FBI agents block one of the gates at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during the raid on August 8.
What stinks? The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below). Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members. And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity. Amazing.
The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”. I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.
The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives. It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”. They’re on a hair trigger. In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump. Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump. Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?
This is completely unprecedented. The people who run the National Archives are not gods. Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another. And Trump was cooperating. Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?
The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd. The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials. There’s even a startling mention of an executive order. What? Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president. They are a creature of him and his office. They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count. This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.
For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them. When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head. Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone? And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices. Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries. There’s evidence of it. And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”. And there is on Trump? Incredible.
The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them. The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone. This should have gone to trial. And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable. The brazen double standard screams injustice.
Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump. It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30). That’s worse than hearsay. No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.
In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter. He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53). It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home. This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
What of the redactions in the affidavit? If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation. They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people. The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising. Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected. Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.
The affidavit still stinks to high heaven. I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway. Breakup DC! Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain. People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.
RogerG
Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf
Today’s hot question: Are we in a recession? My gut says “yes”; and if not, we’re on the cusp.
One thing needs to be made clear, though. Rational cognitive activity in an election year is as common as “father’s milk” – which, by the way, is seriously presented by some as something other than an oxymoron. After all, this formulation alongside menstruating and pregnant men became artificial possibilities once partisan hucksters succeeded in rhetorically establishing a wall of separation between gender and chromosomes. Do you think that the rest of the language will escape the mutilation?
Yesterday, the demigods of the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced a .9% decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter (April to June) to go along with the 1.6% fall in the first. Two consecutive quarters of falling GDP, a widely accepted marker for a recession by many who are denying it today. Magically, legacy media has discovered a complex answer because . . . it suits their biases. In 1991, when it was George H.W. Bush, an R, in the dock for a slight dip, the “two consecutive” was all the craze. And we got the sex addict Bill Clinton. Ditto for 2008 with W, another R. And we got the Alinsky protégé Barack Obama. It seems that the recession definition is fungible to the advantage of only one side.
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Duce questions White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the changing definition of a recession.
Now, the near-octogenarian Biden, a Democrat, is at the Resolute desk and they’ve discovered “it’s more complicated”. Economist Brian Westbury, no shill of the Left, generally agrees with the complicated explanation. It’s a basket of indices that show a decline in business activity. The GDP numbers are only one part of the picture. The GDP numbers could take a dip if the trade deficit rose; they are subtracted from the general production number. Of course, the trade deficit is just one component of the more significant balance of payments. GDP could fall if consumers coming out of a pandemic lockdown with savings and government debit cards go on a spending splurge, which they did in a binge for all those imported goods from China and other exotic ports of call.
Where does that leave us? Still, in a recession, or awfully close. Bluntly put, it just feels bad. Supply chain problems are still not cured. Climate-change zealotry is still rolling out in executive orders and administrative agencies while playing havoc with utility bills. The war on fossil fuels is rupturing family and business budgets. Rents are skyrocketing. People not living in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, or Malibu, nor able to fly first class, are battered from so many different directions. There is no recession for those who regularly view the country from 35,000 feet.
There is a recession for the moms and dads feeling the pinch of today’s milk prices. For anyone not named Warren Buffett, who’s in a mood to upgrade the kitchen stove? A recession is a broad attitude to hunker down. The Democrats came into power in 2021 with a whip to regulate, ban, and tax their way to their nirvana. That means that they don’t like you. They don’t like the idea of you having a 1,500 square foot suburban ranch house with air conditioning. They have many more “don’t likes”: that you might be white and/or male, that you might own an SUV, that you have a problem with vandals and own a gun, your “heteronormativity”, that you might actually want your children to learn the 3 r’s and to love their country in school, that a family bar-b-cue in your fenced back yard is a cherished moment. Looking around you, after all that’s happened under their watch, what’s there to look forward to? Who’s in a mood to be upbeat and work and spend like it? This isn’t “Morning in America”; it’s the world of Mad Max.
Welcome to the recession, or the onset, and I don’t care much about the musings of the chattering classes on the matter. They sacrificed their credibility long ago.
President Biden is noticing the inverse relationship between gas prices and a politician’s approval rating: one goes up, the other goes down. So, what does he do? Sacrificing intelligibility, ignoring human nature in the laws of supply and demand, and contradicting the crux of his green-energy agenda, he spirited off letters to energy company CEO’s on June 15 haranguing them for taking his war on fossil fuels seriously. He attempted to strongarm them into dropping prices at the pump by threatening,
“. . . at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable. . . . I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020, and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.”
