political Correspondent Molly Ball. Titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” in it Ball writes that she gained access to “the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum.”

Admitting the story sounds like “a paranoid fever dream,” Ball wrote of “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” And this from a highly placed media person who ostensibly approves of this sort of thing.

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” she wrote. “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”

Ignoring, if you can, Ball’s use of a semi-colon, you can be excused if you think this sounds a lot like incessant Democratic blathering about “saving democracy,” which you also would not be wrong to equate to the same sort of electoral manipulation that led to the 2020 results. Only they want it in perpetuity. The classic one-party state. All with the full complicity and collusion of the “liberal” mainstream media. Back to the USSR.

In July of last year I posted a piece I titled If You Don’t Read Anything Else This Year, Read This. If you didn’t follow that guidance then, now would be a good time to do it. That piece quotes 36 tweets by researcher, writer, and podcaster Darryl Cooper in which he lays out why, exactly, ordinary people know that the 2020 election was stolen. It closely parallels what Ball says about the conspiracy involved in its “fortifying,” and things I’ve been reporting on all along.

Finally, last month, we got the latest filings from the long-enduring investigation being conducted by Special Counsel John Durham which ties the whole Russian collusion hoax back to its source: Hillary Clinton. We already knew that she was willing to sacrifice national security by conducting classified and sensitive official business on an unsecured private server when she was Secretary of State under Obama, but we now have evidence that her campaign was actually attempting to garner information directly from the Oval Office during Trump’s presidency.

We’ve also had evidence, which predates even the 2016 election and Clinton’s ludicrous “reset” with Russia, of her ties to Putin and his oligarch cronies. We also had evidence, which alarmed even some in the FBI, how Clinton Foundation — the Clintons’ family business — activities in Russia posed a potential threat to U.S. national security and risked providing “. . .  a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.”

With grifters like Clinton and Biden and their cronies, and with media that coverup the facts and perpetuate the lies and deceit, that collude to “fortify” our elections, who needs Russians? It might be too much to hope for a Marina Ovsyannikova, but at least some journalistic ethics and integrity and less malpractice and corruption would go a long way. Even those things, it seems, have gone beyond the range of expectation. And with them goes the viability of our democracy.

Featured image: Marina Ovsyannikova Tells It Like It Is, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden, from his own laptop, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Vlad and Hillary Cozy Up in Vladivostok on Sept. 8, 2012, AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, Pool. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Nicholas Maduro caricature
Dancing With the Devil

Dancing With the Devil

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Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith

— Sympathy For the Devil, The Rolling Stones

How is the Biden administration dancing with the Devil? Let’s take a look.

Hat in Hand to Venezuela

See that funny-looking guy up there? That’s Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator. I can’t verify, so won’t allege, that Maduro is the actual Devil, but he’s a bad dude, for sure. And he’s one of the devils Biden and Co. are dancing with.

For some reason, the administration has decided it’s better to import oil from places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and maybe even Iran, than to unleash America’s own energy resources. It’s a smoke and mirrors trick which they hope you’re too slow to see. As prices at the pump or to heat your house go through the roof, Biden wants you to believe it’s Russia’s fault, when in fact the problem and the upward climb in prices had begun long before Vladimir Putin sent his tanks and troops into Ukraine and even before the U.S. recently embargoed Russian oil.

The U.S. is down 1.4 million barrels of oil production a day since Biden took over and deliberately moved the country away from the energy independence that his predecessor worked hard to establish, the first time the U.S. had reached that point in more than 60 years. This is all in the pursuit of the Green agenda, bowing to the religious orthodoxy of Climate Change. Never mind that, regardless the source, it’s consumption that is the critical factor, not place of origin. And never mind that U.S. energy, and its extraction, is among the cleanest in the world. It’s all a charade and you’re not supposed to notice “little” facts like those.

In the interconnected world we live in, that’s not the only complication. Not only is trading Putin for Maduro exchanging one dictator for another, not to mention that Caracas is closely aligned with Moscow, there also is the fact that Roszarubezhneft, a Russian state-owned oil company, owns 40% of five joint ventures with the Venezuelan state-run oil giant PDVSA. Those ventures account for 15% of the South American country’s production. The administration sent a delegation to Caracas to chit-chat with Maduro — breaking a long standing U.S. policy not to deal with him — to discuss waiving some of the sanctions on Venezuela targeted at the country’s oil exports. So to push Biden’s Green charade, he’ll dance with the devil-figure of Maduro. And in the process, violate our own self-stated intent to hurt Russia. Oil talks, nobody walks.

Willing to play the game, Maduro released two Americans his government was holding, former Citgo executive Gustavo Cardenas, a U.S. citizen, and Jorge Fernandez, a Cuban-American, days after the Caracas visit. He also said he’d consider resuming talks, stalled for months, with the Venezuelan opposition.

High gas prices

Our Friends the Russians Negotiate for Us With Our Friend Iran

No, really. I’m not making that up. I keep saying, you can’t make this stuff up. There is no length of absurdity this administration will not go to if it furthers its agenda, no matter how misguided that agenda might be.

