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Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader and conforms with my more pessimistic side:
Is the sun Setting?
Men like nations, think they're eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn't believe, at least subconsciously, that he'll live forever In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it's harder to hide from reality.
Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.. Forever was about 500 years, give or take.
France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in a perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.
In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.
I was born in 1942, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century - the American century. America's prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the 'Greatest Generation,' we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity.
We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA.. the blueprint of life. But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism - which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world.
We've gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year, becoming more and more dependent upon a gov't which can never provide for us. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We've traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.
The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, 'Dr. Jill' had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.
We can't defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.
The president of the United States can't even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence ('You know - The Thing') correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd. Amendment and slash police budgets.
Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they're women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they're inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about 'unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.
We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It's a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our 'entertainment' is sadistic, nihilistic and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.
Patriotism is called insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We're asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in.
How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.
How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity? Fighting endless wars they can't or won't win and Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay and Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde. Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule Allowing indoctrination of the young. Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy. Losing national identity. Indulging indolence. Abandoning faith and family - the bulwarks of social order.
In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.
Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I'm surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected
This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don't want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely. During Britain's darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, 'Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.'
The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us?
While the prognosis is far from good, only God knows if America's day in the sun is over."
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This morning I played tennis with a liberal who attacked Trump because he could not defend Biden. When I confronted him with lower inflation versus higher inflation, energy costs lower than higher, significant improvement in the justice system, NATO that was paying more of their share of the burden, an awareness regarding China's industrial theft and trade advantages, a better acceptance and exchange among Israel's neighbors and I was about to list a few more accomplishment comparisons my liberal friend said he would leave if the conversation he started continued.
I cite this because liberals are good at changing the topic, attacking but unable to respond in a factual manner.
They support policies and actions that are indefensible so offense is better than defense but it is also disingenuous. It is truly beyond comprehension that they dismiss Biden's evacuation failure but stressing the war's end. If plastic surgeons left the patient scarred and claimed the operation was successful I daresay the patient would feel betrayed.
I am always willing to cede Trump was a narcissist, his own worst enemy and overreached to be obnoxious. That said, I also believe he did what he was elected to do based on campaign commitments, was successful under the most difficult of contrived circumstances and historians will consider him one of our better presidents.
Biden denial is a clear dodge and that dog will not hunt.
Biden and the Left-wing Standard of Attacking Presidents
Victor Davis Hanson
In just a few months Joe Biden has wrought a series of disasters that will invoke outrage that dwarfs the concocted anger directed at Donald Trump.
As Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, there still roared a left-wing revolution, a woke madness spreading through popular culture and Congress, much of which he indirectly has aided and abetted. It has redefined not just politics but the rules of the presidency. And the eventual casualty of these radical shifts in protocols and customs will be—Joe Biden.
Take impeachment, which heretofore had been rare and has still never led to a Senate conviction. Prior to Trump, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were the only presidents to have been impeached (Richard Nixon resigned to avoid it), and both were acquitted in the Senate.
Yet leftist congressional representatives introduced articles of impeachment the very first week Trump was in office, on the absurd allegation of profiting from his office (the presidency cost the Trump corporations hundreds of millions). The House later went on to impeach him twice, without writs of “treason” and “bribery” or even “high crimes and misdemeanors” as set out by the Constitution. Instead, Trump was, first, successfully impeached for supposedly abusing his power and obstructing Congress. I don’t think the average American has ever been pulled over by the police for the high crime “of obstructing Congress” (historically a presidential pastime) or has been charged with “abuse of power” (said of every president from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama).
Trump’s second impeachment was even flimsier. He was accused of “incitement of insurrection” concerning disturbances on January 6 that supposedly led to the violent death of Officer Brian Sicknick, the fatal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt, and the entire fable of an “armed insurrection.” Post-impeachment, we would learn that Sicknick died of natural causes. Strangely, for months no information about the shooter of Ashli Babbitt or the inquiry into that fatal act was ever fully released to the public. No one was charged with armed insurrection, largely because none of the buffoonish rioters were found either to have carried or used a firearm that day or were exposed as master plotters with plans to destroy the U.S. government. They may well have been guilty of felonies, but armed insurrectionary conspiracy was not one of them.
No matter, the precedent had been set that serial impeachments now will be normative when a president in his first term loses party control of the House. Charges may not follow constitutional definitions. There will be no need to appoint a special counsel, to build a case on evidence, or to hold a formal hearing where witnesses present testimonies and are subject to cross-examination. There will be no expectation that the Senate will even come close to convicting an impeached president. Impeachment is simply now a political gambit to embarrass a party or a president before a reelection. Biden and future presidents as private citizens could be hounded after exiting office with a Senate impeachment trial.
Joe Biden by such new standards would then be in jeopardy should the Democrats lose the House in 2022, on the precedent that the Republicans could bring up anything they wished—unwillingness to enforce existing federal immigration law, deliberately misleading the American public on the growing catastrophe in Afghanistan, leveraging a foreign leader to lie with threats of withholding U.S. airpower to enhance his own political agenda, or empowerment of and collusion with his son Hunter Biden in past efforts to massage foreign governments for cash on the expectation of future advantageous U.S. government treatment. These may be flimsy charges for traditional impeachment; they are certainly not under the new Democratic model.
