Category: Security
Sticks and stones

Sticks and stones

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Many children, myself included, often heard the refrain, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. In my case, it was part of my parents’ efforts to calm me in the face of daily schoolyard bullying to which I was subjected in elementary school. I might not have believed it then, but after Saturday’s events, if we didn’t already know better, we do now.

Let’s get right to the heart of the matter. Words can hurt. They can kill. And Saturday they came damned close to killing a former President, the Republican soon-to-be nominee for President, and if current trends hold, the next President of the United States. How close? A fraction of an inch. Less than a couple centimeters.

Ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his run for President in June 2015 there has been a veritable unrelenting tidal wave of hatred, vitriol, and shameless lies to come out of what can only be termed the state media and the Democratic Party against the man who would become the 45th President. They mocked him, accused him of being a racist and a sexist, said he was a hater.

His opponent, Hillary Clinton, bankrolled a bogus so-called dossier to paint him as a tool of Vladimir Putin and someone who would have Russian whores pee on him. High officials in what is supposed to be the country’s premier organ of law enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, furthered the lies, tricked close associates of Trump into entrapment, knowingly verified warrants as truthful that they knew were not. Putin himself would have been proud of the techniques used by FBI officials to attempt to prevent the will of the people from selecting Trump as their President.

For virtually the entire four years of his term he was hounded by one bogus investigation after another. He was impeached, but not convicted, twice. He was badgered, slandered, and mocked relentlessly. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were squandered on trying to pin one false charge after another on the man. The nation’s energy and attention and good will were plundered, all because a single man dared challenge the established order. And that established order fought back, covering up the corruption and perfidy of his opponent in 2020, using a national crisis in the form of a pandemic as an excuse to bend and break election laws, putting a weak, already dementia-ridden tool who would do as he was told, into office.

That was then. This is now.

A lot of people, the current incumbent among them, thought Trump was done, an artifact of the past. But he wasn’t done, and when he indicated he was going to reclaim the office he felt was taken from him, the wheels of the established order swung back into action. Biden’s Department of Justice (sic) swung into action, launching what has been termed a lawfare campaign against him, ginning up legal cases on charges others, Biden himself and Hillary before him, were guilty of, but never charged. Dem Party hacks in Georgia and New York ginned up state cases. But Biden and his henchpeople underestimated voters ability to see through the ploy, and with each charge, each case, each hearing, Trump’s popularity increased.

Biden, in his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2021, promised to bring the country together. Something he put the lie to almost every time he has opened his mouth since. He spoke nothing but defamation and hatred for the half of the country who continued to support Donald Trump. He sneered at “Maga Republicans,” said Trump would be the end of democracy. Never mind reconciliation. It was the hyperbole of hatred that came from Biden’s mouth.

“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump presciently told his supporters. By now those supporters see all too clearly the truth in those words.

And then Saturday happened, and the true import of the lies and hatred and vitriol spewed by the current President and the lackeys in the state media — afflicted to the last one with the mental illness known as TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome — became apparent. You don’t compare someone to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, say he’s going to usher in Fascism and Naziism, be the death of democracy, predict he would incarcerate and execute his opponents, and all the other hyperbolic nonsense spewed by the real haters in the White House and state media, and not expect some nut job, like Saturday’s shooter, to take those things to heart and act on them. Take, for instance, the June cover of the leftist magazine The New Republic, presented above. That’s a real cover, not some made-up meme. And the magazine had the chutzpah to double-down on defending it following Saturday’s assassination attempt.

The power of words to hurt

If someone really believes Trump to be Hitler, who wouldn’t want to see him done away with before he can take power? Biden and others can blather about deploring political violence, but if they really believed their words they wouldn’t say things to incite it. We don’t know all of his motivation, but Thomas Andrew Crooks, the 20-year-old shooter on Saturday, might have felt he was doing something heroic in attempting to kill Donald Trump. I’d also add that he gave truth to Trump’s words about who the haters are really coming for, since the shooter was willing to fire into a crowd of Trump supporters, killing one and critically wounding two others. Almost as miraculous as Trump’s survival is that more innocent people were not killed or wounded in the eight-round fuselage released by Crooks from his AR-15.

Just last week, Biden told donors in a private phone conference it was time to forget about his abysmal debate performance and “to put Trump in the bulls-eye.” Well, on Saturday, someone attempted to do just that.

