Biden’s “Ironclad” Commitments to the World

 By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Biden recently visited the Holocaust Museum and delivered a speech in which he pledged an “ironclad” commitment to the “security of Israel”.

On Wednesday, Biden sat down with CNN and announced an arms embargo on Israel.

This is bad news for the Jewish State, but it’s also bad news for every nation to whom Biden had offered his “ironclad” commitments in the past. And that turns out to be much of the world.

In March, Biden had greeted Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the White House and vowed that, “America’s commitment to Poland is ironclad.”

In April, ahead of a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Biden promised, “The United States defense commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are ironclad. They’re ironclad.”

Then at a press conference with Prime Minister Kishida, Biden touted another, now discredited, ironclad promise. “As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again: ironclad.”

And in troubling news for Ukraine, Biden agreed in a 60 Minutes interview that his commitment to that war was also ironclad.

But is there a country out there that doesn’t have an ironclad commitment from Biden?

Last year, Biden held a joint press conference with President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea and assured him that, “our mutual defense treaty is ironclad.”

Biden has been throwing out ironclad commitments around the world like a peddler selling secondhand goods. As Obama’s veep, he boasted to Jordan’s King Abdullah of “America’s ironclad support”. And he more recently told the Greeks of our “ironclad friendship.”

The Gulf nations looking for an “ironclad security pact” with America may get one, but the price of iron isn’t what it used to be. Especially iron out of the ice cold forges of Washington D.C.

While he has been offering a lot of “ironclad” commitments to the rest of the world, it’s not just individual nations that may be reevaluating the value of Biden’s ironclad assurances.

“My commitment to NATO and Article 5 is ironclad,” Biden had claimed in 2022 as Sweden and Finland had lined up to join the security alliance.

“Our sacred commitment to NATO remains ironclad,” the White House recently posted.

At a meeting with the leaders of 9 Eastern European countries and the NATO Secretary General, Biden assured them all of America’s “ironclad commitment to NATO’s Article 5.”

To paraphrase Oprah, you get an ironclad commitment, you get an ironclad commitment, and you get an ironclad commitment. And it’s worth about as much as those empty words.

The rest of the world has learned that Biden’s ironclad is rusted through, but what about his past “ironclad” promises to Americans?

Biden had described social security as “an ironclad commitment” and the White House claims that “President Biden’s 2024 budget shows an ironclad commitment to protecting Social Security and Medicare against all cuts.” The reality is that Biden’s inflationary wasteful 2024 budget further bankrupts Social Security. Biden’s iron isn’t good at home or abroad.

In further bad news for Americans, Biden also claimed that the budget “fulfills my ironclad promise that no one earning less than $400,000 per year would pay an additional penny in new taxes.” So assume that the tax hikes on everyone are coming.

Last year, we were told that “the President has an ironclad commitment to supporting communities across the Nation as they recover from disasters.”No wonder America has become a disaster area.

Ironclads were battleships impervious to the weapons of the day because they were covered in heavy armor. It’s not really the best metaphor for a commitment, but it’s a perfectly good metaphor for Biden’s imperviousness to telling the truth or remembering what he once said.

When you offer “ironclad commitments” to everyone you meet, they’re worthless. A commitment to everyone is a commitment to no one. That is one of the great gaping flaws of globalism.

Adding “ironclad” or any particular word to a commitment doesn’t make it stronger. Iron may add more armor to a warship, but it doesn’t add anything to a man’s word. What makes a man’s word count is the strength of his character and that is shown by his willingness to keep his word.

Biden betrayed Israel because he had made a lot of ironclad commitments. He had made commitments to Jewish voters in New York City and Hamas supporters in Dearborn, Michigan. His administration had made commitments to leftists and to moderates. In the face of escalating fire from leftists, his ironclad armor buckled and he sank in the shallow mud off Foggy Bottom.

This is a problem for America more than anyone else.

International relationships, like all human relationships, are built on trust. Treaties are just pieces of paper and handshakes are so routine that diplomats need wrist braces. The Pax Americana is more than anything else an empire of trust. And we held off WWIII for three generations because most of the world believed that we meant what we said about things like nuclear retaliation, NATO’s Article 5 or anything else. Whatever you believe about those policies, American power and influence would be a non-starter if the president’s word were worthless.

When a president draws a red line and then does nothing, more wars are likely to follow. If he offers defense commitments that he doesn’t keep, our enemies are more likely to attack. If America stops defending its allies, those enemies will then test if we will defend ourselves.

And if we don’t, they will attack the United States of America.

Our military is short of recruits, our Navy is short of ships and our Air Force has a whole lot of planes that won’t fly. In war games, China tends to win and we tend to lose. What keeps China from pushing farther is all those nukes sitting quietly under Iowa cornfields. Will we use them?

