Compared to Biden it is a no contest. The greatest nation in the world, now on a downward path, is led by a clown.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's handling of Russia's invasion has garnered vast approval from Americans, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. In fact, more Americans approve of how Zelenskyy handles international affairs than they do of President Biden.
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No sound farmer uses eats his seed corn.
Biden Runs Out of Gas
By Matthew Continetti
"This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply into production," President Biden said during his announcement Thursday that he would release more barrels of oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve than at any point in American history. His decision was also a concession. None of the policies Biden has enacted throughout his short presidency have alleviated the problems they were meant to solve. Quite the opposite: In practically every case, Biden has made things worse.
Energy? Killing the Keystone pipeline was one of the first things Biden did when he took office. In February, Biden delayed approval of new oil and gas leases. He continues to blame the increase in gas prices on Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, even though prices began to rise early in Biden's term. Biden scapegoats oil companies for sitting on profits, while he could be doing everything in his power to ramp up domestic production of available fuel sources—including nuclear.
The fallout from Putin's war was bound to make energy scarce and thus more valuable. Biden could have lessened the pain on the American consumer by pursuing an all-of-the-above energy dominance policy from the start, and by reducing the size of the American Rescue Plan so that it didn't contribute to inflation. He chose to ignore the warnings of economists such as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and followed his advisers who incorrectly predicted that inflation would be temporary. By turning to the Strategic Reserve, Biden is promoting a temporary fix while the long-term solutions are plain to see. He's relied on similar gimmicks before. They haven't worked.
Consider Biden's immigration policy. He spent his early days as president tearing up President Trump's agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries that forced asylum-seekers to stay in third-party nations while U.S. judges decided on their claims. The rush for the border was swift and ongoing. This week, Biden is expected to reverse a rule Trump enforced during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed border agents to repatriate illegal immigrants swiftly because of the public health emergency. Homeland Security officials tell the New York Times that because of Biden's decision they are planning on unauthorized crossings to double from an already high level. Republicans must be giddy with anticipation at the coming headlines.
Immigration and the border were the first places where you saw erosion in Biden's job approval numbers last spring. Now he's about to do something that will undermine border security and his political standing, and for no discernible reason. The pandemic is not over. Border crossings aren't falling. We know that Biden's decision will attract additional illegal immigrants. Nothing about this policy makes sense.
Biden doesn't make sense. His Europe trip was a substantive success but a stylistic failure. The Western alliance is holding. But the president gaffed his way across Eastern Europe—saying the West would respond "in kind" to a Russian chemical attack, denying the deterrent value of sanctions when his subordinates have said precisely the opposite, telling U.S. troops that they would see the horrors of war in Ukraine firsthand, then raising the possibility that America's strategic goal is regime change in Russia. Then, when Fox's Peter Doocy soberly asked him about these inadvisable statements, Biden denied that he had said anything problematic.
I happen to believe that the world would be a safer place if Vladimir Putin were out of power—that indeed one possible consequence of a Russian defeat in Ukraine is Putin's demise. I also believe that presidents shouldn't sound like me. They need to watch their public statements because, as we were reminded throughout the Trump administration, words matter. Biden's sentiment in Warsaw was correct. His sense of timing was wrong. After all, you never get in trouble for what you don't say. Biden's problem is that he rarely lets his actions speak louder than his words. And the words are garbled.
People notice. They don't like what they hear, they can't stand what they see. The public verdict on Biden is grim. He has not benefited from a rally-around-the-flag effect. His approval rating continues to fall. He's at 41 percent approval in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls. He fell under 40 percent approval in this week's Marist poll. Republicans continue to lead the congressional generic ballot. Democrats recognize that the electoral battlefield has widened. Biden is running out of time to improve his standing. And he hasn't demonstrated an ability to bounce back as president.
Biden entered office at a time of national emergency. He benefited from the public's desire to see Donald Trump off the airwaves for the first time in years. He oversaw the successful implementation of the vaccination program Trump had started. The resilience of the American economy helped him too.
Then the situation went sidewise. Biden's problems started on the southern border, ramped up with the Delta variant of coronavirus, accelerated with inflation, spread with the debacle in Afghanistan, and haven't abated since. His rallying of the West in support of Ukraine is laudable, but he still hasn't done enough to help the Ukrainians and he keeps stumbling on his own message. His commitments to the left wing of his party keep him from embracing the center. And damaging leaks about the federal investigation into his son's finances only will mount if Republicans take Congress in November.