On Monday, in one of his halting, stumbling, and rare interviews, with NBC’s Lester Holt, Biden tried to cover his tracks. And he couldn’t even get that right, mumbling a couple of times that he didn’t say “crosshairs,” as if it made any difference. Apparently he was trying to remember some talking point given him by his handlers, and all it did was further reinforce the notion of what he did say, and his inability to express thoughts cogently.

Despite every thing thrown at Trump, from Biden’s lawfare to a would-be assassin’s bullet, Trump has only grown stronger and more likely to be elected back into the White House in November. As one black woman said Tuesday, speaking to a reporter in an Irish bar in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is under way, “He’s Teflon Don.”

Indeed.

Featured image: Fight! Evan Vucci, AP Photo, used under Fair Use.

The New Republic cover, The New Republic, used under Fair Use.

The Instant of the Shot, NTD.com, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
Treason, By Any Other Name

Treason, By Any Other Name

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I realize that what these people I’m going to discuss in this piece have done does not meet the technical Constitutional definition of treason, but call it by any other name you want — betrayal comes to mind — and what they have done has had the effect, if not the intent, of selling out their country in the quest for power.

With all the public and behind-the-scenes hand wringing going on within the Democratic Party and its handmaidens among the alleged Fourth Estate, better termed the state media, it’s time to look at the nefarious process that got us to where we are now.

The story begins and ends with Presidential debates. The Democratic Presidential debates of 2020, where it starts, and now the most recent Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which doesn’t end the story, but which may be the beginning of the end.

It was in the Democratic debates of 2020 where the candidacies of both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were derailed by a combination of own-goal errors, on Biden’s part, sniping between those two over issues of race, and a scathing and well aimed attack by fellow candidate Tulsi Gabbard on Harris. Harris was so fatally wounded her candidacy didn’t even make it as far as New Hampshire. Biden limped into New Hampshire, finished dead last in a five-person field, and it looked for all intents and purposes that he was done. If only the Democratic Party lived up to its name. But democracy was the last thing on its mind in 2020, as it was in 2016, and as it is today.

With Socialist Bernie Sanders once more looking like he was on his way to securing the Democratic nomination, it was time for the big swapperoo. And in stepped the first character we can name on our black list of people who will put power before country, James Clyburn of South Carolina. Once a civil rights activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Clyburn, himself 80 years old in 2020, had risen to be the third most powerful person in the Democratic Congressional delegation and Chairman of the House Black Caucus.

Clyburn knew whomever he backed would get Dem votes in South Carolina, and a victory there could then be springboarded into victories in subsequent state primaries, counting on the sheep-like tendencies of most Dem voters to simply fall in line and vote as they’re told. One can wonder why Clyburn would settle on as weak and uncompelling candidate as Joe Biden, and the reason is clear. Biden has no core values, no overarching vision, and he is driven by power and self-aggrandizement. This was known to Clyburn, who also could see that Biden was already drifting into left field mentally, and this made Biden the perfect candidate. He’d do or say anything he was told, and he wouldn’t be running much of any substance as the country’s chief executive, anyway, so the Dem power brokers could have their way with him.

In earlier times, going back just half a century, the Dems had a conscience and put the well-being of the nation ahead of pure political power. It was in 1972 when Sen. Thomas Eagleton took himself off the ballot as George McGovern’s running mate when it came out that he had suffered from bouts of depression and received electroshock treatments. Eagleton’s story is more fully stated in the piece linked in the preceding paragraph. Eagleton could run rings around Biden, but he had the decency, and put the nation’s interest first, to do what Biden would not, and will not, do.

As I said in 2020, Biden’s real running mate was the coronavirus, which was used as the excuse to waive all sorts of electoral rules and laws in a number of states. It also was the basis for keeping him sequestered in his Delaware basement, obstructing any real scrutiny of him by the voters or even the complicit media. At that time I postulated that the real candidate was Kamala since Biden wouldn’t make it through his first term and the 25th Amendment would be invoked to remove him from office. Now I don’t want to seem overly prophetic, and it might be coming a little later in the term than I anticipated, but this is where we’re at today, three and a half years into Biden’s term.

I’m fairly confident that were Kamala not a blithering moron and even more unpopular than Biden, this game plan likely would have been implemented by now. Rather than being a surrogate for Biden she turned into a poison pill, with the dementia-ridden Biden seen as preferable to a President Harris.

