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More failed collusion by Democrats: Ukraine Worked With Democrats Against Trump in 2016 to Stop Putin. The Bet Backfired Badly. | RealClearInvestigations:
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/03/10/how_ukraine_conspired_with_dems_against_trump_to_prevent_the_kind_of_war_happening_now_under_biden_820873.html
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Read our latest article from our On Geopolitics column titled "Unpacking Putin's 'Denazification' of Ukraine and My Forecasting Failure."
Read the Article.
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A dire outlook from a brilliant historian
Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse?
.By Victor Davis Hanson
In modern times, as in ancient Rome, several nations have suffered a "systems collapse." The term describes the sudden inability of once-prosperous populations to continue with what had ensured the good life as they knew it.
Abruptly, the population cannot buy, or even find, once plentiful necessities. They feel their streets are unsafe. Laws go unenforced or are enforced inequitably. Every day things stop working. The government turns from reliable to capricious if not hostil
Consider contemporary Venezuela. By 2010, the once well-off oil-exporting country was mired in a self-created mess. Food became scarce, crime ubiquitous.
Radical socialism, nationalization, corruption, jailing opponents, and the destruction of constitutional norms were the culprits.
Between 2009 and 2016, a once relatively stable Greece nearly became a Third World country. So did Great Britain in its socialist days of the 1970s.
Joe Biden's young presidency may already be leading the United States into a similar meltdown.
Hard Left "woke" ideology has all but obliterated the idea of a border. Millions of impoverished foreigners are entering the United States illegally - and during a pandemic without either COVID-19 tests or vaccinations.
The health bureaucracies have lost credibility as official communiques on masks, herd and acquired immunity, vaccinations, and comorbidities apparently change and adjust to perceived political realities.
After decades of improving race relations, America is regressing into a pre-modern tribal society.
Crime soars. Inflation roars. Meritocracy is libeled and so we are governed more by ideology and tribe.
The soaring prices of the stuff of life - fuel, food, housing, health care, transportation - are strangling the middle class.
Millions stay home, content to be paid by the state not to work. Supply shortages and empty shelves are the new norm.
Nineteenth-century-style train robberies are back. So is 1970s urban violence, replete with looting, carjackings, and random murdering of the innocent.
After the Afghanistan debacle, we have returned to the dark days following defeat in Vietnam, when U.S. deterrence abroad was likewise shattered, and global terrorism and instability were the norms abroad.
Who could have believed a year ago that America would now beg Saudi Arabia and Russia to pump more oil - as we pulled our own oil leases, and canceled pipelines and oil fields?
Our path to systems collapse is not due to an earthquake, climate change, a nuclear war, or even the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, most of our maladies are self-inflicted. They are the direct result of woke ideologies that are both cruel and antithetical to traditional American pragmatism.
Hard-Left district attorneys in our major cities refuse to charge thousands of arrested criminals - relying instead on bankrupt social justice theories.
Law enforcement has been arbitrarily defunded and libeled. Police deterrence is lost, so looters, vandals, thieves, and murderers more freely prey on the public.
"Modern monetary theory" deludes ideologues that printing trillions of dollars can enrich the public, even as the ensuing inflation is making people poorer.
"Critical race theory" absurdly dictates that current "good" racism can correct the effects of past bad racism. A once tolerant, multiracial nation is resembling the factionalism of the former Yugoslavia.
The culprit again is a callous woke ideology that posits little value for individuals, prioritizing only the so-called collective agenda.
Woke's trademark is "equity," or a forced equality of result. Practically, we are becoming a comic-book version of victims and victimizers, with woke opportunists playacting as our superheroes.
Strangest in 2021 was the systematic attack on our ancient institutions, as we scapegoated our ancestors for our own incompetencies.
The woke have waged a veritable war against the 233-year-old Electoral College and the right of states to set their own balloting laws in national elections, the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year-old, 50-state union.
The U.S. military, Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, Center for Disease Control, and National Institutes of Health until recently were revered. Their top echelons were staffed by career professionals mostly immune to the politics of the day.
Not now. These bureaus and agencies are losing public confidence and support. Citizens fear rather than respect Washington grandees who have weaponized politics ahead of public service.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former FBI heads like James Comey and Andrew McCabe, retired CIA director John Brennan, and Anthony Fauci head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - have all politicalized and vastly exceeded their professional purviews.
They sounded off in public fora as if they were elected legislators up for reelection. Some lied under oath. Others demonized critics. Most sought to become media darlings.
