Which of course fairly screams the question why we’re not increasing domestic production?!? Oh,…we’re in a “transition”:
Biden’s Energy Secretary on high gas prices:
“We’re working through an energy transition…The reality is, we have to take some time to get off of oil and gas, we recognize this. This is a transition.” pic.twitter.com/ZOCJIdZCa5
“Irredentism—the romance of reclaiming “unredeemed” old lands—is a symptom of messianic presidents and premiers, and national paranoia and insecurity. Leaders demagogue about the recovery of ancient territories that previously had weakened the nation’s imperial grandeur and power.
Supposedly long-scattered and oppressed peoples with common linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities are recombined—usually by violently overthrowing their contemporary governments and forcing them into a new ethnic super state. Yet irredentism is often a one-way street. Supposedly homeless expatriates—the Greeks of Constantinople, Italians in Malta, Germans in the Sudetenland, Serbs in Bosnia, and Russians in Ukraine—are said to be even more zealous nationalists than their kindred in the motherland. But just as often the territory to be reunited in a grand imperial scheme can be more reluctant than the would-be uniter.
…China is watching the fate of Ukraine. If it is crushed and Putin reasserts his power abroad, then Beijing sees a pathway to absorbing what would be left of a much smaller Taiwan. But if a larger Ukraine survives and Putin is permanently crippled, then Xi Jinping may worry that the Taiwanese could fight like Ukrainians, that China might be sanctioned and ostracized like Russia, that new deadly weapons will be airdropped into Taiwan. He may recall that unlike Russia and Ukraine there is a sea between China and Taiwan—and that a moonscaped Taiwan would not be worth the cost that Putin may pay for Ukraine.
Finally, despite U.S. lethargy last autumn, Putin can still at this 11th hour be stymied without a U.S. “no-fly zone,” without sending American A-10 Warthogs to Ukraine, and without using NATO “volunteers.”
How surreal the Left has become. From Hillary Clinton’s 2009 “reset” to Barack Obama’s hot mic buffoonery, to blankets for Ukraine and applause for Biden’s recent request that Russia pump more oil and hack only approved U.S. companies and institutions, the Left repeatedly has appeased Putin. Yet now the Left accuses its critics of pro-Putin pacifist sympathies! It is almost as if after spending a decade ensuring a Russian invasion of Ukraine and refusing to pump more oil and gas, the schizophrenic Left now wishes to risk a pre-midterm nuclear showdown.
It would be far wiser to quietly send far more weapons, to produce far more oil, to enact far more sanctions—and to stop the loud assassination and NATO interventionist tough talk.“
In an item which is both related and incredible, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy details how…
“Last week, I posited that the Biden administration was soft-pedaling SWIFT sanctions because it does not want to discuss why the United States is not in a position to boot Russia from the telecommunication system that facilitates global commerce and finance: The United States government has willfully entangled itself in dependence on Putin’s regime. This is particularly so in the realms of energy and foreign relations.
It hasn’t taken long for a textbook example of this idiocy to leap to the fore.
As NR’s editors have noted this week(and this is Biden idiocy to the nth degree), the administration is desperate to forge a new and “improved” version of Obama’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal. There is no good reason for this; it is yet another case of “because Trump reversed something that Obama did, Biden must reinstate it.” It doesn’t matter how apparent it is that Trump reversed the deal because it was both reckless and unpopular or even that the recklessness of reinstating it will make Biden more unpopular.
Tehran understands this well, and in its “Death to America” contempt for our feckless government, humiliates Biden by refusing to meet directly with his envoy, appeasement aficionado Rob Malley. The Biden administration is thus forced to grovel and plead for the intercession of Vladimir Putin’s regime, which (along with China) is Iran’s patron. This is especially delicious for the mullahs now: They know that, on the world stage, Biden is trying to play hard-ass against Putin regarding Ukraine, echoing Biden’s legend-in-his-own-mind routine on the 2020 campaign trail; yet, in reality, Biden is a five-alarm phony who, behind the scenes, is actively colluding with Moscow to get a new Iran nuke deal done.