Currently facing a crisis whether to keep a guy in office who wouldn’t be trusted to drive your kid’s school bus or replace him with a cackling VP who was clearly an affirmative action placement and who has shown herself incapable of carrying out even the few tasks assigned to her, the nation has arrived at an existential crisis. All thanks to the undemocratic process set in motion by Clyburn and a few other Dem power brokers, bolstered by a compliant and deliberately misinformed electorate, and covered over by the state media.

That was then, this is now

Jell-O Joe’s performance on June 27 was so piss poor even the complicit media and a range of Dem operatives couldn’t simply ignore it. I wonder how many of the sycophantic alleged journalists already had written their pieces or monologues lauding Biden’s performance as monumentally the greatest debate performance in the recorded history of the world, only to realize that not even the most gullible reader or viewer could be sold on that. And thus emerged the widespread wringing of hands and rending of garments. Quelle surprise, they would have you believe. In fact, these charlatans saw Biden’s deterioration every day they observed him and they, too, were willing to sell the country down the River Styx to further their partisan agenda. They are no better than traitors, both to the nation and to their profession, regardless how you want to term them.

There now exists a schism within the Dem Party. It exists between the few within the party honest enough to go public with their concerns — most driven as much by their own down-ballot electoral concerns, no doubt, as any kind of loyalty to the nation — and those who continue to ignore the fact that the emperor has no clothes. Or resident brain cells. Biden held a meeting, in person and by phone, with Democratic governors on July 3, and of the 22 governors who attended the meeting, only three had the chutzpah to maintain the fiction that Biden is on top of is game and merits staying on the ticket. The three include two of the mentally dullest members of the caucus, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, the third being the new governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, whose intellectual capabilities remain yet to be tested.

What of those other governors? One has to assume they don’t feel reassured enough to go public with their concerns, other than modest-by-too-far California Gov. Gavin Newsom, generally considered to be looking at being the pinch-hitter batter designee sent in to save the game, even given the dumpster fire he’s turned his state into. And with the sole exception of former First Lady Michelle Obama, who has no real political experience and claims she doesn’t want to run, the polls of likely voters show Newsom and Harris and all the the other possible replacements also lose to Trump.

Meanwhile, Biden has pulled his family close, including the power-hungry Doctah Jill Biden, his sister Valerie, and his crack-addled and convicted felon son, to take counsel. Hunter has even been reported to attend high meetings of state, and one wonders what security clearance he might hold, the preferred and likely answer being none. Zip. Zero. This family is willing to put the security of the nation at risk in pursuit of its own power-grabbing interests. Even many White House aides have expressed dismay at this.

This brings us to the large group of unnamed and unindicted parties who would put party politics above the good of the country: The voters who elected Biden and who still continue to support him. A Data for Progress post-debate poll found that 11 percent of voters who watched or read about the debate, and 24% of Democrats, thought Biden had done better than Trump in the debate. One has to wonder who these 11% or 24% are and whether they’re deaf, dumb, and blind, or are just horribly pro-Biden or anti-Trump partisans. At this point, these voters have to be classified as guilty of promoting this charade today as much as James Clyburn did in 2020. Even Clyburn is beginning to back away from Biden post-debate.

If most American voters were shocked by what they saw in the June 27 debate, imagine what America’s enemies are thinking. They now have a golden opportunity handed to them to take action against our interests between now and when, as appears likely, Trump resumes holding the reins of control on Jan. 20. If you don’t like the word treason for what these people who put and keep Joe Biden in office have done, please suggest an alternative. I’ll stick with the substance of their machinations, which is to undermine the country and put it at severe risk.

Featured image, Hear, Speak, and See no Evil, Hunter Leonard, Unsplash, used with permission.

Monkeys on a Branch, Klub Boks, Pexels, used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

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The piece below first ran four years ago tomorrow, January 4, 2020. Four years ago today, January 3, 2020, Donald Trump ordered a drone strike to take out the mastermind of Iranian terrorism in the Middle East, Maj. Gen. Qadam Soleimani. The dire predictions of the naysayers at the time never came to pass, and in recent decades the world has never been more secure than it was on January 4, 2020.