Beijing doesn’t know for sure, but every time Biden offers another worthless promise, the odds look better for the People’s Republic of China and all our other enemies. And worse for us.

Americans and the world have learned the worthlessness of Biden’s ironclad commitments. None of us know what the future will bring, the one thing we know is whom we can’t trust.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

America’s Growing Political Impotence

What happens when government not only fails to perform as expected, but its execution is inept to the point of being an embarrassment?

 December 21, 2022By Robert Weissberg

First-world counties have governments that work. Perhaps imperfectly, and perhaps not in the most economically efficient way, but they successfully fulfill their responsibilities. But what happens when government not only fails to perform as expected, but its execution is inept to the point of being an embarrassment? To invoke an old image, the trains not only fail to run on time, but few move at all and when they do operate, they are accident prone and chronically late while often arriving at the wrong stations.

More is involved than public inconvenience or squandering funds. At some point public confidence is so weakened that the government itself loses legitimacy. And, as legitimacy declines, voters may well consider once unthinkable alternatives. Recall that “making the trains run on time” was the slogan that helped bring Benito Mussolini to power in 1922. This is the politics of exasperation, the belief that something must be done, and that perhaps a new political order is needed. This Is not a good situation for democracy.

Unfortunately, America may be slowly inching to this point where government incompetence undermines its legitimacy. Why support a country run by bumbling fools? This is not just the usual cynicism encapsulated by the comic phrase, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” This is the level of ineffectiveness that makes America a laughingstock to foreigners...........To Read More....

The Madness of King Brandon

By Don Fisher, Jr.  December 21, 2021 @ American Thinker

(Editor's Note:  I'm publishing this in full without permission, and will cut it down to a link if either American Thinker or the Author object.  However, I think this article needs to be published in full to get the full impact of  what Biden has wrought, especially now asking this question.  Can anyone name one area in which Biden and his band of nitwits have not failed.....miserably? RK)

Less than one year since he assumed office, Joe Biden has managed to turn his presidency into a deeply unpopular monarchy.  No longer is he the genial but generally harmless buffoon who entertained most of us while he was in Congress with his mispronunciations, misquotes, and embellished tales of dubious authenticity.  As a result of the 2020 presidential election that was, at best, questionable, Biden was elevated well past his ability, and he proceeded to wreck virtually everything he touched as leader of the free world.

On his first day in office, via executive order, Biden closed the Keystone pipeline for no other reason than a spiteful rebuke of President Trump's energy independence program.  It was a hare-brained sop to his fellow environmentalist lunatics who believed that this gesture would somehow "heal the planet" and reduce the phantom scourge of climate change.  How that was supposed to make a difference is anybody's guess.  It did, however, immediately succeed in reducing the supply of petroleum to our nation and raising the price of consumer gasoline and oil, as well as transporting goods.  Great start there, Joe!

In August, Biden began a bizarre, ill advised, and poorly executed withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which stranded many U.S. civilians and military personnel there and left a reported $85 billion in taxpayer funded, top-of-the-line, and completely operational military equipment for our Taliban enemies to plunder, which they did.  Biden decided that it was a great idea to evacuate troops first and let the rest of the area and our abandoned facilities fall into chaos afterward.  Images of people running to catch airplanes out of the war-torn cesspool flooded the airwaves, which served to underscore the incredibly bone-headed decision to remove the troops who enforced the rules and prevented the area from descending into chaos for many years.  With one stupid decision, Biden handed Afghanistan back to the savage and repressive regime that held it before.  This will be Joe's legacy.

During 2021, Biden's ongoing battle with the American public over COVID-19 revealed the utter contempt he had for anyone who didn't accede to his demands.  His laughably useless mask mandate gave way to his demand that everyone in our nation get an increasingly large cocktail of experimental medicines, with his non–medically supported goal of getting rid of all of the COVID variants due to his mistaken belief that only unvaccinated people could carry and spread the COVID virus.  Once again, Joe was wrong, but he wouldn't stop to admit it.  Rather than consult actual medical experts, and not fame-hungry media personalities who sought more time on TV, Biden gave orders for COVID vaccinations and demanded that the populace obey without question.  Like a child who didn't get his way, Biden became increasingly frustrated when anyone dared oppose him, regardless of medical or scientific evidence that countered his opinions.  He surrounded himself with sycophants who swore fealty to him and twisted logic into pretzels to make sense of Biden's decrees.  Former CNN talking head and current press secretary Jen "circle-back" Psaki proved to be especially adept at this.