For decades now, our cultural hegemons have inundated the whole of humanity with climate-change doom. The drumbeat is everywhere; can’t miss it. Now, we have a government of doomsayers, who have put combative policy teeth to the apocalypse story. The hostility to the CEO’s principal product – fossil fuels – is impossible to avoid, even for the pressed suits in the c-suites. They’ve adjusted to the cultural lynch mob by running ads touting their greenie bona fides and a redirection of investments to match. They see what’s in the wind. They see a government on an eco-jihad. Cancellation of pipelines, ending new leases on federal lands, greenie Bolsheviks in charge at the EPA, greenie Bolsheviks running the show at Transportation and Energy – indeed, throughout the Article II branch – and the regulatory and permitting process under the zealous gaze of a greenie Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), isn’t exactly a green light to increase production, “to get refined product to market”. What Lord Biden taketh away, he expects them to give.
Gas prices in Los Angeles in May of 2022.
Just think like a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy behemoth. He or she would be crazy to commit years and $5-15 billion into building a new refinery or maintaining an existing one, which mostly explains why we haven’t added a new one since 1976 and some are closing. Additionally, why commit millions – without commitment to an asylum – to exploring and extracting the stuff that is constantly portrayed to be the environmental equivalent of monkeypox?
Why do that when Biden’s commissariat, and the sub-commissariats in the blue states, have adopted the Stalinesque “Energy Portfolio Standards” (EPS)? EPS’s are Five Year Plans to shoehorn the entire population into the greenie utopia of blackouts, cramped and overpriced housing, expensive ev’s, and filthy, crime-ridden, and time-guzzling public transit, specifically subjecting it on the most hesitant in the aspiring middle class and proletariat (regular or lumpen). Imagine your standard of living being forcibly molded to fit the conscience of the Sierra Cub executive board, or the lunchroom at Google.
Don’t be a bit surprised that your life takes on the appearance of the beneficiaries – err, victims – of the New Deal-inspired urban renewal extravaganzas of the last half of the 20th century. Is Chicago’s Cabrini Green our future writ large?
A key goal of the Green New Deal is to herd the population into mass transit like this in NYC.Another key goal of environmentalists is dense housing, much of it public, like this one in Chicago. It became a hive of crime and drugs and was demolished in 2011.A policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.
So, we are set to replace $2-per-gallon gas and air conditioning for the “intermittency problem” of windmills and solar panels, which means regular episodes of things going dark and summer sweltering. The polar vortexes present particularly vexing problems for a grid with an irregular heartbeat. Be prepared for forests of windmills and seas of solar panels to mar the views during the family drive in the expensive ev, which could be a dangerous activity if no one thought to plug it in the night before.
And where will the electricity come from to charge the thing? Not much chance of charging the ev if the town went dark. I always thought that a continuous flow of electricity, one that can be ramped up as needed, was preferable to one interrupted by clouds, the rotation of the earth, or the lack of air movement. If we are so paralyzed by the thought of burning coal that we are willing to rush into the arms of “intermittency”, natural gas and nuclear could offer a way forward without upending the entire system from the generating plant to coffee maker. Building new gas and nuclear plants to power the grid makes more sense than trying to repeal the laws of physics regarding intermittency, energy density (remember the vast panoramic expanses of windmills and solar panels – the very opposite of density), and the dumping of trillions into R and D to make something work that by nature is inclined not to.
Intermittency in action: Rolling blackouts in Southern California, 2021A picture of intermittency: Mojave Desert windmills, California.Another picture of intermittency: Solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert
We know much more about natural gas and nuclear generation and the necessary tweaks to make them safer and more efficient. Instead, we are offered the huge opportunity costs of the Green New Deal. Money sunk into this basket of extravagances is money not available for the obvious and accessible. In fact, the obvious and accessible is sacrificed on the altar of will-o’-the-wisp “renewables” as gas-powered turbines are shut down and nuclear power plants closed. Oddly, the most emissions-friendly one, nuclear, has been especially targeted. Globally, nuclear power accounted for 17% of total energy production in 1996. Today, it’s 10%. The picture in the U.S. isn’t any better. Nuclear’s contribution to our energy total is scheduled to fall to 11% by 2050 from the 20% of today. The scare stories of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plants in 2011 are dredged to make the inefficient – the aforementioned “renewables” – seem plausible.
Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California, scheduled for decommissioning in 2025.
It will turn into the classic example of government-engineered socio-economic devolution. Where will this lead? Think of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, North Korea, anywhere coercive utopians seized absolute control of the government to compel others to build their dreamland.
Meanwhile, two words – “carbon” and “capture” – go down the memory hole. A fraction of the money going into R and D for overturning a civilization’s entire way of life could be devoted to “carbon” and “capture” with a much more salutary effect. The remainder of the GND price tag could remain in the pockets of the people. But all that makes too much sense.
And making sense is not the forte of eco-zealots drunk with power in the age of Biden.
RogerG
Sources:
* Biden’s Full Letter to Oil Companies Demanding Help on Gas Prices, https://www.mediaite.com/news/read-bidens-full-letter-to-oil-companies-demanding-help-on-gas-prices-historically-high-profit-margins-are-unacceptable/
* The Global Nuclear Power Comeback, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-nuclear-comeback-green-energy-fossil-fuels-supply-climate-mandates-power-generation-11658170860
* The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power, by Nate Hochman, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-blue-state-war-on-nuclear-power/
Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana physician who broke the story.
On the right, we have QAnon and tales of a pedophilia ring under the watchful gaze of Hillary Clinton, or something like that. It’s hard to follow politically inspired derangements. If that doesn’t startle, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga., 10th District) has openly speculated on a Jewish conspiracy of space-based lasers to ignite forest fires in California. I hope she was kidding, but one can never be sure with this mouth without a filter.
Why do I mention the cuckoo Right? The delusions of the Left prove that the affliction isn’t one dimensional. Case in point: a story is heralded in the press of a pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to flee the “coat-hanger R’s” of the buckeye state to the “coat-hanger R’s” of Indiana for an abortion, all to heap scorn on the Dobbs decision. The president, exhibiting his usual foot-in-mouth antics before a mic, repeated the story. The story is starting to unravel, and it’s beginning to look more like a tale of an unenforced border, thanks to Biden.
I was initially skeptical of a pregnant 10-year-old. That part now appears to be true, though there’s much more to the story. A pregnant 10-year-old? That’s rape simply by the combination of the two words, and it was reported to Columbus, Ohio, authorities by the girl’s mom on June 22. A suspect was arrested: an illegal border-crosser from Guatemala.
The alleged rapist, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant (name kept anonymous)
The fable also opens up a can of worms for Columbus. The city, run by lefty Dems, hasn’t officially adopted the moniker of “sanctuary city” but it behaves like one. In 2015, the city issued a “Police Directive” to prohibit police cooperation in the enforcement of immigration law. In 2017, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther (D) was more emphatic. His proclamation announced that “no city department or employee may use city moneys, equipment, or personnel for the sole purpose of detecting or apprehending persons based on suspected immigration status, unless in response to a court order.” Can’t be much more “sanctuary” than that. Is he equally as insistent when it comes to holding suspects for violating federal counterfeiting or kidnapping laws? I kinda doubt it.
Furthermore, word is leaking out that the sole source for the breaking story was Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indianapolis, a Dem activist and abortion enthusiast. And there is reason to believe that she may not have been the treating physician but only overheard another doctor who was. Anyway, either way, if she or anyone learned of the child sexual abuse and didn’t report it, they become eligible for enrollment in the hoosegow. Don’t be surprised that soon the story gets buried on A-10 as the public’s gaze is redirected to another phony outrage.
The real story is turning out to be the lengths that ideological hopes outrun the facts. Even more troubling, facts are invented or omitted to get at Kavanaugh, the Court, anybody running for office with an “R” after their name, or anyone opposing abortion from conception to the maternity ward crib. Lost in the shuffle is the grisly fact that we’re talking about snuffing out human life. There was a time when, even in states that legalized the procedure, people were disquieted enough about it to keep it private. Not anymore. A couple of days ago, the Schumer-led Senate gave a forum for some to loudly and proudly proclaim theirs. It’s grisly!
