Category: Security
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.

 

 

 

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

Sweeping Up the Mess in Biden’s Brain

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

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

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

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

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

Letting Joe Speak for Himself

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

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

On sanctions and deterrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oopsie.

On possible U.S. use of a chemical weapon

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

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

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

On American troops in Ukraine

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

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

On regime change in Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Biden creepiness

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

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

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

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

Denying reality . . . or not aware of it?

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

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

Biden: “What’s getting walked back?”

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

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

Doocy: “None of the three occurred?”

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

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

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

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

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

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
The Dismal State of the Union

The Dismal State of the Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smoke, Mirrors, and Fooling Some of the People

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

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

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

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

More Blather on the Domestic Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

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“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” — George W. Bush

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush

It’s a sad day when we have to go back to former President George W. to illustrate how befuddled our current so-called “leadership” is, but somehow his linguistic faux pas seem to best encapsulate the current confused state of affairs in this country. Besides, the present occupant of the White House, once King of the Gaffe, now seldom makes enough sense to even come up with a colorful misquote. He just presents as ornery and mean and overwhelmingly somnolent, and most of his words, such as they are, are fed to him by others on a teleprompter. At least George W. made a stab at it on his own, as ill-fated some of those attempts were. If you want to hear equally nonsensical statements, you have to turn to our allegedly second in command (sic), VP Kamala Harris.

As I write this, we’re seeing the results of our feckless approach to dissuading Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. There are reports of explosions, likely from Russian cruise missiles landing in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, as sirens sound and tens of thousands of people flee the city, removing the doubts and questions of recent weeks whether Putin planned on invading Ukraine or not. Now we know.

While a masked Harris, looking more like some comical representation of a cartoon dog than a leader of the Western world, prattled on about “unity” in the aftermath of a security meeting in Munich a few days ago, Putin was lining up his ducks and getting them ready to quack. In a big way. Following a diplomatically polite meeting with Harris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out the reality in more clear terms.

“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen,” Zelensky said, “and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied. Why would we need those sanctions then?”

The prescience of Zelensky’s fears have now been made manifest. Whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated previously will come to pass remains to be seen, but clearly Russia and China are in close touch, and China is observing closely what transpires in Ukraine. But as I predicted, Putin held back until after the Beijing Olympics had ended to make his move.

Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

Biden (shown in the photo above with photos of media representatives, the friendly ones he was “supposed” to call on circled, at a rare press event) has done everything possible to aid and abet Putin’s plans while hindering our own ability to counter, in real terms, Russia’s threat, not just to Ukraine but to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Right from the beginning of his administration, Biden deliberately took America from the energy independence that had been a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policy to returning the country to dependence on foreign sources of oil, including Russia. In 2021, the U.S. imported about 250 million barrels of oil from Russia, tripling the 2020 amount and setting a new record. While canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried Canadian oil to refineries in the U.S., and now  canceling oil leases on U.S. public lands and blocking all new drilling in this country, Biden lifted sanctions and greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Given that petroleum and gas exports are key elements of Russia’s economy — which, with nearly two and a half times the population, is smaller than Italy’s, or with nearly five times the population, is smaller than that of Texas — there is little Biden could have done that would not have been a bigger help to Russia and bigger hurt to the U.S. While Trump argued Germany and Western Europe should not be dependent on Russia for their energy needs, Biden encouraged it. Good work, Squinty Joe. Now we know who Putin’s real pooch is.

While Americans are now paying $4, $5, $6, and more for a gallon of gas — often spending north of $100 to fill their tank — compared with under $2 while Trump was president, Biden has cautioned that sanctions against Russia will incur further costs in the form of still higher energy costs to this country. Brilliant plan. With fuel prices at an eight-year high and inflation at a 40-year high, now Americans are told to buck up and pay up. And of course, the usual media toadies are blaming all this on the Ukraine situation, when in fact those issues were well underway and established long before Ukraine popped up as a crisis. Along with Russia, OPEC, and Iran, the real beneficiaries of this administration’s obtuse policies are the special interests who stand to profit from a so-called “green” economy, much as they did under Obama, when Biden was Vice President.

