Biden: US would defend Taiwan militarily if China invaded
BY BRETT SAMUELS
President Biden on Monday said the U.S. would be willing to defend Taiwan militarily if China were to try and take it by force.
“Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” Biden was asked at a press conference in Tokyo alongside the Japanese prime minister.
“Yes,” Biden responded. “That’s the commitment we made. That’s the commitment we made.
“Look, here’s the situation. We agree with the one China policy… but the idea that to be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not appropriate,” Biden continued. “It will dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.”
Biden said he does not believe China will attempt to take Taiwan by force, adding that the united global response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine can serve as a deterrent against possible aggression by Beijing.
The White House shortly after the press conference reiterated Biden’s comments that the U.S. position on Taiwan has not changed and it still abides by the one China policy.
Still, Monday is the latest instance of the president’s comments spurring some confusion.
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin expressed “strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition” to Biden’s comments.
“China has no room for compromise or concessions on issues involving China’s core interests such as sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said.
China has been increasingly aggressive in recent years, stepping up military flights into Taiwan’s airspace and sending ships into the Taiwan Strait. The pattern has raised alarms among the international community that Beijing may ultimately plan to invade or take Taiwan by force.
Under the “one China” policy, the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as a separate state from China. And under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the U.S. is committed to providing Taiwan with arms for its defense. The law does not commit the U.S. to sending troops to Taiwan to defend it.
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Biden was asked at a CNN town hall last October whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan if it were attacked by China, and he said the U.S. would.
The White House quickly walked back Biden’s comments at the time, saying he was not announcing a policy change.
The Next Biden Catastrophe...By Townhall.com Staff
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Will the US Commit to a Military Response if Taiwan Invaded? Biden Responds.
By Leah Barkoukis
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Liberals are angry Musk has chosen to ditch them and now he is their enemy.
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Target: Musk
By Kurt Schlichter
Zillionaire Elon Musk's glorious red-pilling has, predictably, made him Public Enemy Number One of the garbage ruling caste. Back when he was only making electric cars, rocket ships and producing children with bizarre names via singers with bizarre names, he was A-OK in the blue zone. But then he embraced radical notions like free speech and, well, now he's a threat, a treasonous traitor of insurrection. He even said he'd vote Republican. Oh, how the wine women wailed! Instantly, the regime's immune system sprung into action to purge the body politic of the truth pathogen that is Elon Musk.
His Tesla stock coincidentally took a tumble, but there are no coincidences (I own some). Regime whiteboard New York Times devoted the space they did not devote to Robby Mook's devastating testimony regarding Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit – Musk recently got woke to the Russiagate lies and he publicly wondered what else he was being lied to about – to scoops about the apostate. And, of course, the corrupt feds are looking into him since they have plenty of time on their hands not stopping mass killers. Don't be surprised if a SWAT team shows up to arrest him for planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
And there's the sex slander. It came out that Musk confidentially settled a lawsuit with some bimbo, and instantly he was Bill Clinton times Gropey Joe plus Harvey Weinstein, except he's no longer liberal, so suddenly liberals care about women. I defend people and others in lawsuits over bogus sex claims, and I can smell a rat. But this is not just a rat – this is a New York City alley full of them. Do I believe that Elon whipped out his SpaceX love rocket to some tart? No. Musk can get chicks the old-fashioned way – by having a lot of money.
Look, the guy dated Amber Heard and survived with his throat unslit and his linens undefiled. This trollop's trumped-up charges are not going to take him down. The fact is that what my mother – the judge – told me after she swore me in as a lawyer in 1994 remains true: "Everyone lies." Allegations in sex lawsuits are as reliable as Jen Psaki, and even bullSchiff claims get settled.
But the truth is not the point. Obedience is. They are terrified of Elon Musk because his money – combined with his iconoclasm – makes him dangerous. The thought that Musk would take over Twitter and allow free speech, thereby utterly undoing their last stranglehold on social media, filled the unelite elite with a cold terror. They know their ideas are garbage; they can only keep power by ensuring they control the marketplace of ideas. And they control it by ensuring it is not a marketplace at all but a Supermax prison where wrongthink is locked away in solitary with a lonely cellmate named Ox.
Elon Musk is threatening to bust their info monopoly, so they will do whatever they can to break him first. And they want you to know he's being broken because if the richest guy in the universe can't withstand them, what hope do we peons have?
