Archive of "Biden" Category
August 11, 2026 // 30 Comments »
Andrew Crapuchettes is a man with a mission. He wants to bring patriotic values to government employment recruiting, and, he wants to personally help implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mandate to reform the Department of State to better represent those values abroad long past the end of the Trump/Vance/Rubio administrations. Can he do it?
Crapuchettes earlier this spring received an almost one million dollar contract to act as a recruiter for the Department of State for new Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). He intends to implement this contract for finding America’s next generation of diplomats via his existing employment search websites, RedBalloon and Military Hire. When he talks about values-based recruiting, Crapuchettes pulls no punches about what his intention for State is, saying a lot of State’s “recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.” He promises future recruits that “all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the U.S. government.” He even sat for an interview with podcast CrossPolitic titled “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”
The promised changes are in line with broader directives from President Trump and Secretary Rubio. In March 2025 Trump signed a memorandum directing the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) as a Core Precept that under Biden controlled Foreign Service promotions. Supervisors under Biden were required to list specific DEIA accomplishments for each diplomat on his yearly job evaluation. The Trump memo further directed State not base Foreign Service recruitment and hiring on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, nor embed discriminatory equity ideology within any element of the Foreign Service. Rubio was quick to act, firing some 1,300 State Department employees, including 246 Foreign Service Officers, and recalling many then-ambassadors seen as opposed to Trump’s foreign policy. Rubio wrote about the restructuring that “motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up… While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference. Radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the president and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Some of the first concrete steps to dismantle DEIA and chip away at State’s culture Rubio took after the initial firings already concerned recruitment; new officers offer a faster way to reshape institutional culture than attempting to change the outlook of an entrenched workforce. Rubio suspended the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both existed to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, with a focus on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. The programs were administered through Howard University, a historically black institution, and the recruited Fellows were estimated to be 80 percent black, multi-racial or Hispanic. Rubio also did away with diplomats in residence (DIR), a program designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population. Many DIRs were based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Today, almost everyone who enters State as an FSO must now pass the same rigorous vetting, leveling the playing racial field.
A look at Crapuchettes’ current job employment websites at RedBalloon and Military Hire offers some clues to how State’s FSO recruitment may work in the near future. The sites advise all employers must pledge to honor free speech and medical privacy, something that may challenge State with its complex restrictions on FSOs appearing on TV and even in social media. RedBalloon itself states it seeks “motivated job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition, and employers that respect their constitutional rights and provide a positive workplace where merit and achievement are honored.” MilitaryHire is much the same, but leans more heavily toward matching former military members with technical skills with businesses working alongside government. Crapuchettes is unabashedly Christian (this is of course what the MSM seized upon).
Browsing Crapuchettes’ employment sites shows they currently recruit for ICE and the Border Patrol. Some advertisements seek people who have or who will qualify for security clearances to work at Northern Virginia locations such as McLean, which may or may not be affiliated with the Intelligence Community or its network of contractors. One such ad is looking for people with proven lockpicking skills. Most other employers in the Washington, DC area appear to be well-known conservative or right-of-center groups and NGOs.
It is clear, in line with Rubio’s other changes, the change in recruiting venue is part of an all-out effort to radically change the culture of the State Department. Its last radical change, actually more of a lateral move, was during the Obama and Biden eras, especially under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Democrats expanded the traditional conception of diplomacy to include advocacy on LGBT rights, women’s rights, labor issues, and other social justice policy priorities. Critics argued recruitment favored applicants from elite universities and applicants who shared prevailing progressive assumptions within the foreign policy establishment. It is consistent with this former pseudo-ideological strategy that the new recruitment emphasis fits with the Trump administration’s own approach to foreign affairs.
Trump in his first term talked a good game about State Department reform, but he chose weak Secretaries of State who never understood they needed to affect change at all levels to alter State’s broader culture. The rank and file in an almost feral way understood this and stymied initiatives, slow-walked paper, and resisted initiatives until the changemakers ran out of time and likely interest. State successfully waited out its opponents in the first Trump administration because it did not believe it represents the Executive or even an America which it did not support politically. State instead had its own version of what the world really needs.
Things may be different now, as a growing cohort of conservative thinkers that will outlast Trump has come out of the closet inside State for the first time. Rubio’s changes reach into the hereto untouched recruitment, training, and promotion processes, the systems that shape institutional culture over the long run. Whether these reforms endure past the next Republican president is the central question. Personnel policies can be quickly reversed by future administrations. Rubio appears to be betting that changing who enters the Foreign Service will prove more durable than changing those already inside it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
July 28, 2026 // 8 Comments »
The street fights with ICE seem to have ended for now. So have many of the televised SWAT-style immigration arrests. Did the resistance win? Have the changes made by the second Donald Trump administration helped curb illegal immigration or has much of this just been for show? A careful look at the sum of the evidence at this point is stronger than the political debate surrounding it, and the measurable effects are increasingly difficult to dispute.
No one knows how many illegal immigrants (a catch-all term here for false asylees, visa overstays, border sneaks, the general undocumented, and the like) are in the United States, but various studies suggest it is a large number, maybe 18.6 million people, close to 6 percent of the entire population of the United States. For many years we had no mechanisms to count them, and in many instances the government did not really want to know. For example, despite issuing as many as 11 million visas a year, the State Department has avoided any comprehensive analysis on how many people overstay or misuse their visas as feedback to guide future decisions, claiming in a bureaucratic tussle the task belongs to DHS and isn’t any of their business. Even rudimentary immigration exit controls at airports, near standard world-wide, have only recently been deployed in the U.S. by DHS.
So any measurement of Trump’s attempts to lower illegal immigration begin with current, not historical, numbers. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded about 237,000 migrant “encounters” at the southern border in FY 2025, down from more than 1.5 million in FY 2024 and more than two million annually during the Biden peak years of 2022–2023. ICE reached a milestone this year of more than 10,000 foreign gang members arrested, many at the border. There are now more Border Patrol agents than any other time in the Patrol’s 102-year history. At the same time, Trump did away with the CBP One app which allowed would-be asylum seekers to begin the process by smart phone app even before they reached U.S. soil. Trump also restricted asylum processing and toughened standards against widespread fraud, even seeking to punish an American immigration attorney who (allegedly) filed false asylum applications, a rare Federal action.
Trump expanded expedited deportations and removals, reinstated tougher ICE deterrence policies and arrests, and made changes to the State Department visa-issuing system abroad to include new and higher fees and bond deposits, fewer visa posts issuing visas at all in fraud-plagued Africa, and stopped immigrant and non-immigrant visa issuance entirely in countries that do not cooperate with the U.S. on deportations and fraud prevention.
ICE arrests rose from a long-term average of roughly 350 per day to as many as 1,300 per day, increasing more than three times compared with the final year of the Biden administration. Deportations from within the United States increased by roughly 4.6 times during the first nine months of Trump’s second term. The use of third countries to accept deportees when their home country refuses to do so has increased significantly, with a new office at the State Department set up just to handle the details. Efforts to get illegals to self-deport have yielded almost 90,000 voluntary departures. ICE detention populations increased substantially, reaching nearly 70,000 detainees at one point, compared with roughly 39,000 when Trump returned to office. Congress also approved tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement and detention operations through 2029. Trump toughened up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become citizens. The Justice Department launched legal challenges in states which allow illegal alien college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for legal in-state residents. Trump deincentivized working illegally in the United States while at the same time cutting into money laundering by Mexican and other drug cartels with a 3.5 percent remittance fee on the often untaxed money sent by aliens in the U.S. to their home country.
The administration’s changes were reinforced by two recent Supreme Court victories which allow Trump to regain substantial authority managing the border. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado the Court ruled an undocumented person must be physically present in the United States to make an asylum claim. Asylum seekers who are stopped on the other side of the border (i.e., in Mexico, not actually admitted to America) are not “present” in the United States. If treated as inside the country as under Biden, despite being outside it, these individuals would be allowed to enter the U.S. and remain for years, with work permits, while their asylum claims pended. The eventual formal asylum approval rate was as low as 15 percent, even under Obama and Biden judges, and many asylum seekers simply disappeared into the United States as permanent illegals rather than face refusal and deportation. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found the immigration court system does not systematically track hearing attendance anyway, making it impossible to produce a real “no-show rate.”
The Supreme Court also gave DHS a powerful new tool in Mullin v. Doe, upholding the right of the administration to remove Temporary Protection Status (TPS) from more than 356,000 Syrians and Haitians now in the U.S. Congress created TPS in 1990 to allow temporary legal status and work authorization to nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other transient conditions that make safe return impossible. With TPS, Congress intended the emphasis to be on “temporary.” The alien would not be expected to return home in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, but was expected to return home as soon as possible. TPS as created by Congress never provided a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Yet hundreds of thousands of aliens stayed in the U.S. indefinitely under TPS, often vying for other immigration statuses like asylum when available. Many Haitians affected by the new Supreme Court ruling have been in the U.S. in “temporary” status since 2010, many Syrians since 2012. What was once intended as a temporary humanitarian gesture had been hacked into a new de facto permanent immigration status. The new Court ruling allows TPS to return to its original function. Elsewhere, Trump also seeks to end TPS for people, some 1.3 million of them, from 13 out of 17 countries holding the designation when Joe Biden left office. One TPS designation, for Somalis, has been in place for 35 years.
At the same time, Trump deportations, arrests, and detentions do continue to face significant legal and political constraints. This shows how deeply entrenched illegal immigration is in our society, and how easily it can be made into an emotional and political football. The article you are reading now, with its statistics about ICE enforcement growing, might be seen by The Atlantic as a call to arms against fascism. At The American Conservative, many of the same government actions are likely to get a nod of approval. Progressives are driven by the immigration myth that because their great, great grandpa immigrated to the U.S. from some eastern European shtetl that America is obligated forever to allow near-unfettered immigration. Others believe it is the right of any person living under less-than-ideal circumstances anywhere in the world to “have a better life” in the U.S., ignoring that every other nation instead tries to vigorously control its borders and interior with metered immigration.
Lastly, so much of the opposition to Trump’s immigration changes is simplistic Trump hatred. Reasonable Trader Joe-type suburban people are willing to suck tear gas and engage in street fights with armed Federal law enforcement over points of immigration law they had not heard of a few years ago. One resistor was just sentenced to 100 years in jail for trying to murder an officer in the midst of an armed assault on an ICE facility. The mayor of New York, unaware apparently of the importance of the Rule of Law in America, vows to not enforce a recent Supreme Court decision ruling because he feels it is anti-immigrant. These people’s apparent willingness to risk death or imprisonment over the fate of illegal aliens they do not even know is irrational. What they see as authoritarianism is simply the enforcement for the first time of laws on the books for decades. They don’t see immigration change in terms of something that might possibly help America, only in some schadenfreudian calculus that makes it seem Trump is losing a battle against them. Their way of thinking blocks any sensible discussion of immigration, one that ultimately could result in reforms to the law. Policies that might once have been debated on their merits are now interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of “resistance.” It is all America’s loss as chaos replaces democracy in the streets.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
July 21, 2026 // 12 Comments »
Has the State Department gotten the message yet?
Let’s try it by example. You meet a woman at a party. Even while you’ve telling her about your accomplishments she’s looking around the room. She reluctantly gives you her number before disappearing into the crowd. You text her 25 times telling her what a good romantic partner you are and after the first polite non-answers she stops responding. Is your next move to inform her further how essential you are to her life?
If you’re the U.S. Department of State being essentially declared irrelevant by the Trump administration, for the second time no less, you definitely go for it. You plan a rally with only Democratic Congressmembers a year after 1,350 employees were RIFed to declare the “cost is almost impossible to ignore.” You don’t offer any specifics about what that cost is besides “um, diplomacy is good.” You plant media puff pieces headlined “State is looking to rebuild,” and whining that instead of rehiring the RIFed old timers the organization is looking for new blood among former military specifically because they are not like you. You get MSNBC to write an article worrying about a leadership vacuum abroad as ambassador jobs are left unfilled, and then you cite off-the-grid Moldova, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cyprus as critical examples, even when your own career Foreign Service people are left in charge (chargé d’affaires) but deemed inadequate to the jobs by your own words. You get pieces published about how State cannot respond to the Ebola crisis, without any details of what State might actually have to do with responding to a medical crisis that the UN or others are not already doing. You fill your yearly evaluations with talk about process, what you do, like writing papers and coordinating committees and delivering “strong” messages, without a word about outcomes, what you have actually achieved. And then you complain about new evaluations that require employees to be rated on a numerical scale and for supervisors to provide concise answers to written questions about performance to make the evaluations more data driven and less clubby and inside-baseball.
State can’t cite specifics and won’t embrace change. No one in the Trump administration is even listening, but you don’t get it.
Donald Trump appointed a strong Secretary of State, one who has the chance to be the next president and your next boss’ boss, and you miss the significance that he holds multiple important jobs in the administration, you’re just part of his day. A State Department that mattered would not be able to get by with a part-time secretary. You miss that he has created an exoskeleton of chosen advisors around himself, ignoring the bulk of State. The Financial Times writes “18 months into Trump’s second term the Department is not just sidelined; it appears under siege.”
You don’t seem to notice no one outside the Beltway really cares that a large number of embassies abroad have no ambassador (the administration has demonstrated through its actions that ambassadorial vacancies are a far lower priority than previously believed) and that many that do feature political appointees as personal mockery like former athlete Herschel Walker to conduct “diplomacy.” You miss that visa offices you used to run are being closed across Africa. You miss that a influential organization arose dedicated specifically to changing your internal culture (no such group exists to do the same for any other cabinet agency). You fail to see the impact of articles like those headlined “While America fights a war, the State Department is focused on dress codes.” It’s not a laugh line; it’s proof no one cares what you have to do with wars (and which State Department office is in charge of negotiating with Iran? Trick question, none, America’s most important diplomatic task is being done by appointed Special Envoys, as are Ukraine issues). After helping bungle the evacuation of Americans out of Afghanistan, you complain you weren’t given a big enough roll in evacuations prior to the current Iran War.
Why does the Trump administration ghost the State Department? A lot may go back to how State behaved during the first Trump Administration. State basically ignored his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, slow-walking any changes he proposed. In a leaked dissent memo, Foggy Bottom even claimed their boss violated a child soldier conscription law. The State Department legal office prepared another memo for Tillerson warning of the dangers of leaking by State Department employees, which was then promptly leaked to the Washington Post. State also opposed Trump’s next Secretary, Mike Pompeo, until he walled himself off from the institution. One expert said “Pompeo followed the model of most of his predecessors, whether Democrat or Republican, of ‘doing my thing and letting the department do its thing.”’
State personnel took a lead role in the Trump impeachment hearings over Ukraine. Vanity Fair summed it up better than the FSOs leaking across social media: “A hero is born as Ambassador Masha Yovanovitch gives voice to widespread rage at State. ‘I think people are feeling huge pride in Masha,’ says a former ambassador.”
Alongside Yovanovitch, bureaucrat George Kent issued pronouncements against Trump people he never met who ignored his advice. Ambassador Bill Taylor leaked hoarded text messages with Trump political appointees. Taylor’s deputy, David Holmes, appeared deus ex machina in front of the impeachment hearing to claim he somehow overheard both sides of a phone conversation between Trump and his political appointee ambassador. Holmes surreptitiously eavesdropped on a presidential call and dumped it in the Democrats’ lap as red meat. White Houses, Republican or Democrat, cannot function when career officials routinely leak internal deliberations. And nobody likes a snitch.
State’s Foreign Service Officers saw themselves as resistance superheroes who would take down Trump I. The organization flirted with the role even before the election; a 2016 “dissent” was designed to force the then anti-war Trump into conflict in Syria. Then another leaked “dissent” by over 900 State employees strayed close to insubordination opposing Trump’s so-called “Muslim Ban.” State was forced to settle with conservative media outlets that sued for censorship by the Department during the Biden administration. That court decree actually mandated training for State employees on their First Amendment obligations to all of the Americans they are supposed to be serving, despite those employees having already sworn allegiance to the Constitution which includes the First Amendment. Earlier, everyone remembers the Department’s delaying the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails (after helping hide the existence of her private server). The State Department turned a blind eye for years to Secretary Clinton’s nepotism hiring her campaign aide as a make-work State employee. State’s DEI programs, which grew under the Obama and Biden administrations, were declared discriminatory. Maybe the organization is deemed irrelevant by Trump in part because it has betrayed itself to partisan politics.
Institutions survive only if political leaders believe they advance elected policy rather than resist it. Too many of State’s employees exist in an adverbial relationship to the Executive, and are proud of themselves for it. No other Cabinet agency comes even close to that. The State Department’s challenge is not rebuilding its workforce, it is rebuilding the confidence of the elected government it exists to serve.
Of course there will always be some role for the State Department overseas at least, primarily in assistance to American citizens and the few traditional diplomats needed to handle the bureaucratic concierge work and VIP logistics handling State has always been good at. But we are questioning most of the rest. Being left functionally irrelevant is no fun. But it hurts even more when you slowly learn it was in large part your own fault. Face it, if you were Donald Trump, would you trust the State Department?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
December 16, 2024 // 3 Comments »
Originally published on Responsible Statecraft.
If a time traveler from 2024 went to the Middle East of some years ago with the intent of revealing the future, he might not be believed. He’d tell how the stalwart regimes of Quaddafi, Saddam, Pahlavi, and the Assad family were gone, their once stable countries now either in some level of chaos/failed state or under control of Tehran as proxies. Same for Lebanon and Hezbollah. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is gone, Hamas is beholden to Iran for its survival, and Egypt survives as a sort of U.S. ally, saved by American do-nothingism from the democratic possibilities of the Arab Spring.
When asked how all this could have happened, he’d explain with the exception of the Iranian Revolution and the PLO, it mostly had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq, the destruction of a stable (“evil” regime; they’re all evil) regime it turned out was a linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together. In 2003 the U.S. invasion began a process of inviting all comers to take hold of a piece of Iraq and see how far they might get with it. Many of the same ISIS and former al-Qaeda elements that now stand athwart Syria (and will no doubt soon begin fighting each other for control there) almost grabbed the entire country after the U.S.-trained and equipped post-Saddam Iraqi army ran from the field. It was left for the Iranians to take the reigns, fashioning Iraq into a client state after the U.S. cut its losses by cooperating with Iran to wipe out most of ISIS in Iraq and abandoning the Kurds who had foolishly believed the U.S. owed them a nation-state after all this.
American hubris led to the fall of Quaddafi after a U.S.-sponsored revolt of sorts ended up doing little more than creating a failed state in the once stable region. Pundits saw it, as they will wrongly see the fall of Syria, as a blow toward Russian ambitions in the area, not calculating the negative value of unleashing chaos in a region consumed by the Iranian-U.S./Israeli proxy war. As a side note, watching Quaddafi being sodomized on TV after he gave up his nuclear weapons assured the world North Korea would never do the same. But that’s another world away…
Nobody is going to miss the Assad family. Bashar’s father and the family ran Syria since a 1970 coup. Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising. As the ISIS rebels advanced, they took over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime had for decades tortured and killed political prisoners. As with Iraq being left open for anyone who wanted a piece of it and could find a way to hold it, Syria is going to dissolve. Israel already grabbed snippets of territory to round out its border with Syria, and destroyed the Syrian navy, rocket and chemical stores, and much of its air force because in chaos lies possibility if you have not already blown your money, lives, and goodwill in Iraq. Unlike in 2012, when Hezbollah came to Assad’s rescue against insurgents, Hezbollah today has few shock troops available to help. The internecine fighting among revolutionary groups will inevitably result in one of them seeking aid from Iran (who else? Turkey?), who’ll emerge as the victor of sorts in all this with another proxy statelet under its belt. A weakened Russia is out of the picture and appears to have already abandoned its naval base in Syria.