The summer of 2021 brought hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants into this country via an unenforced border that many described as "porous."  Despite draconian COVID restrictions and required testing for many Americans who live here, Biden turned a blind eye to health concerns and guarding our border.  Instead, he allowed what can only be described as a foreign invasion from virtually anyone, regardless of COVID or vaccination status, who wanted to enter our country along our alleged southern border.  The border wall that President Trump worked to build and fought Congress to fund was disregarded by Biden, and ramshackle, filthy tent cities were set up inside our country by the hordes of illegal migrant families who walked into our country to gain de facto citizenship, courtesy of the Biden administration.   For their trouble, illegal aliens were rewarded with free (American taxpayer-funded) health care, welfare, transportation, career and education assistance, and even $1,400 stimulus checks.

The icing on the leftist cake of idiotic accomplishments was Biden's appointment of pretend woman Richard "Rachel" Levine to the position of assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  Biden's HHS secretary lackey, Xavier Becerra, crowed about the historic nature of having a deluded and mentally ill (and yes, gender dysphoria is a mental illness) man who wears a dress as "the first openly transgender four-star officer."  Anyone who didn't participate in Biden's version of make-believe and instead pointed out Mr. Levine's actual sex was labeled a bigot by the lapdog news media and scolded by fellow leftists.  Science!

Throughout his only career in his life, in which he lived on the taxpayer's dime, Biden's main skill seemed to be his ability to win re-election to the Senate by projecting the home-spun image of "Joe from Scranton," which bamboozled voters into believing he was a regular guy who was on their side in D.C.  Below the surface, the reality was quite different, as even his former running mate, Barack Obama, reportedly said, "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f--- things up."  After witnessing the events of Biden's first year in office, I believe that every sober-minded American would agree with Mr. Obama's warning.

Political observers knew of Biden's authoritarian leanings before he took office, but they were on full display for everyone once he was sworn into office as president.  With such a disastrous beginning that illustrates Mr. Biden's leadership capabilities, it's already apparent that his presidency will be remembered as an embarrassing footnote in our nation's history.  Hopefully, the elections of 2022 and 2024 will restore some measure of sanity and order to our nation's government.

 

Exclusive — Republican Gino Campana ‘Baffled’ by Biden’s Foreign Policy

Jordan Dixon-Hamilton 22 Jan 2022

Republican Gino Campana, candidate for U.S. Senate in Colorado, appeared on Breitbart News Saturday and said he is “just as baffled as everybody else” regarding Biden’s approach to increasing tension between Russia and Ukraine............Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle and Campana opened the show discussing President Joe Biden’s two-hour-long press conference earlier this week. Boyle noted that Biden essentially invited Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Boyle asked Campana to share his thoughts on the disastrous Biden press conference earlier in the week.  Campana berated Biden for calling a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine a “minor incursion.” “I’m just as baffled as everybody else, to find that the President of the United States would say something like a ‘minor incursion’ to take place along the border and allow it,” he said.........To Read More......

 

• Exclusive—Derrick Van Orden: Joe Biden’s Year in Office Has Been a Disaster for America - Former Navy SEAL Derrick Van Orden, running as a Republican for Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District’s open seat, told Breitbart News that President Joe Biden has not fulfilled a single campaign promise in his first year in office and instead has been a disaster for America......
• Chamber of Commerce Cheers Biden’s Expansion of American Job Outsourcing for Amazon, BlackRock, Facebook - The United States Chamber of Commerce is cheering on President Joe Biden’s expansion of a visa pipeline set to deliver more foreign competition against American professionals while cutting costs for the nation’s largest multinational corporations. As Breitbart News’s Neil Munro reports, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the expansion of the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program whereby corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and BlackRock hire foreign students over American STEM graduates at a 15 percent discount by avoiding tens of billions in FICA taxes. Specifically, Biden expanded the OPT program to include 22 fields of study from which corporations can hire foreign students at American universities for coveted white-collar, entry-level jobs.
• Joe Biden Invites More Foreign Workers to Take Americans’ White-Collar Careers - President Joe Biden’s deputies are inviting even more foreign college graduates to take U.S. white-collar jobs, just as they have opened the southern border to roughly one million blue-collar migrants in 2021. “It is a punch to the gut” for American graduates, Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, told this Breitbart News reporter. He continued, “The government has decided that it is in the interest of their donors to get their own unlimited supply of foreign workers outside of the normal [immigration] channels. So, congratulations. If you got a STEM degree [science, technology, engineering, math], you aren’t likely to get a job in STEM, and you’re probably not getting any job that will allow you to pay off your student loans.” The four-sided jobs giveaway will also allow many more......... 
• House Republicans, Democrats Lobby Joe Biden to Cut U.S. Tariffs on China - A total of 140 House Republicans and Democrats are lobbying President Joe Biden to cut United States tariffs on billions of dollars worth of China-made imports. Last month, Breitbart News exclusively reported how Reps. Darin LaHood (R-IL), Jackie Walorski (R-IN), Ron Kind (D-WI), and Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) were courting lawmakers to sign their letter to U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai — urging her to allow more “made in China” imports to avoid U.S. tariffs. The Section 301 tariffs on billions of dollars worth of China-made products were first imposed by former President Trump after a decades-long free trade consensus in Washington, D.C., that has eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the U.S. economy from 2001 to 2018.