Biden's reliance on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is telling. This is a presidency that is running out of gas.
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No need for comment:
Blinken’s obscene Western ‘progressive’ agenda
At the Negev Summit, the U.S. Secretary of State demonstrated what it currently means to be a Western progressive: supporting people who murder Israelis and empowering others who want to wipe out Israel.
By Melanie Phillips
When an Arab terrorist murdered five Israelis in Bnei Brak this week by opening fire indiscriminately with an M-16 rifle, Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip and the “West Bank” handed out sweets in celebration and held jubilant rallies.
It made no difference to them that one of the five victims, police officer Amir Khoury, was an Israeli Arab who was gunned down as he shot the terrorist dead. Palestinian Arabs celebrate with sweets and fireworks whenever they murder Jews.
This was the third such deadly terrorist attack in eight days, leaving a total of 11 Israelis dead. Once more, Israeli families have been left devastated and grieving after attacks perpetrated against them simply because they are Israelis.
At the Negev Summit held earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the unprecedented peace agreements between Israel and the Arab world that have followed the historic Abraham Accords “are not a substitute for progress between Palestinians and Israelis.”
What did Blinken mean by “progress”? Did he perhaps mean that the Palestinian Arabs must stop killing Israelis?
Did he mean they must cast aside the mindset that causes them to celebrate wildly whenever Jews are murdered? Did he mean that the Palestinian Authority must abandon teaching its children to murder Jews and steal Israeli land?
No, Blinken did not mean this. By “progress,” he meant Israeli concessions.
Although he issued a condemnation of the Bnei Brak atrocity within hours of its taking place, he made no acknowledgment that the sole reason for such attacks is that the Palestinians, backed by Muslim regimes such as the rulers of Iran, want Israel annihilated.
He omitted to acknowledge that the war against Israel is driven by profound anti-Semitism and religious fanaticism. At a press conference before the Negev Summit began, he failed to acknowledge that the people responsible for the absence of a Palestinian state are not the Israelis, who have repeatedly agreed to it, but the Palestinian Arabs themselves, who have refused such a state alongside Israel for the best part of a century.
Instead, he put most of the blame for the lack of progress on Israel. Peace should be promoted, he said, through “working to prevent actions on all sides that could raise tensions, including settlement expansion, settler violence, incitement to violence, demolitions, payments to individuals convicted of terrorism, evictions of families from homes they’ve lived in for decades.”
Coming in the midst of the past week’s atrocities against Israelis, Blinken’s remarks were obscene.
“Settlement expansion” only increases tensions because people like Blinken make this so by continuing to perpetuate the lie that Israelis have stolen “Palestinian” land in the disputed territories. The truth is that they are the only people with a legal and historical right to be there.
“Settler violence,” although reprehensible, is minuscule compared with the countless, daily and never-ending attacks or attempted attacks on Israelis—the vast majority of which go entirely unreported in America and Britain.
The Arab “evictions” from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shimon HaTzadik (also known as Sheikh Jarrah) were nothing other than a dispute over non-payment of rent, grossly misrepresented by Blinken and his ilk as a form of ethnic cleansing.
By lumping in Palestinian incitement and rewards to terrorist families along with these criticisms of Israel, Blinken erased the distinction between Israeli rights and Palestinian Arab attempts to erase those rights. And by claiming that his distorted and misleading list of alleged Israeli offenses was blocking “progress,” he effectively blamed Israel for its own victimization.
This inversion of Arab aggressors and Israeli victims is typical of Western liberal Israel-bashers who resolutely refuse to acknowledge the bigotry, savagery and lies among the “Palestinians” whose cause they promote.
After pressure from Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas issued a rare condemnation of the Bnei Brak attacks. This gesture was worthless. The terrorist was reportedly affiliated with the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the “military wing” of Abbas’s Fatah faction.
Abbas himself persistently glorifies as “martyrs” those who murder Israelis. As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, when three Fatah terrorists were killed in confrontations with Israel recently, Abbas himself openly called on Palestinians to murder Israelis—to “dish out to them twice as much as we’ve received.”
The fact that Fatah’s Jenin branch repeated Abbas’s exact term in its social-media post glorifying the Bnei Brak terrorist made clear that the movement saw the attacks as answering Abbas’s call.
Yet Abbas is the individual with whom Blinken is pressuring Israel to make “progress” through concessions.