What’s left is to see what America has to say. There are 900 American soldiers on the ground today in Syria, and U.S. warplanes flew bombing missions accidentally in support of Assad against ISIS factions in their battles outside Damascus (strange bedfellows and all that.) Had all this happened a year ago, when Joe Biden was still nominally in charge of the U.S. military, you might have seen some sort of intervention, more of a blocking move really, to keep the ISIS factions from uniting, to limit their success or at least slow it down, and to interdict any Iranian help arriving from the east. Joe Biden is no longer really in charge of anything. He used up his Commander-in-Chief goodwill on two ugly proxy interventions, fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian and of course supporting Israel in Gaza. A year, or more realistically two or three years, ago Joe might have made the case for either direct involvement in Syria or hitching the old bull of America more directly to another proxy, maybe the beleaguered Kurds who still want a piece of Syria for their own. As it stands, Joe lacks the political oomph to do any of that in his final days in office and good riddance. We are in no position (and have no wherewithal) to take advantage of the situation in a positive way. This will be in spite of trying to claim the lead ISIS faction has a nice government on its mind. Any future expedient rehabilitation of the Syrian terrorists is analogous to the disingenuous glow up granted the Ukrainian Nazi militias (U.S. would recognize a Syrian government that comes from inclusive process, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says, uh oh.)
Incoming president Donald Trump has made it clear he wants no part of a war in Syria (and is not too enamored with continuing the one in Ukraine, either.) He tried in Term 1.0 to withdraw American forces from Syria and failed, and will likely try early on in Term 2.0 to pull them out. It would be the right thing to do and likely engender wide support. Americans getting killed in the Middle East for vague reasons is so-2003 and far from the mandate Trump was handed. Syria will sort itself out, with Israel on one side helping keep the fight inside existing borders (or less!) and Iran, if it is clever enough, siding with the ISIS group most likely to emerge as the most powerful in Syria, say Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whom the U.S. considers a terrorist group. If all that fails to come true, expect another failed state in the heart of the Middle East.
Our Middle East time traveler would certainly have some explaining to do.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
December 3, 2024 // 11 Comments »
After Americans overwhelmingly give the White House, Senate, and House (you might as well count the Supreme Court in, too) to one party, which ran with a vow to limit illegal immigration on Day One of its control, what do you do if you’re governor of a liberal state? Why, you ignore the support Trump and the Republicans have in your state and try to work around the coming war on immigration in direct opposition to the Federal government in Washington. Might as well be 1860 all over again.
“Democrats,” says the New York Times, “envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws.” The Times claims some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Trump won, but the preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election. The anti-populist Democratic effort will rely on the work of hundreds of lawyers being recruited to combat Trump policies. Advocacy groups are workshopping cases and recruiting potential plaintiffs to challenge expected regulations, laws, and administrative actions. For example, Democracy Forward, a legal group formed after Trump won in 2016, has a multimillion-dollar bank roll and more than 800 lawyers on call.
Governors Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are mobilizing their Democratic-controlled legislatures to gird their states loins against the future Trump administration. Newsom’s legislature issued a proclamation to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration… bolstering California legal resources to protect civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families.” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker took a more direct stand, stating “You come for my people, you come through me,” apparently referring to migrant families and illegal alien criminals as “his people.” Pritzker and Governor Jared Polis of Colorado announced the formation of a group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey vowed to protect the state’s “citizens and residents.” While New York’s sanctuary city-loving mayor lies low in the face of ethics charges, Governor Kathy Hochul convened the Empire State Freedom Initiative to combat “threats” from the Trump administration, including on immigration. She and Trump-hating Attorney General Letitia James vowed to be warriors in the fight to, in Redstate’s words “stop what the American people just voted for.” Sanctuary cities and other localities across the U.S. have, since Biden took office, freed more than 22,000 criminal migrants wanted by federal immigration authorities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.) The number of criminal aliens freed into the country by sanctuary authorities could potentially be much higher given many times local law enforcement releases criminal migrants before ICE is aware of them and files a detainer notice.
But it is not all bad news. Oklahoma is launching a program, Operation Guardian, to turn over illegal immigrants already in prison to ICE to jump-start Trump’s deportation effort. Governor Kevin Stitt shared with the Washington Examiner plans to expeditiously deport 526 convicted illegal immigrants as soon as Trump takes office. “We want to be the first state that works with President Trump,” Stitt said. “Right now, we have over 500 people incarcerated in Oklahoma who have broken the law, who are criminals, and they also are illegal. We would love to get them out of the state of Oklahoma, out of the country.” The state pays $36,000 to house them each day, according to the governor’s office.
Trump is staffing up for the war. In addition to Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, Trump is set to install an immigration hardliner in a major White House role, a position that does not require Senate confirmation and will enable him to enact Trump’s immigration agenda across the federal government. Tom Homan, who’ll be immigration czar, formerly headed (but was never confirmed as) the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) division responsible for arresting, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. The two men’s prompt installation in senior White House roles, says Politico, among the first personnel selections for Trump 2.0, signals immigration enforcement is a “top priority.”
Immigration is a complex affair in the U.S., with the immigration legal code longer and more complex than the tax code. Miller, Homan and their staffs will need to poke holes in various parts of DHS in general but also look deeper into the bureaucracy. There’s the Department of Labor, which issues work permissions for many visas (such as the H-1B likely of interest to Elon Musk), the Department of Justice, which runs the immigration courts, and the Department of State, which issues the actual visas themselves abroad. Project 2025 specifically calls out the “Diversity” Immigrant Visa lottery, and F and J student visas as in need of an overhaul. “This is the biggest national security vulnerability this nation has seen since 9/11 and we have to fix it,” Homan said.
But initially Trump’s immigration plan will focus on the reported 1.2 million illegal alien criminals loose across the U.S. This population was created by the Biden-Harris administration by allowing migrants to flow across the border without any vetting being done. The plan was especially egregious when dealing with citizens of places like Venezuela, which refuse to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. Next in line may be military-age Chinese males. All of this targeted enforcement is a far cry from the “mass deportations” feared by the Left.
Trump is serious about all this, beyond personnel choices. Trump confirmed on Truth Social he will declare a national emergency and use military assets to help him carry out his deportation plans. Trump also pledged to continue building the U.S.-Mexico border wall, revive the Remain in Mexico program, hire more border patrol agents, and end birthright citizenship for those born on U.S. soil to illegal migrant parents.
“I’ve got to go back and help because every morning I get up, every morning I’m pissed off about what this [Biden] administration did to the most secure border in my lifetime. So I’m going to go back and do what I can to fix it,” said Homan. “I have seen some of these Democratic governors say they are going to stand in the way. They are going to make it hard for us,” he said. “Well, a suggestion. If you are not going to help us, get the hell out of the way. If we can’t get assistance in New York City, we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. We are going to do the job. We are going to do the job without you or with you.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
November 19, 2024 // 5 Comments »
Things don’t often change overnight. Change tends to happen slowly, then fast, in small increments and then big jumps, but rarely does one night matter that much. So it is with the election; American did not change the night it re-elected Donald Trump president but the election of Donald Trump did mark a significant change in America.
There are some quick and easy changes to note. Most polling shops should just close up, they are worthless. The election the polls told us would be down to a skin of our teeth tie ended up a solid blowout, with Republicans taking the presidency, the Senate, and (likely) the House. Polls are seemingly unable, now, after three presidential elections, to dig into the thoughts of Republicans in general and shy Trump voters in the specific. Whatever it is, whatever methodology is challenged by these voters, the polls are of little value. It’s a joke now to remember CNN the night before the election touting some “solid gold” poll showing Trump would lose Iowa.
Identity politics seems to have run its course. Kamala did not run heavily on her multiple identities as a BlackAsianWoman except until near the end, where she switched to her Sunday church accent (it was ripe for an SNL parody except SNL was fully onboard the Harris campaign bus and not willing to risk insulting anyone with an “edgy” parody) and dragged out a tired-looking Barack and a boyish-looking Michele to chew out black dudes for not voting for Kamala (as if being chewed out was a good election strategy.) There was barely a flamboyant gay or trans person in sight on Kamala’s team, unlike the showpiece drag queens Biden attached to himself last round — remember the guy in the red dress with the bright red lipstick and shaved head? And in the end America elected an old, wealthy, white Republican, Semi-Macho, Man. Read the room, Dems.
There’ll be changes in the bureaucracy of Washington, either via Elon Musk, RFK, Jr., or the use of Schedule F. Trump will again fill any Supreme Court vacancies, this time with a Republican Senate unlikely to challenge his choice in confirmation hearings. As in Term One, this may prove to be one of Trump’s most transformational accomplishments.
It’s doubtful the MSM learned anything from its work on 2024, given it did not learn much from its failures in 2016 and 2020, so change is unlikely. Across the mini-spectrum from CNN to The Atlantic, the MSM unabashedly promoted Kamala Harris at every chance, and bashed Trump whenever possible. All pretext was discarded, right down to dear SNL, who gave Kamala free, puffy air time the weekend before the election, a move so grotesquely out of line that parent network NBC was forced by FCC pressure to hand over two minutes of expensive commercial time to Trump to balance things out ahead of a spanking. Even as they were reporting Trump’s victory, CNN and MSNBC kept injecting little digs about him being a fascist and all that. In its obituary for the 2024 campaign, the New York Times wrote “for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact ‘retribution’ against his adversaries.” They still don’t get it.
The media and Democrats face a forced change of view over January 6. The events of that day never mattered much, despite efforts by the media/Dem establishment to replay things in every format possible. “The real America becomes Trump’s America,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “Frankly, the world will say if this man wasn’t disqualified by Jan. 6, which was incredibly influential around the world, then this is not the America that we knew.” Indeed, it was not the America they knew; it was an America more concerned about food prices and interest rates than settling political mud fights. The results of November 5 should be seen, among other things, as a referendum on things like J6. They never mattered except to some elites and their media. Can we hope never to speak of them again?
The election should hopefully change the view of those elites toward the more than half of America who voted for Trump. Unlike what is believed inside the Beltway, the election vindicates Trump’s argument Washington has grown out of touch, that America is a country weary of war, crazed immigration, and political correctness. Can we as a nation now stop being offended so readily and stop calling everything in turn racist or perhaps the new Trump magic word no one understands, fascist? Does every discussion need to include “but what about the trans people?” Maybe they can take care of themselves for awhile. “The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration and his ability to center them in American life,” said Melody Barnes, the executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy.
Elections do indeed matter. The Democrats tried to defeat Donald Trump in ever way possible — by any means necessary — before the election. They impeached him twice, indicted him 88 times, and attempted to murder him twice. Despite efforts to force him off the ballot in multiple states, he stayed on the ballots, aided by a judicial system that in part had not fully drunk the Kool Aid.
One of the most significant things to have changed, or that we now acknowledge as changed, having had the MRI of an election with a clear outcome, is the permanence of Trumpism. There’ll be books and dissertations defining it, but it is clear whatever it is that Trump is, it is a large part of the American body politic now. Not only did Trump capture the usual red states, he flipped some blues and even in areas where he did not win, racked up high scores, 40 percent or more. The polls obviously missed all this, but the reality is there are a lot of Trump supporters –a mandate for change — and it even looks like he won the popular vote.
Trump is indeed about divisions in America, but more about understanding, acknowledging, and profiting from them than creating them himself. He is unlikely to know how to heal them; it is something it is time to learn to live with and govern over, not simply wipe away half the electorate as garbage or deplorables. They are us. There is little need to worry about Trump seeking retribution or misusing the military; much of that was theater, off-the-cuff remarks or attempts to rile up the crowds. Look to his first term and past the crying around J6 and you’ll see how he’ll govern in round two. And get used to it, because Trumpism is now the Republican party platform. The half-assed attempts to seize control of the party by the Never Trumpers and the neocons failed completely. With J.D. Vance as the candidate in 2028, the Trump legacy will dominate modern American politics well beyond that of Reagan. 2016 wasn’t a fluke, 2020 was.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
October 22, 2024 // 12 Comments »
While the new Supreme Court term does not promise anything as life-changing as overturning Roe v. Wade, several cases offer potential change to First Amendment rights, resolution of questions over transrights, and a Second Amendment case which can affect a large number of ghost gun owners.
First Amendment
The question of the First Amendment and porn rights is represented by Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, in which the court will consider a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify a user’s age. That 2023 Texas law requires viewers pass some sort of test showing they are over 18, and also requires porn websites to display health warnings about the psychological risks of adult material (which the porn industry disputes) to include “addiction, impaired development, and increased demand for prostitution and child exploitation.” Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia all have similar age verification laws.
The key point of contention will be whether or not the process “unduly burdens” legitimate adult porn users in pursuit of their First Amendment rights, or whether the state has a “compelling interest” in protecting children such as to require the age verification test. The Free Speech Coalition, representing the adult industry, argues “Of central relevance here, it requires every user, including adults, to submit personally identifying information to access sensitive, intimate content over a medium—the Internet—that poses unique security and privacy concerns,”
At first glance it appears to have all the impact of say clicking through a simple age verification box, but in fact the decision could have sweeping implications for First Amendment protections, looking into the broader question of whether the speech rights of adults outweigh potential harms to minors.
First Amendment protections have often cut across the liberal/conservative divide, and the court has generally ruled in favor of protecting children, and so is likely to uphold the Texas age verification test. Oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
14th Amendment
The court will also look at transrights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court will consider a Tennessee law banning gender transition treatments for minors. The law prohibits health care providers from giving hormones or puberty blockers to “enable a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Two transgender boys and one transgender girl are challenging the law, alongside the Biden-Harris Justice Department and a doctor, claiming it violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
More than 20 states (affecting an estimated 100,000 trans adolescents and teenagers) passed laws halting minors’ access to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or gender-affirming surgery, meaning the justices will in essence decide the constitutionality of gender-affirming care bans for minors using the Tennessee law as an example. The question of “equal protection” arises from the fact that the Tennessee law prohibits the hormones only for one purpose, gender transition, while allowing their use in other cases unrelated to transition. That suggests the law unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of sex.
The Biden-Harris administration challenged Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care. “The laws are inflicting profound harms on transgender adolescents and their families by denying medical treatments that the affected adolescents, their parents, their doctors, and medical experts have all concluded are appropriate and necessary to treat a serious medical condition,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings.
Greg Germain, a law professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek the case will be an interesting test for the Supreme Court. “Allowing the use of drugs for certain conditions and not others does not strike me as violating equal protection. But it’s the ultimate political hot potato these days,” he said. Oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
Second Amendment
Garland v. VanDerStok, asks whether a kit for assembling a gun, or the sum of a set of parts capable of making a gun, is in fact a gun and thus subject to regulation, needing a serial number, its owner requiring a license and background check, etc. The court recently heard oral arguments in the case, a challenge to a regulation by the Biden-Harris Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that places new requirements on previously untraceable “ghost guns” assembled by the buyer.
The untraceable gun parts are typically purchased online; sales surged until an April 2022 ATF rule (part of the Biden-Harris administration’s crack down on ghost guns) amended the definition of a firearm to include self-assembly kits and collections of parts. It also stipulated partially assembled weapons that can easily be converted to full firearms must be registered as guns. Some of the “kits” are largely-assembled weapons, needing only a few holes drilled and lower receivers fitted to slides to function. A quick look online reveals a vibrant market for the goods. Some claim the full kits can be made into a functioning weapon by anyone who can handle an IKEA build; others say it is a very difficult job. If upheld by the court, all of these devices would need to be registered, doing away with ghost guns.
The justices seem inclined to OK Biden-Harris’ ghost gun rule via some creative examples.
“Is it the case that components that can easily be converted into something constitute that thing before they are converted as a matter of ordinary usage?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued in favor of preserving the ghost gun rule. “I’m going to show you: Here’s a blank pad, and here’s a pen,” Alito said. “Is this a grocery list?”
“There are a lot of things you could use those products for to create something other than a grocery list,” Prelogar replied, prompting Alito to try another example.
“If I show you, I put out on a counter some eggs, some chopped up ham, some chopped up pepper and onions, is that a western omelet?” Alito asked.
Prelogar again said no, because even that collection of ingredients could be used to make something else, while the parts kits at issue in the case “have no other conceivable use” beyond making a firearm.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked “Would your answer change if you ordered it from Hello Fresh, and you got a kit, and it was like turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?” Barrett asked.
“We would recognize that for what it is,” Prelogar responded. “It doesn’t stretch plain English to say I bought omelets at the store, if you bought all of the ingredients that were intended and designed to make them.” Prelogar did say the Hello Fresh example was a better comparison, since the kit is intended to be made into chili and nothing else.
More than base skepticism, Barrett’s rebuttal to Alito, says Politico, was “notable because she was one of two conservative justices who joined with the three liberal justices last year to allow the ghost gun rule to take effect despite lower-court rulings that put it on hold on the grounds that it exceeded the authority Congress granted to federal officials in the Gun Control Act of 1968.”
Justice Roberts joined in trying to understand.
“Just what is the purpose of selling a receiver without the holes drilled in it?” the chief justice asked.
“Well, just like some individuals enjoy, like, working on their car every weekend, some individuals want to construct their own firearm,” the attorney for the ghost gun industry responded.
“Well, I mean, drilling a hole or two, I would think, doesn’t give the same sort of reward that you get from working on your car on the weekends,” the chief retorted.
Also weighing on the justices’ minds were the number of crimes committed with ghost guns, with the ATF reporting a 1000% increase between 2017 and 2021. And thus “by the end of arguments, you could practically hear the 6–3 majority [in favor of registering ghost guns] clicking into place,” wrote Slate.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
October 1, 2024 // 14 Comments »
If there is a next debate (you say no, but it depends on whether you’re ahead or behind in a month, and a fair choice of moderators being offered) it won’t be for a few weeks or so, leaving you, Trump, plenty of time to tidy up some of the missed opportunities from the first debate. Try some of these ideas. They’ll work on the trail, too.
For any of Kamala’s new programs under her “opportunity economy,” such as tax cuts for small businesses and a measly $25k for first-time home buyers (the average house costs $412k, so Kamala’s offer is only about half of the down payment. But try things in California where the average housing cost is $793k) punch back with “You’ve had three years, why haven’t you just done it?” and follow-up with “And how are you going to pay for that, with tax increases on the middle class?”
One of your most effective points in the first debate was in your closing statement, when you asked Kamala rhetorically why she did not initiate any of her special programs as Vice President. The question should next time be aimed directly at her, as it puts her in a real bind; either she can admit as VP she did very little and had power enough to do even less, or throw Joe under the bus and claim he stymied her initiatives. It is win-win for you. In addition, the question drives home the larger point of tying Kamala to the Biden administration. Harris needs badly to show something to the public to give them a reason to think she would be different than the last four years. She is desperate not to run as the pseudo-incumbent, all that “turn the page” and call for change stuff she borrows from Obama 2008, and you should be equally desperate to hold her to what has and has not taken place these last four years. Reminded the public the Biden-Harris administration created all the major issues Harris raised as problems (economy, immigration) during the debate.
On the economy, remind people food prices rose 5.3 percent under your administration while in Biden’s first three years food prices increased, conservatively, by 20.3 percent.
Almost 50 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Biden-Harris took office in January 2021. It’s true; the Census Bureau released an update earlier this month on income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States. Income-wise many Americans were still not quite better off than they were in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, nor necessarily even than they were in 2020. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed you by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s one of the main reasons why she’s tied and not ahead of you in the race overall.
Create a simple app that calculates what groceries would have cost four years ago. People plug in their current register tape numbers and are told what a similar basket of goods would have cost under your administration. It actually looks like someone had once done most of the heavy lifting on this one already. One of your official Super PACs launched a website (now defunct) named “Biden-Mart” that let users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration. Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, featured an interactive grocery checklist encouraging users to “check off the items… to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.” There were over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products, and a variety of different fruits and vegetables. For example, a two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk, and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a killer 57.11 percent increase from the $19.14 it cost during your administration. Egg prices remain 72 percent higher today than when Biden entered office in early 2021. Biden-Mart used data mostly from the United States Department of Agriculture so it should be relatively quick to reconstruct the app.
And build a separate app that calculates gas and mortgage costs. It will remind people during your first three years in office, food prices rose by 5.3 percent as wages soared past them at 12.7 percent growth. Wages have not kept up with food prices during Biden-Harris. It is one thing to talk about inflation as this percentage or that, quite another to reach into a voter’s pantry and hit them with a specific dollar amount. As the Harris-favoring New York Times wrote “Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy.” Harris word-checks “freedom” with abandon, but never mentions freedom from debt, from living paycheck-to-paycheck because of inflationary practices under Biden-Harris. Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote economists point to as the cause of inflation — the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Remind the people they deserve better.