 

 

Biden’s Budget: Affordable Isn’t Sensible

September 29, 2021 by Dan Mitchell

Do Not Submit, Your Kids Will Thank You For It

By David McGrath | Sep 22, 2021 | Lifestyle, Politics

It is tough to take stock of just how disastrous the Joe Biden presidency has been. I thought about it all weekend. Wrote a little bit. I spoke to some of my veteran friends, all of whom are still steaming from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal that happened just weeks ago. Thirteen families had to bury their babies because of the wildly incompetent decision-making of Joe Biden and his administration. It’s hard not to be outraged. That is not even the half of it. We have a southern border that is wide open right now, and we are being invaded by illegal immigrants from as many as seven different countries. The mayor of Del Rio, Texas, has publicly stated that the White House has stopped taking his calls.

Last Friday, the White House dumped some news that the airstrike that allegedly killed the planners of an imminent suicide attack on Kabul airport killed an aid worker, and a family of nine. We murdered nine non-combatant Afghan citizens—no accountability, no firings, and not a word of sorrow from this administration. 

If that’s not enough we are heading full-speed towards an economic meltdown. A recession even. We have no budget for fiscal year 2022, and do not expect one to come anytime soon. The federal government is likely headed towards a shutdown here in the next three weeks.

Have you tried shopping lately? Notice how the shelves are much less stocked than usual? The supply chains have completely fallen off a cliff due to staffing issues and rising cost pressures.......

 Joe Biden and company will continue to destroy every facet of this country. He was selected and put into that position for a reason: To fundamentally destroy our way of life and transform the country. Every fundamental institution we rely on must be destroyed. Hence the demoralization and remaking of the United States Military with woke troopers who will fight the establishment’s enemies, not necessarily America’s enemies. Hence the destruction and utter humiliation of America’s Police Departments throughout our great country. The police need to be brought to their knees and remade to their police who will arrest establishment enemies, not real criminals who burn cities, loot businesses, and even murder other Americans. The Marxists now own just about every institution—Hollywood, academics, big business, tech, and of course, the entire National Security apparatus...........

Joe Biden is simply a conduit. A man so lost and demented, he hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s saying and what he’s signing. He is the perfect trojan horse for the Marxists. Hence his installation. Even when he was lucid, Biden was agreeable, even sort of dense. The type of political animal who would do anything to get along, and line his own pockets. The man you see speaking now is a hollowed-out husk, an empty suit. So now what?.......To Read More.....

 

Civilization Requires Deterrence

Victor Davis Hanson | Sep 23, 2021 

Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends or your interests -- without a major war.  Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed. It's an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited.   The tired democracies of the 1930s learned that lesson when they kept acquiescing to Hitler's serial aggressions..........Deterrence is omnipresent and also applies well beyond matters of war and peace. The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow society's rather than the criminal's fault.

As a result, lawbreakers now believe there is a good chance that robbing people or hurting or killing them might result in monetary gain or at least bloody satisfaction. They no longer fear a likely sentence of 30 years in prison. So, they see little risk in hurting people. And innocents suffer.

With a border wall, an end to catch and release, and tough jawboning of the Mexican and Central American governments, a new American deterrent stance in 2019-20 discouraged once unstoppable waves of migrants.

Northern bound migrants knew that even if they reached and crossed the border, there was a good chance all such effort would be for naught, given quick apprehension and deportation.

So, in their rational calculations, migrants waited at home for less deterrent times. And they found them when Joe Biden stopped construction on the wall, renewed catch and release, and eased pressures on Mexico to interrupt caravans headed northward.

Abroad, Donald Trump restored the strategic deterrence lost by his predecessor.
 

Obama loudly announced redlines in Syria while never intending to enforce them. He gave the Taliban back their incarcerated terrorist leaders in exchange for the return of the American deserter Bowe Bergdahl. And he sent the Iranians nocturnal cash to coax them to conclude an appeasing Iran deal. Aggression followed as U.S. deterrence eroded.

As an antidote to all that, Trump destroyed the ISIS "caliphate." He obliterated an attack of Russian mercenaries in Syria. He took out terrorist masterminds like Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and the ISIS cutthroat Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi............In sum, deterrence at home and abroad is now dangerously lost. And it will be even scarier trying to recover what was so rashly and foolishly thrown away...........To Read More.....

 

CORTES: Welcome To Joe Biden's American Carnage.

