McAuliffe learned, with the passing of each day, Trump's presidency and results are looking better and better unless you prefer inflation, a feckless foreign policy and invasion of our border over obnoxious Tweets etc.
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What are the progressive's various goals? Not only are they dangerous but it has become evident you can only push their radicalism so far and then it backfires. Why? Because parent's responsibility does not end at birth. It encompasses education and health among other responsibilities. Parents do not want their children to become educational wards of and educated by the government.
It is a fact that everything government touches it wrecks and when it comes to education it generally begins with dumbing down. We have President Carter to thank for the Department of Education which helped ruin education in America.
Nine Theories of Progressive Power
Leftists want to stay on top, but they also want to profit and seem intelligent.
By Andy Kessler
Go ahead, try to tax the unrealized stock gains of billionaires, a wealth tax of questionable constitutionality. Or wear a “Tax the Rich” dress with the same font as a Chick-fil-A takeout bag to a gala for millionaires and billionaires. Or expand the idea of “infrastructure” to include social giveaways—free stuff for all. But what do progressives get out of it?
They must know that massive wealth redistribution and public spending crush the economy if they have ever studied the failures of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Progressives often invoke Europe as an economic model knowing full well that the U.S. outstrips almost all European countries in economic output per capita—15% higher than Germany’s, 43% higher than France’s.
Surely former law professor Elizabeth Warren has studied enough history—I mean, Harvard, right?—to understand the fallacy of her socialist leanings. Her government-controls-everything policies usually lead to Venezuela-style ruin. Why pursue these policies? What is the end game? Here are nine answers.
The obvious yet unsatisfying answer is to gain and then stay in power—to buy votes. That is understandable, but then why take it to the extreme, like they did with ObamaCare, which anyone with a revenue-vs.-expense spreadsheet knew would fail?
A better explanation is the shakedown theory. Even Honest Abe Lincoln’s administration was rife with patronage. The goal of single-payer healthcare recalls the opening scene from “The Godfather” when Don Corleone meets with a favor-currying constituent. Bonasera wants justice for an assault on his daughter. Now imagine he’s asking his senator for permission to have gallbladder surgery.
Then there is the “noblesse oblige” theory that the privileged should use government to improve the lives of the less privileged. Hooey, but everything sounds smart in French. Who better to boss us around than the “expert class”? But markets, with billions of price signals, always know better than 537 elected politicians.
Or maybe it’s the “love mankind, hate people” theory. Those who complain about “deplorables” are as bad as those who complain about “elites.” Bad policy hurts everyone.
Or there is the population-bomb theory, as epitomized by Bernie Sanders’s and economist Jeffrey Sachs’s desire to limit population growth and thus solve the world’s problems. As progressives wreck the economy, Americans might think twice about having that third child. Of course, most rich countries already have declining birthrates, while some poor countries are having population booms.
I kind of like the brainwash theory. Declaring lockdowns and pushing words like “equity” and “systemic” and “climate crisis” are all about training the minds of voters that we have big problems that can be addressed only by government. We must attack these problems as if we were at war. Remember LBJ’s “war on poverty” or Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs”? We lost both, and they weren’t wars anyway. Once progressives have brainwashed their constituents, they can convince them of anything, including giving up individual freedoms.
Add the “Lord of the Rings” theory: Power is addictive. Imagine different congressmen as Gollum. It often fits.
The personal-gain theory also plays a role. Mr. Sanders owns three homes, including a Vermont lake house. And that’s nothing. The foundation responsible for the Black Lives Matter movement raised some $90 million in 2020. Self-described Marxist and BLM founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, bought four homes, including two in Topanga Canyon, Calif., near Malibu. Al Gore founded an investment fund “identifying tipping points across the landscape of sustainability,” the same gobbledygook he has foisted on us for years. See also Obama, Martha’s Vineyard.
I asked the “why” question to a tech executive who spent too much time in Washington glad-handing politicians, and he quickly shot back that the progressive cause was driven by resentment, especially toward hedge-fund guys or the T-shirt-wearing coder who recently IPOed. Instead, it’s Ms. Warren, I was told, who has to be the smartest in the room. Harvard, right? Ms. Warren’s plan to resolve this resentment is simple: Confiscate the wealth of the successful and give it to progressives to spend. They know better, after all. “Tax the rich, feed the poor, ’til there are no rich no more,” sang Alvin Lee of the band Ten Years After in 1971. Who cares if the economy tanks as long as the rich are taken out at the knees?
What to do about progressives? Limit their power. While they twist themselves into pretzels trying to solve poverty and inequality, let the marketplace of ideas and entrepreneurs flourish. That already works.
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Most despicable of all is the progressive's use of character assassination attacks on conservatives and accusations of racism. Tuesday proved that dog might no longer hunt. Time will tell.