Now we have the disgraceful politics of the grisly to add to “defund the police”, neo-Marxist indoctrination everywhere from West Point to kindergarten, school buses unloading kids into a gauntlet of crack heads, immigration lawbreakers being shepherded around the country at taxpayer expense, and people and property under constant assault. And I haven’t gotten to the unraveling economy. Amazing, absolutely amazing!
RogerG
Sources:
*The Columbus Dispatch story: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/13/columbus-man-charged-rape-10-year-old-led-abortion-in-indiana/10046625002/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/indiana-abortionist-dodges-questions-about-story-of-alleged-ten-year-old-rape-victim/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/news/illegal-immigrant-arrested-for-allegedly-raping-ten-year-old-ohio-girl-at-center-of-viral-abortion-story/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* Columbus’s sanctuary city status: https://www.fairus.org/issue/sanctuary-policies/10-largest-sanctuary-cities-united-states
*The background of Dr. Caitlin Bernard: https://spectator.org/caitlin-bernard-abortion-phony-story/
A rioter clad in the black of Antifa raises his fist during the August 2020 riots in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard, Getty Images)
“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” – Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.
Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”
Sir Thomas More in the movie was correct. The witty tangle in our heads exists, but the congeries of thoughts, memories, emotions, and facts can generate ideas that can redound to mankind’s credit or condemnation.
Gosh, our present age is amply illustrative of the tangle gone wildly astray. Ideas, oh, those ideas, of the destruction of moral standards that led an 18-year-old to storm into a classroom to kill 19 10-year-olds and 2 teachers. Personal grievance cancels human life. A community’s historical memory is erased by mobs who are angered by the fact that the past doesn’t match the climate of opinion in a college ASB. Defacement of cherished memorials ensued. Waves of crime, violence, riots, and general disorder have turned many urban areas into wastelands that would stretch the imagination of sci-fi writers. The facts of biology are said to play second fiddle to the fancies in our mind. Chromosomes are made irrelevant by chemical and surgical interventions. Thus, a mockery is made of girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. Blatant, revolutionary indoctrination is openly disseminated to the very young in their classrooms and is heartily embraced in corporate boardrooms. The laws of economics take a back seat to highly contestable utopian visions as expressed in climate-change ideology and coerced group equality. Fuel costs skyrocket; broad inflation is unleashed; supply chains break; shortages appear; livelihoods are threatened; the work ethic is weakened; and depopulation continues apace as fertility rates plummet and pews become vacant. Get the picture?
World fertility rate
Something is at work. It’s ideas that emanate from the tangle in one person’s mind and enters the tangle of another. Frequently, if history is any guide, the results aren’t pretty.
These thoughts came to me from a reading of “Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Julian Young (2010 ed.) and a subsequent viewing of Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).
The one is an account of high-minded philosophy and the other is about the vile ends that philosophical ideas can be put. Nothing like the Holocaust, the underlying subject of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, was the intention of Nietzsche in his late 19th century writings. Nonetheless, the Holocaust happened, and Nazi belief was scented with Nietzsche’s ideas: the will to power, the Supermen, his aristocratic radicalism, the need to be hard, the grotesque eugenics, the rejection of Christianity’s “slave” morality, a monolithic ideology supposedly promoting “community health”, and the condemnation of democracy and pluralistic societies, referring to them as “motley cows”. It’s all there in Nietzsche’s published musings.
Elizabeth Froster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who preserved his legacy as her life’s mission, joyfully receiving Adolf Hitler who honored Nietzsche for his contributions to Nazi belief.
The lesson: a person can control what they write; they can’t control how others use what they wrote.
The whole of the twentieth century into this new one is a museum of the evil that men and women can do . . . from the tangle of their minds. The demeaning of standards and the institutions that buttress them is the primary culprit. Revolutionary dogmas – communism, fascism, CRT, transgenderism – were, and are, the excuse to replace the old social fabric with these new (relatively speaking) shiny objects of the mind.
“A Judgment at Nuremberg” put on display only one consequence – Nazism and its Holocaust – while ignoring its competitor, communism. It was easy to do. Invading armies into Germany produced ample eye witnesses as they came upon the scenes when the ovens were still warm and the gas chambers had yet to be demolished, something not true for the victims of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union – and to think that they were our allies (!?). We only had the writings of Solzhenitsyn and a few others to chronicle the horrors of Marxism: Katyn, Kurapaty Forest, 30,000 gulags, the unrestrained secret police, show trials, mass executions, state-manufactured famines. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then experiencing it with your own eyes, nose, ears, and hands is worth a thousand pictures.