The Kremlin, of course, knows this, too. Indeed, the Kremlin knows that while Biden is desperate for a new Iran deal, he can’t afford to acknowledge that it is a new Iran deal. Under U.S. law — the inconvenient though largely toothless Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015 — Biden would have to present a new Iran deal to Congress. Consequently, the president must pretend that all he is really doing is reinstating the already INARA-approved JCPOA (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as Obama’s Iran nuclear deal was called).
This is a lie: The Biden deal has brand new terms, such as sanctions relief for terrorists who have mass-murdered hundreds of Americans, that make it even more of a catastrophic capitulation than was the JCPOA. But Biden does not want to call attention to the terms of his sellout by asking Congress to bless them, so he is pretending that his deal merely reinstates the JCPOA and therefore needs no sign-off from lawmakers.
Putin is now delighting in Biden’s self-made predicament: Incredibly, the U.S. president has put himself in the position of needing not one but three banes of U.S. security — Russia, Iran, and the JCPOA. And for Putin it gets even better.
See, the JCPOA’s terms call for extensive Russian participation and commerce. As the Wall Street Journal points out today, this includes “receiving enriched uranium from Iran and exchanging it for yellowcake, work to turn Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility into a research center and other nuclear-specific deliveries to Tehran’s facilities.”
…in his unprovoked Ukraine invasion, Biden is cutting a deal that would have Iran park its enriched uranium in Russia — with the proviso that Iran gets the uranium back if Putin and the mullahs decide the U.S. has not held up its end of Biden’s boneheaded bargain.
But let’s put that mind-bender aside if we can for a moment. For immediate purposes, the point is that Biden is trying to convince our country and the world that his administration is serious about sanctions that will strangle Putin into abandoning his aggression in Ukraine. Yet, if harsh sanctions are really in place, then Biden cannot have his pretend JCPOA reinstatement because Russia would not be permitted to conduct the commerce the JCPOA prescribes.
So, as you’d expect, today, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei (This-is-even-more-fun-than-picking-Hillary’s-pocket) Lavrov demanded written guarantees from the Biden administration that its Ukraine-related sanctions will not interfere with the Russian commerce with Iran and other nations that is central to the operation of the JCPOA.
What a perfect storm of American amateur hour and embarrassment. And what an inexcusable blow to American national security.“
“…Anger over the loss of blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan is easily justified, as is fury over U.S. inability to guide either country to a smooth and stable future. No serious observer of American foreign policy can deny that over the past 20 to 30 years, the U.S. has made extraordinarily consequential mistakes. The U.S. government has demonstrated an ability to win wars in the form of destroying enemy forces, but not an ability to turn a defeated territory into a stable country, run by a competent and decent government. (The Iraq of 2022 is a big step up from the regime of Saddam Hussein,but still has a long way to go.)
But the world beyond our borders will not just go away, and it is deadly naïvete to think that the world’s motley crew of thugs, brutes, and other menaces — from powerful autocrats such as Putin and Xi Jinping; to rogue states such as North Korea and Iran; to terror groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS; to transnational criminal groups such as drug cartels, organized crime, or private-mercenary groups — will ever just go away and not be a threat to Americans at home or abroad. The world is full of bullies who can only be deterred by a metaphorical punch in the face, or by the fear of a literal punch in the face.
No, not every problem in the larger world ends up coming over here. But not every problem stays out there, either. Recent history is full of bloody examples of what happens when the U.S. either decides to stay out of a consequential conflict entirely or foolishly believes that it can trust a hostile force…
…The world has no shortage of evil people — rulers who see weakness in neighboring states and seek to conquer them, raping and pillaging, building or rebuilding empires atop the backs of subjugated neighbors. The world has simmering ethnic hatreds and madmen who dream of genocide, and angry young men (and sometimes women!) who find meaning by joining up with extremist movements and lashing out violently against innocent people.
