The Israeli Air Force will begin to practice launching a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities amid mounting uncertainty about reviving the 2015 nuclear deal and fears Tehran may be readying a dash towards the bomb.
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'Justice was Served': Loudoun County Student Found Guilty of Bathroom Sexual Assault
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Can a joke, named Biden, joke about making a joke?
Biden Jokes to Elementary Schoolers That His Job is to 'Avoid' Answering Questions from Reporters
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Bill Maher, of all people, must have become concerned enough about his long running television program losing viewers because of his insane liberal comments and attacks on rational conservative commentary so apparently he began a sober reflection and mended his ways.
Will George Will and Bill Kristol be next? Frankly, who gives a damn. Few listen to them anymore.
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I love my country, I just don't trust our government.
A very sobering message, especially to our politicians (Republicans and Democrats) in Washington.
"Real Time" host Bill Maher closed his show Friday night by sounding the alarm on China's growing dominance over the United States. Why are Americans sleeping?...We aren't sleeping, we are spending our time teaching and assisting little boys how to become little girls!!! And, if we aren't busy doing that we have the Sec of Defense, responding to an order from the 'commander' in chief, designing stylish new uniforms for pregnant ‘soldiers’
"You're not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are such silly people. And Americans are all silly people," Maher began the monologue, alluding to a "Lawrence of Arabia" quote.
Do you know who doesn't care that there's a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China," he said. "All 1.4 billion of them couldn't give a crouching tiger flying f--- because they're not silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”
Maher acknowledged that China does "bad stuff" from the concentration camps of Uyghur Muslims to its treatment of Hong Kong. But he stressed, "There's got to be something between an authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can't do anything at all.”
"In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals. Oh, and they bought Africa," Maher said, pointing to China's global Silk Road infrastructure initiative.
He continued: "In China alone, they have 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. America has none. ... We've been having Infrastructure Week every week since 2009 but we never do anything. Half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they're eating babies. We are such silly people.
"Nothing ever moves in this impacted colon of a country. We see a problem and we ignore it, lie about it, fight about it with each other, endlessly litigate it, sunset clause it, kick it down the road, and then write a bill where a half-assed solution doesn't kick in for 10 years," Maher explained. Then the half-assed bill is forgotten.
"China sees a problem and they fix it. They build a dam. We debate what to rename it.”
The HBO star cited how it took "ten years" for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review and how it took "16 years" to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston, comparing that to a 57-story skyscraper that China built in "19 days" and Beijing's Sanyuan Bridge, which was demolished and rebuilt in "43 hours.”
"We binge-watch, they binge-build. When COVID hit Wuhan, the city built a quarantine center with 4,000 rooms in 10 days and they barely had to use it because they quickly arrested the rest of the disease," Maher said. "They were back to throwing raves in swimming pools while we were stuck at home surfing the dark web for black market Charmin. We're not losing to China, we LOST. The returns just haven't all come in yet. They've made robots that check a kid's temperature and got their asses back in school. Most of our kids are still pretending to take Zoom classes while they watch TikTok and their brain cells fully commit ritual suicide." Our teacher's unions are finding every single way to keep themselves on the payroll, but keep students out of the classrooms. WAKE UP AMERICANS!! That means ALL of YOU.
Maher then blasted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, accusing him of degrading school standards by eliminating merit and substituting a lottery system for admittance to schools for advanced learners. Our country is going down the toilet.
"Do you think China's doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?" Maher continued. "Do you think Chinese colleges and universities are offering courses in 'The Philosophy of Star Trek, 'The Sociology of Seinfeld,' and 'Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse'? Can this be real? Well, let me tell you, China is real. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they'll be hungry again."
I would add that the rot being developed internally by groups such as BLM, extreme right wing and left-wing groups, along with the free loaders, and a hundred other groups are perhaps a far greater threat than China, because they are all around us, and we tax paying, country loving, hardworking individuals just sit back and watch it take place. That people like Omar, and AOC, others can be elected, should just make you vomit.
That a statue of George Floyd could be put up in Minneapolis and some historical statues taken down should tell you that its off the rails, way off the rails, and unless it is stopped by the people who care about the matter, I fear that we are not going to get back on the track heading in the right direction. God bless America.