The Biden-Harris administration admitted some 21 million aliens, dramatically more than under the Vietnam War evacuation and the Mariel Boatlift combined. Will you Kamala admit another 21 million under a Harris administration? Talk about what that number means; in 2021, there were around only 3.66 million live births in the United States.
Focus on narrative, personal stories about ordinary Americans unfairly burdened by unchecked migration. Never mind the dogs and cats, Springfield, Ohio, a semi-rural town of only some 60,000 people, ended up playing host to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They overwhelmed the city’s medical and social services systems to the point where the governor had to send in state troopers and millions of dollars as a palliative. Still the poverty rate for the city is 22.7 percent, well-above the state average of 13.4 percent. Fatal car accidents in Springfield increased four-fold last year, due to a surge of Haitian migrants unfamiliar with U.S. driving rules.
Or the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that employ migrant children. Talk about individual victims of migrant street crime in New York City, showing photos of a Midtown overtaken by homeless and drug users. The latter ties also in Harris’ time as a prosecutor and Attorney General in California where, same as in New York, many criminals who should have been taken off the street were given bail or simply released in the wake of “woke” law enforcement post-Floyd.
Whenever possible, follow Ronald Reagan, who at the close of his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, asked simply “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” It is a rare American who will be able to answer unequivocally yes. The ones who say “no” are likely to be among middle-of-the-roaders who can swing your way in November.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
September 19, 2024 // 18 Comments »
We’ve reached the place in America where people can believe Trump taking a photo is more disgraceful than the Biden-Harris administration getting a son killed on a badly conceived final day in Saigon.
It began when Donald Trump was invited to attend a wreath-laying ceremony in honor of the 13 American service members who were killed as a result of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago August. During the visit, the former president was asked to take pictures with the family of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover—one of the service members killed in the 2021 suicide bombing at Abbey Gate outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan—at his gravesite. Democrats then used that photo to attack Trump, with some claiming he broke federal law simply by being present, and that he had disrespected the dead simply by his presence.
Kamala Harris led the hand-wringing, saying “As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation. It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff. Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.”
As for exploitation, turn next to pearl-clutching The New York Times, who sent a reporter to record the names of those buried near where the Trump photo alongside the 13 Gold Star families was taken and then find their families to seek an anti-Trump quote. As their way of honoring the dead, the Times called out Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, an eight-tour combat vet who died by suicide in 2020, and whose headstone inadvertently appeared in the photos of Trump with the Gold Star families. The Times tracked down sister Michele who said only “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.” So much for reptilian journalism.
“When you take a photo of your loved one then other headstones are gonna be present as well,” Senator and veteran Tom Cotton (R-AR) said. “Frankly, I think it’s very disappointing that The New York Times went and found a family whose headstone was featured in that photograph of another Gold Star family and then went to them to try to embarrass the Gold Star families who wanted President Trump there.”
We’re sure the family was honored to have Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano brought into all this by the Times, and was pleased the Times did not bother to talk about the epidemic of solder suicides which plague our best. Nope, Marckesano was only worth exploiting to the point where one of his relatives might backhandedly criticize Trump. He was used again by a heartless media strung out on TDS. Bonus: The New York Times scolding not just Trump, but all those who appeared in the picture taken in Section 60. That included several Gold Star family members.
Yet here is a photo of Joe Biden at Arlington with a grieving Gold Star relative, in Section 60, with plenty of names visible on adjacent headstones. No evidence The New York Times contacted any of their relatives. Is it no less exploitive and political? What was its intent if not to add to the propaganda and political noise that Joe Biden cares about the troops’ deaths? Joe Biden also used shots of Arlington National Cemetery and flag-draped caskets in a recent political ad. You can even see the names on the gravestones in the video with the caption reading “Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about service to his country.” Most of the ad text is Biden “quoting” President Trump degrading military service based on unknown sources from debunked reporting by liberal tabloids. Here’s another. FYI: Joe Biden depended on the same kind of medical deferments Trump did to stay out of the military during the Vietnam war. Harris never served and her running mate misrepresented his National Guard experience.
Arlington National Cemetery is a difficult place to visit. On the one hand signs admonish visitors to show respect to the dead of so many wars while on the other hand hordes of sweat-drippy tourists race from one famous grave site to another to the Tomb of the Unknowns as if the place was the Disneyworld of Death. It is all solemn as a cheerleader, and yes, many photos are taken of headstones with names visible, the fallen men and women treated as props for selfies to show back home. And here we are outside the Tomb! Looks just like on the tee vee! is the next shot.
All this drives home the point Arlington exists for many purposes, many ends. But here is one rarely spoken of: it is a place for Commanders-in-Chief to confront the results of their decisions. They all made the pilgrimage at some point, the warmongers Bush and Obama, game faces on. This stands in for neither man ever sweating in body armor in the Iraqi summer sun, or wincing when a bullet flew too close, or watching someone now in Section 60 die in their lap.
Biden and Harris were not at Arlington to meet the 13 Gold Star families because they were afraid. They stood aside from those men and women as they stood aside from their decision to use those men and women in a terrible war which they now want us to forget. Biden in particular bears a heavy burden, having sponsored the war for eight years as Obama’s vice president and then continuing to do so under his own administration. Now, for Harris to rake Trump over the coals for posing for some photos instead of taking responsibility for the dead in the those photos tells you much about the woman, crying exploitation while shirking the responsibility of her own exploitation of those young lives.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
September 3, 2024 // 16 Comments »
House Republicans released a little-noticed 291-page impeachment report that should have exploded over the Democratic National Convention like an October Surprise, but in the end fizzled like a wet July 4th sparkler. The facts are there, largely thanks to Hunter’s laptop, but the drive to impeach a lame lame duck president seems to have lost its moment. The depth of the report and the impeachable offenses it delineates does add some interesting background as to why Joe Biden might have dropped out of the presidential race, however. It looks like he ducked a helluva punch.
The impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden found he committed several “impeachable offenses,” according to a report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. Republicans have been investigating Biden for over two years, subpoenaing witnesses and riffing through documents pertaining to his family business. And of course, that laptop of Hunter’s.
— The report shows Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich himself and his family. Among other aspects of this conspiracy, the Biden family and their business associates received tens of millions of dollars from foreign interests by leading those interests to believe they would provide them “access to and influence with the Vice President.” (Many of these transactions were detailed previously by TAC.)
— As Vice President, Joe Biden attended dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and spoke to them by phone, often being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden. For example, in 2014, Vice President Biden attended a dinner for Hunter Biden with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, whose husband was the former mayor of Moscow. Following the dinner, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a front company created by Hunter Biden. Then, months later, as Hunter Biden and his business associates continued to solicit more money from Baturina, Vice President Biden participated in a phone call where he told Baturina, “you be good to my boy.” In April 2014, a Kazakhstani oligarch wired $142,300 — the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sportscar — to a bank account used by Hunter. Biden and his business associates leveraged the Vice President’s political power to obtain millions of dollars from a corrupt Romanian businessman. The report is chock full of such specific examples.
— Several witnesses testified Hunter Biden involved his father in business dealings with Romanian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian companies, resulting in $27 million flowing to the Biden family. For example, around 2014, Hunter Biden explored a joint venture with Chinese businessman Henry Zhao and his company, Harvest Fund Management, “a $300 billion Chinese financial services company closely connected to the Chinese Communist Party.” When it appeared the deal was not going through, he called his father for assistance. Similarly, while Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma from 2014 to 2019, he utilized his father’s position to relieve pressure the company was under from a government investigation. In doing so, Vice President Biden changed U.S. policy in order to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee until Ukraine stopped the investigation into the company affiliated with Hunter Biden.
— After leaving office, Joe Biden and his family continued their financial relationships with corrupt Chinese businessmen who would send the Biden’s millions of dollars. Some of the money was laundered through one of Hunter’s front companies and returned “clean” in part to Chinese entities in the U.S.
— The Biden family “leveraged Joe’s positions of public trust” to obtain over $8 million in loans from Democratic benefactors. Millions of dollars in loans have not been repaid and the paperwork supporting many of the loans does not exist.
— Biden knowingly participated in this conspiracy. It is “inconceivable” Biden did not understand he was enriching his family by abusing his office.
— The evidence also establishes the Biden family went to “great lengths” to conceal the conspiracy. Foreign money was transmitted to the Biden’s through complicated financial transactions. The Biden family laundered funds through intermediate entities including Joe’s brother Jim and broke up large transactions into numerous smaller transactions. “Substantial efforts were made to hide Biden’s involvement in his family’s business activities,” the report stated. While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim did not provide any evidence to support this claim.
— The report concluded “President Biden’s participation in this conspiracy to enrich his family constitutes impeachable conduct. By monetizing the Vice Presidency for his family’s benefit, he abused his office of public trust, placing the welfare of his family ahead of the welfare of the United States. He also put foreign interests ahead of the interests of the American people… Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family. Not one of these transactions would have occurred, but for Joe Biden’s official position in the United States government. This pattern of conduct ensured his family—who provided no legitimate services—lived a lavish lifestyle. The evidence uncovered in the Committees’ impeachment inquiry reflects a family selling the ‘Biden brand’ around the world with President Biden—the ‘big guy’—swooping in to seal the deal on speaker phones or in private dinners.”
The House Republican report also cites Joe for illegally retaining classified documents at his home and other locations and states under Biden’s presidential tenure, the FBI and the Department of Justice afforded “special treatment” to Hunter Biden regarding his criminal investigations. The FBI and DOJ allegedly “slow-walked” the investigation, interfered with routine investigative procedures and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious felony charges to benefit Hunter. The White House refuted the allegations, and called the report a “failed stunt.”
This was all supposed to be a bombshell, dropping on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. The problem was it was no longer Joe Biden’s convention — he had been removed from running for president via a coup within the Democratic party, leaving the report to fall on deaf ears. But before one gets too cynical over the timing of this report, remember the circumstances surrounding the initial report on Hunter Biden’s laptop (the contents of which formed the backbone of these conclusions.)
In Hunter’s case the laptop emails were buried by the establishment media. This power arose from interplay between the American intelligence services and corporate-media figures, working for the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party since 2016. That interplay came to maturity in 2020.
As the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files contained potential evidence of a pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter dutifully published by Politico claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers said their national-security experience made them “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was an act of evil brilliance. It played off prejudices cultivated during 2016 that the Russians manipulated American elections. In fact, most of the signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC-server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. Among the establishment, the meme quickly became into “the laptop is fake.”
The report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees shows once and for all there was no fake, and that had the information on the laptop been looked into when it was first released on the cusp of the 2020 election, those election results would have been very different. As it is, Joe Biden and his son Hunter cheated the hangman. Joe is a lame duck, Hunter a forgotten tragic vaudeville act. The report, which should have set Washington on its ear, instead will fade into obscurity. Joe Biden not only cheated on his country and made millions, he got away with it all. Not a bad trade for giving up on an election he was sure to lose anyway.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 15, 2024 // 15 Comments »
The Democrats continue to run to course — manipulating — most recently, Joe Biden out of the presidential race. Their history for the last decade has been one of manipulation and dirty tricks, false promises and anti-democratic actions. They campaign claiming Trump is out to destroy democracy when at the same time can’t seem to find enough anti-democratic ways to behave themselves.
Dirty tricks have long been a part of politics, but in the last decade the Democrats have turned the machine up to eleven. The year 2015 was a pivotal one in that it presented to the American people a massive plot to undermine a candidate for president based solely on direct lies. Russiagate was comprehensive in scope, touching not only on candidate Trump but also on his advisors and key staff. The plot was so outrageous — Trump was an actual Russian agent, a living Manchurian candidate — that it had to be true. The MSM certainly believed it. Indeed, the MSM’s hand-in-glove cooperation with the Democrats is another key feature of the last decades’ evil shenanigans. Had the Democrats had a straight-forward enough candidate to run against Trump (Hillary dragged way too much baggage around with her to beat a Trump in the process of creating a movement with MAGA, never mind winning an election.)
Clinton was not necessarily the only loser in 2016. “The seeds,” writes the New York Times, “of President Biden’s reaction to the Democratic Party’s 2024 crisis of confidence in him were planted in that manipulation to send her to the head of the ticket. It was in October 2015 when Biden, then vice president, announced in the White House Rose Garden that he would not run against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.” What was left unsaid was the manipulation applied to Biden to not take his case to the people but instead allow President Obama, Clinton and others in the Obama camp to force him to the sidelines. He was manipulated into not running to clear the path for Hillary, Bernie’s surprising showing not planned nor withstanding. He’d be dealt with by a similar process, leaving behind a very successful run only to be humiliated at the Convention as a has-been. The anti-democratic message to both men was clear: tonight ain’t your night, kid, the boys from Chicago got the fix in. Yer gonna have to take da’ dive.
Trump’s 2016 win was not the end of the Democrats’ manipulation and dirty tricks, simply the beginning of another phase. In addition to the remnants of the whole extended Russiagate plot, Trump faced down the Emoluments Clause, two impeachments, claims Trump gave away intelligence info to Putin in Helsinki hoax, the Putin is Trump’s spy handler hoax and Trump has been an agent since the 1980s hoax, and a bizarre celebrity Twitter contest about the best way to decapitate Trump (a full list here.) The intent was to try and drive Trump from office either indirectly by humiliating him or directly, by claiming he was mentally ill and the 25th Amendment needed to be invoked. If he could not be actually removed from office, the manipulations were hoped to neuter the president politically even as he still sat in the Oval Office. That they all failed was not for a lack of trying on the part of the Democrats.
If the 2024 presidential campaign started the day Trump left office in January 2021, so did the Democratic manipulation campaign against him, this round built on lawfare, the manipulation of actual laws to force Trump into court, convict him as a felon, maybe bankrupt him, certainly embarrass him, all in hopes of driving him from the race or at a minimum weaken his hold on large numbers of voters. Though several cases will likely drag on through the election, the cases concluded accomplished none of their goals. If anything, Trump the martyr is stronger as a candidate than ever before. What matters here is the ongoing pattern of dirty tricks and manipulations, not whether they succeed, or, like the impeachments and the trials, fail in their larger political purposes.
The 2020 election between Trump and Biden was close, so close that the appearance of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden which showed both Hunter and Joe tangled up in foreign money could have swung the race. Democrats again responded with a manipulation, another full-on falsehood, with 52 Deep State personnel writing an open letter claiming the laptop was likely Russian disinformation designed to discredit Biden and smear the tail end of the campaign. With MSM help as direct as canceling Twitter accounts which sought to tell the truth, to the usual prime time pundits barking in unison about the false nature of the laptop, what would have been a turning point in the campaign was squashed.
The next Manipulation Grande started in the 2020 campaign, hiding a very old and senile Joe Biden from voters so they did not know what kind of man they were actually voting for. In the 2020 campaign the broad excuse was Covid, relegating Biden to a campaign by TV out of his basement. It was actually a good gimmick for a weary nation, and no one suspected it was all flim-flam to hide Biden’s growing dementia. Once past the victorious 2020 campaign, the MSM was enlisted to hide Biden’s age-related dilemmas from the public through editing, selective camera angles, denials, and just plain old falsehoods. Biden literally tripped down the stairs of Air Force One several times without much comment from the pundits; why should they comment, they were in on the game, ignoring the real Biden unscripted at events all over the country.
In fighting for his political life, Biden cited the “fact” that he won the primaries for the 2024 election. Question is, who did people vote for, a spry, older person or a manipulated image of an unhealthy person? Biden cited many reasons for remaining in the race, placing particular emphasis on the argument that he was the choice of Democratic primary voters, and that it would be wrong to disregard their voice. “The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party. Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?” Biden wrote. “It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters – and the voters alone – decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.” Driving the point home, Biden painted his stand as critical to his larger defense of American democracy. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” Then he did because he was told to do so by his master’s voice.
But some have questioned whether Democratic voters truly did place their trust in some version of Biden, or whether the choice was instead made for them. “We never had a real primary process. We never had a real debate in this country,” said one observer. “Everybody decided, for their own political reasons, that the best option was to shut down dissent, shut off choice, and force the public into this choice of an election they never wanted any part of.” That’s called manipulation.
What will happen to Kamala and what will be her cooked up October Surprise? And whither the party, likely to lose in 2024 despite a decade of failed manipulations devoted to winning? Will they play fair next round?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 12, 2024 // 11 Comments »
Immigration ranks as one of the top three issues affecting voter opinion (Biden’s age was number 1, immigration number 2, and inflation/economy in third place.) There’s little more Biden can do about number 1, and little he seems to want to do about number 3, but on immigration Joe will leave quite a record for Kamala Harris (assuming she’s the candidate) to drag into November.
The problem is Joe Biden was obsessed with immigration. He was obsessed with finding new ways to bring more migrants to the U.S. — some tricks resulted in tens of thousands of people entering, others just a few hundred. The numbers seem to matter less than the process. Such is obsession. Harris seems not to share his zeal, but inherits it as a legacy (and an electoral problem) just the same.
Harris’ problem began on the southern border, where practically concurrent with taking office, Joe threw open the doors. The Trump campaign is already releasing ads tying Harris to Biden’s policies there. The ad claims “If you ever wondered how Joe Biden could get the border so screwed up. Remember, he had help,” a narrator reads. “Here’s Biden appointing Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration. And here are a record number of illegal immigrants.”
Under the Obama administration the standard was about 1,000 attempted crossings a day. By the time the Trump administration ended, the U.S. was deporting more people than were illegally coming into the country. In less than a month under Biden, the number of people illegally coming into the country shot up to more than 6,000 per day. Even with Biden’s most recent executive order cutting back on immigration, up to 2,500 crossings are still allowed each day. For the past three years, Biden policy allowed nearly 6,000 asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced an average 1 million immigrants every 200-odd days, a significant number given otherwise only about 1 million legal green card–type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year.
Some 2.5 million joined the illegal population under Obama, actually slightly less than under George W. Bush. Biden broke those records in about his first 18 months in office with the wide-open southern border. More than 8 million migrants have entered the U.S. along the southern border since Biden took office in January 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. That Harris was ostensibly in charge of border affairs does not help her at all; it gives her some sort of ownership and limits any behind-the-scenes denials. She seems at minimum sympathetic; in 2021, she visited the southern border to say “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
In mid-June Biden-Harris announced a new amnesty policy lifting the threat of deportation for tens of thousands of illegal aliens married to U.S. citizens. Biden (to be fair, it was likely almost 100 percent his idea) promoted the new program at a White House event to celebrate the Obama-era “dreamers” directive that offered deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants. The policy allows roughly 490,000 spouses of U.S. citizens an opportunity to apply for a “parole in place” program, which would shield them from deportations and offer work permits if they have lived in the country illegally for at least 10 years. The new policy also removes a legal barrier to allow qualifying immigrants to apply for permanent residency and eventually, U.S. citizenship. It’s a privilege previously reserved solely for spouses of U.S. military members. Those newly-eligible will have three years to apply for citizenship, in time for the 2028 elections if Harris were to get that far.
To invoke some Obama-love, Biden announced another policy on the 12th Anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA; “Dreamers”) making recipients of the program eligible for visas, rather than the temporary work authorization they currently receive under the Obama executive order. Getting a visa potentially legalizes the DACAs and sets them up for a shot at permanent residence and then U.S. citizenship. This move could affect as many as 530,110 active DACA holders. This number does not include the pending applications that cannot be processed due to ongoing litigation. As of December 2023, estimates are that the eligible DACA population to be 1,161,000 were the program to resume in full under Harris.
One way to cut back on deportations is to hamstring the parts of the U.S. government involved in uncovering information that could lead to deportation, in this case with unaccompanied minors. The Department of Health and Human Services is no longer inquiring about the criminal histories of migrant teens in its care. A senior HHS official overseeing the program for solo child migrants told the House Judiciary Committee that even though agency officials contact the embassy of whichever country unaccompanied children hail from, they do not request any criminal records. They do verify date of birth, the child’s birth certificate, and whether the “child” is suspected of being an adult. The result is more than 400,000 have been released into the U.S. in the last few years, with 70 percent of that group aged 15 or older and male. This all raises grave concerns about Central and South American gang members taking up residence in the U.S. via this loophole. The gangs once established won’t be going away, something a President Harris would have to answer for.