The presence in the world of rulers, regimes, factions, and movements that we would define as evil is a cold, hard fact, and one that I suspect many people instinctively turn away from, preferring to believe we’ve left that kind of wanton malevolence behind in the darker chapters of our history books. The idea that someone powerful would deliberately hurt others, just because they can, is frightening; it’s better to conclude that everyone is always acting out of rational self-interest, and that if we just approach them with the right combination of carrots and sticks, they will calm down and be reasonable. (Senator William Borah reportedly said, upon learning that Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, “If only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”)
You can find foreign-policy thinkers who will turn themselves inside out to argue that every attack on Americans or American interests traces back to some sort of U.S. “provocation.”
You know what’s great about hawks? We never blame America first. (Admittedly, it’s rare that we ever get around to blaming America for anything at all.) Hawks rarely get blindsided. Hawks will almost never look at a simmering potential crisis overseas and conclude, “Eh, it’s not that bad.” We don’t count on luck or on problems to solve themselves. Maybe we do come across as paranoid, but it’s partially because we have long memories.
We generally believe that deterrence is the best policy; if you have sufficient military assets in a geopolitical neighborhood, and everyone believes you’re willing to use those military assets in that geopolitical neighborhood, very few people want to start a fight with you or your allies. You don’t see many thieves robbing the doughnut shop across the street from a police station.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Kerry, now the president’s special envoy on climate change, declared that, “I’m very concerned about, I’m concerned about Ukraine because of the people of Ukraine and because of the principles that are at risk, in terms of international law and trying to change boundaries of international law by force.I thought we lived in a world that had said no to that kind of activity.”
Many countries say “no to that kind of activity” — 141 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, to be precise. But 35 abstained on the resolution denouncing the invasion of Ukraine and demanding a withdrawal of its forces, and Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, and Syria opposed it. A world that is 73 percent opposed to territorial conquest is a world that is still going to have attempts at territorial conquest.
It is good that world opinion overwhelmingly denounces Russia.But world opinion doesn’t stop tanks and planes and ships. It is not enough for the world to say “no to that kind of activity”; the consequential question is what the world is willing to do in the face of that kind of activity.
Hawks also rarely underestimate foes. In December 2016, outgoing President Obama was asked about Russian attempts to influence the previous presidential election, and characterized Russia as a flailing, spent force: “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country. Their economy doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate.” As Benjamin Haddad and Alina Polyakova summarized in 2018, “Though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of the ‘Reset,’ President Obama remained reluctant to view Moscow as anything more than a local spoiler, and thought the whole mess was best handled by Europeans.”
The notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on.
In retrospect, Obama’s worldview was infuriatingly naïve, a denial of difficult facts, and a more eloquent version of Kerry’s insistence that we live in “a world that had said no to that kind of activity.”
“If you want peace, prepare for war” — it is so simple and yet so counterintuitive, at least to significant swaths of Americans.“
As the infamous Donald B. so often observed, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Turning from the simple yet counterintuitive to something as plain as the Hammer & Sickle on Obama’s lapel, Best of the Web highlights…
“If the Covid era doesn’t make one suspicious of government, it’s hard to imagine what would. Two years after state and local officials—egged on by federal disease doctors—started inflicting massive burdens on U.S. children, reports of the ineffectiveness of mandated public health measures and their destructive side effects continue to roll in.
