Tag: Biden
Lessons unlearned

Lessons unlearned

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By now the world knows what happened on October 7 in Israel. The gruesome details and the jarring, terrible images have been broadcast on television and across the Internet worldwide. It is not my purpose to repeat those here. Rather, my intent is to focus on the human toll and to look at what brought us to this catastrophic place.

To trace the roots of what led to the events of the 7th we need to look back to the Obama administration and its appeasement of Iran and the forces in the Middle East that are supported, trained, and funded by Iran. For anyone who has been tracking things over the years what is happening now is, at best, only mildly surprising.

It’s important to understand that the current crowd in the White House are, for the most part, Obama administration recycles. No one with even minimal powers of observation believes Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge or calling the shots. It is the ideological bent of the people on the President’s security team that leads them to believe that appeasement of Iran and downgrading of relations with Israel results in peace in the Middle East when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. What is currently under way is visible proof of the error of this belief system, but their ideology and misguided understanding of Middle East dynamics prevents them from choosing another course. And now they’ve led us into the very mouth of the beast and how things will shake out, not ruling out a globally catastrophic result and one that almost certainly will come to do damage at home both in America and Europe, is very much unknown at this point.

I warned of the dangers of this approach of appeasement going back years before I started this blog. On Sept. 12, 2012, during Obama’s first term, I published The Trap Into Which We’ve Been Led. The dangers of appeasement were evident even then, in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, though they’re obvious to anyone who has studied or is conversant with the history of appeasement in world affairs. And then on Aug. 14, 2014, in the middle of Obama’s second term, I published Let Them Eat Hamburgers, describing the aloof and uncaring attitude Obama and his team displayed at that time in the face of the cruelty being inflicted on the Yazidis. Most of that piece could be written today, simply substituting Biden for Obama. In the face of the barbaric attack inflicted on Israel, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden waited Saturday until it already was late night and the end of a day of terror in Israel, to make a pathetic three-minute statement. And then Sunday he was silent, hosting a barbecue — at which they certainly ate hamburgers — on the White House lawn, and on Monday he took a holiday as the carnage continued both in Israel and in Gaza. It took him until Tuesday, three days after the barbarity had commenced and more than two hours later than scheduled, to stumble his way through a speech ostensibly supportive of Israel but without a single mention of the power behind Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I know most people don’t click on the links in my pieces, but I strongly urge you to click on those and the ones that follow and read the linked pieces. You will gain greater understanding of how all these things tie together.

Funding Iran’s Support of Terrorism

Much has been made, as it should be, of the $6 billion in Iranian assets that the Biden administration has unfrozen, part of a deal to exchange five Americans held by the Iranians for five Iranians in U.S. custody. Given that this is just the latest in a string of disproportionate concessions this administration made in exchange for Americans held by other countries, so much for the long-standing principle that we don’t pay ransoms to free people held hostage. The most predictable result, of course, is that such payments just encourage more hostage taking. But the other result, in this case, is that it frees up funds for Iran, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, to support more terrorism. Such as what is going on in Israel right now. Never mind the blather coming out of the administration that Iran isn’t allowed to use the funds for other than humanitarian purposes. It frees up $6 billion for the Tehran regime to spend on its extraterritorial adventurism.

Regardless the argument over the $6 billion, it’s chump change compared with the other funds this administration and the Obama administration handed to the Iranians, no strings attached. In my piece Dancing With the Devil posted in March of last year, I noted this as an adjunct to Biden taking America’s energy independence, as fostered by Donald Trump, to going hat-in-hand to some of the worst actors on earth to once more meet our energy needs after restraining domestic oil production:

“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.”

In the intervening time, the Biden administration’s decision to ignore the sanctions Trump imposed on Iran allowed the terrorist state to sell its oil to the Chinese and elsewhere, yielding at least another $60 billion to Tehran. The country’s foreign currency reserves, which the Trump sanctions had dropped to just $4 billion in 2020 from $122.5 billion in 2018, had recovered to $41 billion in 2022 and could be as high as $100 billion now. Good work, Joe.

Proving the Naysayers Wrong

While Biden and Obama courted the mullahs of Tehran in the misguided belief that they could be dissuaded in their quest for a nuclear bomb and somehow act as a responsible nation among nations, Trump understood the reality and pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. He understood well how peace is achieved through strength, not shows of weakness, and when he took out Iran’s chief architect of terrorism, Qasam Soleimani, in January 2020, the naysayers and handwringers predicting dire consequences were definitively proven wrong. That was then and this is now, and Tehran, like the Russians and Chinese, sees the weakness in Washington, drawing a direct line from our shameful surrender from Afghanistan under Biden’s hand, and the three feel free to exert the bellicose power they had restrained during the Trump years, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or — holding our collective breath — Taiwan.