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Europe confused about America. So are many Americans.
In Europe, Confusion Reigns About the U.S.
America’s pivot to Asia has stirred the most significant misunderstanding.
By Walter Russell Mead
After almost two years of Covid-induced absence from Paris and Berlin, I returned to the old world to make a surprising discovery: Europe no longer understands the United States. Between Washington’s shift to the Indo-Pacific, the lingering effects of the Trump presidency (along with fears of a return in 2024), and confusing signals emanating from the Biden administration, neither the Germans nor French know what to expect anymore. That uncertainty further complicates the difficult task of recasting the Atlantic alliance for a turbulent new era.
The most consequential misunderstandings involve America’s continuing pivot to the Indo-Pacific. After the Aukus explosion last month, the French and the Germans no longer doubt that the pivot is real, but few in Europe have fully grasped what it means.
Many Europeans, including some seasoned observers of the trans-Atlantic scene, believe that if the U.S. sees the Indo-Pacific as the primary focus of its foreign policy, it must be writing off the rest of the world. These observers look at the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and imagine that this is the kind of headlong retreat they can expect from America in Europe and the Middle East.
This is unlikely. American interests are global, and American presidents, like it or not, can’t confine their attention to a single world theater. During the Cold War, Western Europe was the primary focus of American foreign policy, but the U.S. also fought two major wars in Asia. The energy crisis has already forced President Biden to pay more attention to the Middle East. China’s efforts to gain influence in the Middle East and Europe will draw Washington’s attention toward its old NATO partners, as will Moscow’s continued alignment with Beijing.
The China challenge makes the U.S. less isolationist, not more so, and the global nature of China’s ambitions will force American presidents to nurture alliances and work cooperatively with allies around the world.
Europeans also have a hard time grasping what the U.S. wants from its old allies in this new struggle. Britain, France and even Germany have sent token military forces to the Pacific this year. Americans appreciate the spirit behind these gestures, but European assistance in the Pacific means less to the U.S. than many Europeans, accustomed to American eagerness for allied participation in places like Afghanistan, expect.
Few in the U.S. expect Europeans to provide any significant military assistance in the Pacific. And while for domestic political reasons American presidents value European diplomatic support for U.S. military commitments in the Middle East, European support for America’s Pacific deployments carries less weight. Japan, Australia, Vietnam, India and other Indo-Pacific partners will be the countries to which the U.S. turns in the event of regional crises.
Sending token forces to the Pacific in hope of winning American gratitude and cooperation on other issues may be a strategic dead end, but there are other steps Europeans can take to keep trans-Atlantic ties strong in dangerous times. They can do a better job of managing diplomatic and security challenges close to home so the U.S. can shift resources to the Indo-Pacific, and they can join the U.S. in efforts to make the international system more effective against bad Chinese behavior on issues ranging from violations of global trading rules to the use of excessive and unhelpful influence in groups like the World Health Organization. By keeping the international system robust and attractive, European countries can help convince China’s leaders that their best path to a more prosperous and secure future lies through cooperation with existing international arrangements and the observance of global norms.
Besides misreading the implications of the China challenge, many Europeans are also misreading the state of the American union. Perhaps because so many senior Europeans get their views of the U.S. from the more partisan, less level-headed sectors of the American press and academy, a surprising number of people here think that Donald Trump came within inches of preventing the inauguration of President Biden last January. Fears that the American military might somehow be coup-happy, or that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would abandon its constitutional principles to pave the way for a Trumpist putsch, have gained greater purchase in Europe than sober-minded Americans might expect.
Paradoxically, the strength of this belief weakens Mr. Biden’s diplomacy in Europe. The fear of American instability undercuts European confidence in Mr. Biden’s pledges and commitments and strengthens the conviction of some Europeans that they live in a “post-American” era in which Europe is on its own.
To some degree these misunderstandings are due both to the isolation and emotional stress of the pandemic, and with the resumption of travel they will begin to fade. But to the degree that distorted perceptions inform European policy, Americans should think harder about communicating effectively with old allies even as we prepare for new challenges ahead.