Biden’s strategic failures are numerous, but none bigger or more notable than his disastrous and scandalous surrender and withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was like giving a green light to Putin, Xi — with his eye on taking back Taiwan — and every other power-hungry despot in the world. And don’t forget: Biden declared climate change (when he wasn’t blaming white supremacy) as the biggest threat to U.S. security. I wonder how many Ukrainians, or even Americans, would agree with that assessment.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. The same old merry band of morons that were in charge the last time Russia took a bite out of Ukraine, annexing the Crimea in 2014, is back in charge, and Putin knows that. And he knows he can play them like a balalaika.

I’m reminded of the game of chicken we used to play when I was a kid. One kid draws a line in the dirt with his foot and says, “I dare you to cross this line.” The other kid goes, “Oh, yeah?” He steps across the line and says, “There– what are you gonna do about it?” The first kid laughs and announces, “Now you’re on my side.”

What are Russia’s Real Objectives?

Putin and Russia couldn’t be more clear about at least some of Russia’s priorities and how sanctions won’t deter it from pursuing those priorities.

“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about sanctions,” Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, told the Swedish daily Aftonbladet earlier this month. “The expansion of NATO is the biggest threat to Russia.”

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, using more polite language, reiterated the same point to CBS’s Face the Nation this past Sunday.

“We would like to put everything on the paper, we would like to see legally binding guarantees for Russian security,” Antonov said. “We sent our package of proposals, what should we do? We don’t want to see next wave of expansion of NATO. We would like you not to use any Eastern and Central European countries, as well as Baltic states, to deploy their new weapons. We don’t want INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] missiles deployed in Europe.”

The INF Treaty was signed between President Ronald Reagan and then-Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, but President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance, and also concerns about a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, since China is not a signatory to the treaty. Subsequently, Putin also suspended Russia’s treaty obligations.

Some in this country, such as former Democratic Congresswoman and one time presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, adhere to the theory that making it clear that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO would have caused Putin to back off on his threat to the country. If one puts the current crisis in the context of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where the U.S., under President John F. Kennedy, faced down Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba, 90 miles off our shores, Russia’s concern about NATO expansion on its borders makes sense. A little heralded part of the resolution of that crisis was the unpublicized agreement by the U.S. to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, on the Soviet Union’s border, revealing the reciprocal nature of not placing nuclear threats right on an adversary’s border.

Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion certainly are real, but whether they tell the whole story or are simply a red herring for concealing Putin’s expansionist aims may have been answered by Putin himself during a lengthy monologue, delivered on February 21. In that monologue, described by some as “surreal” and historically “revisionist,” Putin claimed that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent country and merely is part of the old Russian empire. In the same speech, Putin announced he was recognizing two predominantly Russian rebel regions in the eastern part of Ukraine, the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” Putin later ordered troops to cross the border to those two districts, under the guise of being “peacekeepers.”

For his part, Biden issued an executive order putting sanctions, not on Russia, but on the two breakaway regions. You can’t make this stuff up.

“Ukraine is a test of western resolve. It’s not just about Putin,” said former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley. “The Chinese communists and Iranian jihadists are watching too. It’s a major leadership moment for Biden. So far, he’s failing.”

Following launch of his invasion of Ukraine overnight, Putin issued the most dire threat yet to the U.S. and the West.

Speaking at 6 a.m. Moscow time this morning, Putin threatened “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” should Western countries become involved in Ukraine.

What these “consequences” might consist of were left deliberately ambiguous. Might they include massive cyber attacks? Invasion of the Baltic states? Nuclear retaliation? It is relevant to recall that, following resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, both Kennedy and Khrushchev said they had madmen on their side urging them to push the nuclear button. One has to wonder, given his increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior and his twisted world view, whether Putin would not have been one of those arguing for nuclear Armageddon. Or that he is not now capable of it.

How much further Putin’s view of returning Russia to what he sees as its former greatness will go, we will have to wait to see. We don’t have to wait to see Biden’s failure. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that, all through this administration. Now we’re seeing more of it, and where it leads.