Democrats Can Retire the White Sheets
Virginia’s contest was a test of whether Americans like being called racists.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
With his upset defeat Tuesday night, it was fitting that Terry McAuliffe’s easy run to the Virginia governorship blew up over the school board issue, itself an absurd culmination of the Democratic strategy of painting every opponent of their policies as a white supremacist and pro-Trump Nazi.
Joe Biden came to the presidency gifted with two vaccines, a rocket ship of an economic rebound, and a mandate for moderation, and yet has acted in office like his only constituency is the left. If he can’t satisfy their every policy wish, as I pointed out in May, at least he can give them the white supremacist menace.
And so it has continued with ever-increasing insistence: The excessive congressional flogging of the Jan. 6 riot. The voting rights kabuki as if democracy’s survival depends on a bunch of reforms nobody had been thinking about the day before yesterday. The anti-anti-critical-race-theory panic that portrays dissenting middle-class parents as the equivalent of terrorists.
It culminated in a ludicrous and embarrassing performance when the White House and staffers of the National School Boards Association ginned up a letter demanding that protesting parents be prosecuted under the Patriot Act. That letter was soon disavowed by the association. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who on its slender premise mobilized the FBI, was left twisting in the wind. And so was Mr. McAuliffe, who was supposed to be a shoo-in until he waded foolishly into the controversy by suggesting parents deserved no say in their kids’ schooling.
And yet, as if to demonstrate their imperviousness to any doubt, Mr. McAuliffe’s allies sent voters to the polls this week with a final note clanging in their ears: the now-admitted employment of fellow Democrats to masquerade as white-supremacist supporters of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who nonetheless secured the victory in Tuesday’s race.
Mr. McAuliffe had to disavow this too, but not before his staff were shown to have busily promoted the canard with their tweets.
During a recent four-day media bubble over a Washington Post op-ed, I posed the obvious rejoinder: What about the “threat to democracy” from Mr. Trump’s opponents if, instead of losing, he should win in 2024? The most dispiriting answer was from the Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, still trying to live down her service in the Trump White House while peddling a book recasting herself as a diversity hero (she’s from England). To a Politico reporter, Ms. Hill insisted: “If he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done.”
Even allowing for ninnyism in search of clicks, how is this not a justification for violence if the election doesn’t turn out the way Democrats want?
The country could stand in such times to hear from a president who is a grown-up. Moderate is not a synonym for weak; a moderate has to face down his own party’s recalcitrants as well as the opposition. But in Mr. Biden’s case it has been a synonym for weak and even something more than weak. The singular moment, for my money, was his rewarding with the vice presidency the rival who implied on national TV he was a racist. This followed his choice to begin his campaign with a demonstrable lie about what Donald Trump said after Charlottesville; it followed his habit of invoking neo-Nazis with “neck veins bulging” so robotically that even supporters lifted their eyebrows.
The pattern has started to become a little too telling. You can do worse than read one of the Hunter Biden text exchanges unearthed by the New York Post. It is terrible in its symbolism. In a lengthy tirade, Hunter blames his father, who has yet to commit to running for the presidency, as if he is responsible for media stories about the son’s drug abuse, influence peddling and philandering. “If you don’t run I’ll never have a chance at redemption,” Hunter berates the future president.
This, from a middle-aged son whose every hope and expectation in life has depended on his father climbing the greasy pole so Hunter can cash in.
And Mr. Biden’s answer? Along with a stream of appeasing, innocuous words, a plea that he’s “positive” that his text messages are a “target.”
OK, millions of Americans know what it is to have manipulative, narcissistic, substance-abusing family member, but still Mr. Biden the president is hard to distinguish from the father seen in the texts, aka the perpetual blackmail victim.
He was elected with a clear mandate for middle-of-the-road leadership but can’t seem to impose his will on anybody. In his worst moments, he has lost sight of his natural place in the conversation and even who he is, while trying to compensate by aping the attitudes and slogans of people whose agenda he doesn’t really grasp. If Hillary Clinton adopted the losing strategy for Democrats of vilifying large chunks of the electorate, Mr. Biden seems to have internalized the bully who he thinks is always out there ready to call him a racist deplorable at the drop of a hat.
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Today Gen. Milley acknowledged he was taken by surprise at the pace of China's nuclear expansion.
One day he might be surprised when China decides it is time to take over Taiwan or even worse, test our response by a Pearl Harbor type attack:
Needed: A Military Strategy for China
The Pentagon, with its outdated policies, may not have the luxury of time when a crisis develops.
By Seth Cropsey
‘Strategic ambiguity” is the longstanding U.S. policy toward Taiwan, but President Biden’s approach has been more ambiguous than strategic. Asked at an Oct. 21 town hall whether he would defend the island nation against a Chinese attack, Mr. Biden replied, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” The White House then “clarified” his answer by reasserting its commitment to ambiguity.
All this begs the question: What should the U.S. do in defense of Taiwan? And it raises a broader one: What should the U.S. do to counter China’s military challenge?