August 17, 2021 by Steve Cortes

In his Inaugural Address, President Donald J. Trump promised that the  misery inflicted on everyday Americans by globalists, via constant war and economic abuse,  would end with a new America First agenda.   He pledged, "this American carnage stops right here and stops right now." And stop it did, as Trump ended senseless wars and ushered in record-setting wage growth in 2019  before the CCP virus hit America like an epidemiological Pearl Harbor.

But now, under Joe Biden, the carnage begins anew, with astounding swiftness and scale,  only months into his administration.  Biden's failures exceed even the most dire prognostications of his fiercest critics 

prior to him assuming the presidency under dubious electoral circumstances.  Presently, America's mood plunges, as evidenced by the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey  which is widely followed by economists and financial markets. ...........To Read More.....

 

Biden Administration Working to Undermine America

By Francis Menton July 10, 2021

The great thing about our freedom-based economic system is that the government doesn’t have to do much at all in order for the people to prosper and the economy to grow. Just sit back and watch the people create businesses, put each other to work, and provide for every imaginable human need.

But we now have a government in the hands of people who hate America and hate its freedom-based system. The current administration is actively working to undermine the American economy and advance the interests of our geopolitical adversaries. In no area is this more true than the field of energy. In this field, the Biden Administration came in with the explicit goal of undermining American energy production. Indeed if an administration wanted to undermine American energy prosperity as much as possible and comparably benefit our adversaries, it is difficult to think of anything it would do different from what the Biden Administration is doing.

During most of my adult life, “energy independence” has been a bipartisan goal throughout the federal government. That goal was actually achieved under President Trump. Within just a few months, Biden has undone that achievement. The administration has made no secret of its goals to reduce U.S. energy production of the things that work (i.e., fossil fuels) and to drive up their price. Let’s just make a small list of key actions in furtherance of those goals:

• On his first day in office, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, intended to bring some 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Canada into the U.S.

• The next day, Biden suspended all permitting of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters.

• Biden’s EPA then set in motion the reversal of Trump Administration loosening of rules on methane emissions in the process of producing oil and gas. These tightened Biden restrictions have the effect of increasing the cost of production.

• Currently in the works are rules from the SEC to require extensive new disclosures by energy producers (and others) of supposed “climate”-related risks.

These are just examples of an overall hostility to fossil fuel energy development, specifically intended to have the effect of making energy projects more difficult and more expensive to develop. And so far, the government’s actions are rapidly accomplishing their intended goals:

• The price of a barrel of WTI crude oil has jumped from $53.30 on January 20 (Inauguration Day) to $74.56 yesterday. Crude oil prices are currently at a six year high.

• The average price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump has risen from $2.42 in January 2021 to $3.17 in June, according to EIA data.

OPEC members and Russia are the obvious candidates to step in to take advantage of the price increases, but it seems that those parties are currently having some kind of stand-off as to who gets how much of a quota when production goes up. From the Wall Street Journal, July 6:

[A] squabble between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over quotas is blocking an agreement [to lift production].

Do you think that a competent American administration might want to see American production go up at such a time? Wrong:

A White House spokesperson on Monday said it is urging OPEC and its allies [including Russia] to quickly come up with a compromise “that will allow proposed production increases to move forward.”  The Administration is worried that higher gas prices could undermine Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and spending plans.

In lieu of energy independence, we are now seeing imports from Russia reach highs not seen for ten years. From S&P Global, April 16:

Imports of Russian oil, which consists mainly of fuel oil feedstocks and some crude, recently reached a 10-year high as US refineries continue to ramp up runs as the economy starts to recover from COVID-19. Russian oil imports as a share of US total oil imports hit a record high of 8% in January 2021, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, up from 4% during 2018.

It’s hard to imagine a more counter-productive set of policies than what the Biden Administration is implementing under the rubric of supposedly “fighting climate change.” What they are actually doing is empowering the very worst actors on the world stage, while having no effect whatsoever on the “climate.”

Everything was better with President Trump in the White House

June 11, 2021 By Patricia McCarthy

Incredibly, only four months have passed since Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was installed as president, and in that brief time, he has done more damage than anyone could have thought possible.  On day one, Biden stopped work on the Keystone pipeline, now truly defunct, which cost thousands of jobs.  He stopped the construction of the southern border wall, putting even more Americans out of work and opening the border to over half a million migrants so far.

These border-crossers, invited by Biden, are not being tested for COVID; they are not asked for their vaccine passports with which the left hopes to saddle all Americans. Unvaccinated Americans, unless the GOP puts a stop to their plan, will be shunned, banned from public places, and/or segregated from the vaccinated.  One might wonder if the vaccine is ineffective if they are still to be separated from the unvaccinated.........