Soviet NKVD officer executing a Polish soldier and prisoner
Don’t think for a moment that the horrors arising from the tangle of our minds are only matters for the history books. The dialectics of Nazism and Marxism are present in our time’s woke brigades. Yes, dialectics: the alleged truth that everything boils down to open and hidden coercion – the “system” so to speak – of people into the categories of the oppressed and oppressors. Merit and free will have no role. Group guilt dominates all. It’s the pith and marrow of critical legal theory in law and critical race theory for everything else in public policy. It shows in your child’s school in the forms of teacher training, curriculum, textbooks, and school management. It shows in banal euphemisms such as “equity” which then bleeds into nearly everything that government does.
Much of our lives are to be turned upside down to fit someone’s incoherent abstraction. In the end, we are guided down the well-traveled road to societal decay, to places occupied by the likes of the USSR, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Xi’s surveillance-and-gulag state, Castro’s Cuba, and Maduro’s Venezuela.
It’s great for the high priesthood of the woke for they’ll get rich as they feed on the rotting social corpse.
Ibram X. Kendi, high priest of CRT
For the rest of us, welcome to the Middle Ages. See, the tangle of the mind can be made to pay, even as it destroys.
RogerG
*Also in my Substack feed, “The Golden Mean”, at rogerlgraf.substack.com/.
KBJ before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination for the Supreme Court.
We have reached the point of personal ideology being a disqualification for office. Progressivism has long been subversive of the rule of law. One commentator of recent memory called the progressive’s “living constitution” an ongoing, never-ending constitutional convention. Jurists under its sway can make and enforce law at will. No longer content with simply applying the law in court cases, they’ll force us back into the jungle of the rule of men (or women, or . . .), and away from the rule of law. We don’t need any more judges as potentates. That means a healthy “No” to KBJ.
KBJ is an embodiment of the threat to our civilizational order. It’s more than her refusal to define a woman when asked. Some of her rulings are just way out there, as in contortions to ignore the restraints in the job description in order to achieve long-sought lefty ends. She’s more of a revolutionary than a judge.
One example of the radical’s monstrous rationale came to the fore in committee hearings considering her nomination. Sen. Grassley (R, Iowa) brought to light her ruling as a DC District Court judge in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, (2019). She, with a stroke of her pen, made a ruling in violation of the law. At issue is the power of the AG or Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to exercise “unreviewable” (by the courts) discretion to determine the classes of aliens eligible for expedited removal from the country (Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 1225). So, what did she do? She went ahead and “reviewed” the DHS decision.
She tried to hang her hat on the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), as if it was the wormhole to make reviewable what was clearly not reviewable. So astounded was the normally liberal DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a panel of the Court reversed and admonished her by ruling that,
“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment.”
She was so intent on bashing the Trump administration’s immigration policies that she violated the law when making a decision on the law. Try to make sense of that. Some could try, given that many are completely unaware that Article III of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to set the federal courts’ appellate jurisdiction. In other words, by statute, “unreviewable” means “unreviewable” by KBJ, et al.
The APA is not to be confused, as she apparently did, with the Constitution. This person is a radical, an unhinged progressive, or maybe even a revolutionary. As such, her nomination should be rejected, if not setting her to face impeachment.
Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.
Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.
Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).
*************
Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.
Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.
But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.
Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.
The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.
And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.
Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.
Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.
These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.
Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.
Protest against the fossil fuel industry – pipelines, et al – in New York in 2012.
The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.
If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.
Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.
The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!
Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.
But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.
Rolling blackout in California, 2021.
You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?
Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.
He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.
Operating well in ANPR.
Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:
“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”
Biden announces his opposition to fossil fuels in 2020 debate.
Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?
That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.
In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
Nikolai Patrushev
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
2/24/22 UPDATE: It has begun. Russia has initiated a full-scale assault on Ukraine from the east, south, and north. The following is my synopsis of the contributions of two Fox News celebrities to the broad sense of confusion and myopia in America regarding Russia and the Ukraine.