These two inextricable questions are united by U.S. policy makers’ failure to answer either. China’s strategic objective is to monopolize the South and East China seas and use the resulting economic power to reshape the global order. But doing so requires breaking the U.S. Indo-Pacific alliance system, which in turn requires shattering the First Island Chain, which runs through the Japanese archipelago, Luzon in the Philippines, and Borneo, terminating with the Vietnamese coastline. The First Island Chain limits China’s maritime exit points into the Philippine Sea and the Indian Ocean, making control central to Chinese strategy. Taiwan lies at the center of the First Island Chain.
In such a conflict, deterrence and warfare become synonymous in policy. The U.S. has yet to articulate what victory would mean in a war with China. The Biden administration has suggested no desire to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party and replace it with a regime that respects international order. Rather, the objective seems to be to maintain the status quo, which means defending the sovereignty of all Pacific states, the territorial integrity of regional allies including Taiwan, and the freedom of navigation that undergirds the international system. Accomplishing these objectives means convincing China to stand down from its increasing regional aggression or in a war, to sue for peace. Accomplishing that requires identifying what China holds most valuable.
The answer is simple. The Chinese Communist Party desires survival. President Xi Jinping fears that the managed capitalism of his predecessors won’t prevent the emergence of a middle class that challenges the party domestically. He has turned for inspiration to three past Chinese rulers: Mao Zedong ; Qin Shi Huang (247-221 B.C.), the first Chinese emperor; and Gaozu (202-195 B.C.), the first Han emperor.
The most effective way to destroy the Chinese economy is a long-term blockade. A Sino-American confrontation would trigger a global economic depression that would harm Americans and their allies. But democracies’ electoral legitimacy makes them more resilient to such shocks than authoritarian regimes. A war-generated economic downturn in the West would bring high unemployment and tighter household budgets in the U.S. and, at the very least, an energy crisis elsewhere in the world. In China, such a downturn would usher in cascading power failures, production stoppages, soaring unemployment, and likely riots challenging the Communist Party’s legitimacy.
The huge Chinese social-media site Weibo reveals discontent with some government acts. For example, despite being accused of murder, Ou Jinzhong, who died Oct. 18 while awaiting arrest by Chinese police, received widespread public support on Weibo. He had lived in a shack for five years while local officials denied his requests to build a proper home. Similarly, although the Communist Party appears to have the Evergrande default under control, protests in Shenzhen and Hubei broke out when the full extent of the disaster was revealed.
China isn’t on the cusp of revolution. But the party understands that a sustained economic downturn would trigger unrest that could overwhelm its internal security. A blockade carries risks, not least because it is a long-term strategy that the U.S. would conduct over months or years. The People’s Liberation Army may believe that it can destroy enough U.S. combat ships in the first weeks of a war that such a blockade would become unfeasible, or that co-belligerents—likely Iran, Pakistan and Russia—would complicate the blockade enough to reduce its viability. Beijing may—understandably—assess that the U.S. logistics fleet is unlikely to sustain a multimonth conflict, and that Washington lacks the political will to do so.
Or Beijing may miscalculate, encounter its worst-case scenario, and adopt Russia’s mentality to “escalate to terminate”—that is, use nuclear weapons. The general assumption that the U.S. and its allies are better equipped to handle a long war than the Chinese Communist Party, and that the party therefore hopes to avoid a long war, is likely correct.
The alternative to blockade is to “fight forward” or, as Lord Nelson signaled at the Battle of Trafalgar, to “engage the enemy more closely.” That means defending Taiwan and the sovereignty of U.S. allies by denying China its short-term operational objectives. This would require much more naval and amphibious basing in East Asia than the U.S. currently maintains. American aircraft carriers must be equipped with long-range anti-ship missiles, and U.S. Marines with ground-based antiaircraft and antiship missiles, to disrupt an amphibious assault on Taiwan. The U.S. Navy must deploy more submarines to Guam, Yokosuka, Sasebo and perhaps the Australian cities of Sydney and Perth to exploit the PLA’s undersea vulnerabilities and sink Chinese merchantmen and warships. A Marine expeditionary force or Army airmobile division must be deployed within range of the Taiwan Strait, likely to Southern Japan or Darwin, Australia. Air Force and Marine fighter squadrons must be placed in new bases throughout the First Island Chain, supported by ground-based antiaircraft missile units, to deny the PLA immediate air control.
Achieving this would entail the most sweeping reorientation of American force structure and deployment since the end of World War II. But it is the safer strategic choice given the dangers of a longer conflict.
There is no articulated plan for the U.S. to defend our allies while conducting offensive operations against China. We build ships, buy aircraft and tanks, and train solders with no strategy in mind, lumbering forward under institutional inertia, guided by policies 10 to 30 years out of date. In Iraq it took the U.S. military three years to grasp the nature of the conflict, another year to implement a new strategy, and another year for the country to stabilize. We won’t have five years from China’s first missile launch. We may not have five months.
Mr. Cropsey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of Hudson’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy
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This is an apt comment when referring to Biden:
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
Paul Keating
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