There’s also some small scale stuff that help illustrate the whole. One U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in an unnamed airport did not have an effective process for detaining and removing inadmissible travelers. In a two year period CBP released at least 383 inadmissible travelers from custody; 44 percent of the travelers did not return for their removal flights and disappeared into the United States. Overnight detention requests for inadmissible travelers before removal flights are denied because of staffing and bed space limitations. In addition, CBP does not have enough overtime funds to pay officers to detain inadmissible travelers at the airport after operating hours. CBP also cited difficulties transferring inadmissible travelers to another airport because they must receive permission from the airline involved.
There’s also the so-called “Dark Brandon” scenario, where lame duck Biden, freed from election-related restraints, makes more immigration changes by executive order for Kamala to take responsibility for. Either way, Biden was a terrible president on immigration issues and some Democrat is going to have to pay for it.
Biden (and by extension, Harris) is appealing to a very small part of the base. Over two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his handling of the border. Even Hispanic voters are not swayed by Biden. A recent poll showed a large number of Hispanic people favor the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The CBS News/YouGov poll found 53 percent of registered Hispanic voters favor the government starting “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally,” a program already proposed by Donald Trump.
Candidate Harris faces the worst of two worlds. As the sitting Vice President she is expected to support Biden’s (unpopular) policies. As a Candidate she must drag those policies forward, and must limit ideas of her own or face calls of disloyalty from the party base. Indeed, a Politico article on policy differences between Biden and Harris failed to even mention immigration. Immigration is probably the most significant of those double-edged issues, but other divisive topics, from Ukraine to Gaza, suggest hers will not be an easy road.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 1, 2024 // 30 Comments »
The big problem for Joe Biden is two problems: the first is about his age and ability to be president and the second, getting around the fact the White House, abetted by the MSM, has been lying for years ago about the first problem.
Some 85 percent of voters think Biden is too old to be president. That massive number of Americans must include almost everyone who has cared for an aging relative and knows the signs: mixed up words, forgotten details, the long, empty stares where conversation used to be. Joe Biden is a sick man by any of those standards. His public speaking is disjointed, punctuated by long pauses, lost trains of thought, and funny-not-funny “gaffes” like calling Ukraine’s Zelensky “President Putin” at the NATO summit. Whether is it Parkinson’s disease, early onset dementia or full-blown Alzheimer’s, Biden has something very serious wrong with him that leaves him incapable of doing the most difficult job in the world well. His debate performance and other stumbles are symbols of a deteriorating man, not signs of a bad night, with the real worry focused on the next four years, not the previous two weeks. Biden’s boast he faces a cognitive test every day is belied by the results of that test: endless war in the Ukraine with no path to victory, endless war in Gaza where the Israel mocks Biden’s red lines, and then the domestic issues of immigration and the economy, with intransient inflation eating away at paychecks. If those things are the test, Biden fails.
As with the Israelis, there is also the problem of Biden appearing weak on the world stage, where the results are harder to judge because the timelines for things like Chinese hegemony are so long and obtuse. Yet one wonders how seriously our adversaries (and friends) take a guy who comes across as having set aside solid foods a few months ago. Those abroad must be like those domestically, who wonder in any given setting which version of Joe they’ll get — the angry, Bad Uncle Joe of the State of the Union, the pretty normal scripted Good Uncle Joe, or the zombie-stare, off-script Joe, as seen in his debate with Donald Trump.
Like many who follow politics closely, I was not surprised by Biden’s debate performance, and on first glance thought it just mediocre, certainly not cause for a crisis. But that’s because I consume too much alternate media, and have seen the endless string of viral clips of Biden falling down the main stairs of Air Force One (and being reassigned to the shorter crew stairs in response.) I’ve seen the memes and loops of his many gaffes, and the awkwardly long pauses where Joe just drifts off when he is no longer in the spotlight or next to Jill. So the debate was little surprise to me. But for those whose media diet is slim, and whose images of Biden were relegated to highly edited MSM clips, they saw Biden in-the-real for the first time and it shocked the hell out of them. It was clear what so many have said before to little belief: the Emperor has no clothes on.
The last of which brings us to Biden Problem Two, the fact that the White House, Democratic Party and Biden himself have been, abetted by the MSM, lying to us for years about the condition of first Candidate Biden and then President Biden. We now can surmise the 2020 campaign from his basement by Biden, supposedly run that way because of Covid, was actually a subterfuge, a way to spoon feed good images and sound bites of Biden to the public and hide his ongoing condition. Clever propaganda, like Franklin Roosevelt appearing to “stand” at public events when in fact in private he was wheelchair-bound due to polio.
Biden’s problem is not with the undecided voters, it is with his Democratic base. How can they believe him after such malarkey? Indeed, it was only a week before the debate that the White House was claiming video of Biden wandering off and/or falling down was the result of nefarious editing and visual trickery (that line of argument seems to have dissipated quickly post-debate.) Now it is a dead solid accepted fact that Biden is senile, and Democrats are paralyzed. No one is listening to anything except questions about Biden’s ability and why this was hidden from the public.
You’ll hear no mea culpa from the MSM about remaining quiet over what they knew from their own close contact with the President, as they remained silent after lying about Russiagate and Hunter’s not-Russian laptop. They saw the real Joe Biden and instead of informing the American people, acted as agents of the Democratic party to help cover things up. In an era where everything about Trump is fair game and then some (if there’s no lead story today make one up!) the media was silent about Joe. Why will anyone believe them about anything Biden-related going forward? This is the same MSM which for four years of Trump bleated emptily about the 25th amendment and how Trump was unstable, unqualified, and mentally ill.
That leaves the Democrats in a dilly of a pickle. If they can’t force Biden to retire voluntarily, they — including Kamala — carry all of the baggage above with them into November, and likely lose to convicted felon Donald Trump, who looks put together in comparison. Trump was supposed to be the one a little crazy, but what happens when the Situation Room phone rings at 3 a.m. and Biden confuses Zelensky with Putin again? It appears the Democratic party, which has accused Trump of being anti-democracy, could end up running a candidate who never won a primary, removing the loser via some back room process as transparent as chocolate pudding. Remember all the moaning about the many political and Constitutional crisis Trump was to unleash? Here’s a real one.
And what of a potential second term for Biden? Second term presidents are lame ducks by definition, and Biden, lacking the confidence of his own party and own party Congressmen, is unlikely to get much done. Any trust built up over his first four years in office is now damaged by what may be seen as a betrayal. The calls for the 25th Amendment and for Biden to retire won’t stop once the election is over; you can count on Republicans and maybe even some Democrats to keep them alive throughout a second term.
Maybe it will be easier than that. Instead of a mediocre post-NATO press conference, perhaps Biden will really screw something up, soon, and make it easy for Dems to decide. And time is not on their side. It is wrong politically and morally to prolong Biden’s agony, and the party’s. Like a shelter dog who has bitten his handlers just one time too many, the party faces the decision on how best to put down Joe Biden.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
July 31, 2024 // 8 Comments »
I was only a little surprised by Biden’s debate performance, and on first glance thought it just mediocre, certainly not cause for a crisis. But that’s because I consume too much alternate media, and had seen the endless string of viral clips of Biden falling down the main stairs of Air Force One (and being reassigned to the shorter crew stairs in response.) I’ve seen the memes and loops of his many gaffes, and the awkwardly long pauses where Joe just drifted off when he is no longer next to puppet master Jill to cue him. So the debate was little surprise to me. But for those whose media diet is slim, and whose images of Biden were relegated to highly edited MSM clips, many saw Biden in-the-real for the first time and it shocked the hell out of them. It was clear what many had said before to little belief: the Emperor had no clothes.
Some 85 percent of voters thought Biden was too frail to be president. That massive number of Americans must include almost everyone who has cared for an aging relative and knows the signs: mixed up words, forgotten details, the long, empty stares where conversation used to be. His debate performance and other stumbles were symbols of a deteriorating man, not signs of a bad night. Biden’s boast he faced a cognitive test every day was belied by the results: endless war in the Ukraine with no path to victory, endless war in Gaza where the Israel mocks Biden’s red lines, and the economy, with intransient inflation eating away at paychecks. Biden failed at the real meat of the job, which is not being discussed, never mind just the bad optics. His own stubbornness and the games played around him weakened America at home and left it exposed and vulnerable to forces abroad.
Which brings us to Biden Problem Two, actually a Kamala problem, the fact that the White House, Democratic Party and Joe himself have been, abetted by the MSM, lying to us for years about the condition of first Candidate Biden and then President Biden. We now can surmise the 2020 campaign from his basement by Biden, supposedly run that way because of Covid, was actually a subterfuge, a way to spoon feed good images and sound bites of Biden to the public and hide his ongoing condition. Clever propaganda, like Franklin Roosevelt appearing to “stand” at public events when in fact in private he was wheelchair-bound due to polio. The Wall Street Journal reports congressional leaders were worried about Biden’s mental state back in 2021. Democrats covered it up. That’s who Kamala is beholden to, leaving the Democratic base to consist of Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries.
Kamala’s problem is not with the undecided voters, it is with Democratic voters. How can they believe her after such malarkey? Indeed, it was only a week before the debate the White House was claiming video of Biden wandering off and/or falling down was the result of nefarious editing and visual trickery (that line of argument dissipated quickly post-debate.) Then it became a dead solid accepted fact that Biden was senile, and Democrats were paralyzed. No one listened to anything except questions about Biden’s ability. No one seemed to ask but likely thought about why this was hidden from the public. Kamala begins her campaign shouting into the wind “Believe me!” Why should anyone? Did she not see Biden’s deterioration and keep silent about it? Meanwhile, the Democratic party, which has accused Trump of being anti-democracy, is running a candidate who never won a primary, removing the loser via some back room process as transparent as chocolate pudding. Remember all the moaning about the many political and Constitutional crisis Trump was to unleash? Here’s a real one.
You’ll hear no mea culpa from the MSM about remaining quiet over what they knew from their own close contact with the President, as they remained silent after lying about Russiagate and Hunter’s not-Russian laptop. They saw the real Joe Biden and instead of informing the American people, acted as agents of the Democratic party to help cover things up. In an era where everything about Trump is fair game and then some (if there’s no lead story today make one up!) the media was silent about Joe. This is the same MSM which for four years of Trump bleated emptily about the 25th amendment and how Trump was unstable, unqualified, and mentally ill.
To make things worse, the MSM pivoted twice in a two week span, jumping on Biden to quit the race like school cafeteria bullies (Bill Maher called them “Mean Girls who smelled blood in the water”) and then to spew out funereal-like dirges about Biden the statesman when he did drop out (Biden clung to the Resolute desk like a Titanic survivor and then left office with the same grace he showed in Afghanistan.) It was almost as if someone was directing the whole affairs from afar. Maybe it was this guy — MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner admonished the home team corporate media to ramp up its negative coverage of Trump while not “ginning up” reasons to criticize the Vice President. Kirschner, on YouTube, urged the media to prioritize critical coverage of Trump while treating Harris better than it treated Biden following the June debate.
The so-called defenders of democracy abetted a cover-up and a coup in plain sight. Credibility? Why should anyone believe them about anything Kamala-related going forward?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
July 16, 2024 // 35 Comments »
Never mind the Supreme Court and immunity, he’s had the power to kill an American citizen since 2010.
Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent from the majority decison in Trump v. United States to grant the president immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts he commits while in office, wrote: “The long-term consequences of today’s decison are stark… The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, perhaps the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he will now be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival? Immune.”
Picking up on Sotomayor’s fears, left-wing media and pundits fantasized about President Biden having Donald Trump and the conservative Supreme Court justices killed as an official act following SCOTUS’ presidential immunity decision. “If I was Biden I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security,” a radio host wrote on X. Is that OK now, as he reasoned?
The biggest problem with willy-nilly assassinations is the Fifth Amendment, which provides for due process before an American is deprived by the government of life, liberty or property. Capital cases require a grand jury. So while Biden may claim immunity if ordering Trump’s murder, he can’t get around the unconstitutional nature and thus impeachability of his action, immunity or not. Right?
Where things start to get fuzzy is with the assassination thing and Seal Team Six. The Seals conduct targeted killings all the time, nailing a terrorist here and an insurgent there across the Mideast. Officially these are labeled as “catch or kill” missions but there seems to be very little catching. The bin Laden raid is one high-visibility example where the kill option was explicit and primary. Of course when the Seals are busy elsewhere, drone assassinations are always a presidential option, as in the case of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. None of these people are Americans with any Constitutional rights, and none were killed on American soil, so it all falls loosely under some category of acts of war or whatever. Which brings us to Anwar al Awlaki.
Al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son were American citizens assassinated via targeted drone attack in Yemen by the United States in autumn 2011. Al Awlaki had once been a friend of the American military, invited in the aftermath of 9/11 to speak and lunch at the Pentagon. A few years later, al Awlaki was connected by the same U.S. government to al Qaeda, apparently mostly as a propagandist who may or may not have taken on an online role in persuading other Westerners to join the cause.
In 2012 Attorney General Eric Holder said of the al Awlaki killing and the Fifth Amendment the “U.S. can lawfully target American citizens” and “that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process’ and that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a ‘judicial process.’” It was unknown at the time, but Holder was referring to a secret white paper prepared by the Office of the Legal Counsel laying out the legal justification for the U.S. government to kill one of its own citizens extrajudicially, in apparent violation of the Fifth Amendment.
The white paper was finally released in 2014 and showed a convoluted legal process had been created to legalize the American citizen killings and thus render the president immune for having ordered them. The essential element for the kill to be legal, the document says, is “an informed, high level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Capture must be found to be unfeasible, and the kill must follow the existing laws of war.
The rest of the justification simply flows from there in a perverse chain of logic: the president has the obligation to protect America, al Qaeda or its like are a threat, and being in al Qaeda is more relevant than whatever citizenship the target may hold or where he is located (“citizenship does not immunize the target.”) International borders and other nations’ sovereignty are not an issue if the U.S. determines the host nation is “unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted.” But what about that due process promised Americans in the Fifth Amendment?
The Fifth Amendment right to due process (and perhaps to a lesser extent, the Fourth Amendment right against unwarranted seizure, i.e., a life) are dismissed casually in the white paper by a claim the U.S. interest in “forestalling the threat of violence and death to other Americans that arises” trumps any constitutional rights for the individual. This is described as part of a Fifth Amendment “balancing process.”
The balancing process cited as conclusive enough to justify the extrajudicial killing of an American, according to the white paper, stems from of all things a 1976 Supreme Court case, Mathews v. Eldridge, where the Court held that individuals have a statutorily granted property right in Social Security benefits, that the termination of those benefits implicates due process, but that the termination of those benefits does not require a pre-termination hearing. The balance test for the Fifth Amendment to apply to murders as laid out in that case has three components [notes added]:
(1) The importance of the private interest affected. [In a kill case, the private interest is the life of an American citizen.]
(2) The risk of erroneous deprivation through the procedures used, and the probable value of any additional or substitute procedural safeguards. [In a kill case, since the American will be dead, it is impossible to ever “correct” the mistake. The Court held that “If the risk of error is minimal, then the need for additional procedures declines. If the risk is high then additional procedures would be merited.” So, with the potential of a recoverable error, less process is needed. The more serious a mistake might be if committed, the more (perhaps non-judicial) process needed.]
(3) The importance of the state interest involved and the burdens which any additional or substitute procedural safeguards would impose on the state. [According to the kill white paper, the idea that killing the American saves potentially thousands of other Americans lies is the state’s interest. The burden of the U.S. government to follow any procedural safeguards, such as a trial in absentia where the target could have his side presented by a lawyer, is not addressed in the kill white paper]
In short, the balancing test says that in some situations, the president can kill an American citizen extrajudicially. No need for Supreme Court-granted immunity, like in the Wizard of Oz he has always (at least since 2010) had the power.
“Where national security operations are at stake, due process takes into account the realities of combat,” then-Attorney General Eric Holder said. “Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate… our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force [and] our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields of Afghanistan.”
So can the president really kill an American, in America? There are no known test cases, but some very disturbing testimony by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Mueller, appearing before a House subcommittee on whether the same criteria used to kill Americans abroad also would apply in the United States and whether the President retained the “historical” right to order such assassination on U.S. land, said that he simply did not know whether he could order an assassination of his own against an American here in the U.S. “I have to go back. Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not” and added “I’m going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice.”
Note that Mueller had the option of saying flat-out “No, no, the FBI can’t order an American killed in the U.S.” or maybe “No, even the President can’t order a hit on an American here in the U.S. where the full judicial system, Constitution, and other protections apply.” Mueller did not say those things. Instead, in 2012 under oath before Congress, the senior G-man of the United States, who to get his job had to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, was so worried about perjury that he was unable to say whether or not the U.S. government can indeed kill one of its own citizens inside the United States without trial.
Immunity may have its dangers, but it is only a small part of the problem given the vast expansion of presidential capital power in the aftermath of 9/11.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
July 10, 2024 // 24 Comments »
This is how lawfare works. The Supreme Court on June 28 likely exonerated 350 of 351 defendants, rebuking Biden’s Department of Justice for abusing an existing law to go after January 6 participants and turn them into felons. You wanna guess who the one last defendant still in trouble is?
Donald Trump remains charged with two counts of obstructing an official proceeding. At issue was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Title 18, Section 1512(c)(2)), which was enacted after the collapse of the energy giant Enron and contains a broad catchall provision that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding. The justices rejected the idea this statute, initially intended to criminalize things like shredding documents or tampering with evidence in corporate malfeasance cases, could be stretched by the Justice Department to include the disruptions of the counting process that took place on January 6.
The SCOTUS case is Fischer v. United States, brought by defendant Joseph Fischer, a former police officer seeking to dismiss the charge accusing him of obstructing an official proceeding, specifically the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s election victory. It involves a federal law which provides anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” commits a felony and can be imprisoned for a maximum of 20 years. The law was repurposed against J6 defendants, claiming their protest obstructed the business of Congress certifying the election of Joe Biden to the presidency. This was a novel use to create a felony out of the J6 protestors’ actions, as typically illegal or disruptive protesting is just a misdemeanor.
There are also First Amendment issues with criminalizing protests against the government that were more or less ignored in these cases (though Justice Amy Coney Barrett did touch on the 1A in her dissent, and during oral arguments stated “People are going to worry about the kinds of protest they engage in, even if they’re peaceful, because the government has this weapon.”)
Trump is in the picture because he too is charged with obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct, with the government claiming he worked in a variety of forms to overturn the 2020 election and make himself president for a second term (that this was Constitutionally and technically impossible is somehow not relevant.) One aspect of this was Trump’s efforts to “exploit” the Capitol riot to his own ends, from which the obstruction charge arises. Specifically, the indictment says “Donald J. Trump did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to corruptly obstruct and impede an official proceeding, that is, the certification of the electoral vote.”
SCOTUS said in its recent decision the interpretation used to convict 350 men was wrong. They said prosecutors overstepped the bounds of the law in using an obstruction statute to charge members of the group that stormed the Capitol. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, read the law narrowly, saying it applied only when the defendant’s actions impaired the integrity of physical evidence. Lower courts will now apply that new, stricter standard, and it will no doubt lead them to dismiss charges against many defendants. Those already in jail will likely see their sentences reduced and future trials will not include the obstruction charge. Left unspecified at present is the fate of the 52 people convicted exclusively under the law challenged in Fischer, with no other charge — 27 of whom are still serving sentences for that in federal prison.
But don’t worry about those J6 guys getting off too easy. The New York Times, practically salivating, writes “Some federal judges in Washington who are handling the January 6 cases have already signaled that they are willing to increase the sentences defendants receive on crimes other than the obstruction count in order to make up for any loss in prison time.” Still, Trump saw the decision as a plus, posting on Truth Social this was a “a massive victory for J6 political prisoners.”
But what about Defendant 351, Trump himself? Special counsel Jack Smith stated Trump’s charges will not be affected, saying Trump’s conduct could be considered a crime under even the narrow SCOTUS reading of the law. The former president is accused of tampering with documents (the law reads “have taken some action with respect to a document, record or some other object”) through his plot to create false slates of electors claiming he won in states actually carried by President Biden. The accusations against him include that scheme to concoct illegitimate documents to disrupt Congress’s processing of electoral college votes, namely, fake elector ballots “cast” for Trump by fake electors. In other words, the J6 guys obstructed the vote count through their protest, acts now deemed by the Supreme Court to be an over-application of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Trump is charged under the same law but for different actions, those fake elector ballots.