Featured image: Twisted Shoe Laces. Pixabay. Used with permission.

Befuddled Biden with press photos. EPA/Oliver Contreras/Pool Photo. Used under Fair Use.

Putin and his pooch. Reuters, from Esquire.com. Used under Fair Use.

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Finally, Something That *Is* Bigger Than Watergate

Finally, Something That *Is* Bigger Than Watergate

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For half a century we’ve heard one political scandal after another called “bigger than Watergate.” None other than Watergate co-reporter Bob Woodward has uttered those words over and over as he peddled his various books across the years, relying on the famed laurels he earned at the early pinnacle of his career. And now, finally, thanks to the plodding but relentless investigation of Special Counsel John Durham, we’re getting details of a scandal that, if substantiated, really is bigger, far bigger, than Watergate.

A recent 19-page court filing made by Durham’s team contains clear indications that the now nearly three-year-old investigation is looking past — far past — indicted Hillary Clinton presidential campaign legal advisor Michael Sussmann. Three times in the submission Durham informs the court that he is conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” not limited to defendant Sussmann. Sussmann, for his part, has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI, and has answered with his own six-page filing accusing Durham of being wrong about key facts and attempting to prejudice the jury pool.

Part of Durham’s allegations is that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was spied on by Sussmann, working with cybersecurity experts, and  touting the information to the media and government agencies, including the FBI and CIA, hoping to spur an investigation of Trump. Which, we may recall, is exactly what eventuated, in the form of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the subsequent ill-fated, but costly and highly destructive, investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

While the Watergate burglars physically broke into Democratic Party headquarters, Durham’s allegations imply an electronic break-in to the Trump campaign. Those kinds of dirty tricks might make the scandal as big as Watergate, but not necessarily bigger. The bigger issue, the one that — again, if substantiated — would make this scandal not only bigger than Watergate, but substantively a direct threat to national security, is that a government contractor, referred to as “Tech Executive-1” in the Durham filing but reported to be early Internet industry pioneer Rodney Joffe, may have been gleaning and passing on data from White House communications during Trump’s presidency. Joffe has not been charged in the case.

Was Trump Right?

Trump has alleged all along that his campaign and, subsequently, his presidency, was spied on. He called the campaign spying “Spygate” and alleged it was conducted by his opponent, who is called Crooked Hillary. He clearly feels, if prematurely, vindicated by Durham’s filing. In an exclusive interview earlier this week Trump told Fox News Digital, “It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century. This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”

In a prior statement, Trump said, “What Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats did with respect to spying on a President of the United States, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate.” He called for further criminal charges and implied that the perpetrators, in an earlier time, would face the death penalty, which is what his opponents would have called for were he the offending party.

“Can you imagine,” Trump said in his statement, “if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President? All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement.”

Asked by a Daily Mail reporter to respond to the allegations contained in the Durham filing, Clinton first ignored the question, walking masked past the reporter and waving. She later came out with a tweet to blame Trump and Fox News for “spinning up a fake scandal.”

“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Clinton tweeted. ‘The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.”

To back up her denial, she linked to an article in Vanity Fair written by Democratic Party toadie Bess Levin and subtitled, “In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.”

Aside from the two former candidates sparring, part of the issue revolves around the value of the data mined by Joffe’s group. According to Durham’s filing, the investigation has approximately 17,000 documents related to Tech Executive-1’s companies, including approximately 226 emails relevant to Sussmann’s defense. While it is not clear whether any specific information was gathered from White House communications, it appears that Joffe’s efforts “exploited” the communications to garner what is called DNS — Domain Name System — information indicating which computers White House computers connected with in an effort to garner derogatory information about Trump. One objective, which failed, was to tie Trump to the private Russian bank, Alfa Bank.

Durham Has the Clinton Campaign in His Sights

It’s been known for some time that the Clinton campaign and the bogus Russian dossier, which contained numerous unsubstantiated and false accusations that attempted to tie Donald Trump to Moscow, has been under investigation by Durham’s team. On Nov. 3 of last year the primary source for the infamous dossier, Igor Danchenko, was arrested and charged with lying to federal officials about his Russian contacts during his 2017 interviews with the FBI.