Compare the world on the day after Soleimani’s assassination with the world today. Afghanistan was not run by the Taliban terrorists. Putin’s Russia had not launched its murderous invasion of Ukraine. Hamas had not conducted its vile rape and slaughter of innocent Israelis, and Israel had not been forced to root out the Hamas terrorist leadership through a brutal war in Gaza. The Houti rebels in Yemen, inexplicably removed by Biden from the terrorist list, were not attacking civilian shipping or U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea. The Abraham Accords were in process to bring peace to the Middle East. China was not openly talking about invading Taiwan. North Korea was talking more and flexing its threatening muscles less. And a villainous Iran was largely contained.

In the three years that the feckless Joe Biden has been in office, all that has been undone, and the world is arguably in a more perilous state than it has been since at least the end of the Cold War. Extending the weakness of the Obama years, with the same misguided so-called “security” team pushing Biden’s buttons, the U.S. has lost its hard-won position as the ornery bear the bad actors of the world were afraid to poke.

The bombings in Iran today that killed more than 100 and injured more than 200 of those going to pay their respects to the deceased Soleimani have all the marks of a terrorist attack. Ex-CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, in an interview earlier today with radio and TV personality Brian Kilmeade, expressed the view that it was probably either al Qaeda or ISIS, both Sunni terrorist groups, providing pay back to Shiite Iran. The internecine tit-for-tats go on as a subset of the bigger world conflicts. It’s not just the U.S. or the West that have legitimate scores to settle with Iran.

It’s more than sad, but extraordinarily tragic and costly in lives and peace, that the lessons of the Soleimani assassination have been forgotten or, more to the point, never learned by the appeasers of this administration. Sensible people can draw comparisons between what works and what doesn’t. But blinded by their ideology and a misguided world view, these people never learn.

Here is my piece from January 4, 2020:

Ding-Dong! The Wizard is Dead

In the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East is killed when Dorothy’s house, spirited off to Oz from Kansas by a cyclone, lands on her. In 2020 real life, the Wicked Wizard of the East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasam Soleimani, was killed when he came into the crosshairs of an American drone flying over Baghdad’s international airport in Iraq. Ding-dong! The wizard is dead.

As the Munchkin Coroner states in the 1939 film, “As Coroner, I must aver I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”

Ditto for Soleimani.

Just as the Munchkins rejoiced at seeing the wicked witch’s stockinged feet protruding from under Dorothy’s transplanted house, there is grounds to celebrate the demise of Soleimani, the head of Iran’s deadly Quds Force. Unfortunately, the figurative kingdom is rife with naysayers and handwringers, and political divisiveness seems ever-ready in contemporary America to overcome any shared sense of victory.

While it is Pollyannish to expect that there won’t be some consequences in the targeting of Soleimani, regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran’s arcane political structure, it is just as Pollyannish to think that there wouldn’t be consequences were he still alive and having breakfast this morning on Al Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad.

The havoc and death wreaked by Soleimani stretches back four decades to when, in 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the Iranian revolution and, beginning in the Iraq-Iran War of the early 1980s, he rapidly advanced within the hierarchy. In 1998 he took over command of the Quds Force, designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Sometimes called “the world’s number one bad guy,” consider these feats of Soleimani and the Quds Force he headed:

Taking out Soleimani wasn’t just a random act. It followed an attack by Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, in which the attackers had penetrated the entrance to the compound and burned a reception area. While no one was kllled in the attack, the U.S. responded by sending in 100 Marines to secure the compound, given the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its internationally mandated requirement to protect diplomatic facilities.

There was more involved than the embassy attack, though. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley made it clear that reliable intelligence indicated that a wave of Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks against U.S. assets in the region was being planned and was imminent. And, of course, Soleiman was brazen enough to show up at Baghdad’s international airport, exposing himself to the drone attack that killed him and also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

“I can’t talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives,” Pompeo told CNN. “The risk of doing nothing was enormous. Intelligence community made that assessment and President Trump acted decisively last night.”

Pompeo said hundreds of American lives had been at risk. He later told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the attack also had saved European lives, though he hadn’t gotten the kind of support he expected from European allies.

“The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well,” he said.

Milley said the U.S. had intelligence that was “clear, unambiguous” that Soleiman was planning a campaign of violence against the U.S., leading to the decision to attack him. Targets included American military outposts in Syria and diplomatic and financial targets in Lebanon.

“By the way, it still might happen,” Milley said.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qasem Soleiman
Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, left, deputy head of the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, right, both killed in the U.S. strike.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei immediately appointed Maj. Gen. Ismail Qaani to replace Soleiman as head of the Quds Force and, predictably, pledged revenge. Qaani said the Quds agenda would remain unchanged.