Because that’s how lawfare works, ignoring the intent of any given law — common sense, in many cases — in favor of microscopically picking out and if necessary reinterpretating those parts of the law might lead to a conviction. The goal is not justice or a search for truth, it is 3D Tetris designed to see if some set of actions can be twisted to fit any available law that might lead to a conviction.
That was the essence of Trump’s felony counts in the so-called “hush money” trial. What was essentially a bookkeeping error, labeling money paid to lawyer Michael Cohen as “legal expenses” when it was actually something else (reimbursement for money he supposedly gave to Stormy) grew into serial felonies because the prosecutor wanted it to. As an example, the Clinton campaign committed the exact same bookkeeping error, labeling money for Michael Steele to produce the infamous Russian dossier as legal expenses, and faced only a fine of $8000. No jail time hanging, no attempt to overturn the campaign for president, not even a decent slap on the wrist. That’s lawfare. Republican lawmakers, including Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Jim Jordan, filed a brief in Fischer’s case saying the Justice Department is using the law as an “all-purpose weapon against perceived political opponents.”
Same for those classified documents. Classified was found purloined and improperly stored by Joe Biden (never mind Hillary Clinton and her email server) but no charges were filed. Trump faces a raft of charges for essentially the same act, without much explanation other than “face it kid, that’s lawfare.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, surprisingly voting this time with the majority, wrote courts concerned about the uneasy fit between this law and the J6 protestors’ actions should not lose sight of “the backdrop of a real-world context” Congress wrote into the law after the document destruction in the Enron scandal. “There was nothing as far as I can tell in the enactment history as it was recorded that suggests that Congress was thinking about obstruction more generally,” she said. Nothing but lawfare, she might have added.
There’s one last wrench to throw into the works, immunity. Following the verdict in
Fisher, the Court one work day later ruled in
Trump v. United States the former president is entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts, and sent his J6 case back to the lower court. The SCOTUS ruling does draw a critical distinction between official and private conduct. VP-hopeful J.D. Vance
called it a “massive win,” as did Trump himself on Truth Social. Practically speaking, this all likely
delays any verdict on Trump’s J6 actions until after the election, when it will not matter. Lawfare, however, is here to stay with us and it is unlikely that Trump will be its last victim.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
June 26, 2024 // 31 Comments »
Misdirection. That’s what you call it when a magician distracts you from looking at the real point of interest, waving his right hand in the air vigorously while his left slips the selected card into his jacket pocket. You’re fooled, but you’re satisfied. You even play along.
Well, if you like magical misdirection, you must be very happy to see Hunter Biden convicted of lying about his drug use to illegally buy a gun, making him the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. Hunter was fully guilty, no doubt, confirmed by the rapid three-hour turnaround decison reached by the jury. He’ll face a similar fate in September when he stares down three felony and six misdemeanor tax offenses in California, alleging he failed to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019 while spending millions more on drugs, escorts, exotic cars, and other lux items. He is unlikely to do time in any case, though you’ll hear uninformed pundits on the MSM bellow about maximum penalties in hopes of creating the illusion of parity between the Hunter and Trump convictions. See, there’s a felon in each family, the system is fair!
The problem is that misdirection thing.
No court is set to look at what Hunter did to amass his millions while a crack addict, and no court is set to look at the slimy connections between Hunter’s made-and-spent fortune and his dad, the once vice president and now president of the United States. A reasonable jury might conclude Hunter made his money off peddling influence to daddy, and that daddy at the very least passively played along, and thus a court of public opinion might wonder if that leaves Joe Biden unqualified to be president (if he ever was…)
The story, if ever told in a court or elsewhere, will get ugly quickly as they say — one can sketch in the outlines even now. Hunter, desperately addicted to drugs and sex following his brother Beau’s death, to the point where he had a scummy affair with his dead brother’s widow, needed money badly. The world responded with a whisper in his fevered ear that Hunter could set up some consulting companies and create the appearance of selling access to his father, then vice president. A grieving dad, watching his last son fall into the pit of crack addiction, tries to humor the venture along until that gets too real over some shenanigans in the Ukraine and a looming China deal (“10 percent for the big guy,” read one email.) Dad pulls the plug on his end of the caper, but Hunter keeps selling, finding foreign yokels willing to pay for the illusion of access. Along the way he taints not only Joe but his uncle Jim Biden as well. Fueled by his addiction, Hunter never stops until finally things collapse completely and he is stopped.
As you the voter, the real jury, consider the evidence, remember a few things. Joe Biden said of Hunter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” And during a debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden dismissed his son’s laptop emails as disinformation from Russia. After becoming president, Joe said his son Hunter was innocent, even after Hunter pleaded guilty to tax evasion. None of that is true. Misdirection.
This sordid story has credibility now in that in the course of the Hunter gun trial the contents of his laptop were validated by the FBI as real. The FBI of course knew for some time the laptop was real, and we explained here why a thoughtful outside observer would come to the same conclusion even without the FBI’s forensics. Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski confirmed his emails were legitimate months before the FBI. The New York Times agreed, reporting on an FBI criminal investigation into Hunter’s business and tax activities based in part on the contents of the laptop.
Here’s what Hunter’s laptop revealed in our reading of its contents as made available to TAC and elsewhere. Hunter, with no previous experience in the energy field, joined the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma at a salary of $83,000 a month. What was his actual job at Burisma? The question is important because on April 16, 2014, while Joe was vice president, he met with Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Joe travelled to Ukraine to lobby for increased fracking. Burisma was one of the few companies licensed to frack in Ukraine. Burisma made hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine’s new policy. Burisma eventually paid more than $4,000,000 for Hunter’s and Archer’s board service.
While Hunter and Archer were serving on Burisma’s board, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma and its owner. In his official position as vice president, Biden demanded Ukraine fire Shokin, and threatened to withdraw one billion dollars in U.S. military aid if it did not do so. Shokin was fired.
While serving on the Burisma board, Hunter and Archer sought meetings with senior State Department officials, including SecState John Kerry (Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s son, is part of one of Hunter’s front companies) and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Blinken coordinated the 51 intel officers’ letter that claimed Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.) What did they all discuss? The reason to ask that question is because it appears whatever Hunter’s job description, his value to Burisma was perceived access to the Executive Branch. Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that. The most charitable reading of the sleazy saga is that Joe Biden, one of the most powerful men in the world, is a gullible idiot. At least that sounds better than “co-conspirator.”
The laptop goes on to show Hunter, through a number of front companies, accepted money from foreign firms and moved that money to the U.S. where it was parceled out to other entities, including Joe’s brother Jim (Jim regularly invoiced Hunter for office expenses and employee costs, as well as a monthly retainer cost of some $68,000, plus other fees in the tens of thousands of dollars for unknown services.) It all smells bad — multi-million dollar transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as business addresses, legal tricks shifting cash from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands. Can Hunter explain why his fees traveled such circuitous routes? What did he pay Uncle Jim for, and why did Jim appear to return/kickback some of the money paid him?
What is this money all about? in 2014, Hunter received $3.5 million from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her company received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor.
The majority of the contents of Hunter’s laptop are a jumbled record of international business ventures. Outstanding in the haystack are a large number of wire transfers to and from clients. Those with traceable addresses appear to be mostly anonymous shell companies run out of lawyers’ offices, with no employees, and fuzzy public paper trails. A typical one involved $259,845 traveling on April 2, 2018 from Hudson West III in New York to a numbered account held by Cathay Bank in Asia. Hudson West was created by Hunter Biden’s own law firm, Owasco, with several Chinese nationals, including a Ye Jianming associate. Ye Jianming is chairman of CEFC China Energy, who reportedly had close ties to both the Chinese government and the PLA. He’s was arrested in China on corruption charges and has essentially been disappeared.
A 2017 email chain involving Hunter brokering an ultimately failed deal for a new venture with old friend CEFC, the Chinese energy company, described a 10 percent set-aside for the “big guy,” whom former Hunter Biden partner Tony Bobulinski publicly identified as Joe Biden. Joe also took Hunter to China with him in December 2013 on Air Force 2, and met with Chinese leaders while Hunter tried to make deals on his own.
There is a lot more but you get the picture. A lot of appearance of malarkey from a senior statesman like Joe who should have known better. In places like China and the Ukraine, where corruption is endemic, it is assumed the sons of powerful men have political access to their father. Hunter traded on those assumptions for millions of dollars, and Papa Joe stood by understanding what was happening. Every father wants to help his son, and we can imagine Hunter went to his dad time after time, pleading for just one more little favor to get past his sordid past. You know, for Beau.
The emails are a multi-pronged series of pointers which deserve the scrutiny of a courtroom to see if there is a smoking gun. To dismiss them because they may be incomplete is to fail to understand the difference between evidence and conclusion. Let’s hope we learn the lesson before November 5.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
June 18, 2024 // 2 Comments »
Joe Biden is playing voters for suckers. He thinks he can snap up their votes with some sleight-of-hand new policy on the southern border. This all comes cynically as the border is emerging as a major issue in the campaign for president; only 28 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the matter so far, and voters overall mark it as their second biggest concern, after the economy. But why fix anything when you can just fake the rubes out?
Biden took executive action earlier this month to turn away asylum seekers who cross the southern border illegally when the weekly average of daily border crossings exceeds 2,500 between ports of entry (it has exceeded that number consistently since Biden took office, averaging about 4,500.) Administration officials, reports The Hill, “walked a tightrope announcing the order, a forceful but targeted shift on asylum rights — one that administration officials said is not comparable to the Trump administration’s system-wide crackdowns.”
Well, maybe. The president’s decree certainly rhymes with a 2018 Trump policy, invoking the same powers to deny people seeking asylum. Federal courts blocked that one. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will challenge the Biden ban as well.
Otherwise, all well and good, except when you drill down a bit. For the last three years Biden policy allowed 4,500 or more asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced a million immigrants every 200-some days, a significant number given otherwise only about one million legal Green Card-type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year. The border does not discriminate; in addition to the flood of poor Mexicans entering the U.S. this way, the in-flow from the southern border is chock-a-block with Serbs, Chinese, Central and South Americans, as well as Africans from a multitude of countries. Almost none of those people got there on their own, benefiting from organized crime and human traffickers to help them make the arduous journey from say Nigeria to Texas. It was worth it to most, as standard Green Card applications (except for spouses of American Citizens) can be backed up for years, decades for certain categories. Why wait when you can be one of 4,500 lucky daily winners? Reducing that 4,500 to 2,500 a day is good one guesses, as it means Biden policy only comes close to doubling immigrant numbers yearly.
What was left untouched by the new executive order was the Biden method for handling those 2,500 claiming asylum.
Humanitarian parole refers to a discretionary mechanism employed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to allow individuals to remain in the United States on a (theoretically) temporary basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. It was never intended to replace regular visas or Green Cards but rather to be a form of temporary relief.
Prior to Biden, humanitarian parole was typically granted in cases involving medical treatment not available in the individual’s home country, urgent family needs, or situations where the person can contribute significantly to the public interest, say as an artist fleeing a repressive government. Pre-Biden, the decision to grant humanitarian parole was mostly made on a case-by-case basis.
The previous two administrations averaged about 5,000 individually-selected cases per year, not per day as under Biden. Past uses of mass parole include the one-time flood of migrants after the Vietnam War (340,000 people) and the Mariel Boatlift (125,000) from Cuba. Every administration, Republican and Democratic, used parole in emergencies; none had made it the cornerstone of an ongoing mass migration program before Biden. Parole used this way is part of the asylum process which is being abused daily on the southern border.
Asylum applicants must demonstrate if sent home they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those five protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. For example, since 1994, LGBT status has been a possible grounds of asylum. Victims of domestic violence were granted consideration for asylum under the Obama administration, rolled back under Trump. However, asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to economic situations affecting blanket-like most everyone in a country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for a legit asylum claim. Until Biden. Economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have taken advantage of slow processing by American authorities. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous.
The 1996 Clinton Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for logistical and political reasons, prior administrations simply released most asylum seekers into American society to wait. Asylum seekers become eligible for work authorization if their case has been pending for more than 150 days, as almost all do. Trump instead directed the letter of the law be followed, ending this catch-and-release system. He also negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working in the U.S. Biden did away with Trump’s reforms.
Biden’s new executive order also contains loopholes for unaccompanied minors, and those applying at a formal port of entry, who won’t count against the 2,500 daily limit. In May 2017, when Trump made an exception for minors, the number of unaccompanied children soared by 329 percent. The smugglers are quick to adjust to any changes in U.S. policy.
Biden of course was equally quick to blame his opposition for the mess he created. While senior administration officials did not explicitly tie the timing of the executive order to the election, they argued the measure was a result of congressional Republicans’ inaction. “If Congress refuses to act, and if congressional Republicans refuse to act, the president is prepared to do so,” one official told reporters. The president and White House officials previously said it was up to Congress to enact changes at the border and suggested Biden’s hands were tied on the issues. They never were.
Republicans chastised Biden for waiting to take executive action on the border and argued this measure is too little, too late. They are correct. It made no sense for Biden to throw open the southern border to faux asylum claims in the first place. It made even less sense for him to maintain there was nothing he could do about the crisis he created, that it was up to Congress alone to fix it, when obviously the executive orders issued by Trump were always available, as well as the weak-tea of Biden’s own order. So, when angry Joe Biden says that there was nothing he could do about the southern border without Congress acting, he was lying. The border crisis is caused solely by Biden’s decision to employ humanitarian parole on a large scale, a decision that can be rescinded anytime. Reducing the daily influx of asylum claimants from 4,500 to 2,500 just months before the presidential election is indeed too little, too late.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
June 5, 2024 // 15 Comments »
A New York jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with buying the silence of a porn star. He is the first American president to become a felon. The verdict is not unexpected from the deep blue Democratic enclave of Manhattan; the larger question is if lawfare will defeat Trump on November 5.
The jury found Trump faked records (hiding hush payments as “legal expenses”) to conceal the purpose of money given to the onetime attorney Michael Cohen. Trump was actually reimbursing Cohen for a $130,000 hush-money deal struck with porn star Stormy Daniels, to silence her account of an affair with Trump. The affair was in 2006, a decade before Trump was elected president. The falsification of business records took place in 2017, after Trump was already in the White House and thus could not have influenced the election. He was found guilty nonetheless.
For the jury to reach its unanimous decision of guilt on all 34 charges, the key was believing two witnesses over Trump.
There are only two people on earth who know if an affair actually took place between Stormy and Trump. Trump said no, Stormy said yes and the jury agreed with her, fully absent of any further actual evidence. Daniels benefitted greatly from her claims to having the affair, and violated a nondisclosure agreement she voluntarily signed and accepted money for, to achieve her goals. “Proving” the affair was the base upon which the rest of the case to find Trump guilty was made.
It is important to understand that having an affair and paying off someone to remain quiet about it are not crimes, even for a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, the prosecutor claimed in closing arguments Trump “hoodwinked the American voter” with a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. In addition to those who may have benefitted from the plan, “all roads lead to the man who benefited the most: Donald Trump,” Joshua Steinglass told the jury.
But the witness whose testimony was fully believed by the jury, and whose testimony will see Trump receive a criminal penalty when he is sentenced on July 11 (four days before the Republican National Convention!) is Michael Cohen. In the total absence of physical evidence and in the face of Trump’s claims to the contrary, Cohen served as connective tissue for many disparate elements. It was Cohen who claimed Trump masterminded the plan to hide the payments to Stormy. It was Cohen who said the 34 checks and invoices, only nine of which were signed by Trump himself, were not for legal expenses as they were labeled but were to reimburse Cohen for paying off Stormy. Stormy’s name appeared on none of the 34 documents, a fact which instead of exonerating Trump became under Michael Cohen’s testimony the linchpin of the conspiracy to falsify business records. Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Trump, told jurors the case hinged on the testimony of Michael Cohen, whom he called “the greatest liar of all time.”
Nearly incredibly (Trump’s defense team called Cohen a “walking reasonable doubt”) the jury believed Cohen based on nothing but his good word. This is despite Cohen having gone to jail for perjury, been caught lying to Congress, being disbarred, and actually telling a lie during his testimony at the instant trial. It remains difficult to understand how a jury could objectively grant so much credence to Cohen in the face of his record of lying to his own advantage. Every critical element of the case came down to whether his word could be trusted. That is what convicted Trump. You might have thought Robert De Niro was leading the deliberations.
There’s more. For jurors to have found Trump guilty of all 34 counts, they must have concluded beyond a reasonable doubt not only that Trump falsified or caused the falsification of business records “with intent to defraud” but also that he did so with the intent to commit or conceal another crime. That second element — the intent to commit or conceal another crime — elevates the charges to felonies and got around the statue of limitations that usually governs misdemeanors such as false business records. To reach this conclusion the jury had to also believe Cohen that Trump’s primary intent in all this was election influence and not, as Trump claimed, to hide the affair from his family.
There are many questions surrounding the jury’s verdict, and the fact pattern of the case itself, all of which should come out in Trump’s inevitable appeal. With that in mind, the actual legal conclusion of this case is far into the future, almost certainly after the November 5 election. But that begs the more important question: does any of this matter to voters? This is lawfare, not justice, after all. “The real verdict is going to be November 5, by the people,” said Trump.
CNN, for example, concluded “Donald Trump, who built a mystique as the brash epitome of power, has never been more powerless to dictate his own fate. His reputation, future, and even perhaps the White House’s destiny, [was] placed in the hands of 12 citizens of his native New York City, proving that not even once-and-possibly future commanders in chief are above the law.”
So a victory for Democratic lawfare? Maybe not. Trump remains eligible to campaign for the presidency and serve if elected. None of the other lawfare shots is likely to conclude before November.
So does it matter? A majority of registered voters said a guilty verdict in Trump’s trial would make no difference in their vote in the 2024 presidential election. Across all registered voters, 67 percent said a guilty verdict would have no effect on their vote, while 17 percent say they would be less likely to vote for him and 15 percent say they would be more likely, according to the NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll released before the verdict. An ABC News poll earlier this month showed 80 percent of Trump’s supporters say they would stick with him even if he’s convicted of a felony in this case. Some say they would either reconsider their support (16 percent) or withdraw it (four percent.) Similar polls followed Trump’s defeat in New York courts over supposed real estate fraud.
And Biden knows it. A Biden campaign spokesman said Trump’s conviction showed “There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
As in other Third World countries where the judiciary is used to smite political opponents, let us hope the people can see the truth, as they still hold the final card to be played. The Deep State has tried from day one to destroy Donald Trump — Russian collusion and dossier hoax, pee tape accusation, Mueller hearing and report, Emoluments Clause, various calls for extra-legal interventions and coups, Alfa Bank hoax, Impeachment I, Impeachment II, demands Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment, MSM blackout of Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter purge of conservative accounts, FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Letitia James prosecution “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” with no victims, no monetary loss but an effort to bankrupt Trump with civil judgment, Colorado attempt to remove Trump from state ballots over the 14th Amendment, and false statements Trump will “take revenge,” “demand retribution,” ensure a “bloodbath,” and “end democracy” (America’s last election if he wins.)
Trump meanwhile has characterized this trial, and the others, as unjust, rigged, lawfare pure and simple. He has kept the voters’ eyes not on who he is (his personal life has been baked-in to the vote long ago) but on what he represents to the electorate. As such, it is hard to see this guilty conviction, however unfair, as mattering too much come November.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
May 30, 2024 // 1 Comment »
Republican or Democrat, one of the most amazing things about Washington is its ability — almost willingness — to make the same foreign policy mistakes over and over. Take Iran. The U.S. has antagonized Iran consistently for the past three decades, doing the same thing over and over hoping for different results (a standard definition of mental illness.) Yet in response to Iranian-backed militias in 2024, what does America do? Bomb again, in Yemen, Iraq, and environs.