Commenting on what precipitated the carnage in Israel, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump during the Soleimani affair, succinctly stated the reality: “What has created war here is American weakness, American appeasement.” To prove Pompeo’s point, we now have a State Department that called for restraint on the part of Israel, whose citizens were being slaughtered on a scale, proportionately, mutliple times greater than 9-11, before being forced to retract the statement.

Instead of the clarity that came of projecting American strength in the interest of world peace and stability, we have an administration that, for all intents and purposes, has lost its mind. We have an open border policy that — by design — has allowed something like 7 million illegal immigrants into the country with little to no idea who they are. Agents so far, in the three years of the Biden debacle, have identified 264 individuals on the terrorist watch list — by far a new record — but have no idea how many terrorists were among the 1.5 million “gotaways” — the ones who just snuck across the border without apprehension. It would be beyond Pollyannish to believe hard-core terrorists were not among them, intent on setting up sleeper cells in the country, waiting for instructions to strike. Even with its tighter border controls, the same is true in Europe, and elsewhere. Terrorism doesn’t just exist in some far-off land, something we watch on television. It exists among us, too.

Hearing representatives of this administration one can be excused for thinking one is watching an episode of Saturday Night Live rather than the performance of serious public servants. Tracking the moronic statements of their boss, we have once honorable people like Admiral John Kirby, NSA spokesperson, saying with obvious seriousness that global warming and a 1.5-degree gain in global temperature would be a worse outcome for the human race than nuclear war, or that white supremacy is a greater danger to the country than terrorism. Baghdad Bob has metastasized across Washington and we all have to fear for our very survival in the face of such institutional delusion.

Before I entered the Foreign Service in 1988 I made an agreement with myself. I decided that I’d stay in the Service as long as it felt right. But if it stopped feeling right, or if I was asked to do something I had serious qualms of conscience about, I’d resign. I pretty much followed that compact with myself when, in 1999, I drafted my resignation letter to then SecState Madeleine Albright. One wonders how much their pay check or title means to people like Kirby to so debase themselves before the public they are charged with serving that they prattle such nonsense and not tender their resignation. Whatever their motivation, it is clear that no lessons have been learned by this administration and the future, not just of Israel or the Middle East, but America and, indeed, all the world, lies in serious jeopardy.

Featured Image: Women kidnapped by Hamas, Israel War Room via NDTV. Used under Fair Use.

Noa Argamani kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Avi Nathan, boyfriend of Noa Argamani, kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Bodies of 260-some people murdered by Hamas terrorists at music festival, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Don’t believe your lying eyes

Don’t believe your lying eyes

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Don’t believe your lying eyes. That’s the message from this bungling and utterly dishonest administration. And from the lying and corrupt State Media that allow them to try to pull the wool over the country’s eyes.

Bidenomics — the misguided but unintentionally descriptive term for Biden’s disastrous economic policies — are working just fine. Don’t believe your lying eyes that tell you something rather different whenever you check out at the grocery store or gas station.

The border is secure. Never mind that new records of illegal border crossers are broken on a nearly daily basis now and illegals are creating true crises for blue cities, from New York and Boston to Chicago and L.A. Pay no attention to hordes of illegals walking across our alleged border and camping out on a sidewalk near you. Or those 100,000+ Americans killed by Fentanyl carried across the Southwest Border or the 82,000 children “lost” by this administration. Don’t believe your lying eyes! The border is secure and everything is just fine!

Crime isn’t on the rise. The statistics say otherwise, as do the experiences of ordinary people in virtually every city of any size. But don’t believe your lying eyes. If there is more crime it’s undoubtedly the Republicans’ fault and, besides, those criminals are probably just hungry.

The president is fit as a fiddle, right on top of his game. Ignore that his stumbles, verbal, mental, and physical, have been happening with such alarming regularity that White House staffers are charged with overriding his impromptu policy statements and keeping him from falling since his competency to serve as President is seen as just one fall away from serious challenge. Don’t believe your lying eyes (or ears, either, in this case).