Mandatory use of face covering masks (FCM) had been established for children aged six and above in Catalonia (Spain), as one of the non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed at mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission within schools. To date, the effectiveness of this mandate has not been well established. The quasi-experimental comparison between 5 year-old children, as a control group, and 6 year-old children, as an interventional group, provides us with the appropriate research conditions for addressing this issue…
We performed a retrospective population-based study among 599,314 children aged 3 to 11 years attending preschool (3-5 years, without FCM mandate) and primary education (6-11 years, with FCM mandate) with the aim of calculating the incidence of SARS-CoV-2, secondary attack rates (SAR) and the effective reproductive number (R*) for each grade during the first trimester of the 2021-2022 academic year, and analysing the differences between 5-year-old, without FCM, and 6 year-old children, with FCM.
And what did the researchers find? The authors state it plainly:
FCM mandates in schools were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission, suggesting that this intervention was not effective.
Not effective. The researchers probably weren’t all that surprised by their findings. Back in August 2020 the Journal’s Allysia Finleynoted:
The only way to ascertain the efficacy of face masks in the real world is to do randomized trials. So far there have been only a dozen examining the efficacy of masks in preventing respiratory illnesses, and conclusions have been difficult to draw because of poor compliance by study participants.None of the six trials published over the past decade found that masks alone had a significant effect on the spread of the flu or similar illnesses in health-care workers or the general population.
Yet officials in so-called public health and public education, encouraged by teachers unions, have spent much of the last two years trying to prevent the current generation of kids from seeing their classmates smile—when they were allowed to see each other in class at all.
…A visitor from another planet would likely be shocked to learn that the press made a hero out of a government doctor who warned against reopening society after the spring shutdowns of 2020 even while admitting he had not even studied the impact of school closures on children. But that’s the story of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his legion of media admirers.
Just as hard to believe in March 2022 is that a few mandate bitter-enders like New York City Mayor Eric Adams are still mandating masks for daycare and preschool kids under the age of 5.
Will the less-than-useless pandemic measures imposed in 2020 never end?“
Not if power-hungry Progressive politicians have any say in the matter.
Here’s the juice: Untold trillions of dollars wasted; hundreds of thousands if not millions of small businesses destroyed; hundreds of millions of lives subjected to utterly unnecessary suffering and stress…and that’s just in the U.S. And come the end of the day, we’re right back where we’d have been had the powers-that-be not initiated a lockdown strategy dreamed up by a 14-year-old for her high school science project, a plan completely panned by every trained virologist or epidemiologist who reviewed it and which was never submitted for comment to a single economist. In other words, had our government leaders and health bureaucrats responded to the WuFlu in the same manner as every other pandemic in history: Shield the vulnerable, care for the afflicted and otherwise carry on with life.
P.S. Are we the only ones who’ve noticed Putin’s unprovoked Ukraine invasion has taken the harsh light of international condemnation totally off the unquestioned source of the Wuhan virus?
Moving on, here’s a quintet of specially-selected items certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(4). Despite the disappointing but unsurprising results among 18- to 34-year-olds in a recent Quinnipiac poll, Charlie Cooke avers YES, if America is ever invaded, every able-bodied citizen MUST take up arms and fight. In other words, the poll indicates a majority of Americans best-suited to Military service either deem their country not worth defending, or believe someone else should do the fighting and dying. As Charlie so accurately observed, neither is acceptable, and brings to mind this not only the conclusion of The tale of Sir Robin…
…but this scene from Patton:
Nor do we want them in our country.
(5). Serial bigamist Ilhan Omar is evidently concerned it may prove difficult to prevent at least some of the American weapons sent to aid Ukraine from ending up in the wrong hands. Which immediately brings two thoughts to mind: (1) Which, in Omar’s eyes, are the “wrong” hands; and, (2) She never expressed similar concern about the billions of dollars in military equipment and arms Biden abandoned in Afghanistan. Perhaps, the reason being, in her twisted worldview the Taliban are the right hands!
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with these from Speed…
…and Major Jon:
Catch you on Friday!
Magoo
Video of the Day
The Thomas Sowell Reader offers the 411 on the decidedly non-racist history of slavery.
Tales of The Darkside
Another bit of undeniable truth The Left will never allow to be inserted into the conversation.
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