As predictable as Khamenei’s reaction was, so was the response in Congress, which broke down along party lines. The anti-Trump Dems, for whom the President can do nothing right, were quick to criticize the action, going so far in some cases to say the strike on Soleimani was illegal, though reportedly legal departments at both State and Defense, as well as at Justice, approved the strike.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that Congress hadn’t been consulted on the planned attack on Soleimani – no surprise there, given the tendency of Congress to leak like a rusty old sieve – and she had the temerity to call the killing of the man who had murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, “provocative and disproportionate.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called the killing of Soleimani an “assassination” and introduced legislation to block funding of any military action in the region. Most of the other candidates in the race piled on with criticism of the attack.

There was some push back, though, even within the parties. Another Dem candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was quick to strike back at Sanders, calling his “assassination” claim “outrageous.”

“If he was talking about killing the general . . . this is a guy who had an awful amount of American blood on his hands. I think that’s an outrageous thing to say,” Bloomberg said. “Nobody that I know of would think that we did something wrong in getting the general.”

While prominent Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Marco Rubio, expressed strong words of support for the attack, another Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, expressing his libertarian view on foreign affairs, said the Trump administration should not embark on a war in the Middle East without Congressional approval.

As the naysaying and handwringing goes on, and will in the days and weeks and more to come, if there is one prediction that will always be correct it is forecasting violence in the Middle East. If that’s anyone’s prediction, they’d be right, with or without Soleimani. In anticipation of Iran’s reaction, the U.S. is sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region. Soleimani may be really, most sincerely dead, but the seething animosities of the region most certainly aren’t, and there are no ruby slippers, like the ones that passed to Dorothy from the deceased Wicked Witch of the East, to magically bring them to a close. So stand by. Film at 11.

Disclosure: The author was an intelligence analyst with the State Department covering the Middle East.

Featured image: Gargoyle, Donovan Reeves, Unsplash, used with permission.

Al-Muhandis and Soleimani images, AFP via Getty, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
One Year Later We Must Not Forget: Disgrace

One Year Later We Must Not Forget: Disgrace

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This piece initially appeared a year ago following the biggest surrender and debacle in U.S. history, all overseen by Joe Biden. It is important we don’t forget this event which long will live in infamy, both for the damage it did to the reputation, prestige, and credibility of this country and to its security and that of other countries. We also need to remember the needless deaths of 13 U.S. service members and hundreds of Afghans due to the incompetence of this administration. That number has now been eclipsed by the deaths of many other innocent Afghans and those who assisted U.S. and allied efforts over 20 years, unconscionably abandoned by Biden, and still more deaths in Ukraine resulting from the Russian invasion which was encouraged by the U.S. failure in Afghanistan and the abject weakness of this administration.

In a normal country in normal times, those responsible for such an enormous debacle as what those at the top in our country caused to happen in Afghanistan in recent weeks would resign in disgrace. And if they didn’t, steps would be taken by those charged with oversight to remove them from office, even try and punish them. But this is not a normal country and these are not normal times, and there seems to no longer exist any sense of shame, disgrace, or even admission of failure. Instead, as the alleged president just did, again, they take a victory lap and spew lies and distortions touting how brilliant and insightful they are, and hope everyone is as imbecilic and full of guile as they are.

Listening to Biden’s words a short while ago made me more angry than I can ever remember any political figure, in my entire life, make me. And that is saying something. I shouted out my anger, and I struck my head wondering how a single human being — as despicable and useless as this rotten excuse for a human being is — can be so profoundly stupid. And arrogant. Surely it has to be a team effort. And the ulterior motive a powerful one.

The insult I used as the title of my last piece on this subject — Ignorance With Impudence — barely touches the level of ignorance nor that of impudence put on full display today.

You see those hands in that photo above, showing a collapsing Biden last Thursday when he was challenged by Fox News’s Peter Doocy on his attempt to blame his Afghanistan catastrophe on his predecessor? Look carefully and you’ll see that they’re drenched in blood. The blood of 13 of our service people killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport last week. The blood of hundreds of needlessly dead Afghans in the same attack. The blood of the Americans, the blood of the Afghans who risked their lives to support us, deliberately left behind while surrounded by rabid terrorists intent on rooting them out and killing them. Also there is the blood of the hundreds, thousands, who will die in Afghanistan, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as a result of the incredibly bone-headed and callous decisions made by this incompetent and those who allowed and facilitated him to make and carry them out.