The “Big Guy” didn’t profit from his son Hunter’s overseas business imbroglios. All that money didn’t get to him in any way and didn’t influence his actions as an alleged “public servant.” Don’t believe your lying eyes! Or what your brain tells you (oh, you have a brain? Turn it off immediately! No logic or thinking is allowed!)

Biden didn’t retain pallets of classified documents from when he was a senator and vice president and had no right to them. No! Look away! It’s Trump who is your culprit, not Biden! Those papers were all safe there in that unlocked garage with his Corvette and Hunter. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Of course we have a system of equal justice. The administration would never think to skew things its way nor persecute the president’s main opposition candidate. The horror of the very thought! We rend our garments! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Our respect on the international stage has returned. Don’t for a moment believe that other heads of state, friend and foe alike, have noticed the bungling senile fool that serves as our head of state and haven’t taken note of his mental and physical debasement. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

And perhaps the most glaring and critically important thing of all: Clearly the president is in charge of everything and it’s not true that he is just a figurehead for a ruling junta, where the real power resides and is exercised. No, no! Don’t believe your lying eyes!

The term for this process is gaslighting, one of the Left’s pet terms they like to level against the Right. It’s hard to imagine more blatant examples of the process, defined by Merriam-Webster as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes!

The Emperor has no clothes

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to compare the current state of affairs in modern-day America to Hans Christian Andersen’s Nineteenth Century folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But these are cliche times in which we live and few comparisons apply as well to them as Andersen’s 1837 parable. Sadly, we lack that astute child who noticed that the emperor had, not a resplendent new suit, but no clothes on at all.

I don’t know if it’s unique to America to have political charlatans masquerading as medical or psychological doctors, but the other day I heard one such charlatan wax enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s great condition and how fit he has kept himself. This about the guy who falls off his bike, repeatedly falls up stairs going on Air Force One, and can barely move his flimsy little lawn chair on the beach where he goes to fill the 40% of his term that he’s spent on vacation. Meanwhile, this same Dr. Charlatan had the temerity to call Donald Trump “a heart attack waiting to happen.” Now I’m not prepared to predict who might or might not have a heart attack — it’s a pretty imprecise science, as far as I can tell. But I do have a set of still fairly good eyes and a functioning brain that tells me, were I to put my money on who was more physically and mentally capable and astute, Biden or Trump, I wouldn’t move my chips to Biden’s spot on the board. Sorry, but I will believe my lying eyes!

On the border, I recently saw a leading member of the State Media try to shut down a guest who had been to the Southwest Border and saw with his own eyes how it’s wide open by insisting — in verbatim lockstep with the liar at the White House’s podium — “the border is secure.” The smirk on the face of the interviewee was priceless. Like me, he was willing to believe his lying eyes, even in the face of derision from the State Media spouting the official and 100% false administration line. And then I heard another minion of the State Media explaining how your dollar is going further now than it was a year or two ago. Whether she is a shameless liar or a total moron lacking in any knowledge of basic economics with no understanding of inflation, how does such a person get through J-school, let alone get hired by a major media company? And how many of her viewers buy into the nonsense she peddles? Hopefully they’re believing their lying eyes.

A little bit of background is called for. While the examples cited here don’t arise directly from members of the White House Press Corps, that’s where the official party line from the administration begins and then propagates through the system. When I was a practicing journalist my colleagues and I largely saw the White House Press Corps as a band of journalistic whores (actual word we used). That was nearly four decades ago, and compared to the current White House Press Corps, its members in those days would be nuns or monks in relation to today’s travesties. Daily White House Press Babler KJP stands before the corps and tells the most bald-faced and easily disproven lies and, with a couple of exceptions, the whores in the corps of alleged journalists nod their heads, take their notes, and go forth, with their colleagues, to lie to the American public. This is what passes for journalism in contemporary America. And you’re not supposed to believe your lying eyes?

Twisted up in their own petards

I’m not sure what a petard is, but I have to admit it’s becoming increasingly amusing to watch as those in the State Media who, for the past three years, carried water for the Biden fabrication machine and crime family suddenly to become unsure of what their mandate is. This confusion has arisen as Dem power brokers, to whom the State Media are largely beholden, begin to express their doubts about whether Jell-O Joe is capable of a second term. Never mind that most of us didn’t think he was capable of a first term, the issue now has become the potential second term and whether he’ll finish his first term.