*************
If you haven’t noticed, Putin is at it again, and our hapless president is bewildered and stumbling toward appeasement, or maybe just plain impotence. Now, here’s the kicker: some on the right are also ambivalent and would be, quite honestly, content with the results of Biden’s passivity. Fox News’s Neville Carlson (alias Tucker Chamberlain) is exhibit #1. He’s Fox News’s #1 offering and it shows. If you turn at least a casual ear to talk radio you’ll hear the occasional caller spout the latest lines, almost word for word, from Carlson about “neocons”, Ukrainian corruption, our undefended southern border vetoing any efforts to assist our allies, Carlson’s adaptation of Code Pink’s “no blood for oil” chant, and other reformulations of old rhetorical handles.
Sadly, he’s not alone on my side of the political ledger, the right. On Tuesday (2/22/22), he was joined by Laura Ingraham in a tag-team revitalization of Lindbergh’s America First Committee, which by the way in its initial form died over the burning hulks of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. If you’re interested, here’s a good dose of Tucker-thought on Russia-Ukraine. It’s entertaining but incoherent bombast.
Carlson repeatedly asks, “. . . how does intervening in Ukraine help the core interests of the United States?” Honestly, substitute Ukraine for any number of different countries and you’ll probably get any number of answers to his query. And prevalent answers would be different depending on the era. One answer would prevail in a time when long-distance travel was a death-defying journey, and before the harnessing of electricity and artificial power and Adam Smith’s depiction of the glories of free trade. George Washington could understandably advise the young nation “to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” But two-month delivery times for a letter across the Atlantic is an alien experience for today. Things move quickly – sometimes instantaneously – and their impacts travel at the same speed. Missiles, hijacked airliners turned into missiles, cyber-attacks, blue-water navies, strategic bombers, and international supply chains make the point.
Let’s ask Tucker’s question in 1931 before Japan’s invasion of China; instead of the Donbas, it’s Manchuria. Oh, what about Mussolini’s 1935 “minor incursion” into Ethiopia? Lest I forget, we could level the question at the “little corporal’s” swallowing up of Czechoslovakia, and furthermore Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. That takes up the Axis connection to Tuckers’ question. 405,000 US deaths later (75-80 million worldwide), we had peace that didn’t last long. And then we’re back to mankind’s annoyingly familiar flawed nature.
Moving forward in time, what core interest did we have in Korea? Or, for that matter, West Berlin? Cuba? Nicaragua? Grenada? Kuwait? The profusion of instances answers the question. It’s an interrelated world of multifaceted interests and impacts. A leading statesman has to pick and choose, not ignore and hide.
To remind you of what a statesman sounds like, President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech of 1983 provides an educational contrast. Tucker no doubt would refer to him as a “neocon”.
Regarding Ukraine, is it in America’s interest to stand pat as the Soviet Union is revived? Ukraine is the vital piece in Putin’s reconstruction project. It was the breadbasket for the empire yet also distinct, so much so that Russification, the policy of transplanting millions of Russians in the country, was active for a couple of centuries or more. For Russia, if they can’t make Ukrainians Russian, they’ll make Ukraine Russian. First-language Russian speakers (14% of the population) are a product of this ethnic imperialism. They’re also the leverage for Putin to use tanks to complete the task that was interrupted by the USSR’s implosion.
The CCP is taking a page out of this dog-eared book by injecting Han Chinese into Xinjiang.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Vietnam in the litany of US interventions. It’s a sore spot, or embarrassment, for most Americans since we are said to have lost. But losing was a choice, not inevitable. Many decisions were made to draw out the war, allow North Vietnam to stay in the fight, and prohibit US assistance to Saigon by Congressional order at the moment Hanoi’s tanks headed south. We saw similar choices throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama yanked US forces out of Iraq and we got ISIS. Biden yanked them out Afghanistan and we got Kabul airport and a descent into the 7th century and more terrorist sanctuaries. Choices, horrible choices, and not the only ones available.
ISIS mass executions in Syria, 2014.
Each time that we choose a new defeat, we’ll go through a period of national PTSD. It’s no different post-Iraq War (W’s edition) and Afghanistan. This time, it’s more than a revival of a McGovernite wing in the donkey party. The right has correspondingly rediscovered its inner-Robert Taft/Charles Lindbergh. Tucker and Ingraham speak in the manner of Lindbergh’s isolationism and Taft’s fear of internationalism. Lindbergh combined a retreat to fortress America and an extreme naivete about the character of the Reich Chancellery. Taft bristled at anything that smacked of a loss of US sovereignty, real or imagined. He found NATO troubling.