Except Musk is not backing down. He's gone to the conservative medicine cabinet and gobbled a handful of red-pills. His Twitter feed is a non-stop chronicle of his ideological makeover. He talks about the truths he's learned since he popped the blue bubble surrounding him, he points out the hypocrisy he sees, and he refuses to back down in the face of the regime's full-court press.
It's kind of inspirational.
Musk has announced that he's taking the next step and forming his own legal Delta Force under his personal command. Nice. There's a lot of damage you can do using the courts. His bat signal to hardcore ambulance chasers focused on lawyers who win at trial, and trials are important, but winning at trial is not optimal. That's tactical thinking; strategic thinking focuses on results, and trials are but one way to get the result you want. If you are bringing a suit, trial may be the only way to get what you want – money. If you are defending one, you want to win without trial. Why? Because in a trial, you can lose. You can't lose a case bringing motions to dismiss or for summary judgment; you can only win.
In any case, this is not a column on litigation theory but on how a rich guy is owning the libs. And owning them, he is. He has gone from green demigod to reactionary demon in just a couple of months, all because he took seriously the principles the progs posed with. Hell hath no fury like a lib disrespected, and Musk's insult is really the basis of this backlash. Musk is publicly unimpressed by the left and the mediocrities who make it up. He sees they are unaccomplished. He sees they are liars. And he sees they are stupid. In his world, you have to perform. The car goes vroom vroom, or you go bankrupt. There's no excusing the car not moving because of structural racism or the male gaze or literal shaking or any of the other crap these quarterwits kick up to obscure the truth. The progs suck, and their ideology is a non-stop series of complaints and curated posturing. Musk's world is binary in an unwoke way; you either do or do not. Their world is not about doing but about being: woke, sensitive, whatever. You are what you pose.
That is the antithesis of an achiever like Musk's – and our – worldview. When Musk called for counsel to come to fight by his side, his criteria was a proven track record of success. Libs would want to know where your grandpa came from, how you pee, and what your pronouns are.
They can throw everything they have at Musk and will, but at the end of the day, they are soft and dumb. He's hard and smart. My money literally remains on Musk.
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Bari Weiss on education and graduation:
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Graduation Week With Common Sense
What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.
By Bari Weiss
There is no more reliable cliché in the news business than “if it bleeds it leads.” But the rule of thumb that was just as dependable, if not quite as catchy, in the years I spent at legacy newspapers is this one: campus craziness sells. It sold to readers of The Wall Street Journal just as reliably as it did to readers of The New York Times. If conservatives and progressives can unite over anything it’s that neither can resist hate-reading a story about Oberlin kids protesting the cultural appropriation of dining hall banh mi.
Until very recently, though, neither group took those kinds of stories very seriously. Neither did most of the editors who commissioned them. They were not unlike the crossword puzzle: a fun distraction. A nice mix for the reader dutifully getting through serious, important coverage about foreign policy and the economy and politics.
Sure, sure, the kids were doing crazy things. And yes, some of it was a little excessive—even most of the progressives could agree on that. But this was college! Remember Berkeley and Columbia and Cornell in the 1960s? Campus was always a radical place. Everyone assumed that the kids would grow out of it. That the politics of the quad would inevitably fade as these young Americans made their way in the world, onto marriage and kids, onto mortgages and life insurance policies, and onto jobs at places like JP Morgan and Bain, Amazon and Random House.
This isn’t at all what happened. Rather than those institutions shaping young people in their image, it’s the young people who are fundamentally reshaping those institutions in their own. As Andrew Sullivan put it: We all live on campus now. It turns out those campus stories were serious in ways many couldn’t—and still refuse to—imagine.
But you already know that. If you’re a Common Sense reader you’ve long noticed that one of our main areas of focus from the start has been education. Our reasoning is simple: We believe that if you want to understand what’s coming for the country and the culture you better pay very close attention to what’s happening on college campuses. Also: our high schools. And increasingly, our elementary schools. Even our kindergartens.
That’s why we’ve done deeply reported stories about the transformation of America’s elite high schools and the radicalization of our medical schools and our law schools.
It’s why we have been ahead of the curve in our reporting on the terrible consequences of Covid lockdowns.
It’s why we’ve run whistleblowing essays, like Paul Rossi’s first-person account of his refusal to indoctrinate his students and Gordon Klein’s essay about suing UCLA.