President Trump made us energy independent.  Now we are again importing oil, even from Iran.  Biden removed sanctions that prevented Russia from completing their Nordstream pipeline that will enrich that country fabulously.  He has stopped drilling on federal lands, including ANWR, and put an end to nearly all drilling for our own oil.  He is intentionally strangling the U.S. oil industry without regard for the hardships this will bring to all Americans.  So typical of the left.

Biden canceled the discounts on insulin and the Epipen that Trump mandated.  Diabetics and those with potentially fatal allergies now will again pay ten times more for these life-saving drugs, but he is going to buy, with our money, 500 million vaccine doses from Pfizer to be sent to other nations!

While Trump put America first in all things, Biden is blatantly putting America last to the delight of China, Russia, and Iran, our three main adversaries.  He has rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, an obvious scheme to fleece American taxpayers.  He wants to rejoin the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, even though everyone knows Iran never abides by any "deals" it signs.  This is just more proof of his plan to devastate the U.S.  He gave Hamas $234 million so they could once again start killing Israelis and paying terrorists.  He betrayed Israel almost immediately.  The man is a menace.

And as if all of the above is not bad enough, consider his embrace of the most radical transgender policies.  Biden supports drugs and surgery for children as young as eight who think they identify with the opposite sex.  Trans activists hope such children can move forward with "transition" even without parental consent.  Biden is sure to agree.

His secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, hired his own personal Lavrentiy Beria, Bishop Garrison, another radical leftist hatchet man tasked with purging the military of any and all conservatives.  Biden, along with the rest of the left, pretends that Critical Race Theory is not Marxist to its core, viciously racist, overtly anti-white, anti-family, and pro-communist.........To Read More.....

Biden flirting with disaster – here's where division at home, weakness abroad will lead

May 16, 2021 Victor Davis Hanson

 

Human nature stays the identical throughout time and house. That is why there was predictable political, economic and social habits that each one international locations understood. 

The provide of cash governs inflation. Print it with out both higher productiveness or extra items and providers, and the forex cheapens. Yet America apparently rejects that primordial truism. 

The United States is greater than $28 trillion in debt – about 130% of the nation’s annual gross home product. The authorities will run up a $2.3 trillion budget deficit for 2021 after a report $3.1 trillion deficit the yr earlier than.

The Biden administration nonetheless needs to borrow extra – one other $2 trillion in new social applications and “infrastructure.”  

In the loopy final 100 days, the value of every little thing from lumber, meals and gasoline to automobiles and homes has soared. Yet many rates of interest are nonetheless caught at or beneath 3%.

Jobs are plentiful; employees will not be. Is it a shock when authorities handouts discourage the unemployed from taking a pay minimize to return to work? 

After being free of 13 months of quarantine, Americans are splurging. But this big pent-up demand is inflicting shortages. Producers worry the Biden administration’s unfastened discuss of upper taxes, higher regulation and cutbacks in power growth.

Are the outdated rules actually out of date? Should we be printing cash whereas increasing authorities debt? Is it clever to maintain rates of interest near zero and to discourage employment, manufacturing and thrift? This harmful habits used to make sure inflation, adopted by ruinous stagflation. 

After George Floyd was killed whereas in police custody in Minneapolis, some U.S. cities slashed police spending. Police response occasions have slowed in lots of locations, maybe as a result of officers are fearful about being fired for utilizing pressure. 

The outcome? In main cities akin to New York and Los Angeles, murder and violent crime charges have elevated by double digits.  

State and native governments believed they had been exempt from primeval legal guidelines of deterrence that warned when criminals assumed they’d not be caught and punished, then they dedicated extra crimes.  

The similar risks of ignoring unchanging human nature apply to international coverage.  

Aggressive opponents akin to Iran, North Korea, China and Russia count on that the Biden administration will ignore their brinkmanship. They assume the administration will minimize American defenses. And Biden sounds to them extra essential of Trump international coverage than of America’s enemies. Why not take beforehand unwarranted dangers? 

So, Russian troops predictably mass on the Ukrainian border. China steps up its harassment of Taiwan. North Korea launches extra missiles, Iran hazes U.S. ships within the Persian Gulf. And now, rockets from Gaza pour into Israel.  

Apparently, the Biden administration didn’t imagine that dictatorships and theocracies would interpret its advantage signaling as weakness to be exploited fairly than as magnanimity to be returned in sort.  

The outdated dictum of the Roman author Vegetius – if you need peace, put together for warfare – was simply an excessive amount of of a downer to take severely.  

In the outdated days, the higher the impediments to crossing a nation’s border – partitions and the enforcement of legal guidelines – the much less probably was unlawful immigration. Here too, the Biden administration apparently rejected the traditional warnings.   

Stopping building of the border wall, promising amnesties prematurely and damning the powerful enforcement of the earlier administration has solely led to extra unlawful immigration.  