The bombing is despite a clear history that for every problem solved a new one emerges. Saddam was the first major Iraqi target of the modern age, having fallen from American grace following the Iran-Iraq war in which the U.S. originally sided with Iraq. Bombing Saddam lead to, over a decade or so, Al-Qaeda in Iraq followed by ISIS in Iraq followed by Iranian militias fighting ISIS alongside the U.S. in Iraq followed by Iranian ascendancy in Iraq as America retreated from its failed invasion of 2003. It can get complicated keeping track of all the players (remember the Yazidis, the casus belli of America’s return to Iraq after the 2010 withdrawal?) But if you want to keep it simple, try this: the U.S. remains at war in Iraq as a way of pushing back on Iranian influence which was enabled by U.S. actions. Got it?
Or even simpler: unless the U.S. is willing to negotiate directly with the Iranians, acknowledging their role as a regional power, the problems of Iranian ascendency are not going away. Every day the U.S. thinks it can control Iran by bombing only grants Tehran another day to enhance its nuclear program and grow as a threat to Israel. With this militaristic history of bombing failing as obviously as it has, why has diplomacy never taken hold?
Leaving aside the long, bad history between the two countries leading up to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, the biggest impediment to full and complete negotiations with Iran is that both nations, America and Iran, are ruled by ideological leaders who open the diplomatic door only to find their adversary’s new leaders are trapped by their own ideology into slamming shut the door of possibilities each time it squeaks open.
Start with the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, which led to a brief period of relative moderation U.S.-Iran relations. Khatami advocated for a more open dialogue with the West. In spring 2003, Javad Zarif, then Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, proposed talks on the nuclear problem and on Iranian-Israeli relations. Look at things from an Iranian perspective: in 2001 the United States had overrun Iranian enemy the Taliban in Afghanistan, leaving a powerful and then-still victorious American military on Iran’s eastern border. The initial succes of the American invasion in Iraq in 2003, and the talk of eventually routing that invasion force into Syria and Lebanon as a next step, meant the U.S. sat astride Iran’s western border as well. The attitude out of Washington was bellicose (“Axis of Evil” and all that.) That Iran’s overture might have been driven by fear it would suffer Iraq’s fate, mattered little. The door to serious negotiations was wide open.
Due to hubris and perhaps just plain diplomatic clumsiness (the State Department was being dismissed in 2003 as hardly necessary, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calling it sarcastically “the department of nice”) the Bush administration ideologues slammed shut the door on Iran. They foresaw, tragically, wrongly, a quick end of war in Iraq and chance to spank Iran properly once that was out of the way. In 2005, Khatami was swept out of office by hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dashing any hopes for a broader rapprochement.
In the 2013 elections another moderate, Hassan Rouhani, was elected president and Zarif was back in as foreign minister. This time, the United States under an ideologue of its own, Barack Obama, was paying attention. In 2015, the Obama and Rouhani administrations negotiated a sloppy nuclear arms agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) along with the European Union, Russia, and China in exchange for sanctions relief. Zarif indicated the nuclear deal could lead to further agreements between Tehran and Washington, which may have included some positive movement on the status of Israel. The trouble was written on the wall as Obama failed to get widespread U.S. government buy-in, and worked to hold the agreement together at the end of his own administration.
Then came Donald Trump, an ideologue for sure, who was ready to dismantle Obama’s nascent agreement with Iran. Trump also listened too closely to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and pulled out of the nuclear agreement and slapped harsh sanctions (the “maximum pressure” campaign) on Iran as the creaky door to negotiations hit his backside on the way out. Tehran in turn announced it would no longer adhere to limits on producing and stockpiling plutonium or highly enriched uranium in a march toward becoming a nuclear threshold state. One can only speculate how close Netanyahu came to convincing Trump to join Israel in striking Iranian nuclear facilities.
Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 on a promise to rejoin the nuclear pact, describing Trump’s Iran strategy as a “self-inflicted disaster.” He charged Trump with upping the odds of a military confrontation by “walking away from diplomacy” with Tehran. Biden’s comments came only hours after Iran’s hardline military claimed responsibility for shooting down an American drone, which it claimed violated Iranian airspace. Biden’s statement also followed an announcement from Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization that it would breach within the next 10 days the uranium stockpile limits established by Obama’s 2015 multinational nuclear deal.
Despite all this as prologue, after Biden was elected, Zarif, back in power, said if Washington rejoined the Obama nuclear pact, Iran would return to compliance with it. The next month, Rouhani repeated the promise. But it became clear Biden’s was not ready to rejoin the deal. In his confirmation hearings, Biden’s nominee as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States was a “long way” from reviving the pact and would have to see first what Iran would agree to do in exchange. At a 2022 midterm election rally, Biden announced the nuclear deal was “dead.” The issue remains there today, fully a non-starter even as relations between Washington and Tehran move closer to direct conflict.
There are plenty of Houthis to kill, and nearly immeasurable sites of relatively cheap drone launchers to blow up. The U.S. has had a lot of practice and is good at it to the point it is almost bullying. Iran is certainly willing to fight to the last non-Iranian militiaman. But decades of bombing have failed to change Iran’s behavior. With a sordid history of ideologues on both sides slamming shut the door to negotiations, we must still understand negotiations are the only route to resolving the current problems in the Red Sea. And in the meantime we are still left with the original question: what will be different about bombing this time?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 31, 2024 // 21 Comments »
Gloom consumes America. Some 73 percent of respondents say the United States is on the wrong track, the highest portion since 1989, when that polling question was first asked. In similar polls, there’s been a prolonged downward trend in Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country, from a peak of 71 percent in 1999 to just 22 percent today. Biden’s 39 percent approval is the lowest of any president running for a second term a year out from the election. Inflation hit 8.9 percent. The cost of rent and food rose two or three times as much as incomes.
So who believes Joe Biden and his running dogs in the liberal media when they say things are actually OK? What tiny 28 percent of America are they talking to? A whole intellectual industry developed to support Joe, making excuses why the dumb Americans in the heartland don’t see how well Bidenomics has left things for them. The industry has come up with three explanations. See if they make sense.
It’s the Media, Stupid. This is part of a bigger problem, presupposing most of the American interior is made of dummies who believe everything they hear on places like Fox, part of an outrage industry. Never mind kitchen table economics, it’s all in your head, idiot.
Referral Syndrome. This hypothesis comes from the Wall Street Journal, which speculates Americans see so many mass shootings, so much immigration chaos, so many overdose deaths, and proxy wars they simply feel bad about everything (which, economy aside, does not bode well for the incumbent.) So when pollsters ask their views on the economy, they get a negative response, because people just feel overwhelmingly negative.
Fatalism. Pretending the economy is just dandy wouldn’t be complete with some candy from Paul Krugman. The New York Times’ resident soothsayer claims all is well if only you could see things from the perspective of a rich, white, Nobel prize-winning New Yorker who writes gibberish for a living. Krugman also postulates Trump supporters who believe Biden stole the 2020 election are so apocalyptic that they skew the whole nation’s outlook.
While the inflation rate may be declining somewhat, the cost of food, rent, and transportation is still higher than pre-COVID levels. Affordable housing kills in most areas. The problem for Joe is these are not problems of perception, they are disasters surrounding hard-core home economics. We’re left with the conclusion maybe the economy really is treating the bulk of non-coastal Americans poorly, the ones who could not sell burgers or clean hotel rooms via Zoom during the pandemic and the ones for whom high mortgage interest rates mean the difference between a home of their own and barely scraping by to pay the (rising) rent. It is these people who will vote Trump, or stay home, but are unlikely to vote for the Biden record on the economy. It is not perception, it is reality. People know when they can afford to feed the kids and pay the rent and when they cannot.
In this environment, for the first time since President Grover Cleveland in 1892, voters face the choice of basically two incumbents, two candidates running on their recent performance in the White House. One was president during a time when wages rose faster than inflation, when the stock market was standardly strong, when home loan rates were accessible, and one wasn’t. But it is more than dollars and sense which will see Trump win in a fair election. It is his understanding of the America that he rode to victory in 2016, and came close to using to win in 2020.
Think of Hillbilly Elegy if you want to take the shortcut. Or as another pundit put it, “Trump rode a wave of pessimism to the White House — pessimism his detractors did not share because he was speaking about, and to, an America they either didn’t see or understood only as a caricature. But just as with this year, when liberal elites insist that things are going well while overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are not, Trump’s unflattering view captured the mood of the country.” Trump’s thesis may be truer today than it was the first time he ran on it — polls show most young people never expect to earn what their parents do now, and deaths of despair continue to rise. People tend to notice when they are doing better in an economy, and when they are not.
Immigration under Trump was simple, and matched a large number of Americans’ thoughts: we may have enough. As Trump said, “A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters!” Yet under Biden a pattern of curtailment, thought once labeled racism is now edging toward policy in sanctuary cities: we may have enough. Biden in a way should be thanked for drawing such a stark contrast between his immigration policy and Trump’s, and what the coastal elite minority hold true and what the majority of inner Americans likely believe and will express by voting for Trump.
They understand that wall hyperbole aside, enforcing one’s borders is a requirement of nationhood. Check out the shelters and sidewalks of Manhattan and Chicago, where it is obvious Biden’s immigration policy is a failure. Trump’s message was crudely delivered but astonishingly accurate, at least to those willing to see through the former to the latter. Call him a bigot, or a racist, or a fascist, but he was right about controlling the border. In fact, every other country in the world does so for itself.
In the broader picture, there are a lot of people who believe immigrants threaten jobs and security. They believe we should bring our troops home from places like Iraq and let other nations such as Ukraine fend for themselves. They believe Hunter and Joe Biden sold influence to Ukraine and China and they believe a deep state exists. They want education but don’t want college to be free to those who won’t repay their loans. They believe welfare encourages people to stay home, and social security won’t be there for them. They want to own guns. And though they are the base, they not alone. Trump’s backing from white, college-educated Republicans doubled to 60 percent over the course of last year.
And outside the MSM no one is buying the “end of democracy” argument. The simplest counter argument is that if Trump does not believe in the system, why is he following its rules and campaigning? Wouldn’t a wanna-be dictator, you know, act more dictatorial? Same for J6. Wouldn’t a proper insurrection, as opposed to a protest march that morphed into a tantrum of sorts, have some path toward success? Yet the J6 “insurrectionists” simply walked back out of the Capitol building on their own, and their supposed leader, Trump, did the same with the White House two weeks later. If that was a potential ending of democracy event, it was a pretty lame one.
If Trump wanted to be a dictator he had four fine years to implement that and he did not and anyone willing to think about it knows that. Rednecks amuck in the Capitol for an hour or two is not the same as tanks on the Ellipse and anyone willing to think about it knows that. If anything the use of lawfare to jail or drive an opponent off the ballot seems as undemocratic as anything else. Like supporting the blue line on J6 and decrying it over George Floyd, hypocrisy is an ugly thing to build an election strategy around.
Trump’s voters look for America and see Brazil. Their detractors blame the Electoral College, or talk radio, or redneck ignorance, or Putin. Trump’s win in 2016 and likely win in 2024 inexplicable? Try again.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 26, 2024 // 10 Comments »
One of the most succinct campaign slogans of the modern era came out of the 1992 Clinton campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid” picking up on feeling Americans were less concerned with the incumbent’s apparent foreign policy success (remember Desert Storm?) than the nation’s changing economy. Clinton spun his personal concern for voters’ well-being off this, with the catchphrase “I feel your pain.”
Things seem headed for some sort of through-the-looking glass style repeat in 2024, as the incumbent is hoping to sell voters on the strength of the economy when they are more than skeptical. Bidenomics’ thrust seems to be “The Economy is OK Unless You’re Too Stupid to Notice.”
Bidenomics, the word itself the meddling of two of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities: he is Joe Biden, age “the crypt keeper” and the economy is just fine if you don’t look at it. Not much can be done with the first liability, but the second opens the door for Donald Trump to run on a populist version of the economy that could leave Biden looking uninformed and out of touch.
The economic world of Joe Biden is best characterized by the New York Times, acting nearly as his spokesperson that things are bright if only you were not so stupid as to be looking at the wrong numbers. So Bidenomics calls out how in 2020 the average wage of workers who still had a job shot up, without talking about how those who laid off, disproportionately service workers. Growth in wages for everyone was then held down because those low-wage workers were being rehired. Biden fanboy Paul Krugman actually went as far as writing in the Times “Until recently I thought everyone — well, everyone following economic issues — knew this.” Stupid voters, not keeping up with the Times. “There are two big questions right now about the U.S. economy,” says Krugman. “One is why it’s doing so well. The other is why so many Americans insist that it’s terrible.”
A dumb line of reasoning seems to attract progressives. One coined the term “vibe-cession” last year to describe the gap between the common perception and cherry-picked economic indicators. Others insist it’s poor perception and political polarization that are mostly to blame. Then there is good old social media and its whack misinformation, reinforcing the “bad economy belief.” A former Federal Reserve economist quoted by, of course, the Times, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy lead to consumer pessimism. If only those rednecks who don’t subscribe to the New York Times could see the view from up there.
The problem down here is economic reality, off limits in Bidenomics. Start with inflation. Things cost more, with some of the highest jumps in inflation-driven prices in decades (excepting the pandemic, there hasn’t been a year with average annual inflation above four percent since 1991.) But even after years of the Fed raising interest rates (see mortgages, below) inflation coming down does not fix the everyday problems of Americans. “Inflation” as economists define the term is nearly meaningless to most voters, because it excludes food and energy prices, two significant parts of any household budget. To include those parts of most voters’ lives, you’re looking for the Consumer Price Index, which includes everything but which rarely appears in feel-good tales of the Biden economy. Even then watch the magician’s hands closely; prices at the pump are down more than 30 percent since their peak last year but still up considerably since Biden took office. Some 74 percent today say they’re at least somewhat worried that the cost of living will climb so high that they will be unable to remain in their community.
Now about those mortgages. As the Fed raised interest rates to buffet inflation, loan costs rose in kind. Average monthly payments on a new home jumped to $3,322 in the third quarter of the year, data from real estate investment firm CBRE shows. It means it has risen 90 percent since the final quarter of 2020 — just before Biden took office in January 2021 — when it was $1,746. Home ownership is becoming a unattainable dream to many Americans as average monthly mortgage payments are now nearly double what they were when Biden took office. Interest rates above seven percent and soaring house prices mean buyers are facing one of the least affordable markets in recent memory.
The low unemployment Biden touts does mean more Americans are working but says nothing about mediocre wages, underemployment, and those forced into two or more jobs to make ends meet. A Blueprint/YouGov poll on the economy found just seven percent of respondents were principally concerned about the availability of jobs, while 64 percent were most worried about prices. Bidenomics, of course, famously focuses on jobs created. Even then the numbers are slippery; the vast majority of this touted job growth comes from restoring job losses from the pandemic. Check instead the broader unemployment rate that includes underemployed and discouraged workers, nearly twice as high at seven percent as Bidenomics claims. And watch claims of rising wages — most rises have been negated by inflation growing at an even faster pace.
Perhaps most significantly among economic perceptions is voters’ view of the future. A poll from March found that just 21 percent of respondents felt confident life for their children’s generation will be better, matching the record low since this question was first asked. In 1990, 50 percent of those asked felt life would be better for their kids. The national debt, which was $5.7 trillion when Bill Clinton was in office, has reached $33 trillion. This constitutes a form of intergenerational theft; rising interest costs will eventually require higher taxes or cuts in federal programs or both.
Food prices are up almost six percent under Bidenomics. Some 59 percent of parents will spend more than $18,000 per child on child care in 2023. The overall average manufacturer’s suggested retail price of new vehicles in the 2023 is $34,876, 4.7 percent higher than last year. Average annual health insurance premiums increased seven percent in 2023. The average family premium has increased 22 percent since 2018.
The Biden people have it just 180 degrees wrong; perception does matter and is not “wrong.” And it does not matter that some of the economic effects listed here are not Joe’s “fault.” Past experience shows the guy in the Oval Office takes credit or accepts fault for what happened on his watch, at least in most voters’ minds. This is because while a few economists are voters, very few voters are economists. What the economy feels like at the checkout, at the end of the month, at the pump, matters most and will drive voting choices. So a recent poll found just two percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” with only 16 percent saying they were “good.” A majority of voters already trust Trump more than Biden on the economy. You just can’t tell the voters they are wrong, all is actually well, when it is not. Bill Clinton called it in 1992, Donald Trump will surely emphasize it this year but Joe Biden hasn’t heard it yet in 2024 with the election only about ten months away: it’s the economy stupid.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 22, 2024 // 4 Comments »
Joe Biden ordered airstrikes on Iraq, against Iranian-backed militants, in retaliation for recent attacks by those militants that severely injured three American soldiers. Joe didn’t consult with Congress or anyone else before ordering the strikes, and no declaration of war exists of course. Yet no one believes the militias, following their spanking, will disappear or stop harming Americans.
That sums up the Biden Foreign Policy, call it a doctrine if you’d like: a series of geopolitically unsuccessful, inconsequential, mostly reactive unilateral actions, with no end game. Underlying it all is the sense that no one is particularly frightened, respectful or wary of American power anymore. Let’s see how this worked on a global scale over the last three bloody years.
The disastrous evacuation of Kabul in August 2021 should have warned all of us we were dealing with foreign policy amateurs. The rush for the last planes was an expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time for third country landing rights. Mistakes made as long ago as Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas for translators and others until literally the last flights were scheduled out. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just “land some planes and see if that works.” No endgame really, simply a unilateral decision to cap the evacuation off at a certain point in time and declare it over no matter who was or was not saved.
Ukraine is some yellowed vision of cold war. The Biden plan was based on a Wonka-like act of imagination, that U.S. arms wielded by amateur fighters backed up by intelligence, space-based targeting, and special forces infiltrated on the ground would hastily defeat a determined opponent (See Afghanistan, failure of the same strategy, 2001-2003.) When the miracle cure strategy failed, there was no Plan B except to continue to pour arms in to a war that had no clear end game, that was not winnable, only sustainable. Meanwhile, Biden restrictions on domestic mining mean the United States is the largest purchaser of Russian enriched uranium. If the Russians are scared of American power they hide that well.
The results have not been better elsewhere. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine preceeded what one pundit described as “the 2023 brazen Chinese spy balloon’s uncontested trajectory over the United States, the recent Hamas invasion of Israel, the serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria, and the terrorist Houthis’ veritable absorption of the Red Sea. America’s enemies had become opportunistic, not deterred.” Biden took the bait at each open-ended opportunity, and now Joe is dangerously close to letting Gaza and Yemen spiral into a global conflict.
And so another “coalition” fight, this time in Ukraine with NATO, ended up a U.S. primary struggle. It is NATO mostly walking away from the meat of the Ukraine struggle, and the baby NATO coalition elsewhere of France, Italy, and others that was supposed to control the Red Sea breaking down. It is a thin gruel of happy talk about caring for civilians backed up by unlimited arms to Israel, handled so poorly diplomatically that the U.S. has inherited pariah status globally. The modern version of American power was demonstrated when Egypt snubbed Joe Biden’s visit over the mess in Gaza. The question of Palestine, always simmering, is now another major issue to divide Red and Blue and further polarize society. In addition to receiving $6 billion in frozen oil funds from Biden as a ransom for five American hostages, Iran controls the playbook, attacking with impunity via its proxies across Iraq, Syria, and southern Lebanon; Iran’s partners carried out more than 100 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea. They decide if and when the 1:1 conflict with Israel goes regional, and the U.S. will be again forced to react. The Houthis, also Iran-backed, have dragged the U.S. into a broad promise to keep the Red Sea open to shipping, as the world rolls its eyes as Pax Americana once again looks like a punchline. Can anyone say we are still indispensable?
Another Biden foreign policy disaster has come home, literally, in the immigration crisis. For reasons too vague to enunciate, the Biden administration did away with any semblance of immigration law and flung open the southern border to anyone interested in wandering in. Already more than eight million illegal entrants have come across, with another quarter-million entering each month. As in Ukraine and elsewhere, there is no endgame. When will the border close? How much will caring for the millions cost (New York City has processed more than 160,000 migrants; some 70,000 remain in the city’s care. In Denver, caring for the new migrants has consumed 10 percent of the city’s budget)? The United States has now exceeded, both in real numbers and in percentages, all past numbers of non-native born American residents. What impact on our greater society will such an influx have, especially given how it is targeted at a handful of cities? Will the Russians ever surrender? What about the immigrants?
