Surprised that high.
More a reflection on voters than Uncle Joe who is a liar, plagiarist, has a history of imbecilic decisions and is a hypocrite closet racist:
Biden Now Polling Somewhere Between Toe Fungus and The Lincoln Project 
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Terrorists, like leopards, do not easily change their spots:
Meet the New Taliban, Same as the Old
The cabinet appointment of a terrorist wanted by the FBI is a slap in the face to the U.S. and its allies.
By Seth G. Jones
So much for a kinder and more enlightened Taliban. This week, the Taliban announced that Sirajuddin Haqqani —the group’s deputy leader and close ally of al Qaeda—will be its first minister of interior. A U.S.-designated terrorist with close ties to the group responsible for 9/11 is now the Afghan equivalent of director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Taliban’s appointment—days before the 20th anniversary of the terror attack—is nothing less than a slap in the face of the U.S. and its Western allies.
The Biden administration has been naive. What makes them think the Taliban has somehow changed? Asked by MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace whether the Taliban is an enemy, national security adviser Jake Sullivan demurred. “Well, it’s hard to put a label on it,” he responded. “In part because we have yet to see what they are going to be now that they’re in control—physical control of Afghanistan.” Other U.S. officials shockingly raised the possibility of coordinating with the Taliban to conduct counterterrorism strikes against ISIS-K.
But with the announcement of the Taliban’s new cabinet, the U.S.’s catastrophic Afghanistan policy has gone from bad to worse. When President Biden was vice president, the administration designated the Haqqani Network a foreign terrorist organization because of its involvement in strikes inside Afghanistan, attacks against U.S. military and civilian personnel, and close ties with al Qaeda.
The Haqqani Network was involved in attacks against the U.S. embassy and North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Kabul—including while I was in Afghanistan with U.S. special operations forces. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the network’s leader, was well known to the U.S. military and intelligence community, and he barely escaped several attempts to target him. He is a wily and dangerous enemy with American blood on his hands.
Relations between Sirajuddin Haqqani and al Qaeda are even closer today, as recent U.S. and U.N. Security Council assessments have painstakingly documented. During peace negotiations last year, for example, one U.N. assessment concluded that “the Taliban regularly consulted with Al-Qaida during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honour their historical ties.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, members of the Haqqani Network reportedly met with al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in February 2020 and discussed subjects including the implications of a possible peace deal with the U.S. According to U.N. estimates, senior al Qaeda leaders met with Taliban officials at least a half dozen times between May 2019 and May 2020. And they have continued to meet since then, according to numerous officials
The Taliban and al Qaeda have also fought together. The Haqqani Network has installed al Qaeda operatives in the Taliban’s security structure, including in such Afghan provinces as Khost, Logar, Paktika, Paktiya, Kunar and Nuristan. Al Qaeda fighters even played a helpful role in the Taliban’s overthrow of the Afghan government.
The Biden administration must take immediate action if it wants to salvage any credibility. The U.S. should coordinate with its international partners and allies to denounce the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani, refuse to recognize the new Taliban government, and prohibit aid to the Taliban from the U.S. or international financial organizations.
The Taliban’s ascension prompted the international community to crack down on Afghanistan’s finances, freezing assets and pausing crucial foreign aid. The World Bank suspended funding for dozens of projects in Afghanistan, and the International Monetary Fund announced that Afghanistan would be ineligible for loans until a government is formally recognized.
Instead of bailing out the new government, the U.S. needs to treat the Taliban as the pariah it is. President Biden is correct that terrorism is the U.S.’s major vital national interest in Afghanistan. But his disastrous policies in Afghanistan are now compounding the very problem he wants to solve.
Mr. Jones is senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former senior civilian in U.S. Special Operations Command in Afghanistan, and author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan.”
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And:
Nor can Trump.
I recently posted a memo in which I said it would be to the benefit of the Republican Party if Trump chose not to run for president not because he failed to accomplish. I still believe he will go down as one of our better president when measured against his commitments, record of achievements and against unbelievable negative efforts to wreck his presidency.
The problem is, there will always be an asterisk by his name because of his personality and excessiveness. and the success his elitist enemies and mass media distortionists were able to construct.