Refusing to name the chaos at the southern border a “crisis” didn’t imply it was not a disaster.  

Wisdom of the ages additionally warned that people’ first allegiance was to their very own tribe, as outlined by race, ethnicity or faith. That existential hazard is why multiracial nations at all times properly sought to tamp down tribal variations, and to emphasize widespread ties of citizenship and transcendent widespread pursuits. Otherwise, a various nation ended up like Lebanon, Rwanda or the previous Yugoslavia, where tribal feuding turned bloody and barbaric.  

Yet for 3 months, the Biden administration has emphasized racial variations fairly than our melting-pot commonalities. It has stereotyped America’s White inhabitants – hardly uniform by way of class and ethnicity – as someway uniformly having fun with unearned privileged and performing systemically racist.

Amid such discuss, the hazard is that racial tensions will improve, hate crimes will spike, racial demagogues will dominate, meritocracy will vanish and tribal solidarity will substitute it. And the traditional concept of America will unwind.  

When an smug current dismisses the knowledge of the previous, then an all too predictable future turns into terrifying.

Walter Mondale, RIP

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Steven Hayward in History, Minnesota

The news that Walter Mondale was in extremis had circulated a few days ago, and blurted out, predictably, by Jimmy Carter, about whom Mondale said on many occasions after 1980, “I never understood how Carter’s political mind worked. Carter’s got the coldest political nose of any politician I ever met.”  

It is still not well known that Mondale considered resigning as Vice President during Carter’s infamous navel-gazing Camp David retreat in July 1979 that gave us the awful “malaise” speech. Mondale was conventional enough to know Carter had lost his grip................One of the more interesting stories of Mondale is how he invited a number of the prominent “neoconservative” Democrats to meet with Carter at the White House....Mondale knew the meeting had been a disaster..............To Read More....

My Take - As you read this piece you can't help by wonder what's wrong with Carter's mind, and even though the writer attempts to paint Mondale in a better light, you have to wonder what's wrong with Mondale's mind.  

Carter's priorities were completely out of whack and his understanding of the issues of the day were either negligible or warped.  And from that base of ignorant mind projection Carter created the Carter Center to help on foreign affairs, and most of that, at least in my opinion, was predicated of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.  But the truth is journalist Mike Wallace probably had more to do with making that happen than did Jimmy Carter, who merely was the beneficiary. 

 

Living A Cartoon

By Ray DiLorenzo ——Bio and Archives--February 13, 2021

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Life in this country has become a cartoon, filled with strange, absurd, and unreal characters with a touch of a gag reel. Let me see if I have it right. I will use just common sense from observation. I did get depressed just writing it…

Because of an election that was extremely suspicious in at least 6 battleground states that no one in government is willing to investigate, we now have a criminal president with dementia. We have a communist vice-president that dated her way to the top, who will probably be president soon but couldn’t get 2% of support from her own party for president. As California’s attorney general, she harassed investigative journalists for exposing Planned Parenthood for selling human body parts taken from fetuses they aborted. We have an overweight man who thinks he is a woman for Assistant Secretary of Health, while Biden insists on including those confused individuals in our military.

We’ve lost tens of thousands of jobs during the first week of Biden’s presidency on top of the millions of jobs already lost during a so-called pandemic that has been allowed to nearly wreck, for political purposes, the best economy in our history. COVID fear, perpetrated by those who can profit from it, has destroyed millions of livelihoods, families, and small businesses. 

At the same time Biden proceeds to open our borders to people, many with diseases we have long since eradicated, who want jobs. The ‘pandemic’ closed churches and schools in mainly Democrat cities where liberals don’t like God and teachers don’t want to teach. It kills people at a similar rate of a normal flu season, but you wouldn’t know it because every hospital that treats a COVID patient is paid much more than for treating a flu or any other like condition. 

As a result, everyone, including gunshot victims are said to have the virus. Now Democrats want us to take an untested, new technology, experimental vaccine, much of it financed by Bill Gates, who believes we have too many people in the world. We have no knowledge of the long-term effects of this vaccine, but it has already killed as many as 400 people with thousands suffering serious adverse reactions. Men are even being told to freeze their sperm before getting the vaccine, because of future fertility problems. The current administration is destroying the oil and gas industry, the farming industry, the automotive industry, the transportation industry, and the personal firearms industry. 

They are in the process of doing away with the First Amendment, and working at killing the 2nd Amendment. They don’t like the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance, but insist they are pro-America.

Is that about right........To Read More.....

 

The Destabilizing Mix of Demography and Entitlements, Part II

January 22, 2021 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty 

A few days ago, I shared some slides from a presentation to an e-symposium organized by Trends Research in Abu Dhabi.