When Donald Trump’s confidential phone calls with foreign leaders were leaked to the press it was celebrated by the media and the Left as a sort of blood sport. Now are we to think the same of the embarrassing leaked phone call between Biden and the Afghan president?
Donald Trump was impeached over a phone call with the Ukrainian president for supposedly pressuring Ukraine, by the threat of holding up foreign aid, to conduct an investigation of the Biden family syndicate’s shenanigans. So, what are we to make then of Biden’s demand that the Afghan president lie to the world so that his fragile government did not appear in jeopardy, even if, Biden acknowledged, it, of course, was—with the added insinuation that Biden’s commitment to support the Afghan government with U.S. military power was predicated on his compliance with parroting such lies?
We saw from 2017 to 2021 the precedent that both active and retired top Pentagon brass would either leak derogatory assessments of the commander-in-chief to the press, or overtly declare him to be morally unfit to hold office—all in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. What then is the country to do, amid the Afghanistan catastrophe, when lots of retired generals are now going public with calls for their president’s key military and civilian office holders to resign for culpability for a series of foreign policy disasters? Is it a good thing for our generals and admirals to become editorialists and critics of an elected president’s administration or ill-conceived, both, neither—or sometimes, depending on who is president?
In the Trump years, the Left institutionalized the new idea that threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment was a casual affair, a strategy appropriate to harming or removing a president. So the acting heads of the FBI and Justice Department apparently discussed plots to wear eavesdropping equipment to entrap Trump in recorded conversations that might reveal his alleged dementia. An Ivy League psychiatrist was called to Congress to swear that the president was non compos mentis and in need of a forced intervention. The media demanded proof of Trump’s sanity to the point he took—and aced—the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.
Joe Biden is obviously suffering from some sort of organic illness that has reduced his mental faculties to the point he is often dazed. When he is rarely able to craft complete sentences, he says things that are incoherent, offensive, and occasionally racist. He seems to have no knowledge of current events and so reassures trapped Americans in Kabul that they can simply go to the besieged airport, show their passports, and waltz on in.
Under the new protocols, are we to expect high Justice Department officials to record stealthily Biden’s private conversations, to subpoena an appropriate ivy league psychiatrist, or to ask the president to take a simple cognitive assessment test?
Under Joe Biden, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, sought to ingratiate himself to the woke movement, to his woke Secretary of Defense, and to Joe Biden by assuring Congress he would get to the root of “white rage” and in general recommend to his troops the relevant woke texts such as those of Professor Ibram X. Kendi.
Milley produced no evidence that there were lots of insurrectionary white supremacists in the military. He cared little in his virtue signaling that “white” male soldiers had died in Iraq and Afghanistan at twice their numbers in the general population—a cardinal sin under woke disparate impact and proportional representation canons.
Again, fine. But given the sometimes violent nature of Black Lives Matter, and its apparently proud Marxist origins, is it now equally OK for some future chairman to testify that he will go through the ranks to understand black rage as his Pentagon roots out would-be BLM extremists?
These hypocrisies are endless, given the pernicious precedents that so casually have now been embraced for cheap political advantage.
Will the next Speaker of the House ritually tear up Biden’s State of the Union address, as he hands the text to him on national television?
Will the Congress appoint a special counsel, allot him 22 months and $40 million to scour the Biden team to find the causes, origins, and those culpable of the greatest foreign policy debacle since the last days of Vietnam—with occasional side trips along the tortured family money trail and indifference to the IRS of Hunter Biden’s international grifting?
Will retired Trump-era CIA and high-ranking intelligence officials go on cable television to wink and nod about their privileged security clearance information to accuse Biden of treasonous behavior?
Will they tweet that he and his policies are similar to those of the German death camps, or stamp him as Mussolini or Hitler-like?
And will some “brave” disillusioned Democratic “loyalist” be canonized in the media as he falsely reassures the nation, as “Anonymous II,” that he is both high-ranking and representative of a large, dissident, and grassroots resistance to Biden within his own administration and party? Will the New York Times print his warning that an army of idealists is ready and willing to resist any Biden presidential order that it finds distasteful? Is that the political culture that Biden should now operate under?
Did the NATO allies find Trump’s brashness—which resulted in a considerable increase in alliance military funding and readiness—as bad as Biden’s soothing words that betrayed our European partners and have all but ruined the alliance?
Was all this hypocrisy predicated on the idea that the Left will never lose power, or that its atrocious behavior was defensible for the moment given the accident of Donald Trump? Or do Democrats really believe there must be one standard for leftist moralists and another for their supposed inferiors, on their blinkered assumption that there would never be a Democratic president as controversial and disliked by the Right as Donald Trump was by the Left?
The truth is that in just a few months Joe Biden has wrought a series of disasters that will invoke outrage that dwarfs the concocted anger directed at Donald Trump. And it may be vented through the very protocols that the Left invented for its own short-term advantage.
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
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I believe we must prepare for a gut wrenching period of The Taliban rubbing our nose in our own excrement. Why not? The Taliban have the upper hand, the leverage and the desire to make fools of America.
They also need acceptance, money and help in their ability to govern.
How the two are resolved is something we have some control over but The Taliban have the upper hand and hold better cards.
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New York's Archbishop speaks from his heart:
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