Ohio Senator Robert Taft speaks at Arlington National Cemetery in 1939. (Library of Congress)
Still, a catalyst was necessary to provoke a 180-degree turn for the mediagenic stars of Fox News who were past boosters of the War of Terror. To be fair, I’m not aware of Tucker’s stance at the time of Bush’s invasion of Iraq but we have Laura’s confession. She got a whiff of populism, Trump style, and was intoxicated. Trump had no statesmanlike competence to exhibit on the debate stage in 2016 so he resorted to insults and boilerplate attacks on Jeb Bush that drew from the worst of the Bush-lied-people-died period of Democrat demagoguery. Everyone pre-invasion assumed Saddam had WMD, including the dictator himself, or so he said. Trump refashioned the canard in the language of illicit “forever wars” as a campaign slogan and cudgel against Jeb Bush and his new bogeyman of “the establishment” (synonymous with anyone in opposition to Trump). It’s a familiar feature in the Trump Brigades’ talking points.
And the slogans thrived, going so far as to mutilate any original meaning. RHINO morphed from liberal Republican to anyone opposing Trump. Neocon changed from the architects of Reagan’s foreign policy to, again, anyone antagonistic to Trump. “Forever wars” came out of Trump’s mouth as easily as it did any Democrat sealing the doom of South Vietnam. A person’s stance on Trump became the arbiter of meaning in our political lingua franca.
From the time of Trump’s ascension, Trump and the Fox News primetime lineup trundled in unison into a fixation on getting out, and staying out. Trump, with Ingraham and Carlson in tow, tried a pullout in Iraq but he’s got an ISIS problem. The complication of ISIS extended into Syria so he’ll have to eradicate these blood-thirsty savages even as he tries to abandon the Kurds to Erdogan’s new Ottoman Empire. Trump detours and his fits and starts abound. Assad gasses his own people and Trump orders missile attacks. It’s a messy world, but he’s determined to get out of Afghanistan with nothing but cheerleading from Tucker and Laura.
Trump’s Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 29, 2020) was minted in the same manner as the previous negotiated sellouts: the victims were absent from the room. Chamberlain/Daladier cut a deal with Hitler on Czechoslovakia that excluded the Czechs. Nixon/Kissinger reached agreement with the North Vietnamese with only a perfunctory role for the South. The Kabul government was at most a wall flower to Pompeo and the Taliban. The kink in the grand diplomatic design was that Trump wouldn’t be around to see it through. Biden was elected and, true to form, he flubbed the flight out of the country.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Head of Taliban’s Political office in Qatar Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the Afghanistan Peace Negotiations in Doha, 2020.
Remember that Trump and Biden were united in their enthusiasm for getting out and not in the least worried about its return to terrorist sanctuary and the loss of a strategic asset.
Now it’s Ukraine’s turn. The same “forever wars” vitriol that our Fox News celebrities and Trump retroactively aimed at W and his people would be directed at anyone wanting to stop Putin. Epithets are summoned to smear the object of our sympathies. Ukraine is vilified as corrupt and not a democracy. Well, yes, Ukraine is corrupt, like the rest of the old USSR post-breakup, but is it more corrupt than, say, our politicians who enter office middle class but leave oligarch-rich? Pelosi, can we examine your account books?
Tucker is fond of saying that the country is an affront to democracy because it banned political parties and jails the opposition. He’s only half right. The other half is the existence of the country under the pall of Russian domination. After the fall of the Soviet empire, “Russian interference” was a recurring feature of the Ukrainian political scene; and before it, Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-3) was as much genocide as it was a byproduct of central planning. Ukrainian elections were continually beset by massive Russian intrusions. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) was a popular uprising to throw out a Putin puppet in the presidency. It was followed in 2013 by the Euromaidan protests to force a realignment away from Russia and toward the West. All throughout, Putin’s operatives were active with money and guidance to contort elections. Russia’s $40,000 in Facebook ads in 2016 in our country pale in significance. The country has been in a near continuous struggle to be independent of Russia. Life under nonstop foreign pressure isn’t healthy for the fragile elements of democracy.