It’s why we’ve reported on the smearing of parent activists and free-thinking professors—and introduced you to courageous figures like Kathleen Stock, the University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot, and Peter Boghossian, who resigned his post as a philosophy professor at Portland State University last year with these words: “For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?”
For every professor who refuses to cave, though, there are so many more who don’t. Indeed, the major theme that has emerged in our reporting is institutional retreat—schools that have abandoned their founding mission, leaders that have decided to follow, and professors paid to think for themselves who seem very scared of doing so. Exhibit A: Suzy Weiss’s story last week on the destruction of David Sabatini, the world-renowned molecular biologist who, until recently, was a star at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. Now he’s unemployed. Sabatini is a symbol of a system and culture that has eaten its own.
But it’s not all bad news—not by a long shot. Just as we have exposed what’s gone so wrong, we have been moved as we watch people, often ordinary Americans, try to make things right.
Those builders include the parents behind the homeschooling boom—which appears to be even bigger than we understood when we reported on it back in September; the fascinating group that has convened around Synthesis; and those who have planted a flag in Texas with the University of Austin, or UATX. Since Pano Kanelos, the university’s inaugural president and former head of St. John’s College, broke the news of the new university in Common Sense half a year ago, UATX reports that they have raised over $100 million dollars. Perhaps most amazingly, the school has received 5,000 inquiries from prospective faculty. This summer, they are offering their first summer school program in Dallas. I’ll be there, along with teachers like Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rob Henderson, Thomas Chatterton-Williams, Nadine Strossen and Arthur Brooks.
None of these projects lack naysayers. But I’m bullish on the builders.
It’s hard to think of a system that deserves a shake-up more than one that has resulted in $1.7 trillion of debt. In which young people are paying upward of $80,000 a year for degrees that don’t guarantee a job. In which students—and we hear from them daily—are closeted and live in fear of being found out as politically normal.
Here’s something worth remembering: The founders were Congregationalists who believed that Harvard had become too theologically lax. Princeton was started by men who were frustrated with Harvard and Yale’s opposition to a Presbyterian movement—frustrated enough to settle their new school in New Jersey. The point is that everything we now regard as institutional and prestigious started as something scrappy built by people who were pissed off about the status quo and decided they weren’t going to wait around for someone else to fix it.
So, given the commencement ceremonies taking place around the country, we give you our inaugural graduation week. Happy summer.
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Sometimes you must tolerate "trash." We did with McCarthy and eventually he fell on his sword as will Rashida. That does not mean we must remain silent. Silence is seldom a solution. We must rebut until she falls on her sword as well.
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Rashida Tlaib’s indelible stain on Congress
By Victor Sharpe
Posted By Ruth King
The Democrat representative of Michigan in the House of Representatives is Rashida Tlaib who spends her time as part of the disreputable group of house Democrat women who call themselves the Squad.
Mark Levin, Conservative Radio host and consummate expert on the U.S. Constitution, says this of the so-called Squad. “This is not a Squad. This is a cabal of Marxists who hate this country – some of them first, second-generation immigrants into the country, who bring their attitudes, who bring their indoctrination into the country and are at war, right there in the halls of Congress, against our own country.”
But Rashida Tlaib who, as a young Muslim Arab immigrated to America with her family, goes even further. She has a self-corrosive hate for the State of Israel, which she endlessly spews whenever and wherever she can. Along with fellow Muslim House representative, Ilhan Omar, their output of religious bigotry against the Jewish state has become a hallmark of shame in the United States House of Representatives,
Now Representative Tlaib has introduced a loathsome resolution which falsely and outrageously accuses Israel of causing a ‘catastrophe’ for the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians on the day the reborn Jewish state declared its independence and became a recognized and sovereign state and member of the United Nations. She calls it by the Arabic term, ”Naqba.”
But what she hides is that as Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies immediately invaded the Jewish state’s tiny territory. The armies came from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, along with military detachments from Saudi Arabia and as far away as the Sudan.
This immense Arab military power was from Islamic states whose populations in the millions dwarfed those of tiny Israel, which at that time was a mere 600,000, including the pitifully few Jewish survivors from the Holocaust or impoverished Jewish refugees who had been driven out of Arab Lands where their ancestors had lived for 2,500 years. Indeed, some 820,000 destitute Jewish refugees would be expelled from Arab and Muslim states and 586,000 of those were subsequently given refuge in the embattled Jewish homeland in later years.