This governmental freefall is overseen by a tragically bewildered, petulant, and incompetent president. In his confusion, an increasingly unpopular President Joe Biden seems to believe his divisive chaos is working, belittling his political opponents as racist Confederate rebels.
As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, who will stop our descent into collective poverty, division, and self-inflicted madness?
(C)2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
And:
Kerry remains Green with envy: https://jewishworldreview.com/0322/hanson031022.php
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Our befuddled president?
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/09/watch-psaki-says-biden-not-always-super-comprehensive-in-press-gaggles-n1565088+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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It's only worthless paper: The House passed a spending package that includes a whopping $1.5 trillion in federal funding and $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine. If the Senate approves, the package would fund the government through Sept. 30, avoiding a shutdown. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Maybe we should put Jane Goodall and her staff in charge of the world!
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I am in total agreement. Very perceptive:
Three Reasons Why Trump Shouldn’t Run for President in 2024
The American Thinker
Donald Trump was a great president, and Americans of all stripes are beginning to recognize that. Even his opponents will find it hard to argue against that conclusion without waxing stupid about a supposed “January 6th insurrection” that was “worse than 9/11,” or citing the futile “impeachments” where Democrats beclowned themselves in conducting show trials against him.
The truth is that under the Trump presidency, America became a net exporter of energy. We were largely “energy independent,” a phrase that had been little more than a pipe dream since at least the 1970’s until it became a reality in Donald Trump’s America. We had a genuine path to peace in the Middle East, another prospect once-unthinkable in most of our lifetimes. The economy was the best it had been in 50 years, businesses were repatriating due to competitive tax policy, and the vast majority of Americans experienced significant tax cuts (even the New York Times begrudgingly admits this).
Perhaps most importantly, President Trump did nothing short of giving American conservatives a voice in the culture again, punching back at left-wing government-corporate-media attacks against conservative principles like life, family, and American exceptionalism, and by eventually forcing them to expose their fascistic impulses and practices for all to see.
No man is without faults, and like so many great men, Trump certainly has his share. Yet I am deeply thankful for him, and his service to this country. All of that said, if he loves this country and wants what’s best for it, he should not run for the presidency in 2024.
Official portrait of the 45th President of the United States
Here are three reasons why.
The Virginia Template
We don’t need to delve into all the fishy late-night delays in tallying newly-discovered ballots to determine that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Molly Ball, at TIME magazine, confessed to us all that she was a conspirator among a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
This testimony from the horse’s mouth notwithstanding, lamenting lost battles has little value in rallying your troops to pursue a mission’s objective, and politics is no different.
Virginia, however, presents a rousing victory in the ideological contest for Americans’ hearts and minds, and one that conservatives and moderates are suddenly winning.
Biden won Virginia by 10-points in the 2020 election*. That’s the political equivalent of finishing by miles in a marathon. If you asked anyone even a year ago, Virginia would be considered solidly-blue.
Yet in November 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin ended the longstanding Democratic stranglehold on the governorship in Virginia. Republican Winsome Sears won the Lieutenant Governor role, and Jason Miyares, another Republican, won the Attorney General role. And Republicans picked up seven seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, rallying to a two-delegate majority from being a five-delegate minority in the state legislature.
In all of this, Trump remained at arm’s length from Youngkin’s campaign. What drove that election was a massive groundswell of moderate, and even some left-wing, opposition to the huge uptick in crime, a faltering economy crippled by inflation and supply chain disruptions, and most importantly, the school closures and forced imposition of Critical Race Theory and radical sexual and transgender ideology in public schools.
Republicans won the deep-blue state of Virginia by espousing Trump’s policies in a relatively Trump-free campaign.
The point here is simple. Trump would likely win most or all red states in 2024 by presenting similar political arguments to those that won Virginia for Republicans. It seems far less likely that Trump would win in Virginia in 2024 while presenting those same arguments.
The Romney Curse
It’s politically difficult to oppose a thing that you once favored. Mitt Romney may not understand this about his own political career, but some of us observers have known it about him for a decade. The 2012 election was largely a referendum on Obamacare. And somehow, the Republican Party managed to select the only candidate that had instituted Obamacare-Lite in his own state. After pushing Romneycare for Massachusetts back in 2006, Mitt Romney was perhaps the worst choice imaginable to represent the Republican opposition to Obamacare.
