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Do We Really Want a Restoration of the Soviet Union? Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham Seem to be Saying, Not a Problem.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Ukraine Separatist Rebels
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.

Tucker and Laura didn’t get the email.

The Better to Keep Peace with My Dear . . .

RogerG

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We Picked the Wrong Time to . . . Fight Climate Change

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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?

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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.

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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.

RogerG

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A Flummoxed President

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Biden and New York City mayor, Eric Adams, at yesterdays’ meeting (2/3/22).

Flummoxed: adj.; bewildered or perplexed.

I am flummoxed and so is our president.  I am perplexed by young people, formally educated and from comfortable backgrounds, storming police stations, burning down central business districts, and imposing on us their warped views by defacing our monuments and memorials.  I am further bewildered by a refusal to recognize the most elemental of things: if you don’t enforce the law, there is more law breaking.  Our president is equally flummoxed and displays it regularly.  He strode into New York City yesterday (2/3/22) and announced that he was going to lead an effort to arrest, wait for it . . . guns!  Arrest guns, not the people who use them to commit heinous acts.

Yes, that’s right, President Biden declared a crackdown on inanimate objects.  The favorite phrase in vogue among his people is “gun violence”.  And they don’t mean violence committed by human beings WITH guns.  They mean violence BY guns.  It’s as if these metallic things have a mind, a will of their own.  They jump from the coffee table to a person’s hand, take over the psyche, and drive the individual to commit horrifying acts with them.

Nary a word about blue-bubble public leaders vilifying the police, robbing their budgets, and refusing to prosecute lawbreakers.  Check this out: mobs using phone calculators during smash-and-grabs to guarantee that their thefts don’t exceed $950, thanks to the voters and political establishment of California (Prop 47).  And blue-bubble potentates don’t need a Prop 47 to set a baseline for allowable criminality.  They’ve got Soros-funded henchmen as DA’s refusing to fulfill their oaths of office to faithfully enforce the laws, and thusly are deserving of impeachment.  Sorry, “prosecutorial discretion” doesn’t cut it.  This is not discretion; it’s essentially ripping pages out of the duly-passed code of laws.

Our exalted president says not a word about the vastly more significant contributions of his party to the mayhem.  Get prepared for a campaign to hamper your ability to own a gun to protect yourself from the lawlessness that they inspired.  Mr. President, you should be condemned for not lowering the boom on your party’s abettors of criminality while leaving the rest of us without any means to protect ourselves.

Watch yesterday’s disgusting spectacle on the video below.

RogerG

P.S.:

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Biden’s First Supreme Court Nominee. She’ll Be a Doozy.

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down.  Since the Supreme Court has insinuated itself in all matters of life, there’s much at stake when choosing a juridical potentate for a lifetime appointment.  President Biden set down his criteria for filling the seat and, guess what, it has little to do with merit.  It has everything to do with melanin count and genitalia.  But does it, really?

In a pandering applause line to a radicalized party base in a debate, Biden boasted of a “black” and “women” choice.  Do you think for a moment that’s what he’s really after?  Do you think the “black” part is encapsulated in a Clarence Thomas?  Do you think “black woman” means a Condoleezza Rice (NS advisor to Bush 43, former provost to Stanford University, Dir. of the Hoover Institution, and concert-quality pianist) or Winsome Sears (Lt. Gov. of Virginia)?  No, the closest equivalent is Corey Bush, charter member of The Squad.  Many of the women that he chooses are lefties, so much so that it’s hard to avoid the descriptor “socialist”.

Take for example his floundered choice for comptroller of the currency, Saul Omarova, a graduate of Moscow State University pre-Soviet collapse.  This Cornell University prof favors a Fed takeover of banking, a proposal that would make Lenin’s corpse smile.  Get the idea?

In a debate, Biden plaintively cried, “Do I look like a socialist?”  I don’t know what a socialist “looks” like since many of them look like they stepped off the pages of style magazines.  But I do expect a full-blown lefty of the kind that’ll produce the gibberish of a Sonia Sotomayor.  Once installed, the appointee better have an army of clerks to clean up the mess in her opinions.

May be a cartoon of one or more people and text

Get ready for a Supreme Court that looks like America: six sane ones, two Kool-Aid-drinking lefties, and one lefty trying to avoid the scat left by the other two.