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Will The GOP blow it, as they are prone to do, and will Trump be the cause? Can a party go forward selling a rear view mirror?
GOP Has a Chance at More Than Election Victory
It could break America’s political stalemate by looking forward not back to Trump or Reagan.
By Gerard Baker
‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban observed in 1973. As the unfolding Biden fiasco looks set to present Republicans with an unusually promising political moment, will the same prove true of America’s conservative movement?
It’s easy to understand Republican complacency. Why not sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Democratic ineptitude and ideological overreach and wait to receive its fruits? On current polling evidence, the GOP is well-placed to win back control next year at least of the House and perhaps the Senate too, setting itself up for a good shot at the White House in 2024. In the face of your opponents’ implosion, masterful inaction is usually the order of the day: Don’t just do something, stand there.
Yet tempting as it is, merely waiting out Democratic failure and the swing of the pendulum would represent a historic missed chance for Republicans.
Out of the current turmoil they may have an opportunity not only to reverse 30 years of mostly indifferent political outcomes for them but perhaps even to begin bridging the great divide in American politics and build a governing coalition the country hasn’t seen in a generation. Will they seize it?
Three temptations are currently dangling before Republicans:
First the Trump temptation. He delivered Republican majorities in 2016; he seems on current polling ready to do it again.
But it’s a Faustian temptation, and most people know it. For all the legitimate concerns conservatives have about the trashing of their values and the erosion of their cultural legacy Donald Trump promised to reverse, the man himself remains an ominous threat to the health of the republic.
It takes an act of willful blindness to deny that his continuing rejection of the 2020 election is a unique challenge to orderly constitutional government. I’m genuinely dismayed at the number of senior Republicans who acknowledge this in private but say nothing in public. Conservatives have their own cancel culture. Hundreds of top Republican officeholders are silenced today by fear of the Trump mob.
The second temptation is the opposite: to attempt a reversion to Reaganism.
This would not only miss the electrifying effect Mr. Trump had on voters angry at what’s gone wrong in America in the past 30 years. It would ignore also the failures the Republican Party itself contributed. Ronald Reagan was a political genius whose economic policies transformed America’s fortunes. But 1980 was a very different time. The complex challenges the country faces today won’t be fixed by big tax cuts and deregulation.
The third temptation comes from an interesting new group—a collection of deep thinkers convinced that liberalism in its classic sense, with its emphasis on individual autonomy, has failed because of the atomization of economic and social life it has wrought. These conservatives espouse a postliberal philosophy such as “common-good originalism” or Catholic integralism. I am Catholic and have much sympathy with critiques of modern liberalism, but if you think America is ready for some kind of Habsburg Restoration, you are definitely best placed of all to miss the opportunity conservatism faces.
The answer, at least in the short term, may be simpler: Seize the moment to build a coalition of economic populism and cultural conservatism that addresses the dystopia in modern American life, elevates the family and traditional values; resists the advance of cultural nihilism, and rejects the pure neoliberal market economics that has in some ways exacerbated the crisis. Grotesque inequality in the face of rapid technological change and intensifying market concentration isn’t going to be addressed by further corporate tax cuts or a regulatory environment shaped by the interests of corporate donors to the Republican Party.
If the GOP succeeds, it might break the strange stasis that has gripped American politics for 30 years.
Since 1992 there have been eight presidential elections. In none of those contests has any candidate received more than 53% of the vote. In the eight preceding elections, from John F. Kennedy in 1960 to George H.W. Bush, four candidates exceeded 53%: Lyndon Johnson in 1964; Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bush in 1988. Johnson and Nixon both topped 60%.
America has become an entrenched 50/50 nation—or maybe 52/48, with a slight tilt to the Democrats. Joe Biden claims a mandate for transformational change on the basis of a victory in the popular vote of less than five percentage points.
The near symmetrical split is both a cause and a product of the caustic partisanship that is corroding faith in American institutions.
Recent political trends suggest the electoral opportunity: a multiracial coalition of the working and middle classes that disdains the progressive authoritarianism of the left but wants policies that address their daily economic struggles. Republicans may simply choose to enjoy the bounty of Democratic failures. But that would miss a rare opportunity to start the larger work of rebuilding a fractured nation.
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