Israel is currently enduring reportedly the deadliest wave of violence since 2006. With Ramadan coming up, there are concerns that this wave will further accelerate—and the deepest anxiety is that this will involve not just “Palestinian” terrorists but also Israeli Arabs.
The attacks over the past few days in Hadera and Beersheva, in which six Israelis were murdered, were perpetrated by three Israeli Arabs with connections to Islamic State. This week, there were rock attacks on Israelis and a stabbing on a bus, following two previous stabbings in both eastern and west Jerusalem. And the country was severely shaken by Arab riots in hitherto calm mixed communities last May.
Effi Eitam, a retired brigadier-general in the Israel Defense Forces and former housing minister, warned this week that Israel is currently facing a violent, Islamic-nationalist uprising among Arab Israelis, whose ultimate goal is to dismantle the Jewish state.
Speaking on Army Radio about the hundreds of thousands of weapons stolen from IDF bases and police stations over the last decade, he said: “The [Arab] sector is building a military force against the state. Israeli Arabs are becoming a separatist population.”
The main reason is that, while many Israeli Arabs have been steadily becoming more educated, prosperous and assimilated, there have also been systematic attempts to radicalize them by Hamas, the P.A., Isis and Iran.
Even more significant is their belief that final victory over the Jews is now within their grasp. These attacks are being fueled by an exultant fervor that the United States is in retreat and, by its craven submission to Iran, is surrendering to Islam.
This plays into the strand of apocalyptic Islamic messianism promoted by Islamic preachers whipping up expectations that the weakness of America and the resulting likely victory over the Jews means that the end of days is imminent.
Blinken assumes that the “Palestinian” cause is one that needs addressing in order to achieve progress towards peace. On the contrary—since the “Palestinian” cause is nothing other than the extermination of Israel, the only way to achieve peace is to sideline that cause altogether. Insisting on making “progress” with it is tantamount to insisting upon progress in achieving the destruction of Israel.
Contrary to Blinken’s words, the Abraham Accords were indeed a crucial substitute for that cause. The alliance makes true progress in ending the war against Israel’s existence by abandoning the people who continue to wage that war.
Yet the Biden administration regards the alliance between Israel and its new Arab allies as an impediment to the actual progress it so incomprehensibly desires—to empower Iran.
While Israel and its Arab allies understand that the Iranian regime poses a mortal threat to themselves that must be defeated, Blinken and the rest of the Biden team are desperate for an agreement which will enable Tehran to develop nuclear weapons within a short space of time and which will funnel into its coffers tens of billions of dollars to fund its infernal activities.
What Blinken demonstrated in the Negev was what it currently means to be a Western progressive. It means supporting people who murder Israelis and empowering others who want to wipe out Israel—while spouting liberal pieties out of the other side of their mouths.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.
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Biden adds another log on his growing pyre of dumb mistakes and unsound judgement:
Saving the Ayatollahs
Biden’s unwise Iran policy
By REUEL MARC GERECHT & RAY TAKEYH
The Islamic Republic is in trouble. Its economy, heavily socialized and riddled with corruption, needs high-priced oil to stay afloat. Its politics are broken: Since the end of the 1990s, when a real reform movement, led mostly by lay, left-wing Islamists who thought that democracy could resuscitate and humanize the revolution, was suppressed, the regime has been rapidly losing ideological appeal and a solid base of support. Its bickering elite constantly plot against one another, finding common ground on fewer issues. Given its continuing commitment to subvert the regional order, the clerical regime remains permanently at odds with most of its neighbors.
In other words, the mullahs need a nuclear deal to give them relief from a predicament of their own making. As surely as détente prolonged the life of the Soviet Union, the West’s addiction to arms control is the theocracy’s own form of salvation. Contrary to what many observers have suggested, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the muscle behind the theocracy, supported Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because it brought so much cash with less-than-onerous inspections, sunsetting nuclear restrictions, no restraints on the IRGC’s foreign machinations, and no limitations on the country’s ballistic-missile program, which is under the IRGC’s control. By yielding little to and getting much from the Biden administration in the ongoing negotiations in Vienna, the clerical regime is trying again to have both guns and butter.