RogerG

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MERS, SARS, COVID-19 and Natural Immunity

One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.

I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.

The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?

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MERS virus
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SARS virus
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COVID-19

If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.

When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.

I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.

RogerG

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The Year’s Signal Event: Afghanistan. Lest We Forget.

Afghans at Kabul airport scrambling to get aboard a taxying US plane to escape the Taliban on August 16, 2021. 5 died in the attempt.

President Obama to prominent donors and Democratic Party operatives in 2020: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s [Biden] ability to f&#@ things up.”

Alas, Biden has, and what he left behind in the dust is the reputation of the USA and a green light to the world’s scoundrels. We’ll be feeling the foul repercussions for decades to come.

President Biden followed his repugnant decision to flee Afghanistan with a repugnant excuse. He dismissed complaints about his bugout with, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” It’s a question, unspoken, that similarly roiled the brain of President Trump. Trump dubbed it an “endless war” (Biden liked “forever”) and scheduled his bugout in his infamous Doha Agreement that set the withdrawal for May 1, 2021. Would Trump have delayed the skedaddle? Hard to say; in fact, it’s impossible to say for sure. A tantalizing clue stems from the fact that Trump wanted out from the moment he rode down the escalator in 2015. Any contrary and hypothetical action is rank speculation. In the end, we had a succession of two presidents who could think of nothing else but getting out. One formalized the bugout in a signing ceremony in Doha; the other pushed it through, damn the torpedoes.

We forget at our peril that the US is no ordinary country. We provide the guardrails for a civilized order on a planet beset with innumerable and unpredictable villains. Our world isn’t a Sesame Street stage set. The UN can’t function as the guardians because it is a vacuous debating society populated with the same villains. That leaves the US as the hall monitor of last resort, like it or not. We’re not the “world’s policeman”; we’re the Don that the vulnerable turn to in extremis. If we abdicate the responsibility, we’ll pay a heavy price at home and abroad.

Indeed, the rush to hide behind two oceans, following the inclinations of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and the mentally corrupted Biden, would result in a US under constant siege. The only other parallel is Israel. It’s a country on a near perpetual war footing, whose existence is guaranteed by the shadow of America’s big stick. What happens when the big stick is kept behind our oceanic walls?

In turn, try to have a prosperous free economy when we must forever fortify and man the walls as the oceans and lands beyond are a playground for those who hate us. History shows that autarky (the drive for complete national self-sufficiency) is the dream of halfwits and murderous thugs, and a ticket to a medieval way of life. Adam Smith laid out the case quite clearly. Go ahead, sell it to a family of four struggling to make the mortgage, whose life was made harder because our so-called populists were popular and in office to mess up their lives.

A great deal of American engagement in the world is good for a decent everybody, and most of all, us. So, to escape a repetition of the mistake, what are the lessons of the self-inflicted catastrophe? First, unilateral withdrawals aren’t much different in their effects from humiliating surrenders. Nobody trusts you; you lose strategic positioning and intelligence-gathering benefits on the flanks of your enemies; and your real and potential allies avoid you like the plague. It’s a lose-lose in every direction.

Second, we need to clean house of our sclerotic foreign policy/defense leadership. We should start with Biden but he’s got a four-year term. If we can’t fire Biden – short of a declaration of incapacity and invocation of the 25th Amendment (not out of the realm of possibility but ultimately culminating in no improvement in fitness looking at the replacements) – we should sweep through the NSA, CIA, State and Defense Departments, anyone with fingerprints on the debacle. The Pentagon is especially a nest of gross incompetence. Austin, Milley, and some senior service commanders are ripe for the axe. Worst of all, they are responsible for the insidious imposition of the horrendous and dispiriting neo-Marxist ideology of diversity-inclusion-equity (DEI) which emasculates esprit de corps and shrivels retention and recruitment. Who wants to join an armed force run by the rants of campus snowflakes? Biden is commander-in-chief but he’s a bozo without well-balanced and strong-minded advisers. This crowd doesn’t cut the mustard.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (L) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley (R) testify during a hearing before the House Committee on Armed Services on June 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo; Alex Wong)

For someone like Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an illustrious career would be forever soiled by his own behavior in the runup to the calamity. Sad, so very sad.