If ever there was a time to say there is plenty of blame to go around, this is it. But since Biden is at the top of this heap of excrement and claims the buck stops with him — as if he actually means it, as Harry Truman did — he bears ultimate blame and responsibility for what happened, what will happen. To paraphrase the immortal 1988 words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, back when Democrats still had some honor and a tad of sense, to vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, Mr. President, I served with Harry Truman. I knew Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Harry Truman.

Stalemate

Once more I find my post taking a different direction than I initially intended. The news continues to come in so fast, and it’s so awful, it’s impossible to keep up with it. I’m not a news service and this is not intended to be either daily reporting or a book. Any one with a fair mind and open eyes can see the reality, the actual events and people creating them, the results of those events and those people, and they don’t need me to continually point them out. My job, as I’ve executed it for more than four years now, is to put the pieces together, to analyze them, and to do what I can to bring people a clear view of the reality. To the extent many of my readers already have a clear view, they read my pieces and nod their heads and occasionally let me know they agree. And I try to give clear views to those readers who don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality, and I hope I can bring some around to at least consider views other than those they are fed by what I’ve come to call the State Media, the corrupt and biased mainstream media and Big Tech whose lies and coverups in large part brought us to the terrible place we’re now at.

Initially I was going to call this piece Stalemate — the point in a chess match where a player has no legal moves left that won’t land his king in checkmate. It’s a draw, and the game is over. As a nation, we’re now in stalemate, and there are no legal moves left that will get us out of it. As a nation, we’re forced to live in this stasis, which was engineered by the Dem strategists and whoever is calling the shots behind the scenes of the party, and one has to hand them kudos for that achievement, as despicable and dangerous as it is. We have a clearly mentally incompetent president who, by almost any measure, the 25th Amendment was written for. But then, even if he could be removed from office either through that amendment or impeachment, we have a poison pill, the repulsive and dangerous Kamala Harris, as vice president. We get rid of the top guy, and we’re left with what might be an even worse substitute. And below her is the power hungry and vicious Nancy Pelosi. So, three layers deep, we’re left with no good legal moves, and that was the plan all along.

Those same Dem power brokers counted on what they see as the stupidity of the American people, for whom they have no respect other than to use them for their own purposes, and then along came the gift that keeps on giving — the COVID pandemic — which allowed them to flaunt and just plain throw out constitutional protections of our vote. That fraud allowed them to engineer a victory for a doddering old fool you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, let alone head the most powerful country on earth. And they knew that, even in his dementia, given the chance to grab the top accolade of his long and feckless political career — the presidency — Jello-O Joe would put the interest of the country aside and go for it. For this he won my top Profile in Cowardice award.

As I point out in that piece, it wasn’t always this way in American politics, even among the Democratic Party. Read the piece and see, if you forgot or weren’t around at that time, how Thomas Eagleton — a far more capable figure then Joe Biden — stepped down from being George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 when details of some issues with depression Eagleton had dealt with came out. At that time, the good of the country took precedence. That now seems like a prosaic concept.

An Unmitigated Disaster of a Presidency

For anyone who voted for Joe Biden — and, to be perfectly frank, you have to bear some responsibility for this debacle — I defy you to name one single thing Biden has done, one decision he’s made, that has made life better for ordinary Americans. I’ll go one further, and defy you to name one single thing, one single decision, he’s made, that hasn’t made things much worse for this country and its residents. We are so far beyond fucked at this point, it’s hard to even find a suitable word to describe it.

Whether it is throwing open our southwestern border to every ilk of criminal, drug runner, COVID-carrier, and terrorist who cares to cross it, in thorough disregard for our laws and well being — now being augmented by thousands of unvetted Afghans arriving and being sent willy-nilly around the country — taking our focus from competence and merit to attempting to inculcate divisions and distrust in our military, in our corporations and other institutions, and in society at large, to flaunting the Supreme Court and the rule of law to undermine the ability of property owners to pay their bills and stay afloat, to creating what can only be described as confusion on the coronavirus front, this president and his puppet masters have done what they can to sew discord and disorder in the nation. Crime is allowed to spiral out of control, unbridled federal spending is driving inflation, and he took us from energy independence to once more being dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

On the international stage, he has now shown this country to be weak and untrustworthy, and as we’ve learned, weakness breeds instability and tempts bad actors to take chances they would not otherwise. Despite the lies Biden told today — and there is no other word to describe his ridiculous and readily disprovable assertions — we have now created a terrorist nation in Afghanistan, and given a safe haven to not just the Taliban, but their close allies, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and ISIS, among others. Even more mind-boggling, by leaving behind $83 billion in military hardware, we’ve made this terrorist state the fifth best equipped military in the world. The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters, as just one example, than Australia.