Is Donald Trump Finished?
Admit it: You don’t want him to run again yet his absence hasn’t solved any problem.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Is Donald Trump playing the game badly? The question needs to be asked. If you think Mr. Trump the worst thing that ever happened to America, the answer might not be entirely reassuring.
Let’s put aside the elephant in the room, his post-election antics. If you were Mr. Trump’s Twitter strategist, you’d be kicking yourself right now. Assuming he could be persuaded to bring a modicum of discipline to his tweeting, he would be on an “I told you so” roll: My vaccines are the global gold standard. I warned you about the China lab leak possibility. I warned you about “defund the police,” runaway urban crime, and the Democrats with their woke racism, which they call critical race theory.
I warned you about illegal immigration, with hundreds of thousands risking their lives and their children’s lives to get here illegally. I offered a big beautiful wall with a big beautiful gate. We got instead Sleepy Joe’s border chaos. Next he may throw away the post-Covid jobs boom I gave him. And which president has been eating out of Putin’s hand—canceling weapons for Ukraine, surrendering on the Nord Stream pipeline, begging for relief from the ransomware reign of terror? Could anybody have done a worse job of getting us out of Afghanistan? It’s been a travesty, with America looking weak rather than strong by smartly putting America First (the eternal privilege of the out-of-power is the fanciful counterfactual).
The elephant in the room is his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 race, which has become an albatross for millions of former fans and many who served in his administration. You don’t expect a mea culpa but, because it’s how he operates, you might expect him to emerge with a new story about how his now-admitted defeat was really a moral victory. This story would actually have some persuasive power:
I got 11 million more votes (he would say) than I did in 2016. I got more votes than any presidential candidate in history except Joe Biden. And that’s not because Joe Biden is Washington and Lincoln rolled into one. If the race had been Biden vs. Jeb Bush, do you think 155 million would have turned out? Not a chance. That was my doing. Real change was on the table. Real change upsets a lot vested interests. It upsets a lot of nervous nellies and swamp creatures who were happy under the “America Last” policies of my critics.
The only way Democrats could beat me (he would go on) was with every trick in the book, using the pandemic to permit wide open mail-in voting, bringing out a lot of low-information, low-motivation voters who could be bullied by the media into voting for Joe. I still won going away with voters who voted on Election Day, who care about our country and the sanctity of the ballot box.
If you had Mr. Trump’s ear, you might be advising him that a political gold mine lies in making this concession to a Biden victory (without, of course, acknowledging that it amounts to a concession). Mr. Trump could then position himself to benefit from the inevitable Biden buyer’s remorse, taking credit for what promises to be a strong GOP showing in 2022. He might even mend fences with untold thousands of GOP voters who never forgave him for the loss of two Georgia senate seats.
Democrats are lucky Mr. Trump has no long game. He goes from contretemps to contretemps, playing tit for tat. Yet luck is working for him here too. America doesn’t feel noticeably less chaotic with him out of the picture. A cynic might also notice that, for all his bluster, Mr. Trump generally refrained from letting himself be pinned down on any specific allegation of voter fraud. It was always “people tell me” or “what I hear.” So Mr. Trump perhaps did not completely throw away the possibility of digging out from under his post-election behavior, with some typically brazen piece of Trump revisionism.
My own estimate is that Mr. Trump can’t afford not to run for president between now and 2024—it’s too lucrative. His business life now appears to consist largely of paying himself for services his companies provide to his own campaign, funded by thousands of small donations and sales of Trump merchandise. And yet a hunger for him to serve again as president, even among his fans, is not conspicuous. I also ask myself: Would he be selling his Washington hotel, one of the few ways he successfully synergized his business interests with this political interests during his presidency, if he planned on being president again?
I doubt it. Mr. Trump has likely already decided he will be happy with just picking the next president, which explains the troop of hopefuls outside his door in Mar-a-Lago.
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What do I know but I believe China is not likely to drop nuclear bombs just use them to intimidate their way into getting what they want unlike Iran which might be willing.
Why not now when America has a weak president, has been damaged both internally and externally and is in decline.