Devil or not with whom we’re dancing, if you think it’s not a good idea to use one’s strategic enemy to negotiate on your behalf with another of your strategic enemies, you apparently have more sense than our so-called national security establishment. That would be the case aside from how one feels about the issue under negotiation, reentry of the U.S. to the Iran nuclear deal, and whether that deal makes it easier or harder for the Iranians to develop a nuclear bomb.

Since the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian deal under President Trump, it has no standing in the agreement or negotiations over it, so depends on the kindness of strangers to represent its interests. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that if the deal was bad before, when we were involved in its negotiation, it will be that much worse now, with the Russians looking after their issues first.

Given that reality, it’s not a huge surprise that the Russians have thrown new demands into the mix which have caused the negotiations, which had been nearing conclusion, to stall. Also not a huge surprise, the Russians demanded that Washington’s sanctions on Russia would not negatively impact its trade with Iran.

“In view of the new circumstances and wave of sanctions against Russia,” said Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s chief envoy to the negotiations, “We have the right to protect our interests in the nuclear field and wider context.”

That put Washington into a bind. Hungry for Iranian oil to replace Russian oil, does the U.S. agree to let Russia circumvent the sanctions put on it over the Ukrainian invasion, or does it pull back on the gas. It opted for the latter, with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, saying the U.S. would not play Let’s Make a Deal with Moscow.

Russian nuclear negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov

Dancing With the Iranian Devils

But, you see, the Biden administration already has been releasing billions to the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Faced with rising social discontent in Iran, which was at least one of the intended affects of U.S. sanctions, last summer the administration unfroze $29 billion in Iranian assets. With conclusion of a new nuclear deal with U.S. participation, another $100 billion in Iranian assets are likely to be unfrozen.

All this is on top of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration — of which, let’s not forget, Joe Biden was part of — paid to the Iranians, all in cash to circumvent U.S. sanctions, in 2016. This included $400 million delivered by cargo plane direct to Tehran. Ostensibly these payments were in exchange for the release of four Americans being held prisoner by the Iranians, and Iran entering the nuclear deal. So much for the idea that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms. You see, it’s not just gangsters who pay protection money, and yet oddly we heard no calls to impeach Obama for a clear violation of properly imposed sanctions or long-standing U.S. policy.

And now, after all this dancing with the Devil, here we are. I’m in no better position than anyone else to determine how close the Iranians are to developing a nuclear bomb, but some of my sources tell me it could be a matter of weeks before Iran “breaks out” with a nuclear weapon. And still we press on with allowing the Russians to speak for us, still want into the ineffectual nuclear deal, still are helping pay for Iran’s nefarious activities. And Russian trade with Iran, as much as an issue as it is, is hardly the biggest issue at stake.

It’s not just, as the Stones’ song goes, that the Devil “stole many a man’s soul and faith.” He’s doing pretty good at stealing some countries’ soul and faith, too.

Featured Image: Nicolás Maduro caricature by DonkeyHotey. The source images for this caricature are Creative Commons licensed photos from the Congreso de la Republica del Perú’s and newsonline’s Flickr photostreams. Used with permission.

Gas prices from back when gas was under $4/gallon. Photo by AP. Used under Fair Use.

Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s Governor to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Alex Halada, AFP. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

 
The Dismal State of the Union

The Dismal State of the Union

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“Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and minds of the Iranian people.” — Jell-O Joe Biden, State of the Union Address

And you have any doubt that we’re all in mortal danger?

Yes, Jell-O Joe Biden actually said that during his State of the Union address Tuesday evening. Often sounding like the drunk you run into at a city bus stop late at night and stumbling on almost every sentence uttered during the rambling, 62-minute annual ritual talk, if Biden failed to inspire confidence in you, imagine how much less he might have inspired in the besieged Ukrainian people had they gotten to hear him.

Dedicating the first 12 minutes of his talk to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden’s claims for credit in deterring Putin fell short and could easily be picked apart. Perhaps the bigger danger lies less in this administration’s missteps that led to the current situation than in its self-delusion that it actually did and is doing all it can to deter Putin. Every day that delusion, not just in regard to Ukraine but on every front, is paraded before the public, and increasingly the only ones deluded are the President and his coterie and the ever smaller percentage of the population who continue to think there is any hope for this administration.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but somehow it came as a bit of a shock to realize that this was Biden’s first SOTU. To me it seems like years since he took office and began driving the country straight into the ground, starting on Day One. But, no, it’s been just over one year. And the scariest part is to think that there remain nearly three more years of this national nightmare. While the Republicans are likely to secure a take-over of the Congress, perhaps of historic proportions, in November — assuming we and the world make it that far — it’s painful to think that 10 months remain before a change comes to that branch of government. And still, even then, the White House will remain in the hands of squinty Joe, the profoundly inept Kamala, and the merry band of morons pulling the strings of what passes for government in this country.

There was some fantastical thinking among some in the pundit class that Biden might have taken advantage of the SOTU to do a reset, given how fabulously his so-called policies have failed over the past year. But, no, that was not in the cards. Mostly he just drilled down on the same stupid objectives, obfuscated and outright lied on some of the administration’s “successes,” and rebranded the dead-in-the-water “Build Back Better” monstrosity.