Thirdly, we’d be less vulnerable to the dimwits in the executive branch if Congress would step up to exercise their Constitutional oversight and legislative powers in the war-making arena. Simply put, they won’t act since they’ve surrendered so much to the executive branch.

A good portion of the blame lies in the makeup of one of the major political parties. How do you get the 535 politicians in the Capitol building to act in anything like a commanding voice when one side, the Democrats, is so enthralled to a radical, neo-Marxist mindset? Bridging the gulf would only produce a semi-neo-Marxist conclusion, something highly unpalatable. The radical stridency of one party nearly rules out a cooperative coalition of both parties to defend Congressional prerogatives. The parties have so little in common. Where are the Scoop Jacksons? So long as the Democratic Party remains a revolutionary party, Congress will remain a joke.

Senator Scoop Jackson (D, Wa.), now deceased.

The Republicans, on their part, should steer clear of the American Firsters that were resuscitated in the wake of the Trump ascendancy. Firebrands, cranks, and cooks are not steady hands at the tiller of state.

Since the Article I branch is a cantankerous mess, finally, Congress is not in a position to stop the administration from swinging a wrecking ball to our delicate diplomatic and defense arrangements around the world. As such, the horrific scenes that unfolded at Kabul airport were cringing to our present and possible allies as it incited dreams of new possibilities in our adversaries. Russia and the CCP’s China have every reason to follow their lusts. It could spell doom to the Ukraine and Taiwan. American perfidy just downgraded American deterrence. The Kremlin and Beijing are neither as militarily crippled nor lacking in determined leadership as they were in the 1990’s. The Afghan retreat is a replay of the police stand-down orders in Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Baltimore, New York City, et al. When the cat is gone, the mice play.

Massive quantities of Russian supplies and equipment on Ukranian border in recent satellite photo.

Hitler parallels have become a rhetorical banality, but some are noteworthy because the similarities are so striking. Of particular relevance is the Munich Agreement of 1938. At the time, America had taken itself off the table – in a Tucker Carlson stance – as Germany shredded the Versailles Treaty and performed the March 1938 Anschluss (forced unification of Austria and prohibited by Versailles) with only a diplomatic protest in response. The League of Nations was a nonentity. The Axis allies of Italy and Japan were molesting North Africa and China respectively. A demoralized France and a Britain in the grip of appeasement were left to check Hitler’s ambitions in Eastern Europe, notably Czechoslovakia. They retreated from a defense of the small country and it was sacrificed in the subsequent Munich concord only to have much worse follow. An appeal to the hearts and minds of thugs is dangerous; after all, they’re thugs.

Afghanistan is our Munich. Should we say goodbye to the Ukraine and Taiwan as the West said arrivederci to the Sudetenland in 1938? And what of a nuke-obsessed Iran and its terror proxies surrounding Israel? Will the band of rogues be satisfied with the vast steppe west of the Urals, Formosa, and a smoldering Tel Aviv? I suspect not. They are probably just the hors d’oeuvres.

RogerG

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Dem-lusions of Grandeur

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Jon Meacham (r) and Biden in split screen on the night of Biden’s November victory speech, which Meacham helped compose. Meacham also organized the historian conclave in March.

Pedigreed historians congregated in the White House earlier this year to arouse the latent inner-FDR that resides in the heart of any Democrat who happens to land in the oval office. Certainly, these guests aren’t solely responsible for what followed but they goaded it. What followed was an end to energy independence, unenforced borders, eco-fanaticism, neo-Marxist racialism, and WWII-scale spending bills in the face of galloping inflation. Gird your loins; we’ve seen this before and it wasn’t pretty.

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Politicians can be like football head coaches of prestigious teams. They are inflated with high expectations that seldom survive the first clash of shoulder pads. As a USC fan, oh how I know this. The players’ and coaches’ heads are filled with sycophantic praise by local big media. Then the indulged egos start to go bust by the first half of the first game.

Sounds like Biden and his social revolutionary inner-circle’s March meeting with politically sympathetic historians who were taking on the role of the lick-spittle sports media. In the room according to Axios were Doris Kearns Goodwin, and “Michael Beschloss, author Michael Eric Dyson, Yale’s Joanne Freeman, Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr., Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed and Walter Isaacson”. The Party revolutionaries don’t need much encouragement to upturn everything, but then in comes people with high reputation to incite them into doing what they are chomping at the bit to do anyway. Inevitably, they will face the truth of having no mandate in the paper-thin majorities in Congress and the 2020 presidential vote. Acting like they have one won’t change the reality.