China Sees Its Nuclear Arsenal as More Than a Deterrent
Beijing is adding warheads, missiles and subs at an alarming rate. The goal is global dominance.
By William Schneider Jr.
The military threat from Beijing is accelerating at a pace few anticipated. Recently released satellite imagery shows that China is rapidly constructing nearly 300 hardened underground silos in its western desert to house intercontinental ballistic missiles. Also unexpected was the revelation that China recently began work on a third site of similar size near Ordos City that was not previously associated with ICBMs.
This indicates that the Chinese have dramatically increased their operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads beyond even what was forecast by the Defense Department a year ago. The type of Chinese missile expected to be loaded into these particular silos is currently in serial production, so it won’t be long before these sites reach their full capability. According to Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, the scope and scale of these activities should be considered a “strategic breakout by China.”
Why was the West caught so off-guard? The U.S. and its allies have a persistent difficulty grasping the underlying aspirations of China’s economic, foreign and defense policy, resulting in dangerous misestimations of China’s security advances. The U.S. assumed China would always retain Mao’s “minimum deterrence” approach to nuclear weapons.
China aims to become the leading global economic and military power by midcentury. Although President Xi Jinping outlined this aspiration in 2011, it wasn’t formalized until the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017. The evidence affirms that China is seeking global military dominance, not “parity” with the West.
An early clue to China’s approach to defense modernization emerged as it built a Navy to meet global, not regional security needs. China’s naval shipbuilding infrastructure facilitated a rapid increase in naval vessels: By 2030 China’s naval forces will have an estimated 415 surface vessels and 99 manned and unmanned submarines, while the U.S. will have a maximum of 350 manned and unmanned surface ships and 66 submarines.
China has added an additional capability not found in Western navies: a capacity to control the sea from land. In August 2020, China launched an intermediate range missile from Western China and a medium range ballistic missile from Eastern China. This flexible, land-based capability could augment China’s naval forces almost anywhere in the world. The U.S.’s planned naval modernization efforts are far behind what will be needed to avoid being outflanked by China.
Western expectations for growth in China’s nuclear force were upended by obsolescent assumptions about the Chinese goal of minimum deterrence—a small number of missiles sufficient for deterrence in some circumstances, but little else. Since President Xi took office, China has increased the size and sophistication of its nuclear delivery systems. While China’s missiles were silo-based a decade ago, Beijing has developed a triad of land, sea and air-based nuclear capabilities. The Defense Department estimates the Chinese have 350 nuclear warheads, of which roughly 250 are operationally deployed. But Defense warned in 2020 that these forces would double by 2030.
China’s newest ICBMs have been deployed in a rail and road-mobile configuration. When not on rail or road deployment, these systems are stored in 3,100 miles of tunnels throughout the country.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that one new Chinese missile, the long-range DF-41 ICBM, is designed to deliver as many as 10 independently targetable warheads with nuclear yields ranging from 20 to 250 kilotons. This capability, along with a new submarine-launched missile with six warheads and a new strategic bomber, could allow China to deploy more than 3,000 warheads on top of the 350 existing warheads.
The silo-based component of China’s nuclear force alone could be larger than the 1,550 operational nuclear warheads permitted to the U.S. or Russia under the 2009 New START agreement and could exceed the total number of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons by 2030. The likelihood of further growth in the number of China’s strategic nuclear delivery systems is high given the momentum in its modernization program.
Even more worrying, in 2016 China also established its Strategic Support Force to enable the integration of cyber, space, electronic and information warfare with its nuclear operations. This approach provides China with a means to integrate all the most significant instruments of national power with its nuclear forces.
How can the U.S. respond to these alarming developments? The current recapitalization and modernization of the U.S. deterrent was based on assumptions about peer-competitor nuclear aspirations when President Obama signed New START. But the optimism Mr. Obama expressed in his 2009 Prague speech on disarmament no longer reflects global realities. The world has underestimated China’s determination to field dominant military capabilities in naval forces and strategic nuclear forces.
What’s next? China’s militarization of space.
Mr. Schneider is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has served as an undersecretary of state and chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board.
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