Smoke, Mirrors, and Fooling Some of the People

The Grifter-in-Chief’s claims that he united NATO and that we did, and are doing, all we can to deter Putin fall flat on their face in light of the facts. It was when Putin moved his tanks and troops into Ukraine that galvanized Germany and caused other countries to sit up and take notice. Until then, Biden and Harris’s feeble calls for “unity” had little impact. Shocked into action, Germany finally agreed to send lethal aid to Ukraine and even neutral Switzerland and Sweden took action to sanction Russia. The U.S. dragged its feet on cutting Russian banks off from the SWIFT international bank transfer system, and still has cutouts for the Russian energy sector, which makes up 40% of the Russian economy and provides funds to Putin to fund his warmongering.

Biden made a big point of having released 30 million barrels of oil from our national strategic reserve and talking other countries into releasing an additional 30 million barrels from their reserves. To the uninformed, that sounds like a lot. But when the U.S. alone uses 20.5 million barrels a day, that amounts to less than three days worth of consumption, not to mention that it defeats the purpose of having a strategic reserve in the first place. Meanwhile, the U.S. is still buying more than 670,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia. And while the U.S. goes hat-in-hand to beg OPEC to pump more oil to control jumping prices at the pump, Biden has canceled drilling on U.S. public lands, stopped all new drilling in this country, blocked construction of new liquefied natural gas terminals that could supply U.S. natural gas to Europe, and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried Canadian oil to the U.S.

Who does Biden think he’s kidding? Even as he spoke Tuesday night, the price for oil spiked another $5 a barrel on Asian markets, and has gone up still further since. The world price for oil is now pushing $114 a barrel, up more than $17 or 8.4% for the week, as I write this.

With a 40-mile-long (64-km-long) column of Russian tanks and other vehicles headed toward Kyiv, the U.S. blocked Poland’s offer of old Mig fighters to Ukraine and it also refused to provide a number of U.S. jets slated for retirement. It took nearly a week of Russian aggression for Biden to finally announce the U.S. would ban Russian airline flights into the country, something the Europeans did days prior. Doing everything we can? Hardly.

More Blather on the Domestic Front

Biden’s drivel didn’t stop with Ukraine, of course. After leaving the Southwest border open for his entire term, leading to record numbers of illegals entering the country over the past year, Biden lamely called for securing the border. He lamented the rising death toll from fentanyl deaths, for which he bears so much responsibility, and blathered on about funding, rather than defunding, the police, in contravention of his party’s policies over the past two years and contributing to spiking crime across the country.

“The answer’s not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police,” he called out to applause, as if from trained seals, citing what might be obvious to most Americans, as members of the Squad, responsible for so much of the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party, sat on their hands.

Showing that he doesn’t have a clue about the economy or how business works, he told business to “lower your costs, not your wages,” completely oblivious to the fact that labor costs are the largest expense for most businesses. And then, criticizing corporations that allegedly pay no taxes while making billions of dollars, he called for an increase in the corporate tax rate to 50% from the current 21%, the reduced rate which was responsible for repatriating so much corporate money back to the U.S. Never mind if, as he claims, corporations don’t pay the 21%, how he intends to get them to pay the 50%. Logic apparently is not Biden’s strong suite, either. Meanwhile, even as we still buy Russia’s oil and many of our military parts come from China, Biden called for buying American products.

Perhaps most noticeable was how the COVID virus, after permeating the halls of Congress the past two years, suddenly had been banished exactly on the night of the SOTU, and masks, previously required by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, suddenly had virtually disappeared from the hallowed halls. And in contravention of the teacher unions’ obstinate position that has done so much harm to the nation’s children, he called for students to return to the classrooms. Ya’ think?

We can’t have a Biden speech without some reference to his deceased son Beau, making some obscure connection to burn pits and his death, and then we also can’t have a Biden speech without some form of plagiarism, either.

“The state of our union is strong because you the American people are strong,” Biden shouted, sounding remarkably like his predecessor, who said during one of his SOTUs, “The state of our union is strong because you are strong.”

One of Biden’s more memorable quotes melanged together some half-formed criticism of Trump’s border wall with promotion of vaccines which, let us not forget, came about as a result of the latter’s Operation Warp Speed:

“You can’t build a wall high enough to keep out . . . a . . . a vaccine,” he said.

If you want more depressing entertainment, you can read the full transcript of the SOTU here.

If any of this troubles you, take heart. The intrepid Kamala Harris awaits in the wings. Asked by a radio host to “break it down in laymen’s terms for people who don’t understand what’s going on [in Ukraine] and how can this directly affect the people of the United States,” the second in command of the Free World broke it down in terms more suited to kindergartners.

“So Ukraine is a country in Europe,”Harris said. “It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.”

Are you starting to get the idea why I say we are sooo fucked?

Featured Image: Sunken Boats. Carlos Moral Reis, Pexels. Used with permission.

Russian Convoy of Tanks and Military Hardware Bears Down on Kyiv. BBC. Used under Fair Use.

State of the Union. Sarahbeth Maney, AP. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.