One recent poll showed that 72% of Americans, including 79% of independents and 48% of Democrats, don’t want him to run again. Some polls have shown as many as 75% of Democratic and Dem-leaning voters don’t want Jell-O Joe to run again. Apparently more people are believing their lying eyes and the State Media is in a quandary how to deal with that inconvenient fact.

As I’ve opined before, and will continue to since it’s the absolute 1,000% truth, the real threat to American democracy lies not within the government nor any given administration nor even within any insidious social or political movements, but with the lack of a free, fair, and unbiased news media. As I recently said, repeating sentiments frequently expressed over the years, “What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.”

So now that the cat is out of the bag, anyone with two functioning eyes, or two functioning ears, combined with one functioning brain and the willingness to look beyond the official party line, can see that Joe Biden is incapable of being president. The quandary now for Dem power brokers, deep-state actors, and their media client sycophants, has become who will replace him on the ticket. This is largely an existential question for them since they are looking down the barrel of a deeply embittered Donald Trump, currently beating Biden in the polls by as much as 9 points, who is determined to finally and definitely clean out that swamp that Washington and the federal establishment has become. And even in the highly unlikely event that Trump isn’t the Republican nominee, the other leading candidates on that side of the divide also have strong inducement to do the same.

Faced with an opposition party with a deep bench of qualified candidates, the Dems have a dearth of possibilities that could effectively fill the seat. They also have to deal with the Kamala Problem, what to do about the vice president who was put in as a poison pill to keep Biden from being removed from office and who has proven to be even more unpopular than her boss. Can she be bypassed without raising a storm among the Democratic Party’s various constituencies in its divide-and-rule strategy based on racial and sexual politics?

The party, I’m quite sure, would have no issue with another figurehead candidate while pulling the strings of power behind the scenes. But are voters willing to accept another such sham and insult to democracy? Already the Dems are rolling out their dirty tricks to make another go at stealing the 2024 election if they can’t win it through fair and legal means, and their hope is that voters won’t believe their lying eyes for another 12 or so months, when early voting begins.

Don’t be one of those gaslit voters. No matter what anyone tells you, believe your lying eyes. There is plenty there to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and look.

Featured Image: Eyes, Noelle Otto, via Pexels. Used with permission.

Retina: Basila Vlad, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Iris: v2osk, via Unsplash. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
Nothing to see here, folks

Nothing to see here, folks

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That’s become the not-so-hidden message coming from what is supposed to be our government: Move along, folks, go on home, nothing to see here.

The most recent example of this is how the discovery of a baggie of cocaine in the White House has been handled (or mishandled) and information related to it squelched. Never mind that the White House is supposed to be “the People’s House.” You’re just expected to pay your taxes and shut up. You have no right to know whose coke it was, why supposedly no culprit has been found, and likely won’t be, or even where it was found. Right from the beginning we were told no fingerprints or DNA swabs were taken of the baggie — which, if that is true, is nothing short of investigatory malpractice — and then that part of the story quietly disappeared from the news.

First, we were told it was found in the White House Library. No, it was near the West Wing Lobby. No, no, it was found near the  Situation Room (described as “the most sensitive single location in the US government”). Wait, stop the presses! It was found near the West Wing Executive Entrance, an area described by the evil elf, Karine Jean-Pierre, who pretends to be the President’s Press Secretary, as “a heavily traveled area” (translation: Gee, it could be anyone. Maybe a little old lady from Wichita. Who knows?) We also were told, as if we’re a bunch of rubes who believe the world is flat, that there are no cameras in that area that might have captured the act of placing the coke baggie, wherever it was found.

The Secret Service, charged with guarding the safety of the President and the White House and once a highly regarding organization, is leading what passes for an investigation. And in true “nothing to see here, folks” style, the Service has announced it will wrap up its investigation this week. When you don’t want to find something, you don’t find it.

Now I’m not going to say that the coke belongs to Hunter Biden, the President’s once crack-addicted son supposedly now in recovery. That’s supposed to be the point of an investigation, to find evidence of who the guilty party is. But applying Occam’s Razor, which says the most obvious explanation usually is the correct one, that might make him at minimum a prime suspect. Fingerprints, DNA, security cameras could easily either rule him in or rule him out. But if it is him, there goes that sweetheart deal he negotiated with his father’s Justice Department, and it be prison, not diversion, in his future. So, nothing to see here.