Here’s a video of my presentation, which includes 16 visuals to drive home the point that the world is facing a demographic/entitlement crisis.

Today, I want to share five more visuals to underscore the severity and magnitude of this catastrophe.

But before we look at the charts, I’ll start by saying this isn’t a fast-developing problem. It’s taken several decades to get where we are now and most nations probably have several decades before an actual crisis materializes.

Though what’s already happened in Greece (and what’s presumably about to happen in Italy) should underscore the seriousness of this issue.

This issue is global, as illustrated by this chart showing the staggering shift that will happen to the world’s population. Simply stated, there are going to be lots and lots of old people, but no concomitant increase in the number of children.

It’s not just that there’s not a corresponding increase in the number of children.

The real story is that birthrates are plummeting.

The data for Europe is particularly sobering.

Here’s a look at some other nations that face big fertility declines.

By the way, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with families deciding they want fewer children.

But it does create a big fiscal problem because governments have tax-and-transfer entitlement programs that were created when everyone thought there would always be ever-larger generations.

But that’s not happening now, which explains why the world is going from eight workers per retiree to four workers per retiree.

That’s the global data. For many developed regions, such as Europe, the situation is far more challenging.

And the United States isn’t far behind.

I’ll close by observing that there’s actually a very simple solution to this problem. We need genuine entitlement reform.

Sadly, that definitely didn’t happen in the past four years in the United States. And it also won’t be happening in the next four years.

P.S. Hong Kong and Singapore have very low birth rates and very long lifespans, but those jurisdictions are in reasonably good shape because they didn’t make the mistake of imposing western-style welfare states.

P.P.S. Some have argued that the demographic problem can be solved by having government-created incentives for fertility. At the risk of understatement, I’m skeptical of that approach.

 

When Democrats Say ‘the People,’ They Mean ‘the Government’

August 31, 2020 By Robert Spencer

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump announced that “today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another -- but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People.

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished -- but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered -- but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.... That all changes -- starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.”

These were stirring words, but they were the sort of thing presidents have said for ages. Back in his first inaugural address in 1913, Woodrow Wilson decried the fact that “the great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.” In his first inaugural address in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower asserted that “we, the people, elect leaders not to rule but to serve.”


 And in his January 1996 state of the union address, Bill Clinton declared: “We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over… Our goal must be to enable all our people to make the most of their own lives -- with stronger families, more educational opportunity, economic security, safer streets, a cleaner environment in a safer world"............ To Read More...

Do the Democrats Have an Issue?

August 17, 2019 By Steve Feinstein

The poor Democrats: As the Russia Collusion/Mueller Investigation issue disappeared into nothingness like so much skywriting wisping away into the winds, so to did the sure-fire issue with which the Dems thought the White House would automatically be theirs in 2020. The candidate themself was irrelevant, an afterthought. We have it in the bag, the Dems thought. It's just a matter of to which person we bestow the privilege of the Presidency this time around. Let's pick a good one: A woman. No, a woman of color. No, a gay. No, an Hispanic. Perhaps an American Indian.

But that slam-dunk Russia issue is gone. Gerry Nadler and Adam Schiff are still flailing about, trying to collect their "undeniable" Russian collusion evidence and convince the rest of the Democratic caucus to initiate impeachment proceedings...........What are their issues? What are the candidates putting forth thus far? Do any of them seem like game-changers, the lynchpin to electoral victory?.........Nothing the Democrats are proposing so far is grounded in even the slimmest notion of feasibility or reality............To Read More.....

Our Exhausted American Mediocracy

By Victor Davis Hanson| December 30th, 2018

The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.” By “rule of the best” I mean the ancien régime was no longer understood to suggest wealth and birth (alone), but instead envisioned itself as a supposed national meritocracy of those with proper degrees, and long service in the top hierarchies of government, media, blue-chip law firms, Wall Street, high tech, and academia.

The 2016 election and refutation of the ruling class did not signal that those without such educations and qualifications were de facto better suited to direct the country. Instead, the lesson was that the past record of governance and the current stature of our assumed best and brightest certainly did not justify their reputations or authority, much less their outsized self-regard. In short, instead of being a meritocracy, they amount to a mediocracy, neither great nor awful, but mostly mediocre.

Remember the “new normal”? Our economic czars had simply decided anemic economic growth was the best Americans could expect and that 3 percent annualized GDP growth was out of the realm of possibility. Big government incompetence combined with Wall Street buccaneerism had almost melted down the economy in 2008. Recent presidents had doubled the debt—twice.

Few could explain how recent agreements such as the Paris Climate Accord or Iran deal could ever have achieved their stated aims, much less were in America’s interest. War planners had not translated interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya into strategic advantage—much less lasting victory—and never offered reasons to be in such places that appealed to half the country...........To Read More....