Along with supplying fabricated information to Christopher Steele, the former British intel operative who provided the dossier to the Clinton campaign, Danchenko had lied about never speaking with what was identified as “PR Executive-1,” described as a “long-time participant in Democratic Party politics.” It was later revealed that PR Executive-1 is Charles Dolan, Jr., a former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and also volunteered for her 2016 campaign. It is alleged that Dolan supplied Danchenko with information and Danchenko’s deception about his contacts with Dolan “was highly material to the FBI’s investigation of these matters.”

One key thing revealed in Durham’s recent filing is that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had not been fully forthcoming about his activities that are relevant to Durham’s probe of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. For one thing, Horowitz had failed to disclose that he met with defendant Sussmann in March 2017. A focus of that meeting was discussion of how the computer of an employee of the Office of the Inspector General had been detected connecting to a virtual private network in another country, information Sussmann had gathered through his connection with Joffe.

Also revealed was that Horowitz had failed to turn over two cell phones belonging to FBI General Counsel James Baker, the official Sussmann is accused of lying to, claiming he was not advising the Clinton campaign while peddling stories of Trump-Alfa Bank connections. Durham has sought possession of a number of FBI phones, including the Baker phones, and is “working diligently” to review relevant materials on them for presentation to the court.

Unindicted Co-conspirators

During the Watergate festivities we heard a lot about “unindicted co-conspirators.” Well, there are plenty of them in the current imbroglio. Not the least of them are the media miscreants who spouted the lies about the alleged “Russia-Trump” conspiracy as if they were fact (and in most cases, still do, and who are now covering up the latest Durham revelations), and Democratic Party apparatchiks, not the least of which are California Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who almost certainly knew, and know, the allegations about Trump were bogus. Working in tandem, those co-conspirators wasted the country’s time, trust, and resources for the better part of five years, and are continuing to squander the national trust and treasure in an effort to drive a stake in Trump’s heart.

There are plenty of guilty parties who may or may not ever be indicted by Durham or anyone else. These include not just Hillary Clinton herself, but also the current occupant of the Oval Office who, along with his boss Barrack Obama, was informed of the phony efforts to defame Trump and allege collusion with Russia to distract attention from Clinton’s illegal use of a private server for conduct of classified government business. They also include former CIA Director John Brennan, who informed Obama and Biden of the plot, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who knew the allegations against Trump were unsubstantiated and who lied to Congress, former FBI Director James Comey, who approved of false filings to the national security FISA Court, his deputy, Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, all of whom furthered the bogus plot.

We know all this went on thanks to former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Clapper’s successor, who held multiple conversations with Durham and confirmed there was sufficient documentation of all this rot. Perhaps most explosive and damning is a CIA Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) that the CIA forwarded to Comey and Strzok stating that Clinton allegedly approved in the 2016 election “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Does it get any clearer than that? I don’t think so. Now the question is, will any of these big names, whether it’s that of Hillary Clinton or Comey or Brennan or Obama or Biden, wind up in any indictments? I doubt, and have doubted for a long time, that our dual system of justice will bring justice to the biggest offenders. As I said about three years ago, in March 2019:

“But do I see it happening? Do I believe that tomorrow the sun will come up in the West and set in the East? The depth of corruption, the extent of the collusion, and the two levels of justice we live with in this country all make prosecution of Hillary and most of the other guilty parties about as likely. Sure, there might be some low-level functionaries punished, beyond the resignations and firings that have already taken place. Maybe. But the worse offenders? The most egregious actors? Not likely.”

I hope I’m proven wrong. But I doubt I will be. The better chance is that we’ll see Hillary again vying to be crowned to what she sees as her divinely ordained place as President of the United States. May that divinity have mercy on our souls.

Featured image: Hillary Shocked, source unknown, from BizPacReview.com. Used under Fair Use.

Donald Trump, source unknown, from HuffingtonPost.com. Used under Fair Use.

John Durham, source unknown, from NeoNettle.com. Used under Fair Use.

Adam Schiff, Getty Images, from DailyCaller.com. Used under Fair Use.

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