2024 is destined, along with whatever comes of Biden’s foreign policy that has led us to the brink of World War III, to be a referendum on America’s liberty-strangling and economy-crushing COVID response. Time can only illuminate how wrong the government’s “health experts” have been about everything when it comes to COVID. We shut down the country over a disease that we knew, almost immediately, only severely affected the very old and immunocompromised.
Donald Trump supported the national shutdown to flatten the curve. Then he shut everything down until Easter of 2020, opening the door to a level of tyranny that has never before been seen in America. Trump had supported the lockdowns, then the masks, then the vaccines, and then the boosters.
Here the truth that Republicans can, should, and will run on in 2022 and 2024. Masks don’t work, and have never worked. There’s not a single place on the planet where they have. The vaccines may be efficacious in preventing hospitalization or death, but they do not prevent infection or transmission as was promised. And boosters? They’ve proven so obviously ineffective that they’re rarely mentioned anymore, even by the most zealous of the Fauci faithful.
The problem with later opposing a thing you once supported is a simple matter of credibility. Joe Biden knows this all too well. It’s hard to push a widely supported anti-crime bill in 1994 only to later lead a Party which argues that it was a terrible and racist idea, while also supporting the defunding of police departments across the country.
Lucky for Biden, all of the other candidates in the Democrats’ field in 2020 were so terrible and clearly unelectable that the Party conspired in his favor for the primary. After being shellacked in early primary races, he was thrown a life preserver in South Carolina in the form of a James Clyburn endorsement to carry the crucial state. Then, on Super Tuesday, the Party destroyed Bernie Sanders by forcing him to split the socialist vote with Elizabeth Warren while the supposed moderates, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, dropped out of the race just in time to clear the moderate lane for frail, doddering, yet hopefully nostalgically familiar Joe Biden.
Republicans will not be in such dire straits in 2024. And among potentially many suitable candidates, one stands out among the rest.
The Rise of Ron DeSantis
Ron DeSantis is the face of the opposition when it comes to government-imposed COVID tyranny and the voice of modern conservatism. He doesn’t suffer from the Romney Curse, in that he doesn’t have to defend against his own past violations upon Americans’ liberty over COVID, because he was among the first to successfully lift and speak out against those impositions.
Like Youngkin, he is able to openly and charismatically promote Donald Trump’s ideas while enjoying the benefit of being someone other than Donald Trump.
In all likelihood, the Democratic Party has already determined that the ancient and embarrassingly incompetent Joe Biden will be unelectable in 2024. The speed at which his cognitive faculties are abandoning him is scary, and this has been accentuated by the complete disaster that his presidency has proven to be.
We need a strong and measured president to lead America in these precarious times. One who doesn’t bandy loose threats of annihilation or petty insults against foreign leaders on social media. One who doesn’t necessarily embrace his role as being the most polarizing figure in American politics. One who passionately rebukes the media and demolishes their lies, but remains grounded in logic, reason, and facts.
We need a leader who can’t be tied to leading America into COVID lockdowns or, right or wrong, the mythological January 6 “insurrection.” And most importantly, we need a leader that doesn’t come with the physical and mental impairments that come with 78 years of life on Earth, as Trump will be carrying in 2024.
The frontrunner for that role, it seems clear, should be Ron DeSantis. And while Trump was the right man for the presidency in his time, I hope that he will recognize that his time for that role has passed, and he will pass the torch to his natural successor.
And:
Being the hawk that I am, I tend to agree with Lieberman and believe it is time to challenge Putin. Before any action is taken and/or agreed upon, America and those nations who comprise NATO must seek the concurrence of their citizenry.
The Case for a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine
It would be an act of defense against Russian aggression, an exercise in the ‘responsibility to protect.’
By Joe Lieberman
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s refusal to give Ukraine no-fly protection from the continuing, indiscriminate and inhumane Russian attacks from the air is strategically weak and morally wrong.
The weapons the U.S. and its allies have sent are helping the Ukrainians defend themselves from some of the Russian attacks, but the aerial bombardment of civilians continues without risk or cost to the aggressors. We cannot stand back and allow this mass murder from the air to continue.
Western leaders have said the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a direct attack on the international order that has protected the security, freedom and prosperity of much of the world since the end of World War II. It logically follows that we should use the superior air power we possess to stop Vladimir Putin from succeeding, to protect the Ukrainian people and to prevent the establishment of a new world order that would be much more dangerous for all of us.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have said they couldn’t support a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that would be an offensive action, and NATO is a defensive alliance. But that makes no sense. The offensive actions are being carried out by invading Russian troops. The purpose of a no-fly zone would be defensive, protecting and defending the people of Ukraine from the Russians.