Three years ago, there was no war in Ukraine and certainly no U.S. military involvement in the Crimea and Donbas. Israel and Hamas existed in their tinder-like stasis condition, no brutal massacre of 1,600 Jews (30 of whom were Americans) and no invasion of Gaza. Campus protestors limited their protestations that they were not anti-Semitic in their hatred of Israel. Iran and the U.S. cooperated on fighting ISIS in Iraq, uneasy partners for certain but not shooting cousins as now. The Houthi struggle was confined within Yemen’s borders. On the positive side, efforts were being made to watch diplomacy bloom with North Korea, which instead is now test firing missiles aplomb once again. Biden has made no progress on China either to limit their opportunistic stance or reduce their hold over America economically. Biden has largely ignored most of Africa and South America as well as the world’s most populous democracy (and nuclear power) India. It is impossible to call it progress and all too easy to call it sadly the Biden Doctrine.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 11, 2024 // 16 Comments »
It’s evening in America. How might what we see affect the presidential election?
Pessimism: There is pessimism about the future, as a majority of Americans now believe the next generation is likely to have a lower standard of living. A Wall Street Journal poll found just 21 percent of respondents felt confident life for their children will be better, matching the record low.
Inflation: For more than two-thirds of voting age Americans, 2023 was by far the highest inflation of their adult lifetimes. Higher prices means less spending power. A recent poll on the economy found just seven percent of respondents were principally concerned about the availability of jobs, while 64 percent were most worried about prices. What’s the White House concerned about? Jobs, not prices, even to the point where one of its unofficial spokespersons, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, has created a genre for his column scolding Americans for not seeing how great the economy really is. Things are going well for some; the richest one percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth, worth $42 trillion, created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the population. If the economy is expanding, fewer people are benefiting from it. Averages may look good, but the median numbers, not so much. Why, Bidenomics seems to ask, can things be bad when so many people now work two or even three jobs?
Crime: Only 20 percent of registered voters feel that “things in the country these days are under control,” compared with 66 percent who feel that things are “out of control.” Out of control how? According to Gallup, 28 percent of households reported that they had been hit by crime, up from 20 percent in 2020. Some 63 percent of Americans describe the crime problem as “extremely” or “very” serious, the highest Gallup ever recorded, and 56 percent say there is more crime in their area than a year ago, also a record high.
It has gotten to the point where several businesses near the location where George Floyd died are suing the city of Minneapolis for a lack of policing. The lawsuit accuses police of blocking off the area, called “George Floyd Square,” for over a year with concrete barriers, which turned the area into a hotspot for violent crime. Criminals know “the area lacks police protection,” the lawsuit alleges, and businesses are seeking $1.5 million in damages. As with many school resource officers, the cops left George Floyd Square in response to community complaints about over-policing. Downtowns are hollowing out again, as businesses close in response to unabated smash and grab and mass shoplifting campaigns carried out in front of prosecutors unwilling to act. Albeit in part Covid-related, more than two percent of New York City tax payers fled the state, mostly high net worth individuals/taxpayers.
Drugs: Deaths from drug overdoses almost doubled from 52,404 in 2015 to 106,699 in 2021. Efforts to halt the flow from China of precursors used to make fentanyl have been limited, from blandly bellicose and provocative statements about Taiwan’s future, to asking Beijing very nicely to stop exporting.
Deaths of Despair: Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically and are still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who first sounded the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge on the social and economic forces making life harder for the working class.
Health: The U.S. now has a lower average life expectancy than Japan, driven by an increase in death rates in young and middle-aged adults 25 to 64. Besides Japan, life expectancy is also lower than Canada, the UK, Iceland, Hong Kong. Also Iran, China, Algeria, and Cuba, not the usual peers the U.S. claims. Guns account for about half of the suicides committed by young people and the majority of homicides. So while firearms play a large role, clearly there’s a mental health crisis fueling it. Mental-health-related visits among children, teenagers, and young adults surged between 2011 and 2020, from 4.8 million to 7.5 million.
The bottom line is our young people are less likely to reach age 20 than most around the world, including Syria. Only 23 percent of American youth are eligible to serve in the military due to being overweight, using drugs, or having mental and physical health problems. The U.S. drags the global lower-middle, clustered in infant mortality statistics which place it as peers to Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, and well below Canada, Japan, and most European countries. Those numbers reflect broad averages from within the United States. When you look at America by race, black infant deaths are more than twice those of whites, about what most Central American countries suffer.
Education: The educational harm caused by the coronavirus pandemic has been “devastating,” according to a recent survey of 26 million K-8 students by researchers at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and Harvard. The researchers also found the pandemic “exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.” The average “U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.” In New York City there are 119,300 homeless students in the public school system who depend on school for three meals, a shower, medical care, and handout clothing in addition to reading and writing (math scores are also down.)
Guns: Americans ages eighteen to twenty account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murders. 86 percent of the weapons came from the homes of friends, relatives, or parents. Some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 were carried out by people under eighteen. The median age of school shooters is sixteen. There have been at least 554 school-shooting victims, with at least 311,000 children exposed to gun violence at school in the U.S. since the Columbine High School massacre, all spread across 376 schools. Black students make up 16.6 percent of the school population but experience school shootings at twice that rate. The frequency of shootings has increased, with a surge of forty-six incidents in 2022, the highest in any year since 1999. The safest year was 2020, when most schools were closed and parents needed only to worry — mostly pointlessly, it turned out — about Covid taking their kids.
War and Defense: Overseas a period of relative calm has been replaced by an era of proxy-type wars that appear to many Americans to be as pointless as they are expensive. The fights in Ukraine and Gaza draw hundreds of billions of dollars in “aid,” leaving many Americans wondering if their taxes are too high given what appears to be the easy availability of such massive amounts of money. Politically the war-weary American population knows we are one bad decision away from entering both conflicts, unless you want to count Special Forces in Ukraine and naval action against Iranian-Houthi targets as us being “already in.” There is a feeling of unsettlement — are our sons and daughters going back to war so soon after the disastrous ending of twenty-some years in Afghanistan? At what point will the troops come home and the money come home to assist Americans in their struggles? At $877 billion in defense spending per year, the U.S. outspends the next ten nations on the list (China, UK, Japan, etc.) The U.S. has more bases abroad than any other country. Our post-9/11 wars caused 4.5 million deaths, and displaced up to 60 million people. What for?
Immigration, healthcare costs, war talk with Iran, nuclear gamesmanship with the Russians, it’s a long story. But as they say economics (education, etc…) is only complicated when talking to an economist. About 70 percent of all voters do not want Biden to run, including 51 percent of Democrats polled. Against the likely Republican nominee, Biden already trails by four points or more in swing states.
So, who are you voting for?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 3, 2024 // 8 Comments »
Boy oh boy, if anyone looks seriously into the end game in Afghanistan is somebody gonna be in trouble. See, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) the collapse of the Afghan army and government was mostly our own fault. No dessert for you!
You remember the war in Afghanistan, don’t you? Anyone? Bueller? See it was America’s longest war, stretching from 2001 until 2021, long enough that soldiers who deployed near the end had not even been born when it all started. Now that’s a war! The thing is, the war accomplished nothing in its 20 years. The situation on the ground — Taliban in charge, open territory for any terrorist needing an AirBnB — is pretty much status quo September 2001 except it is now 2024.
And now it turns out that’s mostly our fault. SIGAR released its report, Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to Its Demise. It posits two major factors that lead to the demise: unclear U.S. war aims, and corruption and mismanagement on the part of the Afghan government created, advised, and funded by the U.S. (so that’s sorta on us, too.) General James Mattis, who served as Mad Dog, head of Central Command from 2010 to 2013, and as Secretary of Defense from 2017 to 2018, told SIGAR, “The lack of political clarity on ends, ways, and means meant we were always wondering if we were still going to be here next year. Were we going to be funded next year? We weren’t sure whether to attack, retreat or go sideways.”
SIGAR found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two U.S. presidents to withdraw U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves. One former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR, “We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the jenga pile and expected it to stay up.” The sad-great thing about those quotes is that they could have been applied at most any point in the 20 year war. Lack of political clarity? It was a couple of years into the war itself before anyone knew the reason for the war (it turned out to be “terrorism.”) An unstainable Afghan military? Maybe someone could point out where in say year 16 the army was sustainable. Boy, heads are gonna roll over that one! All we need to do is find out who was responsible for creating a sustainable army and political clarity and roast ’em.
The other factor which contributed to the demise of the Afghan army was the last-minute wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s security institutions. In 2021, amid rapidly deteriorating security, President Ghani reshuffled most of his security officials, often replacing them with fellow ethnic Pashtuns. These leadership changes were part of a broader pattern of politicization and ethnicization (in favor of Pashtuns) of the security sector in the final years of the Ghani administration.
One analyst told SIGAR, “Districts collapsed not because of the army, but because of that restructuring that happened and the fact that none of [the replacement police chiefs] had connections” at the district level. He claimed it was the police that did most of the fighting in the final 18 months, not the army. By undermining the morale and political legitimacy of the police, this restructuring directly contributed to the collapse in August 2021. Ethnic competition between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns was likely the single biggest source of dysfunction within the ANDSF. But some former Afghan officials described other types of friction. One former MOD official described competition between the younger and older generation of officers, between the jihadis and the professional officers, and between ethnicities. All these issues distracted from the fight, he said. Now, see, someone on the American side should have been watching for that!
This strategic level mismanagement had a direct effect in the field. “Overnight, 98 percent of U.S. air strikes had ceased… the Doha agreement’s psychological implication was so great that the average Afghan soldier felt this idea of abandonment… U.S. soldiers were confused about what to engage and what to not. On an hourly basis, the U.S. military had to coordinate with the Doha office of Ambassador Khalilzad and others from the State Department to get clarification on what they could do,” said one former Afghan Army corps commander. “They [U.S. partners] said it was not right, but they have to follow orders. They would see the Taliban attacking our checkpoints. They would have videos of the Taliban doing it. But they would say we are not able to engage, because we have limitations. There was also so much concern about civilians, which gave the Taliban an advantage,” explained a former Afghan Army General.
According to an senior Afghan official, it was not until President Biden’s April 2021, announcement of the final troop and contractor withdrawal date that Afghan President Ghani’s inner circle said they realized that the ANDSF had no supply and logistics capability. Although the Afghan government had operated in this way for nearly 20 years, their realization came only four months before its collapse.
Then there was the lack of coordination between the U.S. and the Afghan governments as the Americans negotiating in Doha cut their own deals with the Taliban to enable a quick exit. One former Afghan government official told SIGAR that following the U.S.-Taliban agreement, President Ghani began to suspect that the United States wanted to remove him from power. That official and a former Afghan general believed Ghani feared a military coup. According to the general, Ghani became a “paranoid president… afraid of his own countrymen” and of U.S.-trained Afghan officers. According to a former Afghan general, in the week before Kabul fell, President Ghani replaced the new generation of young U.S.-trained Afghan officers with an old guard of Communist generals in almost all of the army corps. Ghani, that general said, was “changing commanders constantly [to] bring back some of the old-school Communist generals who [he] saw as loyal to him, instead of these American-trained young officers who he [mostly] feared.”
Afghan officials, largely removed from the negotiations, struggled most of all to understand what the United States had agreed to with the Taliban. According to Afghan government officials, the U.S. military never clearly communicated the specifics of its policy changes to the Ghani administration. According to a former Afghan general, in a broad sense, the U.S. military took on the role of a referee and watched the Afghan government and Taliban fight, something the general referred to as “a sick game.” According to that general, Afghan troops had not only lost U.S. support for offensive operations, they no longer knew if or when U.S. forces would come to their defense. U.S. inaction fueled mistrust among the ANDSF toward the United States and their own government. The Taliban’s operations and tactics, however, suggested that they may have had a better understanding of new levels of support the United States was willing to provide to the ANDSF following the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement. For example, under the U.S.-Taliban agreement’s rules, U.S. aircraft could not target the Taliban groups that were waiting more than 500 meters away—the groups “beyond the contact” that would engage in the second, third, or fourth wave to defeat the last ANDSF units. A senior Afghan official said this was a loophole that the Taliban used in their targeting to their advantage.
SIGAR’s sad conclusion to the report could have been written at any point, including in 1968. “The U.S. approach to reconstructing the ANDSF lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country. As a result, the U.S. created an ANDSF that could not operate independently, milestones for ANDSF capability development were unrealistic, and the eventual collapse of the ANDSF was predictable. After 20 years of training and development, the ANDSF never became a cohesive, substantive force capable of operating on its own. The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multi-generational process. In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security assistance sector were likely to fail from the beginning.”
“Likely to fail from the beginning” is a helluva epitaph for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. If only SIGAR could find the guys responsible, we might avoid another round in Ukraine, where our policy depends on another U.S. patsy leader whose army is now totally dependent on U.S. funding, supplies, and advisement in a war that cannot be won, only sustained at great expense.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
December 15, 2023 // 6 Comments »
They just won’t stop. The same day we wrote about media exaggeration of Trump’s second term plans to “seize power,” the New York Times comes out with an end-of-days Trump Apocalypse story — “Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State.’” Their version of term 2.0 reads like an AI-generated text of Mein Kampf. But what might Trump really do his second term? Don’t worry, it’s all good unless you like the Deep State.
To start, Trump will not repeat a mistake from term 1.0, and will quickly fill his political appointee positions with allies. This sounds like a shocker until a) you realize this is what every new president does and b) Trump was roundly criticized in term 1.0 for not filling the ranks fast enough and thus somehow endangering America. Very likely never expecting to win, and not being a lifetime pol, Trump took office without a bench team, without a folder of thousands of resumes from party loyalists and think tank exiles looking for work. In Biden’s case, he finished the task fast by basically picking up most of the under-employed Obama administration hacks and those still grouchy because their promised Hillary Administration jobs never materialized.
Trump this time seems more prepared. Every president has some 4,000 appointed positions to fill. Every president fills these with loyalists, party hacks, or in the case of jobs like ambassadorships, wealthy donors as payback. In the case of term 2.0, in addition to the usual suspects, the Heritage Foundation has been compiling and vetting some 20,000 resumes. The chosen should come through that process enthusiastic to carry out the peoples’ will having elected Trump, and are unlikely to form the core of a Deep State “resistance” as during term 1.0. You can submit your resume online. To ensure all these appointees are ready to go to work on Day One, Heritage is also offering an online course to train them up for the task. You can also apply to enroll online. The thousands of jobs which need to be filled are listed in the Plum book, alongside the expected salary, everything from Secretary of State to Member of the Morris K. Udall Scholarship and Excellence in National Environmental Policy Foundation. This initiative and most of the others comes from the Heritage Foundation’s2025 Presidential Transition Project 2025.
Also in planning is the implementation of changes to Schedule F, which shields stay-in-place-forever Civil Servants from political influence. Unfortunately what was intended in good faith to create a merit system inside a government where civil servants’ allegiance was owed to the public and not the White House, ended up as a bubble of invincibility around many who do their work slowly and without interest. Though the Executive Order was written during the chaotic end of term 1.0, high on a Trump policy list for term 2.0 would be implementing these changes to Schedule F. The action would convert as many as 50,000 civil servant positions (still leaving about two million Federal civilian positions untouched) into political appointees, allowing deadwood to be cut away and jobs filled with people in line with the administration’s goals. Action, rather than nonaction, is the goal. If actually seen to fruition, this would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Impact might be greatest in institutions like the Department of Justice, which the liberal media fears will be weaponized by Trump to go after Biden and others in the same way the Mueller investigation, two impeachments, and multiple indictments have dogged Trump since leaving office.
Aside from personnel changes, it is Trump’s policy plans that scare the liberal media the most, having worked themselves into a froth in term 1.0 by mislabeling everything from immigrant holding centers (“concentration camps”) to mob violence (“insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States at the People’s House” and all that.) Project 2025 has a long policy section, dealing with the issues department-by-department. Here’s a look at what they have in mind for the Department of State as an example. State under Obama/Hillary had morphed into the Department of Nice, working full time for women’s and LGBT rights, climate change and just about everything but making America great. It was a center of “the resistance,” grinding out dissent cables on matters outside its own purview, such as domestic immigration policy and war plans for Syria.
According to Plan 2025, Trump should remake the Department into a tool of his foreign policy instead of the adversary it was during term 1.0 (see the scuttling of rapprochement with North Korea.) High on the list is to “focus on core diplomatic activities, and stop promoting policies birthed in the American culture wars. The United States should focus on core security, economic, and human rights engagement… and reject the promotion of divisive policies that hurt the deepening of shared goals.”
More broadly, “there is a tug-of-war between Presidents and bureaucracies— and that resistance is much starker under conservative Presidents, due largely to the fact that large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision. It should not and cannot be this way. A major source, if not the major source, of the State Department’s ineffectiveness lies in its institutional belief that it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.”
Other State-centric policy goals will be the freeze all in-process negotiations for review, conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations, and refocus policy on China, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. This will be done in conjunction with internal housekeeping, specifically to “develop a reorganization strategy. Despite periodic attempts by previous Administrations (including the Trump Administration) to make more than cosmetic changes to the State Department, its structure has remained largely unchanged since the 20th century. The State Department will better serve future Administrations, regardless of party, if it were to be meaningfully streamlined. The next Administration should develop a complete hypothetical reorganization of the department—one which would tighten accountability to political leadership, reduce overhead, eliminate redundancy, waste fewer taxpayer resources, and recommend additional personnel-related changes for improvement of function. Such reorganization could be creative, but also carefully review specific structure-related problems that have been documented over the years.” In other words, heads will roll in a staid, uncreative bureaucracy already on record as opposing most of Trump’s foreign policy goals and with an agenda of its own.
The final set of clues as to what a Trump administration 2.0 policy might look like rests in Heritage’s 180-day Transition Playbook, which includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency. The Playbook will provide the next President a road map for doing that. You can read it all in eye-numbing detail (they’re not kidding, even the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets its own road map to Trumpism.)
It is possible Trump and his advisors won’t pay a whit of attention to Project 2025 and its recommendations, and may discard most of the 20,000 resumes Heritage hopes to pass on during the transition period following the 2024 election. Still, if you are looking for clues as to what might follow in Trump 2.0, getting the policy wonk-level view from documents such as Project 2025 may be as good a place to start as any. But read it dispassionately; it is a serious to-do list for transitioning a liberal government structure to one flavor of a conservative one. There should be no fear democracy will disappear from these shores in the process.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
November 28, 2023 // 17 Comments »
One of the fads in the liberal media is for Trump horror stories, Apocalypse Trump, should he be re-elected as president. Like political porn, there may be no real point to all this other than to titillate, although there could also be an underlying strategy try and con the proles into not voting Trump in 2024. Either way, it’s worth reading the horror tales just to laugh at what the writers’ imagine a second Trump term might be like.
The Los Angeles Times gets you the inside baseball the action with an article headlined “Trump promises vengeance and power grabs if he wins in 2024. Here’s the plan.” Save yourself the trouble of looking; there are no named sources to almost all of these descriptions of Trump 2.0, though they are presented as certainties. The Times begins with Inauguration Day, stating as fact “anticipating widespread protests against his second term, Trump and allies reportedly are drafting plans to invoke the Insurrection Act in his first hours back in the White House — thereby confirming the expected protesters’ likely point: Trump is a danger to liberty and constitutional governance.” The author doesn’t seem to remember how the Insurrection Act, last used in 1992 to quell riots in L.A., did not end liberty and/or the Constitution. But it wasn’t Trump you see, so OK!
And that’s just one of many MAGA plans in the works, as the Washington Post reported, all aimed at making good on what the writer feels is Trump’s central promise of the 2024 campaign: retribution. According to the Post, Trump allies are “mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents,” even naming individuals to be investigated and prosecuted. Ironic prose given Trump is neck deep into five legal battles, two with the Federal government, since he left office, and that the FBI was used even while he was in office to spy on him in an effort to prove he was a Russian spy.
It is also ironic Trump has all these plans to use the judicial system against his enemies. First of course because declaring himself something of a dictator you’d think Trump could bypass all that innocent until guilty stuff that bogs down trials and just kick in doors. More important, why would Dictator Trump bother with “justice” at all? After all, writes the Los Angeles Times, “His obnoxious outbursts this week in his New York civil trial over financial skulduggery [sic] were just the latest evidence of his disdain for the law and the judicial system. And we haven’t even gotten to his three criminal trials for seeking to overturn Biden’s election and making off with government documents. No one — not witnesses, prosecutors or judges — is immune from his attacks and the death threats that follow.” Jen Psaki separately warned MSNBC viewers if Trump regains office he would “unravel the rule of law as we know it.” Jamelle Bouie of the Times warns “it looks an awful lot like a set of plans meant to give the former president the power and unchecked authority of a strongman.”