Combatants walk in a procession as they attend the memorial service and the funeral of Aleksey Mozgovoi, a militant leader of the separatist self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, and his subordinates in the town of Alchevsk in Luhansk region, Ukraine, May 27, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
Anyway, Ukraine isn’t in the same league with Putin’s Russia when it comes to sheer political ghoulishness. Enterprising but critical journalists disappear at an amazing clip. Anna Politkovskaya (2006) and Natalia Estemirova (2009) are two of many of Putin’s victims. The list of the murdered for being so impetuous as to stand athwart Putin is so long that the Russian human rights group Memorial (now illegal) maintains a catalogue called “Last Address”. Political homicides aren’t limited to Russia as the spate of overseas poisonings illustrates. Exile is no refuge from the guy.
Do you think Carlson is cognizant of these realities? It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t hear any pushback on the torrent of claims coming out of the Kremlin. Putin believes that the Ukraine is an illegitimate country. Does Carlson? It has more legitimacy than Russia’s claim on it. Russia’s control over most if it didn’t happen till Peter the Great in the 18th century. Prior to that, the nation shape shifted under the control of the Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and the Golden Horde (Tartars), Russia arriving on the scene later. If not for Russia, the country might have joined the family of eastern European nations much earlier.
Laura’s stance was obvious when she became euphoric from the fumes of Trump’s populism. Right now, another scent is in the air. It is the whiff of 1938 Czechoslovakia and later Poland. Both were creatures of the Versailles Treaty and thusly held in ill-repute by an ascending German leader in much the same manner as Putin holds Ukraine. The two eastern European countries were just stepping stones on the way to lebensraum. In like manner, the Ukraine is an important cog on the path to reassembling the USSR, or Russian Empire, or whatever label you wish to apply to Putin’s Slavic lebensraum. Laura, is lebensraum an appropriate tool for satisfying territorial appetites?
Seriously, are a country’s borders to be decided by the ambitions of dictators? If so, say goodbye to Taiwan and South Korea. Welcome to the Palestinian Caliphate, a gift of Iran’s mullahs. So, what’s our interest in the Ukraine? It’s to prevent the resuscitation of imperial ambitions in a region critical to our well-being, Europe. If we stood up to this thug, we might have more going for us in confronting Xi than a pell-mell run for the hills in Afghanistan and the Ukraine scalp for Putin.
The next shoe to drop: Taiwan. Partially, America’s fatigue in the Middle East gave us Trump, who gave us Doha. America’s fatigue with Trump gave us Biden which led to the Afghanistan bugout, and much else that plagues us. It didn’t take Putin long (5 months) to initiate the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II. Xi’s been watching, and has a checklist with Hong Kong marked and followed by the Senkaku Islands, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and worldwide hegemony. Debacles unleash tyrants, and so will a retreat into fortress America and a handwringing paralysis every time there’s talk of a venture beyond our shores.
In case you haven’t heard, Biden is big on the fight against “climate change”. It’s everywhere in the earlier “bipartisan infrastructure bill”, the Build Back Better monstrosity, new EPA edicts, and in the travels of Biden’s roving climate change ambassador, John Kerry. We’re doing this as governmental Covid-panic bludgeoned the economy and the fed unleashed trillions of new dollars – 50% increase in two years – at a time when the economy registered only a 6-7% expansion. Something has got to give, and I think it’ll be our personal fortunes.
It’s a perfect storm, in the words of the economist Edwin T. Burton. You see, we need a leap in economic growth to absorb the tidal wave of new money. Don’t expect it from a greenie economy. A Greta Thunberg economy doesn’t work any better than a socialist one. On second thought, is there a difference?
16-year-old Great Thunberg
Central planning, common to both, whether to eliminate differences in wealth or fit the fantasies of Earth First (and our 16-year-old sage), replaces the decisions of millions of free individuals with the commands of a few autocrats. Right now, as inflation is about ready to rage through the economy, these autocrats are working to cripple the economic lives of millions with expensive and unreliable greenie energy while at the same time they are trying to strip our freedom of movement in their war on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine. Supply chain disruptions aren’t the only misery that awaits us.
As President Obama was famous for saying when confronting congressional Republicans, elections have consequences. Yes, they do. This time around, we replaced mean tweets and insults at rallies with a basket of lunacies.
The whole situation reminds me of the Jeff Bridges character in the movie “Airplane”. We picked the wrong time to fight climate change while our practical lives are teetering at the edge of an abyss.
Watch the clip below. It’s a hoot, and also a bit more frightening if we realize that sniffing glue is not that much different from an enthusiasm for the Green New Deal: escapes from reality.