The defining truth: Iran isn’t an island of autocratic stability in a turbulent Middle East, which many commentators routinely suggested while the Arab world cracked up over the last 20 years. Economic malpractice, much more than sanctions, has left the Islamic Republic routinely subject to unrest. The mullahs have never managed to tame inflation, create sufficient jobs for the young, or temper their greed. When the Iranian press periodically reveals massive corruption scandals, this means, translated from Persian, that one mafia within the regime has the high ground over another, allowing prosecutors and judges, always aligned with the supreme leader’s current interests, to shred the offending party. American sanctions have aggravated all of these forces and the regime’s basic incompetence; the Covid-19 pandemic was so grossly mismanaged that even Iranian health officials have had the courage to say that U.S. sanctions, which have always had openings for health care, weren’t responsible for the shocking death tolls and clinical meltdowns. Or as the deputy minister of health, Younes Panahi, put it: “We have been dealt more damage by Covid-19 than we were in eight years of war [with Iraq].”
But economic incompetence rarely crashes a dictatorship; authoritarian states become wobbly when they lose their capacity to intimidate their sullen subjects. There is no social class that hasn’t registered its opposition to the clerical regime by taking to the streets. Teachers, farmers, laborers, university students, and even retirees have voiced their grievances, some displaying the bravery to face down, and occasionally force the retreat of, the regime’s security services. Ethnic unrest — the minorities probably make up a majority of the country — has become noticeably more vivid and violent in the last decade. The pious in shantytowns and those of more questionable faith in the well-to-do neighborhoods have found common cause in their rejection of theocracy. The class resentment that the mullahs relied on to keep order is gradually yielding to a sense of solidarity across large swaths of Iranian society. The evolution of the pro-revolution, Shiite-mysticism-loving populist and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a particularly amusing reflection of the half-educated poor who have ardently supported the theocracy. Moving from a sincere admirer of supreme leader Ali Khamenei to a mocking critic (and the way he disses the supreme leader is polite compared with the scathing attacks he’s launched on others in the clergy), Ahmadinejad shows how corrosive, potentially convulsive dissent can rise to the top. The ruling mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards are keenly aware that when dissident clergy, merchants, the urban and increasingly secular middle class, students, and the poor all are cursing unha, “them,” the unnamed source of their pain, they aren’t talking about a few bad apples among the ruling elite. Even more worrisome is the increasing boldness of the discontented to name their oppressors. “Death to Khamenei!” was common in the nationwide protests in 2017 and 2019. The latter protests required automatic-weapons fire, mass incarceration, and torture to stamp out.
In reply to all of this anger, the supreme leader serenely touts his “resistance economy,” in which Iran weans itself off oil and somehow relies on its internal markets and trade with China. This is a plan for deepening poverty, as a nation of 85 million people cannot sustain itself without increasing the export of its most lucrative natural resource. Iran isn’t Turkey, the most Westernized of Muslim states, which has made lasting progress without petroleum.
Yet economics has never been what the Islamic Republic is about. “Regional strength gives us strategic depth and more national strength. Why should we stop this approach?” asked Khamenei, who has overseen the theocracy’s much more aggressive and more explicitly Shiite expansionist policies. The supreme leader picked up the nuclear mantle from the former major domo of the revolutionary clergy, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who probably should be credited for first making the mullahs’ nuclear dreams a reality. Nuclear empowerment is similarly a declared goal of Khamenei, who has correctly assessed how becoming a nuclear state is a game-changer. And the supreme leader hasn’t been timid about purging those who cast some skepticism about the importance of the regime’s atomic ambitions. Khamenei, whom Rafsanjani made the supreme leader, once was hesitant about exercising his authority amid the country’s many competing power circles. Today, he demands loyalty or silence from those who disagree with his decisions.
And Khamenei, who succeeded Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, knows that big countervailing forces against him have often ebbed. Joe Biden came into office pledging to “pivot toward Asia,” an empty slogan that surely meant — still means — retreating from the Middle East more than it means confronting Beijing. The mullahs aren’t blind and deaf: This administration rather desperately seeks to revive a nuclear deal, with its quickly sunsetting limitations, with a regime that U.S. officials, unlike their predecessors in the Obama administration, don’t even pretend to see evolving toward moderation.
“Longer, stronger, and broader” was the White House’s initial mantra, meaning that once America returned to the agreement, it would seek to make its provisions stronger and its reach wider to include the clerical regime’s missiles and nefarious regional activities. All that talk is gone now. Tehran is set to receive billions in sanctions relief while moving ahead with its atomic ambitions. Terrorism, imperialism, ballistic missiles, and internal repression are effectively off the table. President Biden is now just transactional: very short-term nuclear therapy at a very high cost.