In contrast, the number of Arab refugees who needlessly left for neighboring Arab states was estimated at the time by the UN Mediator on Palestine at 472,000 and that only 360,000 of them required support. That part of the Arab population who did leave, as the Arab League ordered them to do, believed that they were merely removing themselves to safety while the triumphant Arab armies would be free to exterminate the Jewish population and steal their homes and farms. As one Arab refugee was quoted as saying in the Jordanian newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954). “The Arab government told us: “Get out so that we can get in. So, we got out, but they did not get in.”
What the disreputable Rashid Tlaib hides from her bigoted resolution was the avowed intention of the Arab League and its Secretary General, Azzam Pasha, to utterly wipe out the nascent Jewish state and massacre its population, men, women and children. He declared that “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”
But miraculously the few defeated the many.
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, even as they hide the reality of the Arab aggression which caused the Arab defeat, nevertheless continue hurling from their mouths lies upon lies. Their so-called “Naqba” was the result of the Arab world’s own genocidal aggression against Israel.
To begin with, no such thing as a sovereign independent Arab state called Palestine has ever existed in all recorded history and you will look for evidence of it in vain. The land of Israel, in contrast, yields Jewish archaeological antiquities dating back almost 4,000 years with Biblical sites going back to the time of Abraham. For instance, in Hebron, one of the four holy Jewish cities in Israel, the others being Tiberius and Safed with Jerusalem as the jewel in the crown, you will see the shrine covering the ancient Cave of Machpela where Abraham purchased burial plots for his family from a Hittite.
Below is just one of the enormous numbers of Jewish Biblical and post-Biblical archaeological sites to be found throughout Israel. This is the Israelite city of Tel Gezer with its gate built by King Solomon some 2,850 years ago.
As I point out in the four volumes of my work titled, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state, the Middle East was divided by the Principal Allied Powers at the San Remo Conference during April, 1920 between a proposed Arab nation and a Jewish nation. The Arabs were granted independence after the end of the First World War throughout the entire Middle East, except for what became British Mandatory Palestine. That territory, on both sides of the river Jordan, was designated to constitute the national home for the Jewish people.
But in 1921, Great Britain unjustly carved out a new Arab state called Transjordan from the territory of geographical Palestine. The territory east of the river Jordan stretched all the way to the eastern boundary of Mandatory Palestine, a border that would separate it from what was to become the future British-created state of Iraq. Britain presented this gift to Abdullah, the son of the Hashemite tribal chief and Sherif of Mecca, as a consolation prize for their contribution in helping defeat the Turks. However, even T.S. Lawrence (of Lawrence of Arabia fame) later described the Hashemite role in derisory terms as, “a side show of a side show.”
This was a shameful betrayal of the earlier 1917 Balfour Declaration and constituted a loss to the proposed Jewish homeland of two thirds of the land mass earlier promised by the British Foreign Office.
On November 29, 1947, the Arabs living in British Mandatory Palestine were offered a substantial part of what was left of the Jewish National Home by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 181). The Jewish representatives reluctantly accepted the further loss of territory because of their need to provide an urgent refuge for Holocaust survivors and for the growing number of Jewish refugees arriving traumatized and penniless from Arab states. The Arabs, however, rejected the offer from the UN and thus chose to invade the newly reborn Jewish state for the purpose of obliterating it. They failed.
The fact is that though the endless Arab aggression may always appear to be a dispute over borders, in reality it is a religious war and the Arabs, so long as the overwhelming majority remain Muslim, will never accept the existence of a non-Muslim state in territory previously conquered in the name of Allah – whatever the size or shape of its borders. This is especially so of the fraudulent Arabs who call themselves Palestinians who will never recognize or accept peace with Israel.
As mentioned, Arab armies responded to Israel’s founding with a call for genocide and their leaders continued with repeated wars and barbaric acts of terrorism for the sole purpose of killing Jews and destroying the world’s only Jewish state. However, a growing number of Arabs are becoming disillusioned with the obduracy and barbarity of the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Thanks to President Trump in establishing the Abraham Accords, several Arab nations are now drawing closer to Israel and moving away from their previous support for the Palestinian terrorist entity, be it the PLO, the PA, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, ad nauseam. But President Biden and his handlers and leftovers from the Obama regime continue to support the so-called Palestinian Authority under the malign leadership of the Holocaust denying, Mahmoud Abbas, who has remained in power well beyond his original term. The Biden Administration continues to pour millions of taxpayer dollars to Abbas who then uses it to pay his terrorists to murder Israeli civilians. This is blood money.