Make no mistake. The same bunch of misguided idiots — Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, child-moron Jake Sullivan who purports to be National Security Adviser, throw in Joint Chiefs Chairman and blowhard Mark Milley, and other members of the Obama foreign policy (sic) team — that brought us the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian nuclear deal have now undone 20 years of progress, as difficult as it was, in Afghanistan, and created a mess and a threat that will be our nemesis for decades to come.

Perhaps most poignantly telling are the comments of the parents and spouses and siblings of the 13 slain service people, who spoke of Biden’s insensitivity, his self-absorption, his incessant talking about the death of his son Beau — who did not die in combat — his checking his watch each time, 13 times, a coffin came off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. I’ll end this piece with the words of Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Marine Rylee James McCollum, killed in the attack on HKIA, who says it better than I ever could.

Calling in to a talk show Friday, McCollum said this:

“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday. Twenty years and six months old — getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife and witness the birth of his son. And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die. I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to [have White House Press Babbler Jen Psaki on] right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin’ Taliban terrorists who just freakin’ blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about, oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

McCollum’s son is gone. And as tragically, so is our national honor, and very possibly our security and our future with it.

Featured image, Biden’s Collapse, Al Drago, Bloomberg News via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Stalemate, from rutrackerpulse.weebly.com. Used under Fair Use.

The Three Heads of the Poisonous Serpent, Jim Watson, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please comment and share the piece and subscribe here, and there.
Nothing Matters Anymore

Nothing Matters Anymore

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Now we know, as if we had any doubts before: Nothing matters anymore. That might be an odd conclusion to come to for me, who has a Substack called Issues That Matter. But it’s consistent, actually. That nothing matters anymore is an issue that matters. Or should. Unfortunately, there is bloody little anyone can do about it except grin and bear it and suffer the consequences, or look for a way out of the madhouse that the United States has turned into. That’s the option I’m once more looking at.

So Jell-O Joe Biden, the Grifter in Chief, unilaterally has “forgiven” big chunks of student loan debt. Never mind that he has no legal power to do so. Even the Queen of Grift, Nancy Pelosi says so. But who needs laws any more? Laws are for the pissants, not for the Big Guy. Certainly not for the ruling elites (provided they’re of the right party). Whether it’s allowing people out of their contractual obligations to pay their debts or allowing now more than 2 million — heading toward 4 million — illegal aliens and border crashers to enter with impunity into the country, or using his official offices to further his family’s corrupt enrichment, law and the Constitution are irrelevant. If you haven’t noticed that, you haven’t been paying attention.

If you had student loans that you struggled to pay off, if you saved and scrimped so you didn’t need student loans, or maybe you never got to go to college, why would you mind paying off some rich kid’s loan? Are you really that selfish? Maybe you went in the military and risked, or even gave, your life or your limbs. Maybe you were counting on the GI Bill to pay for your education. You don’t think this was a fair deal, what Biden did? You self-serving bastard!

You pay your taxes and are distraught about our record $30 trillion-something national debt, and now you’ll be asked to contribute your share — estimated at $2,000 per taxpayer — to pay off the $300 billion (which is just a guess, no one can say how much this lawless act really will cost because no one has a clue how many people will be affected) this give-away will cost. You must not understand your role as a taxpayer, which is to support without question every mindless and insane thing your government does. Add the increase to inflation all this extra money going into the economy will bring, and the costs are likely to be even more. Who’s problem is that? Why, yours, of course!

And if recent history is any indication, fraud will take a big part of that money. Like the $100 billion-plus in pandemic relief funds that were stolen by fraudsters, only a very small percentage of which has been recovered or prosecuted. But that’s “official” fraud. Most of the funds will go to the “unofficial” fraud that lies at the basis of this whole thing. Biden’s “generosity” (at your expense) is aimed as a payoff to young voters to vote for Dems in the upcoming midterms, and an even bigger payoff to the colleges and universities that profit off the student loan program.