Nearly alone, the Islamic Republic sees an opportunity in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As Mohammad Marandi, a particularly loathsome member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, noted, “They need Iranian energy to calm down the markets. So, it’s for their own good to [finish] the negotiations as soon as possible.” Indeed, the chatter in Western chancelleries is that, perhaps after a nuclear agreement, Iran’s oil can come back to the market and offset any loss of Russian exports. The Islamic Republic in this telling is no longer one of America’s most enduring adversaries but a global stakeholder. And Biden has oddly summoned this authentic axis, Iran and Venezuela, to help him stabilize carbon-based-energy markets, which, not too long ago, his administration viewed suspiciously, if not dismissively, because of their contribution to climate change.
Unsurprisingly, the mullahs have eagerly engaged the administration — while making it stay in the kiddy corner. (U.S.–Iranian negotiations in Vienna must be transacted via third parties.) They’re being offered a lot while being required to do little. An arms-control agreement can also help tranquilize the clerical regime’s domestic troubles. With its coffers full, the Islamic Republic can rebuild its patronage networks. In the 1970s, it was the Western loans, credits, and technology transfers that kept alive the Soviet bloc. But relief from sanctions is a temporary respite for the clerics: They will surely benefit from another generation of Americans wishing to placate a revisionist state. Yet the bonds between state and society are too damaged to be so easily healed. Western benevolence can’t straighten out the Islamic Republic’s internal contradictions.
But a deeply troubled revolutionary regime whose financial fortunes are improving is still a dangerous adversary. The clerical regime’s Arab Shiite militias have undone the politics in Iraq and Lebanon, sustained the Assad dynasty in Syria, and killed scores of Americans. With more funds at its disposal, the theocracy is bound to enlarge its auxiliary forces and bring more havoc to the region.
In the debris of the Russian assault on Ukraine, there are stark historical lessons. Rash ideologues cannot be dissuaded by diplomatic resets and commercial entreaties. Their calculus often defies American officials too invested in their balance sheets and bottom lines. Another lesson: A Russia that possesses nuclear weapons can undertake blatant aggression without fear that its territory will be molested. An Islamist regime that has its own designs on the Middle East understands that nuclear deterrence works.
An arms-control accord between Iran and America is now all but inevitable, momentary hiccups notwithstanding. In the mainstream, liberal press, the clerical regime, led by Khamenei and his ruthless mini-me president, Ibrahim Raisi, may even soon be celebrated as “hard-line pragmatists.” (And if the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards decide to test a nuclear weapon in the not-too-distant future, the same voices will surely find Iran’s ruling elite too dangerous to isolate.)
The Republican critics of the JCPOA and whatever now comes out of Vienna have been mostly fair and accurate. They are, nonetheless, not particularly reassuring, primarily because most Republicans also can’t free themselves from the infantilizing hopes of arms control. “Squeeze ’em until they relent,” which was essentially Donald Trump’s diplomatic strategy, is (barely) plausible against a determined, virulently anti-American theocracy if it is, say, a decade away from the bomb. If the enemy is 24 months away, which is an Israeli “guesstimate” that the Biden White House accepts, then that approach is, to put it politely, flawed.
By 2025, if a new, hawkish Republican president is in the White House, the clerical regime will have even more money, and its nuclear advances would place it inches from the bomb. Iran’s progress with centrifuges and uranium enrichment is irreversibly significant. And now the Israelis are signaling clearly that they are unwilling to roll the dice with preventive air raids. The Israeli moment has probably passed. Some Republicans have surely been hoping that the Jewish state would do what America has declined to do.
So where Republicans are going remains unclear. Toward a containment strategy where American power, on land, sea, and air, is increased in the Middle East? Or to just more of the same with a hopeful twist: Washington sells more-advanced weapons to the Sunni Arab Gulf states (which really don’t have the skill set or volition to use them), rebuilds a sanctions wall, and hopes that the Iranian people will rise up, tear down the theocracy, and play nice with the nuclear weapons they have in their possession?
It’s a certainty that the Iranian people will keep confronting their oppressors. Best news for them: The possession of atomic arms doesn’t make the theocracy safer from the anger of those who don’t feel blessed living in an Islamist state. Nukes didn’t save the Soviet Union; they won’t save the Islamic Republic.
— Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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