If you want to know what’s wrong with your kids’ school, the answer walked into the White House on that 2021 March day. The history profession resembles what happened to the social sciences in general. They have become a vast apologia for fashionable and radical ideologies whose tentacles reach into a deep and abiding FDR-love. All history textbooks that I’m aware as a teacher (of almost 30 years) and Social Science Department chair worship FDR and the New Deal. None of them rate higher than a “C” – most are “D” or “F”; none are “A” or “B” – by the center-right Fordham Institute. Bluntly put, it’s indoctrination. The brainwashing makes it easy to fill the ranks of the activists in the Democratic Party and those burning Portland to the ground.

Antifa in Portland, 2020

In my role as a department chair and teachers union president, I pressed upon my superintendent the fact that we are making good little Democrats. Much like the blatherings of the revolutionaries in the current edition of the donkey party, none of the textbook Great Depression stories made any sense. Roosevelt gets elected and inaugurates feverish activity (the New Deals), and the Depression becomes Great, persisting for the rest of the 1930’s, then took a WWII hiatus as unemployment was cured by putting the jobless in uniform and employing them in making the weapons to destroy Germany and Imperial Japan (Italy was a nonentity by 1943), and was set to resume in 1946 after the wartime recess ended. After the surrenders, there’s not much of a demand for a Sherman tank in the garage or a Norton bombsite in the refrigerator’s spot. The ugly conditions were set to return but avoided by a relaxation of the wartime and New Deal taxes and controls.

Probably, the “illustrious” historians filled the heads of our mentally deficient president and his party’s big wheels with delusions of grandeur of being the next FDR, which will only produce the same miasma for the rest of us. Alongside a Fed currently greasing the skids of inflation through mismanagement of money supply (30% increase with more coming) and the raising of taxes and the reregulation of the economy, Biden and his Party promise another disaster.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'VEGAS RA REVIEW-JOURNAL nea VIRTUAL UAL AOC is SPELLED WITH INDOCTRINATION AN AN"I"... "T" nea nea SSOCATION DUCATION nea @Ramireztoons nea michaelpramirez.com'

Historians of many book deals should know better. But, sadly, they don’t. Don’t expect your kids’ school teachers to stand athwart the all-enveloping orthodoxy of falsehoods. In the end, we have tumult because a party with razor-thin majorities has been deluded into thinking that they can remake America like the earlier crowd around FDR. The only difference: FDR had a real mandate. This crowd doesn’t.

Overall, the lefty oldsters of the 1930’s made healthy exertions; they’re modern political progeny is trying again; and the American people will suffer . . . as in olden days. Same ol’ same ol’.

May be a cartoon

RogerG

Posted on

The Art of Lying

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” H.L. Mencken

Are the people pushing “Build Back Better” (BBB) proving Mencken right? As if we need any further examples, we’ve already got the person who nosed across the finish line first in the 2020 presidential derby sounding grossly incoherent on most matters, and especially on his bigger-than-WWII lollapalooza — the “BBB”. He’s not alone. Listen to Psaki at pressers, and Pelosi, Schumer, and the rest of the big wheels running the show in Congress.

Here’s the head-scratcher: How can you have “costs nothing” and “paid for” in conjoining sentences? They’ve said it regularly, and with a straight face. If it costs nothing, it’s free. Right? If it’s “paid for”, somebody, probably many somebodies, paid for it. Reality sets in. It will be taken out of one group’s hide to fatten the financial accounts of others, least of all the beneficiary down-and-outs.

The Congressional Budget Office just scored the latest edition of BBB. Surprise, it comes up short, way short. The DC capos (as in mafia “captain”) invented a number – $400 billion – from various BBB empowerments to the IRS. The CBO awakened the conjurers from their wet dream by downgrading the number to $120 billion. And this may be an overestimate since the law of unintended consequences will be unleashed as it was for LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960’s.

The poster child of the failures of the Great Society: the east side of Detroit as seen in a recent video.

Bear in mind that the whole shebang is designed to turn your life upside down and give you wasteful government services that you don’t want and won’t like. That’s not the end of it.