See those huge tuitions? $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, for at best a spotty education? When the student loan program was taken over by the federal government, it was just an incentive for college administrators to really jack up tuitions, which have risen at rates far in excess of the general inflation rate. Given the huge endowments most of these institutions have — not just measured in the billions of dollars, but in the several tens of billions of dollars — why should they not be forced to bear the costs of this largesse? Because this is really a payoff for all their contributions to the Democratic Party, to which 90 percent of university contributions go. When I lived in Key West 40-some years ago, it cost a six-pack of beer to buy a vote. The stakes have gotten a whole lot higher in the current game of political corruption and vote buying.

Nothing Else Matters, Either

Beat, rape, rob, or car jack someone in some of our biggest cities and at most you might face a misdemeanor charge, if that. You’re likely going to be back on the street the same day or the next one, all set to commit your next crime. Defend yourself against this kind of rampant criminality, and you might be the one who faces real criminal charges. This is not just speculation, but has become a daily occurrence in cities ranging from New York to L.A,. Chicago to Seattle, Philadelphia to San Francisco, and many in between. Is it any wonder that crime rates are rising at the fastest rates since the 1960s, or are reaching record rates in many places? If you’re a law-abiding citizen, just STFU and pay your taxes and take it. You don’t count. You don’t matter. You’re just some freaking racist if you complain about this kind of treatment. You’re getting in the way of remaking America, so move aside or get crushed.

Remember when Trump said there was a plan to do away with single-family zoning and moving urban problems right into your neighborhood? Well, guess what. That’s exactly what is happening. Not far from where I live, the city council of the city where I went to graduate school, Gainesville, Florida — home of the University of Florida and a city mostly of single-family homes — voted to do away with single-family zoning. The future is coming to a place near you, and it’s coming fast. Don’t like the idea? Tough. You don’t matter.

I’ve already opined and lamented what has clearly become a dual standard of justice in this country, and you can read about that here and here and in lots of others of my postings. This is no longer a collection of isolated incidents but has become what is called a pattern and practice. Combined with pervasive corruption, this might be the biggest threat facing our democracy, aside from the repression of any dissenting views and the near-total silence and even complicity on the part of the nation’s mainstream media.

When Nothing Matters Anymore, It Becomes Pervasive in the Society

If you have the stomach to watch the news, you’ll often see images of people being beaten, shot, and otherwise attacked on the streets while onlookers capture the scene on their phones, hoping for their 15 seconds of fame, while doing nothing to intervene or try to protect the victim. We’ve become a nation of voyeurs and cowards.

In the 1960s we had the famous case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman raped, robbed, and murdered on the street in Queens, New York, while onlookers observed from their apartment windows and did nothing. The incident shocked the conscious of the nation at the time. Today, we can’t even muster shock when these things occur. The onlookers that don’t scurry away watch and video the events.

This tendency was brought home to me yesterday. A young man doing some work for me related how he was driving down a busy street in the next town, and there was this little 4- or 5-year-old girl skipping down the center line of the street. Cars just drove by, paying her no heed as if she wasn’t a vulnerable little human but rather some curiosity or maybe even a nuisance to speed by. To his lasting credit, this guy stopped, turned his truck sideways across the road to stop traffic, began to try to get the girl off the road, and to find what careless adults had let her slip out from their attention. Down the road were a couple of guys looking at their boat on a trailer. He shouted at them, and they suddenly “noticed” that the little girl, who belonged to one of them, had gone missing. The damned boat was more important to him then the presence and safety of the little girl. The pair hadn’t even noticed she was missing.

It’s entirely possible this young guy saved the little girl’s life. But this is what we’ve come to. People can’t take a few minutes to stop and try to save a little girl skipping down the middle of a busy street. A boat takes precedence to a life. We see kids left to die in hot cars and people are advised to put their phones or their purses in the back seat so as not to forget their kid, as if a phone or purse is more important to them than the kid. People watch and look on as criminals attack innocent people, and they and the courts and the law look the other way. You struggle to pay your debts and your bills and your money is stolen and given to those who don’t.

The Romans at least confined their barbarity, their bread and circuses intended to placate and buy off the populace, to the arena. In modern-day America, the entire country is the arena.

When nothing matters anymore, nothing matters anymore.

Featured Image, Factory, Peter Hermann/Pixabay. Used with permission.

Wires, Cottonbro/Pexels. Used with permission.

Scrap Metal, Tom Fisk/Pexels. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Please comment, share this piece, and subscribe here, and there.