While Rashida Tlaib works to delegitimize Israel in the US House, the Arab terrorists who call themselves Palestinians incite hate and violence, while committing horrific acts of terror against Israeli civilians. Tlaib has a “history of antisemitic remarks” in Congress and the real catastrophe is that we have reached the point that this hate-filled Democrat has introduced a vile resolution which is an indelible stain on Congress. It is a direct result of the failure of the House Democrat leadership to act against anti-Semitism, even as it increasingly festers.
It is long overdue for Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has promoted and protected the squalid Squad, to not merely issue resolutions condemning anti-Semitism, but to lead the House in censuring those who spew it, such as the members of the infamous Squad: Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
As Ari Lieberman pointed out in a recent article, “Tlaib’s reckless and malevolent tweets, where she instinctively and falsely blames Jews for murder and other capital crimes, belies a sinister intent. Even more troubling is that Tlaib is a member of the U.S. legislative branch, and her words carry weight. Yet she continues to spew blood libels with near impunity and the deafening silence from her own Democrat party should sound alarm bells.”
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Having just turned 89, and with the prospect of a few more ahead, these little comments begin to hit home. These were sent by dear friend and fellow memo reader who is leaving and we are going to miss them terribly.
My own would be: I owe my longevity to Levi's because someone told me it is your "jeans."
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* "To get back to my youth I would do anything in the world, except exercise, get up early, or be respectable." - Oscar Wilde
"The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for." - Will Rogers
"Old age comes at a bad time." – San Banducci “
"Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened." - Jennifer Yane
"Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do about it." - Golda Meir
"I’m so old that my blood type is discontinued." - Bill Dane
"The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. - Mark Twain
"Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes, age just shows up all by itself." - Tom Wilson
"Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your retirement home."- Phyllis Diller
"I don’t plan to grow old gracefully. I plan to have face-lifts until my ears meet." - Rita Rudner
"I’m at that age where my back goes out more than I do." - Phyllis Diller
"Nice to be here? At my age it’s nice to be anywhere." – George Burns
"Don't let aging get you down. It's too hard to get back up." - John Wagner
"First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down." - Leo Rosenberg
“Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.” - Kitty O’Neill Collins
“Old people shouldn’t eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.” – Robert Orben
"Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings, and you hope it isn’t for you." - Ogden Nash
"At my age, flowers scare me." - George Burns
“I have successfully completed the thirty-year transition from wanting to stay up late to just wanting to go to bed." – Unknown
"Nobody expects to trust his body much after the age of fifty." - Alexander Hamilton
"The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down." - T.S. Elliot
"At age 20, we worry about what others think of us… at age 40, we don’t care what they think of us… at age 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all." - Ann Landers
"When I was young, I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties, I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then, and I’m labeled senile." - George Burns
"I complain that the years fly past, but then I look in a mirror and see that very few of them actually got past." - Robert Brault
"The important thing to remember is that I’m probably going to forget." – Unknown
"As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can't remember the other two." - Sir Norman Wisdom
“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.” - Andy Rooney
“Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.” - Larry Lorenzon
“The older I get, the better I used to be.” – Lee Trevino
"I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me—they’re cramming for their final exam."- George Carlin
"I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap." - Bob Hope
"I’m 59 and people call me middle-aged. How many 118-year-old men do you know?"- Barry Cryer
"I don't do alcohol anymore—I get the same effect just standing up fast." – Anonymous
“By the time you’re 80 years old you’ve learned everything. You only must remember it.” - George Burns
“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” – Maurice Chevalier
"Getting older. I used to be able to run a 4-minute mile, bench press 380 pounds, and tell the truth." - Conan O’Brien
"I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to." - Albert Einstein
"Grandchildren don’t make a man feel old, it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother that does." - J. Norman Collie
"You know you are getting old when everything hurts; and what doesn’t hurt doesn’t work." - Hy Gardner
"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old." - Mark Twain
"You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks." - Joel Plaskett
"There’s one advantage to being 102, there’s no peer pressure." - Dennis Wolfberg
"I've never known a person who lives to be 110 who is remarkable for anything else." —Josh Billings
"Old age is when you resent the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated because there are fewer articles to read." – George Burns
"The idea is to die young as late as possible." - Ashley Montagu
“You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.” - George Burns
"People ask me what I’d most appreciate getting for my eighty-seventh birthday. I tell them, a paternity suit." - George Burns
"Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician." - Anonymous
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