Ah, death threats. One cornerstone of Apocalypse Trump is he controls a zombie army of MAGA believers that he can direct against adversaries — “targeting” in the words of one judge. Another reason to question his “planned” use of the court system. Why not just release the hounds? After all, why not make good on his claim under the Constitution’s Article II, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” made when everyone was saying Trump was a Russkie spy. Nonetheless, the system it is. Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The Washington Post reports Trump told advisers he wants the Justice Department to investigate his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general Bill Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley. Trump also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI/Justice Department.
Here’s how it will work, using justice to commit unjust acts. The Post, to the rescue to the confused, says “To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.” The Post quotes “It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”
If irony was water we’d all have drowned by now.
It wouldn’t be a party unless The New York Times weighed in. They succinctly state “Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands. Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies under direct presidential control.” He’ll do this by “stripping employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’” The New Republic wrote an article headlined “Inside Trump’s Fascist Plan to Control All Federal Agencies if He Wins.” Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic there are “plans for a dictatorship that should appall every American.”
And let’s not forget everyone’s favorite Apocalypse Trump subject, immigration. There, according to the New York Times, Trump is conjuring up “sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations,” claiming “If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them.” Trump supposedly plans to ban people from Muslim-majority nations and reimpose a Covid-era policy of refusing asylum claims based on his feeling migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis. He plans to deputize local police officers and the National Guard voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states to carry out sweeping raids. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget.
Are you not entertained? That may be the only purpose of the Apocalypse Trump genre, garnering clicks. It stands then to reason that to keep the snowball rolling the claims toward the Apocalypse, the tall tales, need to become increasingly dramatic, topping yesterday’s dopamine hit. Do a quick Google search using the phrase “Trump will seize control” to see the latest, as well as some greatest hits. These types of stories were popular during Trump 1.0, putting words into his mouth and distorting those that came out, assigning nefarious intent to even the simplest Executive Order. A favorite fretted over Trump seizing control of the FEMA emergency broadcast system and the whole Internet to disseminate propaganda and control his minions. NBC News helpfully uncovered the fact “Trump can’t use FEMA’s wireless alerts to send personal messages” a question which apparently had not come up previously in the 80-odd-years the original Cold War system has been in place.
A second driver of all this “journalism” is a desperate attempt to convince on-the-fence voters to not vote for Trump. After all, the Los Angeles Times made their intent for this advocacy pretty clear: “Too many voters are disengaged, grumpy that their choice seems to be coming down to Trump vs. Biden. As if those choices were comparably distasteful when, in fact, one is vanilla and the other is nitroglycerin.” The idea here is to use the tools of the media to scare the proles into not voting for Trump for fear of bringing on the end of Constitutional government in the United States. You’d think people would be tired by now with these “sky is falling” pronouncements but apparently you’d be wrong given the sheer bulk of them, and the crazier-than-last-time feel most have.
The possible effectiveness of this strategy assumes most Trump voters, for gosh sakes 50 percent of the entire country, are too dumb to see what is right in front of them, fascism itself. But since Trump has not been kind enough to write out a Mein Kampf-like manifesto of all the dastardliest deeds he intends to do, America’s liberal media is doing it for him. No mind Trump is the only recent president not to start or join a new war; he is a war monger. No mind Trump tried to restart relations with North Korea via old-fashioned diplomacy; we are on the verge of nuclear disaster. No matter the state of the economy or decisions on Covid which resonate well in hindsight, he is clownishly wrong. No mind Trump has participated according to the law in every legal action against him, he does not believe in the rule of law. Oh, and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is so scared about what will happen in Term 2.0 he is planning to leave the country, so there is an upside.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
November 16, 2023 // 7 Comments »
Did anyone ask you (or maybe Congress) if it was OK to go to war again in the Middle East? After literal decades of fighting in that troubled part of the world, it looks like the U.S. is without discussion, never mind vigorous debate, already at war in various sub-theatres of someone else’s conflict. See if anything that’s going on seems like war to you.
— The U.S. is flying drones over Gaza. The Pentagon says the unmanned aerial vehicle flights began after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and are being conducted “in support of hostage recovery efforts.” The drone missions are also providing “advice and assistance” to Israel. A total of seven different aircraft are flying across the region, four of them per day, passing information to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF.) The U.S. is also supplying precision-guided munitions, fighter aircraft, and air defense capabilities, such as interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome counter-drone systems, to the IDF.
— U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are in Israel. Officials anonymously told the New York Times several dozen special operators are on the ground working with the FBI, the State Department, and other U.S. government hostage recovery specialists. A senior Pentagon official told the “Forever Wars” blog that SOF are preparing for “contingencies,” which may include the active retrieval of hostages from Hamas. The U.S. previously said it has sent military advisers to help Israel. Christopher Maier, an assistant secretary of defense, indicated other soldiers have also been deployed. “We’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things,” Maier said.
— Two American veteran-run organizations, the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) and Save Our Allies, sent roughly two dozen volunteers, all former special operators, into Israel and Egypt to support evacuations. Each volunteer was chosen based on having experience working with Egyptians or Israelis. They arrange for local nationals to provide food and medical supplies to trapped Americans, and they have interfaced with the Egyptian military personnel who ultimately have to approve Americans’ departure. The special operations volunteers also coordinate directly with the IDF to ensure Americans are not targeted. They call their work “sheparding” and forswear a kinetic role. SOAA staff are also in Tel Aviv helping to coordinate evacuations. The volunteers’ actions, particularly working with the Egyptian and Israeli forces, come very close to traditional governmental roles, though the groups deny that.
— Meanwhile, the U.S. has roughly 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq at at least eight bases/facilities doing God-knows-what. An additional 300 troops will soon be dispatched to the Middle East. Thousands of Marines wait off shore.
— the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named Site 512, the base is also a radar facility that monitors missile attacks on Israel.
— American service members stationed in the Middle East have endured at least 27 attacks by Iran-backed terror groups. There have been 16 attacks in Iraq and 11 in Syria.
— American fighter jets launched two retaliatory airstrikes against locations in eastern Syria on October 26, which were followed by at least six additional small-scale re- retaliatory attacks in the region. A Pentagon spokesperson said the military would “do what we need to do to protect our troops.”
— The USS Carney, a destroyer in the northern Red Sea, intercepted four land attack cruise missiles and 14 drones launched by pro-Iranian Houthi forces in Yemen. A Pentagon spokesperson said the U.S. is prepared to do whatever is needed “to protect our partners and our interests in this important region.” United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS. The attack marked the first time ballistic missiles were launched at Israel since Saddam Hussein fired his Scuds in 1991. The action by the Carney represented the first shots by the U.S. military in the defense of Israel in this conflict.
The ability of the president to make war is a contentious issue that has evolved over the course of American history. The Framers’ intent was to vest the primary power to declare war only in the hands of Congress. This was seen as a way to prevent the president from unilaterally committing the nation to military conflicts, reflecting concerns about an overly powerful executive. The idea didn’t last very long, only until President Thomas Jefferson used military force against the Barbary Pirates without a formal declaration of war. The first official declaration by Congress was not until The War of 1812. Over time, presidents began to assert more authority in matters of war, often without obtaining formal declarations from Congress. The ability to use military force became more flexible, and presidents argued that they had inherent powers as Commander in Chief. Congress approved its last formal declaration of war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Korean War, followed by the Vietnam War, marked a significant turning point in the balance of war powers between the president and Congress. The conflicts, as well as all the brushfire wars of the Cold War, were waged without a formal declaration. In response to growing concerns about presidential war-making authority, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973. This required the President to consult with Congress and seek authorization within 60 days of introducing U.S. armed forces into hostilities or conflicts. It has been near-completely ignored or treated as a technicality, an afterthought. The 9/11 attacks led to the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which granted the President broad authority to use military force against those responsible for the attacks. This AUMF was used to justify U.S. military actions in various regions, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and literally the whole rest of the world (apply as needed.)
With all this as background, at what point of involvement in the Israeli conflict will we talk about it? The old “boots on the ground” standard, which was never applied to Syria, Yemen, or Iraq War III anyway? Or, as in Ukraine, will Joe Biden simply lead us into another endless war with nary a word of debate and a blank check from a cowardly Congress and media?
Leaving aside one’s feelings for or against Israeli actions, either way it is clear America is again at some sort of war in the Mideast. The difference between what is happening now and “war” is more about semantics than it is about combat. The old definition, something about boots on the ground, no longer serves any function in a world where combat is carried out by remote control and gestures such as the deployment of small numbers of special forces are enough to fan a political flame into a literal one. It is long past time we talked about making war.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
October 20, 2023 // 18 Comments »
America needs to hear from its own president, not Volodymyr Zelensky, about what is going on in Ukraine.
America just can’t get enough of Endless War it seems; otherwise why would it keep getting into one of them? Leaving aside ancient historical examples like Korea (still ongoing) and Vietnam (result was a complete defeat of the U.S. after decades of conflict preceeded by years of U.S. nearly completely funding the failed French war effort there) we have the more modern examples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The former sputtered to defeat for the U.S. after decades of war (counting Gulf War I and the bombing campaigns which accomplished little permanently and Gulf War II which led to empowering Iran in Iraq via Gulf War 2.5) and the latter concluding decisively on the TV August 2021 with the symbolically cluster-futzed final evacuation (memories of Saigon.) Each war started with no real practical goal in mind (remember nation building? The War on Terror, i.e., a war against a tactic?)
With that kind of track record you’d think America would take a breather from Endless War, you know, take a few years off to get its head together, maybe work the fentanyl problem, get the economy together so people other than Democratic commentators can see it growing. But no. Just a scant six months after hosing the last Afghan dust off our boots the U.S. finds itself mired in Ukraine. No clear, realistic goal? Check. Open-ended commitment of U.S. resources? Check. Potential to suck U.S. forces directly into the conflict? Check. Dubious one man celebrity leader? Check. Unclear as hell how Ukraine fits into our national interest, how much more time and money will be expected to achieve whatever our objectives are, and how much Europe plans to contribute to the war taking place in its backyard? Check.
It is time for President Biden to explain some things to the American people.
1) What is the endgame, Joe? Is it democracy in Ukraine? If so, you’re off to a rough start. Zelensky over the past two years conscripted his own citizens, kept young males from the freedom to travel, done away with opposition parties, canceled all future elections indefinitely, consolidated all TV platforms in Ukraine into one state broadcast, dealt harshly with dissidents, and assumed practically one-man rule over the nation, certainly its war. Plus there’s all that about units of the Ukrainian military being actual Nazis. So Joe, what is the plan to bring democracy to Ukraine? It seems only that things have gotten worse since the U.S. intervened to prevent the Russians from doing many of the things Zelensky has already done to his own country. FYI Joe, you’ll recall military imposition of democratic values historically has failed.
2) Or Joe, is the point of the war to force Russia out of what Ukraine claims as its territory? Does that include the territory the U.S. gifted a few years ago to the Russians in the Crimea when under another president all this seemed much less dire? Or just to retake the land back which Russia gained after February 2022? That was the point of the Great 2023 Spring Counter-Offensive, right? Be up front with the propaganda-weary American people about how things are going; the Ukrainians in their offensive using most of the conventional ground-force arms in America’s arsenal, gained back only 143 square miles. The Russians, supposedly on the defensive, gained 331 square miles of land. With the Counter-Offensive now clearly a failure, what is the next step? Is there a plan? How do we define win? “As long as it takes” is not a viable option, it’s just a recipe for another Vietnam, another Afghanistan.
3) What role if any will diplomacy with Russia play in achieving this end game, whatever it is? Have the Russians sought to meet and discuss the war? Has the U.S. offered to meet? If not, why not? Diplomacy can end wars. We know your secretary of state can pick a fight but can he stop one, the real test for his profession? Because it is complicated, we’ll give you a pass on how our own government helped create this situation in the first place, something the American people need to know more about at some point.
4) Speaking of things the American public needs to know about, who blew up the Nordstrom pipeline between Russia and Germany? Is this the kind of war America is in that we would blow up the pipeline to press Germany to further join the fight? Or is it the kind of war where Ukraine would somehow muster the technical know-how to blow up the pipeline to force Germany to further join the fight? Why would the Russians blow up a pipeline that supplies their gas to Germany, a significant source of revenue? Is this war that dirty?
5) The U.S. has appropriated $113 billion dollars to Ukraine, paying for everything from tanks to ambulance drivers’ regular salaries. And what else Joe? What systems are in place for accountability for this money? Could it be that more money simply deepens the quagmire and pushes us closer to direct conflict with Russia? You’ve spoken in the past how accountability lies with the Inspectors General at the Department of Defense, State, and USAID. They point to “a decade of shared experience gained from joint oversight of eight different overseas contingency operations, forgetting the spectacular failure of oversight of these overseas contingency operations,” and how the same agencies covered up waste, fraud, and mismanagement and deliberately mislead the American public on the progress made in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Joe, you need to address opposition to the more formal structure of establishing a Special Inspector General for Ukraine (SIGUR), such as SIGIR in Iraq and SIGAR in Afghanistan. “As much as it takes” is a blank check the American taxpayer needs to know more about. Senator Rand Paul in the spring placed a temporary hold on a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, demanding unsuccessfully Congress insert a provision into the aid package creating an inspector general to oversee the distribution of the aid. As SIGAR noted, “While Afghanistan and Ukraine are very different countries with a history of facing very different threats, many of the challenges U.S. agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.” And speaking of corruption, your own State Department has singled out Ukraine for its corrupt practices, which as you know from Iraq and Afghanistan will seriously dilute any aid. Why resist additional oversight?
6) We know there are American Special Forces on the ground in Ukraine, and America forces in command and control roles in the ongoing fight. Are there redlines, either promised to Zelensky or just for yourself, Joe, to trigger a larger U.S. direct role in Ukraine? What would it take to have more “advisers” on the ground, or American air power, or American leadership embedded with Ukrainian troops in the field? At what point in escalation would you agree Congress needs to formally weigh in? And no fair making it all OK by calling the deployments “NATO” instead of American. A Russia-NATO scuffle is a Russia-U.S. scuffle.
No more malarkey, Joe. Time to talk to the American people about Ukraine.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
October 12, 2023 // 10 Comments »
One of the evils of the Trump era was that illegal, immoral, and at times unconstitutional acts were raised to high standards if they seemed to chip away at Trump somehow. So a fake dossier, which consumed several years and millions of dollars of American life, was brushed off with in the end a fine from the elections commission, not someone going to jail for lying to the FBI. So it is now with General Mark Milley, the Left’s newest bestest friend in violating the Constitution in order to save the Constitution from Trump.
A slithering little piece of hagiography in The Atlantic about Milley (published while he was still technically Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he goes to great pains to explain should be apolitical while being hella political) might have just been that, a chance to kick the dog one more time without consequence, except for the fact that Milley clearly has higher intentions in Washington (or at least to sell books) and most of all because Trump stands close to a second term. The article hashes over the usual, proclaiming Trump an existential threat to Mom and apple pie, never mind democracy, all without details or explanation. Readers of The Atlantic just know it is true and the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, sees no reason to expand on the idea. The real danger here is not poor journalism (we’re used to it) but the promotion of the idea that Trump is inherently dangerous and without men like General Milley willing to bend the rules and warp the Constitution we will all die in some Trumpian nuclear hissy fit.
It is important to restate at this point that Trump finished his four years as president. He started no new wars. He did not launch nuclear attacks on Iran or North Korea, nor antagonize nuclear power Russia closer to the edge of one. He came as close as any modern president to some sort of rapprochement with North Korea. Trump never used the Insurrection Act to send the military against lawful protesters in the United States. It is worth remembering because Milley’s comments create the impression of something very different.
A healthy portion of The Atlantic article details what Milley felt was Trump’s disrespect for the military (Trump’s deferments but not Biden’s are mentioned liberally.) The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg writes. “Milley’s family venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.” Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Goldberg continued, “in addition to other former Trump administration officials, also argued the former president had such contempt for the military that it made it challenging to explain concepts of honor, sacrifice and duty. That sour view of the armed forces, alongside Trump being unfit to serve as president among other points of contention, made Milley’s first 16 months as chairman far more difficult than he anticipated.” “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” retired three-star general James Dubik, one of the general’s mentors.
One wonders about that disrespect for the military, and how a candid Milley might characterize the actions of commanders Bush and Obama. Was invading Afghanistan when the 9/11 perpetrators came mostly from Saudi the act of a sane man? How about lying to create an excuse to invade Iraq? What about the bombing of Libyan infrastructure, the results of which were on display for the world recently as tens of thousands drowned in a broken-dam flood there? Over 7,000 U.S. service members, plus near millions of civilians, died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Are those sane acts? Should Milley or one of his counterparts have acted unconstitutionally to stop them? See what happens when one man determines he’s smarter than the rest?
Milley, while speaking out of one side of his mouth about the sanctity of the chain of command and the president’s role as commander-in-chief, goes on to call Trump a “nuclear monarch” and bemoan the fact that Trump alone could order the use of nuclear weapons as if that was something new. Milley then says without batting an eyelash that during the final days of the Trump administration he took the extraordinary step of having key military officers swear an oath to him promising to involve Milley in any decisions “weird or unusual.” Milley called together senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center on January 8 and “instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.” Milley says his fear (without evidence, of course) was that Trump would initiate a nuclear war with Iran after losing the 2020 presidential election. Milley was out to break the chain of command to stop it, which you see was A-O.K. because breaking all the rules if you possess the judgement of General Milley is itself A-OK.
His other brush with insubordination was two phone calls to General Li Zuo cheng, leader of China’s People’s Liberation Army, in the days surrounding January 6, assuring the PLA that the U.S. had no plans to launch a first strike against China. Milley was not ordered to do this, he just did it because he felt on his own Trump might launch the nukes as a bizzaro-world way to stay in office after the “insurrection” of January 6 failed. Oh yeah, that insurrection — Milley, an alleged student of history — claims was America’s “Reichstag moment.” He called Trump’s statements “The gospel of the Führer.”
Kori Schake, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said the revelations Milley covertly acted to counter his commander-in-chief are “bad for the military as an institution… It encourages people to do what Americans are already doing, which is viewing the military as they view the Supreme Court: apolitical when they agree with them, partisan when they don’t,” she said.
As if the prove the point, an anonymous (of course) senior military official said Milley “did what he had to do to fulfill his oath to the Constitution and to protect this country.” Yet Trump called it treason. Senator Marco Rubio demanded Milley resign, as did Christopher Miller, who served above Milley as acting defense secretary in the final months of Trump’s presidency. Milley ignored his boss’ admonition to quit. So much for the chain of command.
Milley did not act to fulfill his oath; he acted like a coup planner at best, an idiot at worst because (checks notes) Trump did not launch a nuclear attack on China, and General Li must have wondered exactly what was going on in Washington to prompt Milley to call and foreswear a strike, a first of its own in U.S. history.
None of this — what he said recently and what he did during the Trump administration — has hurt Milley’s standing in political Washington. Biden loves him. Milley was chosen to speak at the French ambassador’s residence, a journalist-heavy throng that officially was a celebration of the First Amendment. It was the sort of gathering where you’d “expect an address from a fight-the-power free-speech lawyer or a hell-raising investigative reporter, not a uniformed four-star general. But Milley’s lack of journalism credentials didn’t appear to bother many in the audience, who greeted him as a hero.” Politico says “Milley has become a cause celebre in Washington — and a presence around town.” WaPo calls him “Pattonesque.”
In peacetime it is not normal for a senior general in the U.S. military to be famous. It is not normal for one to seek the spotlight as a domestic protector of our democracy. It is not normal for a general to claim to be apolitical while acting aggressively in the political sphere. Milley instead found a way to spread the gospel of a non-politicized military as itself a political act. Why you’d almost think Milley was up to something, setting himself up for some new role, maybe running for some office. Milley warns in his Atlantic interview he and others will likely be sent to jail if Trump is reelected. Be sure to vote accordingly.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