The other argument against establishing a no-fly zone is that it might anger Mr. Putin and trigger World War III. But inaction based on fear usually causes more conflict than action based on confidence. Fearing to act not only makes it easier for Mr. Putin to win his inhumane war but also encourages such nations as China to believe they too can invade neighbors without fear of a U.S. response.
There are moral reasons for the U.S. and NATO to act that are rooted in our Good Samaritan laws and values. In the 1990s Samantha Power was so troubled by our slowness to intervene in the Balkans and Rwanda that she argued for a “responsibility to protect” citizens of other nations from genocide and other war crimes, which was unanimously adopted as an international norm by the United Nations World Summit in 2005.
Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut U.S. global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.
Mr. Lieberman was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000 and a U.S. senator from Connecticut, 1989-2013. He is chairman of United Against Nuclear Iran and of No Labels.
And:
The White House divides the alliance and signals weakness to Putin by refusing to let Warsaw send fighter jets to Ukraine.
The Editorial Board
The U.S. and Europe have shown impressive cohesion since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which makes this week’s fiasco over delivering Poland’s MiG fighters to Kyiv so damaging. The message to Mr. Putin is that his intimidation works and NATO can be divided.
On Tuesday Poland said it could transfer around two dozen MIG-29 jet fighters to a U.S. base in Germany, and then to Ukraine, whose pilots can fly the Soviet-era planes with minimal training. On Sunday Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said the U.S. was working with the Poles on the issue and would try to “backfill anything that they provide to the Ukrainians.” Yet Washington later claimed surprise at Poland’s proposal.
“The decision about whether to transfer Polish-owned planes to Ukraine is ultimately one for the Polish government,” said a Pentagon spokesman in a statement late Tuesday. “The prospect of fighter jets ‘at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America’ departing from a U.S. NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance.” He added that the plan lacked “substantive rationale” and was not “tenable.”
Untenable how? After a NATO no-fly zone, which the alliance has refused, the MiGs are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s top request. The jets won’t decide the war, but his generals must think they’d help if only to deny Russia control of the skies. Any Russian artillery batteries or jets taken off the battlefield could save Ukrainian lives.
What happened between Mr. Blinken’s endorsement and the Pentagon’s rejection? It’s hard not to conclude that the White House blinked for fear of provoking Mr. Putin, who is demanding that the West stop arming Ukraine.
But NATO countries are already sending all sorts of weapons into Ukraine. Is a Polish MiG with a Ukrainian pilot somehow more provocative than a Turkish drone or an American antitank missile? Transferring planes isn’t the same as NATO aviators directly shooting down Russian jets.
Mr. Putin calls anything beyond Western acquiescence and Ukraine’s surrender a provocation. And NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg felt obliged to warn Mr. Putin Tuesday that a Russian attack on supply lines in alliance territory would trigger a collective response: “We are removing any room for miscalculation, misunderstanding about our commitment to defend every inch of NATO territory.”
Poland—which shares a border with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine—doesn’t want the transfer of planes directly to Ukraine from its territory to be perceived as a unilateral provocation. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Wednesday that the decision “must be unanimous and unequivocally taken by all of the North Atlantic Alliance.”
On Wednesday U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin formally nixed the MiG transfer to Ukraine. The failure of Team Biden to back up Warsaw is a failure of U.S. leadership.
There is risk of escalation in any war, and needless provocations should be avoided. But the risk of giving Mr. Putin a veto over NATO actions is that it undermines the credibility of deterrence. As Mr. Putin’s frustration grows, he is bombing cities, and Wednesday bombed a maternity hospital. The death toll is rising.
As he escalates, will he use chemical weapons or tactical nukes? Will NATO refuse to respond then because it fears World War III? The MiG mistake may let Mr. Putin believe his threats will make NATO stand down.
Finally:
Yes Or No Fly Zone: Congressman Mike Gallagher On Ukraine Policy And Politics
interview with John H. Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, Bill Whalen, Mike Gallagher via GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution
Have “false flags” given way to false hope in Ukraine? Despite the images of bold resistance, will Russian military setbacks eventually lead to a bad outcome for the citizens of that nation? Rep. Mike Gallagher, a member of the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, joins Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane to discuss the latest news in Eastern Europe, US strategic choices, the war’s economic ramifications, plus China’s short-term (peacemaker?) and long-term (absorb Taiwan) aspirations.
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HYPOCRISY!
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