Just think, if it fuels inflation, interest rates rise and interest payments of the accumulated debt jump to new levels. Financing “paid for” will eat up the budget, and say goodbye to our blue water navy and a sane dollar. Of course, we could be a banana republic and repudiate the debt. It’s easy, don’t pay it, and we’re off to oblivion.

How do politicians lie? This way. Yep, our recent edition of the clowns is making Mencken’s point.

RogerG

Posted on

The Electric Car Scam

Charging station in Fairfax, Va.

Our new god, The State, speaks: “Thou shalt drive an electric car.” When this god-imposter speaks, run!

Something normally left to individual choice, along with vacation destinations, is now the province of The State. Combine a neurotic over-reaction to unprovable threats (climate change hysterics) with a growing State impulse to engineer the person along the lines of the neurosis and the result will be a pure, unadulterated mess. The State is a hammer-for-everything when a shed full of tools is the actual necessity. Our lives will begin to look like the incessant and crude pummeling of a hammer. Translation: live less well.

And, God almighty, are they out to get the internal combustion engine. Gavin Newsom, governor of the looney bin formerly known as the State of California, and emboldened by his survival of the recall, signed the death warrant for the gasoline car in the state, the lethal injection to be performed by 2035. From DC, Biden’s Build Back Better – errrr Worse – has $13.5 billion for scarring the roads and interstates hither and yon with plug-ins for the things. To make sure that you use those plug-ins, the feds will bribe you with other people’s money – to the tune of $12,500 per purchase – to buy the contraption and junk your quite functional family sedan. That’s right, replace something that works for a will-‘o-the-wisp.

*Read about the EV and its heart and soul, the battery, here.

I equate the EV craze to gender reassignment surgery. Surgeons jettison the Hippocratic Oath by destroying perfectly healthy organs to align a person’s physique to their imagination. Ditto for Build Back so-called Better: mutilate the transportation grid to better fit the fancies of the half-witted representative from NY’s 14th congressional district.

And what are we going to get out of it, besides the will-‘o-the-wisp? A mess, a big mess. How much of a mess? Just think it through. Those holiday trips to grandma’s house will be measured in battery capacity. Don’t take too many long trips, commutes, or otherwise because the trip’s mandatory half-hour quick charges degrade the batteries. Don’t expect 100,000 miles out of the thing. And just think, you were forced to give up something that works very well for . . . God only knows what. Wait for this to percolate through the economy and into higher unemployment figures and higher grocery bills and poorer diets.

That’s a ticket for a return journey to the Middle Ages.

And what of those now-common California blackouts? After all, the greenie grid functions like the greenie car. The physics of the substitution of high-density energy with low-density doesn’t add up. The trillions spent on trying to make it work is an attempt to bend the laws of nature to the half-literate musings of The Squad. What will you do with an EV with no juice to its umbilical cord and plug? Commutes will be made more formidable, the suburbs will atrophy, and its back to cramped apartment life at the mercy of Lori Lightfoot’s or Bill de Blasio’s defund-the-police rantings. Is raising kids in decrepit schools and on streets filled with gangs, the homeless, needles, and feces supposed to be “Build Back Better”?

Homelessness in LA.

Remember, the trillions and trillions going into this bottomless pit is money not spent on other things. An adult, not the eco-fanatics in Congress, would recognize this as trade-offs. Our decaying military will make it possible for the Pacific to become a CCP lake. Try a supply chain under that regime. Reliance on more expensive and unstable energy and less functional vehicles means less productivity, and productivity is the name of the game for prosperity. More money going into greenie infatuations is less money for R&D for the next wave of world-impacting innovation. Add it up . . . and cringe.

Have we lost our minds? Our car fleet is more efficient and less polluting than nearly any outside the Anglosphere and Europe. We are now expected to dispense with the great strides in the use of fossil fuels and jump headlong into electricity-everything, just at the time when they plan to make the production of it more unstable and vulnerable. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy

Nearly empty shelves in an American Walmart.

So much pain for so little gain.

RogerG

Posted on

A Disturbing Future

What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.

Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.

And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.

The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.

Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.

Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.

What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.

Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.

The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.

But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.

The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.

Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.

Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.

The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.

The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.

What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.

Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?

RogerG