Nothing to see at the Justice Department either

It’s not just in the White House where we’re told there is nothing to see. The FBI, another once respected organization, has been in possession of Hunter’s now famous, or infamous, laptop since 2019, a year before we were supposed to believe that it “had all the signs of Russian disinformation,” and it confirmed the laptop’s authenticity in very short order. Hunter documented his own crimes — cocaine usage, influence peddling for his dad, lying about his drug usage on a gun application, possession of child pornography — and his many non-chargeable sexual peccadillos on the laptop.

Further, the IRS uncovered evidence of his tax evasion on income of multiple millions of dollars going back as far as 2014, and his gun was found in a trash bin across from a school after his former sister-in-law, his deceased brother’s widow, whom Hunter had been boffing, along with her sister, disposed of it there.

Let’s face it. It doesn’t take more than three years to investigate crimes when the evidence is right in front of you. That is, if your last name isn’t Biden. But if it is Biden, it’s another case of move along, nothing to see here, folks, and offenses that would have landed (and routinely do) mere mortals, lowly citizens, many years behind bars, resulted in a couple of misdemeanor charges and a divergence program that will result in no jail time at all for Hunter. Well, unless of course the coke in the White House belongs to the first son, which would be a violation of the terms of the agreement before it is even accepted by the court. So is it any wonder, given the depth of corruption of this administration, that the Secret Service investigation is likely to come up empty-handed?

Keep in mind — when the beast wants to find someone, it does. Consider, in contrast, how the FBI and DOJ have gone after every single person who pranced through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, rooting them out nationwide. And the kinds of judicial abuse, pretrial detention, and excessive sentencing imposed on those people. And then we have pro-life activists raided and bullied and arrested by the FBI when the lame Attorney General, Merrick Garland, claims the people who have firebombed and vandalized pro-life care centers can’t be found since, gee whizz, they did those things at night and it was dark. I wonder if it was “dark” in the White House, too, when that coke was left.

Nothing to see at the Supreme Court

This “nothing to see thing” is getting to be a habit. More than a year ago the Dobbs decision, which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, was leaked from the Supreme Court weeks before its planned release. Something like that had never happened before, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among High Court watchers and pundits. Chief Justice John Roberts vowed the guilty party would be found and and he launched an investigation. Unlike the two-week wonder of the Secret Service’s investigation, that one is supposed to still be under way. And what is the result of that investigation? If you guessed nada de nada, go to the head of your class.

A tradition of nothing to see

As discouraging as all these recent “nothing to see here” situations are, this is not the first time our government pulled this kind of gaslighting. For instance, for 60 years we’ve been waiting to find out the facts behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For 60 years the real truth has been kept classified and hidden from the American public, even though all the facts were supposed to be released, but weren’t, by 2017. Many of us suspected all along that the CIA was behind the assassination, which explains why the facts have been kept secret so long, by administrations of both parties. And earlier this year someone who knows what those documents say told then-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson that it was, indeed, the CIA who masterminded the assassination. According to Carlson’s source, when asked if the CIA was involved with the assassination, replied, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”

Then, a year after the Kennedy assassination, we had the Tonkin Gulf incident which was used as a pretext for amping up our involvement in Vietnam. And when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the country how the North Vietnamese had attacked our naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, he knew the story was bogus. As did President Lyndon Johnson when he announced new troops to be sent to Vietnam and a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

We wouldn’t know the truth about the Tonkin Gulf incident or the many other lies we were told during the Vietnam War were it not for the Pentagon Papers, leaked by now deceased former Marine and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. And we wouldn’t know what those papers — 7,000 pages, photocopied page-by-page by Ellsberg on an old-style copy machine — had The New York Times and Washington Post and close to two-dozen other newspapers not defied the government’s attempt to squelch the information they contained and published the papers. And that is the essence of the dilemma we are facing today.

The real problem

Instead of calling truth to power and defying the power structure, most of today’s mainstream media and Big Tech are doing what they can to protect this administration, this corrupt president, and are blindsiding the American public about these stories that, in more normal times, would be considered major scandals. It’s bad that the government and politicians try to deceive the citizenry. But worse, is when the news media covers up official misdeeds and doesn’t call the government out on them. And that is where we are today. What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.

Featured image, cocaine and a rolled hundred, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden in the bath, from Hunter Biden’s laptop, via Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

U.S. Supreme Court, David Dibert, from Pexels. Used with permission.

JFK shot, one-sixth of a second after, Mary Ann Moorman/Wikimedia Commons. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Share the piece 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.